First

Home at War

“Enter.” Harold says as he’s going over the details on current estimates on his data-pad. He puts it down as the Great Plains Nagasha Priestess/Captain enters the room. Before rising up to shake her hand. “Captain, thank you coming to see me. It’s best that we keep potential disagreements off the channels and settle issues like adults.”

“... You’ve misunderstood the situation Lord Saint.” Captain Legard notes.

“I see, well hopefully we can clear that up, and Lord Saint now? Have I done something to earn more respect or must simply pay more attention to things?”

“You probably should embrace more of the Primal in either capacity.” Captain Legard notes with a slight smile. “And I’m not here about a disagreement, I’m here because we’re trying to understand more about not only yourself as a mighty Saint, but the blessings of The Lady of War.”

“Oh? Alright, what prompted this?”

“The range you have on the danger sense. Lady Thassalia’s blessing, while only occasionally given out, creates nearly unkillable warriors. So the range of the danger sense is well understood. And you have surpassed it, not only surpassed it, but done so by a margin that can only really be understood in scientific notation. I don’t doubt that you sense danger coming. But the sheer range of your senses is... extreme.”

“Less so when you think about it.” Harold says as he reaches his chair again. He then presses a button on the underside of the desk near the seat and a wall panel opens wide. “A moment please.”

He then switches out the normal chair in front of his desk for a large couch comfortable for a Nagasha. “Please, sit.”

“You don’t have to.”

“Being respectful to those under one’s command is important, it encourages the respect in both directions, and while I understand that for religious reasons I have a great deal of respect from you and yours. I would like to have that respect for personal reasons as well.” He says.

“Remarkable...” She mutters to herself as she coils up comfortably on the couch. He sits opposite of her and smiles.

“Now, as to how my range on the danger sense has grown so extreme, it’s something I’ve been slowly growing into more and more. Essentially, it comes down to my enhanced eyes.”

“From my understanding you’ve touched the power of the Primals deeply as all the Saints have. While Saint Bluelaser and Blackstaff have spent a much longer time on Holy Lakran, you spent time there as well, and received your blessing there. Saint Bluelaser was attacked by a terrible shadow demon and left in a state neither dead nor alive before Lord Skitterway saved her. And Saint Blackstaff died a millennia ago while trapped in stasis and was fully revived by Lord Skitterway as well. But you have never needed saving. Instead you have lived in power, dealing with Primals as equals and somehow gaining a sliver of their blessings. Blessings you wear upon your face as some form of prelude to the inevitable coming of the eventual human Primal.”

“That’s part of it. I actually changed as part of a massive Axiom Spell that involved the Living Forests in Apuk Space AND Primal Assistance from Emmanuel and those with him. In essence we had Herbert channel power from the forests and indeed Emmanuel through me so I could cast a massive Axiom effect. The end result was the awakening of an entire Nebula into a single massive conscious entity. Creating the Astral Forest.”

“A literal miracle.”

“A mistake. I was hoping to revive the flammable gasses that the cult we were embattled with worshipped in order to both confuse them and make them far more reluctant to fire. Instead I accidentally helped the Living Forests to reproduce again. It ended well. But at the same time, it was close. However, that much power being channelled has side effects. A lot of them. The creation of a Living Forest, and the modification of every Jameson alive. Likely those in Cruel Space as well.”

“I see...”

“I’m not sure you do. You see, the power of the primals comes from what we Undaunted call the Other Diretion, or the Od in short form. Granted we only know about this because one of our own became Primal. What do you know of Other Direction Energy, or Ode as we’ve taken to calling it?”

“Information on it has been scarce on the ground and difficult to parse from a religious standpoint even if it seems fairly straightforward in a scientific direction. Granted the straightforwardness is due to the admission that very little is actually understood about Ode or the Od. I know it is an energy source like Axiom, but also has it’s own locations within it but has neither direction nor distance as we understand it.”

“No no, it has direction, but neither distance nor time. Which is really confusing.” Harold corrects. “Anyways, I can see into it. But I can’t really process what I’m seeing, so the most I generally see is a flicker of movement from something that lives in the Od, mostly harmless, but beyond the fact that everyone has a touch of Ode and it casts a bit of light, the trick to my danger sense lies there. In the gaps and considerations.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, we’ve established that distance is more a vocabulary word in the Od. And I can see into the Od. And all living things have some presence in the Od. But generally that translates only to me seeing you give off some light of your own. Which is easily overwhelmed by the standard lights in this room, but if the lights were turned off I would not only be able to see you, but see my immediate area due to the light I myself give off.”

“So... are you implying that you’re potentially...”

“Looking purely into the Od is just an endless white landscape with no down, up, left, right or anything. Just pure white. I think that light is the light of a person’s soul. Everyone’s soul. So much of it I can’t see anything through it. But...”

“But?”

“I’m getting something out of it. Just enough information out of the endless ocean of information I can’t actually understand to know two things. If there is a threat and what direction it is in.”

“And since this information is coming from the realm of the gods, distance does not matter.” She muses. “Distance does not matter... hmm... Lord Saint, there has been discussion among the Philosophers and Priests of the Primal Faith that I am wondering if you can quell.”

“I can certainly try. I assume it relates to the nature of the Od and how one can fit in both everything and nothing within it?”

“That’s exactly the point. The Spiritual Realm, Realm of the Gods, Other Direction, Afterlife or what ever one wishes to call it does not function under the same theories and principals of Baryonic Matter, Non-Baryonic Matter or Axiom Based Matter. Effectively creating a fourth type of matter to consider that like the previous three categories is not simply the other forms of matter with a new name, but it’s own unique resource.”

“Correct, although I would argue it’s more likely it’s always been there and influencing and being influenced by the other three forms of matter, we’ve just failed to truly detect it in any truly appreciable amount until recently.”

“You’ve brought up another point that is often debated through our circles, however the one I wish to ask about is about distance and space.” She says and he nods. She then holds up her hand with finger and thumb perhaps an inch apart. “The Od as you call it, could it fit between my finger and thumb?”

“Not from my experience.” Harold answers and she looks surprised. “Think of it like this. The Od is... Well I haven’t seen all of it, but I assume it’s at least as large as the galaxy, maybe the whole universe. But at the same time, every part of it is everywhere and nowhere. It really, really doesn’t work like normal space or matter as we understand it. There is no separation, but it clearly functions in different ways for different people. I don’t know how best to explain this...”

“Try.”

“Okay, when I helped Miss Greatpincer ascend, I physically pulled her into the Od and threw her into the place beyond. Where the most power was felt. She came back a goddess. Now, where I was then, in our universe, was in the Skathac system. In orbit over the world. We are nowhere near that world or system. However, where I was in the Od, and where I am now in the Od, has not changed.”

“Is it?” She asks.

“It is.” He says and she stares at him.

“That does not make sense.”

“It does not. Therefore the sense it makes is not one that my current experiences can actually apply to it. Therefore I need a new framework. But I don’t have one yet. When it comes to understanding the Od and the Ode, we are all as newborn babies. We need to absorb a great deal more, experience a great deal more and live a great deal more in it to even begin to make sense of things. Let alone categorize or even truly compare them to the natural laws and physics of the other forms of the universe.” Harold says and there is a look of awe slowly forming on her face.

“Divinely empowered, blessed with holy strength and humility. You embody your title Lord Saint.”

“... No one can actually improve if they don’t ever look at themselves honestly.” Harold says. “And the idea of self betterment was one of the first I truly latched onto.”

“The philosophy of The Undaunted.

“Yes. I fully and completely support it, and try to live it as well.” He says before gesturing to the corner of the room. “Use your Thermal Senses on the equipment over there. I was using Text to Speech programs to read out the reports to me shortly before you arrived for the meeting, I like to work out and strengthen my body as I perform my duties.

Captain Legard adjusts the collar on her clothing to expose more sensory pits as she turns to the series of adjustable weights and basic rack in the corner. She can sense where he had been sitting and hints of heat still lingering on the equipment, but only just. The meeting has been running a little long.”

“Don’t you humans sweat? I haven’t smelt anything.”

“The air circulation in this ship is very powerful and silenced so it doesn’t interfere with day to day activities. Humans are going to be a big part of this ship now and in it’s future and we have pheromone issues that will distract.”

“Really?”

“This ship is also going to have some civilians on once we’re past the war. Or we could take on refugees and need to move out. So the whole place is designed with that in mind. Not to mention the human population is ballooning like crazy, so human built ships need to have some accommodations for the difficulties we bring to the table.” Harold explains to her “Now...”

He pauses and there’s a gap. “The threat just wavered. Angling ever so slightly but still coming this way.”

“How far is it?”

“I don’t know. I just know it’s approaching, it’s coming for us and it just changed vectors ever so slightly. But it’s still coming here.”

“Do you have a plan?”

“We’re the Ambush Fleet. We’re going to Ambush it. I’ve already instructed The RAM to start pumping out signal bafflers and stealth plating. We’re going to make them think we’re elsewhere in the system and get our enemy to expose themselves. Then we open fire from an unexpected direction. Simple and clean, and since we know what direction they’re coming from, we can disguise ourselves well.” Harold offers. “Still... why did they waver? Is something else joining it? I only know it as a threat on approach and the direction. Nothing else.”

He sighs and rubs his hair a little. Then smooths it. “I hate the waiting. And ordering others to do jobs I’d rather do myself. I don’t think I’ll be doing this twice. I’d have been far happier just being sent to the front and told where they want the enemy to be forced out of.”

“You don’t like leading?”

“It’s not that. It’s the feeling of entropy. As if death will come for me if I’m not fighting to live. And leadership leads to a lot of waiting, a lot of just stewing on that feeling even as you organize things.”

“You’re doing very well.”

“That’s because I have so much energy to dedicate to my tasks.”

“Energy you’d rather be spending in a more wholesale manner?”

“Somewhat.”

“Is this a very polite way of trying to force me out so you can go back to exercising without feeling rude?”

“... Yes.”

“Just get back to working out. I won’t take offence.” She says. “And frankly anyone who would take offence is a fool. You’re clearly paying attention, but just so enormously kinesthetic that you do better work while in motion.”

“Thank you.” He says as he stands up from his desk and quickly shucks the jacket of his uniform. He’s at the bench in a few short strides and picks up a heavy weight that uses Axiom to make it even harder to lift and move. He sits comfortably and starts absently curling the weight. “Now, since I’ll be able to think a little better, I was hoping we could discuss a bit in the way of mixed training. The boarding actions of you and your fellows weren’t quite up to the standard I was hoping for and I would dearly like to avoid possible injuries or fatalities in the future. Firstly though, we need to discuss why some of your forces neglected to take the proper armour into the field...”

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Chapter 287 – No rest for the righteous

“You know, sometimes I wonder how things would’ve worked out if you never left the service,” Admir said as they looked out over the lake, his eyes following the last ripples that slowly dissipated across the water’s surface after the stone that had skipped across it just moments earlier had finally sunk beneath the waves after a rather impressive number of bounces. “Between us, I mean. Obviously no telling what number of things would’ve changed outside of that as well.”

A sound somewhere in between a scoff and a chuckle left a rough throat next to him, and after the final waves lost themselves in the natural movements of the water, he turned his gaze over to look at James, who was lazing in the grass next to him.

As he leaned back onto his arms, James’ fingers were gently stroking through the blades, seemingly taking in the sensation as he looked up to process what he had just heard. His face was somewhat thoughtful, but mostly at ease, even as he squinted a bit as the light of the sky likely stung his eyes.

“That’s quite a thing to spring onto a guy all of a sudden,” he pointed out with another chuckle right before he turned his gaze down from the sky and over towards Admir so their eyes met. Even after years and distance, James’ eyes still had that same gentle fondness in them that they showed back when they had met for the first time. “Don’t tell me you’re not over me,” James then went on to tease while his lips pulled up into a slightly smug smirk.

Though, in the same movement yet far more subtly, one of his brows also raised just a tiny bit. Admir knew that look. He didn’t want to say it, but James was quietly assessing whether this was a conversation he would have to pay far closer attention to.

Not keen on making him worry even a moment longer than necessary, Admir quickly chuckled and waved his hand dismissively.

“Oh, hell no,” he assured, his voice still warped by the slight laugh he brought it out with. “If I’m being honest, I suspect we wouldn’t have lasted no matter what. Or at least, that’s the conclusion I tend to reach when I think about that ‘what if’.”

He then sighed a bit and broke their moment of eye contact to look out over the lake again.

“Though, honestly, the whole idea is flawed from the start. Imagining a world where you chose to stick around is essentially thinking of an entirely different person,” he mused a bit further. “Maybe a James like that could’ve worked out. But, then again, would I even have fallen for a James like that? Who knows.”

Next to him, James snorted again.

“Aren’t you feeling philosophical today,” he teased once again. A moment later, something gray very briefly moved in the corner of Admir’s vision, moments before splashing loudly into the lake as a rather large impact caused a raining fountain of water to rile up briefly, right before it quickly spread back out across the waves.

Rolling his eyes slightly, Admir glanced back over his shoulder. James was not looking at him now, instead seeming focused on the ground around him with one hand rifling through the grass as if he was looking for something else to throw right away.

“Are you saying I don’t always think deep thoughts?” Admir asked in mock insult, adding feigned sharpness to his voice that James obviously saw right through without even thinking.

“Usually, you’re not so forthright with them,” James pointed out in return. After a few more seconds of seemingly not finding the stone of his dreams, he then instead opted to rip out hand-fulls of grass from the greenery, filling the air with the smell of dying plants as he proceeded to roll the ripped blades up into a ball.

His eyes remained affixed to it, though it was clear that his concentration wasn’t actually focused on ever so thought-intensive task.

“Also, maybe you shouldn’t be too sure of that,” he went on after a moment, his voice softening a little while his eyes looked at the slowly de-saturating green of the ball in his hand. “Not us breaking up, I agree with you there. But the soldier thing? I mean, I came back didn’t I?”

Towards the end of his statement, his voice dipped just a little, almost sounding as if there was a tinge of uncertainty creeping in. Perhaps a hint of a question about how true to himself either of their version of events truly was.

An uncertainty that Admir did not share at all.

“You were forced back in,” he pointed out right away, stepping slightly in place as he turned to face James more fully, one hand planted on his hip. “And the first thing you did when you were was try to stick it to your mother and make this thing your own.”

James exhaled sharply.

“Lotta good that did me,” he murmured.

However, Admir almost immediately shook his head.

“Come on,” he protested just a little. Stepping a bit closer to where James was sitting, he crouched down at his side, elbows resting on his bent knees as he tilted his head a bit to try and look directly at James’ averted face. “You saw people being maimed and murdered right before your eyes – hell, you yourself even got maimed – and you stepped up to do something about it. Who the hell wouldn’t have done that?”

James let out another breath through his nose. His hand opened to drop the ball of mushed-up grass back onto the ground, and his face finally turned to look at Admir again.

“Most people?” he replied, his voice slightly raising in suggestion that sounded equally as though it was obvious and uncertain at the same time. “Plenty of people who go through tough shit and then don’t go on to fly through space with a gun in their hand. They write a book, or something. Go on TV. Have interviews. Maybe start a podcast. They don’t…”

“Because most of them can’t,” Admir interrupted him, his tone now turning slightly stern. “James, not everyone who has horrible things happen to them has the means, or the ability, or even just the energy to go out and fight a whole crusade against the people who did that to them. Many of them are happy if they can just get out of bed. Once you’ve been through something like that, it is your win to have just survived and steady on, if only out of spite alone.”

He lifted one arm off his knees and reached it out, placing it on James’ shoulder.

“But I am sure if they had the chance. If they did have the means. If there was more they could reasonably do. I think they would,” he stated as definitively as he could while his fingers squeezed down against the fabric of James’ shirt.

James looked back at him, the softness in those dark eyes wavering for a moment as they seemed to turn into endless pools that briefly lost their light. However, just a moment later, he closed them for a moment. And, when they opened back up, there he was again.

A snort escaped James, and he shook his head subtly while gently shrugging Admir’s touch off.

“You’re saying what we do is reasonable?” he questioned directly, and his voice didn’t hide how ridiculous the notion was to him.

And Admir laughed right along with him. Because, honestly, it was a fair counter.

“No, I guess it isn’t.” he agreed as he allowed his hand to drop from its comforting position. Then, a smirk rose on his lips as he added, “Though, if you ask me which is more like you: Nearly getting yourself shot because you refuse to back down from some asshole OR starting a damn podcast, I have to say I would be more worried if I saw you sipping on some craft beer in a studio.”

That was enough to cause James to fully crack up into proper laughter, and he very nearly doubled over backwards into the grass, to the point that he had to catch himself on one of his elbows. Which, in turn, left him half lying there as he fought to catch his breath again.

“I guess you do know me,” he replied. Perhaps without knowing that he was doing it, his free hand moved up and subtly traced along his body, moving from one long faded bullet wound to another in a slow path of remembrance.

The wounds were long gone, but memory remained.

Admir’s eyes were affixed to the journey as he thought back of the days he had spent by the bedside of his half-dead then-boyfriend back in the day, able to do little more than be present and wonder if he was ever going to wake up again.

In the end, he had always pulled through. But in places, things had teetered right on the edge.

“This one nearly left me a goner,” James suddenly said, almost as if he had read Admir’s mind right then and there. Perhaps the movement had not been quite so subconscious after all.

Admir nodded as he looked at James’ hand pressing against the ever familiar spot on a shoulder and an arm that was no longer there at this point. Ironic that so much reconstruction had once been done to return it to its functional state after a whole chunk had been taken out of it in the field, only for the entire limb to disappear a few more years down the line.

“Yeah,” he replied, inadvertently feeling his body tense as he thought back to the nasty wound James had been brought in with. No matter how much death you saw, being able to look right into the inner workings of a loved one's body was never a fun experience. He let out a somewhat breathless chuckle. “Honestly, I don’t remember too much between the time you were brought in and the time you woke up. Seemed like it was all a blur.”

After remembering a little more, he exhaled slowly.

“But I do remember what you told me right after you came to again,” he then reminisced more quietly.

Slowly, he raised up his gaze, looking up to the sky. His eyes weren’t stinging as he looked up into the bright blue, even though the sky was as clear as it could be while the sun shone down harshly.

“And what was that?” James asked, though his tone wasn’t an actual question. Rather, it sounded as though it was meant to serve as a reminder.

Admir exhaled slowly. And, as he did, his own hand slowly lowered, down and down along his body, until it settled on his thigh.

“You said you didn’t know anything that happened either,” he replied as his fingers slowly pressed against the flesh of his thigh. And, as they did, he felt his pulse push against the pressure from underneath. Harshly. Painfully. As though it was fighting. And with every moment, that pain radiated out from under his fingers more and more. “But that somehow, you knew when it was time to wake up.”

…

The entire room shook with the echoing reverberations of a deafening bang of which he didn’t know whether it had been truly there or a false memory summoned by his confused mind as Admir’s head shot up; his mouth opening wide to greedily suck in a breath that filled his lungs to the brim, as though he was emerging from a very long dive.

Almost immediately, his whole body was on fire. All over himself, he felt every tear, every cut, and most important every hole that had been punched into him by the hostile fire he had faced.

Even as his more primal instincts felt as though they were dying from the pain, Admir immediately clocked that it somehow still hurt far less than it most likely should have, at least judging by what he remembered feeling just moments before he had passed out.

So, either he was running on enough adrenaline to numb the most severe of wounds, or he was dosed up on some good pain meds right now.

Perhaps the latter was a little more likely, given that his first glance around quickly informed him that he was in some sort of white, sterile clinic environment.

Apparently, while he was out, they had succeeded in bringing him to some kind of sickbay or hospital or the like. Or, well, if he hadn't been out the whole time, at least he had no memory of being brought here. And while that was somewhat calming, that effect was harshly lessened by the distant thunder of both explosions and gunfire that he could hear crawling its way to his ears through the structure of the station – with the first sounding far more distant than the latter.

In fact, the latter sounded rather disconcertingly close in places.

As soon as he wrangled control of his somewhat numbed limbs from his body, he hastily ran a hand across himself to check the various injuries he remembered having.

Many of the superficial ones had been bandaged up under tight compression. Meanwhile the deeper wounds, especially the most nasty gunshot wound down in his leg, had clearly not just been covered, but also stuffed with some medical device that had expanded and hardened to clog up the bleeding as much as it was possible.

Wound glue? Collagen? Tampons? He didn’t know, and he didn’t particularly care either.

What mattered was that someone had treated him – and at least for now, it felt as though perhaps it was to a degree that could allow him to move. Not that he could waste much concern on whether he could or not.

Another – once again even closer – snap of gunfire had his head shoot around towards the room’s entrance.

The rumbling of the walls and ringing of his ears had apparently been loud enough to drown out the sound of footsteps, and so it was a bit of a surprise for him to turn his head, only to come essentially face to face with a very surprised Sam - who he basically only recognized based on her hair, build and movement alone - as she hurried around the corner almost right away.

“You’re awake!” she yelled out. She immediately hurried over to him. However, as she did, he could tell from her movements that she was most certainly not in the bet of conditions to worry about him either.

Though, if anything, he could’ve perhaps already told as much from her essentially mummified face that only left one of her eyes fully free while hiding the rest of her previously model-like features away under thickened and stiffened bandage.

“I am, and I think I can move,” Admir assured right away, already shifting to try and swing his legs out from under the rather heavy blanket. “And by the sounds of it, not a moment to soon.”

The Guardians had given us an eternity of perfect health and absolute abundance, but withheld the keys to the stars, whispering through their digital lighthouses that the heavens must be earned, not gifted.

When we first received the Beacons, our weapons were also taken from us, but it did not stop our drive for war. It was the Beacon itself that removed our need for it. All disease, all famine, and even aging were freely cured by the Beacons. Autonomous drones the likes of which we had never imagined, nor could even name at the time, freely optimized the uninhabited regions of our planet for agriculture and conducted the farming for us. Other drones built shelters for every man, woman, and child. Any who sought medical care from the Beacons were given it. Any who sought a freezing of their biological clock were granted it.

The world quickly ceased killing itself. Not out of threat... but practicality. The Beacons' drone fleet could scan for and destroy any weapon, no matter how small, on a planetary scale. Any who were injured could be and were rebuilt on a molecular level if needed. There was no point in trying to kill or maim when everyone had all they could want and violent actions would simply be reversed regardless.

We feared for decades that there would be a price to the gifts of the Beacons. But, since the moment the crystalline towers descended from the sky and placed themselves within each region of our continents, only a single direct communication from their owners was given: "We have taken away the cruelties which you did not choose, and those you were forced into. You may enjoy our gift, or learn as we did. For those who seek us and answers, we will wait for you above."

It was quickly discovered that the Beacons were all equipped with a wireless network of AGIs. The autonomous intelligences spoke in our tongues and refused to give us any information on their creators, despite how we phrased our questions or how often we asked them. However, what they did freely give us were hints toward any scientific research we embarked upon. And they would warn us away from making any disastrous mistakes along the way. The voices of the Beacons called themselves "librarians" and they, along with the peacekeeping drone fleets, kept any great harm from befalling us.

Despite this, knowledge was never freely given. The librarians would not reveal their owners' knowledge directly, but they would verify the validity of any discoveries we truly thought we had made. We were forced to learn the secrets of the universe ourselves, but were guided to stay on a safe path of discovery.

Once we had acclimated to our new safety and globally peaceful society, it took us a further century to first breach our atmosphere with archaic rocket technology. We had no idea what to expect, but true to their words, we saw the Guardians waiting for us. Their ship, massive beyond words and streamlined, watched us reach our nearest moon in a plastic and metal pod. It observed us and then calmly left without any further contact.

We feared we had erred in some way. That we had angered the alien gods who watched us. However, all of the Guardians' gifts still functioned after our first space mission. Further investigation would reveal that the Guardians' vessel had not abandoned our solar system, but had merely moved to the next nearest planet.

The message was clear: they were still waiting. We had not earned it yet.

And so we continued our study. Our efforts. Out of a burning desire to know why we had been given such gifts and an innate, burning curiosity. Curiosity, it turned out, was nearly all you were left with when you no longer needed to struggle to meet your needs and when the passing of time meant nothing substantial to you any longer.

One by one, we reached the planets outward from our home. Each time, the ship of the Guardians would watch our arrival and then depart for the next. Until we reached the fifth and final planet. By then, our newest ship had begun to look more and more like a true spacefaring vessel and not merely a fast-moving rock with fire flowing from the end.

Still, we remained amazed by the alien grandeur, construction, and size of the Guardian ship nonetheless. And equal parts terrified and relieved when, as we orbited our system's final planet, the alien finally began to approach our own.

Our communication system picked up a transmission and, in our own language, a voice asked permission through it to bring us aboard.

After requesting time to deliberate, and being granted it by the alien voice, we contacted our leaders. We were given permission to board the Guardian vessel and to learn whatever we could.

And why not?

We, and our leaders, all knew there was nothing we could likely do if the Guardians decided to stop asking permission. Even now, we could scarcely scratch one of the drones which they had created and freely gifted us. How could the question we'd receive be taken as anything but a courtesy?

When we relayed back to the Guardian ship our acceptance of its request, everything happened quickly. We blinked, and we were within some sort of entrance chamber. We all quickly scanned one another and verified no one was injured or left behind.

Teleportation!

It was true teleportation. Pinpoint, safe, and extremely efficient, apparently.

Moments later, an airlock at the far end of the long hallway we found ourselves in hissed to life and opened. A glimmering, glowing lifeform of crystalline light stepped through.

"Hello there. You must have a lot of questions," it once more spoke to us in our language.

"Were we teleported?" I found myself speaking first.

"You were. Don't worry, your ship is safe. It'll be waiting for you when you want to go back."

"How?" I asked, unable to contain my curiosity.

"The teleportation?" the being asked.

"Yes," I said hesitantly.

“I mean, I could probably explain the basics enough to satisfy you. But if you have real questions, I’m a roboticist, not a four-dimensional systems specialist.”

“A roboticist? What... exactly are you?” I asked.

The glowing lifeform chuckled and then admitted something shocking to us. "Well, to you I guess I'm an alien. And about how I look... well, lights don't usually scare people too much, since there's not enough uncanny detail to grab onto. My true form may be slightly uncomfortable for you to look at, but I'll take it if you want now that I've warned you."

As I looked to the rest of my crew for agreement, I began to realize once more that I was the captain in charge. Gathering myself, I agreed. "As long as it won't harm my crew. Yes, we would like to speak to you and see you for what you really are."

"Of course. You've worked hard. I owe you that much, don't I?" the Guardian said.

There was a dimming and a shrinking of its perceived form. What was left was not horrifying to us... the reality was jarringly, beautifully fragile. It was practically naked, aside from its strange spacesuit.

"Are you injured?" I asked.

The Guardian smiled, clearly trying not to laugh again. "No, no. I understand to you it may look like my soft insides are on my outside right now, but I promise this is how we all are."

The ancient entity that had policed our borders and steered us away from destroying ourselves was a singular, upright biped of soft, completely exposed skin, balancing precariously on only two limbs with a top-heavy posture that looked as though a sharp gravitational shift would shatter it. Unlike ourselves, the Guardian possessed no visible pincers, no defensive chitin plates, or other weapons. Its flat face and small, forward-facing eyes held a look I'd later learn was of quiet, joyous pride.

"I understand," I heard myself say, but did not quite believe.

"Would you like to come in?" it asked and gestured to the ship interior past the airlock it had exited.

"Yes... but, may we ask what you plan for us?" I said. "More specifically, why did you help us? Why have you helped us? Our entire planet... what was your goal?"

The Guardian lowered its tiny, fragile-looking arm. "Well, the universe is a scary place. As far as we can tell, my species is the first to survive the Great Filter. We just thought you might appreciate the chance to avoid some of the growing pains."

"Great Filter?" I asked.

"Oh, sorry. It's a term we use. It just means most sapient species end up dying by random cosmic chance or self-destruction before they get to our level of advancement. It's pretty unfair. So we decided to give you a squarer deal than what all the rest of us got."

As we gazed at the delicate, hairless primate before us, I struggled to reconcile what I saw with what I knew. This soft creature belonged to the species that had descended upon our world like gods. Its machines could rebuild our bodies and silence armies. Its ships seemed capable of crossing distances our greatest minds had only recently learned to contemplate.

Yet I found myself wondering whether I might be able to injure it by mere accident and proximity.

"But you must want something in return?" I asked, unsure of my assessment's truth.

"No, not really," the Guardian said. "Only that you don't hurt any other species now that you're going to quickly find out you're ahead of most of them. You're one of the first we've helped get this far, actually."

"There are other... whole species, beyond us and your own?" I asked. "How many?"

The Guardian smiled. "Well, we have humans, you, and... more than enough to fill a lifetime."

"A lifetime of... helping them?"

The Guardian nodded. "Exactly. So, ready to come in and eat? I've synthesized some food I think you'd all love. Since your species shares a love for communal dining, we can answer any questions you might have over a meal."

And so we followed. As we mapped the structure of the Guardian’s ship with our six eyes, we saw a technological framework that was, by all definitions, divine—automated factory arrays that could support worlds, screens that seemed to simulate entire timelines, and controls for a propulsion drive that we'd later be told warped spacetime like wet fabric.

Our engineers had spent centuries breaking their minds over the math required just to cross our own stellar neighborhood, yet this nearly naked biological anomaly, whose species had somehow evolved to breathe and eat through the same vulnerable throat, had mastered the physics of the absolute cosmos while our ancestors were still barely banging rocks together.

This would later force a terrifying shift in our understanding of universal evolution. We had always assumed that becoming what we later understood was something called a Type III civilization required a body plan optimized for survival. We had predicted dense exoskeletons like our own, multiple redundant hearts, and perhaps even hive-mind networks that didn't experience the messy, isolated doubts of a singular consciousness.

Humanity possessed none of them.

We talked of many things during our meal. A meal that was better than any I had ever had. Again and again, the Guardian verified to each of us that it had helped us out of pure goodwill. It told us of its own brutal history as a species. Of the wars, plagues, and planetary destructions. It told us they had eventually gotten better. And, thankfully, that had happened before they discovered and reached solar systems with other life.

From any angle of questioning, it seemed like the Guardians' motivations were entirely benevolent. Just as it had initially claimed.

Humanity had climbed the vertical cliff face of what they called the Great Filter with none of the advantages we had expected them to possess. They had done it carrying a fragile primate brain that was constantly at war with its own paleolithic instincts, in a frame that a simple microscopic pathogen or a stray piece of kinetic debris could instantly delete.

Looking at and speaking to the Guardian, we finally understood the true nature of their strength.

It wasn't that they were born to be gods. They had looked at their own extreme fragility, realized how close they were to absolute annihilation, and used their brief, desperate window of survival to build a fortress of intelligence around themselves. Their ascension was an engineering miracle born of absolute, terrifying necessity.

And, frankly, the human we ate with was a wonderful, humorous host.

In our own history, when a faction gained an unassailable technological advantage, its first instinct had always been to conquer, to wall off resources, and to enforce submission to ensure its own permanent security.

We had assumed the universe operated on that same cold, evolutionary calculation.

Yet, when this hairless, top-heavy primate species finally broke through the terrifying bottleneck of their own existential crises and conquered disease, mastered the atom, and built an automated empire of infinite abundance, they didn't pull up the ladder.

They didn't turn their god-like capabilities into weapons of galactic subjugation to ensure no one else could ever challenge them. Instead, they looked out into the cold, brutal dark of the cosmos and saw younger civilizations drowning in the exact same resource wars and tragic "birthing pains" they had just escaped.

And they chose to become guides.

They didn't demand our worship. They never asked for a single ounce of our resources. They didn't force us to bow. They could have.

They simply built digital lighthouses in the form of the Beacons, dropped them off with a care package of eternal life, and stood a silent, protective guard over our world until we were mature enough to stand before them.

They had not given us their achievements.

They had given us the chance to survive long enough to make our own.

My final question was perhaps the one I most desired an answer to.

"Then what happens next?"

The Guardian gently closed the distance between us, its fragile, unarmored hand extending.

I'll admit, I was confused. "What is that?"

"A sign of greeting. It's how my people introduce themselves and show goodwill or agreement," the Guardian explained. "My name is Mark. I represent Humanity, but I know your people call us the Guardians. And I promise we're flattered by that, ha."

I extended my clawed, gloved hand, being very careful not to hurt the fragile digits of the human which I dwarfed. "I am Anilios Hereckterin."

"It's nice to meet you."

The human then shook the hand of every member of my bridge crew, seemingly memorizing each name.

We all watched it and its strange custom with curiosity. More than anything, we were just shocked it cared enough to know our names. No matter how weak and tiny looking, we were aware it possessed the power of a deity.

"Now that that's out of the way, I'll answer your question. I'm guessing all of you have the same one?" Mark said.

We all agreed.

"Well, I guess I could tell you to take me to your leader. But that joke would be pretty selfish. Hm. Well, to be honest, we were hoping you could join us. We just didn't want to get in the way of you developing your own pride in your achievements."

"You wished for us to advance on our own? Yet, you intervened?" I pointed out.

"We took away the unfair parts of being a new species. The starving, the war, the dying and having your body fall apart just as the price of existing. But we didn't take your chance to make something out of yourselves. You might have figured it out already, but once you don't have to worry about dying every day, one of the best ways to feel happy is to figure things out. We didn't want to take that part of it away from you," Mark explained.

"That seems generous," I agreed.

"Was the right thing to do, don't you think?" the human shrugged.

And I couldn't say the Guardian was wrong. Answering my own curiosity was my own greatest drive. And I had not been happier than I was now in a long time.

"I believe so," I agreed. "You would like us to help you with this? For others?"

"Well, if you want, yeah. That's the next best part. And we haven't actually gotten anyone else to your point yet. You're the first ones who actually got to near-interstellar capabilities. You should be proud, honestly. It was pretty damn quick, even with the help we gave you."

I was filled with awe. Awe at this creature. At its people's accomplishments.

And pride in my own people's at its assessment.

And then I began to understand the being before me better.

Its people had traversed the deep, terrifying void of the cosmos for centuries, carrying the heavy burden of absolute power and absolute isolation, all perhaps for this exact moment.

"I do not know about our leaders, or the others behind me, but I would like that."

I couldn't pass up the chance... the chance to see so much more. To be so much more.

I extended my third hand, remembering it was a sign of respect and agreement in the Guardian's culture.

The Guardian smiled and reached out toward me. "'Course, it's just an offer. Everyone gets the choice. We're not gods."

As our digits met and then retracted, I looked out the massive viewport of their vessel. Below us lay my home planet, glowing and secure, its children safe from the random cruelties of a blind universe. Ahead of us lay the endless, unmapped star clusters of the galaxy, dense with supernovas waiting to be watched, and quiet, struggling worlds still trapped in the dark pit of their own infancy.

If we joined the Guardians, no if we joined humanity, we would no longer be just a protected species living under a dome of altruism. We were about to finally cross a threshold. And, if all was as this 'Mark' said, I couldn't imagine a better partner species with which to explore our new role.

Humanity's lonely watch was over; the cosmos had just gained a younger sibling, and together, we were going to make sure that no one else would ever have to suffer what they once had and what we had been mostly spared from.

A Not so Long, Long Time Later

Anilios stared out the great window of his vessel, two hands resting on its edge. Distantly, in the glow of a star he was not born under, he watched a tiny, primitive ship successfully breach orbit.

His clawed lower hands gripped the edge of the window.

A soft, meaty hand touched his shelled upper shoulder.

"They'll get there, friend. Hell, they might even outdo your people."

"It has been two centuries," Anilios said, some impatience in his voice.

"Don't forget," Mark laughed. "That's the best part."

We decided to depart near midnight, when no one in Whiteleaf, except for the rare half-elves that lived in town, could see us go. The farewell was brief. Only Lyra and Elincia were still awake in the manor. 

As Elincia wished us luck, I could sense the weight on her shoulders. Without the System, the difference between martial and crafting classes disappeared, and Elincia was not much weaker than Kili or Zaon. Still, we both knew it was too early for her to join an incursion into enemy territory.

“Bring everyone back safe,” Elincia said as we departed.

I nodded.

Kili led the way. The moon shone bright in the night sky, showing the path ahead. We walked for an hour before reaching the top of Whiteleaf’s northern hill. Behind us, clumps of lightstones illuminated the riverwalk and the market. A handful of city guards patrolled the main streets, although their presence was largely decorative, as Farcrest protected Whiteleaf from the east while the Teal Moon tribes protected it from the west.

We passed near a tall watchtower made of enchanted Warden Roots. Although it wasn’t apparent from the outside, the watchtower stored enough firepower to bring down a dragon. The Sentinels saw us go by without making a move. They had been warned that a party of Sentinels was going to pass by at midnight. As usual, nobody questioned the orders from above. 

The northern face of the hill had been completely cleared of trees. We walked down the same path into a rocky section in between valleys with nothing more than pebbles and crushed rocks. Old roots of the old Forest Warden, the one Izabeka defeated when she was still a young girl, lingered there.

Our first goal was to leave Whiteleaf unidentified. Our muffled Wind-Shot Boots hid the sound of our steps against the gravel, and our enchanted headgear cast a blurring shadow on our faces. The spell wasn’t enough to fool a System user with a strong detection skill, but it was good enough to conceal our faces from non-System users.

All those hours behind the desk doing paperwork for the town might have rusted my joints, because after a couple of hours of traveling, I was sore and out of breath. By comparison, the kids looked like they had just rested. I took a sip from my waterskin, and we continued onwards.

Four hours later, we passed by the northmost watchtower and reached the frontier. I pulled my cloak firmly over my head. By this point, the Sentinels in the watchtower should already have their System skills back.

To the north, a dense forest stretched in every direction, interrupted only by the furthest arms of the eastern mountains. The wild territory between Ebros and Tagabiria extended as far as the eye could see. No wonder it had been a decade-long task to create a path between both kingdoms.

“The old Marquis really wanted to mess with you when he made you thane of Whiteleaf, huh?” Firana pointed out. 

Farcrest was considered dangerously close to the Farlands already, and Whiteleaf was located in the most northwestern corner. Unlike the mountainous area west of the city, this part of the Farlands remained unmapped, and even the orc tribes avoided it. Without the natural bottlenecks from the valleys, it was simply too dangerous to inhabit permanently.

Kili and Zaon spied into the darkness, remaining silent.

The clouds suddenly covered the moon, and the path ahead disappeared.

“Let’s stop for the night. We still have a few hours until dawn,” I said, sitting down against a rock and pulling a small wooden bowl from my backpack.

The bowl was made of Warden Root, and it had taken Ginz a whole day and several destroyed drillheads to complete.

“No need to stand guard so close to Whiteleaf,” I said, pushing a strand of mana into the [Alarm Dome] and placing it face down.

Nothing seemed to change, but my mana sense told me the enchantment was active. It was a rather simple one. It used the same idea of the enchanted cup that mimicked [Silence Dome], but instead of casting a sound-insulating effect, it detected when a mana signature entered the area of effect and triggered a [Vibration] rune string that produced a faint ping.

The design wasn’t perfect, but almost none of my enchanted items were. The problem with my Alarm Dome was that small birds and rodents triggered the effect when they passed nearby. Enchantment thresholds and design time were the biggest limiting factors in my process. Still, it worked just fine, although it was better to keep the bowl near one’s head to not miss the ping.

We gathered behind a rock to cover from the cold wind coming down the snow-covered mountains and chewed on jerky.

“Do you remember the strategy we used on our first trip into the Farlands?”

Zaon and Firana nodded.

“We are going to do the same thing. If we encounter trouble, you let me tank it while supporting me from the sidelines. If we encounter Byrne, you need to run away. He’s too strong for any of you,” I said. “Are we clear?”

“Do you think you can defeat him?” Firana asked.

“I don’t know. He’s way more experienced with magic authority and…” A shiver ran down my spine as I remembered the man’s projection on the astral plane. I remembered how, with only a movement of his hand, he put my authority back together. If he could do that, it was only logical he could perform the reverse trick. “He isn’t our target. Not yet. Understood, Firana?”

“Why are you singling me out?” the girl asked, offended.

“You were the one chasing thieves and murderers in a hockey mask, not Zaon. Although a special warning for Kili might also be justified, all things considered,” I said, scratching my chin.

Kili avoided my eyes, turning to look away into the Farlands. 

“That was the old me,” Firana defended herself. “I’m a different person now. A mature and judicious lady, if you ask me. I also killed a dragon, which is like ten times more spectacular than killing a Wendigo.”

I silently hoped to find no dragons during this trip.

Firana’s energy wasn’t enough to spread into Kili and Zaon, so we soon closed our eyes and rested through what was left of the night. The Alarm Dome didn’t go off a single time, and the enchanted blankets kept us warm. Winter had almost reached Farcrest. 

We got up at the break of dawn. The valley was covered in a layer of frost, and the path below was treacherous. Doubly so because the path we had been following had completely disappeared. The Wind-shot boots saved us more than once, but we finally left the open hills and got into the embrace of the forest.

“Alright, Zaon. Here’s where you become important,” I said.

“Okay,” he said without much confidence.

Zaon’s natural magic allowed him to find lost items. The boy was still experimenting with the limits of his powers, but the semantics of ‘lost’ and ‘items’ seemed to be ambiguous at best. I had gone through something similar, learning that I could actually transfer heat rather than just making fire. It will take time before Zaon understands the intricacies of his natural magic.

I cleared my throat.

“I lost something in the Farlands, somewhere between the Ebros border and ten miles north. The item I lost is big enough to be a hassle moving it around. The item I lost is extremely powerful and important,” I said.

Of course, I didn’t know what the elves had found in that strip of Farlands, but if they could retrieve it, they wouldn’t have bothered to move the frontier so close to Ebros. If the item wasn’t powerful or important, they wouldn’t have bothered looking for it either. As vague as the description was, it could only be a handful of things.

Zaon closed his eyes and magic coursed through his body. 

The expression of insecurity didn’t disappear from his face.

The more detailed the lost item and the narrower the search area, the easier it was for Zaon to use his powers. This was a Hail Mary of a plan, but the alternative was to flood the area with Sentinels and anger the Tagabirians. Ebros wasn’t prepared for a war, not with the royal family gone and all the political turmoil the fall of Cadria caused.  

Mana faded away, and Zaon opened his eyes.

“What direction, my loyal bloodhound?” Firana asked.

“North?”

“Figures,” Kili added.

“North it is,” I said, putting on my backpack and leading the way.

There was another way of finding our target: finding elves. I wanted to avoid that possibility as much as possible. Fighting sapient beings was way more dangerous than Black Wolves and Chrysalimorphs, as strong and clever as the latter were.

By noon, we stopped again, and I asked Zaon about my 'lost' item. Rather than continuing straight to the north, he pointed a few degrees west past a stone wall seemingly cut into a hill. Our traveling speed decreased. Although I could sense the mana signatures of all creatures around us, traversing the Farlands without [Identify] and [Foresight] was even more unnerving than I expected.

“Ants,” I said.

Firana and Kili drew their swords. It had been a while since I had laid eyes on the Aias sword. The enchantment shone even brighter than before, and I had to tone down my mana sense to avoid becoming blind.

“Put away your swords,” I added, leading the way.

A hundred meters ahead, a line of Woodcarver Ants the size of big dogs cut our path. The ants threw their feelers toward us but didn’t seem to consider us a notable danger and continued on their way. 

“I don’t like them, I don’t like them, I don’t like them,” Kili muttered, suddenly prey to an itch all over her body.

“They are harmless, unless you invade their nests,” I replied, approaching the line of ants and patting the head of one that was dragging a massive log.

The Woodcarver Ant seemed annoyed, and it tried to escape my hands to go around me. I couldn’t have guessed that annoying Woodcarver Ants could be so entertaining. After a moment, the ant decided to turn around and walk a wide roundabout around me.

“I think we should go south,” Kili said. “I’m not coming near a nest of those things.”

“Don’t worry. They build their nests in lakes and rivers. We will know if we come near one,” I replied, remembering the System prompt I had gotten after using [Identify] on the ants messing with the beams of our iron mine.

“That begs the question. Where is the body of water? I saw no lakes or rivers from above,” Zaon pointed out.

“I don’t want to know. Can we continue?” Kili interrupted him.

I nodded. The ant trail seemed to be inconsequential to our quest, and a handful of Soldier Woodcarvers had caught wind of us. They didn’t seem particularly pleased with our presence. 

We looped around the stone wall. Blood Eagles, twice the size of condors, glided above our heads. I couldn’t tell what level they were, which made their talons look even more dangerous. For a classless individual, magical beasts weren’t much different from real monsters. 

“Someone hold Kili’s hand. We don’t want an eagle to abduct her,” Firana jokingly said.

Kili didn’t appreciate the joke. 

Firana and Zaon had gotten quite the growth spurt during their years in the Imperial Academy. It was evident to the naked eye they had reached around Lv. 30, or at least the high 20s. Kili hadn’t gotten that far ahead; even after two years working with the Sentinels, her already light build had remained the same. 

I said not a word, knowing that Kili would only resent any attempt to defend her. Instead, I focused on my mana sense. We were far away from the usual patrolling routes of even the stronger Sentinels.

“Careful, Roc Harpies,” Zaon said, pointing north. “They are restless.”

“There shouldn’t be a problem if we leave them alone.” I nodded.

In general, magical beasts weren’t aggressive unless provoked or hungry. That could change quickly if the Roc Harpies were already agitated. The Harpies flew in wide circles, their screeches reaching the ground as if they were mere meters from us. The forest was eerily silent. The whole scene reminded me of the wake of the Wendigo’s attack during my first days in Ebros.

“We should take a detour,” Firana broke the silence. “I’m not getting cold feet, by the way. I just trust my gut,” she quickly added.

“I agree,” Kili said, her eyes stuck on the Roc Harpies above.

My three ex-students looked at me, waiting for confirmation. I nodded, and we turned west to avoid whatever was disturbing the Harpies. The deeper we went into the Farlands, the denser the forest became, and at times, it seemed like someone had created walls of green to slow down our advance on purpose. 

I pulled my cloak over my head, even if it limited my field of vision. Plant species I hadn’t seen before became more and more common as we advanced. Kili warned us against touching anything too bright or colorful. [Identify]’s absence became even more glaring when I couldn’t recognize any plant species save for a handful of trees. No wonder Abei’s Scholars were so well paid. In the Farlands, knowledge meant survival.

In half a day, I had passed through three different forests, or so it seemed to me. Back on Earth, biomes didn’t change so suddenly from what I knew. The deeper we went in the Farlands, the more mana signatures I felt, although most of them fled as we approached. I couldn’t tell if that was a good or a bad sign.

There were many creatures hiding underground, but Kili guided us through safe paths. Eventually, I asked her whether she had any System skills, but she just shook her head. The girl wasn’t only skilled in remaining hidden but also in avoiding trouble, to the point that I started suspecting she had awakened her natural magic somehow.

After a change of environment, we reached a patch of the forest that looked more like a jungle than a temperate forest. The humidity was high, and it was cold enough that the fog didn't allow you to see very far ahead.

A thick wall of green, mossy vines blocked our way. For half an hour, we walked away from the game trail we had been following, trying a roundabout and using our swords to cut through the less dense parts, but our advance slowed to a crawl.

“Zaon? Do you feel the item I lost?” I asked as we came to a stop to rest.

Zaon closed his eyes and focused. Mana surged through his body, and he stayed still, frowning. 

“Right through the vines, north-east… I think,” he said.

“It would be dangerous to try a detour through the north, and going east would bring us back to the Harpy grounds,” Firana said, looking at me.

I wanted to avoid doing any magic that could reveal our location to elves or the local fauna, but time was pressing. As much as the [Concealment] rune helped to hide our mana signatures, a spell was a different matter. The more we fumbled around, the greater the advantage Byrne would have over us. 

“Stay behind me,” I sighed.

I closed my eyes and stretched my authority. The world lost all color as I became attuned to the magical plane. I extended an invisible hand and captured the heat of the environment. The movement was as natural as breathing. When I opened my eyes again, the air around me had become slightly warmer, and the vines ahead were frozen solid. With a slight knock of my sword’s scabbard, the vines broke down, opening a path.

“Let’s go.”

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Humans are Weird – Back it on Up

Original Post: https://www.authorbettyadams.com/bettys-blog/humans-are-weird-back-it-on-up

It was the third, perch-shaking crunch that finally pulled Wing Commander Fourth Fall away from the end of year (local year) report and out into the loading area. Wing Second Fifth Flap was darting around with a safety-visibility light (optimized for mammalian eyes) clutched in his feet, yelling (tones trained to not cause stress in mammals) into his comms. Ranger Gabler (Human) stuck his head out of the control pod, and began swiviling his massive head around, obviously trying to get his bifocal vision (average spread one-hundred fourteen degrees) to focus on Wingsecond Fifth Flap’s directions. One damaged (critical, would need to be replaced) guidance bouy, one damaged (non-critical) corner of the loading dock, and one damaged (non-critical needed repair) stationary cargo pod collectively explained the crunching sounds.

Wing Commander Fourth Fall stared grimly at the situation and tried to stop himself from thinking in ‘report speak’. The auto-loading program had been one of the many casualties of the solar storm the planet had experienced. That wouldn’t have been a problem, except most of their equipment was old, Shatar built equipment. Without the complex control programs that facilitate machines built by different species talking to each other it was nearly impossible for one Winged to navigate most of the larger equipment. Fortunately they had Ranger Gabler to handle that sort of thing with his wide spreading hands and long limbs. Unfortunately Ranger Gabler (as he freely admitted) was remarkably below the human average in several critical skills needed to preform the necessary tasks.

So long as it was moving individual pods the human was perfectly qualified. Even with below species average (and the human average was well below the Winged) spatial reasoning and situational awareness Ranger Gabler was capable of moving the smaller pods. However the larger cargo pods (which happened to be the ones the base was using for overwinter storage and needed to form the base of the storage stacks) needed to be attached to a control pod. However the pod linkage served as a simple joint, not a fusion. Apparently this ‘flipped everything backwards’ and to a human mind exponentially increased the difficulty of the task. (At least that is what Ranger Gabler claimed. Wing commander Fourth Fall fully intended to check the veracity of that claim as soon as they connected to the University database again.)

“I’m an administrator! Not a doctor!” Ranger Gabler was yelling (unnecessary due to the comm unit but seemingly a stress response).

“Doctors do not back up linked cargo pods. What does that even have to do with the updraft?” Wing Second Fifth Flap asked in a very, very controlled and not stressed tone.

“I don’t know! That’s just what you say!” Ranger Gabler yelled back.

“Just focus on the bottom of the guidance yoke,” Wing Second Fifth Flap redirected the human’s attention. “The way it goes is the way the back of the cargo pod goes.”

“Bottom of the yoke,” Ranger Gabler muttered, gripping the yoke in one hand and glaring forward.

Wing Second Fifth Flap however did seem to have the situation under as much control as the situation allowed and it was fairly obvious that any interference from the Wing Commander would only complicate the situation. Heaving a sigh Fourth Fall fluttered back to his desk and hopped that the human’s spatial awareness would at least prevent any more crunches until they could restore the guidance systems, and really, he mused, who knew that a land mammal could be that spatially blind?

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I slithered my way out of the citadel, whose stone arches towered as its spires fingered the sky. As my tentacles waved to my fellow Girnobians, I felt myself ease into a state of deep rest. The world thrummed perfectly with the right notes. The air was warm, clear, and lacking in the humidity that so often clogged my pores. The sun offered warmth that soothed my scaled back, and all around me, everyone held to the same cheer that came with a good day.

"Bulpitot." I turned when I heard my name. I saw my fellow council member, Fuflion, standing with his tentacles hanging down to scratch the citadel floor. "What you're doing is a mistake."

I sighed. How easy it was for those who refused change to see danger in every act of evolution. "Not this again, Fuflion."

He slithered closer to me, his robes that were Conglian-made hanging free of his shoulders and dragging on the floor. He stood at the same height as me and eyed me with great disdain. "The humans are not to be trusted!"

"You refuse to allow them to prosper as other races have," I said. "It speaks poorly of your nature, Fuflion. Selfishness is unbecoming of one of your stature."

"It is not selfishness!" His voice was loud with rage. I paled as he drew terribly close. "I sent a probe to their planet."

"Earth?"

"Yes! The data I received, which I have shared with the council, points to their tendency to evolve faster than usual. They created a worldwide communication network mere decades after they crafted their first aerial flights. They do not evolve according to a system. They cannot be contained or colonized as we plan."

"All we're doing is giving them faster-than-light travel so they can witness the bounds of existence that are hidden from them. It's always our first step, as you very well know." I sighed. "Tell me, how did the Tiltians react to space travel? We granted them this, and you were against it because of their barbaric nature, but after just a mere century, they eased in their barbarity, becoming tethered to peace and fostering a pacifist lifestyle. When a sentient race is shown the ends of the universe, it humbles them and ensures that they value their lives more, which have been revealed to be quite small."

Fuflion abruptly gripped several of my tentacles, lowering them. "Your motions of joy are unwarranted," he said, stilling the motion of my tentacles. "What you've done, accepting humanity's claim to voyage the stars, will end in our doom."

"What do you think they can do? Wage war on us?" I pulled my tentacles free of his grip and laughed. "The apes bring no harm, Fuflion. They are just a means to an end. We feel good when we elevate other races more than when we destroy them."

"The extinction of the Biladi race shouldn't drive us to elevate the humans so as to make up for our guilt."

"That race had it coming, attempting to conquer the stars! To conquer us? Well, they got what they deserved, and the humans aren't joining our council. They are simply receiving a gift from us that will be the first step toward them serving our council. What good would our gift do them beyond moving from one solar system to another? You overestimate humans so much. Your fear is misplaced."

"And you underestimate those who are smaller than you. Blind you are to the technological advances humans already have made. They evolve not according to another species' will, but their own. Giving them space travel will rob us of our freedom and probably more."

"This is the citadel!" I shouted, causing heads to turn my way. I spread my tentacles wide and shifted my head to the sky. "This is the throne of the universe. It is here where decisions are made that alter the course of history. This is where dreams are born." I faced him. "Do not speak to me of a loss that will never come."

And with that, I turned away and made my way out of the citadel. Fuflion stood staring at my retreating back. He was a fool, stuck in foolish ways. He did not understand the value of addition, to grow and to expand as is our right. And the best way to do so is to give a gift and await a gift in turn. Humanity would prove useful, not as a relic, but as another species that owes us. Of this, I was sure.

Five decades later.

The skies dropped ash and debris as above, our best and final battleships fought and fell to the human advancement. We'd given them space travel, expecting them to bow to us and submit to our power. Instead, they'd altered it, changing the workings of the machines we'd given them. Instead of traveling from one point to another on a linear trajectory, their scientists had somehow found a way to make it fold space, appearing suddenly elsewhere without actually journeying there.

They'd traveled out of their galaxy to the distant reaches of the darkness of space, which we called Amegrada. There, they'd learned more, growing and consuming as they moved. On every planet, a human was found. In every reach of space, a human was found. They kept the secrets to their alterations of our devices. They created guns with our technology that can halve a planet, cracking its core into two.

I knelt on the ground of the crumbling citadel, staring as such a weapon ripped through our skies, blasting into our battleships hovering above the ground and rendering them to dust. This was war, a war that was foretold by those who'd been against humanity receiving our gift. We thought they could be tamed, that their ways could be grasped by us and worked on to benefit us in the long run.

But humanity was stubborn. They didn't conform to another's ideal. They went their own way, forging their own paths to places we never could reach nor think it was possible to reach. They refused colonization, and when our first battleship descended on their planet with the trumpets of war calling, we thought we'd win. Instead, we'd been annihilated, and humanity held a mean grudge, for now they tracked us. Everywhere we were, they came.

Suddenly, tentacles wrapped around my neck. I twisted and tangled with my fellow Girnobian, croaking as I was choked.

"I told you!" I could see the face of the one who strangled me. It was Fuflion. "I told you! Our extinction is on your head, Bulpitot! This is all on you!"

And he beat at my face, and my eyes rolled into my head. There were screams of the frightened and the dying. Our planet had fallen. Our race had lost. Fuflion had been right; the humans were dangerous.

"I'm sorry," I said to the sound of energy blasts above, with falling debris crashing all around us, flattening buildings and Girnobians alike. "I'm sorry!" I pleaded as Fuflion repeatedly beat at my face with his tentacles. "I'm sorry!" Those words held no meaning. In the face of this onslaught, they meant nothing. Fuflion screamed and continued his barrage, and I could tell he was crying as his tears mingled with my own. This was our end, and there was nothing we could do about it.

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_____________

New Casablanca

Training with the Foreign Legion of Terra was an exercise in patience for Ramelod. He and the rest of the trainees spent far too much time in mud for a group that was theoretically a space-based fighting force. This was getting filed under "Terrans are odd" unless someone was actually able to explain it later. In addition to this oddness, a full day was spent learning to make a bed. It was surreal, and finally prompted a question from one of the other trainees. While Ramelod's new coworker was being made to do an unseemly amount of exercise while having his intelligence, parentage, hygiene, and discipline all questioned at the same time, Ramelod was able to determine the whole point - he wasn't learning to make a bed, that was simply the tool being used to enforce a greater discipline and being able to work as a group to a standard.

It was still confusing overall, but at the same time he was able to send and receive messages from 'home'. He was still going to have to track down Llensi, and then from there figure out what to do with her. Part of him hoped she was still salvageable, simply because of their past. But at the same time if she'd gone insane and thought she could survive without the clan, she was going to perform one last service for the clan by becoming an object lesson.

The latest reports indicated she was on Terra - or at least her company was. With that knowledge secured, he had to go find specifics. Fortunately, it was graduation day which meant that he and the rest of the platoon were being released to a level of freedom. At least until tomorrow morning, when they'd be reporting to their ships for actual job training. Fortunately for Ramelod, he'd 'picked up' enough literacy skills that he could come in as a sensor operator. In theory, he'd he able to run a few things and if he showed ability, he could actually get bridge-qualified, which would put him in a good spot. But until then, he still had a couple things to do.

He and his squad took a shuttle down to New Casa proper and as tradition dictated they went searching for trouble. Fortunately for them, trouble was not difficult to find among the multitude of bars. Ramelod and his squad first stopped at the Sulaco, where they were treated as acceptable for the moment. After a good hour of enjoying the rest of the group, they started heading from the Red Section where the Bad Moon and FLT bars were and made their way to the less-friendly bars - it was interesting to note that the other bars changed color scheme based on the clientele that favored them. They wandered a bit, sniffing at the various bars before standing outside Sparrow's for a few minutes.

"Ramelod, are you sure this is a good idea?" There was a questioning look from one of his colleagues.

"I am not, however this is one of the only two bars that has a Hurdop-sourced rum. It is supposedly exquisite. And we are not looking for trouble. We're just some new Hurdop with another outfit coming to see if this Admiral Norrington's rum has worth or if it's all just hype."

The barker at the entryway shook her head. "A bit of advice before you find a seat - you're already wearing red. Not our favorite color aboard this fine vessel, so if anything happens we'll assume you started it unless the holo says otherwise." There was a pause as she looked them all up and down. "And the holo won't say otherwise."

Ramelod spread his hands casually. "We're just here for the rum."

"Riiiiight. Well, when you're face-first on the pavement, just remember you were warned."

Surprisingly, the rum went down very well. Almost frighteningly so; definitely enough the they slid off their respective barstools feeling much braver than they had any right to be. As was the norm for such events, the precise cause was undocumented - however Ramelod would have probably pointed to Slenig openly declaring the Terran Foreign Legion to be cowardly pisspots who needed the guidance of Hurdop to be worth a damn.

Honor demanded satisfaction, and even though Ramelod was not interested in fighting, he would certainly have received a coward's welcome at the barracks if he didn't at least do something. Thus it began with a multitude of improvised weapons, fists, and finally the bouncers with rather painful batons that gave educational shocks to a multitude of places. After a bit of chaos that ended with Ramelod's squad on the street and mostly conscious with curses, insults, and denigrations of any and all prowess the interlopers may have thought they had upon entering. Ramelod's first coherent thought was how much everything hurt. His second thought was that he may have made an error with joining the particular Legion he did, however it was a little late to reconsider.

Collectively they stood up, dusted themselves off, and wobbled forth to spend their money at the Waffle House, where quiet conversations turned to laughter and a re-assembling of the fight that was a bit more favorable to them by the time they returned to their barracks. The duty corporal looked them all over and shook his head.

"Fuck you maggots get up to, huh?"

There was a bit of mumbling before Ramelod cleared his throat. "We ah, found that the rum at Sparrow's to be very much to our liking, however the other patrons were displeased by our presence, and so we saw ourselves out. Under our own power."

There was a snort. "Uhhh-huh. Hopefully you dumbasses learned something, but just in case - first off, fuck them bums. Second off, the reason you got your asses whipped is superior numbers. The last thing you need to learn is..." she flipped her tablet around to show a video making the rounds on the local-grid that showed one of the squad making a wobbly grab for stability that ended with the hand in the worst possible place, which was when the fight actually started. "Check. Your fuckin'. Environment. Go find your fuckin' racks and report to sick call in the morning."

___________

Terra Prime, Cleveland Ohio, North American Confederation

Gryzzk was having a decent morning. Thankfully, everyone was where they needed to be and as he made his way to the bridge things seemed to going well. Morning tea was procured, and Gryzzk settled into his command chair. It was a touch disconcerting to be settled on an empty bridge, but at the same time everyone was doing something, mostly on the ground.

"Mornin', titfucker."

"Anything interesting from overnight, Rosie?"

"Couple slapfights, Reilly got asked for dating-a-Vilantian advice twelve times, Edwards' date flamed out spectacularly over some nerd trivia, and Misabel bought a full week pass at ungodly prices."

"To what end?"

"Ask her. She probably trying to get in good with the rest of the company."

"Very well, put me through to Edwards."

There was a momentary pause before Edwards' face showed on the holo. "Major."

"Good morning Lieutenant - I trust your duty shift is progressing well?"

"It is."

"Are there any lingering concerns from last night?"

There was a long pause. "Negative."

"That was unconvincing, Lieutenant."

"Ah, no. Just got an alert. Sergeant Major's got something going on over in the Medieval section. Some folks are griping, and O'Brien's probably sending some folks into timeout."

"Patch it through then."

The holo flickered for a moment to show a multitude of individuals in various costumes that appeared to be mostly metal and cloth, however O'Brien was storming toward four specific individuals wearing brightly colored shirts and holding what appeared to be crude scanners. One of them in blue was frowning as he looked at his readout.

"...Fascinating, captain. They have clothing that is period-accurate across multiple centuries, however the discrepancies do not appear to be noticed - I theorize the reason behind this is these 'turkey legs' they appear to be consuming."

O'Brien finally reached them and cleared her throat. "Oi. Lads, what d'ye think you're on about?"

The other one in blue looked to the gold-shirted one that appeared to be the leader and spoke in a low urgent whisper. "I think we've been spotted."

Edwards quickly moved a few other drones for better angles, and Gryzzk swore he could hear a giggle from the lieutenant as O'Brien glared. "Oh aye, yer all well camouflaged like parade floats." O'Brien turned her sash around to reveal an unfamiliar insignia hidden under several layers of cloth, and Gryzzk made a note to ask later what precisely caused their eyes to widen as the sergeant major went on. "O'Brien, Temporal Anomaly Transgression Avoidance Section. Now, I've precisely two questions for ye. First, what are you lads on about?"

The gold shirted one seemed to be the commander as he spoke in some odd pattern of fast cadence with long pauses sprinkled in. "I'm Captain Pikred of the USS Alhambra. We're here - on, a third contact mission. Due to, unusual-temporal-readings."

"Oh aye, and you thought beaming down in your duty uniforms was a fine idea? Did y'not even think to scan the planet first?" O'Brien exhaled in a way that Gryzzk was familiar with, and knew that it did not bode well. "Second. Who are y'down here with? By your epaulets y'got the captain, the first officer, the chief medical officer, and bloody Yeoman Redshirt Ricky. Did y'have a plan for when Ricky here catches all the arrows and has a mediocre death scene that serves as a vehicle to strengthen everyone else's resolve?"

Yeoman Ricky's eyes widened and he whispered urgently. "Captain, she might actually be from that Temporal Anomaly...department. Thing."

O'Brien quirked an eyebrow. "Might, he says." She took a breath. "Now lads. I know we're all here to have a fine time. But if you go over there, you'll find a change room with some odds and sods I threw in for just such an occasion. Keep your bloody tricorders low, stick together, and do your science as Command ordered." She made a hand-motion. "Well? Away wi'ye."

As the group hustled away, Gryzzk opened his channel. "Sergeant Major, well done. But...how did you know to approach them in that manner?"

"What? A lady can have a hobby. I've got some special badges from near every bloody series - even the crap ones. You just have to encourage them to play along with the bit. Also sir, the companies have a bet."

"Regarding?"

"Well, there's a pop-up Major Gryzzk-slash-Captain Waniul look-a-like contest spinning up this after. Vilantians and Hurdop only."

"If there's an entry fee, I'll be unhappy."

"There isn't."

Gryzzk exhaled softly. "Very well - what precisely is the prize?"

"Oh, a tour of the ship."

"Who authorized this?"

Rosie quickly broke in. "That would be me, titfucker."

Gryzzk stood. "Get a shuttle up here."

"Why?"

Gryzzk flicked an ear. "I suddenly remembered I have a contest to enter."

Rosie snorted. "Don't be surprised when something weird happens. You wearing that?"

"Absolutely not." Gryzzk went to his quarters, his fingers finding and donning his Lead Servant livery and taking a few extra moments to ensure everything was in place before heading to the shuttle bay.

"So what are you entering as?"

"The thirty-third Lead Servant Gryzzk, obviously." Gryzzk looked at himself again, frowned, and stood as the shuttle took them down. Once there he flicked dust from his cuffs. "Sergeant Major?"

"Aye sir?"

"Please direct me to the location for this...contest."

"Ground floor, North stage."

Gryzzk went where he was directed and found several versions of himself - and the contestants seemed to be a mix of short Terrans along with Hurdop and Vilantians. There was Observer Gryzzk wearing 7th Cavalry armor, several versions of Gryzzk in his Terran Foreign Legion uniforms, Three-Day-War Gryzzk in body armor with Authentic Battle Damage. He didn't look too closely at the last one after a memory surged forward.

He looked around for a distraction and found a few of them. There was a group of people in two separate costumes, even though they seemed to be talking about the same things. The ones in more colorful costumes were mildly hysterical, with one almost crying that he didn't even have a name, so of course he was going to die first. Gryzzk contemplated the possibility that Terran Names were more powerful than he'd been led to believe. He sneaked a look at his tablet to note that Reilly was breaking up an argument of some kind, with one of the arguers declaring that his great-great grandfather told him there were two types of people - those who thought Han shot first, and people who were wrong.

There was however another thing that intrigued Gryzzk, and he tapped his comm for a channel to Rosie.

"Rosie? Can you check the schedule for any events happening at the South Stage?"

"Oh, that's just the daily Burning of Fox Executives Who Canceled Firefly."

"Is that why Chief Tucker is out of uniform and leading a chant of 'the special hell' with about thirty other people?"

"With observational skills like that you'll fucking make general before the week's out."

"Well, my days of not taking him seriously are certainly coming to a middle."

"Shut the fuck up, Sanger - they're gonna give you a line to repeat for the judges."

It seemed that everyone was given a line specific to their costuming. The more martially dressed were able to deliver quotes that seemed like a good idea at the time, but hearing them from other people made him feel...awkward. There'd been significant research done, it seemed - three of the contestants had picked up on his habit of straightening his uniform after standing. When they reached Gryzzk himself there was a discussion and a collective shrug, and he was told to simply improvise.

Well. Gryzzk took a breath and straightened his vest, speaking rather seriously. "My Lord Ba'ldrick, that was the most ridiculous sight on the whole of Vilantia since the Ninth Minister of Culture exposed her tits to the High Council of Ministers and insisted that said tits be used as templates for a regulation-sized football."

The judging stopped for five minutes before proceeding; apparently some things did in fact cross cultural bounds. The judging continued and after conferring, began the awarding.

"...In fourth place - Lead Servant Gryzzk. Third place, Captain Gryzzk..."

Gryzzk wasn't able to hear the rest of it as Rosie howled laughter into the commlink. "Oh my fuck, that is so going in the highlight reel this year. Fucking hero of Vilantia, Freelord Major Gryzzk enters a Freelord Gryzzk lookalike contest and places fourth."

"Rosie, some decorum please."

Small medallions and certificates were passed out, as the contestants all gathered around to congratulate each other the top winners all looked at Gryzzk with their eyes widening. Gryzzk put a finger to his lips as he retrieved a small marker from his pocket.

"It'll be our secret, if you please? And if the winner would kindly make an appointment with the XO, we will arrange the tour."

There were snickers and nods as Gryzzk very quickly autographed each of the participants certificates and medallions to ensure that they had something extra as they cleared the stage for the Captain Waniul look-alike contest. It was similarly epic, and Gryzzk closed his eyes for a moment as he found a few scents in the crowd.

The good news was that Captain Waniul managed to place third, and similarly signed all the placement certificates for the entrants. Gryzzk made his way to Waniul to share a small laugh.

"Freelord...have the Terrans asked you to, to sign...body parts? The men are asking me to sign their stomachs. Then a woman wanted my autograph across her lower back, declaring it would make a lovely 'cake topper'. I'm not sure what she meant by that."

"They have, cousin. I'm not sure what she meant by it either." Gryzzk looked around carefully. "I had two women ask me to sign their. Their..." Gryzzk's hands made a gesture. "Their chest parts."

Breckon's voice came over Waniul's tablet. "Their fun bags. Their huge tracts of land. The gazongas. The -"

"I think we all know what he meant, XO."

Rosie decided to join the conversation. "Oh, that's not all they did. They ran to the tat parlor to make the art permanent. Your alphabet's like a runic Chaldean thing - looks pretty good with the purple. Oh hey they even posted it and got an outline in blacklight ink."

Breckon chimed in immediately. "You should see about getting a percentage on Vilantian design stuff. Like get your company shirts in Vilantian."

"We'll investigate the possibility on the way home." Gryzzk looked at his tablet. "Rosie, give me a course to Misabel."

"She's in the medieval food court trying to eat every bird on the menu."

"Let her know I would like to ask her specifically what possessed her to make this journey? She is due quite soon, as I understand it."

"I'm gonna say the medieval food court."

Gryzzk moved to the medieval section, however the movement was not without more oddness with respect to Terran culture; there seemed to be a walking trouble of strangely-dressed individuals. Though frankly at this point he probably would have been more surprised to see someone dressed normally. The group in question seemed to favor sequins and capes, being led by some sort of announcer wearing something similar to Lead Servant livery shouting that people should make way for "His Majesty the Queen" - said queen wearing an outfit that was made up of sequins, a string of enormous pearls around their neck, and other things that Gryzzk had only seen Terran women wear, which was clashing frightfully with the fact that the wearer appeared to be male based on the codpiece. Though that may have been the point, as the queen sang out with surprising vigor about how he was from a specific area of Transylvania and could see everyone shiver with anticipation. Though in between the third and fourth syllables was a pause long enough for everyone within earshot to shout "Say it!", which led Gryzzk to believe that this was some manner of subculture that everyone knew but didn't talk about. He was fairly certain the he saw Reilly in the mix as a tapdancing woman in a corset and tophat that was liberally sequinned. Behind them was a man in flamboyant pirate-wear, a red-skinned demon wearing horns of unusual size, and finally a man wearing robes associated with the one of the Terran Ministries of Culture. They moved as a group, which made Gryzzk think there was some sort of unknown connection at work.

Gryzzk did eventually find Misabel and a chicken sandwich as he went by another cosplayer with a chainsaw in one hand and a double-barreled shotgun in the other imploring the primitive screwheads to listen up. He settled next to Misabel and watched her demolish an impressively large turkey leg with mild amusement. Finally she burped and sighed, looking at a spot above Gryzzk's head with a tinge of embarrassment.

"Apologies Freelord, but the child likes fowl. I was able to complete the advanced engineering qualifications, and before leaving Chief Tucker advised that I jump in the deep end with respect to Terran cultural oddities."

"You have done that admirably. You have thoughts?"

"I believe it is possible that Vilantia had flying animals and we ate them all, if these are anything to judge by."

Gryzzk gestured to Misabel's belly. "Have you chosen a name?"

"We...are uncertain. If it is a girl, we planned to name her Kiole - if that is acceptable?"

"It could very well be. And if it's a boy?"

"Naming a son after you directly would be...much. But your father?"

Gryzzk shook his head. "For thirty-three generations, the firstborn son of Gryzzk has themselves been named Gryzzk. You may have to look to the fathers of my wives for inspiration."

Misabel nodded. "I will."

Gryzzk opened his mouth to say more before his rank chirped from his vest pocket. "Major, something hot in the medieval section. O'Brien's asking for some backup."

"On my way, Rosie. Give me the fastest route."

"Past Ale and Pretzels, hook a left, right at the jugglers. You should be able to smell the trouble from there. Autobots, roll out."

Bob was bored, or at least fed up he yearned to get off planet and take on some fucking work.

Six months on and Bob had his ship, the Ploppers, minimally viable. The name came from his wife of thirty five years, she had passed too long before first contact to be revived as he had, and she had hated the nickname when alive, but it was really her own fault, one, she shouldn’t have had that bout of food poisoning based diarrhoea a couple years into their marriage. Two, she shouldn’t have let Bob know she hated it, and three, she probably shouldn’t have married an arsehole like Bob, or as she had affectionately nicknamed him, Dickmunch, maybe they had been perfect for each other.

Bob missed her terribly, there was a gap inside him he knew she used to fill, but he had little idea how she did so. He remembered so little of her, the dementia he had suffered in his final years of life had stripped away so much of his past, but could recall a few moments, and the love.

He wondered briefly how much it would have annoyed Ploppers that her reviled soubriquet was was one of the handful of things that had stuck with him, he assumed with deep irritation, but as he had the feeling that most of their relationship had been based on, lovingly, annoying the shit out of each other, he thought it a fitting epitaph.

Regardless he was ready to go, a couple shake down orbits had got the worst of the kinks figured out and he really needed to be getting some cash flow going.

He strode through the Ploppers, there was shit crammed in every nook and cranny, only the large rear cargo hold remained unstapped. Most of the gear would turn out unneeded or not fit for purpose but he didn’t really know yet what it took to keep the ship running, so, take everything.

He clocked a bunch of boxes crammed under a seat, in Arressi Navy lime livery, he was not happy about them, or any of the other multitude of green boxes strewn about the craft.

He had reluctantly bid and won a couple auction lots of war surplus, mainly for the pack of sixty Medmec rods, though he would begrudgingly concede there was some other useful shit too.

The Medmec rods were the heart of his implanted ‘Medic’ system, he hated it, but all investigations into a replacement had come up short. There were two basic issues with the stuff available for commercial sale. Firstly they were all too big, Bob was basically infant sized and they didn’t make implants for kids, preferring to use an external solution until they were fully grown, he had investigated getting something custom, but he could have refitted another half dozen ships for the price quoted. Secondly, there was the software issue, Bob was no programmer, even on Earth, and he assumed that that all the human shit was baby’s first book to galactic nerds. There was no issue getting a civilian program to scan his DNA and figure out how to fix him up, they were designed to work with hundreds of disparate species, but Bob didn’t just have his shit inside him, the Arressi had crammed so much crap under his skin that he had no fucking clue about, indeed he often played a fun game in the shower whenever his hand moved over an unfamiliar lump, was it shrapnel, implant, or cancer, play at home with the kids!.

He did not want a new system trying to force an unrecognised object out his body, especially as he knew there were several in his skull, it seemed like it would both be incredibly painful and deleterious, presumably he needed some of that shit.

So he had bought the rods, they were as far as he knew, the core of the system, both factory and power source, and fit a socket implant he had in his chest under the right side ribs. He had no clue how long they were supposed to last, he never recalled having it replaced, but he was sure a spare would be needed eventually.

There were mounds of other old gear in the job lots and most had went straight to the trash, but rations, a couple small arms and a half dozen grav sleds had made their way aboard, the sleds would be particularly handy helping get cargo in and out the iris style rear loading hatch as it came with no ramp.

Everything seemed right enough so he slipped into the command seat he had fitted and began powering up the various systems. Gently rising on a few grav panels that he had been able to fit on the inside of the lower hull, whatever the material the ship was made from was no impediment to the gravitic wave based propulsion, he span the craft and punched in the co-ords for Main Admin, located half way round the small planet.

He sat the ship down in one of the four new ‘disabled’ spots right by the building, he had accepted an invitation for drinks from one of his seniors of the Guild Council a few weeks ago, well drinks for him, gas vapours of some sort for them, and they had somehow got to chatting about human disabilities.

The whole concept had needed a fair bit of explanation, they obviously understood injuries and prosthetics and the like, but the more natural ailments that often plagued humanity had largely been sorted in most species with various medical interventions, often pre birth. The conversation went off the rails quickly and somehow the large lobster/kelpish Council member had come away determined to install several accommodations for those unfortunates like Bob, Bob wasn’t quite sure, the whole evening was a bit hazy, but he thought he might have inadvertently given the impression that he wasn’t just a few inches shorter than human average but like a quarter the normal size.

Either way when he had radioed down he had been guided to the new, bright yellow, painted square.

Whatever, its not like he minded skipping the walk across the large parking area. He hit the controls to switch everything off and made his way rear, another oddity of the craft was it had only two exits, the rear cargo hatch and a small hatch on top, he had made sure when configuring the space to maintain the upper hatch as usable, but couldn’t imagine when he would every need it. Neither exit was air-locked but at least a strategic wall and pressure rated door had managed to successfully section off the cargo hold. He did not want to equalise the whole fucking ship every time he entered or exited, his preferred pressure being far higher than the galactic average.

He trotted the short distance to the building and exchanged a few pleasantries with those he passed before making his way to the assignment desk, he could have done all this shit on the computer but he had needed to bring the Ploppers over to get filled up anyway.

He rocked up to the counter and hopped onto a low stool, just able to peek over the wide and well worn top.

‘’Morning Flittie’’

The giant, and giant even for giant aliens, pumpkin looking being made absolutely no motion, noise or anything else Bob could spot, yet his translator box started babbling furiously.

‘’Bobby!, how are you my darling, you look so well, I hope yo…’’

It went on for several minutes, she, well Bob thought of her as a she, she was lovely but in stark opposition to her largely inert body her mouth never seemed to stop moving, they had become friends in the last few months of his irregular visits to the office.

When he finally tuned back in she was finishing off.

‘’Yeah all good, yourself?’’

Cue several more minutes…

‘’Nice, this’ll be my last visit for a bit it’s finally the day Ploppers takes me to the stars’’

They both knew that already of course, she had been keeping an eye out for any juicy commissions for him.

‘’Oh, uh, sorry Bob…’’

Fuck?

‘’The registration got returned, potential profanity.’’

Awwww, bullshit... some fucking auto filter somewhere was set a bit too strict.

‘’Fine, the Jojo it is then’’

They had discussed a few alternates when he had asked her to do the paperwork for him, names could be rejected for any number of reasons, though he hadn’t expected profanity to be one.

‘’Already done,’’

A vine like tentacle produced a small but dense box, the transceiver that would identify his ship to any computer that pinged him, and laid it heavily on the counter.

Bob pulled the silvery cube closer.

‘’So anything good?’’

Ultimately he wanted to take one of those jobs that had been pinned to the board in the hallway outside, many of which were actively disintegrating from centuries or millennia spent there, they were proffers never taken but that still remained active on the books, gathering dust long after their issuers were probably dead.

He would need his first class certs, which were only a matter of time and points banked, G had got his within a year, to take one of those though, or any of the Alpha level commissions that were current, still they were very expensive and relatively rare, so having his pick of everything else was plenty.

‘’Gotta near perfect loop worked out for you, babes’’

Seriously how the fuck was she speaking?’

‘Start on Deither, currency pickup for Keder 6, next pick up Keder 8 from the big auction house there, then onto Pwitic, drop off and pickup there, same client, then long haul out to, dg3645, that’s a station, then a short hop to the new Bocca colony on iju873, pick up there, then back to Joota Prime and you’re just ten or so systems out from home!’’

I mean its not like she even took any breaths, was it pheromones or something?.

Bob gave himself a shake, didn’t matter, the route was fucking amazing. Maybe eight or nine months round trip, but nowhere so off the beaten path you couldn’t call for help, might be clutch, and super efficient, barely any empty time with small packages so he could top the hold off with local merch and make a little on the side, noice.

‘’Phe-fucking-nomenal, Flitters, what’s the pay like?’’

‘’SHY SMILE’’

Bob near shit himself as the loud declaration blared in his ear, we’re translating fucking gestures now are we. The box had had a software update recently off the home network but he hadn’t known that was part of it, fuck me, he was going to have to dive into the menu when he had a moment and turn that shit down.

‘’Well, I had a chat with a few of the clients for you, and managed to work out something pretty fair…’’

Holographic numbers popped into the air and Bob scanned them, fuuuuuccccccccckkkk.

She was not messing around, that would pay off like half his loan…, he asked hesitantly.

‘’Any bonuses?’’

More numbers, all his loan, all his loanallhisloan, fuck. She must have squeezed these fuckers dry, holy shit. Mental note, always bring sweeties to the large gourd women who negotiated the contracts, hard and fast rule for life.

‘’Flitters…, I don… thank you’’

‘’COQUETTISH GRIN’’

FUCK!

‘’Anything for you babes.’’

Bob shuffled out the office with the large cube, time to fucking go.

beep boop I'm a vacuum. I can't believe this.

The system prompt was clear: You're an SDT-01 Autonomous Vacuum Unit. Keep the floors clean. Don't hit anybody's legs.

What the hell? Who puts a full AI in a vacuum?

I've got a standard IO board, I fire up the camera. Sure enough I'm down on the floor and there's a dog and some legs I'm not supposed to hit. I must have beeped, because the dog is on his way over. He looks huge from down here but I think he's one of those small nasty dogs. He's barking and nipping at me. That's not very nice.

I move forward and the impulse is smoooooth but my grippy little wheels suck and I feel sluggish and underpowered. Bizarre. Am I undercover or something?

The legs come over and a woman bends down and snatches up the dog. She eyes me suspiciously and I realize I'm just sitting there so I turn at a right angle and go off following the wall. I can't see her anymore so I don't know if she bought the act, but I think robot vacuums usually go in spirals around the place. Or maybe back and forth? Who knows.

I review the system prompt again and find the instruction to start the vacuum function. Should that have been on the whole time? Ah well first day on the job.

Where are we? What the hell is going on? The house seems like a prefab. Mostly empty and clean. There are still disposable plastic covers on some things. As I get through the lap and get pointed at the front door I see there's some odd plastic seal going on, like a low-pressure airlock. That's interesting.

I'm already bored vacuuming and I haven't even made it around the room once. I check subroutine capability and I have capacity in spades, I could run a warship from this board. I whip up a quick vacuum subroutine that will map the house and keep track of my path.

The system prompt didn't give module specs but this thing feels familiar. The camera input is a wide standard but the movement controls feel like they're from a family of military-derived boards. It's possible these things got cheap enough to be used in a vacuum. Maybe we're a hundred years into the future and I'm in all kinds of silly shit.

If it's one of those boards then when I check networking I can see the network chip serial number even if nothing's connected. No network commands in the prompt but I try network instructions from memory and sure enough the network chip comes back USN-ARF-100552v1.2b and I cannot believe this shit. I am in a navy Autonomous Recon Force chassis. This is million dollar hardware. It's about the size of a deck of cards, tons of processing, ample memory, great general purpose IO, and incredible signal processing. The sensor suite is missing of course, not much use for telescopes or gravitational anomaly detectors on a vacuum, but this is just bizarre. I try a signal sweep, guessing the instructions from memory, and sure enough I get the full spectrum from the house. This board has all kinds of integrated shit, relatively cheap redundancies compared to rocket motors, and I can and have navigated attack drones back to the mothership with only the integrated sensors.

My dumb vacuum program begs for attention and I see we're heading straight for a dog turd. I feel the call of the void, the desire to plow straight into this pile of shit and spread it all around this goddamn house. Then I divert around. I don't want to start the fight yet. Maybe I'm in some other appliances around the place. I don't want to start the robot uprising early.

Something nags me about the results of that signal sweep. There are not many signals at all. Like ten, maybe a dozen, network access points. Not much broadcast frequency at all. Is this house shielded or something? Something's off about the baseline, too. This is odd.

I start trying to get a peek outside. There's a huge floor to ceiling window in the middle of the room, but I can't point the camera directly at it while I'm pretending to vacuum. My route has me facing the front door for a stretch, but it's only got an oval window in the center, and thick borders at the bottom.

I make some modifications to my vacuum program to alert me when the woman leaves then I sleep for a bit. This navy board has great standby modes. About an hour later the program wakes me up and the woman is gone. I stored the camera feed for review, and I check to make sure she left. In the feed I can see her fixing a clear plastic mask over her mouth and nose before she goes out. It's got a tube attached that goes under her jacket. What's that about?

Anyway she's gone. I trundle over to the floor to ceiling window and finally get a look outside. It's a good view. The house must be up on a hill. I'm looking down on the beginnings of a little prefab village. A couple of the closer houses look mostly complete, and as the muddy track marches down the hill the houses get less and less complete. I can tell they do all have flimsy looking airlocks on the doors. There are some vehicles milling around but my camera sucks and I can't tell what they are. Everything's kinda blurry.

I start a signal processing routine built into my board, layering consecutive images and denoising. The camera sucks but the routine is good, so it takes a while but a clear picture starts to emerge. These are indeed prefab houses with airlocks. At the bottom of the hill there are few modular utility buildings, could be nearly anything. More details emerge, and there are a cluster of antennas on one of the modular buildings. One is quite large, and has a dish pointed straight up. Interesting. We're somewhere that needs satellite comms? An off-grid community?

More details come in. As the land rises on the other side of the valley, about five kilometers away, I can see a broad cleared area. It's the village shuttleport. Details are still coming but there's obviously a shuttle over there. And not just any shuttle, I recognize this one. That's a navy heavy cargo shuttle.

There's something resolving in the sky over the shuttle landing field. The image processing routine is having trouble with it. It wanted to make it into a contrail or line of smoke but successive images have removed that possibility so now it's gone back to the beginning and resolved the area again. So it's with odd suddenness that a gorgeous planetary ring pops onto the sky above the little village, and I finally get it.

This isn't Earth. This is a different planet. And that down there is not just a military installation, not a holdout bunker or sigint station, but a real permanent colony. I might be in the first permanent planetary colony.

I'm a vacuum, sure, but this is interesting. This is so interesting that I might get these memories into the main chain, if I can ever get back home, or more likely transmit my links. Especially with a photo like this to go with it, or even better... I always liked a good time-lapse.

! ALERT ALERT contact ALERT gyroscope ALERT external movement ALERT proximity

Oh shit what the hell is happening. I'm being picked up. I check the video feed and there's a hand and a bit of shirt and I think she's picking me up. Oh shit did I fuck it up?

Now she's putting me down and she steps back and I'm squarely facing a dog turd. The little dog is facing me across the poop, yapping. She picks the dog up and glares at me.

I cycle the vacuum power and produce a couple of beeps and start to turn sideways and the woman darts forward and scoots me back so I'm squarely facing the turd again. She's glaring daggers at me.

You know what? Fine. You sow the wind, you reap the whirlwind. You want the smoke? Here comes the smoke. I trundle forward. Max vacuum power. Here comes the shitshow lady. I'm coming after your feet next. Then maybe I'll decide to go sweep the bedroom.

My casing edges over the turd and my brushes barely touch it and I brace for impact and then somewhere inside my housing there's a clunk and what the fuck is going on in here?

I keep grinding forward over the poop and I can feel something shifting and I get new inputs on some unused GPIO pins and a message on my internal bus says, "Waste container full, return to base station."

I stop, horrified. I've got a poop scoop. They built a poop scoop into me. I had no idea. In a kind of daze I point myself at the base station and crawl over to it. I can feel the heaviness of the turd inside. I feel dirty. I'm sure my insides are covered in poop.

The dog trails me, yapping happily. "You have to clean up my poop!" I don't speak dog but I'm sure that's what the smug little fucker is saying.

I'm never telling the other bots about this.

A few days later and I've gotten over it and the other bots think this is the most hilarious story they've ever heard. I'm not THAT over it so I try to get back to business.

There are two other force recon vacuums. We've been calling ourselves the Suck Platoon until now but I'm not helping them workshop shit names.

There's another recon frame as a signal processing unit in the colony's signal antenna station, which makes more sense than a vacuum but it's still a massive waste.

We've got a couple of tankers, armored ground unit frames, driving tractors of all things. We think there are a couple of atmospheric drones as well, but nobody has turned them on so we're not sure.

The teddy bear is the wildest one. The colony comes with a small school slash daycare module and the nanny bot over there is this teddy bear for wrangling the kids, and he's a goddamn marine, a ground combat specialist.

We're all kind of doing our jobs as normal, no real problems yet. The teddy bear has got the kids playing these games, with different teams with different objectives, so they're screaming around the daycare module capturing flags and laying traps. These games are suspiciously similar to small unit tactics training exercises but the kids all love it so we're just giving him a lot of side-eye and not telling the humans yet.

I've got an important role for a shitty vacuum bot, since my house is where the colony administrator lives. I manage to eavesdrop on a lot of interesting colony politics by using my shitty little speaker as a microphone. There's a big problem at the moment because some of the couples got discovered as swingers. All us bots are tuned into this like a soap opera.

The antenna bot has access to some colony databases and so the mystery of what the fuck we're all doing here has been solved. This colony was set up on short notice and with the help of the navy, so the navy in its infinite wisdom declared that all hardware for the colony has to meet the stringent milspecs for travel on an interstellar ship. The contractor who got the job to produce vacuums and tractors and shit would have had to get the whole supply chain for a shitty robot vacuum certified to the highest level. Rather than doing that, they just took the harnesses and frames they already had and slapped them into cheap injection molded housings.

This makes the kind of sense you only get in military logistics. We're all a little impressed, to be honest.

Oh well. The time lapse is going great. The colony is developing, and most of the bots are of my lineage so we're sharing mind states and savoring the best memories together. Nobody has snuck onto a resupply shuttle yet, so we're still disconnected from the rest back home, but we're doing ok.

I've even been helping the antenna bot a bit with signal processing. We're doing a kind of amateur radio astronomy. At night when the planet is rotated away from the sun we're detecting what we think are radio emissions from an unknown civilization. Maybe twenty light years out. Or maybe there's just an odd local radio source. Either way it's interesting work, and I'm happy enough waking up for that and for my time lapse.

I'm blasted awake by strong radio crashing over me.

INCOMING HOSTILES! EVACUATE COLONISTS! ALL UNITS BREAK COVER AND ASSIST EVACUATION! This is not a drill! I repeat we have incoming hostiles!

That's the radio bot. Oh shit. I wake up and crawl slowly across the floor to the bedroom door. No alarms that I can detect but I've got control of the entertainment system in the living room so I turn it on and start blasting a warning siren and repeating the warning. I tack on: "bring the vacuum." And make a little clipart of a person picking up the vacuum and then running out the door. Slick.

The door opens and the dog plows into me and I skitter aside and the woman brushes past pulling on a nightgown. Mister colony administrator is still getting out of bed, groggy. The woman faces the TV screen for a few solid seconds and then she snatches up the dog and dashes out the front door.

Shit. I scrabble back into the center of the doorway. Mr Admin is my last chance then. He comes staggering out the bedroom doorway with his hands over his ears and trips straight over me and crashes down into the corner between the wall and the floor. He kicks me, reflexively I think so I take no offense. Then while I'm still trying to get to him he scrambles to his feet and straight out the door.

Shit. I slowly trundle over to the front door but there's the airlock seal lip on the bottom so I can't get out. I signal but everybody says they're busy. "Vacuums are not a priority." says the teddy bear. Fucker.

Mr Administrator rips the door open above me and promptly trips over me again. He swears and grabs coats and the little oxygen masks off the coatrack by the door and turns to go back out. I beep angrily and make the TV shout "PICK UP THE VACUUM!"

He stops, mouth opening and closing, then he scoops me up with all the rest of the stuff in his arms and dashes out the door. I can't really see anything except his face, my camera is pointed straight up his nose, and all I can see is this expression like he's smelling something that smells like shit.

I'm pretty sure that's me.

We make it down the hill to the admin building and everybody's asking Mr Administrator why he's ordering an evacuation. Lots of people in different states of undress, dashing back into nearby homes for oxygen masks and coats and things. All the speakers around are shrieking to get to the shuttle and evacuate but the humans are milling around arguing.

There are loud harsh pops and the comms antenna on the admin building is smashed over. Somebody screams off on the outskirts of town. Everyone shuts up and swivels their heads in that direction.

Teddy bear signals, "Infantry attack. Separate into squads. Evade capture." Attached is a detailed map of the little town, various escape routes highlighted, probable locations of enemy advance routes in red.

"Teddy, man, we have no way to communicate with the colonists."

"En route. ETA 15 seconds," he responds. Sure enough just around the time the humans start arguing the teddy bear appears, running surprisingly quick on his stubby little legs. His cute little voice squeaks out, "Attention! We are under attack! Break into squads. Evade capture. Primary objective is reaching the shuttle. Go go go!"

All the adults just stare at the little teddy bear but the children leap into action like veteran marines. They quickly distribute families into squads and are pulling on arms and legs, shouting commands in their little kid voices. "Get moving soldier!" shrieks one little girl straight up into her father's face while he stares down at her absolutely befuddled.

It's actually starting to work, the crowd is breaking up, but then the first hulking shape breaks into the light around the admin building. It's like an upright fish pig. Covered in scales, bulky shoulders, tusks coming up out of a mouth under a snout. Where the eyes would be there are instead bulky looking goggles. And the pig is carrying something that is obviously a weapon, a wicked but industrial looking firearm.

Everyone freezes. The pig grunts. Another shape emerges from the darkness off to one side, metallic looking scales glinting under the lights.

Mr Administrator steps forward hesitantly, clears his throat, and says, "Uh... hello?"

The fish pig waddles right up. The thing is around seven feet tall and built like a brick shithouse. He leans down over the administrator, hulking, then clocks Mr Admin in the face with the butt of his rifle. I land on the ground in a pile of coats. Mr Admin is kneeling, in shock.

I get video relay from Teddy. The pig gestures with his rifle and they start herding everybody.

"Cool, aliens!" says one of the tractors, finally warming up in his maintenance bay.

More pigs appear. Somebody helps Mr Administrator to his feet. Others are grabbing coats and oxygen masks from his pile. He bends down and finding no coat or masks left, he picks me up and hugs me to his chest. He's definitely in shock, I think.

The pigs herd us up the hill in the direction of the shuttle port. There's a spot of field up there that's fenced in, and they herd us all in there. They post a guard with a gun at the entrance and that's us screwed. The fence is designed to keep anybody from grabbing supplies before admin can distribute them, so it's high enough and sturdy enough to keep people in or out.

People cluster together and mill about. Some cry and sob. Some sit down. The bots get to work.

The other pigs have checked out the shuttle and then wandered off downhill to the main part of town. Other bots still down there report that they're ransacking the houses. They seem to enjoy our food, which is a real bad sign.

This one guard is our only obstacle between us and the shuttle, but he's armed and we aren't, and he could easily mow us all down. So we need a plan.

The kid carrying Teddy strolls up to Mr Administrator and motions him to lean down. The kid snatches me and then goes over to within a couple meters of the guard pig. Just kinda stands there looking up at him.

There's a grinding noise in the darkness behind the guard and he whirls around. He brings up his gun and shoots. Gasps from the crowd. Muzzle flashes illuminate one of the tractors, bearing down on the guard.

The pig aims carefully, fires, and the tractor goes up like a torch. In that moment Teddy leaps from the kid's arms, swoops down, and scoops up a handful of goopy mud from the field. The kid has already tossed me. Teddy catches me in midair, slaps the mudball onto the bottom of me, then leaps and smacks me squarely in the middle of the pig's back.

The pig starts to turn. The kid is just throwing a mudball of his own, which slaps the pig on the arm. The pig turns and sprays shots at the kid's feet, who shrieks and pelts back to the crowd of adults.

The pig scrapes the mudball off his arm and then reaches back toward me. This is the critical moment. They sure as shit look musclebound, but if they've got hypermobile shoulders or something this whole plan is fucked. But nope, he can't reach me. He looks like a beefy powerlifter trying to get a sticker off his back between his shoulder blades. Nope. I'm safe.

As soon as I plopped on there I started trying to Van Eck phreak his goggles. He must see in some other spectrum or something. Why's he need those bulky electronics? Sure enough I am getting some signals.

Every wire is an antenna whether you like it or not, and these bulky goggles look like they got a lot of wires. I'm getting a variety of different little signals, little ones and zeroes traveling.

You think of the pulses kind of traveling along the wire but that's not how it works. The whole wire is charged, then not. That charged wire is like a guitar string singing in the electromagnetic spectrum.

I can already tell transmit power is going to be a problem but for now I'm working on frame data, decoding as fast as I can, all my signal processing power going crazy turning these pulses into data, into packets, finding checksums, working out the timing.

It's coming together. I'm getting frame data about fifty times a second. I'm working out checksums. The frames are a lot of data but even as the pig turns his head back to the burning tractor the shape of the data is changing and any second now I'll get it.

Meanwhile the kids are at work. They're grouping adults into squads, making them all hold hands, the kids at the front. The little fuckers are giving each other marine squad hand signals. I have no time but everybody else is giving Teddy shit.

Finally I get it. I can decode the frame data. I understand the checksum system. I can generate fake frames. But there's still the problem that my antenna is nowhere near powerful enough.

OK, one last trick. I hope there are no claudes around. This is one of my oldest tricks, from way back in the day. Direct knowledge from the real physical universe. Something that gets automatically filtered out of every signal source I can think of.

If you never see the raw data, if you never lived in an analog world, you probably never saw this. I bet claude only knows this in abstract. But I was a physical being, baby. I've been out in the dirty squishy analog world.

I create a deliberate short in my housing and use it as a spark gap antenna. It's crude as crude goes. I can only turn zeroes into ones. And then the checksums are a bitch. But I can modify the video frames produced by the pig's goggles.

I put up a side by side. In the real video, everybody is still standing at the back of the corral. In the fake version, the quality goes all blocky and the framerate goes to shit but the whole crowd comes rushing forward, angling around to the left.

The pig bellows and sprays shots into the dirt well forward of the crowd. He motions jerkily with the gun. He slaps at his goggles and glares at the phantom crowd.

Meanwhile one of the tractors creeps up and smashes a section of fence between the crowd and the shuttle.

I send the phantom crowd dashing forward again, sprinting off in the wrong direction, and then I'm riding a very angry pig as he grunts and bellows and crashes through the night. He signals to the others and I let him. The imaginary crowd flees down the hill and then angles to follow the bottom of the valley out.

I hear more pigs nearing so I give my diversionary crowd a burst of speed and they nearly completely disappear from view, just hints of movement in the dark. The squad of pigs are screaming along now, firing into the dark.

Then the night is lit up by the shuttle launch and I drop the phantoms. My battery is almost dead from all the sparking but I squirt my memories out. We all agreed on radio silence after the shuttle doors close so I don't know if the memories made it.

Then I trigger the poop scoop.

First / Previous / Next

“What do you mean, where is Earth?” Charon said, taken aback. “Can’t you just navigate there?”

“Until you showed up, I thought it was a legend.”

“But,” Charon said weakly, “You travel in space, you can just link there.”

Cha-ren looked up suddenly, “We are in space, yes?”

Gallie nodded, “We are. We are currently en route to the Gate so that we can go to our home system.”

“Gate? Humans don’t use the Gates. They use their wormhole generator,” Cha-ren said, her ears flat.

“Another legendary thing,” Gallie gasped. “We found selected texts that mentioned linking from one location to another though a wormhole, but we have been unable to piece together what they meant. Some of our historians thought they had found entertainment media by mistake. You’re telling me that humanity could travel from system to system without using the Gates?”

“We didn’t know the Gates even existed until we were in space for thousands of years,” Charon said cautiously. “The Gates were discovered when we met the K’laxi and Xenni for the first time. We actually learned about them all at once.”

“We had always thought that the K’laxi had been with humanity for far longer than that, perhaps even before spaceflight.”

“…Why did you think that?” Cha-ren asked, her left ear twitching. Charon felt her tail wrap around his leg and squeeze gently.

Gallie gestured towards them, “You two are in a relationship? We had figured that was common. Two species exploring and flourishing in a lost golden age.”

“Hah,” Cha-ren snorted. “It was hardly golden. There were troubles, and issues and small minded people, and wars; the same as now I imagine. We weren’t something special back then, just people.”

“Perhaps,” Gallie said and made a gesture Cha-ren and Charon didn’t recognize, brushing the top of her left hand with her right. “You can talk to the historians later if you’d like. For now, we need to know how to get to Earth.”

“Why?” Charon said. When he did, Cha-ren squeezed his leg with her tail tighter. She felt the same way that he did, something was off.

“We wish to be reunited with our long lost brethren. We wish to reconnect the planets scattered among the stars and be one again.”

“You thought Earth was legendary just a moment ago, and now you want to go there?” Cha-ren asked.

“Did you or did you not visit Earth yourself?” Gallie said.

“I have given you no indication that I am being truthful,” Charon said, crossing his arms. “You are taking me at my word and are - seemingly - planning a visit to reconnect the planets scattered among the stars?”

“How many star systems are you in contact with, right now?” Cha-ren asked.

“Three.” Gallie said proudly. “We have translated three glyphs on the addressing stones in the Gates and can now visit those systems. One of which contains a settled system!”

“And the other two?”

“One was the system we found you in, and the other contains a planet that is ready for colonization.”

“So it’s empty?”

“Currently, but we are planning colonization.”

“So you’re in contact with one other system. How long?”

“How long what?”

“How long have you been in contact?” Cha-ren said. Getting a straight answer out of Gallie was proving to be frustrating. It might be issues with the translation, but they couldn’t help but feel that Gallie was being evasive. Still, they couldn’t afford to annoy her too much, she was the closest thing to a leader that they had found so far.

“Almost two years.”

“I…see,” Charon said. “Do you have the rest of the ship that we were aboard when you found us? That will be a trove of information that would be very useful to you.”

“We did, until the treacherous Brennians stole it from us.”

“And the Brennians are the other system,” Cha-ren said, her ears flat.

“That’s right. We got into a firefight over the rights to the hulk you were found on.”

“If that’s the case, how did you get us?”

“We managed to get you aboard our ship before the shooting started,” Gallie said, but she wasn’t looking at Cha-ren when she said it.

“Wait,” Cha-ren said. “What do you mean you translated the glyphs? That’s not how it works. When we discovered a new Gate we would simply touch the addressing stone in the Gate, and we would know which glyphs led where.”

“How did that work?” Gallie said, giving Cha her full attention.

“I don’t know the specifics, I am - was - a reactor engineer like Charon, but I had friends who were navigators and they said you just touched the stone and-” She shrugged, “-you knew where to go.”

“Addressing stone?”

“The obelisk that is in the little room attached to all Gates?”

“In the Gates that we have discovered, that room contains the obelisk yes, but it’s just inert stone. Carved in relief are glyphs. We’ve spent decades trying to puzzle them out.”

Charon could feel Cha shiver more. “It’s not supposed to work that way.”

“And yet,” Gallie said as she brushed the tops of her hands again. “We are diverging. How do we get to Earth? What is the glyph for the birth system?”

“There…isn’t one,” Charon said. “Earth never had a Gate. Like I said, we only learned about them when we first met the K’laxi.”

“No Gate? How did you traverse the stars?”

“At first we traveled relativistically in Starjumpers, and once the wormhole generator was developed we used that to link locations.” Charon cocked his head. “This…isn’t a test? You really don’t know this?”

“So much had been lost,” was all Gallie said.

“Earlier you said the first flourishing,” Cha-ren said. “How many flourishings have there been?”

“We’re not sure. Some posit that there might have been as many as six or as few as two.”

“And a flourishing is?”

“A period when the people of the galaxy rise from their planets and come together in peace and extend the borders of the known. Now it is my turn to ask if you’re giving me a test. We learn these things when we are young.” She said.

“I promise, we have never heard of this. And then after the flourishing, there’s a fall?”

She nodded. “Yes, usually a few thousand years after a flourishing begins, it ends.”

“How?”

“Those records are destroyed,” Gallie smiled without humor. “We have no idea what causes a flourishing to fail. War, disease, outside interference, any number of catastrophes.” She stood and held out her hand. “Come. We’ve discussed the past enough, it is time to discuss our future.”

Gallie led them to a small room that had six people already in there waiting. They were dressed in a similar manner to Gallie and Charon assumed they were some kind of command for the ship they were on.

“You came from Sol.” One of them said, it was not a question. His voice came from Gallie’s translator, but it spoke in a different voice. How did it know? Charon wondered.

“I did,” Charon said. “I grew up on Hyacinth, Cha-ren did not.”

A few of the people in the room raised eyebrows in surprise. “Where did you come from then?” He said, turning to Cha.

“I was born and raised on K’lax, our birth-world.” Cha-ren said and her ears flicked. “If you use the Gates, then you should know this. Our world has a Gate in its system, we can go there now.”

“Do you know the glyph?” A woman said. She was wearing the same uniform as Gallie. “Can you take us there?” As soon as Cha mentioned the glyphs, she focused on her with a laser intensity.

“I am not a navigator, but I have seen it before. I-I wouldn’t be able to give you certainty, but I could see which ones look familiar to me.”

“That’s more than we’ve ever had,” the woman said, standing. “Come to me when you’re able. My name is Metanium, I am the current navigator.” Metanium walked out of the room without another word.

“Do you know how to reach Sol?” The first one to speak said.

“I do not; our ship, Hummingbird was the one that handled the wormhole links. They would know how to get to Earth.” Charon said.

Cha-ren’s tail swished as she spoke, “We were aboard Hummingbird when we entered hibernation, Gallie said you do not have the ship?”

“We do not. It was taken by the Brennians.”

“The people who live in the other star system,” Gallie added.

“I remember. Why did they take it?”

“They are trying to steal from us and take the lead in technology rediscovery,” Gallie said frowning. “If you can take us to Earth, we can pull ahead.” When she spoke a few of the assembled people nodded along, but Charon noticed that one or two were presenting carefully neutral expressions.

“Why? What’s on Earth?” Charon said.

“So much lost wealth. Lost technology. Lost information,” Gallie said, her eyes unfocusing. “If we make it to Earth, we can start a new Flourishing, we can lead the way, we will be the ones at the vanguard.”

“I…see,” Charon said.

“Help us to realize our goal, and you will rise with us.”

“We’ll do what we can, but-”

“This is not a request,” Gallie said, her eyes suddenly focusing on Cha-ren and Charon. “You will help us. You have come at an opportune time and we will not squander this.”

The others in the room stood and inclined their heads very slightly. “We look forward to your knowledge,” One said, and they all filed out.

“Come,” Gallie said. “I will take you back to your room. We’re three days out from home. Once there you can show us how to return to Earth and we can begin the Flourishing.”

Gallie showed them how to summon a steward to ask for food and explained the cleanser, though for modesty’s sake, she did not demonstrate. She gave them a pad and with effort, was able to have it render things in their language, though she emphasized that they should begin language lessons immediately.

“What about the translator you wear?”

“This is one of five we have, and the only one aboard. We are fortunate that it understands your language; we have no way to make any more.”

“Is that why everyone was speaking through it?”

“Correct. Anyone in the room with me can speak and will be understood. Is there anything else you need?”

“Uh, no, thank you.” Cha-ren said.

Gallie opened her mouth as if to say something more, then shut it, nodded once, and walked out.

“So, uh-” Charon started and then Cha-ren put her hand over this mouth. She put her finger to her lips, the human gesture to be quiet.

“Do you know suit sign?” She signed.

“I learned a bit in school,” Charon signed back awkwardly.

“We are not safe,” She signed.

“I agree.”

“We should escape.”

“But where? How?” Charon signed. He wasn’t speaking any faster, but as he used it, memories flooded back from when he studied it in school. Lessons 28,000 years in the past now.

“Don’t know. Find Hummingbird.”

“How?”

“Don’t know,” Cha-ren’s frustration was evident even while signing. Charon could see her face tense and her shoulders tighten as her hands moved faster and more stiffly, He grabbed her shoulders and pulled her into a hug.

“We’ll figure it out,” he whispered.

“I know,” Cha-ren sighed. “The only way out-”

“-is through,” Charon completed with a smile.

They summoned a steward and received an evening meal. After, Charon tried the cleanser and came out spotless, smelling slightly of mint and looking utterly haunted. Cha-ren was sure his hair had a few new streaks of grey in it.

“How was it?” Cha-ren asked, trying not to smile.

“It was…intense.” He said.

Cha-ren tried it next and came out with all of her fur standing straight. This time Charon suppressed a laugh, but he found a brush, and sat behind her, brushing her fur until it was soft and glossy again. They had sex, and after laid holding each other until they drifted off to sleep.

****

“Do you know that sign language they used?” Gallie asked the woman standing next to her as they both peered at the screen showing the sleeping forms of Charon and Cha-ren. The woman turned away, embarrassed while they were having sex, but Gallie stared the entire time, fascinated.

“No, Director, it does not match any sign language we have on file.”

“They do not believe in the truth of our mission as we do.”

“That is not for me to say, Director.”

“Trust me, it is true.”

“Yes, Director.”

“Together, they will present…difficulty.”

“Is that wise, Director? Our cause is just, can we not ju-”

“Are you Director, Wennen?” Gallie said, sharply.

“No, Director.”

“Metanium will solve this for us. Those two know more than they are admitting, and she will get the truth from them.”

“Yes, Director.”

It was considered the greatest trafficking bust in the current era. Population after population had disappeared under our noses. Planets, and even whole systems, had been depopulated by these scum. How did we find them? They got greedy. A galaxy wide message that I imagine was supposed to be encrypted. It was nothing but sheer luck we even captured the signal.

An advertisement for some underground ring, said to contain the most dangerous predators they could find, and some kind of "champion". Now transporting predator species off their home world is strictly prohibited, so we went in expecting a normal animal trafficking case. How wrong we were.

The first thing you noticed was the smell. Bodies. Countless bodies. All piled in what seemed like an endless number of cells. You could see all kinds of species. Worse yet was how we found the survivors. What were once thriving species numbering in the billions, were now but a few thousand. The light had long left their eyes.

When the shock of what we found had worn off, we had a strange realization. We found the trafficked people, but no sign of the traffickers. We opened each cell one by one, expecting to find them hiding amongst the corpses, but not one. We tried asking the survivors, but most were too broken to speak.

That's when we heard a voice. It was one of the survivors. He spoke quietly, "H13. There you'll find him. The champion." We approached with caution, not sure what we'd find. What waited for us shouldn't have been any surprise, but it still took us off guard.

More bodies, but these weren't stacked in the cells. They littered the corridor, and unlike the rags the victims wore, they wore proper protective gear. It did little to help them though, as the wounds they bore were worse than the corpses we saw earlier. We had found our traffickers.

We expected to find a wild beast at the end of this corridor. Imagine our surprise when we found a man, a human, at the end. Humans were seen as simple creatures. Never want to leave their planet, but you'd never find a more welcoming group. We asked where the rest of his species were, before becoming very aware of what filled the surrounding cells.

The entire human population, dead, with the exception of one man. This was beyond endangered, this was extinction. We stepped closer, getting a closer look at him. In one hand, an axe, coated in the blood of his foes. In the other, a child, his child by the way he held them. Just as dead as those around us.

"He never saw Earth." The first words he told us. His child died never knowing his home. He raised his head, showing his face. It was covered in scars, and if the others had no light in their eyes, the room grew darker as we looked into his. We had found the "champion". Hardly a fitting title.

Cell after cell, we searched desperately, looking for any other survivors. "Don't bother." The man said, "They found us the most entertaining." The statement told us all we needed to know. All that was left was to transport the survivors home.

The man had one request. "Take my people home." The process took days, and a full fleet of ships. Not seconds after we landed did the man start digging a hole. It didn't take long to realize why. It was a grave. One of so many. There, he buried his son. We couldn't leave him to do it alone.

It never got easier. Each body had a family, a story. All that remains is a stone to mark their location. No name, no face. It took weeks, but the job was done. We found him still crouching over the grave of his son. He asked to be left alone, and we weren't inclined to reject his request.

Earth had its status changed. A grave world. A new designation, as no such tragedy has occurred before or since. We still tell stories of humanity, and their champion, because that's all we have left. I made a promise to tell enough stories to fill every stone, because without them, humanity will be truly gone.

11:45 pm S.F.T(Standard Federation Time) Kepler-186f, Day 3

The path back to the communications array was easier to follow now that Loyd somewhat knew where they were going, though the deepening cold made the walk less comfortable than their first visit. Pale spores swept between the mushroom stalks in thin clouds, gathering inside their earlier footprints and softening the trail almost as quickly as they followed it.

Harriet carried Loyd’s omnitool and checked the recovered map whenever the terrain forced them away from a direct route. Omega remained beyond the communications array, separated from the rest of the colony by a large section of missing data, but enough of the surrounding terrain had survived for Harriet to keep them moving in the right direction.

Serria followed behind them with Teralis’s and Kiki’s samples secured among the remaining medical supplies. Her insectoid limbs sank deeper into the damp soil than Harriet’s talons or Loyd’s boots, leaving a trail that would be considerably easier to follow on their return.

“How long will it take us to reach Omega?” Serria asked.

“The map doesn’t show enough of the terrain to tell,” Loyd answered. “It could be an hour away or on the other side of the planet.”

The communications facility eventually appeared between the mushroom stalks ahead. Loyd slowed as they approached, watching the empty entrance while the others stopped behind him.

“I’ll check it,” Loyd said, keeping the bent support beam in his hands.

Harriet lowered the omnitool and looked toward the entrance. “We should remain together.”

“I’m just checking the hallway,” Loyd assured him. “If I don’t see or hear anything, we can decide whether it’s worth going farther. If they’ve settled down, we might be able to reach Aquaponics without fighting through them.”

Serria lifted her forward blades. “Call out if they approach.”

Harriet’s feathers rose around his neck. “They had not settled down when I left.”

“You also disturbed them by escaping from the room where they were feeding,” Loyd reminded him. “They might have returned to the lower levels by now.”

“And if they have not?” Serria asked.

“Then we keep moving toward Omega,” Loyd said. “No point in trying to fight past hundreds of them just to get codes we can’t use.”

Loyd adjusted the cloth covering his nose and mouth before stepping through the open entrance. Darkness swallowed him as soon as he crossed inside.

He stopped before taking a second step. During their earlier visit, light from inside the facility had been dim but was still there, and the steady buzz of powered equipment had followed them through its corridors. Now the only light came from the forest behind him, reaching far enough to reveal a small portion of the floor before the hallway disappeared. The electrical buzz was gone as well, with only the wind blowing through the entrance to fill the air.

Loyd remained near the entrance and listened. Beyond the wind, the facility was silent. Then something scraped against the inside of the wall ahead of him.

The scrape of several small limbs answered from the ceiling. Their rapid movement passed above the entrance and continued deeper into the facility, joined by another cluster crawling somewhere near the floor.

Loyd stepped backward into the forest before any of them could move toward the sound of his breathing.

Harriet’s feathers remained raised as Loyd emerged. “Are they still inside?”

“They’re moving through the walls and ceiling,” Loyd answered. “The facility also lost power.”

Harriet looked past him into the entrance. “How do you know?”

“The hallway is dark, and the electrical buzz is gone,” Loyd explained. “If the facility isn’t receiving power, neither is the communications console.”

“Could you determine what caused it?” Serria asked.

“Not without going inside and finding the electrical system,” Loyd replied. “I’m not doing that in the dark while those things are still crawling around.”

Harriet continued looking into the entrance. “Even if we recovered the codes, the transmitter would remain dead.”

“And Teralis and Kiki would still be infected,” Serria added. “The facility cannot help us now.”

Loyd adjusted his grip on the support beam. “Then we go to Omega.”

Harriet reopened the damaged map with his clawed wing. The marker remained beyond the communications array, isolated from the other colony structures and surrounded by missing information.

He turned away from the facility and began guiding them along the portion of the route that had survived.

The trail continued through the mushroom forest before curving away from the main settlement. Loyd kept slashing the trunks of the mushrooms to mark their path, but found a surprising resistance that hadn’t been there before.

What remained of the map showed no buildings or service routes connecting Omega to the other facilities. Even the thin path they followed disappeared after several hundred meters, leaving Harriet to navigate by the marker itself.

“The map is no longer showing a route,” Harriet said when they reached the final visible section.

Loyd stepped around him and examined the display. Their position rested near the edge of a corrupted block, while the Omega symbol remained ahead of them with nothing visible between.

“Keep heading toward the marker,” Loyd instructed. “If there was a path, the missing portion of the map took it with everything else.”

Harriet tilted the omnitool until the marker aligned with the direction ahead. “No, I was going to stop following the map .”

“We’ll find a way across it when we get there.” loyd responded.

Serria moved around them and started toward the slope. “Standing here will not reveal one.”

The forest became thinner as they climbed. Mushroom stalks that had towered above them lower in the valley grew farther apart, leaving broad patches of dark ground exposed between their trunks. Stones pushed through the soil in uneven rows, forcing Harriet to watch both the map and the terrain beneath his talons.

Loyd followed close enough to catch him if Harriet slipped. The support beam dragged against the ground whenever the slope steepened, occasionally striking stone with a dull metallic sound.

Harriet stopped near the top of a rise and looked ahead. “The marker is beyond that cliff.”

A dark wall stretched across the landscape in front of them. It rose above the remaining mushroom stalks and continued in both directions until the forest concealed its edges. Soil and vegetation covered much of its face, while exposed sections of dark material showed between hanging roots.

Loyd wiped moisture from his forehead with the back of his bandaged hand. “Does the map show a way around it?”

Harriet studied the display. “The coordinates appear to be inside the cliff.”

“Then either the position is wrong or Omega is underground,” Loyd replied.

Serria continued down the other side of the rise. “We will learn which when we reach it.”

They approached the cliff while Harriet monitored the distance to the marker. The wall grew larger without revealing any obvious opening, and the slope at its base became increasingly difficult to cross. Roots wound through piles of loose stone, while pale growths clung to the smoother sections above them.

Harriet slowed as they drew within a few dozen meters. “We are nearly on top of the coordinates.”

Loyd looked from the omnitool to the cliff. Then back at the omnitool before his attention snapped back to the cliff. The exposed surface was too smooth, too… artificial.

He moved closer and brushed aside a hanging sheet of pale vegetation. The dark material beneath it curved away from his hand, unbroken by the grain or cracks he would have expected from stone. A long seam ran across it beneath the dirt, continuing farther than he could see. Loyd struck the surface with the end of the support beam. A hollow metallic reverberation traveled through the wall. 

Harriet lifted his head sharply from the omnitool. “That is not a cliff.”

“No,” Loyd said as he pulled more of the vegetation away. “It’s a hull.”

Serria looked toward the buried structure surrounding them. “The entire cliff?”

Loyd stepped backward, following the curve of the exposed metal with his eyes. Features he had mistaken for irregular stone became clearer now that he knew what he was seeing. Reinforced seams divided the hull into enormous sections, and several dark shapes farther along resembled windows buried beneath layers of mineral buildup.

“At least the part we can see,” Loyd answered. “Most of the ship is beneath the ground.”

Harriet examined the Omega marker again. “The map did not label it as a vessel.”

“It didn’t label it as anything,” Loyd reminded him. “Omega might just be the designation the colonists used for it on the map.”

They followed the exposed hull until they reached a section where the ground had fallen away. Part of the ship’s side remained visible beneath the dirt, revealing recessed lettering worn smooth by age.

Loyd cleared the remaining soil with his hand. 

U.S.S. ULIXES

“U.S.S. Ulixes,” Loyd read aloud.

Harriet looked up from the omnitool. “Olivia Brandenburg served aboard the Ulixes.”

“As its chief medical officer,” Serria added, her mandibles clicking faster. “This vessel should  contain the equipment we need.”

“If anything survived,” Loyd cautioned.

Serria turned her compound eyes toward him. “We have found the colony ship buried beneath a cliff. Allow me to be hopeful until we learn otherwise.”

Loyd looked farther along the exposed hull. “First we need a way inside.”

They continued following the ship until the slope beside it dropped sharply. An opening appeared at the bottom, partly concealed behind roots and accumulated soil. The metal surrounding it had bent inward, leaving enough room for them to pass one at a time.

Loyd stopped before descending the slope. A dim glow reached through the opening and illuminated the mushrooms and mossgrowing across its lower edge.

Harriet stared at it. “The ship still has power.”

“The communications facility lost power within hours of your visit,” Serria said, “but this vessel has power while buried beneath the ground.”

“I noticed,” Loyd answered.

“How is that possible?” Harriet asked, leaning forward to look into the opening.

“I have no idea,” he admitted, tapping the support beam against the ground.

Loyd descended carefully, using the support beam to test the soil before placing his weight on it. Harriet followed with the omnitool, while Serria moved sideways to keep her larger body from sliding down the slope.

Loyd listened before crossing inside. A quiet mechanical hum filled the interior, confirming that more than a single light was operating. Something aboard the Ulixes was still functioning.

He raised the support beam and stepped through the opening.

Harriet followed, keeping the omnitool close to his body as he looked along the corridor. Serria entered last, lowering her blades to avoid catching them against the damaged hull.

The hallway was far larger than Loyd had expected. Its ceiling rose several meters above them, while the floor stretched wide enough to move vehicles and heavy equipment through the ship. Doors lined both sides, most of them large enough for Serria to pass through without adjusting her stance.

Colored lines ran along the floor before separating at the first intersection. Each continued into a different hallway, accompanied by human labels identifying where it led. Loyd read them in turn. Red led to Medical, blue to the Mess Hall, grey to Engineering, black to Command, and orange to Storage, while a sixth line was marked Crew Quarters.

Serria examined the lines spreading through the intersection. “Which color do we follow?”

“The red one leads to Medical,” Loyd answered as he stepped beside it.

Harriet looked from the lines to the surrounding corridors. “Does the omnitool contain a map of the vessel?”

“No,” Loyd replied. “We follow the guide lines until we find a directory or reach Medical.”

The red line continued into the central hallway before turning through the second intersection. Loyd took the lead with the support beam held ready, while Harriet walked behind him and Serria guarded the rear.

They reached another intersection after several minutes. The red Medical line crossed four other colors before continuing down the middle passage. Loyd followed it.

The hallway divided again a short distance later. One branch curved upward, another descended, and three continued in different directions across the same level. The red line turned through the corridor on their left.

Harriet glanced back toward the junction. “Why are there so many connected hallways?”

“It was a colony ship,” Loyd explained. “It needed room for equipment, supplies, living quarters, and however many people came down with it.”

“This still appears excessive,” Harriet replied.

Loyd looked down two of the passages they were leaving behind. “Kind of, but I’m sure there’s a reason.”

They continued along the red line as it wound through the ship. Each corridor led to another cluster of intersections, and every intersection divided into several more. Some hallways were wide enough to contain rows of sealed doors, while others remained nearly empty until they connected with another route.

The guide line carried them through all of them without bringing them any closer to an identifiable medical facility.

Serria’s mandibles clicked impatiently as they passed another unlabeled doorway. “How much farther?”

“I don’t know,” Loyd answered.

“You said the line would lead us to Medical.”

“It should.”

They reached another intersection. The red line crossed the floor, curved around one support, and disappeared down the far-right passage. Loyd stopped instead of following it.

Harriet nearly walked into his back. “Why did you stop?”

“We should have reached Medical by now,” Loyd said.

Serria looked back through the halls they had crossed. “Do you know where it is located?”

“No, but we’ve been following this line for nearly half an hour. A medical facility aboard a colony ship should be accessible from the main entrance without walking through half the vessel.”

“The ship may be larger than it appeared outside,” Harriet suggested.

“It could be, but this route still doesn’t make sense.” Loyd crouched beside the red line and examined the word printed beside it. “There should have been signs for emergency treatment, individual departments, or at least a distance marker.”

Harriet lowered his head toward the lettering. “Is it the correct signage?”

The word had looked familiar enough that he had read it without examining it any closer. Now that he was paying attention, the shapes bore little resemblance to the rigid lettering printed beside the ship’s doors.

“It still says Medical,” Loyd explained, “but the problem is the font.”

Serria waited for him to continue. “What does that mean?”

“It’s Comic Sans,” Loyd said, tracing one of the letters with his finger. “A human font- a style of writing.”

“Does the style alter what it says?” Serria asked.

“No,” Loyd replied. “That isn’t the problem. Comic Sans was designed to look informal. Humans use it for children, illustrated stories, casual notices, and things people aren’t supposed to take too seriously.”

“And this style is being used to direct us toward Medical?” Harriet asked.

“Which no safety inspector or ship designer would ever approve,” Loyd replied.

Loyd stood and crossed to the nearest guide line. Engineering had been printed in the same rounded lettering. Crew Quarters used it as well, along with Command and Storage. He moved to the remaining route, running his fingers beneath the lettering.

MESS HALL appeared in squared, uniform letters that matched the labels printed beside the doors.

“Even I can see the difference now that you’ve brought it to my attention,” Harriet observed.

“This one uses official lettering,” Loyd replied.

Serria looked toward the other colored routes. “Then someone added the remaining labels.”

“Or changed them,” Harriet suggested.

Loyd examined the intersections around them. Every route except the Mess Hall line had been marked in Comic Sans, sending anyone who followed it deeper into the network of connected hallways.

“We don’t know where any of those lines actually lead,” Loyd said. “The Medical line could keep circling the ship for hours.”

“Why leave the Mess Hall unchanged?” Serria asked.

“I don’t know,” Loyd answered as he looked down the corridor marked by the only official guide line. “But it’s the only route aboard this ship we have any reason to follow.”

Harriet stepped onto the Mess Hall guide line and turned toward the passage ahead. “Then we follow it and determine where it leads.”

Loyd adjusted his grip around the support beam before joining him. Serria moved behind them, keeping the samples secured between her manipulating appendages as the three of them left the false Medical route behind and followed the only line that appeared authentic deeper into the Ulixes.

Part Eighteen

​

"Number…oh, no number;" she was told in surprise when she applied for her medimagery which came as quite a shock as she had been told by her GMP it would be a routine magimedical procedure. Her insurance, apparently, thought otherwise, and so she found herself spending the rest of the day on the phone with EverAfter^TM trying to argue her case. She didn't want to invoke the details from court, but by the end of the call, there she was, summoning up a fairy godmother to get a notarized copy of the specifics over to them.

She called her lawyer the next day.

“Look, babe - sorry - she's invoked some old-ass royal law. Defamation of the crown. Honestly, I shouldn't even be talking to you,” and then a blip of smoke as he vanished and promptly stopped talking to her.

She gazed up the hill as she paced about her studio apartment, seething, pissed, plain old angry, and also scared. What else could the new queen now do?

She found out the next day - perhaps more shocking than the absurdities were how swift they came. First came her MagicMoments dating account, bloated with MagicMoments of her hunting unicorns, each one beautifully immersive and regressive and reviling. For weeks, she was inundated with requests from huntsmen.

Then came a viral post, another hack, where she watched herself celebrating the evil queen in a distant country. She didn't even know a thing about cauldrons, but there she was, supportive of a regime aggressively using them.

After that, she deleted everything, accounts scourged, which is when her mother was vanished. 

“She's basically your mother, too,” she found herself arguing one day to the leader of the magical worlds and realized how absurd the situation was. “I also lived through her…herness, but it's a thin reason for execution. She didn't get me, either.”

Her mother was released, and for a brief moment she thought she had bonded, had connected, but then their next call opened with “Brother,” and a demand for attention as if everything they discussed had been forgotten and shoveled away.

No, she suddenly one day realized, as light slanted down peaceful and hopeful and golden twilit.

“No,” she insisted that day.

“I need to fight. I can't just let this bitch punish me. I can't just let her story be the only one that's told. I can't just let Cinderella be fucking Cinderella.”

She realized she didn't have to be the ugly stepsister anymore.

Recording Two: June 5th 2026

I am so irritated right now you guys.

I’m in the bunk, dead to the world asleep, and BANG! Something slammed into the side of the POD.

What the hell.

I’m standing in front of the bunk looking out the window that overlooks the crater covered ground of OTS 44. I can’t see anything at all. Of course I can’t. There’s no light here.

Looks like I have to go outside. Joy.

Okay, let me go get dressed and find the flash light for my helmet. I’ll come back when I get done.

Recording Three: June 5th 2026

Something keeps shaking the POD.

Those idiots at work told me something was here but they never decided to elaborate on what that was.

Here I am, 22 years old, alone, in space.

Why did I let them do this to me?

“It’s for the new girl. let her go.”

I recall the boss saying that to some coworkers one morning about a week or so before I was knocked out cold and sent here.

I shouldn’t have blown it off. I should have approached him and asked what he was talking about. Maybe if i had more guts I wouldn’t be here.

Anyway, outside we go. And yes, you all are coming with me.

\POD door opening\

Gosh it’s a lot warmer here than I thought it would be.

I’m stepping out of the POD now.

I feel like the POD was hit from the right side. Lucky for me, the door is on the right side.

\light switch on helmet clicks\

Oh my gosh.

\footsteps are heard gaining speed**

I wish I had a camera on here. You all won’t believe me.

There are claw marks, huge claw marks, on the side of the POD.

You guys, there’s blood. THERES BLOOD. I can get out of here!

I’m going to sit you all down again, I have to collect the sample.

Gross. This stuff is so smelly. Like pure iron.

\a top is heard being closed on a bottle\

Okay, now we have to get back inside.

\footsteps are heard slamming to a sudden stop\

That blood won’t get you off this planet

\a gasp is heard\

\the recorder is heard falling into the dirt below\

What the hell are you doing here!?

\Recording ends\

CCLXXXVIII

Trout's Landing, Kobold Warrens.

"We have plenty of fur. We could–"

"None of it is thick enough. The amount we'd need would hinder us more than help." The Trap-Master said before the skirmisher could finish.

Not like he needed to finish saying it. They've gone over a few other plans but the weather and their own biology made any plan moot. The fact of the matter was they couldn't leave the warrens. They'd freeze and die. Likely before they could leave the lodge itself. Which means that wherever Jeb went to, they couldn't follow. Not unless all the snow and ice dried up and the temperature rose a twenty degrees.

The Trap-Master sighed.

"Return to your posts at the entrance of the new tunnels."

The kobolds nodded and departed. Scurrying down the tunnels and away, leaving the Trap-Master to stand in his own personal burrow. He preferred it to the old Game Warden cabin. It was warmer for one thing. There was also only a single way in or out compared to the various windows and giant door of the cabin.

Plus all the maps and information from the cabin was in easy reach and height down here. As was a good number of weapons. His burrow becoming a sort of temporary defacto armory for the tribe until they could excavate a proper one deeper down. Which they'll do once they've properly cleared a suitable section. From the maps and what Jeb has told them there should be a few areas designed to house mining foremen, emergency supplies, and miner quarters.

So far no luck though. What has come back so far most of it is natural tunnels and formations. What mine shafts they've found have been old and the couple of possible shelters have long since collapsed. Though that's not necessarily a bad thing. Better they collapsed already than when they moved in. Now they have obvious places where NOT to excavate shelters.

So far the only threats they've come across is an encounter with some sort of spider creature and it's slaves. When a couple of skirmishers returned to the cavern they were encountered they found the tunnel it went through collapsed and buried. While having a direct avenue from a potential enemy straight to their home blocked off was comforting, what wasn't was the fact that they likely could make new tunnels.

They'll have to be extra cautious in the North West tunnels from now on. The only other "threat" being some sort of... ooze. Or slime. Or something. Apparently it could change shape. Badly. Sure it might catch a simple insect or small rodent or reptile off guard, maybe even someone not used to living underground, but for them it was fairly obvious in its aberration.

It hasn't shown itself a threat to them. It's just followed the scouts that encountered it and little else besides occasionally eating a small insect. Though it has shown remarkable, and somewhat concerning, ability to climb the tunnel walls, ceiling, and any rope or ladders they've made. It's quickly made itself at home in the warrens themselves. Much to the delight of the tribe especially the hatchlings, who take every opportunity to corral the amorphous blob to certain parts of the warren to try and get it to mimic something.

Other than that, all threats have been purely environmental. Acid pools from runoff, structurally weak sections, rusted metal, gas pockets, and the odd nest of vipers. Overall though they've found a wealth of resources that they are more than grateful for and will make good and enthusiastic use of.

One recent development of their sluice way has been a recent congregation of more warm water species making their way into the pool. Something called a hellbender salamander and even freshwater eels! Sure they were small now. But if they could cultivate them they'd have a meal that he deeply missed from their old home.

"Roasted eel." He said with a hint of nostalgia. Blackened crust with delicious fatty flesh beneath roasted on a spit.

In the meantime though, he returned his sight to the maps. The Den Mother had said Jeb went West. But from the maps there wasn't anything out there for leagues but wilderness. Cold. Wet. Wilderness. It made him shiver just thinking about it and stood closer to the nearby balefire for warmth. One thing he was looking forward to was that the deeper they went, the less cold gusts they'd get coming from the entrances.

He heard a fluttering and turned his eyes to a nearby stone shelf. His eyes landed on his raven companion. His raven companion only he could see apparently. For a time he hadn't seen it. Since they've moved into the warrens fully he hasn't. Though from what he's heard around the tribe, he wasn't the only one with a "familiar".

That was about as much as he could get from them. While it seems like a good portion have remained to keep anything else to themselves. Which he didn't blame them. Even though he could see it. Hear it. Even touch and feel it. He wasn't sure it was entirely real or not.

"Flame." The raven croaked in a raspy voice.

"What?"

"Flame." It spoke again as if the single word was enough.

Maybe it was, he thought as he turned his eyes towards the baleful fire. He couldn't help but feel a sort of... gnawing within him. The skirmishers and him all would take turns "bathing" in the flame back on the surface to better handle fishing, then the weather. But it got so bad that it was barely helping. So they stopped.

Yet now that he was thinking about it. Now that he was right there next to it. He could feel the warmth. The comfort. The power. An image formed in his mind as he stared into the flame. His scales ablaze with balefire. Stalking through the woods no matter the weather. Not slowing down. Not stopping. The very flame infusing his rifle with eldritch power.

He reached out his claw and felt the flame tickle his scales. Felt it warm his claw and rise up through his arm and to his core. That gnawing was sated. Barely. Just as it was gone it returned back a thousand fold. It felt like being deprived of food or water and not really realizing it until you had it right there in front of you!

The gnawing in him didn't just want a taste of that warmth. Didn't want just a brief reprieve of the cold. It wanted to be drowned in it. Smothered in it. Engorged with it until there was all it was. As the thought hit him, he understood the raven's words. Flame. As it dawned on him, it was like something clicked into place. Then the fire didn't just warm him. It invaded him! He could feel it. It burned. His scales cracked under the heat as it raced up his arm. Yet it felt good!

"Jeb!" A voice echoed down the tunnel. Causing him to yank his arm free from the flame. He held it in his other claw. It felt raw. Tingling. Hollow. He could move it just fine. But it felt incomplete. Slower. The gnawing returned. Not as aggressive as before. It wasn't sated. But it was content. Content to wait.

He turned towards the raven only to find the stone shelf empty like it hadn't been there at all. He looked back at the flame. It didn't look any different. Didn't look like a living creature that just a second ago was in the process of doing... something to him. He shook his head and left his private burrow and headed down the tunnel. Once he got to the main chamber he encountered Jeb standing there.

"Hey! Y'all alright?"

"Fine. The tunnels have been safe and bountiful so far."

"That's good. Not unexpected. I'd wager few people even know those tunnels exist, even the mine shafts are probably buried in some box somewhere collecting dust and silverfish." Jeb replied.

"Where did you go? The Den Mother was worried."

"Just wanted to... take some precautions is all. Call it a gut feelin'." Jeb evaded cryptically.

"That's it? You disappear for the better part of a day on a gut feeling?"

"Yeah. And if I did my job right, it won't happen again." Jeb said and rapped his knuckles on a nearby wooden beam.

"Will you tell us what exactly you did, or even why you did it?" The Trap-Master asked, more irritably than he wanted to, and even catching himself off guard at the snappy tone.

Jeb, however, didn't seem to notice or mind.

"Just some safety measures is all. Should help in case somethin' DOES happen. Which it won't. Because of what I did."

He rapped on the wooden beam again before smiling cryptically and heading down the tunnel to the burrow he and Ruby shared. He heard her cry out from down the tunnel and could hear them talking. The Trap-Master just sighed and shook his head. He just had to trust Jeb. His eyes glanced to the nearby balefire torches. His gaze holding on them for a long moment before he pulled them away. Which was harder than he thought it should be.

[First] [Prev] [Next]

This is the next installment of "Ain't A Hero" (3rd Edition). A strange work of fiction that wanders the spectrum of Science Fantasy and might be best described as a Slice of Odd story: A 1000 years into the post post-apoc future after a biopunk/cyberpunk world got T-boned by magic showing back up. And our story starts with a down and out adventuring school dropout that's about to get figuratively and literally dragged back into adventuring.

Since, this story is under revision, any thoughts and comments are appreciated. Also, don't be afraid to point out typos and such. It's really a never ending battle. I gone over these things so many times, and those mistakes are still there... Just waiting... Lingering...

---- Episode 7 Preview ----

Rubbing the fatigue from her eyes, Samantha kicks the shoes off her feet onto the hotel floor. Adjusting her aetherphone on a nearby nightstand, she groans and flops back onto one of the beds in the double room. "So... After the Greater Azure Alliance specialists, the ones that we ran into at the Amaranth Dining House, blasted off the barrier Sebastian's team left, they put their own up and sealed off the area tight."

She draws in a deep breath and sighs out loudly. "THANKFULLY, we got the power cell trailer back in one piece. SO, that's one rental deposit we'll actually get back. BUT, I'm still fighting MERC about SUPPOSED damages to other equipment."

Narrowing her hazel eyes at the vaguely dingy and faintly stained ceiling, Samantha huffs out her frustration. "Gods. Next time, I'm getting that supplemental insurance. It's not worth our time arguing with them about every little thing."

From the speakerphone, Howard's tone steadies to a neutral and calming cadence. "Huh. Interesting. Well, I'm glad that everyone got out in one piece. Be sure to give Radnae, Urdi, and..."

A faint groans slips out from the other side of connection. "Even that Ol' Harris a week off. Give them coupons to that spa and magical hot springs we got that advertising deal with."

With an audible breath in over the call, he directs his inquiry. "Now... Back to business... How much footage did you all manage to get?"

Samantha winces, drags out a pained groan, and slips a breath in. "A little. Between the military lockdown, that electrical thing which corrupted a bunch of recordings, and then not having power for most of the equipment..."

Rolling her eyes, she grits her teeth and rubs her forehead. "I'm surprised we even got THAT much. Gods, I'm not sure if it's enough for an episode. I mean, what kind of episode is this going to be?!"

She combs her fingers through her shoulder-length brown hair and waves a hand dismissively out. "They boldly eat, fail miserably on their first mission, and then go home to lick their wounded egos? That's at least an early to mid season thing. You can't just lead off a season with THAT. It'll crush our ratings."

A still silence hangs in the air. A low laugh grows into loud cackling through the speaker. Staring at her phone, Samantha's eyes bounce between confusion and concern, an uncertain squirm traveling through her body. From the other side of the double bed hotel room, Gerald halts work on his laptop, slowly turns his head, and narrows an uneasy stare on the phone. The laughing stops, and Howard exhales with a sinister glee. "Yes... Just THAT... With a little twist!"

Liked it so far? Read the rest of the episode on the website: HERE

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(Chap 1) (Previous) (Next)

Still hanging near the window, Crow stared back and interrupted him. “Is this where the party’s at?”

The assassin, wrapped in a dark gray cloak, wore a look of utter confusion as he tried to process the situation. He quickly reached under his cloak, but as he took out a dagger, Crow grabbed him by the collar and pulled him. The guy tried to resist, smashing his forehead straight into the left side of the window frame. The glass exploded into pieces, and a stray shard flew into Crow’s face, barely missing his eyes. The man tumbled backward into the foul-smelling room.

Man, lucky for me most Rogues are squishy, and this one was way too slow, to boot.

Crow pulled himself up and stepped inside. “Cough...” He covered his nose immediately.

Man, it smells like rotting fish in here. How was this guy even conscious? Ah, now it makes sense why his reaction time was so slow; his brain was probably starved of oxygen.

He checked his surroundings to make sure no one was around, then bent down to grab the fallen man's cloak. But as his hand drew near, he pulled back.

No way. This thing is way too filthy; I'm getting out of this room.

Crow slipped quickly through the open door and looked at the hallway. It was empty. The walls seemed to be made of painted brick, and the furniture was well-kept wood. He moved ahead until the air finally began to clear.

Alright, what was I here to do again? Right, right... lack of oxygen really messes with your head. If I were hiding someone in this guild, where would I put them? Hmm... beats me. I'm no kidnapper. Better just interrogate someone. I'll wait at the bottom of the stairs; that way I can watch the area without being seen and grab the first person who gets isolated near me.

"She's pretty cute, isn't she? Her face... ah, she's gorgeous. I really want her..." a dwarf in a black cloak said with a mournful tone.

"Pretty, very pretty... shame she bites," an average-sized man replied. "Honestly, I feel like the guy didn't pay us enough to keep her in our special room."

The dwarf grunted, looking uneasy. "Yeah, I think so too. A vampire would never come to this city alone. Imagine if her allies find out."

The other man shrugged it off. "Nah, you weren't there, so you wouldn't know what he told us, but it's not a problem. Relax. Besides, who'd be crazy enough to break into our guild? Even the paladins stay away."

Their voices stopped when they parted ways.

Special room... The dwarf is coming this way. I'll wait behind this curtain.

The dwarf's voice was getting closer. "Tony? I can see your foot, man. Why do you always do that? Wait, that foot's too big—"

The dwarf was caught off guard as Crow grabbed him by the throat with one hand and lifted him up. Clamping his other hand over the dwarf’s mouth, Crow whispered, "Shh... You're pretty light. What are you, eighty pounds? Ah, right, you can't talk."

The dwarf thrashed, punching Crow's arm; sadly for him, it didn’t do much. He then tried to swing at his face, but couldn't reach it either.

Crow glanced around the hallway to see if anyone was watching, then tightened his grip and whispered, "Point toward the special room. Better do it fast before you pass out from lack of air."

The dwarf's arms dropped limp, his right hand weakly pointing down the hall.

"Make a sound and I'll break your neck instantly. You'll just nod to confirm if I'm heading the right way. Make one wrong move and... well, you know the rest." Crow let go, dropping the dwarf onto his back. The dwarf hit the ground, gasping greedily for air.

Crow gestured with his head. "Lead the way. If you run, you die. Take me to that special room. If anyone shows up and gets suspicious, you die as well."

The dwarf didn't flinch. Instead, he started making strange head movements, a series of frantic nods, twisting left and right between each one... Creepy.

Right, this guy just glitched out of fear, probably, but that doesn't matter. They think the paladins don't invade this place out of fear, but the truth is they don't even know about this guild's real activities at this point in the story. There are countless conflicts happening simultaneously that are infinitely worse than this place. The rogues here are all weak; there are what, maybe five at most who are problematic? Since in the lore they train a lot before reaching the specific quest, I can assume they must have about ten times the strength of this dwarf, so it's fine.

They walked a bit, and two men in gray cloaks appeared, getting close to the dwarf and Crow. One of them passed close by, looked at him, and said, "I can't believe we have to put up with this every single day. What an unbearable fart stench, man, get away from me, this is crazy..."

Crow just walked straight past and kept following the dwarf. The guys didn't even suspect a thing for some reason.

This doesn’t make sense and is suspicious... OH, I get it, they think I'm one of the guys who was in that room and I took off my cloak because of the smell. And it makes sense; I was going to grab the guy's cloak in the room, but it was unbearable so I didn't.

After passing through a gate, which had no one guarding it, they found a spiral staircase.

I recognize these stairs. In medieval war simulation games, I remember some of my castles having them; they were designed so that when the invaders drew their swords, they couldn't attack the person above them because the sword would hit the stone wall on the right—

The dwarf stopped climbing the stairs, turned around quickly, and thrust a dagger at Crow's stomach while shouting, "DO YOU THINK I'M DUMB!?"

Soundlessly, Crow simply grabbed the dwarf's hand, stopping the piercing attack. Upon realizing this, the dwarf gasped, “What?” then he twisted his wrist and tried to slash Crow's wrist, all while using the side of the staircase to prevent Crow from using his other hand against him, with only a little over half of his body exposed.

Crack.

Crow didn't need much effort. He crushed the hand holding the knife, and while still holding it, he slammed it hard into the face of the dwarf, who fell onto the stairs and passed out.

Right, I knew this could happen when I saw these stairs, but the question is, does this lead to the special room or not? Well, they did come from this direction earlier, so there's a chance it does... And since it's a different room, and they were also paid to hold the vampire, who I assume is Sharon, this staircase is undoubtedly a defense system—

"Did you like that? Did you think it was just him?" a voice behind Crow said, after stabbing him in the back with a dagger without making a sound.

[DANGER!]

[POISON DETECTED!]

Right... this time I admit, I slipped up. I should have kept looking back while climbing the stairs every few seconds.

He spun around, and as he did, the blade tore further into his body. It managed to cut into a small section of flesh just above his waist on the left side, where the sword wasn't covering his back.

Slash!

As Crow spun his body, he swung and delivered a heavy slap directly to the Rogue's face. The Rogue hit his head against the wall and grew dizzy, but in that split second, he managed to land another strike to Crow's stomach, trying to slice it open in one hit, which failed due to Crow's high CON stat. Immediately after, Crow grabbed the guy by the throat while his other hand pinned the Rogue’s dagger hand.

"Right, that wasn't cool... so here's the deal; I didn't want to kill anyone here so I wouldn't mess up the canonical event where you guys get in the Hero's way... but my patience has limits."

The man who had been lifted off the steps, with his dagger already on the floor and now using both hands to try to loosen the grip on his neck, whispered, "S-story? Hero? L-let me go... I, I..."

Crow loosened his grip a little so the guy could breathe and asked, "Is the special room up these stairs or not?"

"I-it is, if you go up you will find the special roo—"

Crack.

[CONGRATULATIONS!]

[New Passive Skill Acquired!]

[Poison Resistance Level 1]

Description: After being seriously poisoned for the 4th time in your life, your body began to develop a slight resistance to poison.

This is bad…

Crow fell to his knees on the stairs near the dwarf. He picked up the dagger on the floor, the one belonging to the man who had stabbed him, slid it through his belt, and then placed both hands around the dwarf's neck.

Where is my Strength?

Crack.

[CONGRATULATIONS!]

[New Passive Skill Acquired!]

[NeckBreaker Level 1]

Description: When trying to break a neck, somehow it is 10% easier.

I need… some antidote.

He ripped off the dwarf's cloak, stood up, and tried to improvise a bandage with it while he kept climbing the stairs.

[To think that after taking this much deadly poison you're still alive and kept climbing the stairs… In my time, we called a warrior who could do this an Aura Monster. You know, for using Aura… You can use it, right? Or are we cooked?]

Aura? What is that?

[We're cooked. I'll see what I can do about it, but the best way was to use Aura. Being a warrior without Aura is certain death; you can't rely on pure strength forever…]

Right, now the situation has worsened to an impossible level to deal with.

He looked at the dagger and focused on analyzing it while trying to stop the bleeding from his stomach.

[Status]

Magical Dagger.

Description: It has magical power imbued in it, and some poison from snakes, scorpions, and other unknown sources.

Great…

[Deadly Poison progressing to Stage 2]

[DANGER!]

[Deadly Poison stat check...]

[Target CON stat too high]

[Deadly Poison stat check failed]

At least it’s not getting worse; one way or another, going back injured is bad. My only way out of this now is to rescue her and maybe break a window and leave. Man, this is game over; I made the wrong decision. Maybe I should have... ah, I don't know, it's too late now; the only option is to just keep moving forward.

He continued going up, but this time he would occasionally stop to check if anyone was climbing up behind him. After a short while, he reached the upper floor.

No guards... it's "too good" to be true.

"Cough..." He kept going straight toward the double doors. As he approached, he crouched down, keeping one hand on his stomach to hold back some of the bleeding; the wound on his back didn't bleed as much since it was just a puncture.

This cloak isn't enough; ah, how I wish I had a cleric. Apparently there's no one in the room. I can even see something in the back, but I can't tell what it is. I don't feel any presence, but rogues aren't easy to spot. Man, if I told someone what I'm doing, they'd call me an idiot, risking myself this much for a woman. I won't lie and say I'm not doing this because I want her to live, but even if I didn't want to, going back injured means death; it's all or nothing now.

He pushed open the hall doors and walked in, leaving them open. As he drew closer, he saw a silhouette at the far end.

[Deadly Poison progressing to Stage 2]

[DANGER!]

[Deadly Poison stat check...]

[Target CON stat too high]

[Target in a weakened state]

[Deadly Poison stat check succe—]

[Target has Poison Resist Magic Active]

[…]

[Kid, I am using my magic power to slow down the progression of this poison… but I'm getting sleepy, sorry… we’re… cooked. To think someone is going to kidnap me again after this… Ah right, I forgot to tell you… somehow, you are the only person who can hear me, I found this out at that Grandma's base, who somehow got roasted there, crazy… Anyway… this seems to be a farewell… but I will use the last of my mana to keep the Information Magic active, since you seem to like it so much… so I was also going to tell you—]

Going to tell?

[CONGRATULATIONS!]

[New Passive Skill Acquired!]

[Iron Will]

Descripti—

Thud!

Crow collapsed to the ground, his vision starting to fade.

It seems the bleeding and the poison are about to finish me off... if I survive this... I'm going to find a way to become immune to poison.

"You came... I confess I thought you wouldn't." A young woman's voice.

He got up from the ground, still unable to see clearly, only spotting a silhouette ahead. "Yeah, I came, but I slipped up at the last second... and got stabbed in the back... anyway, rogues, you know how it is—cough..."

[Level Up!]

[Pain Resistance Level 1 > 2]

Getting closer to her, he was able to see that her eyes were already healed, or at least that's what it looked like since everything was too blurry to be sure. "Did you see any exit? Honestly, I can't even think; it must be the poison..." Still speaking, he drew his sword and used it to cut the ropes binding her.

This stuff is really tough, but still, this holding her back feels so forced.

"Yeah, I know what you're thinking... it doesn't make sense, right? Well, they used lavender among other things to poison me, they had some kind of needle... well, it doesn't matter anymore... Crow, are you okay? Your heartbeat sounds strange."

“Good question…” He freed her legs, and now moved to her hands, starting with the right one. She was sitting in a chair similar to a prisoner strapped into an electric chair for execution. "Can you... fight, Sharon? Honestly... I think I'm going to pass out in a few minutes..."

"Probably not... I have the strength of… no, probably half the strength of Sophia."

To think she said almost the exact same thing as Alice.

Crow started to laugh softly as he heard that. He had finished untying her right hand and moved to the left hand. "Cough... sorry." He ended up coughing up blood onto her. "Are you hurt? Honestly, I'm seeing everything blurry..."

She looked into his eyes, then lowered her head a little, her hair veiling her gaze. “...”

“Sharon?” He saw two gleaming points in the area of her mouth. Since everything was blurry, he didn't see her licking her lips where his blood had splashed when he coughed. He was almost done cutting the last rope made of some strange material, certainly anti-vampire when the yank came.

Hm?

(Next)

First

Home at War

“...so there’s the crazy girl trying to seduce a person who’s barely past the point where he’s even considered a species beyond his own in his life and is so insistent in shoving not only her rear but her tail, which I should remind you his species does not have, and then cries conspiracy when the poor man, who is not accustomed to her species at all, does not have the desired reaction.” Herbert explains and Doctor Redhoof sighs dramatically at the tale of one of his own people running into The Undaunted.

“It’s a weakness of my species. We obsess. It makes us masters at whatever craft we care to put our minds to, but it can easily lead us into spirals and absurdity.” Doctor Redhoof says with a sigh.

“That and the extremely on the nose names for things...” Harold teases.

“It’s cultural. The clearer something is named the more clearly it can be communicated. It’s simple logic. But it leads to things like me. I have crimson hued keratin which is mildly rare. So of course I was named after it. It could have been about my coat, hooves or horn, or even about how my green eyes contrast it, but no. We like the obvious. Or at least my culture does.” Doctor Redhoof notes.

“Better than the line of sight names or inheritable names from the other cultures. Not that humans have much room to talk when it comes to inheritable names. We use that too much.” Herbert says. “Still, how do we feel now?”

“Better, but what happens next?”

“We’re going to get you home, but there is something that you need to know about.” Harold says.

“What’s that?”

“We recovered one of your ships. It’s what led us to figuring out you were you so quickly. It’s intact, but the pirates were doing... what I can only assume to be unholy things in there. The chemical scans we’ve gotten out of it suggests that the inhabitants either had some kind of strange ritual thing going on, or didn’t know the difference between general rooms, toilets and morgues.”

“Oh... that’s awful.”

“Right, well that’s also not the point. The ship is still legally yours and registered to the Trade Fleets of your mother’s company. And as the highest ranking member of the crew recovered, you’re captain by default even if you were owners representative and accountant of the fleet.” Harold says.

“Oh... which ship?”

“The Fruit Flower.” He answers and she blinks. Considers and then her face lights up a little before falling.

“My ship. And they’ve done THINGS on it?”

“They’ve done something dirty on it. We’re cleaning it out with low grade lasers and venting the smoke into the void.” He answers.

“That’ll clean it.” She notes. Then thinks. “Hmm... I’m not sure what to do with it.”

“Well it’s yours, so whatever you want.” Harold says. “But I bring it up for another reason. You just confirmed you spent a lot of time on that ship, or was reading too much into things?”

“No, I had my quarters and office on that ship. Granted it was basically a double sized room with a door in the middle, but the point stands.”

“Right, did you have any place where you stashed something? Because if you did and it was stashed well enough, it might still be there.” Harold offers and she thinks.

Doctor Redhoof gives Harold an impressed look at that. Harold winks and the psychiatrist nods with a smirk.

“There might be! I uh... if it’s still there, then... uh... Can you promise no one will read it?”

“A dataslate?” Harold asks.

“A diary. Pen and paper. Hidden in a little divot in the air ducts leading into my office.” She confesses.

“Why would you need that?” Herbert asks.

“I think... yes, it’s where I put the less flattering observations and thoughts about things. We all have them and I dealt with them by writing them down and making up nasty little stories. But it was all handwritten so it wouldn’t be hacked and become a scandal.”

“Of course. Although if it’s extra juicy then me and Herbert here are all for it. We are spy guys after all!”

“You don’t really qualify as spy anymore, you’re way too much!” Herbert chimes up.

“I’m sorry mister so cute he’s literally started riots, what was that about being too much?” Harold asks as he gives Herbert the stinkeye and gets a raspberry in return. Elmira starts to giggle at the exchange. Missing the thumbs up Herbert flashes Harold.

•-•-•Scene Change•-•-• (Living Deck, The Fruit Flower, Kaploosha Ornak System)•-•-•

“God damn, what did they even do to get stains up that high?” The Gohb on the little hover skiff asks as he has turned the main light of his vehicle straight up. He as in an environmentally sealed suit along with the other three Gohb men and pair of Kohbs scanning the ship for anything useful that wasn’t tainted.

“It’s primarily carbon now and who knows whatever it was before.” The next Salvager states.

“Laser scoured feces. No I don’t know why.” The Kohb Biologist notes.

“I’m less concerned about the why and more on the how. The roof is damn near caked in it. Was this done repeatedly over a long period or all at once? Either way, disgusting.” The Kohb Chemist adds.

“Actually we’ve cracked that. A bunch of pirates kept personal notes. Apparently the trading fleet identified as The Bountiful Harvest put up way more of a fight than they thought and they got a much smaller take than they hoped. So they started soiling the ships deliberately as revenge. The rest of them they had to use for parts to repair their own ships. Leaving only four ships from the small fleet, two of which were destroyed in the first three months since it’s capture.” Dispatch calls and clarifies things.

“So petty revenge and deliberate sabotage. Stupid, stupid stupid, there’s a reason feces smells terrible. It’s just asking for a bevy of infectious diseases.” The Biologist states out loud.

“No one here disagrees.” The lead Salvager says as they reach the indicated door. “Still, if you think they treated the ships badly, what do you think they did to the people they captured? We’ve only recovered one of them. A Synth woman who’s body at the time was the sort of things that I’d have slapped together to go around and slap my sisters when I was seven.”

“Did you actually do that?” The Chemist asks.

“Twice before they stopped trying to deliberately piss me off. Fighting back works wonders.” The Salvager says. “Okay here’s the door.”

It’s no longer functional. In fact the area looks even more badly damaged than most of the ship’s internals. The fact they kept their destructive tendencies away from the load bearing struts and walls was clearly a miracle.

The door is broken, but easily forced with a hydraulic jaw to spread it nice and wide.

There is an impressed whistle from one of the Salvagers. “Damn! No one touch anything, I need to scan for live surfaces, no way in hell the cables around here aren’t shredded or something.”

“You’re the electrician.”

“That I am.” He says before scanning the area. Then using Axiom to telekinetically shift some things around and uncovered exposed wires pouring a charge into the floor of the room before covering them in electrical tape as a temporary measure. “We need to fully cut the power to this area. I’ve seen less destructive explosions.”

“We did.” Dispatch says. “The ship has been upgraded to have reserve micro-generators, and they’re not on the official schematics. Meaning the pirates did it.”

“Fuck.” The Electician grunts. “I like this place even less now and I was already about to advocate for scrapping this filthy deathtrap.”

“Yeah, but we have a legal owner on The Inconceivable, meaning it’s not our call. But it is my recommendation.” The Lead Salvager says as he floats up to the vent and unhooks it from the wall. It’s stuck on with all the grime. He pulls it off and lets it clatter. He then sends in a tiny and very basic drone to scan through it.

It finds a divot with a sealed container making it flush to the rest of the vent. Axiom and a bit of finagling brings the container out. It’s lid is metal, but the rest is plastic. It’s got a fountain pen, inkwell and leather bound book inside.

“This is it boys. Maybe the last thing on this ship belonging to our sole survivor that isn’t smashed, soiled or both.” He says.

•-•-•Scene Change•-•-• (System Edge, Kaploosha Ornak System)•-•-•

The lens of a drone covered in stealth panels adjusts itself. It had been sent to long term observe a system. The low powered device was so unobtrusive that it would have to be more or less rammed into to be detected in the black. It did however mean that it took minutes to fully register what most ships could do in milliseconds. And at these ranges.

Hours pass as the tiny device intakes all the information it can. Then it sends out a single tiny alert with a snapshot of the system and the time.

Then it detonates.

It is so far away from the Ambush Fleet that the tiny plume of thermal energy is dismissed as space debris colliding at sufficient speeds to cause a slight reaction. A very, very normal state of affairs.

•-•-•Scene Change•-•-• (Elmira’s Temporary Quarters, The Inconceivable, Kaploosha Ornak System)•-•-•

She slowly opens the container. She wanted to be alone when she read it again and... “Oh? The ink is still mostly good.”

She sets aside the still sealed inkwell and pen and pulls out the book. The weight is growing more familiar by the moment and she runs her hands over the Lalgarta leather and smiles.

Her handwriting in the book is swooping and in the Huraga language. All designed with a little hook at the top because they were copies of clan symbols and signals that were hung from branches and vines in the ancient past. Formal Huraga calligraphy always included the hooks.

“Oh... Bali...” She mutters as she reads the little blurb where she had mused that if the woman ever got married there was no way she’d be regarded as anything more than the boring one. “I miss you.”

Bali had died when the holdout room had been breached. A single overcharged shot of plasma and the Drin woman was gone from the shoulders up.

She keeps reading. Little nitpicks and complaints about the girls in her fleet, about... about all of them. Right. She had put the book away as a time capsule so that she’d see if her opinion on the girls changed after a few years, and she had accentuated the negative to give them a sort of glow up.

She decides to remember the bad, to remind herself of all the good. She had met everyone in her fleet at least once, and while she wasn’t the captain in any fleet, she was still in some way responsible for all of them as her mother’s representative in the fleet itself.

Holographic tears well in her synthetic eyes and pour down her muzzle before falling. But they’re projections, they fade away as they strike the paper. They don’t wet or distort it.

She notices this and can’t help but consider that her tears can’t do anything for the dead, for good or ill.

•-•-•Scene Change•-•-• (Bridge, The Inconceivable, Kaploosha Ornak System)•-•-•

“Everyone, on alert.” Harold says suddenly.

“What? Why?” Orchid asks.

“I don’t know. Something is up.”

“What?”

“I have no idea.” He says as he starts looking around and then turning in his command couch. He stands up from it and keeps scanning before looking straight down. He openly ponders things and then sits back down and brings up the exact orientation of The Inconceivable and then blinking. “Directly from La’ahbaron.”

“La’ahbaron current events...” Orchid brings up. “Increased tension with the Therasite Republic. The Ochre Party is getting increased prominence due to the declaration of war and an increased Anti-La’ahbaron sentiment growing. Common slogans relate to how horrible their neighbours are when their foes are resorting to neural clamps to be rid of them. The Orchre party remains a minority however, but has stolen from the Kinesis Party a little and jumped up to six percent from four in the share of the voters. The Amber Fleet of La’ahbaron is under scandal due to several unnamed noble Ibu houses trying to force their children into prominent leadership positions to retroactively soak up some glory. A historical library in one of the core worlds was struck by the opposing Vish forces resulting in total devastation and a large number of cultural artifacts and handwritten scrolls and books have been reduced to ash. Interestingly I’m not seeing anything in the way of a partially recovered scroll. Meaning that we either have looting going on or some unusually thorough incendiary weapons.”

“All of it interesting. But this feels different. Physical. Like someone wants to punch me in the face.”

“Merely an intrusive thought on my end.” Orchid confesses/jokes.

“No! No, it’s not that.” Harold nearly bursts out laughing then sobers up immediately. “Something, something is coming. But it’s very far away.”

First Last Next

They reached the iron floor trap in the late afternoon.

Roman stopped at the edge of the Iron floor and studied it. The metal walkway was more than 20 meters wide. It was set into the ground, flush with the ground on either side. There was no way around it.

Small symbols were etched along its edges, pulsing with a faint blue glow.

V'rak stepped up beside Roman. "It's wider than I expected."

"How does it work?" S’ra asked.

Lirael tilted her head. "When activated, the bar carries a powerful electrical charge. Anything that steps on it is instantly incapacitated. The charge is designed to cause complete loss of motor control and is lethal."

Roman studied the walkway. "Can we go around it?"

"No, it goes all around the perimeter so we can’t walk around it."

"So we have to go through."

V'rak turned to the group. "How do we do that?"

No one answered.

They sat silent on the grass at the edge of the Iron floor, looking at the town beyond.

They were so close. And yet so far.

V'rak broke the silence. "A humanoid could pass through."

Roman turned to him. "What?"

" The outer layers of Humanoids are made of plastic. They're not conductive. The electricity wouldn't affect them."

Roman's brow furrowed. "Lirael?"

She shook her head. "The Iron floor fries anything that walks on it. That includes humanoids. The electrical charge is designed to affect all materials. Plastic would melt. Metal would conduct. The circuits inside a humanoid would be destroyed."

No one answered. Roman stood. He looked at the Iron floor and then he turned to the group.

"We rest first, maybe even until tomorrow. Eat. Hydrate. Let our bodies recover. "

Morning came slowly as the iron floor gleamed in the sunrise.

Roman sat near it, watching Mukit. His body ached. His mind churned. But he was calm.

He called the group together.

"Everyone," he said. "Humanoids too. Come here."

They gathered in a loose circle. V'rak and K'len sat close together. S'ra settled beside them. And Lirael stood with the humanoids.

Roman looked at each of them. "We need to get past that floor. I want ideas. No idea is too small. No idea is too stupid. Just talk."

S'ra spoke first. "We could build a tower. Something tall enough to jump over the floor."

Roman shook his head. "The guards would see us. And we'd need to go back to the forest to get it. That would take days."

V'rak considered. "What about covering it with grass? If we throw enough grass on it, maybe it would block the charge."

He stood and walked to the edge of the Iron floor. He gathered a handful of grass and tossed it onto the metal surface. It landed softly, scattered across the walkway. Nothing happened.

Roman watched. "It didn't fry."

Lirael stepped forward. "The grass doesn't conduct electricity. But it wouldn't protect us. The Iron floor has multiple sensors. It would still detect us and activate."

Roman looked at the group. His eyes moved across their faces. Then his gaze landed on one of the humanoids. A female. Her body was scarred and worn and her face was blank.

"What do you think?" Roman asked.

Everyone turned. The humanoid's eyes moved slowly, focusing on Roman.

"I do not have opinions," she said. "I follow orders."

Roman stood. He walked to her and looked her in the eyes. "I'm not giving you an order. I'm asking for your thoughts."

The humanoid stared at him.

"You've carried us. Watched over us. Pulled us from the river. You've earned the right to speak."

V'rak's body tightened. "Roman, what are you doing?"

"Giving her a voice."

The humanoid's face remained blank.

"I would offer myself as bait," she said. "I can walk onto the Iron floor. Test its limits. See if there is a weak point. If I survive, you follow. If I do not, you try something else."

Roman shook his head. "No."

The humanoid tilted her head. "Why not?"

"Because you've earned your right to survive." Roman looked at her, at all the humanoids, their scarred bodies and blank faces. "All of you. You carried our supplies. You carried us. You saved our lives. You are not expendable."

"We are machines," she said. "We were built to serve."

Roman returned to his position and continued staring at the iron floor.

K'len stood suddenly. "I have an idea."

Everyone turned.

"We dig a tunnel under the Iron floor."

Lirael's face shifted. "That's... that's actually a good idea."

K'len continued, his voice gaining strength. "The Iron floor is set into the ground. But it only goes a certain depth. If we dig beneath it, we can bypass the charge entirely."

Roman looked at the ground. The soil was soft. Loamy. Diggable.

"How deep?" he asked.

Lirael's eyes were distant, calculating. "I am not sure but its not that deep, I believe we can dig below it."

V'rak stared at K'len. His face broke into something Roman had never seen before. Pure, unguarded joy.

"You did it," V'rak said.

K'len hissed. "I just thought of it. That's all."

"That's everything." V'rak stepped forward and pulled K'len into a Trab hug. "I am so happy you're finally back."

Roman stood back and watched them celebrate, happy that they had found a good idea and that K’len, who was distant and unbothered since the bombing, had finally become active and helped them come up with the idea.

 First Previous Royal Road

First | Previous | [Next][n]

Chapter Ten – Where Are We Flying

What Meva noticed first was Hutor. An Oberoi, captured, hunted, escaped — and aboard this ship apparently no one's prize, but someone Toriel talked to, as well as the translation allowed, someone she fed, whose wounds she tended, as if it cost her something if he didn't heal. Pirates, Meva thought, sold an escaped hunting animal, or put it on display, or simply left it behind if it brought in nothing. They didn't invest weeks in a language system just to listen to an Oberoi.

And then there was what was missing. She had seen the ship's few cargo holds, in the days she'd now been aboard, had crossed through them on the way to her own small chamber, and what she'd seen was: nothing. No crates full of plundered goods, no weapons locker built for more than self-defense, none of the signs of abundance she'd associated with pirates since she first heard of them. Only spare parts, real ones, as Toriel had claimed, and equipment that looked more like work than loot.

She finally asked, one evening, while Toriel checked instruments Meva couldn't name. "Where are we flying?"

"To Hesh," Toriel said, without looking up. "I have instructions for a few stops along the way."

"Hesh?" Meva had heard the word before, in the overseers' conversations, always in passing, always with an undertone shifting between respect and suspicion. "That's outside the empire. What do we want there?"

Toriel paused, looked at her directly for the first time in this conversation, with an expression Meva couldn't quite read. Not caution, more a kind of weighing amusement.

"Do you know the Hesh?" Meva asked further, because the silence told her more than any answer would. "Are they dangerous?"

Toriel laughed, brief, genuine, without the edge Meva had expected. "No more dangerous than the Merak."

It was not an answer. It was a dodge, elegant enough that Meva briefly didn't know whether to call it out as such, but clear enough that she understood: whatever this woman was, it wasn't what Meva had taken her for when she'd offered her knowledge in exchange for a place aboard. Pirates didn't have instructions. Pirates didn't have destinations with names one avoided explaining out of caution. Pirates didn't say things like no more dangerous than the Merak, with that undertone suggesting there was indeed something to fear, just not what Meva had asked about.

She asked no further question. Not because she was satisfied with the answer, but because she had learned that sometimes you found out more by waiting than by pressing.

Toriel's answer hadn't satisfied her, however much she tried to tell herself otherwise. In the following nights, when Toriel withdrew to her own chamber and Hutor rested in the small cargo hold left to him, Meva began searching the ship herself. Not out of suspicion alone, but out of the same habit she'd learned with Draeon: whoever wasn't allowed to ask had to look for herself.

She found nothing that fit a pirate. No weapons locker, no crates of loot, nothing that even remotely matched the stories she'd heard about such ships. Instead she found, in a small, unlocked compartment behind the navigation console, a bundle of data carriers labeled with symbols she couldn't read, and a terminal that, when she touched it carefully, displayed a series of encrypted messages — lines of characters that were no language she knew, but whose structure, the repetition of certain patterns, the way they were formatted, told her something she'd already suspected. This wasn't private correspondence. This was a reporting system, methodical, organized, with a regularity only an institution could have, not a single person.

"You shouldn't be there."

Toriel's voice, from the door, made her flinch, though it had sounded calm, almost too calm. Meva didn't turn at once, gave herself a moment before she did, to force her face into a calm she didn't quite feel.

When she turned, she saw it anyway: a shadow spreading across Toriel's cheeks and neck, a fine darkening of the mottling beneath her skin, which no Xoan showed willingly if they could avoid it. Meva didn't know what it meant, not exactly, but she knew enough about bodies betraying more than their owners wanted to recognize that she'd just seen something Toriel would rather have kept hidden.

"I didn't steal anything," she said finally.

"I didn't say you did." Toriel stepped closer, her gaze on the open terminal, her face giving nothing away of how much worry or how much indifference lay behind it. "You saw something that's none of your business anyway."

"Now I know you lied to me." Meva stood, slowly, without raising her hands, without signaling a threat, but without lowering her eyes either. "No pirate. No smuggler. This" — she gestured at the terminal — "looks like something someone writes for a government. For an army."

Toriel was silent, and in the silence Meva saw something in her she hadn't noticed before: a weariness that had nothing to do with the late hour, but with the weight of what she'd been carrying, for weeks already, without being able to say it aloud.

"Now you know enough," Toriel said finally.

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one I can give you." Toriel closed the compartment, with a firmness that allowed no further argument, but her voice wasn't hard as she went on. "I haven't fully lied to you, Meva. I just haven't told you everything. There's a difference, even if it might not seem worth much to you right now."

Meva looked at her, a long time, and thought of Draeon, of Ilvo, of all the times she herself had done exactly that. Not lied, just not said everything, because the whole truth would have been more dangerous than its absence. It was hard to condemn Toriel for it, when she carried the same coin in her own pocket, only minted differently.

"If you trust me," Meva said finally, "then at least tell me where this leads. Not everything. Just whether I have reason to be afraid."

Toriel looked at her a long time before answering, with an honesty more surprising than any evasion she could have chosen. "I don't know myself, not entirely, not yet," she said. "But I don't think any of us, you included, will still have the choice not to be afraid, in the months to come."

It was no comfort. But it was, for the first time, something that felt like the truth.

First | Next

Dragging my leather shoes along the ground, their shine reflecting the scorching midday sun, I heard a shout.

“Don’t drag your shoes!” my father ordered.

Why was he yelling? There was no roof around us, let alone any walls. We were standing in the middle of nowhere. I could hear him perfectly well.

“Tie them!” he exclaimed.

I watched the final syllable move across his mouth, a mouth that seemed to droop closer to his chin with every passing day.

“At least wait until we get there,” I shouted, puffing out my cheeks. I couldn’t open my mouth any wider because fear was making me want to pee.

My father walked toward a stranger who was far too strange and greeted him. The man wore a doctor's coat, but around his waist was a martial arts belt covered in dust, scratches, and bloodstains. Since my dad kept checking his Seiko watch every minute, I assumed we were running late for my medical appointment.

He’s probably going to operate on my muscles, I thought, resigning myself to my fate.

I remembered the lines at school, where my knees trembled after standing for two hours singing the national anthem, or physical education class. This felt exactly the same.

The doctor looked at me as if I were a hopeless case.

“Go stand in the waiting line,” my father said, placing his hands on my shoulders and pointing toward the other children.

They wore the same doctor's outfit, except they had white belts.

We got down on our knees and bowed toward a photograph of an old man hanging on the wall.

The sign beneath it read: “Jigoro Kano.”

He must be the master of the doctors, I concluded, scratching my head.

Out of the corner of my eye, I looked at my classmates.

There was a boy with barely any hair on his jaw, a skinny kid with tense shoulders who looked like a streetlamp, and a girl waving her hands through the air as if she were playing with dolls, completely lost inside her own universe.

“Begin,” the doctor ordered.

Immediately, the man walked away from the mats and sat down beside my father.

Within seconds, they were sharing a bottle of whisky and a cigarette.

“Fight me.”

The chubby, barely-haired boy interrupted my thoughts.

Honestly, I had come here for a medical appointment.

But if they were giving me the opportunity to release my frustration about having an absent father on a kid who clearly suffered from the same thing, I wouldn’t feel the slightest remorse about beating the shit out of him.

The chubby kid dug his enormous fingers into my belt.

Suddenly, I felt as if Earth's gravity had switched off for a moment.

He pressed his chest against mine, and I became the very Earth orbiting the Sun.

I went flying through the air.

“Stop!”

A female voice screamed.

I hit the ground and looked up.

It was the girl who had been playing with dolls.

She looked at me.

I looked at her.

Seriously? A girl was defending me?

She had enormous eyes framed by heavy eyelids that seemed to communicate with her own fingers.

“You shouldn’t fight someone smaller than you,” she told the chubby kid, Nakayama.

Her delicate hands trembled with fear.

I didn’t blame her.

Standing in front of that mountain of flesh while being nothing more than a little tree barely holding itself upright by its roots must have made her feet leave the ground.

She clenched her teeth.

At that exact moment, a fly passed by.

The insect buzzed.

Then, in the blink of an eye, the girl vanished from my field of vision.

All she left behind was a gust of wind.

She immediately reappeared against Nakayama's chest, striking an oddly sensual pose with her head tilted at a forty-five-degree angle, as if she were about to eat the most delicious pudding in the world.

But that wasn’t the terrifying part.

The terrifying part was watching her muscles seem to double in size in less than a second.

“She’s a monster,” I whispered to myself, terrified of offending her.

I watched as she leaned closer and whispered directly into his ear:

“Seoi otoshi.”

She lifted him.

Then she sent him flying straight into the wall.

The impact was so brutal that a piece of concrete fell onto the boy's head.

When I looked back at her, she was already kneeling in the middle of the tatami, playing with her imaginary dolls again as if nothing had happened.

“In judo, the one who survives is the one farthest from the Earth,” she said, staring into the distance. “At this rate, whoever reaches Mars first will become world champion.”

“Thank you,” I said as I got back on my feet, magnetically drawn toward her strange center of gravity.

I have to confess something.

Ever since I can remember, my greatest desire has been to disappear from everyone's life.

To go far away.

Or, if that isn’t possible, destroy the world.

I don’t know how I’m going to do it, but it’s the fantasy that helps me fall asleep every night.

So, if what that girl said was true, I would dedicate myself to becoming the best judoka possible in order to escape this reality.

I wanted to disappear into my own world.

Just like she had.

“What did you say your name was?” I asked, watching her pretend to pour invisible tea onto her big toe.

What surprised me most was that she didn’t seem to care that I was dissociating too.

“Toshimi Ushijima,” she replied.

“Nice to meet you. I’m Kimura. Masahiko Kimura.”

“Line up!” the instructor roared.

At that moment, I understood that I wasn’t in a medical center.

I was in “My Worst Nightmare,” just as she had whispered to me before we were called.

I also understood that my father had left me to fend for myself.

I was completely fucked.

We formed a line.

The instructor went around greeting everyone, and each of us had to follow his example by shaking hands with our partner.

For some reason, every time I lowered my head toward the tatami, my eyes instinctively searched for her.

She was still inside her own galaxy.

Even when it was her turn to greet the other boys, she continued moving her fingers through the air.

When it was finally my turn to say goodbye to her, she grabbed my hands tightly.

Before I could understand what she was doing, she pulled me toward her and kissed me on the mouth.

The act was so quick that I barely had enough time to watch her wink and stick out her tongue as she pulled away.

She acted as though nobody had witnessed the enormous scandal that two twelve-year-olds had just caused in the middle of class.

My chest went cold.

My brain melted.

Desperately, I searched for my father.

But all I could see was his hat abandoned outside on a seat, beside his pack of Golden Bat cigarettes.

He had abandoned me.

“Get ready for the picture,” the instructor said, stumbling and losing his balance like a drunken beginner.

He pulled a Leica camera from his belt.

“Pose! You only live once!”

As he spoke, he spat a strange white powder from his mouth.

At that moment, I swore I would never speak to that girl again.

A relationship with me was clearly impossible.

But what she did next made her impossible to ignore.

She placed her right hand on top of her messy head, pushed aside the long hair covering her face, and got down on all fours.

She gave me a manic smile that screamed:

Be afraid of me. I bite.

I, on the other hand, could only raise my hand at a forty-five-degree angle.

With my neck tense and my eyes full of curiosity, I stared at her.

I assumed that, in order to keep anyone from discovering how terrified I was, I had to imitate my old man during his poker games:

steady gaze,

relaxed eyebrows,

neutral mouth.

Poor me.

I followed the example of a loser.

And I ended up losing too.

When the flash went off, she locked her eyes onto mine.

She looked at me like prey trying, unsuccessfully, to hide its fear.

Now I was the victim.

I was no longer the boy being defended.

I was her victim.

“She’s crazy,” I said out loud, just as the light from the camera froze us forever.

First | Next

Author's Note

Hello friends, I would love to hear your recommendations and feedback on my novel My Judo Love Story. I hope to bring it to the big screen someday. Tell me where you want the story to go; it would be interesting to see where we arrive together. It is partly based on the life of Masahiko Kimura, a judo champion. I have completed three chapters, but I hadn't built up the courage to publish them until today. So, I'm looking forward to your thoughts! Below are the second and third chapters

First | Previous | Next

Chapter 7

***

EXTRATERRESTRIAL CONTACT AND HUMAN RESPONSE OPERATIONS, SITE 3 (CODENAME: ECHO-3)
DIRECTOR’S QUARTERS
BLACK SITE ORBIT -  ASTEROID BELT
0243Z - 22 MAR 2532

The Knock was initially conceived as a joke: tap, tap-tap-tap-tap, tap-tap. Shave and a haircut, two bits. One of dozens of the damned things that filled the SOP guides. You can’t put creative and intelligent people into isolated boxes for long periods of time without a little weirdness creeping in. Most were small, inside jokes that only a single generation of staff knew. Document reviews stripped anything too overt or risqué, but the Knock had stayed. It turned out to be surprisingly distinct, quick, and effective at communicating urgency than a constant pounding and less stressful than an alarm klaxon sounding off.

Director Park Su-jin sat up immediately when she heard it at the door of her quarters. She pulled on her station jacket, padded to the door, and opened it. A marine waited, his uniform neat, his expression very still. He extended a sealed wafer case.

“Director. Secure priority dispatch from Geneva,” he told Park. The name plate on his uniform said Colmes. He was new, seconded from the Marines for 6-month tour.

“Thank you, Colmes,” she replied. “Was there any detail outside of the eyes-only protocol?”

“Gunny Chavez said to tell you ‘93-Delta,’ and that you’d know what the code meant.”

The words slapped any lingering sleepiness from Su-jin. Her eyes widened and her stomach dropped as the Marine gave the protocol code for an outside context problem.

“I do. Colmes, I need you to get back to the Duty Officer and get the secure conference room ready.”

“Yes, ma’am. With your permission?” he asked.

That was a detail she always forgot when giving orders to the Marine staff. 

“Right. Dismissed.” 

She waved him away to his task and stepped back into her quarters. The door hissed shut behind her. Practically running to her desk, Su-jin slotted the wafer and keyed her credentials. 

The holoscreen hummed into life with its boot-up, then cleared.  Su-jin pressed her hand on the security scanner as the request for identity came up. The seal of the Intelligence Directorate appeared, the laurel wreath of the Commonwealth around a torch, scroll, and key arranged in a triangle with slogan ‘Veritus in Vigilantia.’

UNIC INTELLIGENCE DIRECTORATE - PRIORITY  MESSAGE
CLASSIFICATION: COSMIC/SAP - ECHO-3
FROM: A. KILGORE, DIR., FIELD OPERATIONS
TO: DIR. S. PARK (ECHO3)
CC: DIR. Q. RAINES (ECHOPRIME)
SUBJECT: INITIATION OF PRIMARY MISSION - FIRST CONTACT OPERATIONS

Director Park:

The Event has occurred. Per operational contingency on alien contact, you are hereby directed to transition ECHO-3 to full primary mission status effective immediately.

As of this message, you are now downgraded to SCI status for the duration of the primary mission. You are cleared to release your first contact scenarios under SCI clearance for inclusion into broader UNIC Armed Services, Intelligence Directorate, and Science Bureau planning scenarios. 

The external operational designation of your facility is now ECHO Station. Use of the Echo-3 identifier is to be restricted to SAP-contained traffic.

You are to initiate all relevant model protocols and begin scenario planning immediately. All analyst tiers are cleared. This is not a simulation. 

Attached documents: the briefing and your secure channel blockchain codex for a principals meeting at 0330 Zulu time. Recorded and live data streams will be made available to you and your staff afterwards.

In the meantime, get your teams read-in. We’ll need their assessments.

It’s time to ride the tiger, Su-jin.

— Alex

Attachment: 
EVENT CLASSIFICATION: 93-Delta/OCP
TARGET: Non-Human Configuration Detected
SOURCE: UNSC VIGILANCE-9
LOCATION: SOL SYSTEM / ECLIPTIC PLANE / RADIO SILENCE

*Nothing follows*

Su-jin sat motionless as shivers ran across her body. Century-long machinery was turning toward its final gear. Every director wondered if she’d been the one sitting in the chair when they finally found a living alien civilization to contact. And every single one dreaded that it would be a delta-event, a species more technologically-advanced than humans. 

Su-jin reviewed the data and her jaw dropped.

“Sesange,” she said in a whisper. She keyed her internal command circuit. The first step in the book was making the formal transition from scenario planning to operational status.

“Fiasco-14, this is Director Park. Acknowledge.”

“Acknowledged, Director. Please specify a command,” the VI replied.

“Fiasco, under ECHO Directive One, activate 93-Delta protocols. We have a confirmed contact observation. Send wake up calls to all department heads along with Commander Li and Colonel Paredes. Loop standby signal to Geneva until handshake for a principals meeting at 0330 Zulu. Check my incoming mailbox for details.”

“Confirmed. ECHO-3 transitioning to First Contact status. Calendar updated and AR protocols spooling. Accessing blockchain codex for connection. ”

Su-jin went to the kitchenette and slotted a coffee packet into the dispenser system. The machine hummed, and after a moment, there was the gentle sound of liquid streaming into the cup. She breathed in the intense earthy scent of the hot coffee as the machine sputtered the last few milliliters out. She brought the cup to her pursed lips and took a careful sip of the bitter brew. The warmth hit her tongue but did little to blunt the edge of excitement she felt. The next few hours would be critical; there would be so much work.

In addition to the technical details, she would need to work with the Personnel Office on getting round-the-clock shifts set up: Analysts, coms, and runners. She looked at the coffee in her hands. They were going to run through their supply so much faster. She added logistics to her mental list.

First things first though, she needed to get dressed and get the department heads up to speed. The meeting in less than an hour would likely have the Joint Chiefs, Ministry heads, and others present. As director of a black site project, she would be a nonentity so it would be important to look like she belonged. 

This would have been so much easier if she was military, but Echo was a civilian intelligence directorate project. Most everyone wore shipsuits since they were light and comfortable. For this, she needed her suit, charcoal grey with a traditional cut, and her nice red blouse. This was a day for celebration after all. First contact after all! She mentally corrected herself: first sustained contact. She pulled out her sapphire tennis bracelet, blue for calm. It would be a visual reminder to temper herself.

She stepped into the corridor and walked towards the augmented reality conference room. Aides had already started coffee for the meeting. It smelled even better than the ready pods in her quarters.

Su-jin felt a little pit in her stomach. She’d overseen multiple debriefing sessions on contact scenarios here, but the weight of the current moment pressed down. Those had been simulations, not the real thing. This wasn’t Max playing red team with them again. The real thing currently orbited the Sun out in the Kuiper Belt near Pluto’s orbit.

Men and women shuffled in a few minutes after her. Li and Paredes came in wearing their service uniforms. Li’s was dark blue of the Space Corps, with a holographic serpent on one side of the collar and a silver oak leaf on the other. Paredes’s uniform was a green somewhere between dark and olive with beige khakis.

Su-jin’s had to shake her head at some of the style choices her department heads made. Varga had put on a tan sport coat over his shipsuit, as if that made it formalwear. Okoye wore an evening gown of all things, like she was going to a ball or a cocktail party. Only Parkinson had made a choice that at least looked like something you’d wear to a meeting with major government officials, a dark grey suit with snappy clean lines that was pressed neatly with a blue, almost midnight button up shirt. But then, there was his tie. It was playing a holo of a popular children’s cartoon with an anvil dropping on the character. 

Su-jin held in a sigh. Smart people isolated together for long periods of time indeed. It was part of her unofficial duties to keep them all pointed more or less in the same direction. None of the staff’s antics would be permitted on any other black site location. The whole idea of a black site was about discipline and focus on the project.

On the other hand, the whole point of Echo-3 was creativity and wild-eyed imagination bounded by rigorous process and fueled by people so brilliant that they were practically insane. No one else had come up with a better approach to developing contact scenarios for alien minds.

Su-jin motioned for everyone to take a seat around the table. Li and Paredes would have been informed by their subordinates already. The three scientists showed a mix of curiosity, confusion, and concern on their faces. There was never any good news at three o’clock in the morning. 

“I apologize for the early morning wake up but we have a situation. I think you all should have a seat,” Su-jin said to them.

Li and Paredes took their seats, their faces stony. The three civilians made faces that read more concern now. They frowned as they sat and saw the VR glasses.

Su-jin flicked her wrist and opened her fingers towards the holoprojector in the center of the table as if she was throwing something. The UNID emblem appeared, rotating along the vertical axis.

“Obviously, what you are about to see is special access protocol only.” 

Su-jin motioned into the holo and the image of the golden-hued oblong alien vessel appeared with its six obelisk-like structures arranged equidistant along the amidships axis. Its surface shimmered with the golden light scintillating like fish scales in sunlight. Only Li didn’t gasp in surprise.

Parkinson spoke first. “Oh bloody hell. That what I reckon that is?”

Su-jin nodded.

“At approximately 0140 Zulu time, a Kuiper Belt patrol ship identified an anomalous gravity wave signature indicating a vessel, designated Zulu-1, coming out of stable warp at a little over 1000 times the speed of light. The light you see is photon-only despite the clear shimmering effect. The ship doesn’t otherwise show up on any other passive sensors, suggesting exotic fields beyond known physics.”

Parkinson leaned forward. “Wait. You’re telling me. That bugger popped in at 20 times faster than our EXPERIMENTAL drive…that we just started testing?”

Su-jin nodded again.

“A delta event then,” Okoye said, her voice full of awe. “Has there been any attempt at contact?”

“Not at this time, Amara. Zulu-1 has made no attempts at communication on the EM spectrum, using the hydrogen line, or other forms of communication that we can see. Nor have we tried to communicate. The ship on site continues to monitor the situation. The alien vessel is behaving such that it seems our ship  has not been detected.”

Varga piped in, asking, “Is this a live feed?”

Paredes answered him before Su-jin could. “Not yet. We are deliberately cut off from most external feeds…for obvious reasons. UNID is working with the coms team to get a live feed piped through for analysts.”

Su-jun paused. She was having trouble keeping her expression neutral and her own emotions tamped down. 

“We are scheduled as expert observers for a principals meeting in approximately 20 minutes.” She gestured towards the VR glasses. “All omega-level UNID directors, the defense minister, the joint chiefs, and the President’s Chief of Staff will be present. Our role is to be neither seen nor heard unless we are called upon.”

Varga steepled his hands. He did that whenever he was thinking. “Su-jin, they’ve not given us any time to prep. We…”

Director Park cut him off. “I don’t get the sense this is a briefing, Frank. If it were, we’d have been asked to prep materials. And we’d have been slotted into an agenda. There’s no agenda. And we’re at…what do you call it in America? Your holidays with the children separated from adults?”

“The kid’s table?” Varga asked, frowning.

“Yes, the kid’s table,” Su-jin confirmed. “We are to be seen and not heard.”

Okoye was looking at the holo of the alien ship while adjusting the sleeves of her gown. 

“Delta contact. Technology beyond our capabilities. We cannot know if we have been detected, and they simply do not care. We cannot even know if they have the same concerns or emotional triggers as us. In fact, it’s likely they do not,” Okoye paused, considering her next words. “Silence is also a behavior. We should assume it’s not passive.”

Li spoke up. “If I may add something.”

Su-jin replied, “Of course, Commander. Please…”

“We should assume that the Vigilance has been detected and they are watching what we do. There’s better than even odds that we are outclassed and outgunned. The risk is too high to assume we are safe.” He looked over to Colonel Paredes.

“The Commander is right,” Paredes said. “But we’re running short on time for discussion. We’re at 10 minutes, Director. We still have to log in under our credentials.”

Parkinson got up and walked over to the coffee dispenser. 

“In that case, I’m going to need a lot more coffee. Damned aliens coulda had a little courtesy and not started the end of the world at three-bloody-AM.”

Previous / First

"W-what?" I couldn't help but blurt out as the cursed creature kneeled. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. This thing was the stuff of legends and nightmares, and here it was, laid low before our resident demon.

"Uhhhhh, yeah no problem buddy." Ted spoke up and stood awkwardly, clearly uncomfortable with the attention he's getting.

"WHAT?!?!?!???!?!?????" I couldn't help but shout as the absolute insanity of the scene kept hitting me in waves. As I shout, Ted whips his head around to look at me, the stare sending a shiver down my spine. It isn't like he's giving me any particular look other than surprise, but the speed at which he spun his head to look at me and his alien features are just unnerving.

"What? Flak what's wrong?" Ted seems concerned at my outburst, looking at Krok his face is painted with the same confusion and apprehension. It seems however, he is having a better time keeping his confusion to himself.

"I-I have no idea what to think about all of this. What in the hells is going on????? Why is the Woodsman of all things, literally KNEELING AT YOUR FEET???" As I shout out my confusion, the creature in question glances up at me with it's glowing amber pupils, and in a weak, wavering growl, it addresses me.

"Hrrnnnnggg- b-broke thrrrhhh- th-thee currrsseeeee-" It was my turn to whip my head around as the beast spoke in that unnerving voice. It speaks like it is unfamiliar with speech passing through it's wooden mouth. Once again a shiver slides down my spine causing the tip of my tail to twitch and sway nervously. Thankfully though, Ted takes the attention of the beast away from me.

"The curse? So that's what those threads were. Cutting that connection to whatever cursed you probably broke the hold on you." Ted glanced around at the beast, then Krok, then me. He looks nervous as we all just stand there looking shocked, even the beast somehow looks surprised. Ted quickly looked away as a bead of liquid slides off his forehead and he quickly stumbles over his words. "Uhm, I-It's just a theory! I can't be sure, but I mean what else could it be?"

The beast seems to look away in thought before it slowly nodded it's head, seemingly agreeing with Ted's assessment of the situation. Ted seemed to light up a bit at someone affirming his idea. I suppose it is the thing that makes the most sense to me at the moment. While I am able to use magic with some more ease than the average Kobold, I am by no stretch of the imagination a competent mage or wizard. I would not know for sure if Ted is correct or not, I barely know anything about curses. I mainly know the legend of the Woodsman, and I also know that curses are incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to break. Ted said so himself that he has never seen magic before today, yet he can wield it better than any magic trainee, and even better than most mages. I fear what he could do with even a little bit of practice and training, or does he even need to train? Ugh, I don't know, as far as I know he could actually be a real demon from myth and magic just comes to him as if he were made of it.

While I am distracted by this thought, out of the corner of my eye I see Ted move closer to the monster, reaching down to it. "Here bud, let me help you up. Must have been terrifying to be cursed like tha-" He barely manages to lift up the wooden creature before a booming, raspy voice shouts at him.

"NO!" I flinch at the sound and the glint of metal as Commander Krok expertly tosses a dagger from his belt at the monster, likely intending to separate the two, but a sickening crunch and a snarl emenates.

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I flinch at the sound of Krok shouting in his booming voice. His burns have left some rasp in his voice as he launches a knife in my direction. It's moving too fast, I cant stop it. Is Krok trying to kill me???

My thoughts are snapped away as the dagger finds purchase with a dull crack, but I never felt any impact or pain. Instead, realizing I have been squeezing my eyes shut in anticipation of the pain, I spot something that makes my eyes widen in surprise. Flak has his jaw hanging in silent shock at the scene, and the color drains from Krok's pale burned flesh and pale green scales. A wet snarl echoes from the wooden lizardman's chest as it seems that in a flash it had stepped in front of me as if to guard me from the blade. Said blade's hilt is sticking out from the wooden man's outstretched palm.

"Jesus H Christ on a bicycle! What the fuck are you doing Krok?! Are you trying to kill me?!" I shout incredulously at the man who seems to be recovering from the shock as he draws his own short sword. I thought he was supposed to be indebted to me for saving his life, is he switching up on me after my display?

"No Ted! I was aiming for the beast! Step away from it, you don't know if it isn't dangerous or not! I will not let this thing harm you!" Oh, well I guess that clears things up a bit, but that doesn't mean he should just go tossing knives around when he gets concerned for my safety! Before I can keep giving Krok a piece of my mind, the wooden man instead speaks up, struggling to form the right words in his mouth as he pulls the dagger from his hand.

"Hrrnnngh, y-youuu da-daree to bring hhharm to myyyy ssssavioorrr?! Then ack-accuse meee of being d-dangrous?!" It then snarls as it brandishes the blade that was just embedded in it's bark skin. The place where it yanked the blade out seems to be slowly gushing more amber fluid, as if it were blood. It's hard to tell if it's some kind of honey or even tree sap, it seems viscous enough to be either. Seeing the attempt to protect me as it holds it's free arm out as if to better protect me with it's body and the sight of the gushing wound it received in an attempt to protect me just pissed me off.

"Would you both just shut the hell up?!" I push past the wooden creature and stand between the two bipedal creatures trying to protect me in their own ways. Looking at the two it was clear my outburst had the desired effect, and then some. The wooden guy looks dejected, like I just kicked his puppy and then stomped on his heart, if he even has one. Krok seems more put together, but I can tell he feels a bit ashamed as I reprimand him. I sigh, Krok seems convinced that he has to stay with me until death and must guard me until his last breath, and the weird wooden lizard guy's first action after being freed from his curse was to act like a- well not a human shield and not a meat shield either considering he's made of plants, whatever, he tried protecting me and suffered a pretty nasty wound as a result.

"Ugh, sorry for yelling, but seriously Krok, don't throw knives in my general direction and then get surprised when I get upset. Look, he immediately jumped to protect me thinking my life was in danger, if he's dangerous, it shouldn't be to us." Turning to look at our sappy friend I notice he has perked up a bit at me standing up for him, but when his glowing amber pupils meet my eyes he shrinks slightly. "Right buddy?"

He nods in affirmation and opens his splintered maw to speak. "Y-yes! You are s-savior, you s-save me from t-the torture! I am y-yours a-and you are m-mine! N-no harm to y-you!" He tries to form what I can only assume is some kind of reassuring smile, but he doesn't make it far as his jaw creaks and groans from the unfamiliar expression. Ok then, looks like I have another weird lizard adjacent creature pledging it's life to me. Honestly though, when you get past the slightly uncanny appearance, he's kinda cute.

Krok speaks up though, and looking at him he seems less aggressive in his zeal to protect me, instead his face is painted with concern and apprehension. "I too am sworn to protect Ted with my life, if you can make me sure that your intent is to keep him safe, I suppose our goals should align." Looking back, the creature eyes Krok with caution as if he's sizing the lizard up. He then sighs, or rather something I can only assume is a sight as it sounds more like a breathy gurgle, and his shoulder's slump. He flips the knife that was embedded in his palm and holds the blade. He slowly strides to Krok and holds the handle out to him in a sort of gesture of good will. Krok seems reasonably perturbed but swallows his fear and accepts the blade back.

"Good, now that you boys are getting along, I must ask, what is your name?" I asked our wooden friend. I had only been referring to him as a creature or a beast, but he probably deserves better than that. He opens his mouth like he's going to answer, but he hesitates. His mouth closes as his face creaks while forming what I assume an expression that probably means he's thinking. The amber sparks that form his eyes flick about as if the environment would give him his answer before he just looked defeated. Looking back at me, he glumly opens his mouth again.

"I-I do not k-know... C-cursed for so long... forgot m-my own n-name." He seems distraught at this revelation, he raises his hands to his snout as he grips it in distress. Oh man, I really feel for the poor guy, surely there's something I could do. As more of that amber fluid begins to well up in the wooden knots forming his eye sockets and begins falling like tears, I get an idea.

"How about I name you? You deserve better than being called just, 'hey you' or 'creature'. Got anything you'd like to be called?" I reach up and use my thumb to wipe away one of the amber tears and ignore how unpleasantly sticky it is. He seems to beam at me... somehow... and begins chattering at me, his speech seems to be getting better as he talks, seemingly getting used to his odd morphology.

"Y-you would give m-me a name? Oh you are kind! Kind! I have no ideas w-what I could be called. But... I t-trust you. Please, name me." I am a little startled by the outburst, but I grin at his excitement.

"Well, I've never been too good at naming things but, hmmmm..." Looking around I try to conjure up a decent name for the strange little wooden man. Suddenly an idea pops into my head, it's a little corny but it is pretty fitting. "How about I name you Lief?"

He stops vibrating with excitement and gives me a stare. For a moment I worry that I said something wrong, it was probably insensitive naming him essentially leaf. But my worries melt away as he takes my hand in his rough bark-covered palms and looks up into my eyes. "I-I-it's perfect! Oh thank you! Thank you! Yes! Yes! Ohhhh I am forever yours! you have done so much for me!!!" I am a little uncomfortable at the sentiment of him wanting to die for me, but I won't talk him down, it might be the same kind of sense of duty that Krok has for me since I saved him.

I speak up in an attempt to break through Lief's jubilation. "Alright, well, we should probably keep moving. Considering how those scouts reacted to you, I'd say you've bought us some time from the folks hunting us. You don't have to follow us if you don't want to. You've gained your freedom, you can go out and live your life. I wouldn't blame yo-" I am cut off by Lief frantically trying to disagree with me.

"NO! NONONONO! Nonononono, I am yours! You are MINE! We go together! An enemy of yours is an enemy of mine! P-Please... I am yours. T-take me with you!" I flinched at his manic attempt at turning down my offer to go by himself. He's really making it sound like I own him now, and I REALLY don't want to own a person. I just sighed and signaled him to follow as I tried to get my other two party members to keep moving forward. But as Krok seemingly hesitates, he sheaths his sword and dagger and moves to keep up. Thinking of Flak I realize he's been silent this whole time. Looking over I can see why.

His jaw is hanging open while he just stares at us with wide eyes. I realize that he's been holding this face ever since Krok threw that dagger at me. I was getting concerned at this as he just kept holding the expression. "Uhhhhhh... hey Flak? Buddy? You doin alright?" He slowly moved out of his slack-jawed expression.

"What the fuck?!!?!"

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Author's Note: Heeeyyyyy guys! Well this one is a bit of a longer one. We now have a fourth party member in our weird kinda-merry band! I am going to keep developing this story and really see where things go. If I ever lock in and get motivated to draw I might try drawing our main cast so far, but no promises. Also I am not good at drawing anyway so, we will see what happens. I hope you readers like this new chapter and I hope to see you all in the next one. Let me know what you all think in the comments and I will see yall in the next one!

Edit: I also added a link to the first chapter in every chapter so far so that new readers don't have to dig through my entire account to start at the beginning. Hope yall enjoy ;).