A series of tumblr prompts turned into a novella. Aeth and Lyta work as Tech Support Technicians. They have a lot to do at their work, they've got to solve wifi problems for deep sea gods, they've got to help the Underearth Spider God Aspect with their broken keyboard, and get this small god out of the computer of a small child. But something has happened, there's this new app Swwarm that is everywhere. And it's origins may not be of this world. Originally written here, this version is for sale for pay what you wish and features two new stories not publicly posted: Ghostchains starring terrible person Ji, and The Horrifying Reality of Being Known an epilogue for Aeth and Lyta.
Third person, finished, fantasy/sci-fi
False Idols
My second book and the good one. Lucienne Prophet watched the Chosen One die. Now there is no one left to stop the apocalypse. But she will not sit back and wait for death, she will try to stop the God of Darkness no matter what stands in her way.She’ll have to recruit some people abandoned by the Empire of Light to help her stop the end of the world. A blood mage with a centuries long vendetta, some spies with questionable methods, and a woman made of fire.Will the war finally consume Lucienne? Will the gods of Light and Dark finally destroy each other and the world in their long war?
It's for sale on Amazon, and there's a PDF version on my kofi page (which I get all of the money for)
Third person, published, fantasy, dark fantasy
Dead Letters, Missing Wife
A cosmic fiction story told via dead letters left behind by your best friend that you had as a kid and married as what you thought was a joke, until the official certificate came in the mail. You're married, legally, to your best friend that you haven't seen in years, and no one seems to remember.
Second person, on going, cosmic fiction, romance
Beneath the Electric Sky
In the year 21XX the world has changed. The singularity came 23 years ago, and since then nothing has been the same. Operative Synthia [Last Name Redacted] is part of the beyond top secret Collection, a prison for the dangerous technology like her. She is going to have to go to the endless electromagnetic storm and steal a piece of long sealed technology without the electric sky killing her or anyone else getting to it first.
Third person, on going, novel length, sci-fi
A Child of Ravens
Ravens are seen as harbingers, death bringers, curses, and black magic. So what happens when a child marked by ravens comes to town? What happens when that child makes a friend?
Third person, on going (3 of 5 parts done), fantasy fiction
Assassin's Monthly
Assassin's Monthly is the premiere magazine for assassins. We feature articles about up-and-comers and the best of the best. Don't forget to check the rankings to see where you place among the Top 500 assassins in the world! Or maybe you're not as lucky and you'll find yourself on the bottom of the list!
Third person, loose universe, fiction, lighthearted
It's the most selfish thing that you could have possibly done.
You loved them. And not a "once in a lifetime" kind of way.
No. You'd never diminish what you felt with something so trite as "once in a lifetime". There are billions of people alive right now, there were untold trillions of people that have already lived.
Once in a lifetime means so much less in the grand scheme of things.
Your love for them was "once in the universe".
And so you did it. The most selfish thing you could possibly do.
They were tied to this Being of Good, this thing you couldn't have understood even if you tried. But this Being was tied to the person that you loved more than anything or anyone has ever loved anyone or anything else.
If your love was going to be tied into this unending war between immortal beings, one of Good and one of Evil, then you will be damned if you let them do it alone.
And so you do it before you die.
It wasn't as complicated a ritual as you'd have suspected.
But you summoned an immortal of your own, and tied yourself to them.
If you love was going to come back, life after endless life, reincarnated across the world as a soldier in a war without end, then they were going to do it with you. You love them too much to let them go through it alone.
And so you tied yourself to the Being of Evil.
You saw the pain, the horror, the injuries that your love suffered. And you wished, demanded, to be the one to avenge those hurts. You could have broken those that tried to kill your love in ways that they never could, because they are supposed to be Good.
Maybe it was an easy choice to tie yourself to Evil.
And of course Evil saw this as the ultimate victory.
The lover of their enemy's puppet willingly came over to their side? They can have their love be the one that breaks and hurts and destroys Good over and over and over and over again until the war is won or the universe ends? How could any self respecting Evil entity turn away such a choice?
But Evil was always so short sighted.
Yes, it was hard the first time. The betrayal on your love's face was the most devastating and cutting thing you've ever seen.
They couldn't bring themselves to try and fight you. And, of course, neither could you.
Your two competing immortals raged and tried to puppet you into fighting, destroying the other. But there are very few things stronger than the love you have for them.
It was a stalemate the first time.
But it wouldn't always be.
Some lives are harder than others. You never really understood that part. The reincarnation, the genetic lottery, the home-lives.
There is so much to chance.
And there is so much that an Evil Immortal Being will do to manipulate you into being as bad as you possibly can be.
But Evil couldn't corrupt that one thing that you held so dear, because Evil had no hold on your love.
You made sure to find them every time, every life, every redo of this fight that you inserted yourself in.
Most of the time, after spending more than a few lives repairing what you had, you spend it together, steadfastly ignoring the Immortals that are desperately pulling at strings in a fruitful attempt to resume their Unending War.
Some of the time, rarely, one of the Immortals gets the better of you, and you do fight. You try to kill each other. Or rather, one of you tries. There has never been a time where you've truly fought each other, not really.
And there has never been a time that you've won.
Because you love them, so much. You love them more than your own life, your own safety.
Even at your weakest, your lowest moments, at the times when Evil has a firm hand on your strings and makes you dance, you can never ever bring yourself to kill your love.
There has been a few times you've been killed by them.
You never held it against them. You always understood.
Besides, what sweet bliss to be killed by your love.
The shuttle ride down into the now dead core of the gas giant was long and exceedingly tedious. It was probably only 18 minutes. But D'ilm had a unique talent for making it feel like it went for hours.
You are a good counter interrogator. Very good. You gotten information out of uncooperative witnesses and hostile forces.
But there's one thing that you never really mastered, you don't even really know if there's a way to counter someone who just doesn't stop talking.
Even you couldn't twist the conversation back on to points more interesting or useful.
Not for lack of trying.
D'ilm was also an idiot. He didn't know anything.
"So, like, who are we going to meet?" you ask, interrupting D'ilm's vaguely racist tirade.
"You'll like him! He's a human like you! But I don't really know much about him. Human names are really hard to pronounce if I'm honest," D'ilm says. "You know I can't wait for whatever is coming. I'm hoping that we dethrone the King. I mean, there's no way that some dumb tmesyan can rule all of this. Obviously any indoctrinated would do better. Best if we can get a nastanrelian, am I right?"
Baht forces a chuckle.
The rest of the ride went on like that. Eventually, you give up even trying to get information out of him, and just let him talk.
Kasyn has been staring at a rivet in the back of the shuttle the entire time.
Finally, mercifully, you land in the cold, solid core of the planet.
"You know the core, what's left of it, is mostly compressed carbon. Diamonds or something. Someone already mined out all the useful shit so we've got these weird complex tunnels," D'ilm explained as he exits the shuttle. "We're going right down that way."
The second that he shows you where to go, Baht pulls a combat knife out and stabs D'ilm right between the gaps in his armor, angling to make sure he hits a weak spot.
The man dies in moments.
Baht turns to you as if he is daring for you to object.
You shrug. "If I was in charge of this idiot I wouldn't have told him anything. His operational security is trash. I think we can strike 'take over Zed' as a goal."
Kasyn rubs the front of her face. "I'm just glad he's not talking anymore."
"He said we're going that way," Baht points to the same way D'ilm did.
"Let's hope he wasn't lying or confused," you mutter.
"We don't have that much space to search," he counters.
"Yeah, but it's still the dead core of a planet. It's pretty goddamn big."
When no one said anything, they just headed into the dusty diamond tunnels. Whatever crazed Bridge technology went into building the gas giant siphoning structure several miles above your head offered some kind of strange gravity still here in this tiny, totally inert, core of a planet.
You try to tell yourself that you can't feel the Bridge all around you, that it is itching at you beneath your skin, both real and synthetic. And yet, it's giving you both a headache and a high in equal measure.
There was a long, winding corridor that you walked down for almost an hour before you got anywhere.
"I'm just gonna say it: are we lost?" Kasyn asks. "Should we not have killed the really really annoying guy?"
"No," you and Baht say at the same time.
Kasyn grumbles something about how he sucked but you'd be well on your way to wherever.
Finally you get to an area that was locked behind a large steel door.
"That's new," Kasyn mutters.
"How do we get in?" Baht asks.
You frown, looking over the giant door. "It's obvious."
Baht sighs. "Is it now?"
"We were invited. We just go inside," you say. "Play it cool. We learn everything we can. And then..."
"What?" Kasyn asks.
"We leave."
Baht laughs. "You think it'll be that easy."
"Of course. Why wouldn't it? If we have to kill a few people to do so, why not?"
"Now you're talking my language," Baht responds.
You move up to the door, aware that this could all go extremely sideways in ways that you will never expect. You don't have a weapon anymore. You threw it away as part of your cover. What the fuck were you thinking?
You enter into a strange almost amphitheater looking thing. There is about twenty seven people all gathered around. You clock and count them all quickly.
Only one turns to look at you with absent curiosity before they turn to look at the person standing at the proverbial pulpit. When you notice him, he's the only thing that you can notice.
You see the Hyperion armor, it's perfect and pristine, because you're not seeing him as he is now, in a dusty core of a defunct gas giant. You're seeing him as the one that promised you all those things so long ago. You see him hallowed in light. He looks like a God.
Hyperion lied to you. Every single thing they ever said to you was a lie. They never told you the truth.
He never told you the truth. Mitchel always lied.
That's what you have to say to yourself to sleep better.
But really you know that they lied inside their truths.
He recruited you. And the recruitment worked because you wanted it to work. You could lie to yourself and say that you didn't fully know it was Hyperion, that you suspected by didn't know, that you were unaware of all of the Hyperion crimes. That Mitchel gave you the sell by never quite saying that it was Hyperion that was promising you everything you wanted. If you believed that you would be doubting your own skills, your own experiences, yourself.
They promised you the world. They promised to make you whole again.
It was what you wanted, it was what you needed. You need so badly. How could you possibly go through life ruined and broken and hollowed out?
They were going to make you you again.
They did, in a way, but you just didn't understand the consequences.
They were the face everything that was done to you and the avatar of all the mistakes you made. Someone you could put your blame on and self-hate on even if it wasn't fair.
He's speaking now as he did then. In a familiar, firm voice that brooked no argument nor doubt. He was promising the world, again.
You know him. You know his voice. You know it as well as you know the sands in your dreams.
"My brothers and sisters in fate. Our work here is almost done!" he says. He doesn't need to yell to project. The entire room is hanging on his every word. You are hanging on his words, just like you did before.
Because it is so much easier to put the blame on him. To say that you didn't know better, and had no choice.
You always had a choice. You had millions of choices that put you on a path that led you to him. To Hyperion. To Indoctrination. To the Glorious Usmarus.
To right here.
He didn't make you come here.
You could have died.
You could have ended your story before it started. But You started this. Part of You wanted this.
"We shall soon finish what we started. We shall finish what was started in our blood. We will soon send off our final batch of new recruits. And we will leave this retched and dark place, to return home to our beautiful and bright desert."
He paces on the dais.
You can see, now, his armor is cracked, broken, and sandblasted.
You still see him as you saw him before: a savior for you.
Baht is whispering something to you, but you barely register that he is there. All you can see and hear is Mitchel.
His voice. His being.
He is bright. He is light.
He is a Usmarus.
"We will finish what was started! We shall leave but return to Zed as the Cycle starts again! We will all of us finally know why we were chosen!"
The gathered indoctrinated cheer.
You almost cheer with them, but you stop.
You snap out of it as Mitchel turns around and faces several dozen people in cages. You see someone that looks familiar. A face you saw flash across a missing person poster. One of the hundreds you've seen earlier.
Your skin starts to crawl.
You hear Mitchel say to this poor person, "And we shall build anew with your flesh and bone."
"No," you hear yourself whisper.
"We don't move until I say so," Baht says.
But he's gone.
You are on the dais now. Your hand is on Mitchel's. Your grip is iron. You rip it away from the scared prisoner.
"YOU," he snarls. The whole of the indoctrinated echo him.
For a second you recognize everything that is happening and reapply your skills to see the whole room.
You teleported yourself to the dais. It was something that you always had such difficulty trying to do on purpose.
You just did it.
Now you stand in front of the assembled crowd. Their attention is split. Half hypnotic enthralled staring at Mitchel. Half fascination and Awe ate you.
You can't help but feel yourself in the presence of the Usmarus, something holy and profane. Something you haven't felt in so long.
But now it feels different, strange. Because the indoctrination are looking at you like that. And you can feel them.
You feel like an eclipse, the shadow over the sun.
Mitchel is still there. You are capable of pulling focus from him, but not from Them.
He starts to fight against your influence, your dark matter.
His Bridge powers start to Burn, to leak. They are not usual, perfect, haunting Blue, but are the dark and consuming Red. His powers burn with the powers of the Dead Usmarus.
You know that You are not welcome here. Not unless You submit.
But You can't submit can You?
You have to resist, it's the only thing you can. If you don't resist you die.
You might die anyway, but you didn't learn that lesson the first time.
And so you fight.
The only thing that you can think to do, up here, on the dais, in the middle of everyone's focus is to explode. To unleash a nova, a brilliant flash and explosion of Bridge Energy that even a corona would be jealous of.
The spell Mitchel was weaving over the indoctrinated is shattered as you stand alone on the dais. The spell is broken but the eyes of almost thirty indoctrinated all turn to you as if you were the new sun to worship and be enlightened by.
You were the center of attention and you could feel it, feel it fill and sustain you in a way nothing else would ever be able to.
"No," you whisper again, almost to yourself.
It was loud enough that it carried to all the other indoctrinated.
Something collides with you and feels like you were hit by the drive core the size of a small city.
You pick yourself up off the ground and you see your former commander advancing on you, wearing the power of the Bridge like he was an Usmarus all himself.
"We are the apex," Mitchel says with a voice from beyond your dreams, beyond the sands. It is the voice of a dead god whose will had once been your own. "We are the answer and you will SUBMIT."
Fuck that.
Every step he takes towards you is trailing sand, you watch it mingling with the dust from this place. Some subconscious part of you recognizes that he isn't fully human anymore. That parts of him have been upgraded, changed, and implanted. That he has cybernetics haphazardly ripping through and coming out of his flesh.
Now that you're not looking at him as he was, not as you worshiped him as, you can see the horrors of what happened to him.
You stand up, all you have is your astrolabe and your skills. It's going to be a tough fight. But you've wanted to kill Mitchel for everything he did to you for a long time.
The attacks he throws at you come faster than human reactions should have allowed.
You don't even have time to think. You simply reach out for the Bridge, which feels eerily close, but you don't have time to worry about that.
Things impact against accretion disks that you hastily throw up. That infinite space that you conjure into existence takes many impacts for you. Mitchel is hitting you with everything he can and it is all you can do to react and try to not die horribly.
His attacks are large and wide reaching. There's more than a few times that his attacks would just fully miss you, but would kill dozens of the captives behind you. It costs you to throw up large enough accretion disks to save them.
You're fighting with your subconscious, things are happening too fast for you to recognize and think about what you're doing. Your right hand is starting to bleed from the death grip on your astrolabe.
Some of the higher level functioning in your mind perceives some of the combat around you. Kasyn is jumping around attacking with claws and wild abandon. Baht is doing is his best to be the best preforming Agent he can be.
Mitchel's Bridge Channeling is leaking, he is Burning, but that is something that gives you a little bit of confidence, because while Burning can be seen as someone operating with an extreme level of power, it also means that they don't have total control over their powers, they are leaking power and bleeding energy.
Baht and Kasyn are taking the fight to the indoctrinated around you. The indoctrinated fight almost like a swarm.
You dive out of the way of beam of pure Bridge energy shot right at you from Mitchel. You land on the ground hard, trying to roll away, but it was less graceful than you would have liked. Still you have a half second opening. You'll have to make it work, do something to expand the gap.
With as much power as you can you summon open a Bridge singularity behind Mitchel.
The temporary black hole draws in everything around it. Several of the still alive indoctrinated lose their balance as they are suddenly pulled towards it. Even Mitchel stumbles as he wasn't expecting you to pull him from behind.
That stumble gives you the brief moment you need. You stand and keep moving. Because if you remain still you die.
You quickly pull up your holo and throw together an absolutely disgusting hack, but it will work. Hopefully.
You throw the hack at Mitchel a split second before he attacks you again.
You can't block his access to the Bridge, but you can overload and overwhelm the Usmarus tech in his body.
If it is truly pieces of Usmarus then you couldn't ever hope to hack the pieces of a Machine God, even a dead one. But if it was some kind of amalgamation, some necromancy designed to try and bring a dead thing back to life, then you can exploit that.
You get lucky.
And isn't it really hard to admit that you have been lucky, ever?
The machine pieces spark and flash and Mitchel twitches awkwardly as the dead machines return to being dead once again.
You've widened the gap even further.
You have to exploit it.
You manage to suck in one deep breath, and with that fresh air in your lungs you feel a sudden, deep, maddening anger.
This is the man who did all of this to you. And you can see pieces of the dead gods you were forced into subjugation for, emerging out of his skin.
You reach out once more with your bloody hand and astrolabe.
You don't do any of the standard, or even typical Bridge techniques. You could try to tie Mitchel to a piece of the Bridge and teleport him into the vacuum just outside the core. You could tie the Bridge to a piece of the local star and burn him with the intense nuclear fusion of a living star.
But no, that wouldn't be painful enough.
Instead you rip open an entrance into the Bridge Itself. You pull the Bridge here. Right next to Mitchel.
The Bridge is pure energy, the thing that you can tap into to move things at incredible speed across great distances. That if you pierce you can find the... something.
Or if you push a piece of living material into it, you can rip it into pieces, atom by atom.
Mitchel staggers as the Bridge grips him and pulls him close.
The power drain is immense and all consuming. You feel like it is sucking away at your very soul. You feel the Bridge trying to rip you apart too.
But you have to hold it for as long as you possibly can.
You have to push Mitchel through it. Shove him into the energy cascade of the Bridge. You have to make him suffer.
You have to keep it open.
But you watch as Mitchel does the unthinkable, he starts to pull the mangled, eviscerated remains of his bloody machined arm out of the Bridge to continue to advance on you.
The Usmarus really did have total control over the Bridge. How foolish of you to believe that you could use the techniques that they pioneered, that they mastered, that you foolish thing of flesh and blood thought you could disgrace with your fumbling with something you don't even understand.
You will Submit or you will die.
It's too much.
You cut the Bridge off, and in doing so, you trapped half of Mitchel in there.
With the singularity and the Bridge, you basically cut off the right half of Mitchel's torso.
The room suddenly doesn't feel as loud or dark as Mitchel collapses to the ground covered in sand and blood.
You drop to your knees. You suck in lung-fulls of the dusty, dry, and stale air.
It felt like you sprinted the entire length of Marathon.
The Usmarus infected body of Mitchel collapses in front of you.
Kasyn and Baht better be good enough to handle whatever it coming because you certainly can't.
You've won.
You think the fight with Mitchel was over, and that was your first mistake.
The dissected body of Mitchel stands over you. Blood and sand are everywhere. But the Usmarus pieces within him are undeterred by your attacks or the Bridge.
How foolish you are to think that your tech could have possibly stopped a GOD. Stopped me.
Did Mitchel say that to you? Did he say that out loud? Or did you just think it?
These thought fills you with dread.
With the one hand that remains held high, you see your death being brought down upon you.
Until something, someone, intervenes.
It's not Baht nor is it Kasyn.
It's someone else.
They only manage to get a tech-shield up in the fractions of a second before Mitchel's Usmarus enhanced blow lands on their head.
The armor explodes in a brilliant flash.
You're blinded but you can still perceive the Usmarus in Mitchel. The light behind your eyes tells you exactly where he is. And with the last little bits of strength you summon from somewhere else you hold up your astrolabe one last time and do the simplest Bridge technique.
You push Mitchel as far away from you as you possibly can.
You hear him impact against the far wall at the speed of sound.
Somehow you find the strength to stand up and walk to the person that took the blow for you.
Looking down, you feel confused. And at least part of that is the tsunami of exhaustion that is threatening to bear down on you from overexerting yourself. But all that you see at your feet is a tmesyan child.
There was something here that just didn't make sense to you, but your vision was narrowing further and further and you couldn't focus on what was so strange about this.
You pass out.
You wake up, hopefully only minutes later.
But whatever is happening the tmesyan is yelling at and squaring off against Baht.
Kasyn seems to have taken a neutral stance.
You manage to pull yourself up off the floor so that you can try to walk over to the source of the conflict.
"I don't give a fuck about your convictions," Baht says tersely. "These people are witnesses and the Eidolon has questions."
"These people require safety and medical assistance and I won't let you take them anywhere!" the tmesyan that saved you yells defiantly before the battle-hardened nastanrelian.
"What the fuck are you yelling about?" you ask, unfortunately sounding exactly like a grumpy teenager just woken up from their nap.
The group whips around to look right at you.
"I'm informing this child, that we're taking everyone in for questioning. They know something. And we need to figure it out. Since you snapped the best lead we had in half," Baht says accusingly at basically everyone.
The tmesyan huffs. "You're taking these people from one prison to another! That's not fair! I won't let it!"
The constant buzzing in your head from the Bridge Tech all around this core is giving you a headache. Or enhancing the headache you've already had.
"Baht, stop being such a pain in the ass. You think these people know anything? At all? They didn't even tell the people in their little organization shit. And also that's no way to get information," you mutter.
You turn away from the trio and move to the prison cells. Half of them have been pretty badly beaten up in the fighting. At least one of the cells has a space big enough for the relatively slight tmesyan to sneak out of.
"I'm not a child," you hear get spit back at Baht, but you don't have the brain power to focus on that at the moment.
You start opening the cells.
"Sorry about that everyone. We're not taking you anywhere to interrogate you. I promise. We came here to stop them, and stop others like them. You're free to go, but if you want to help us stop the rest of their group, go tell that nastanrelian over there any thing you know that might be helpful. Anything you know will be helpful."
You notice that the tmesyan is next to you, helping you undo the locks keeping these people in prison.
In moments, Baht has a massive line of people waiting to tell him information.
You catch his eye and smile at him. It's a derisive smile. Telling him without using words that you were right.
Once everyone is freed you sit down heavily.
Your bones feel tired. You can feel the electricity of your neurons firing all over your body. All of it hurts.
The tmesyan sits down next to you.
"Thank you," they say. "For saving us. For saving me."
You nod.
The individual sitting next to you isn't actually a child. But they are clearly young. Even if there are still some scars and battle-wounds from the War that cling to them.
They are small and slight, their wings... branches that come from their back were also thin and looking like they had been pruned harshly. There were multiple leaves missing. And they seemed to be already looking like they were turning towards the yellow and gold of middle age instead of the bright and vibrant green of youth.
Without even asking you can see the experience that the War had on this person sitting next to you. They did not have a good time at it. But they are still alive.
"No, thank you. You were fractions of a second away from dying for me," you say quietly. It takes effort to use your voice. Huh. Were you screaming during the battle?
The tmesyan shrugs. "But I didn't."
"You didn't."
"I'm Aleis," they say, holding out their hand with such quick nonchalance that you realize they spent a lot of time with humans.
"Cass," you respond as you shake their hand.
"Oh, your hand is bleeding," they say. You'd forgotten how hard you were gripping the astrolabe during your fight. "Here, I've got something for this."
They take your hand, with a surprising amount of both speed and care, wrap your hand in a bandage.
"Thank you," you manage to mumble.
"Of course," the tmesyan says with a soft smile. "I'm here to help." There's a significant pause in your... conversation, is that what this is? "Is that what you're doing here? Helping?"
"Trying to," you respond.
"Well I'm glad you are trying. Who knows what would have happened if you weren't here," Aleis says.
"They would have shipped you off somewhere and tried to make more Usmarus or something equally horrifying."
There's a silence that comes after your words. You feel like a fool for even saying them.
At some point, you're not entirely sure when, you must have fallen asleep, because after you open your eyes again there's a dozen or so Eidolon agents milling about.
You stand up, a task that requires way too much from you.
"We're done here," Baht says. "Or close enough."
"Where are we going?" asks a voice. You expected it to be Kasyn but it's not. It's Aleis.
"We are going to somewhere you're not," Baht says with more than a touch of anger in his voice.
"I'm coming with. You're here to stop indoctrinated. I'm going to help you. It is what I was doing before I got captured."
"Oh great, that's just the best application I've ever seen. I'm doing the same shit as you but worse at it," Baht snaps.
"I didn't have a team or back up or anything and I found this place before you did!"
You're still exhausted and this bickering is hurting your headache something fierce. "They come with," you say. "I'm running point. I get to decide."
Aleis beams up at you with a smile that is like sunshine.
"I hate you," Baht grumbles.
You pull him aside. "They're right. They found this place before we did. They saved my life. Relax."
"You want someone not affiliated with the Eidolon. Someone seemingly without an agenda."
You stiffen a little. He saw right through you. "They're not indoctrinated either. They might see stuff that we're going to miss since we're too close to everything. We're embedded. They're not."
"Fine. But they get the same deal as the two of you," Baht mutters as he stomps off.
You take a deep breath and nod at Aleis who smiles brightly and claps their hands together in joy.
Before you leave you take a look at Mitchel's corpse.
A few Eidolon techs are looking over it, measuring, taking pictures, all sorts of things.
You stare into his dead eyes for a moment. You study the Usmarus tech running all through his body. You stare at the hole you ripped into his side.
Suddenly it feels so hard to hate the dead.
Well, hard might be the wrong word. It's easy to still hate him for everything that he did to you, but right now it feels like you don't have the energy to waste on the dead man and the Dead God.
You finally turn away to follow Baht out to wherever it is you're going next.
Aleis is waiting for you.
"I'm glad you're in charge," they say. "I would have followed you though. Even if you didn't let me in. I'm not very good at being told I can't help."
"I'm starting to get that impression yeah."
"When we get some time, I want to have a longer talk with you, but you look like you're going to fall asleep again, so I can wait."
"Yeah... sure."
"I want to know what we're doing, where we're going, and how come you're indoctrinated but not like them."
You feel your stomach drop out of your chest.
Aleis said it so matter-of-factly. They knew. They always knew. And they still saved you. They still want to work with you.
Part of you wished that they didn't know that about you, that this shameful secret about yourself wasn't so ready and apparent to anyone who looked at you.
But this strange tmesyan with a bright smile and eager bounce in their step sees the worst in you and still wants to work with you.
It's mostly a trope in movies, but you've seen it a few times in real life. Someone, an adept in the Bridge mostly, can Burn or Leak or Bleed with excess Bridge energy.
The few times you've seen it happened was in Basic, when the instructors managed to get under a recruit's skin and terrorize them into getting madder than they've ever been.
There was a study or something that you saw once upon a time, you barely even remember it, but it was a conclusive study that people that Bleed the Bridge can activate their powers at a power magnitude higher than they would have been previously capable of, but their endurance and stamina are lessened by four fifths.
"You didn't kidnap my daughter, you morons, you kidnapped one of my agents. This is an ARISE unit. You kidnapped a magical girl. Agent Mayweather, you have full permission to engage."
You look past your minions to the teenager in the holding cell. You can see it now. The tiredness that you chalked up to the usual teen late nights, early mornings, rebelliousness wasn't just not getting enough sleep. There's a bone-deep weariness, an exhaustion in her face that doesn't come from just staying up to late.
She stands up from the deliberately uneven chair with a weight that doesn't belong to her slim frame. That weight comes from injuries, from damage done and healed but the body still remembers the damage. She favors her right leg a little bit too much, because you remember one of those pesky magical girls got their leg broken a week back.
She cracks her joints and rolls her shoulders in a way that you can only see coming from a professional boxer who should have retired years ago.
"Yeah, I'm going to bust out of here now," she says without much enthusiasm. "But thanks for giving me a couple of hours without having to do anything. That was nice."
You can't help it, your mouth betrays you. "Any time."
You don't feel anger or depression that your plan had gone awry. Instead, as this magic girl lays waste to your operation (again). You feel a deep sadness.
You shouldn't be, but even as everything is going wrong around you, you are plotting another kidnapping. Maybe just so this kid could get a nap in.
For the first time in a very long time, in fact no one could really remember a time when it was, the Axe and Chain was closed.
The paper nailed to the locked door simply stated "Family Matters, Will Be Open Tomorrow".
Ashryn had been avoiding it for a while. She's been avoiding this whole encounter basically her whole life.
She put on some leathers she hadn't worn in a long time and had to adjust because she wasn't nearly in the same shape she was when she was in the Wilds the last time.
Hells.
The Wilds.
Even going back there was a lot.
And now she was going back to see her daughter that she hadn't seen since she was born.
She grabbed the axe that her own daughter had stolen from her and headed out into the Wilds.
Trouble was following her. Because of course she was.
That was part of the reason that Ashryn loved her so much. She was so worried and protective and sweet. Trouble was behind her quite a distance, and didn't even ask if she wanted the company. She just did it. But was far enough behind to give her the proper space.
Those really sweet kids told her about Ashishka and where to find her. It wasn't a hard walk, but it felt like it too days, weeks, and the thirty four years it took for the consequences of her actions to come haunt her again.
Gods. The ramshackle... shack... that Ashishka built out here in the Wilds was... bad. It barely looked like it was standing, much less like it was going to provide anything remotely in the same area as protection from the weather as winter has clearly settled in.
The walk gets harder the closer Ashryn gets to Ashishka. Her daughter is sitting on a stump, playing with a section of rope, tying some complicated looking knots and undoing them in rapid succession.
Ashryn steels herself as best as she can and offers prayers to whatever gods are listening.
Ashishka saw her mother approach. She knew what was coming, but her mind simply couldn't think of anything to possibly prepare.
Finally, after what felt like an agonizingly long time Ashryn got close enough to Ashishka to have a conversation.
Before anything could happen, Ashishka picked up the very worn greatsword at her feet and drew a line in the dirt.
A very clear, "this is how far I can reach with this thing so stay beyond it" message.
Ashryn stood further away than the line could ever hope to reach.
A million questions burst in her head. How? Why? What brought her here? What happened to her?
But her heart was bursting.
"How are you?" Ashryn asks finally. Her throat and lungs conspiring to asphyxiate her rather than speaking.
Ashishka shrugs. She can't think of anything to say.
A silence stretches between them for an extremely long time. The only sounds are the fire that Ashiska had built crackling, providing the only source of warmth within the cold Wilds. "Why did you come up here?"
"I couldn't stay at home. I mean, literally."
"Why not? The dowry should have set you up for a comfortable life. The... arrangement my parents made should have made a nice life for you and... Pholencio."
Ashishka scoffs. A snorting laugh. "The second that you left and it was clear you weren't coming back, your parents cut all contact. I mean I was pretty fucking young, but I can't ever remember meeting them. Your husband," she says with an accusatory point, "was a right piece of shit. He didn't give a fuck about me. And without your parents' blessing and whatever I was just some low born piece of shit with a name not worth the paper it was printed on. The dowry was gone in weeks. Your husband had an intense gambling problem so the money was gone before I could even hold up my own head."
Ashryn was taken aback. "What? No.. That's... that's wrong... that's not what was supposed to happen."
Ashishka finally abandons her ropes. "And what, mother, exactly, was supposed to happen?"
"You... you were supposed to have a nice life. Without my bringing you down. You were going to have a noble life. The name from your father, the wealth from my family. It should have made it all work out for you."
"So either you didn't know what was up, or you chose to ignore it. Pholencio was an idiot and an asshole. He had been eroding his family name for years. There was no goodwill from his side of the family. And without you there to cement the thing, the only thing keeping his name afloat, your family's money, was gone. Although I can't really speak to how he's been doing, because he sold me to cover his debts when I was eight. But we were not rich nor noble."
This revelation hit Ashryn like a ton of bricks.
She had even taken an involuntary step back.
"No... No... Oh gods, I'm so sorry," Ashryn said. She knew, even as she was saying it, that there was nothing she could possibly say to ever make up for what she did.
Ashishka took the apology with a flat, borderline angry, expression.
"I couldn't... I couldn't take you... You were supposed to have a nice life. A measure of... independence... a freedom... that I couldn't have... Never had. If I had stayed... I would have been... it would have killed me."
Her daughter just watched as Ashryn struggled. Her emotions were already on a knife edge, and they were threatening to destroy her now. She sank to the ground. Ashishka did nothing to help or offer any sympathy, empathy, or understanding.
The silence, well not quite silence because Ashryn was trying so hard to not openly sob, stretched on for a very long time.
"You going to invite your wife over, or is she just going to glare at me from like 30 yards away?" Ashishka ask to break the silence.
Ashryn finally got enough breath back to answer, "Trouble? She's not... we're not... She's just trying to keep me safe, but give me space to..."
Ashishka let the sentence slip and didn't try to fill this silence. She wanted Ashryn to either finish the sentence or move on.
Finally, when the silence got too much, Ashryn added quietly, "beg forgiveness."
After another few minutes, Ashryn got herself together, and adjusted her position on the ground. She tried to face the fire, but she couldn't not continue to look at her daughter.
"How did you find me?"
Ashishka shrugged. "Spent a lot of money on a lot of magic-men to cast spells to locate you. You didn't really go a whole lot of places, so I just had to be patient and listen and finally you mentioned the Charnel Wilds so I had a location. Then it was just a series of various ships and sea disasters that I had to fight and claw my way through to get up here."
"How have you lasted this long?"
Ashishka looked offended at the question. She gestured at the greatsword, at her muscled arms. "How do you think?"
"No. Not that. I know that road. I've been down it myself. I mean... how are you fighting against the curse?"
"What curse?"
Ashryn tried to wet her lips. "The thing that keeps the Dead Lands, the Dead Lands. It pulls everything it owns back to it. One way or the other."
"What the fuck are you talking about?"
"The... the curse!" Ashryn says as she throws her hands up in the air. "The migraines that feel like a hook in your eyes. The feeling like all of your muscles are broken and torn. Like everywhere you go is a constant uphill climb, and the only way it feels better is to start walking back towards... home. The sleepwalking that pulls you back to the place that owns you."
Ashishka shrugs. "You sure that's a curse? Sounds like it's just every day life."
Ashryn looks at her daughter with shock and concern. "No. No that's not how life is supposed to feel. The only way I was able to get out of it was by... ugh... selling myself to other stuff. It's why I got married again after leaving the Dead Lands. Flamberge was... nice enough. I liked him. I did. But it was mostly convenience, someone to tie myself to who wasn't going to take me back to the Dead Lands."
"That's... a name."
"Shut up."
"What happened to him?"
"He died out here."
"Sorry," Ashishka said, but it didn't sound very authentic.
"He was a good guy."
"So if you claim you and I are 'cursed' and all this crap, how are you not suffering all your ill-effects?"
"I gave myself to my inn, to the people that come inside. There's a whole series of rituals I do every couple of months."
"When you can just marry your girlfriend over there instead?"
"It's complicated."
Ashishka nods. "Uh huh. Sure it is."
"You must have done something similar. Otherwise you would have been pulled back to the Dead Lands by now."
"Look, I don't believe in this curse of yours. I'm not owned by anyone. Anyone. I was abandoned by my mother, sold by my father. Every ship I served on and loved a little has been sunk and brought to the bottom of the ocean. Any friends I have are dead or want me dead. I have no ties to anything or anyone."
Ashryn dropped her gaze once again. "I'm sorry. I'll never not be sorry. But I hope you can at least understand why I left, why I thought you would have a good life. All I was was the youngest child. The spare. The leftover. When my older brothers died, I was suddenly the last one left. They went from having no hopes or thoughts about me, to pining the entire family success on my head. But because they hadn't bothered to prepare me, I was no longer allowed to have any of my own choices. I couldn't do anything for myself because I might die and ruin the family or embarrass them. So when I was forced to marry Pholencio, I thought that might be an escape for me. But it was just another jail cell. When I was pregnant with you, none of the focus was on me, the spotlight was all on you, even though you weren't even born yet! Everyone talked about the scion of these two great families! The perfect heir! They had plans to get you the best of everything! Clothing, education, food, whatever you could possibly want! That sounded so nice! So much better than my life. I was nothing but a broodmare locked away in a tower. I didn't even get to meet you. You were taken from me the moment I finished giving birth. The only thing I was allowed was to give you a name. Ashishka, meaning, roughly, Life for the Determined. I didn't leave, not right away. But I never got to see you for two months. You were given to wet nurses and maids and everyone else. I was forgotten about. So I saw my chance to leave. I had to take it or I would have died there. I'm sorry. I was never going to be a good mother."
Ashishka didn't interrupt, nor say anything after. What could she say? That sucked? But she didn't know that Ashryn stayed for as long as she did.
"Sorry," Ashishka said after several long minutes of silence. "That's... yeah..."
"Yeah..."
"Now what?" Ashishka asked. "I honestly didn't expect to get this far without trying to kill you or walking away."
"And I never expected to actually meet you."
The silence grew again as the mother and daughter struggled to communicate.
"I know you won't want to," Ashryn said before trailing off. Eventually she took a deep breath, steeled herself, and said, "You shouldn't stay out here. The Wilds are extremely dangerous, and your house isn't going to keep you safe from the weather. Stay in the Inn with me until you find an actual place to stay. And we can do the rituals to keep you from being sucked back to the Dead Lands."
Ashishka studied her mother for a long moment without speaking. "You want me to stay?" her voice was quiet and almost broken under the weight of what was being asked.
Ashryn nodded firmly. "I don't want you to be lost to me again, unless you want to go. If you want to stay I'll break the earth and sky to help you stay."
Once again her daughter didn't say anything but just looked very carefully over her. Studying her, almost like an ambush predator studying its prey.
Ashryn, growing a little uncomfortable and unsure of what else to say, finally stood up. "The invitation will always be open for you. Any day and any time."
"I'll think about it," Ashishka said quietly. "I promise."
Ashryn nodded. "Just don't freeze to death please. And be careful out here. Not too long ago we had a Frost Giant come into town. Made it all the way through the guards and into the middle of town."
"What? A giant?" Ashishka said, stunned and kind of excited.
"Yeah, and the sweet kids that are out here adventuring have run into all sorts of things. Half-dragons and goblins and things. So be safe. Watch yourself out here. Now that I know you're here I'm going to worry."
Ashryn turned to leave and as she walked, albeit slower than she would normally, her daughter called out to her. "Did you think about me? While you were out here? Living your life."
She studied her child, now grown, a complete and strange person that she'd never thought she'd ever meet. All of her thoughts and dreams for how her daughter would turn out were pale imitations, shadows cast on a wall based on nothing more than dim, distant hopes. They couldn't content with the real thing.
"Not really," she lied.
Ashishka nodded. Like that was the right answer.
Ashryn just wasn't sure who she was lying to.
[-]
About a week after Ashryn and Ashishka had their first conversation, Ashishka came into the Axe and Chain, carrying all of their stuff.
"Ok, so maybe I half-believe you about the curse thing. And it's getting cold out there," Ashishka said, "You got a room?"
Ashryn nodded, trying not to smile.
"But if all I gotta do is marry someone or something to prevent these headaches, then I do have an idea," Ashishka said.
Ashryn suddenly got an extremely bad feeling.
"Hey, Trouble!" Ashishka called out. "You're not seeing anyone, right? You're pretty hot and I'm young and full of stamina, what do you say we get hitched and circumvent this whole curse thing?"
Trouble's face went red and grew very hot.
Ashryn shrieked. "WHAT?! No! You! You can't do that!"
Ashishka with a wide grin at the chaos she had caused winked at Trouble and started heading up the stairs to find an empty room.
"Honestly, your credentials and work history are at best, sub-par," says the sentient ball of fire, wings, eyes, and wheels. "Retail and service industries have some transferable skills."
"So why me?" you ask.
"It was the last section where we asked what you could do to make Hell work better or more efficiently. We, and I think I can speak for the entire Heavenly Host here, that we were horrified. What you said you would do to Elon Musk was a level of depravity and ironic punishment that we never could have imagined. You were... are... the most well suited to the position it seems."
Silence was one of your favorite interrogation tools. You just sit in silence and others would speak just to fill the silence, to make it retreat.
They would fill the silence with words, with themselves.
And you would use it to destroy them.
So you stand next to a man that stabbed you less than an hour ago.
You stand. And you wait.
And you wait.
And you wait.
Baht is more resilient to silence than most.
But even he has a breaking point.
Kasyn is taking a long time.
He tries to wait you out. But your silence is fueled by your spite.
"I was a good agent," Baht grumbles under his breath.
You fight a smile. "Of course you are," you say back. "That's why I'm here."
You see Baht's hands clench, threatening to crack the stone railing of this patio.
You smile and turn your attention fully down to the station stretching out before you.
Baht grumbles to himself and you know you got under his skin.
Station Zed is hot. It smells of sweat and oil and desperation and people questing for oblivion.
This is the Last City.
Everything else was ruined. Broken in the war.
But Zed endured.
It is the Last City. The war didn't come here. Or least it doesn't feel like it did. The scars are easy to hide here. Hide beneath the drugs, the booze, the sex, the sleaze, music, dancing, someone other than yourself, anything you want you can find here.
Except for peace.
Finally, Kasyn emerges from her own conversation with the Eidolon.
"He wants to speak to us. All of us," Kasyn says ominously.
You reenter the room, and nothing about it has changed. For some reason you expected it to.
The holographic projection of the person who uses the name and face of the so called Eidolon is still here.
"Cass is going to be running point," they say.
For the first time, you and Baht are in agreement.
"What?" Although his is more of a declarative statement, a shout, your's is a question.
"Why me?"
Why you indeed? Why... you.
"I don't want it," Kasyn says.
"You are... unique," the Eidolon says. "You are resistant to the... call of the other indoctrinated. That gives you a certain insight that has foiled my other agents so far."
Baht grumbles to himself.
"So that is why Cass is running point. You find the indoctrinated and you find out what is going on."
There is a silence that follows.
You can't tell if it is an intentional, meaningful silence, or something else.
The Eidolon's image falters, flickers, and disappears.
When it reappears a second later the Eidolon continues like there was no interruption.
"Baht, you are running ops. I want constant updates. You keep these two on task. If they stray at all, kill them. We'll start over. But if you waste useful assets I'll bury you so deep you'll never see starlight again."
You remember that insult was one of the worst epithets you could muster for a nastanrelian. It was a serious threat.
And from the look on Baht's face, it was one they were likely to keep.
"Kasyn. You will do everything in your power to help. If you don't even your memory will be destroyed."
This Eidolon has a lot of knowledge in terrible ways to wish terrible fates upon people that feel very specific to each person.
The hologram doesn't have physical form, but you feel the Eidolon's attention turn to you.
"Cass," they start.
And then there is a long, agonizing silence.
You break.
"What?"
The Eidolon lets you hang in silence for a few more moments.
"I will leave you abandoned on a dead planet. Baht take over the rest of the brief. You have the details."
The feed suddenly, and with no fanfare, shuts down.
"That happen a lot?" Kasyn asks as Baht takes a space in front of the two of you.
"Doesn't matter," he snaps.
Kasyn offers just a shrug to drop the statement, but still trying to acknowledge that it was weird.
"What are we up against?" you ask.
"Over the last ten months we've been noticed that indoctrinated are just going missing," Baht says.
You say nothing. You can't. You never mentioned the dreams of the desert. But those started up about ten months ago.
You lie to yourself that it is a coincidence.
"This isn't missing like suicides or vigilantes killing off who they see as traitors?" you ask.
"No. There'd be bodies. Or vigilantes would be stringing them up," Baht said. "And you would expect to see a rise in suicides, especially with the Chtúr Trials coming up."
"Trials?" you ask, worried.
"Yeah," Baht says, trying to hurry through the explanation to get to more important matters, "they started treason trials for some of the indoctrinated and arrests should be going up, suicides should be going up, but there's not that much of a jump in the numbers."
"The governments could just be disappearing people," Kasyn offers. "I wouldn't be surprised."
Baht shakes his head. "No. Not with this much attention on the subject. They wouldn't want to risk all that negative attention when everyone is going to be focused on these trials as a way to string you lot up for what you did."
Petty barbs trying to get you back for needling him with your comments or lack thereof earlier.
"But -" Kasyn started before getting cut off by Baht.
"No. There'd be evidence. We'd see some bodies. The indoctrinated are all fleeing, disappearing in large numbers that defy any other explanation other than they are gathering for something. And don't forget that the only reason you two are here is because you ignored whatever call you got. That's proof. We're moving on."
"Yeah but we are ignoring one big thing," you say.
"And what is that?" Baht asks.
"What does the Eidolon get out of all of this? Why do they even give a shit?"
Baht shrugs. "Hard to say, but he's probably testing this out as some kind of indoctrination hunting squad. And then he plans to sell you and your services to anyone who wants to ease their paranoia about the insidious poison of the Usmarus seeping into their operations. Probably most governments would trip over themselves to buy this service."
You frown. That sounds about right for what you know about the Eidolon. But you can't help but think that this doesn't feel quite right. There's something else here.
"Oh. How fun," Kasyn grumbles.
"So. Baht. What about you? What are you in all of this?" you ask.
"I'm the guy who decides if and when you stop being useful and stick a bullet in your skull to end your sad existences."
"Oh. How fun," Kasyn repeats with even less enthusiasm than she had before.
"Where do we start?" you ask, feeling that this whole thing has exhausted itself out.
Baht shrugs. "You're the point, you tell me."
Kasyn turns to look at you, waiting for you to tell her where to go.
Fuck. You never really wanted to be in charge of anything. And yet. Here you are.
Against all of your better judgment.
"We should start where we came in," you say, trying to sound confident.
"We've been over the area with an ichö," Baht says. "There's nothing there."
You blink and rub your ear. What a hell of a time for your translation software to glitch out. You push a few buttons on your holographic heads up display to get the thing working again. And then, belatedly, it tells you that an ichö is some kind of beach combing device. Since nastanrelians don't have hair and therefore no need to ever invent a comb, the translation software shat the bed while trying to come up with the common human phrase of 'a fine-toothed comb'.
"Yeah, but, I mean, that's why we're here. To go over what you missed," you say.
Your rhythm had been totally thrown off and you don't like how that makes you feel. Like your suddenly a half-step out of tune.
Baht stares at you with dispassion in all four of his eyes. "Fine. Let's go."
You leave the apartment, passing a pair of Eidolon employees guarding the door on your way out.
You exit the building and into the heat and teeming masses of Station Zed.
For second you consider running. You see the swell of people, all sorts of humans, aliens, strange sentience all mingling in the crowded streets.
Then Baht catches your eye and he laughs.
"By all means," he says.
He taps a button on his own holographic computer. You feel a sudden warmth in your hand.
"We attached a bomb to your computer, you stray too far, or piss me off and I can detonate it."
Not a totally full proof solution. If you kill him quick and sever his arm to take with you, you likely wouldn't explode for a while.
"Explains why my translation software has been glitching," you say. "You need to get better at this."
Baht just looks at you. Waiting.
"Look you dragged us here while we were unconscious. I might be able to guess at where the landing pad is, but I don't know," you tell him. "You lead, dumbass."
Baht sneers at you before turning and walking briskly away.
"Wow," Kasyn whispers mostly to herself, but you overhear it.
Baht pushes through the crowds. It's kind of like fighting an ocean. You have to watch the currents and mind the tides.
After more than an hour of walking you finally make into the area where the landing pad is. You couldn't have walked that far on your own; the trip was a nightmare trying to get through the sheer crushing weight of sentient peoples moving listlessly through Zed and their lives.
But finally you push into the very well guarded gate.
The ship you came in on is still here, but there are people going in and out of it. It seems like they are doing something. Retrofitting it or putting stuff into it. Maybe taking stuff out of it.
You look around. The dead bodies are still here, but they are being closely guarded by other Eidolon agents.
Your Counter Espionage training was largely focused on getting information out of people, extracting knowledge from people that didn't want to give it up. You have a much harder time when the only things you can interrogate are corpses.
Just to be thorough, and not at all because you are stalling for time to try and figure out how in the depths of the Beyond are you supposed to find the indoctrinated you've been running from, you spend over an hour just looking at things. There really is a frightening lack of evidence. No trails to follow. No smoking gun or even red herrings.
You sigh. You've run out of things to investigate, or pretend to.
"Fuck."
You close your eyes. You can picture Baht's smug face before he shoots you for being useless.
In the darkness behind your eyes, you can feel Kasyn around towards the back of the ship looking through something. You can't tell exactly what she's doing, but you can feel exactly how far away she is.
It's like she's a candle, burning in the darkness you see when you close your eyes.
"Hey, Kasyn," you call out.
"What?"
"Go hide somewhere."
"What are you talking about?"
"I want to see if I can find you, you're the only indoctrinated around," you explain, briefly and badly. "Make it hard."
Kasyn rolls her eyes, but stomps away.
You turn away from everything, instead looking out to the masses beyond the makeshift barrier someone built to guard their landing space.
You wait for a couple of minutes before you turn around and close your eyes.
Sure enough, Kasyn burns like distant starlight.
It takes you exactly as long as it takes to walk directly to her location to find her. She had climbed up and hidden on top of the ship.
"You cheated!" she exclaims when you find her immediately.
"You didn't even try," you respond. "I told you to make it hard."
Kasyn scowls at you. "Fine. You want hard. Give me exactly one minute. Stand here. Don't look."
You do as you are told and count to 80.
You jump down off the ship and, closing your eyes every few steps, follow Kasyn's starlight to exactly where she was hiding: clinging to the ceiling inside one of the small rooms just inside the landing pad.
"How did you do that?" she asks. "No one ever looks up!"
"I can... see you. With my eyes closed. You project a light. Like starlight. And I can just follow you," you explain. "I'm sure if you closed your eyes you can see a spark of light that's where I'm standing."
"Oh yeah. I can see you," she says. "But you're not starlight. You're..."
"What?" you ask suddenly worried.
"Ok, enough fucking around. What do you have?" Baht asks, interrupting this very important discussion.
You knew it. There is something wrong with you. Fundamentally. Even more wrong than the indoctrination.
"I think I know how to find the indoctrinated," you say slowly. "We just need to get close to them. Be in the general area."
"Good," Baht says. You get a little ping from your translation software. The tone of Baht's words in his own language convey a clear and unmistakable meaning. He doesn't believe you. "Where are we going?"
The nastanrelians were a fucking intense people. They had these immutable laws, that were things that were to be followed absolutely. No questions, no grey area. The rules were their society. And that's all they had.
Turns out that when it comes to make a society extremely susceptible to indoctrination, the 36 Tenets make for an ideal way to do it.
Tenet 17: The Religion set by the Dominion is absolute, perfect, and to be worshiped without question or doubt.
Baht's eyes narrow. "I'm not taking you to a nightclub to dance and drink our leads away."
"You want me to find indoctrinated? Then we should go to the most densely populated place. The more people, the easier for me to clock one."
Baht grumbles at that. "Fine. But you're buying your own booze."
"Cheap-ass," Kasyn mumbles behind you.
You set off into the densest part of Station Zed.
The real reason the station is as overpopulated as it is: hedonism.
The rest of the galaxy suffered, died, was reborn, and is currently trying to splint its broken bones and stop the bleeding.
Not Station Zed.
They say that the bars never closed. The music never stopped on Station Zed. You weren't conscious enough to refute those claims. But it feels true enough.
There's little to no law here. Other than the Will of the King of Zed.
And so far it seems like that Will is mostly just quality assurances on the cheap alcohol they peddle. Because people going blind from drinking denatured alcohol isn't good for business.
Not that there's much in the way of money or bartering going on here. People don't have much on Zed.
You don't have the understanding nor the willpower to try and understand the economics of Zed, so you follow Baht as you forcibly push your way through the crowds.
You walk through all of the towers, with the thousands if not millions of people in them. There's just so many people here. It's an overwhelming amount of people.
You do spot a section of thinned out crowds and quiet reverence. But it is around a statue. It is large and clearly very old considering how worn and smooth it has become over the ages. Recently, it seems to have been the victim of some rather severe vandalism.
Someone has painted over it, changing the dull brown stone to black and red. The LS9 was a dead giveaway. Someone has altered this statue to be something for The Pilot.
They are already turning them into a god. A deity. Someone to pray to for protection.
Fat load of good they did you.
Baht leads you to the biggest, most infamous part of Station Zed.
SyÇ’n. It's tmesyan for whatever their specific equivalent of "hell" is.
You can't help but roll your eyes at the subtext turning rapidly into text.
You descend into hell.
This hell is much more fun than any of the human depictions of it.
It's dark, loud, full of bodies.
At least the music is good and loud enough to drown out the voices in your head.
Well, almost loud enough.
You can feel the vibrations of the bass in the soft tissue of your body, what hasn't been replaced or changed against your will that is.
Baht gestures to you that you should move. It's too loud to talk here.
He wants you to go do your looking.
Kasyn wanders off not too far away. She doesn't know what she's doing here.
Neither do you.
Do you?
You just wander through the people and the noise. Doing what everyone around you is doing. Looking for something.
After several minutes you start to actually do what you are here for.
You start trying to find the indoctrinated.
You don't see any. You can't feel any.
It's too crowded and too noisy.
Your attention is captured by a tmesyan lounging in a dark corner.
They're not indoctrinated, so you try to turn away and look for the people you should be searching for.
But you find your attention drawn back to them again and again.
And again.
And...
Where did they go?
You feel a presence right behind you.
"I got you a drink," the tmesyan shouts.
They don't have the traditional leaf-wings that everyone else in their species does. But the pale green skin color is a dead giveaway.
"I saw you from across the club and I couldn't help but think that you need a drink."
They aren't that much taller than you, but you can't help but feel like they loom over you.
Their voice feels like molasses, thick and dark and practically dripping over you.
"It's not poison," they say. "I promise."
You feel like they are just whispering it to you now, no longer shouting. You don't even notice the music anymore. It's totally gone.
You cautiously take the drink from them. Its clear and smells like alcohol.
"Who are you?" you ask.
They shrug. "I was going to ask the same of you."
"I'm..."
Who are you? How do you answer that question? What is the right answer to that question?
"You don't need to give me a name," they say as they get even closer to you.
You notice that they are moving their hips slowly, almost at half speed according to the vibrations that you can still feel even if you don't notice the sounds anymore. Your attention is focused totally on the one before you right now. You find yourself moving with them as they get closer.
"We're similar, aren't we?" they ask.
Their words leave marks on your skin. Like embers from a fire. A fire so dark that you can't see it.
They must be indoctrinated. But they can't be. You don't feel them like you have the others.
But that's not true is it? You feel them more than the others.
"Oh, yes. Yes, we are. You burn like I do," they say. Their gaze is fixed on you. Their eyes burn into you like lasers.
You down the drink in one go. You need something else to focus on that isn't this dark matter of a creature. The alcohol burns a hole through your stomach and throat. The feeling grounds you for a moment, but only a moment. The tmesyan before you pulls you back in by doing nothing more than looking at you.
This person is striking. They seem like they belong in the darkness and the terrible lighting of the club. The entire club, the entire station seems perfectly made for them.
You feel like you belong right there with them, like you belong in their gravity.
The rhythm you find yourself in, dancing together, feels so natural.
"What's a person like you doing in a place like this?" they ask.
"I'm looking for..."
"Everyone is looking for something," they whisper. You feel drunk on the proximity of them.
"For others."
They lean back a little and smile like a corona.
"Oh, I see. Feeling a little lost my sweet lamb?"
You see them as a hunter, a wolf, stalking you, and what you wouldn't give in this moment give to be in their teeth.
"I was hoping that you'd be more interesting than the others I've come across. So susceptible to the call. I was hoping you'd be different." There's disappointment in their voice, in their face.
The disappointment you see in them makes your stomach drop, like you've just been flung out into space, escaping their gravity.
"I am different," you say. "I am!" You're defiant now. You feel like you need to prove it. Your hands grip their hips hard, almost possessive in a way.
They smile, all teeth and sharp intentions.
"Then I hope you prove it to me," they say as they lean in closer once again.
You think they are going in for a kiss, a seal, a promise of something more. But they don't. They place one hand on the side of your face, their thumb runs along your lips, before they grip you hard and turn your head. Then the lean down and lick your neck before they sink their teeth into your flesh.
The bite stings a little bit, but not enough to really hurt.
But enough to leave a mark, to brand you with teeth. To make you their's.
"Go to the bar, tell the r̂eishi bartender that you're looking for D'ilm," they whisper into the bite mark on your neck. "If you manage to pull yourself out of their call then maybe we can have our own fun."
"What-"
"CASS!" Baht shouts at you.
You start to pull away from this enthralling person, but reluctantly, like a moon leaving the orbit of their planet.
"The name's Syul," they whisper.
"CASS!"
"What?" you turn to snap at Baht, but when you turn back around Syul is gone.
"What the fuck were you doing? We're working or should I just blow you up right here and now?" he yells.
"I was working! I got us a fucking lead you piece of shit!" you snap.
You can't see or feel the presence that just left you. You try to sense them again. You close your eyes and try to find that presence again, but it is gone. Like it was never there.
But you don't know where they are, and the spell is broken. Part of you feels infinitely sad because you know that you'll never be able to recapture that feeling. That inclusion, that purposefulness. So instead you throw yourself headlong into the one thing that you can do, that you alone seem capable of doing: the job.
"I don't give a shit what you were doing I'm-" Baht starts, but you ignore him.
You shove passed him and head to the bar. You force your way through the crowd, inviting a lot of glares, curses, and a couple of attempts at attacks, but you intercept the blows before they could land.
The bartender nods at you but is serving other people.
You reach across the bar, which means one of the bouncers pulls a shotgun to level at you.
"I'm looking for my ride out of here," you snap. "D'ilm said he could get me the fuck out of here."
The r̂eishi bartender waves off the bouncer. Through the mask and voice filter. "D'ilm is offering his cab service out back, by the incinerators.
"Thanks," you say as you stalk away from the bar.
Baht stands, waiting for you with arms crossed.
"What are you waiting for?" you ask him. "Let's go."
"You-"
"Kiss my ass from the front," you cut him off.
You storm out of the bar, and go around the building looking for the incinerator.
When you spot it, you stop.
You pull out your pistol and remove the firing pin before you throw the whole thing in the trash.
"It was a piece of shit," you offer as way of an explanation.
It was. And also going in fully kitted out was likely to attract more attention and more questions.
"I'm not tossing my gun," Baht says firmly, but uselessly.
"Did I fucking ask?"
"What's your problem?"
"The six foot tall nastanrelian that crawled up my ass and is trying to turn me into a fucking muppet."
"I don't even know what you just said," Kasyn says quietly.
"Look, both of you, don't fucking say shit. Just play along, ok?" you order. "We need this guy to take us to wherever they're all going. So if we kill him, we got nothing. None of you have social skills, so do me a favor, and shut the fuck up."
"It's not like you have any social skills either."
"That I haven't used on you, Baht, because you're not worth the goddamn energy. Now follow me, and play along."
You round the corner and approach the other nastanrelian, waiting by a parked shuttle. They look very serious and are extremely well armed.
"Oh my gods," you say with a lighter affect to your words. You speak faster, higher pitched, doing everything you can to act dumber than you are.
The nastanrelian, D'ilm, tenses. "Who are you?"
"Oh wow, you are impressive," you say as you close the distance. "I'm Cass. This is my friend Kasyn, and my partner Baht." You put heavy emphasis on partner. You can feel Baht seethe behind you, which in and of itself was worth it. If this D'ilm is indoctrinated, you need a reason for why you have a non-indoctrinated with you. "They do their best to keep me safe. We've been looking all over for you. We were on a ship that brought us here and we were told that you were going to take us home. And we were attacked by some assholes. We escaped, but barely. And like, we spent some time hiding out, but we don't know where we're going and it took us so long to find you. So what do you say? Can you take us where you need to go?"
D'ilm pointed to Baht. "He's not with us."
You wrap your arm around him. "Yeah, but, like, he knows what's up. He knows we're, you know, indoctrinated. And like. It's not his fault that shit went sideways for so long. He was like stuck on a backwater planet with no way off for like six years! But Baht totally wants to know what's up with everything. I mean the whole 36 tenets are all about the Usmarus right? And my baby here really needs to get realigned with tenet 18 and 27! What do you say? Help us out?"
The nastanrelian, looks hard at each of you. You can tell he is checking that you are indoctrinated. You try to stand with your eyes open as wide as you can without seeming insane to show off how your eyes have changed. He's probably looking at you and seeing that dim light that you see within him.
"Yeah... ok..." He shakes his head. "Yeah. I get it. Makes sense. We're heading down in a little bit. Sorry for not believing you right away. But he's not... you know. And you... you're different."
You fight to keep your vapid smile in place. You fight against the instinct to ask. "Oh don't worry about it!"
"We head down to the core in a few minutes, just waiting to see if anyone else joins us."
"We're going to the Wards," you say. "We need a large concentration of people, and all the apartment complexes and places for people to live and shop or whatever, is a prime place for me to comb for indoctrinated."
Baht narrowed all four eyes right at you. "Fine. But don't go too far."
"Or you'll blow off my other arm! I got it," you say. "Let's go."
Baht escorts you and Kasyn out of the landing pad and into the tons of people walking the streets of Station Zed.
You head into the densest, most swarming mass of people to head to the area where the most habitable spaces are set up.
With all of the towers around you, with the thousands if not millions of people around you, you try to find a semi-quiet place to sit and catch yourself. There's just so many people here. It's an overwhelming amount of people.
You do spot a section of thinned out crowds and quiet reverence. But it is around a statue. It is large and clearly very old considering how worn and smooth it has become over the ages. Recently, it seems to have been the victim of some rather severe vandalism.
Someone has painted over it, changing the dull brown stone to black and red. The LS9 was a dead giveaway. Someone has altered this statue to be something for The Pilot.
They are already turning them into a god. A deity. Someone to pray to for protection.
Fat load of good they did you.
You try to close your eyes, to concentrate, but there's just too much here. Too loud, too many people.
Your attention is instead pulled away, pulled to something else.
The missing posters. You've seen thousands in your time bouncing around the galaxy, trying to lose yourself.
But there is a huge number of new ones up. Someone is even figuring out how to print out paper ones to slap on walls and signs and any open space. There are neon adverts that have been hacked to show dozens of missing people.
And there are many of them that are recent. Very recent. Within the last few weeks.
Then something else catches your eye.
There's a missing picture.
A pretty and young tmesyan girl. Her wings missing a bunch of the leaves that should be bright green. The picture was from a few days ago, at least according to the digital missing poster.
But there was something in her eyes. There was a dim light there. A light that was surrounded by the absence.
Then there was her face. A smile. Tight, not authentic, even by tmesyan standards. That wasn't a lot to go on, but that was something. It felt... specific. Not strictly unique, but unique to your situation.
Baht was saying that a lot of indoctrinated had gone missing. Maybe this one had someone who missed her. Or maybe she wasn't indoctrinated and was just missing.
There was the practical, and cold, part of you that realized if you got to speak to the person who was looking for this person, you might get a few precious seconds away from the tsunami of people, long enough to find another indoctrinated.
You pull up your holo and quickly try to find that one missing poster again. Searching through the thousands of posters is going to take a long time, so you try to narrow it as much as you could from what you saw in the flash of a moment on the hacked sign.
"What are you doing?" Baht asks lazily.
"Trying to find a missing person," you reply as if that answered the question at all.
"Why?"
You don't respond until you found the one you were looking for. "Here. You see. Her eyes look like she might have been going through the early stages of indoctrination."
"This is a bad picture. The quality is shit. That could be any number of things, most of all a goddamn coincidence."
"You're the one saying that the indoctrinated are going missing," you counter. "Someone is reporting them. And unless you have a better idea."
Baht is quiet for a moment. "I don't. So what now?"
"We have to find the person who reported KlÃyon missing. We talk to them, and maybe we find out who they were with or their friends or something and that will lead us to indoctrinated for us to follow."
It takes another long time for you to fight your way through the crowds to the one building in the Wards you want to go to.
You give plenty of deferential space to the defaced statue to the Pilot.
Finally you manage to push your way into the crowded apartment complex. Dozens of people sit, sleep, and live in the hallways, only those lucky few manage to actually secure doors and walls.
You make it up to the 17th floor and find the right door.
You approach slowly, like the door itself is a frightened and wounded animal. You eventually steel yourself enough to knock on the door.
After a few minutes a rosenan answers the door.
"What?" he asks.
"I'm looking for the person who reported KlÃyon missing. We have some questions," you say.
The rosenan grumbles, closes the door, undoes the locks, and opens the door wide.
As you step inside the apartment you see that you've caught the attentions of some of the tenants outside. You quickly clock a few of them paying you close attention. Including a small r̂eishi individual.
Odd.
But you put that piece of information away for later.
Right now you are in a crowded and messy apartment that ideally would house two people but is currently sleeping seven.
The worn looking tmesyan stands and looks at you expectantly. He waves you into one of the small backrooms. A small looking bedroom that is cramped and tight and definitely sleeping too many people in a way that is surely a fire hazard.
Several of the roommates get up and awkwardly leave the apartment, making half-hearted excuses about how they need to be elsewhere.
You spend about thirty minutes in the small bedroom talking to, and comforting, the tmesyan dad who was desperately looking for his missing daughter.
As the only one with social skills, it was up to you to talk to the man.
From the start you realized that this was a dead end. You shouldn't have come here. You can't help this man. He doesn't know what is happening here. You're not the helping type.
KlÃyon was a young kid when the war started. She was dragged into it like everyone else in the galaxy. She was struggling to get by, as was her dad and everyone else in the years after.
During the war she had been trapped in a collapsed building and had to survive, alone, in total darkness, for almost a week before she was rescued.
When you finally manage to extract yourself from the apartment and into the cramped hallway, you can't help but feel rather free.
A handful people watch you curiously, but more importantly the r̂eishi at the end of the hallway is still watching you.
"What did we get?" Baht asks immediately.
"Not sure," you say quietly, keeping your voice down. "We didn't get anything from the father, but we are being watched."
"Who gives a fuck? Was the girl indoctrinated? Was that enough time?"
"I can't tell you when my indoctrination started or when it was completed," you snap. "It's like falling asleep, can you tell me exactly when you went to sleep?"
Baht frowned but didn't say anything else.
"Under no circumstances are you to look over, but that r̂eishi at the end of the hall is watching us, and has been since we stepped in here," you explain. "That suggests to me that he knows something. I want to know what it is. But we can't spook him."
"So what?" Baht demands again.
"Kasyn, can you follow him but not be seen?" you ask.
Kasyn laughs. "I know how to tail someone."
"Don't. Be. Seen," you demand. "Baht you continue the whole angry asshole thing and start shoving us back towards the stairs. When we go down one floor, Kasyn, I need to you get to the other end of the hallway and start heading back up to follow the r̂eishi. find out where he goes when he thinks we're gone."
Kasyn nods, and Baht looks annoyed.
All three of you turn and walk down the stairs, seemingly heading all the way down, but Kasyn peels off quickly and Bridges herself across the hallway to the other set of stairs.
You go down another flight before you stop.
You only had to wait a few minutes before Kasyn messaged you.
"Stopped two floors up. He's in room 1989."
You and Baht head up.
Kasyn was waiting around a corner, keeping an eye on the door, but out of sight.
There was a curious lack of people crowding the hallways up here. Which was odd.
This whole thing was odd.
"What are we doing here?" Baht asks.
"Don't you think it's weird that this guy is watching us?" you say. "He followed us the moment we set foot in the building. Why? We're not necessarily the most armed people. We're new comers, sure, but we don't stand out too much."
Baht sat quietly for a moment. "It is odd. But is he indoctrinated? Is this a lead or a red herring?"
You close your eyes and concentrate for a long moment. There's no starlight, no dim call from apartment 1989. There's something else.
Before you answer, Kasyn does. "I think so. But he's like... different. Like maybe he didn't get fully pulled in or something. Kinda like..."
She trialed off before she finished. Which causes Baht to prompt her. "Kinda like what?"
Kasyn shrugs. "I don't know. Felt kinda familiar for a second but then it was gone."
"Fine. We can investigate this," Baht says. Then he shoves you. "You're point. Let's go."
You walk slowly towards the door to the apartment. Before you even have a chance to knock, you feel something coming.
Without any thought you throw up a Bridge Barrier, a concentrated shield of pure Bridge energy that absorbs the bolt of energy that ripped through the door like it wasn't even there.
"Is that a fucking railgun?" Baht yells as he dives to the side.
Kasyn also hit the deck at the sound of the gunfire.
You draw your pistol and try to shoot through the door, but the crappy pistol doesn't do much. It barely even damages the door structure.
"Fuck this!" you snap as instead you just summon the Bridge and accelerate the door fully off it's hinges and into the apartment.
The door crashes into the apartment, the r̂eishi dove for cover and out of sight.
But you can still sort of feel him, like an even darker shadow tickling back of your mind.
You quickly enter the room, if this asshole does in fact have a railgun there's no use in hiding as it'll blow you away and basically any behind you for the rest of time. You're really lucky your Bridge Barrier has some kind of insane accretion disk event horizon thing that traps the hyper accelerated energy in a barrier of infinite space where it will eventually run out of energy and dissipate before hitting anything sometime around the heat death of the universe.
You find the r̂eishi struggling to rearm his railgun that he has pointed directly at you. You raise your shitty pistol in one hand, clutching your astrolabe in the other and push against the bullet as you fire it, turning into into a mini-railgun itself.
The three bullets that you fire tear through the r̂eishi's suit. The difference in pressure means that he is fucked. Even if he isn't dead from the gunshots, the suit is ruined and the atmospheric pressure that the r̂eishi lives at naturally will result in his death one way or the other.
You kick away the railgun and watch, with somewhat dispassionate distance, as they r̂eishi's carefully maintained suit expels the last of the high pressure atmosphere and the man dies.
Baht enters behind you a few moments later, when there are no more sounds of combat.
"There goes our only lead," he remarks coolly.
"Go fuck yourself," you respond.
Baht goes to the weapon first. "Yeah, this asshole hand built a damned railgun. You could have been removed from the universe if this thing hit you. And he's just as lucky it didn't blow up in his hands."
Kasyn had entered without you noticing. She had gone in the opposite direction to you and Baht. She opens a door and your translator fails at picking up what she says in horror, "Bamo a boha aelö!"
You turn around, gun at the ready.
Rushing to Kasyn's side you see what she saw and whatever she said was not strong enough.
"Fucking hell," you say as you see the half dozen dead and partially dismembered bodies.
"This is some shit," Baht says.
Kasyn turns away from the scene. "Can you have some of your people come in and comb for evidence or something?"
"No."
"Come on! This is disgusting!" Kasyn complains.
"How many people do you think we have?" Baht says. "If you can't handle it then stand by the broken ass door and don't let anyone inside. You," he scowls and points at you, "find something that makes this whole side diversion worth it."
Kasyn happily goes to try and put the door back in the doorway and keep people from looking in and bothering you two. Baht looks over the weapon that you recovered.
"You can just give that to me. This pistol is a piece of shit and I need an upgrade," you say.
"Absolutely not. Not just because this shit is super illegal but I'm pretty sure it only had one shot in it, and if you try again it'll blow. Might take out this entire floor. As funny as it would be to watch you take yourself out, I want to be around afterwards to laugh about it."
Not wanting to look at the mutilated corpses in the apartment you instead turn your attention to the dead r̂eishi. You start undoing the suit helmet to get a good look at his face.
The whiff of the specific atmospheric mixture hits you. It's not entirely unpleasant. If it weren't for the vast differences in atmospheric pressure between what everyone else could tolerate and the r̂eishi then they wouldn't need to suit, maybe just a small respirator. But that wasn't how evolution chose to go.
You finally get the dense helmet off the small dead man and you can already tell. His eyes started to change. He was also indoctrinated. But he was different. Just like you?
"Shame you killed him, we could have questioned him," Baht says. "Poor performance."
"You're the one that just said that he was going to blow up the entire floor with his gun if he shot it again."
He shrugs as if that didn't apply here.
There's nothing else you can learn from staring at a corpse. Even one of your making. Any answers, any similarities between the two of you died with him.
Instead you turn and look around the apartment. Clearly he had the place to himself. And possibly even the apartment next to his, considering there was a decent hole in the wall.
Baht turns to go inspect the bodies as you descend deeper into the serial killer's lair.
In the hole to the next apartment over you find more a living space and less of a butcher's block. This is where there would be information, clues, something to find.
You don't find anything for a bit. In fact, Baht comes back from looking through the dead bodies before you get anything.
"Your missing girl isn't here," he says. "Or least if she is she's in too many small pieces to be sure."
"Gross."
"But at least from what I can tell, he was targeting people that looked like they were indoctrinated."
"What does that mean?"
"Two of the heads in the back had signs of early indoctrination, the changes in the irises and whatnot."
"And the others?"
"Harder to tell, at least one of them wasn't. He seemed to have some kind of corrective machine implants or synthetic eye implants to possible correct some kind of blindness. Which, if you're an idiot, looks like indoctrination."
"Oh, great. We have an idiot serial killer."
"That's what it appears to be. You find anything good yet?"
Just as you were about to answer no, you didn't find anything in all of the drawers and usual hiding places resulting in you starting to tear the place apart, your holo beeps.
You don't answer, instead you just start flipping through the dead man's digital information. He really was an idiot. He only had the one password to get into his holo, he didn't have any additional security, and even your bargain basement holo was able to hack it in only a handful of minutes.
"There," you say. "He was following our girl. He suspected she was indoctrinated."
"That's not saying much," Baht responds.
"No, but he suspects that a bunch of people she was meeting with last week were indoctrinated, and if she's missing and she's not here. Then maybe she went with them."
You show Baht a picture of several individuals. It was clearly a surveillance photo taken by the dead killer. It showed KlÃyon meeting with several others, including a nastanrelian whose eyes were practically glowing from the indoctrination.
"Friend of yours?" you ask Baht.
He doesn't rise to your bait. "You know where that is?"
"Yeah. Our dumbass dead friend didn't clear or lock up his data at all. I can find out exactly where and when he went places. This was taken near the shuttle docks."
"Fuck. That means that they could be anywhere."
"No, not the space ports. The shuttles. It looks like they might be going down to the planet."
It takes you a while to walk over there. But when you spot it, you stop. An indoctrinated, one you spotted in the pictures stands next to a shuttle. Even from this distance you can tell he's indoctrinated.
You pull out your pistol and remove the firing pin before you throw the whole thing in the trash.
"It was a piece of shit," you offer as way of an explanation.
It was. And also going in fully kitted out was likely to attract more attention and more questions.
"I'm not tossing my gun," Baht says firmly, but uselessly.
"Did I ask?" You look over the scene and think. You need to play this whole thing properly.
"Look, both of you, don't say shit. Just play along, ok?" you order. "We need this guy to take us to wherever they're all going. So if we kill him, we got nothing. None of you have social skills, so do me a favor, and shut the fuck up."
"It's not like you have any social skills either."
"That I haven't used on you, Baht, because you're not worth the energy. Now follow me, and play along."
You round the corner and approach the other nastanrelian, waiting by a parked shuttle. They look very serious and are extremely well armed.
"Oh my gods," you say with a lighter affect to your words. You speak faster, higher pitched, doing everything you can to act dumber than you are.
The nastanrelian tenses. "Who are you?"
"Oh wow, you are impressive," you say as you close the distance. "I'm Cass. This is my friend Kasyn, and my partner Baht." You put heavy emphasis on partner. You can feel Baht seethe behind you, which in and of itself was worth it. You need a reason for why you have a non-indoctrinated with you. "They do their best to keep me safe. We've been looking all over for you. We were on a ship that brought us here and we were told that you were going to take us home. And we were attacked by some assholes. We escaped, but barely. And like, we spent some time hiding out, but we don't know where we're going and it took us so long to find you. So what do you say? Can you take us where you need to go?"
He pointed to Baht. "He's not with us."
You wrap your arm around him. "Yeah, but, like, he knows what's up. He knows we're, you know, indoctrinated. And like. It's not his fault that shit went sideways for so long. He was like stuck on a backwater planet with no way off for like six years! But Baht totally wants to know what's up with everything. I mean the whole 36 tenets are all about the Usmarus right? And my baby here really needs to get realigned with tenet 18 and 27! What do you say? Help us out?"
The nastanrelian, looks hard at each of you. You can tell he is checking that you are indoctrinated. You try to stand with your eyes open as wide as you can without seeming insane to show off how your eyes have changed. He's probably looking at you and seeing that dim light that you see within him.
"Yeah... ok..." He shakes his head. "Hey, I'm D'ilm. And, yeah. I get it. Makes sense. We're heading down in a little bit. Sorry for not believing you right away. But he's not... you know. And you... you're different."
You fight to keep your vapid smile in place. You fight against the instinct to ask. "Oh don't worry about it!"
"We head down to the core in a few minutes, just waiting to see if anyone else joins us."
The r̂eishi are always kind of fascinating. You've never seen one without their suit on in person. Which you know leads to a lot of weird fetishists, but like, you can look up what they look like without the suits on. The internet exists, it's not that big of a mystery.
But they have this whole thing where their atmosphere and pressure are just so slightly different that they are one of the only species in the galaxy that can't really conform to the atmospheres enjoyed by everyone else. They can, but only for short periods of time or they start getting compression sickness.
Really makes a big problem for interrogating them, since you can't rupture the suit without causing severe distress and eventually killing them. But that does make it really easy for them to fight. Just one little suit rupture and they'll eventually succumb. Which means that most r̂eishi are extremely well armored. Their suits are resilient things.
According to the Galactic Standard Time that was in use on Sentinel and therefore everywhere else, a minute has 80 seconds. There's 80 minutes in an hour, and a day is 20 hours long.
Which is a long and stupid way of saying that time is different and weird and the days are like two and half hours longer than they are on Earth.
The Galactic Standard Year is also much shorter than an Earth year, it's only 250 days or so long, which means that every time you hear some bullshit about the tmesyans are a very long lived race that lives for centuries you can't not roll your eyes because by GST so do humans.
In fact, if you did your math right, humans, on average, might live longer than the truly long lived tmesyans. But time has been one of the few universal things that make fools of everyone and no one really manages to get the translations right. There's just something hardwired into a person to always think of time based on where they come from.
What is Cass? Why are you different? Why are you here?
What is Cass? Who is Cass? Who are you?
Who are you? Who are you? Who are you? Who are you? WHO ARE YOU​? WHOAREYOU?
WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU
