The Top 10 Workplace Hazards and How to Prevent Them ...

I guess I’m what you’d call an addict. Junkie, even. Alcohol? No, I don’t touch the stuff. I drink it, hahaha. Don’t need hands to do that, hence the punchline. Drugs? I mean, I dabble. Recreationally. Whatever you got, if it’s free, I’ll shoot it up, lick it, smoke it, stick under my eyelid, snort it right into my aorta. And I’m not particularly picky either. Captain Cody, Skag, Mud, Fidgeridoo, Herbal Speedball, Organ Oil, Demmies, Miss Emma, Kickers, Mrs. O, Yog-Sothamines, XTC, Sneeze, R-Balls; if you have them, I’ll take them. Still not addicted to the stuff though.
No, my one and only addiction is exceedingly simple, yet intolerably hard to satisfy; FUCKED UP SHIT. I’m not talking about your everyday dark web snuff mind you. I need the real deal. Something about my brain's incapability to shoot me up with dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin and endorphins (the D.O.S.E), according to several online doctors. So it’s a medical thing. Still haven’t scored a prescription for it though.
In any case, my medical condition forces me to deep dive into the fuckiest corners of society. You have your dark underground clubs, murder parties, subteranean sickofests, torture theatres, decapitation diners, and the odd organ orgies, but what I really enjoy, what makes my D.O.S.E overflow, is the ones you never hear about. The ones you have to find. No invitations, no RSVPs. One day they just pop up like a popcorn baby, and before you know it, they’re gone.
I’ve been to a few of these over the years, and they never disappoint. I already told you about the Baby Killer Incident, yeah? Then you know what I’m talking about. Fucked up shit!
I happened upon this particular one by Chance. Chance being this stripper I know that’s into some ritualistic cannibalism or other (I don’t ask), and long story short she knew the sicko who was hosting the event. I was hesitant at first, this particular sicko placing fairly high on my shitlist of sickos, but hey, beggars can’t be choosers and all. Not to mention that my D.O.S.E-withdrawals were flaring up, making me in essence nothing more than a shivering sack of suicidal human tissue on the best of days.
So there I was in an abandoned mall, shivering sack of suicidal human tissue, idly accepting assorted drugs from random passer-by deviants taking a pity on me, when this guy comes up to me, all dressed up in a pink hazmat suit with a freaky unicorn horn (which, when I look back on it, was probably a massive drill-shaped dildo) stuck to his helmet, and he goes Hey Tilly (that’s my name, Tilly), Hey Tilly, he says. I hear you like fucked up shit.
Man, word gets around, I think to myself, but at the same time these loud fucking alarm bells starts going off in my head, accompanied by Soviet Union-amounts of red flags. How the fuck do you know my name? I ask.
Your ears, he answers. The guy told me to look for a man with fucked up ears.
Well, you found’em, I say, making sure to twirl around all ballerina-like, highlighting my ugly-ass ear-stumps. And what fucking guy gave you my name?
That guy, he mumbles idly, not actually pointing to anyone. Say, what happened to them?
To who?
Your, uh, ears.
Oh, that, I say. Sliced them off as a punchline in an elaborate Van Gogh-joke. Well, two seperate jokes, actually. Both Van Gogh-related though.
The guy nods, maybe smiles, but I can’t really tell because of the dildo-helmet, and beckons for me to follow him. Now, I don’t normally follow strange men into bathrooms, but sometimes that’s exactly what you should do. I guess learning when to do it, and when not to do it is an integral skill in this setting, but you’ll figure it out one way or another, so don’t worry too much about it.
Anyway, into the bathroom we go. Like the rest of the place it’s spotless, meaning there isn’t a single fucking spot that isn’t covered in grime or dirt or bodily fluids of some description, and I wrinkle my nose in disgust as the guy waves me into an empty stall at the far end of it.
I hesitate momentarily, my mind doing some olympic-levels of mental gymnastics to calculate the risk/reward-ratio of my current situation. I land on an even 50/50 - good enough - and I saunter into the stall, only to realise it’s not a bathroom stall at all.
Unexpected, I say, my D.O.S.E-levels elevating ever so slightly.
The guy starts descending the winding staircase leading god-knows-where, looking back at me when he notices I’m still just standing there sheepishly. You coming or what? he asks.
Fuck no, I think to myself. Yeah, I say.
Now, I’m no architect, but I’ll hazard a guess and propose that winding staircases are a rare find in your standard mall bathroom, abandoned or not. This wasn’t always a mall, was it? I ask.
Good eye, the guy answers. Used to be a church. I guess capitalism always wins, huh?
I just nod, soon enough realising these fucking stairs are neverending, like one of those spirals you see in old movies, you know, when someone is getting hypnotised? Then I think back on this woman I met when I was young. Younger? Time man, it’s always going somewhere, and I never really bothered catching up to it. Anyway, I think back on this woman I bumped into on the street, and how she out of the blue asks me if I’d seen her job, and I was like what the fuck do you mean?
I’ve lost my job, she says.
It’s always in the last place you look, I note.
That’s really helpful, she says unironically. Say, could you help me with something else?
What?
Do you know, she starts. Do you know how to rewind a winding staircase?
I don’t know man, that shit always stuck with me. Some kind of riddle? An elaborate joke? A covert Operation Mindfuck? Escaped lunatic lingo? In any case, that’s how I felt when we descended those stairs. Like I was rewinding a winding staircase.
Here we are then, the guy suddenly exclaims, bringing me out of my temporal trip down memory lane.
I am wildly underwhelmed at this point, but after letting my eyes get used to the dimly lit basement chamber, I can feel my brain starting to upchuck some good fucking shit into my system.
Champagne? the guy asks, beckoning to a rather unbecoming rat-faced girl in the corner to come hither with a tray of alcoholic beverages.
Don’t mind if I’m already two steps ahead of you, I think, having snatched a bottle I found sitting by the stairs. I pop it open, and enjoy the weird expressions on their faces as I chug the whole fucking thing in a manner of seconds. Tastes like an aging puke-shit hybrid, but my think-organ seems to enjoy it, and I’m not one to start a fight with my own fucking brain.
I watch the two of them trade looks of confusion, realisation, and then something I (falsely) identify as fear, then turn my attention to the tied up naked man at the far end of the room. I think I forgot to mention him, but he was there too. In fact, he was the sole reason my D.O.S.E was elevating - the prospect of some kind of fucked up torture show enough to get my juices flowing.
Now what? the girl asks. Do we tell him?
Fuck it, the guy says, and then proceeds to bash half of my skull in with a crowbar.
You know the part in every fucking action movie where the main character knocks some poor unnamed henchman unconscious? Do you realise how fucking dangerous that is? Concussions are silent killers man. Could’ve inflicted some serious brain damage too. Those fuckers can fuck you up for life.
Anyway, I guess I must’ve been out for a few, because when I woke up, I found myself dangling from the ceiling, my body suspended mid-air by some rather sturdy-looking chains.
You fucked up royally this time Tilly, the dildo-helmet proposed.
If my jaw hadn’t felt like someone had ripped it out, then jammed it back in the wrong way around, I probably would have responded with a witty remark. As circumstances were though, I felt forced to reply with a half-hearted Guh?
Let’s show you exactly how much you fucked up, the guy says.
My mind slips in and out of what I assume is consciousness, but it’s like my thoughts are torn in half; one side continuously trying to make sense of what I’m seeing, and the other rapidly filling with nausea-inducing dread. Both are fucking screaming though, my stump-ears somehow hearing the inside of my mind lamenting as it drowns slowly in an all-consuming madness.
The naked man screams too, but he’s more physical about it. How can a supposedly regular set of lungs contain that much air, I find myself thinking. His skin is a deep shade of red, some of it undoubtedly caused by lack of oxygen, some of it by the ever-growing stream of blood ceaselessly dripping down from his soon-to-be empty eye-socket.
Pull it Ems! the guy yells.
The rat-faced girl, Ems, has this horrid fucking grin on her face. You know how an old lemon looks, like a really shrivelled up piece of lemon? All wrinkles and browning leathery texture? That was her face. All fucking rotting wrinkled lemon texture smiles.
Pull it!
Ems got the naked man’s eye firmly gripped between her thumb and index, long dirty fingernails digging into the spongy vitreous, having now pulled it about an inch or so outside of the poor fucker’s socket. And I can just tell by her posture that she’s readying herself for that final, horrible yank.
I want to close my eyes so badly at this point, you know, just fucking succumb to the madness my brain is desperately conjuring up to save me, but at the same time I can’t. I physically cannot get my eyelids to work. I don’t know why, but that fucking fact freaks me out more than anything else going on.
And then it happens. With a swift, overly dramatic motion, she rips the fucking eye all the way out, and the man’s tormented shrieks reaches sonic levels that transcends human hearing. My ears are ringing, my mind is swirling, and my eyes are itching.
Watch this Tilly, the guy says coldly. Watch this fucking shit real closely.
And I do. Barely conscious at this point, hanging onto sanity only by fucking ignoring reality as a concept, I watch as Ems drops the severed eye to the dirty grime-covered floor, the disgusting fucking thing still somehow connected to the man via the optical nerves - impossibly long squirming crimson tendrils.
What the fuck? I mumble.
I told you, the guy chuckles. I fucking told you.
It’s hard to say how many there were. Countless maybe. Countless and then some, probably. Thin crimson worms, entangled in each other, organically interwoven to form a disgusting chain from the naked man’s empty eye socket to the severed eye on the floor. I could see them slithering in perfect repulsive unison, and suddenly the eye starts...moving.
This is the best part, the guy says.
The squirming chain slowly starts retracting, the blue of the eye turning a savory shade of grime-grey as it is dragged across the floor, up the naked man's legs, stomach, neck, face, until finally, after what seems like an eternity, it pops right back into the socket with a repulsive gloooph.
My stomach wants me to vomit now, but it’s barren and dry and empty and sour, so instead my brain takes control, a tempting blank void all the way in the back of my mind presented as a possible solution. But they won’t let me go. Ems erupts in a maniacal laughter, like the sound of a chainsaw on rough concrete, and the guy soon follows. I feel the muscles in my back contracting all seizure-like; more than likely my body’s last desperate attempt at shutting me down.
The naked man has stopped screaming now, the tortured wails replaced by a deep gargle, slime and blood mixed together in the back of his throat. Maybe his nightmare will end, I think, but then I realise it won’t. It hasn’t. It’s still going.
The eye is still moving.
Being dragged now inside his skull, I see the spongy texture of it bending and morphing hideously as it squeezes past bone structures that are by far too fucking narrow, and then it disappears completely, accompanied by a soundscape of gloophs and schlucks.
The man topples over, still tied to the chair, and convulses in agony for minutes, until it all suddenly stops.
I have never experienced such silence. That’s how I imagine space, you know. A great old big fucking vast empty nothingness of all the senses.
And now, the guy says, standing over the corpse of the naked man. Now it is your turn.
Ems hideous face morphs into that smile again. Big old lemon wrinkled smile. I remember her crooked yellow fingernails so vividly, horrid jagged things inching closer and closer to my eye, until I could feel them scraping on my exposed pupil.
I guess my mind found a way out right then. Fucking took it long enough though, but I figure I must have passed out, maybe from the pain, maybe from the fear, maybe from the exhaustion. Most likely neither of those, though.
When I woke up, I was alone, face down in my own sour-dry vomit on the ground. No naked corpse man, no dildo-helmet guy, no lemon-smiled Ems. I spent a good fifteen minutes checking my eyes, trembling fingers tracing them, you know, just to see if they were still there. And they were. They were fucking solid. They were fucking perfect.
I guess I spent a few weeks or so recuperating from that shit, but I’ve never felt quite the same. Turns out there’s a reason for that.
It’s weird you know, how I didn’t realise it sooner. I might be a fucked up piece of shit, but I’m no dummy. Gotta hand it to them though, it was a clever way to do it. Offering you a drink. I guess that’s how they got it in the naked man too. I suppose that’s why they told me I fucked up. Took too much, as the saying goes. Chugged the whole infestation.
I cut myself shaving this morning. Just a tiny nick, you know. But where you’d expect blood, there was none. Instead I was greeted with the unseemly sight of a thin crimson worm, dangling restlessly by my nose.
Now if that’s not some FUCKED UP SHIT, I don’t know what is.
TCC

Happy Lunar New Year's eve to all my readers who are celebrating and feasting! Some notes for clarity on today's post...
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Q: What is this story?
A: This is a spinoff that I have been dabbling around with for the last few months on and off, based on the events of a commission from last January: The First Juggernaut
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Q: Why haven't I seen this story before if the 4th chapter is releasing today?
A: This story falls under the category of "one shots", which is content made available, at least initially, only to certain subscribers of my patreon. I am making prior chapters available to everyone today both on my patreon and below.
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Q: I am a patron, where can I read the latest installment in the untitled goose snake saga?
A: I will be posting it to patreon shortly after finishing this post and I will link it at the bottom of this chapter.
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Q: I am a patron, why can't I read the latest chapter?
A: Latest installment is available to anyone supporting me to the tune of $10/month or greater. As with the prior chapters, chapter 4 will eventually be released to the public.
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Q: Is this considered canon for HEL Jumper purposes?
A: Yes, unless something explicitly conflicts with the HEL Jumper in which case I made an oopsie.
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Q: Who is Drake and what is this snake of which you speak?
A: Read on to find out!
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Chapter 1
September 17th 2035, Human Dreadnought HMV Resplendent Dawn, Shuttle Bay
“Mr. Thane! Good of you to join us here in Udanis. How was your journey? Uneventful I hope,” the incredibly tall, dark-skinned man called out across the cavernous metal room. Delta Division shuttles could be seen darting in and out of the space almost constantly, ferrying goods and personnel between the dreadnoughts, cruisers, destroyers, and support ships that currently made up humanity’s presence in what was, effectively, a star-system wide DMZ declared by the Ghaelen and enforced by humans. Unable to stomach the reality of warfare in hostile conditions against even more hostile foes, the ‘space elk’ presence had long since fled the system. Taking his bearings, the stockier, tanned individual with unkempt black hair and a civilian’s uniform nodded to the approaching figure.
“I’m afraid you have me at a disadvantage, Rear Admiral. Until just now I didn’t even know the identity of my destination. Though I understand the need for secrecy now that I’m here. Drake Thane, it’s a pleasure.” The two men engaged in a firm handshake, the squeeze of the palm a tried and true test of such men. Beta Division did not have many Admirals, and Udanis did not have many civilians.
“You’ll have to forgive Admiral Freidrich, but our resident Juggernaut seems to be giving him the runaround again. Victory will go to a young woman’s head though, won’t it?” the taller man laughed. “I am Rear Admiral Natori Kaczynski, at your service. And yes, that is a Beta Division insignia. Though perhaps you might be able to appreciate such a thing? After all, Delta called you out here too, didn’t they?”
“With all due respect Rear Admiral, I don’t even know why I’m here,” Thane replied. “Only that the pay is better than the FBI was offering.”
“Mmm, significantly better I’d suspect. The HEL does have its means,” Natori agreed. “Right this way then, Mr. Thane. Perhaps you’ll understand better once you’re brought up to speed. Ah, how rude of me!” the Rear Admiral suddenly exclaimed as though set upon by a novel idea. “Can I get you something to eat or drink?”
“I indulged in a ‘final meal’ on the transport, sir. But thank you,” Drake replied. Natori cast a knowing smile his way.
“Very good then. I see you packed light so let’s head to the nearest briefing room then. Mary?”
‘How may I be of assistance, Rear Admiral Kaczynski?’ the ship’s VI requested.
“Has a briefing room been set aside for Mr. Thane’s arrival?”
‘Yes sir, forwarding the location to you now.’
“Useful little tool, isn’t she?” Natori asked as he turned on his heel and led Drake straight in the opposite direction down the corridor.
“I’m only familiar with the civilian models, sir. The US government hasn’t gotten around to upgrading its systems yet.”
“Surprising absolutely no one, but perhaps we should be thankful,” Kaczynski suggested as he turned a corner and carried on, saluting various soldiers and support personnel as they moved at a leisurely pace. “Were it not for the bureaucratic incompetence of Terran governments, who would want to join the HEL?”
“That’s one way of looking at it, I suppose,” Thane agreed. “And while it may not be my place Rear Admiral, isn’t playing escort below your station?”
Natori looked him over with an appraising eye. “How tactful, but such is to be expected from a crisis negotiator I suppose. Allow me to assure you, Mr. Thane, the current situation is very much the concern of men like me.”
-----
Over the next couple hours, seated across a polished wooden table from one another, Natori reviewed with Drake the timeline of the pacification of Udanis IV, from the discovery of life in the system in early 2035, to first contact, and eventual full blown war by the end of May of the same year. The conflict had ended on June 6th, with the first truly successful battlefield deployment of Beta and Delta division’s latest collaboration, the Juggernaut program.
“So you brought me here to deal with Lieutenant Lavinaga, sir? Was it something about the, what did you call it, Queen’s nest operation? How many of those… stimulants is she still on?”
“No and yes. Fortunately, Lieutenant Lavinaga is quite well,” Natori replied, reaching for the pitcher of water and glasses in the middle of the table. He unhurriedly poured for them both, and the two men paused to soothe their throats. “While it is true that you were brought here to negotiate with veterans of this conflict… perhaps it’s better that I show you. This way please,” the Rear Admiral proposed, leading Drake on a short walk that nevertheless felt like a mile. The Marines and other combat personnel he’d seen up to that point appeared to be in high spirits, already swapping stories about gallantry during the operation while reminiscing fondly about the fallen. Maybe years later they might need someone like him, but not then and not there.
Eventually they arrived at their destination, given away by the fact that Natori was required to provide biometric identification in two forms as well as enter a combination PIN to pass through a set of imposing steel bulkheads. Drake recognized the area immediately as an interrogation facility, with the Rear Admiral escorting him all the way to the back. It was a cell constructed for long term confinement, and the two men found themselves alone in front of what Drake was sure was a one way mirror. The only other humans in the area were the Marine guards stationed back at the entrance. It didn’t help his nerves that they were in full armor intended for combat in hazardous environments. “Who’s on the other side of that wall, Rear Admiral?”
“Not who, Mr. Thane,” Natori corrected with an unsettling fire in his eyes. “But what.”
With the flick of a switch light suddenly poured through the opening, allowing Thane to see the interior of the spacious but barren room. “Jesus fucking Christ!” he whispered. “Are you mad, Rear Admiral?”
“Quite, Mr. Thane. But so are most who labor for the advancement of humanity. I daresay if you accept this job you’ll be rather similar.”
“I speak Farsi and Arabic, Rear Admiral. I deal with veterans of the Middle Eastern conflicts. What in God’s good name do you expect me to do with a Gorgon?!”
“An excellent question!” Natori agreed. “For starters I’d like you to see if you could bring us to the point where she does not spit acid at anything that moves. The fact that they store them in the approximate location of human mammary glands lost its humor… rather quickly.”
Drake swallowed heavily and took a closer look at the alien. Its entire body screamed danger to him. Natural rock-like armor covered its entire, serpentine form, which took after the Nagas or Lamias of human mythology. Her yellowish-green skin was the same color as the acidic environments of her homeworld, and her whiplike tail seemed to be constantly searching for something to coil around, or perhaps lash out at like a flail. “How long has she been here?”
“Since June 7th, Mr. Thane.”
“It’s been more than three months? Rear Admiral, surely this is in violation of… something!”
Natori licked his lips and hung his head. “This is why we sent for you, Mr. Thane. We have tried everything, and I mean everything, to establish some sort of diplomatic relationship, or even communication. She eats heartily and tries to kill us whenever she can. She is one of the only survivors of the Queen’s nest, and we believe that such authority will be key in any sort of eventual alliance.”
“You really are mad,” Thane whispered as Natori placed his hands behind his back and looked at the Gorgon.
“Am I mad for seeking powerful allies for our species, Mr. Thane? The Ghaelen possess powerful technology, but the price of its acquisition was steep. We will only bring ruin to ourselves if ‘galactic policeman’ is to be our role. Let our own country’s history be an example on that matter. No, one day we will come across a challenge we cannot surmount alone. I would much prefer it if the acid spitting snake women were on our side in that event, Mr. Thane. After coming this far, I hope you’ll at least humor me.”
“And Admiral Freidrich, sir?”
Natori met Drake’s eyes. “Approved this operation personally, Mr. Thane.”
The crisis negotiator breathed deeply and ran a hand through his mop of hair. “Just… how many people have died before me?”
“None, Mr. Thane! And I have no intention of making you the first.” The civilian shot Natori a dubious look that obviously conveyed his opinion on that particular statement. “Yes well, there were a couple of men who needed emergency medical treatment and reconstructive surgery, but we have equipment that is rather resistant to Gorgon acid thanks to their sacrifices, among many others. Shall I fetch one for you?”
“With all due respect, Rear Admiral-”
“Ah, you know what they say about that little lead in,” Natori chuckled, the casual hand on his hip indicating he fully understood why Drake had afforded him his ‘due respect’.
“Then you’ll have to consider the month-long journey to be my gesture of good faith. I’d like to see everything you have on the Gorgons, ideally in printed form. And yes, that includes the classified bits. I’ll sign whatever NDA’s you deem reasonable. And a cup of coffee… maybe two. You can keep your acid-resistant suits for now. I don’t think she’s going anywhere.”
After a moment of consideration, Natori offered Drake his hand again. They shook. “I appreciate your consideration, Mr. Thane. I will oversee the preparation of said documents, as well as the necessary security clearances. In the meantime you are free to observe our captive, though might I suggest taking a pitstop in your cabin first?”
“You’re the type to get mixed up in the affairs of his subordinates, aren’t you, Rear Admiral?” Thane ventured cautiously. Natori’s smile was different somehow that time, almost unsettlingly so.
“Perhaps your keen eye will succeed where I have failed, Mr. Thane? We will be in touch and Mary is, of course, at your disposal. Welcome to the Resplendent Dawn,” Kaczynski finished, turning quickly on his heel and departing, saluting the Marine door guards as he left.
“Apparently he’s also one to leave civilians alone with alien captives,” Drake muttered, looking down at the control panel for the one way glass. Left there was a post-it note, a vintage technology that still found itself in use even in the era of shield generators, FTL travel, and VI’s.
Don’t activate the two way functionality. We’re running low on materials to manufacture more polarized glass.
Thane chuckled in disbelief and ran a hand over his face, captivated momentarily by the holes he could see in the alien’s forearms, a natural biological gap between the Gorgon analogs of the radius and ulna. At least he assumed she had bones. “What have I gotten myself into?”
-----
As it turned out, the answer to that question was a bit more complex than one on one prisoner or hostage negotiation, something that became readily apparent after an hour or so of reading in front of the alien’s cell. The coffee was surprisingly adequate, as was the insulated mug that kept it warm as he labored. He would glance up on occasion to observe his subject, not wanting to fully depend on unreliable witness testimony, more reliable autopsy reports, combat records, and the gruesome video feeds from the suit of one Lieutenant Lanvinaga. If Kaczynski’s tale was true, and he had no grounds to assert it wasn’t, the alien before him had not only retained the will to live after more than three months in solitary, she also retained the desire to kill and fight. She was sane and hostile. That was more than could be said for some of the veterans he’d talked down in the past.
“Or failed to talk down,” Drake allowed with a mutter, shaking his head. Movement caught his eye and he refocused on the alien, watching as she curled up on herself only to adjust and re-adjust, picking at the rock-like armor that seemed to grow from her very body. Scratching his head, the human consulted several images that he would have rather not dealt with, various post-mortem shots of Gorgons that had been killed during the pacification. Very few sported natural armor to the level of his subject, but not because she was some sort of unique specimen. Near as he could tell the Gorgon before him was quite typical for her species, but her natural armor was jagged and reminded him of a volcanic rock field. Much of his reference material depicted Gorgons with relatively smooth plating that rested underneath manufactured metallic armor. “It’s worth a shot,” Than shrugged, noting that it was 21:00 shipboard time. “Mary, is Rear Admiral Kaczynski still awake?”
‘Good evening Mr. Drake Thane,’ came Mary’s synthesized but pleasant enough voice. ‘The Rear Admiral has retired for the evening. Are you experiencing an emergency?’
“No no, nothing like that,” Thane clarified quickly. “I’ll just leave him a message then.”
‘Very well, you may begin recording when ready.’
“Rear Admiral, this is Drake Thane. In the morning I’d appreciate it if you could track down a couple of rocks and an industrial sander for me. I have an idea.”
-----
“I believe I’ve waited long enough to sate my curiosity?” Natori stated as he watched Drake sanding down one surface of the chunks of Udanian crust he’d been given.
“Fair enough. How familiar are you with the anatomy of beavers, Rear Admiral?”
“How familiar are you with the anatomy of beavers?” Natori barked with laughter. “Oh I definitely picked the right man for this job.”
“Save that for when I actually get somewhere, sir. The answer, I suppose, is that I’m familiar enough to know that beavers don’t just cut down trees to build themselves shelter. Left alone long enough without anything to gnaw on their teeth will continue to grow and grow, injuring or even leading to the death of the animal. These Gorgon appear to possess the same quality when it comes to their natural armor,” Thane postulated. Natori’s eyes lit up.
“You propose a gift?”
“I hope you don’t mind the loss of a belt sander,” Drake said shortly.
“Let’s not wait then. Her first meal of the day is scheduled around this time.”
“Good enough for me. Where’s this suit, the one that will stop me from getting my face melted off?”
“Storage locker on the left. We haven’t personally delivered anything for some time, so be prepared for resistance,” Kaczynski warned. “She seems to consider eating her meal off the floor worth the chance at an attack.”
“Duly noted,” Drake replied in a tense voice, finding a heavily fortified hazardous environment suit that would have looked more at home on a space walk where the Admiral indicated. A short time later, sweat beading on his brow, he unlocked the door to the Gorgon’s cell. The moment he entered, the alien puffed out her chest and spat a stream of sickly green acid from her mouth. Though the attack was exemplary in its aim and velocity, that also made it relatively easy to dodge if one was willing to simply drop to the floor. Well protected as he was, Drake did just that, squashing whatever manufactured nutrient cubes had been intended for her. In return, he chucked the first rock at her, earning a momentary reprieve as the alien tried to process the fact that one of the legged beings keeping her hostage had thrown a rock at her. It was enough time for him to roll the second one to the base of her body, a couple feet below where her torso met her tail, which carried on behind her for a good six feet or so. The fact that the second rock was ‘presented’ instead of ‘chucked’ was not lost on the alien, but that didn’t prevent her from compressing the venom sacks in her chest again.
“Oh for the love of-” Thane cursed, retreating out the door as the second biological attack splattered onto the surface just behind him. To his amazement, Natori was applauding even as two Marines rushed at him with decontamination equipment.
“A magnificent swan dive if I’ve ever seen one, Mr. Thane! And before you believe I’m having a laugh at your expense, come look at what our guest is already up to.”
At Natori’s insistence Thane shucked the enviro-suit as quickly as he could and returned to the one-way mirror. There, he could see the Gorgon ignoring her smushed breakfast entirely. After a brief contemplation of the rocks that had been given to her, she began banging at her own body with one of them, chipping off pointy bits of rock that clearly agitated her. At least Drake considered it could be fully fledged rock; he had no idea if aliens producing natural rock armor atop their own dermis was reasonable. Whatever it was, it was certainly tougher than keratin. The Rear Admiral ran a hand over his short, close cropped hair. “I would certainly call this progress, Mr. Thane. What is your next step?”
“To see if I can get her to look at a human for longer than a second without trying to dissolve him,” he replied tersely. “Do you have more of those rocks?”
Natori cocked a brow his way. “Mr. Thane, this is a Delta Division Liberation-class dreadnought. We have plenty of rocks.”
Chapter 2
“You have got to be fucking kidding me,” Drake Thane cursed, hauling himself to his feet after another harrowing trip into the Gorgon’s cell. She had accepted his gift of rocks, but had not made any sort of connection between the smooth and jagged varieties, instead using both to chip away at and then grind down the excess armor growing from her skin. That was how she spent most of her days when not eating or attempting to fight anyone who entered her enclosure. He had only been aboard the Resplendent Dawn for forty eight hours, but he’d read more than enough to make it clear that the Gorgon’s were highly intelligent and capable of advanced battlefield tactics. Humanity’s swift victory was primarily a technological feat, not a tactical one.
“Which leaves pride, an absurd amount of pride,” he muttered, debating whether to remove the helmet from his head and return to study or attempt something new. Exactly what, he did not know. Not willing to throw his life away or test the durability of the hazardous environment suit further, he began removing it in a process that took several minutes and assistance from one of the Marine sentries on duty. “Thank you. Let’s leave it out for now. I might try again later today.”
“As you say, Mr. Thane,” the Marine replied. “Not sure what you could do though. Nothing gets through to them.”
“Something will,” Drake insisted. “But I understand where you’re coming from.”
“Shall I inform the Admiral of this morning’s result?” the soldier asked
“No need. It’s status quo for now,” he said, heading back to the table that had become his workstation and opening up a portable computer he’d been provided with to review the various multimedia files that humanity possessed on the Gorgons. Ongoing attempts at communicating with the planetside populace had borne no fruit, with the various kingdoms going to ground the moment anyone tried to make contact. He had already checked once, but he double checked to make sure there were no records of torture, starvation, or unusual punishment of his current subject. He doubted they would have actually been logged, but there was continuity in the timetable. That was enough for him.
“How long can you keep this up?” he wondered of his new adversary. It was practically against the code of his profession to consider an interlocutor an enemy, but given that she had attempted to dissolve him without fail every time he stuck his nose in the door, he was willing to make an exception. “Yeah, don’t remind me. The answer is at least a couple months. At least the coffee’s still hot.”
Caffeine in hand, Thane instead opened up various combat records. He did his best to avoid the more gruesome ones, but a few caught his interest. There were several instances where gear had been retrieved and the combat logs analyzed to discover that the deceased had been engaged in one on one combat by individual Gorons, sometimes in the presence of entire enemy units. “Dear Lord in heaven,” he muttered. “They’re going to make a movie out of this, if it’s even declassified.”
The ‘this’ in question was a helmet recording from a Marine private who had been surrounded by an enemy platoon. With no ammunition remaining, he had fixed his bayonet and stood to face his death with courage. Instead of immediately spitting acid at him or ganging up on him, one of the Gorgons had stepped, or was it slithered, forward. After a long moment that took Thane’s breath away, the Marine realized that the spear-wielding, armored alien was challenging him to something of a duel. Most remarkable was what happened when the Marine proved victorious, ramming his bayonet into a gap between the alien’s armor and bringing her down in a writhing mass of rock and flesh after several minutes of testing each other. The remaining enemies retreated, and the victorious Marine had survived the hostile environment of Udanis IV long enough to call for backup.
“Only problem is I doubt I could land a hit on her to save my life, even if she’s unarmed and unarmored… well, no extra armor,” he mused. The idea of asking another to fight in his stead was equally unpalatable, especially since he wasn’t sure the Gorgon would submit to anything short of death. “This is getting me nowhere.”
Recognizing his own limits, Drake sorted his affairs and left the interrogation bloc, wandering around the ship and letting his mind drift until he drifted right into an imposing blonde soldier whose rolled up sleeves revealed several mechanical interface points embedded in her arms. “Who the hell are you?” she demanded.
“Drake Thane, crisis negotiator. I’m here at the request of Admiral Freidrich and Rear Admiral Kaczynski. It’s an honor to meet you, Lieutenant Lavinaga.”
“Christ, is it that fucking obvious?” she asked, glancing down at her arms. “Guess it is. You lost, Thane?”
“Physically? No. But maybe you can help me? I’ve got a bit of a Gorgon problem,” he admitted.
“The survivor? Should just space her if you ask me,” Lavinaga said dismissively. “Assuming you want that thing alive I’m not your woman.”
“And what if I want someone to go in there and wear her down so I can actually attempt to communicate with her and not get a face full of acid?”
“And I thought I was insane,” she laughed.
“It’s my job at the moment,” he shrugged.
“Would I get to wear my armor?”
“Of course. Don’t see how else you’d survive. You're still mostly flesh and blood.”
“I’m going to let that insult pass cause it’s been way too long. She’s in the interrogation cells, right? Meet you there in a few.”
“I actually don’t have approval for this yet,” he admitted. “I just had the idea when I ran into you.”
“Well you don’t worry your little head about that, Drake,” she simpered, clapping a hand down on his shoulder so hard he thought his collarbone might fracture. “You let me handle those Admirals.”
-----
Drake didn’t want to know how Lavinaga had gotten permission, but true to her word she appeared in her full star spangled glory about an hour after leaving him in one of the Resplendent Dawn’s many corridors. The hum of the ship and overhead lighting was drowned out by the heavy footfalls and hissing hydraulics of her suit. When she reached his side, the visor of her helmet slid open.
“You have no idea how awful this feels,” she said affectionately. “So, what do you need me and Ares to do?”
“I don’t really know. Just wear her down enough that I can show her how this works without dying,” he suggested, holding up the portable belt sander he’d used to smooth over a few rocks that were now the sole possessions of the Gorgon. Lavinaga just shook her head.
“If that’s what you want. Should be fun. I wonder how long she can go,” Lavinaga said with a bit too much anticipation in her voice. “Well, enough standing around! Let’s go see if she remembers me.”
Drake readied himself at the observation port as Lavinaga hefted her enormous shield and casually threw open the door to the cell. “Sup bitch? Long time no see!”
Thane watched, horrified, as the Gorgon assaulted the Juggernaut with a zeal and fury that she had never shown him. Her venom sacs were depleted within seconds, only scratching the paint of the wall of metal that made up Lavinaga’s shield. She threw what rocks she had and slammed her tail against the hulking monstrosity to no avail, the borderline psychotic laughter of Lavinaga her only reward for her efforts. Sweat dripped from Drake’s brow as his thesis slowly proved itself correct and the Gorgon’s blows slowly weakened and became lethargic. The juggernaut drove the point home by casually pushing her to the ground after about half an hour. “Now why don’t you just get comfortable down there? You’re lucky someone other than me is running the shots or I’d be testing my boot against your skull,” she warned.
“Lieutenant please, we don't know how much of our language she understands,” Drake said over the intercom. “Thank you for your restraint. I’ll be right in.”
On account of the mobile metal wall that stood between him and the broken alien, Drake steadied himself and managed to summon enough courage to enter the area without any protection other than the jeans and shirt he was wearing. In his hands were two stones and the sander. The Gorgon watched his every move, her acid green eyes still alert even as her body failed her. With no acid left to spit, she bore witness to him demonstrating the ability of the sander to grind down and polish rock. He didn’t belabor the point. Instead setting the tool down a couple feet from her. “I want to talk,” he said before turning to leave with the juggernaut. “Lieutenant, whenever you’re ready.”
“You eggheads think up the craziest things,” Lavinaga shrugged. “Am I allowed to taunt it again?”
“Please don’t.”
“Fine, but only because you’re handsome,” she insisted when they were safely outside. “Oh, also you owe me a few beers on account of the time I’m about to spend in the armory. See ya, Thane.”
Drake was so struck by her antics he barely had time to rush back into the cell when he was the Gorgon lifting the tool he’d left her to the one place on her body she had no armor, her neck. “Stop!” he roared, snatching it from her grasp before leaping back several feet as his brain finally caught up with what his body had done. “Why? You’ve been trying to kill us all for months!”
The alien’s eyes were narrow and downcast, and bits of her natural armor littered the cell where they’d been broken against the unyielding armor of Lavinaga’s suit. Small areas of her body were discolored, a deeper green than the rest. He could only assume bruising. “Maybe I am fucking insane,” Drake admitted, walking forward and turning the sander back on. “I didn’t defeat you, so I’m not going to be the one who kills you.”
The Gorgon hissed violently at him, but was unable to physically harm or stop him from grinding down and polishing one of her shoulders. With no other recourse, she simply refused to look at him instead. When Drake left, he took the sander and every rock with him, not wanting to leave her anything that might be used as a tool for suicide. As soon as the door to the cell closed, his legs gave way and he collapsed to the floor, feeling only the racing of his heart and the damp cling of his sweat-soaked clothing to his body. He did not return to the interrogation blocks that day.
-----
“You wanted to see me, Rear Admiral?”
“Yes indeed, Mr. Thane. I daresay you did something, I’m just not sure that something was good,” Natori explained as Drake entered the interrogation wing the next day, having spent more time than necessary grooming and feeding himself. His mind weighed heavily with the pain he’d inflicted upon his charge. The language of the Gorgons remained an inscrutable mess of low pitched hissing and other sounds, but hopelessness was a universal concept. It seemed that their captive was finally allowing that darkness to permeate her mind and influence her actions. Per Kaczynski’s report, gone were the consistent attacks against those bringing her food as well as efforts to eat it. “I am not usually one for threats, Mr. Thane, and I don’t precisely intend this to be one but I know you’ll likely interpret it as such. We cannot afford to lose her. Her potential is too great.”
“I understand, sir. I’ll head in right away,” Thane replied, acknowledging the Admiral’s concern. Instead of stopping by the locker containing his protective gear, he instead grabbed his coffee and walked straight to the cell door. Natori held out a hand but remained silent.
“Well I suppose I did threaten him,” he mused, nevertheless ensuring his sidearm was loaded, a round chambered, and the safety off. Precautions in place, Kaczynski settled in to observe what he was sure, one way or another, would be an eventful ‘session’ with the prisoner. To his most welcome surprise, Drake Thane managed to enter the cell and stand just past the threshold for several moments without getting attacked, dissolved, or impaled. The man took a long draught of his coffee before jerking his head upward in a moment of recollection. The Gorgon watched him all the while, almost unblinkingly, as he left the drink on her untouched breakfast tray and retreated to retrieve the portable sanding device he’d used on her the prior afternoon. He paused to speak with the Rear Admiral.
“Well, I’d call that an improvement,” he insisted. “You ever notice what it smells like in there?”
Natori cocked an eyebrow his way. “I can’t say that I have. I assume you’re about to share?”
Drake shrugged and tilted his head. “Nearest I can describe it is the Devil’s perfume, like if fire and brimstone smelled appealing, or at least rather inoffensive.”
“How curious,” Natori replied, leaning slightly to the right so he could look around Drake. “Though perhaps we should ruminate on that once we secure your coffee?”
Drake spun around fast enough to tweak his neck, finding the Gorgon with his coffee in hand. Her long, thin, black, serpent-like tongue was extended several inches and lapping at the dark brown liquid. The two men stared. “Has she ever been given coffee before, sir?”
“Just water, Mr. Thane. Curious as I am, I would like you to go and stop her now.”
Thane needed no further encouragement, bolting back into the room to snatch back his drink. The Gorgon replaced the disposable lid and offered it to him. Her eyes were still as menacing as ever, but the telltale contractions of her chest muscles that foretold a gout of deadly acid were missing. He tentatively reached out and accepted it, earning a low, complex hiss in return. Glancing down, he pointed at her untouched meal and then the sander. The Gorgon cracked her whip-like tail against the ground in frustration but complied, taking the food to a far corner of the room and beginning to eat piece by piece. Her eyes never left him even during her retreat as she demonstrated a rather remarkable ability to slither backwards.
Drake figured that was good enough, sitting against the opposite wall and opening his coffee. While it didn’t seem any different, he wasn’t about to take the chance that an alien with venomous pseudo-breasts didn’t produce oral toxins. Instead he stood again and approached her, keeping both hands on the cup so as not to arouse suspicion. He deposited it next to her and then returned to his position. With a curious hiss the alien opened the lid and, instead of continuing to drink, dipped the tip of her tail into the still slightly steaming liquid before continuing with her meal.
“What in the world?” Thane whispered, watching as the greenish skin underneath the Gorgon’s natural rocky plating shifted to a yellower hue, starting from the tip of her tail and moving slowly upward towards her body. The color change didn’t get all the way there before stalling out, but she seemed pleased with it to the point that upon finishing her meal she actually pointed to him, then to the sanding tool in his hands, and finally to her other shoulder. Unheard by the two of them, Natori threw his head back in laughter, amazed at the transition from murderous adversary to an imperious giver of orders. Drake shrugged but saw no reason not to comply. He’d been planning to attempt such a maneuver anyway as a further showing of good faith following the Lavinaga incident.
When he stepped within arm’s reach of her, the Gorgon straightened her torso and held out a thin, armored hand and poked him in the sternum. Even her fingers had the potential for danger with their rocky nail-like tips. Her other hand rested on her chest as she hissed a particular pattern of sounds twice in a row; she then poked him again. He nodded. “My name is Drake Thane. Sorry I can’t understand you.”
Undeterred, the Gorgon simply lowered herself back onto her coiled tail and presented her shoulder. She hissed again in a softer tone as Drake activated the sander, taking another glance at his coffee which now seemed to be serving as a tail warmer.
“Might as well get started then. You clearly have quite a bit to teach me.”
Chapter 3
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Chapter 4
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Hello everyone, Hope you're all having a wonderful day! I'd like thank you all for supporting this series, it really motivates me to write. With that said, hope you enjoy this chapter.
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Chapter 10 - Is this the best day of my life?
When you have an inseparable God virus in your body like I do, dreaming can go one of two ways. Either the virus reacts to the dream as it would react to conscious behavior, or it will be aware that its host is dreaming and attempt to interfere. I thought about it and found more than enough reasons to believe in the latter theory. But that raised another question — in what way will it interfere?
A) Because dreams are a side effect to a natural brain activity during REM sleep, the virus will remove that side effect, preventing me from dreaming.
B) The virus will try to communicate with me, or vice versa.
C) The virus will give me lucid control over the dream, and since the virus is going to be involved, the experience will be somehow more exceptional than regular lucid dreaming.
Analyzing these theories any further would be a waste of time, so I decided to put it in practice. But in the unlikely event that the virus is going to burn down the kingdom while I'm asleep, I knew I had to take measures to avoid that.
So, I stopped by the inn after reverting the color of my hair and eyes. Yes, I mean ‘stopped by’ because I wasn’t going to do something dangerous like ‘sleeping’ in my own room, that would be crazy. You see, I had another destination in mind. It’s just that some preparations were in order before I headed there.
The blanket we had on our bed was the first thing I took, securing a fairly comfortable surface to sleep on. I folded it and tucked it away in an empty leather bag. I also needed a rope, which I couldn’t find in the room. ‘I guess I’ll just buy one on the way,’ I said to myself and resumed packing. Next set of items were a blank notebook, a quill and a bottle of ink. Because, in case my dreams end up being completely ordinary, I wanted to take notes of what I could recollect after waking up; since dreams are normally easy to forget.
For the last item I needed, I began preparing some UU enchantments. If you remember, UU enchantments are based on magnetically coded instructions electronically translated and converted into magic skills. Therefore, it doesn’t require the ‘enchanter’ to have an associated enchantment skill. Basically, I was manually encoding binary instructions into magnetic disks.
Knock! Knock!
“I have brought you tea, lord Zenith,” the innkeeper’s muffled voice came through the closed door. She apparently saw me enter the inn and prioritized on preparing me tea.
“Come in,” I replied loud enough for her to hear. I remained occupied with coding, as she opened the door and walked up to the coffee table behind me. “Leave it here,” I said, referring to the study table by which I was working. Obediently, she brought it to my side and poured the tea from the kettle into the cup.
“Lord Zenith, as you requested, the rumors about non-believers and ill-intended people being smitten by the one true God is being spread around. It was just as you predicted. We all received the news about the giant apple tree in the Kullu district, and now this whole city is talking about it in relation with the rumors.”
“Very good,” I didn’t take my eyes away from the task I was doing.
She set the tea cup and coaster off the tray and comfortably within my reach on the table. “I shall take your leave then,” she said and proceeded out.
Before she got to the door, I called out to her. “Oh and could you bring me two sets of ropes? Maybe also something sharp to cut it with.”
…
I boarded a shared carriage to get to my destination. I wanted to board a private one, but they were all pre-booked. The shared carriage was not too bad though, especially because I paid the coachman for an extra seat. You see, with shared carriages, you have to wait until a certain amount of time or a certain number of passengers to occupy the seats before departure. When I boarded, the coachman needed one more person to board, so I offered, “I’ll pay for two people if we start now.” Unsurprisingly, money speaks louder than patience.
On the ride, I continued working on encoding the enchantment instructions. Okay, I’ll admit that I couldn’t finish it at the inn like I thought I would, but in my defense, coding in raw binary language is a pain. So there I was, mashing buttons on a peculiar apparatus with every other passenger staring at me and it.
The magnetic disk was inside a disk reader the size of a toaster, and it was connected to an input device with 3 main components; two for reading data and one for writing. On the left, there was a numeric keypad. This was to set the pointer on a specific memory location on the disk. Right above the keypad was an analogue screen with all the data readable in binary form. The device can read up to 8000 bits of data, the pointer starting from 0 to 7999, which is too much to fit on a still screen. So to its side, there was a rotator to scroll through the screen. Last but not least, on the right, there were two buttons representing ‘0’ and ‘1’ used to write data.
Just to be clear, this apparatus was engineered fairly recently. When we initially made the UU enchantments, data was encoded manually by hand. After the demo, I designed this apparatus and Devon engineered it, making it easy thereon.
Ignoring the curious stares of my co-passengers, I finished overwriting the old code with the new one. I ejected the disk from the disk reader, and pulled out the enchantment device out of my leather bag. Then I connected the disk to the input mechanism of it, and hoped for the best. Seventh time’s the charm. I snapped my fingers in the air and the sound was heard by everyone in the carriage. Following that, I released a little mana to be processed by the enchantment. And snapped my fingers again near the enchantment’s output.
Voila! There was no sound this time. I didn’t hear it, and neither did the other confused passengers. My soundproofing enchantment was finally working. I put the device into my bag, and pulled out another disk to code the instructions for the second enchantment I needed. Fortunately, this one was simple. Because, what I needed was electrical insulation and I’ve already developed the binary code for that in the ‘lightning resistance’ enchantment that is among our line of products. It’s the equivalent of copy-pasting from stack overflow, except I’m the one who wrote the code in the first place.
Anyway, I was done with all the preparations by the time I reached my destination, or rather close to it. I was dropped off about 3 kilometers away upon being stopped by government officials who prohibited entry past that point into the perimeter. Moreover, people who lived in that area were being evacuated on priority due to dangerous levels of electrical currents.
Amidst this orderly confusion, I paid the coachman what I promised, and set my eyes back on the scene, specifically on the monster that was impossible to miss — the tree that penetrated the clouds and was generating several gigawatts of power every second. Imagine spotting a skyscraper from 3 kilometers away and it still manages to look breathtakingly massive, that pretty much sums up what I was seeing.
Even as people were primarily focused on evacuation, there were still plenty who just stood and marveled at the tree. I overheard one of them, a lady, saying, “Did you hear? They are saying that this was an act of our one true God, smiting upon evildoers that were doing something bad in that place.”
“Really? What were they doing?” asked the curious person to whom the lady gossiped.
“I don’t know. But whatever it is, the city guards must be aware of it and are not telling us.”
Surprisingly, the rumors have managed to spread so far in less than 10 hours; I suppose I underestimated my own followers. It looks like they are going to soon find out about the red mages who held captives for slave trading. And when they do… Needless to say, matters are moving in my favor.
Anyway, on to dreaming. I moved away from the crowd, and found a secluded spot where I settled down. I made sure no city guards or civilians were in sight, and began focusing on developing a much needed skill at the moment — flight. There are plenty of ways to fly using magic. Despite that, not many were ideal for me in the current situation. For example, I can use some sort of gaseous ignition to initiate thrust, but that’s going to end up burning all the items I was carrying. As for flight methods that are not a fire hazard, I would need better mana control to perform.
Not to worry though. I spent the whole carriage ride here, thinking of a solution. And the solution is simply brute force, by which I don’t mean jumping up, exerting force on the ground. That would be disastrous. I would be using pure mana as particles to carry me through the air. For anyone else, including the immortals, this would be a terrible method of transportation because it continuously consumes ridiculous amounts of mana. It's a good thing my mana pool is a bottomless pit.
> Skillset: … 3D Space Navigation (Complexity - C)
Based on its complexity, you could probably tell that this is a stupidly simple skill. I basically just need to input the 3-dimensional points in space (latitude, longitude, and altitude) and my mana will carry me to that point. Also, this was a really slow mode of transportation, so I activated my camouflage skill before performing it.
I felt my feet lifting up along with my body, and the ground beneath me getting further away. This is the part where you would expect me to use a metaphor linking the ability to fly with freedom. Unfortunately, it was not a comfortable flight. You see, with the mana literally carrying me up, the force exerted on my body from below, including on the crotch region, felt nothing like freedom. I was waiting for the ride to be over.
15 uncomfortable minutes later, I reached the branches of the tree. I was defended against the electrical currents by the virus, as was my leather bag which I held closely to my chest. I landed, stepping on a huge branch. The width of that branch was as big as a sidewalk, and did I mention that the trunk of the tree is 15 meters wide? Looking down from where I stood, I saw thunderclouds, and past that, the humans were practically just a bunch of ants.
I didn't waste much time admiring the view. I unpacked the enchantment tools and set them down between my legs. I pulled out the blanket and the rope and started crafting a hammock. The difficult thing was to ensure none of my items got knocked off by the altitude winds or lightning. Apart from that, things went not so badly. Although a bit crooked because I couldn’t find a perfectly straight branch, the hammock was set up with both the prepared enchantment attributed to it.
Holding on to my bag which still had the book, quill, and ink bottle inside, I laid on the hammock and released my mana for the enchantments to work. Slowly, the noises of thunder faded away and electrical current was getting nowhere near me. I spent a solid 5 minutes consistently releasing my mana to make it an involuntary process as I fell asleep.
For the purpose of lucid dreaming, I maintained a strong conscious awareness that I was going to be dreaming. You can try this out yourself. As long as your conscious is aware that you're in a dream, you'll have lucid control over it. Admittedly, it's easier said than done since it's not easy to maintain conscious awareness when you're in REM sleep. The trick is to slowly adapt to it and you'll eventually be able to do it consistently.
The reason I'm telling you this is to make it clear that prior experiences with dreams significantly helps with lucid dreaming. With that being said, I had never experienced a dream before, at least as far as I was aware. I didn't have a clue about what a dream looks or feels like, I just knew the theory behind it. So unless the virus interferes, I should not be able to lucid dream.
Now, what do you think happened? Did the virus interfere? Did it help me lucid dream? Yes, and yes. But, what I experienced was far beyond anything I predicted. To say it was extraordinary would be a laughable understatement.
First thing I remember was me standing on the same tree branch, staring on to the planet’s horizon. This was my first experience with dreaming, and my conscious was not aware of it. It’s like suddenly being spawned in a place with no clues or context — you have no idea how you got there, but you don’t have the ability to question it either. Another thing about regular dreams is that it’s annoyingly difficult to recollect, and if I try to explain it, it’s going to sound weird. So, bear with me while I do.
An apple dangled before me all of a sudden. It was not a golden apple. Or maybe it was. But I remember the color red, so I’ll go with the bright red apple for the sake of this explanation. I poked it repeatedly for some reason, and it broke. And from it, a creature emerged. It was either a crow or a rat, let’s go with the crow. It immediately fled, and I ran after it. It led me to a more dark and bleak environment where I saw the first group of red mages I consciously murdered in the eastern forest. They had apple trees grown through their bodies and poking out of their faces, just like I remembered. I approached closer, and they silently crumbled down into fragments of charcoal.
That’s the extent to which I remember that dream. The thing to note here is that this dream was completely natural, like any human beings would experience. Right after that dream ended, I remember blackness surrounding me. When I say ‘remember’, I don’t mean vaguely. I vividly remember myself standing in the middle of absolute blackness where I was the only visible entity. And then this information popped up in my head.
> Level: INFINITE
> Mana Capacity: INFINITE
> Mana Control: POSITIVE
> Skillset: … Seal (Complexity - S , ???) …
> Character Trait: Logical, Malevolent, Opportunistic, Calculating
> State of Mind: Lucid Dreaming
Either I accidentally activated my analysis skill in my sleep, or as per my theory (2-C) the virus interfered to give me lucid control over the dream. If it was a case of the former, then that doesn’t explain my level, mana capacity and control. So yeah, this was the virus’ interference.
With my consciousness restored, I decided to start testing out the limits of this lucid dream. I recollected the events of the battle with Heath. And sure enough, the blackness that surrounded me transformed into the wasteland under the night sky. The scene was exactly how I remembered it to be, to the point where the details were astonishing.
“So, it was you,” I heard Heath speak the words I remembered. He was wearing his white and gold cloak that he introduced himself with. “You’re the one responsible for killing our people in the eastern forest. I’m glad you showed up as I hoped, it’s nice to meet you…” Meanwhile, the dream version of me stood behind a regular apple tree with overgrown branches, without responding. The scene was going exactly how it actually happened, and I was watching it all from a third person POV.
That’s when I noticed something odd. I walked towards the scene, getting closer and closer to the characters. The sicko was standing on the sidelines, incapable of doing anything as the battle raged on between Edith and Heath. It was around the time when Edith shoved a punch to Heath’s face and broke his nose, the sicko just ran off. Away from the warehouse and away from the battle. Nobody noticed him fleeing, which is what I found odd.
Back at the estate, when I tried to recollect whether the sicko had survived the battle or not, I couldn’t find him in my memory. But now I was seeing every step he took as he was fleeing. ‘Pause,’ I spoke through thought, and the scene froze with Edith’s fireball hanging midway between her and her target with the handlebar mustache.
I immediately realized what was going on, but it was technically only a theory. So, I decided to test it and confirm. I walked all the way up to Heath and resumed the scene. Obviously, none of the characters could see or react to me; I was practically non-existent as far as the scene was concerned.
Heath raised his hand to use his magic to counter Edith’s fireball. ‘Slow down,’ I demanded of the dream, and everything was now in slow motion. Following that, I commanded, ‘Make the mana visible to my eyes,’ and white glowing particles clouded several areas of the battlefield, especially exuding out of the Edith and Heath. I further observed to see the flow of mana as Heath performed his cause and effect skill, whose functionality I was yet to understand.
Not only did I figure out how the skill worked, I also pretty much confirmed my theory — I wasn’t in control of this dream. I mean, I was able to control the dream, but not directly. My commands were being executed by the virus instead. That’s why I was able to see things like the sicko fleeing, which I never paid attention to during the battle. Moreover, the whole scene was extremely detailed like I mentioned earlier, which could be explained by the virus recreating this scene based on my command rather than my less detailed visualization.
As for Heath’s skill, it turned out to be very close to what I assumed. He basically uses mana to scan and determine the cause and effect of any physical action, and replicate it on a target. Additionally he can control which of the causes and effects to replicate in what combination, and to what degree to amplify it based on mana input. For example, take the moment he threw an unexpected gust of wind at me and Edith. His mana determined the cause of my breathing, which is inflation and deflation of the lungs. He replicated that effect and targeted it at us after amplifying it like a million times by consuming a ton of his mana.
I took my sweet time analyzing the flow of mana to figure this all out, which made me rather annoyed to find out there was an instant way to acquire details about a skill. I just had to ask the virus for the skill’s pseudocode. Well, there’s no use pondering over it now. So, I shrugged it off and carried on dreaming.
You see, I wanted to first know the extent to which I could make use of this virus-assisted lucid dreaming. That way, I can plan for ways to farm benefits off of it, perhaps even learn to control my strength. And that’s how I quickly realized the sheer extraordinariness of this dream. The so-called extent of this lucid dreaming was non-existent — there was simply no limit to the things I could do in there.
And how did I realize this? It started with me walking away from the battlefield where Heath and the dream version of me were fighting in slow motion. I walked further into Kullu district and soon found a neighborhood. Out of curiosity, I entered and checked the houses. Sure enough, there were people inside. Some were asleep, some were reading, and some were having sex. Don’t label me as a creep just yet, I was checking the people out to see if I would recognize someone. And I did.
I recognized 3 of the people I found in this neighborhood from an hour ago when I was watching people evacuate with the assistance of the city guards. In other words, the people I was seeing in this lucid dream actually exist in the real world despite the fact that I haven’t seen most of them. Furthermore, what I saw them doing is also accurate to what they were actually doing at that time. And yes, that means a couple was really having sex while I was battling Heath less than 2 kilometers away.
Are you seeing what’s extraordinary about this lucid dream yet? If not, let me tell you one more thing I did in that neighborhood. I roamed around and found the bell that was for alerting its residents of an immediate crisis. I physically rang it, and the people within their homes came pouring out, confused by what was happening. Their expression of confusion and the panicked chattering all stopped when the thunder and lightning came. They saw the glowing tree with their jaws dropped as it grew and grew to the size I was familiar with.
This lucid dream wasn’t merely a recreation of my past experience. Rather, it was the entire universe reconstructed at this specific point in time. So, I could go to the Andromeda galaxy and see whatever happened there during the time I was fighting Heath. If that wasn’t incredible enough, I was also able to interfere with the simulation, triggering the butterfly effect. All of this was being done by the virus.
Naturally, I wasted no time to make use of this situation the best I could. And there were quite a few things I managed to pull off. If I were to start explaining each and every one of them, this chapter could go on for a while. So, I’ll just give you a brief rundown.
1) I observed Edith and learned how to fight. Although, it wasn’t simply observation that allowed me to master 27 styles of martial arts; that would have taken way too long. I actually made use of the virus, and commanded it to embed Edith's martial arts knowledge into me. It sounds like bullshit, but it worked. The instincts, muscle memory, techniques, and all else were cleanly transferred over to me.
However, it wasn’t without problems. You see, all the muscle memory and instincts made me hypersensitive to potential threats. And you know what happens when I subconsciously react to threats. So, I reversed some of the effects, I gave up the instincts, muscle memory, and other aspects that made me touchy.
2) I tracked down the 3 remaining Immortals, and studied their skills. ‘Locate humans with S level complexity skill: Immortality. Search radius: the entire planet,’ was the command I thought of, and it revealed me the coordinates of all 6 of them. Ignoring Edith, Devon, and Heath, I teleported to the other 3. Two females and one male.
Unlike the dynamic between Edith and Devon where Edith is the strongest one, it was different among the castaways. Heath and the other male immortal were significantly stronger than the females, which further strengthened my suspicion that perhaps the Omnipotent faced an issue with coding the male robot as the fighter and the female as the supporter.
3) In addition to locating the other 3 immortals, I used them to sharpen my battle skills. I simply made myself visible to them, and repeatedly provoked fights. I won’t lie, I was having a lot of fun kicking their asses while getting super creative with my seed modification skill. Especially with my new athletic capabilities that came along with the martial arts techniques, I fought those 3 with style.
You may be concerned about my dream battle affecting the real world. But rest assured, there is no real danger as long as I’m lucid dreaming with the assistance of the virus. You see, the virus was occupied with listening to my commands and controlling this dream, which confirms that the virus is aware of my lucid dreaming state. So, there’s no reason for it to react to my dream activities in the real world. However, if I’m physically threatened by something in the real world, that’s a different story.
Anyway, that’s about all the things I managed to do during this dream session. Sure, there were plenty of other things I hadn’t tried out. But for one, they weren’t too important or I failed to realize it, two, I didn’t want to spend too much time in the dream, and three, I can lucid dream any time I want so it’s all good anyway. By the way, if you’re wondering why I didn’t just use this opportunity to look into the future and solve all of my problems immediately, the reason is I couldn’t. I mean technically, I could but it’s not as convenient as you think.
You see, the future is solely based on the present point in time. And the number of futures that can be derived from the present are infinitely many, all of which are equally probable. In other words, there’s no way to look into a specific future out of the infinitely many and make my life easier. Furthermore, looking into the future itself will create a recurring loop since there will now be more futures that are derived from the present where I’ll be aware of a particular future. It’s best not to think too much about this stuff. The concept of time travel is riddled with paradoxes, because it’s simply not possible to achieve in a practical way.
‘End simulation,’ I commanded as I was finally ready to wake up. My surroundings returned back to absolute blackness, and I concentrated to allow my consciousness to leave the state of lucid dreaming. I slowly opened my eyelids, and the blackness was replaced with branches and leaves, and the rope that was tied to my hammock.
I remained laying down for a few seconds to allow my brain to get booted up. There was still no sound I could hear other than my own breath, meaning the enchantments were still in effect. I pulled my body and got down from the hammock, on to the giant branch below. “Hm, that’s weird,” I mumbled, seeing the sun setting before me.
With the sun’s orange hue reflecting off my face and irises, I thought to myself, ‘Looks like only a few hours had passed while I was asleep.’ I was so sure that I was asleep for at least 12 hours though. But if only a few hours had passed while I was lucid dreaming… I brought up my palms to my face and triggered the analysis skill.
> Level: 387
> Mana Capacity: 54000
> Mana Control: A+
> Skillset: … Seal (Complexity - S , Activated) …
> Character Trait: Logical, Malevolent, Opportunistic, Calculating
> State of Mind: Thrilled
Is this the best day of my life? With just a few hours I managed to raise my mana control from F to A+? Based on this, I would say the peaceful life I’m aiming for is just around the corner. Wouldn’t you?
I stopped my involuntary release of mana, wearing off the enchantment, and the sounds of thunder returned. After packing up everything I had brought along, I was all set to fly back down and back home. This called for a huge celebration. Moreover, I didn’t have to use the same 3D space navigation skill to get down. With my current mana control, I could develop a proper flight skill. And that’s what I did.
> Skillset: … Flight (Complexity - B+) …
This skill was also quite simple. Just imagine Ironman with a see-through suit. Admittedly, it still burns half the mana required by the 3D space navigation skill, which is a lot. But the important thing is that this skill is more comfortable to use and easy to maneuver.
Still feeling immense amounts of joy, I descended the tree, passing the thunderclouds. And then I saw something that made my smile disappear — a huge wall surrounding the area of the tree that didn’t exist when I went to sleep. There was another thicker wall surrounding the trunk of the tree, which was connected to the outer wall through a roofed pathway. Surely, this couldn't have been built in a few hours.
Maybe, Just maybe… I’ve been asleep for a little longer than that.
​
Chapter notes: Zenith's interference in the lucid dream does not affect the real world. The lucid dream is simply a simulation.

"We'll want to minimize the amount of our tech they can get their hands on before full capitulation," Intelligence Officer Rouel noted. "To go from undetectable from a distance to an orbital communications relay network in only five hundred years suggests a remarkably high innovation score."
​
Admiral Crassock flicked an ear tuft and nodded. "The less we give them to reverse engineer, the less we'll bleed. Are there any other warning flags?"
​
"No, sir," Rouel answered. "They launch their satellites with chemical rockets. Even first generation counter-grav is more cost effective, so we can reasonably assume they don't have it. Since you can't do FTL R&D on a planet's surface without destroying it, no counter-grav means no FTL, which means no reinforcements. A separatist colony would have retained enough tech for an outward facing system defense network; a penal colony would have an inward facing one. Since this system has neither, this must be this species's homeworld."
​
"Has there been any change in the habitability report since the original survey?" the admiral asked. CRX-4 sat right in the sweet spot of the habitability assessment, with most of its landmass in the subtropical zones, but enough temperate and arctic real estate to ensure that over 90% of galactic species could live there with only adornment grade protective clothing. Only a handful of the most extreme outlier species would need more than class three environmental gear to survive somewhere on the planet. The only reason no one had snapped it up when it was first discovered was that its location was simply too remote to be practical. But borders had expanded in the intervening centuries, and now the Wingover Heromancy was close enough to claim the planet and defend that claim against any contenders.
​
"Surprisingly little," the intelligence officer answered. "They must have had their industrial revolution at an atypically low population benchmark, and learned how to clean up after themselves fairly quickly. Another indication that they have an abnormally high innovation score."
​
"What about their physiology?" Admiral Crassock asked. "It won't constrain their combat effectiveness as much as it would for a less innovative species, but it must still influence their tactics."
​
Intelligence Officer Rouel nodded. "Here, we have visuals on them." He flicked a command to the display, but then began reading off the data anyway. "Mammalian bipeds, hair sparse except on the top of the head and a few other locations that vary by individual. Moderate sexual dimorphism--subtle but enough to render co-ed sports competitions impractical for any but strictly recreational purposes. Very conflicting reports on strength and stamina, suggesting that they have a use-it-or-lose-it physiology. Atypically high resting metabolic rates, even for endotherms."
​
"Meaning that a middle of the sleep cycle surprise attack will have to be perfectly executed in order to retain the advantages of a surprise attack?" the admiral interjected.
​
"Precisely," Rouel answered. "Viviparous with a gestational period of nearly a year and roughly two decades to maturity. Birthrate appears to inversely correlate with wealth, which suggests a lack of innate control over their reproduction. It's difficult to determine their typical lifespan--hereditary and environmental factors apparently can alter it by as much as 50%; the current primary suppression of their life expectancy appears to come from a tendency toward extreme recklessness in their adolescent males."
​
"That will make ground combat...interesting..." Admiral Crossack said. "I think i'll tell the training officers to put their most creative minds on designing the practice scenarios for the ground units."
​
"With a combination of innovative and reckless, i'd suggest putting the truly diabolical minds on the air unit training scenarios," Captain Hussend said, his reptilian muzzle parting in a grin of malicious glee.
​
"Looking for an excuse to pull out that black box scenario?" Admiral Crossack asked the captain of his fleet's contingent of planetary troops. Returning his attention to the intelligence officer he asked, "Do we have to worry about attempted MAD?"
​
"FTL research is noisy enough that we'd detect it long before they managed to weaponize it." Rouel answered. "As much easier as that is than using it for travel, it's still far from easy. They do have fission reactors providing some of their power. There's no evidence that they ever tried to weaponize that technology, however; we'd see fallout scars if they'd done any testing. I'd still recommend seizing those nuclear power plants and any fuel processing facilities as quickly as possible."
​
Admiral Crossack nodded. "Unless you find something else before we arrive within targeting range of the planet, i think we'll remain in stealth mode until we're in position to take out all of their satellites simultaneously. Their ground based sensors should be sufficient for them to realize we have orbital superiority. If that isn't enough to make them surrender, it will be Captain Hussend's turn to call the shots. Do we know what they call themselves? If we're going to demand that they surrender sovereignty of their home planet, we can at least do them the courtesy of using their name for it."
​
"They call themselves 'humans'," Intelligence Officer Rouel answered. "The planet they call Ferrari. Oddly, it's the same in all twelve of their languages; perhaps it was inherited from some archaic language that is no longer used."
​
---------------------------------------
​
The initial attack went off perfectly. All of the satellites around Ferrari disintegrated within a few seconds of one another, with no wasted shots from the WHN ships. Almost as soon as they realized that all of their satellite communications were down, the humans began evacuating their civilians toward a series of massive underground bunkers.
​
"I can't tell if that's an overpowered communications laser, or a weapons test modulated to carry data to give them plausible deniability if it fails," the Communications Officer reported when the humans finally replied to the Wingover Heromancy's surrender demands.
​
"Retaliation will make them assume their weapons are strong enough to damage our ships," Captain Hussend predicted.
​
Intelligence Officer Rouel concurred. "My recommendation would be to politely ask them to dial back the power on that laser as it's clearly intended for communication over much longer distances. Imply that it's merely signal degradation due to overexposure, not anything that threatens to actually damage our receiver."
​
Admiral Crossack considered the suggestion for a few moments and then told the communications officer, "Do it."
​
After some negotiation with the humans over optimal signal strength, the transmission settled on the image of a human in what appeared to be their civilian formal wear. "President Chen, of the Faction Arbitration Council," the human identified himself. "Since you're asking for our surrender rather than simply glassing the planet, you must want it intact, which means you're going to have to come down here and take it. It would be easier to negotiate a land for tech swap--except that none of us has the authority to order everyone else to stand down. You'd have to negotiate with each faction separately if you want the whole planet. And since you opened with an attack, even if it was just on infrastructure and not personnel, rather than a diplomatic contact, half of them are going to insist that you're nothing but thieves and bullies, no matter how big an empire you might happen to have behind you.
​
"The short version," President Chen continued. "If you want this planet, you're going to have to come down here and take it."
​
"If we refrain from firing on your evacuating civilians, will you refrain from salting the Ferrari?" Admiral Crossack asked.
​
"Salting the--?" the human President's forehead wrinkled as he tried to puzzle out the phrase. "You mean, 'salting the earth'?"
​
"Isn't that what i said?" Admiral Crossack asked. "I understand that the connotations of synonymous words can vary, but the denotation should be similar enough for understanding. And every terrestrial species calls their planet some cognate of Fertile Soil or Solid Ground. It requires relatively advanced astronomical knowledge to realize that the planet beneath one's feet has anything in common with the wandering stars in the night sky, after all."
​
The human's eyes widened, and then his face went curiously blank. He just figured something out, and he's weighing the tactical considerations against the strategic ones, Rouel guessed silently.
​
"We won't start an atrocity contest as long as you don't," President Chen said. "Not all of our cultures agree on what does and what does not constitute war crimes, but as long as you refrain from targeting civilians and don't use biological or chemical weapons, they should all remain within the parameters of what most warriors consider an acceptable level of occupational hazard."
​
"What's the most common opinion on eating your kills?" Captain Hussend asked, displaying his mouthful of large reptilian teeth.
​
"In extremis only," President Chen answered. "There are a few superstitions that hold that eating hearts or certain other organs can be a way to appropriate your enemy's virtues, but far more of us regard it as a way of declaring your enemy to be an animal rather than a person. Cannibalism as a last ditch alternative to death by starvation will generally be overlooked, but ritual practice is not tolerated."
​
Captain Hussend nodded. "That is a common consensus among most polities and species as well. I suppose that any trophy taking would best be justifiable as preserving DNA samples to determine who is dead and who is missing once the war ends?"
​
"Oh, the nerds are going to love you," President Chen muttered. "Is there anything else we need to discuss, or is it time for you to either reconsider your invasion or else 'bring it on'?"
​
"My troops are already dropping," Captain Hussend answered with another toothy grin.
​
---------------------------------
​
"Woah, hey, there's no need to get nasty," Pedro said as his eyes locked onto the tray of surgical implements. "I'm a civilian. I've got no reason not to spill the beans."
​
"Civilian," the mantis looking interrogator scoffed. "You killed at least forty of our soldiers, and crippled over a dozen more."
​
"I'm just a guy trying to defend his home. If your people had just obeyed the 'no trespassing' signs, nobody would have died," Pedro responded.
​
"In any case, it's your medical condition that's responsible for any nastiness," the interrogator informed the human captive. "The squad that dug you out from under that landslide thought they were recovering a corpse for autopsy. Growing replacement organs for your ruptured ones was straightforward enough, but your species is violently allergic to all of our existing bone glue formulations, so your broken bones are going to have to heal the slow way. I'm told that broken ribs are even more painful than a fractured thoracic plate."
​
"Convenient," Pedro said. "You get to dose me with enough painkillers to keep me from guarding my tongue and still claim you're just trying to help me."
​
"Quite convenient," the interrogator agreed. "Also a useful argument against those who claim that compassion is nothing but a waste of resources. May i have your full name for the next exchange of survival records?"
​
"Pedro Fook. I'm seriously tempted to give you the correct spelling instead of the one English speakers will pronounce correctly, but i'm too tired for that game."
​
The interrogator paused to listen to what the linguist was telling him through his earpiece and then clacked in amusement. "Very droll. I can accept that a civilian would have sufficient motive for attacking our troops, but i find your effectiveness implausible."
​
Pedro answered, "Why? Hunting the free-range livestock gets us kill training. Paintball games give us tactical training against opponents as smart and creative as we are. Wilderness hiking and camping gets us survival training. And VR lets us familiarize ourselves with the stuff that would be too dangerous to do for real."
​
"But how are you coordinating your attacks?" the interrogator asked.
​
"We aren't," Pedro answered. "We're spread out enough that we aren't likely to get in each other's ways; and we all grew up reading the same books, watching the same movies, and playing the same games, so we all have fairly similar ideas as to what tactics are likely to work in what situations. We don't need to win, we just have to keep harassing your people enough to prove we haven't abandoned our claim until the military gets here. If you had a prior claim, you should have planted a flag or left a beacon in orbit or something, so we'd have known we needed to negotiate instead of just moving in."
​
"Habitable planets are far to precious to be left in the hands of those who can't defend them," the interrogator replied. "There are a few interstellar species so xenophobic that they will glass a planet that someone else beat them to. If you can't keep us from taking it when we want to preserve it, you'd have no hope of keeping them from destroying it."
​
"You still could have tried negotiating first and attacking second," Pedro replied angrily. "Counter-gravity tech would be well worth sharing a planet over. Possibly even giving one up if we could have come to an arrangement regarding the people who have put down roots too deep to be willing to move to a different one. Too late for that now, though."
​
"You have no FTL," the interrogator said. "How would you leave, and how could you have come here from somewhere else."
​
"Why do you think we--ohhhhhh..." Pedro suddenly realized, "You never did solve the energy discharge from getting it almost right problem. You had counter-grav, you could just do your research and development in deep space where failures wouldn't destroy your planet. We had to focus on miniaturization instead, so the energy release was small enough to contain, until we could consistently get it right. Then we scaled back up until we had something suitable for a mass transit system. By the way, the emergency evacuation portals can be weaponized, so i'd advise against backing us into any corners. And our home planet isn't on this network, so even if you manage to capture a control unit intact, you can't get all of us!"
​
"Do you know where it is, in spatial terms?" the interrogator asked.
​
Pedro started to shrug and them stopped when his ribs objected. "Galaxy cluster on the other side of the Great Attractor from here, if i remember correctly. We've got at least a hundred planets scattered across a dozen different galaxies, as best the astronomers can tell. There's one that's suspected of not even being in the same universe."
​
"What does Ferrari translate as," the interrogator asked.
​
"Did anyone notice that paved track with the freestanding garage near my house?" Pedro responded. "That car in there, that's a Ferrari."
​
The translator listened to something on his earpiece and then said, "Four-wheeled ground vehicle, internal combustion engine--used for recreational racing?" Getting a nod from Pedro he went on, "The car is named after the planet?"
​
"No," Pedro answered. "The planet was named after the car; the car is named after the guy who founded the company that originally manufactured it. No clue what the etymology on his family name is."
​
"I see," the interrogator said. His insect-like anatomy and stridulatory vocal apparatus didn't prevent him from being noticeably disturbed by what he'd learned.
​
-------------------------------------
​
"But everyone calls their planet 'Dirt'," Admiral Crossack objected once he finished watching the recording of the interview.
​
"But they're not from here," Captain Hussend said. "It would have been obvious, except their method of getting here flies in the face of everything we know about FTL tech. We've got enough seismic surveys now to know those bunkers are nowhere near big enough to hold everyone who went into them. Not even with true stasis tech or physiology that would allow for adult cryofreeze. Can't swear on the former, but we know they don't have the latter."
​
"A pity this Pedro never studied enough physics to explain how their portals work. He can tell us what they do, but not why," Intelligence Officer Rouel said. "They probably sent anyone who did have that knowledge home in the first wave of evacuations. A pity we didn't know to stop them."
​
Captain Hussend disagreed. "Just as well we didn't. If that portal tech really does have the same energy discharge problem as conventional FTL, they have at least planetary, and possibly system scale, MAD. Firing on evacuees would have been a disaster."
​
"And Pedro thinks they've sent enough shuttle parts through that portal for them to reverse engineer the counter-gravity tech," Admiral Crossack said glumly. "Doesn't know enough to guess how long that will take, or which direction they'll try to hit us from once they have it. I suppose i can't really blame him for not bothering to study astrography with the way their portal network ignores physical distance, but it's blasted inconvenient for us."
​
"And President Chen still insists that negotiation is impossible until their military arrives in force--no one currently on planet has the authority or the firepower to force all factions to abide by any agreement," Rouel noted, equally glum. "We need to crack one of those bunkers open, see what's in there."
​
"Already in planning," Captain Hussend said. "And i just ordered it moved to the top of the priority list."
​
That was when the bunkers in question exploded. A number of blunt conical projectiles erupted from each site, propelled by an unholy mixture of chemical rockets and conter-grav.
​
"Those missiles have shields," one of the point defense sensor techs reported.
​
Captain Hussend's pupils went to full dilation and he lunged for the fleet wide communication toggle. "All personnel, stand by to repel boarders. Projectile loadout, not concussion."
​
Admiral Crossack stared at the captain in consternation. "That firefight is going to be a nightmare for damage control."
​
"If they can survive that kind of acceleration," Hussend waved a hand at the display that was tracking the missiles' progress, "and be able to fight afterwards, then while concussion injuries may still be a nightmare for the survivors' nearest and dearest to deal with, they won't do us any good."
​
"Notify me as soon as all of these presumed boarding missiles have either docked or been destroyed," Admiral Crossack told the sensor officer sorrowfully. Then he turned to the main console and began reciting a lengthy series of authorization codes, concluding with, "Assimilator boarding protocol to standby."
​
"You think they're that dangerous, sir?" one of the other ship commanders asked on a private channel.
​
"MAD only works if it truly is mutual," Admiral Crossack explained. "We don't know how many planets these humans have or where they are; we cannot allow them to have that information about ours. A species that scores as high as this one for both aggression and innovation is not something we want to have to fight a defensive war against."
​
Even with the deranged acceleration produced by the hybrid drive systems, it was several long minutes before the boarding missiles began impacting against the orbiting ships. The smaller, faster ships had been sent racing away from Ferrari. Half of them immediately headed to various WHN stations to relay the information acquired so far; half of them loitered on the fringes of the system to see how events played out. The larger ships, however, needed too much time to bring their main engines up to full thrust to escape the attack via distance.
​
The human soldiers from the last of the boarding missiles to arrive were greeted by an automated sounding, "Assimilation boarding protocol activated. Detection of any breaching charge will activate the self-destruct on all WHN ships within one astronomical unit."
​
"What did we do that spooked them that bad?" a human from a different boarding party wondered.
​
"If that translated correctly," the squads senior member answered, "they're using a protocol intended for somebody else. Still, we must have spooked them at least a little to go with one that all-or-nothing."
​
"I'm getting painted with a sensor laser," a third man reported. "Can they eavesdrop on us without cracking the radio encryption?"
​
Admiral Crossack figured it was time to offer his proposal. "If you refrain from penetrating any further into our ships, we will withdraw to the fringes of this system until we can negotiate terms for retrieving our planet-side personnel as well as your own return. We will also order our ground troops to return to and remain in the currently existing fortified positions for so long as there are no attacks on those positions. Is this cease fire acceptable?"
​
"You will refrain from attacking the positions we currently hold?" one of the human boarders asked.
​
"We will," Admiral Crossack answered.
​
"Terms accepted."
​
-----------------------------------
​
Negotiations went as well as could be expected when the humans were reluctant to allow enough Heromancy shuttles near the planet to lift all of their personnel at once and the WHN officers were reluctant to leave a contingent of the size they could lift at one time on the planet alone. The boarding parties, in contrast, had been returned as soon as the humans could satisfy themselves that the shuttle was not booby trapped--neither they nor the WHN was happy about the active self-destruct contingency.
​
Eventually a compromise was reached in which the last of the Heromancy bases on Ferrari was to be converted into an embassy. It wouldn't actually attain that status under Heromancy law until the Council of Winglords formally recognized at least one of the human governments, and required a Winglord's presence to attain at least consulate status--but nothing prevented the humans from granting it formal diplomatic recognition in the meanwhile.
​
President Chen and Admiral Crossack sat facing each other in one of the lounges of the future embassy. "Exactly how much authority do you have to negotiate?" President Chen asked.
​
"Officially, none," Crossack answered. "Treaties must be ratified by the council and negotiated by a Winglord. Unofficially, i should be able to give you reliable guidance as to what terms will be acceptable and what will not. How much of a courtship dance will be required to get those terms accepted, i can't guess until i know which Winglord will be conducting the official negotiations."
​
"Seems strange to give you the authority to start a war, but not to finish it," Chen observed.
​
"Ordinarily," Crossack explained, "a Winglord would have been dispatched as soon as we realized the situation was anomalous. However, they happen to be in the middle of the once a decade Grand Conclave, the one time when Winglords whose disputes cannot be reconciled by legal means are permitted to seek normally illegal forms of redress. Any Winglord not participating still wants to be there to keep an eye on those who are."
​
"Normally illegal...such as dueling?" Chen guessed.
​
"Precisely. I was able to attend the last Conclave, and the preparation rituals, intended to preclude cheating, are so humiliating that it can be safely assumed that the participants were not going to be satisfied by anything less than blood." Crossack added, "Technically it's not limited to Winglords, but the requirements for ordinary citizens to challenge anyone are much more stringent. The conventional wisdom is that the less one has to lose, the less likely one is to be deterred by death and dishonor."
​
"Hmm, i suppose i can see the logic in that." A communication device pinged, and President Chen looked at the display. "What is a Voice, among your people?"
​
Admiral Crossack's ear tufts straightened. Finally, for good or for ill, he would know what was to be. "Both a courier and a seal of authentication. They make no decisions, but they speak with the authority of the full Council of Winglords. They are generally superlative specimens of species that have powers of persuasion or coercion, which is another reason they are so rigorously trained to be bearers of law only and never lawgivers."
​
"I see," Chen said slowly. "If she's coming with an arrest warrant, like you were speculating about a few days ago, we're willing to offer you asylum."
​
"I find exile more unpalatable than death and dishonor combined, but i am honored by your willingness to have me," Admiral Crossack said. "I am a bit puzzled by it, however. I was the one who ordered the attack on your world, after all."
​
President Chen shrugged. "You only fought with those who wanted to fight, and the conter-grav tech we captured is more than adequate compensation for the infrastructure damage. And the special ops teams that boarded your ships were flattered by the fact that you felt you had to pull out your worst case scenario contingency to stop them. The penultimate contingency apparently wasn't good enough. Er, i hope that was your worst case contingency."
​
"Worst case for contingency triggers," Crossack agreed. "There's self-destruct every ship in the system now, and trigger a system sterilizing solar flare, but those are direct triggers, and the latter is for scenarios that so far remain purely hypothetical. And the problem was that your people only needed to capture one ship, while i had to keep every single one out of their hands."
​
"Your people haven't figured out that the counter to a gray goo scenario is to build nannites that eat nannites?" Chen asked rhetorically. "What are the Assimilators, anyway?"
​
"The reason we don't do implanted technology unless there's no viable alternative medically and keep augmented reality to the absolute minimum needed for non-lethal training," Crossack said. "As best anyone has been able to tell, the Assimilators started as a faction in a VR role playing game. Somewhere along the line the species that originally created the game switched from external device full immersion VR to cyborg tech augmented reality and the players started LARPing. Sometime after that, they stopped their practice of only cyborg modding volunteers who wanted to join their club and started modding anyone they could catch."
​
Crossack grimaced and continued, "As long as they needed a full surgical suite to perform the modifications, they were strictly a law enforcement problem. Unfortunately, before the last of them could be hunted down, they got their hands on some kind of replicant nano-tech that lets them infiltrate a neural link into a person without that person's knowledge."
​
"There's no such thing as a person with a direct brain-computer interface who isn't one of these Assimilators," Chen asked for clarification.
​
"No," Crossack sighed. "Any network they manage to link into, any person directly connected to that network immediately gets converted. How they do it, we're not sure; the leading hypothesis is that they've managed to create a computer-based intelligence with persuasive or coercive powers of a type and power that require a person to either take the Voice's Oath or else accept lifetime quarantine. But we just don't know. The good news is that as long as you keep your tech at arms length, it's perfectly safe, or at least they can't do anything that a conventional hacker couldn't. But it does mean that we can't infiltrate their network to figure out what in the seven blue perditions is going on with them. There are some aspects of a neural link that an external interface just can't mimic."
​
"That could be a problem," President Chen said. "Thankfully, we can't run cable through a portal--it gets cut anytime there's a power blip--but we've got way too many people with medical implants. Your people don't happen to know how to repair spinal cord injuries, do they?"
​
"Some species yes, others no," Crossack answered. "In our efforts to provide medical care to POWs of your species, we found that the treatment had to be provided immediately to be effective, and that which treatment protocol would work varied by both the cause of the damage and idiosyncratic factors. We had to guess right on the first try for treatment to work."
​
"Figures," Chen said. "Any vaccine for their nannite infiltrators?"
​
"A vaccine...for nannites?" Crossack asked in surprise.
​
"Why not?" Chen asked. "Any sufficiently advanced nano-tech is indistinguishable from biology; so why not borrow a page from the bio-control handbook?"
​
"I don't believe there's any such thing," Crossack answered slowly. "Many species can induce sufficient sensitivity to trigger a lethal allergic reaction, but that means walking around with a lethal allergy to many common structural and medical materials."
​
"That would be problematic," Chen agreed. "I need to pass this information about the Assimilators along as quickly as possible. Excuse me for a few minutes."
​
"Of course," Admiral Crossack said. Once President Chen had left the room he stood and began pacing. Curiously, knowing that a Voice was en route and that he would not have to wait much longer to have his hopes and fears regarding his future resolved was making the delay harder rather than easier to endure. After a few laps of failed attempts to resign himself to further waiting, he went to the door and asked the officer guarding it to find out how soon the Voice was expected to arrive.
​
"The Voice's shuttle has landed and the humans are trying to figure out what size and type of escort is appropriate to her rank," the officer reported. Then he blinked and flicked his tail in confusion. "Sir, a Voice is her own escort, isn't she?"
​
"The humans don't know that. A Voice speaks with the authority of the full Council of Winglords, but the humans have no official relationship to the Wingover Hegemony until the Voice delivers her words--assuming she has been given words to that effect."
​
"Precisely, Winglord Crossack."
​
Crossack turned to face the new arrival. The female was tall and so ethereally slender that she was nearly translucent. "Voice Laurelliana," Admiral Winglord Crossack said, having met this particular Voice before. He started to bow, but then the implications of her greeting caught up to him and his ear tufts straightened so hard they nearly snapped. "Wait, what--?"
​
"For recognizing that the impossible was possible in time to avert disaster, for valuing the welfare of the Heromancy above your own pride, for a lifetime of exemplary service, you have been granted the title of Winglord and a seat on the counsel."
​
Admiral Winglord Crossack needed some time to reply as he first had to persuade his throat to stop trying to swallow itself. At last he said, "I am well aware of how badly things could have gone if i had been any slower to admit that the humans must have some other, unknown means of bridging the distance between worlds--but i would have thought that barely enough to buy me an honorable retirement, given that i lost a war i chose to initiate. Then too, i would never have arrived at that understanding so quickly without Captain Hessend and Intelligence Officer Rouel, and their many subordinates who had the wisdom to recognize which reports required immediate attention."
​
"You followed standard procedure to the letter until it was made clear that you were not dealing with the kind of situation which that procedure was intended to cover. You therefore cannot be faulted for initiating the conflict. You were also able to admit that the inconceivable had occurred. To not only be able to stretch your thinking to accommodate what was previously unknown and unimagined, but to do so in time to keep defeat from becoming disaster--this is a capacity much needed in a Winglord, and rarest to find. Many prepare for the impossible; but how can anyone prepare for what he cannot imagine?"
​
Crossack nodded, conceding the point, and the Voice continued, "Many admirals find it almost physically painful to yield overall command to the captain of their ground forces and be relegated to providing fire support. Many of those who have no difficulty yielding command are reluctant to reclaim it when the priority returns to space-side operations, preferring to avoid responsibility. But you have never shown any hesitation in either direction, preferring to let the responsibility rest where it can best be fulfilled."
​
Crossacck shifted and flicked an ear tuft and said, "It helps that i trust Captain Hessend's judgement."
​
"And you never once have tried to claim the credit for your subordinate's efforts," Voice Laurelliana smiled at Crossack.
​
"Eh, stolen honor is not," Crossack replied.
​
"Many say it," the Voice said. "Few live it. The appropriate commendations for those you cited credited with identifying the anomalies here have already been issued. The Vaerins claim to have solved the regeneration resistance problem in draeliks; if Hero Hessend chooses to risk the as yet inadequately tested treatment, the Council will cover his expenses."
​
Hero fits a lot better on him than Winglord sits on me, Crossack thought. "I can't predict whether Hero Hessend will take that offer. He keeps his own counsel when it comes to his injuries."
​
"Is something wrong?" Voice Laurelliana asked President Chen, who'd returned partway through her conversation with Crossack and had been staring at her ever since.
​
"You look much like the description of some of our more insidious legends," Chen told her bluntly. "As unlikely as it is to be anything other than coincidence, it is still difficult to keep the resemblance from inducing significant levels of paranoia."
​
"At least you prefer to lance the boil at once rather than dance around the issue while it festers ever deeper," Laurelliana said, dropping her gaze to indicate that she was speaking as herself and not as a Voice. "Long and long ago, or so it is said, while we were still planet-bound, mine and certain of the other will-bending species dealt with those who abused their powers by exiling them to another world. Your portal network suggests that this is not so impossible as we had thought. If your species has suffered from predation by one of our outcasts, i wouldn't blame you for being paranoid where my kind is concerned."
​
"The conspiracy nuts are going to have fun when they hear that," Chen said with a sigh.
​
Voice Laurelliana lifted her head again. "The council wishes to extend formal diplomatic recognition to your people, but we are suffering from some confusion as to which entity we should be extending that recognition to. Some clarification as to your political structure is needed."
​
"Ah," President Chen said. "I can see how it might. Each of the factions on this planet is considered a sovereign nation, although they're a bit more easy-going about their borders than was, or for that matter still is, customary back on earth. The Faction Arbitration Council is precisely what the name says, a neutral forum in which the factions can hash out their differences and save face by accepting a compromise suggested by a neutral party instead of their opponent. We have no real authority, but we do provide a place where you can address all of the factions at once."
​
"It sounds as though you have all of the responsibility of a Winglord, and none of the power," Voice Laurelliana said.
​
Chen shrugged. "I may only have the authority of a debate moderator, but most of the time that's all i need. As for the times when it is not sufficient, well, the prospect of imminent destruction tends to have a remarkably clarifying effect on everyone's priorities."
​
"I suppose it would," the Voice said. "Whose military did you call in?"
​
"The Liberation Hegemony doesn't claim sovereignty over any but it's native States, but they do provide military protection and economic assistance to anyone who abides by what they regard as the minimum standard of human rights. Which usually works out in practice to 'you can have whatever laws you want as long as you make it easy for people who don't like your laws to leave'. Which is why you never see a planet on the Hegemony network with fewer than seven factions--easy to leave requires that there be a compatible place for you to go."
​
"So we can treat with your Faction Arbitration Counsel as a planetary power, and this Liberation Hegemony as a regional one?" Voice Laurelliana asked, and then added "--to the extent that that's a coherent concept with the way your portal network allegedly ignores distance."
​
"Yes," President Chen said. "There's also the Golden Bureaucracy Bloc. Don't buy anything from them without reading the fine print, and never take out a loan from them. The only reason they aren't ruling us all is that the Hegemony is perfectly willing to apply Alexander's solution to Gordian red tape."
​
"Cultural reference," the Voice said. "Not clear from context."
​
"Sorry," President Chen replied. "Gordias was some guy who tied a really complicated knot and said that the man who untied it would rule the world. Alexander came by a while later, looked it over, and used his sword to cut it apart. After he went on to conquer a larger chunk of the world in less time than anyone before him, the locals where Grodias left the knot decided that this counted as 'untying' it."
​
"So keep it simple, and in good faith, when dealing with the Hegemony, because you never know what they might decide is underhanded enough to void the contract?" Crossack guessed.
​
"This system of yours...works?" the Voice asked uncertainly.
​
"As well as anything else we've tried," Chen answered. "Mostly due to the fact that most of us have gotten too lazy to want to bother proving that we could run other people's lives better than they can. MAD helps keep the peace, too, of course. Although, the fact that exile is always an option does tend to leave people favoring lethal forms of self-defense."
​
"Now that would explain a lot," Winglord Crossack said. "I should go mention that detail to Hero Hessend--he's a bit sore over the fact that it was your civilians bleeding his men so hard."

Useless Facts 1. Rubber bands last longer when refrigerated. 2. No number from one to 999 includes the letter “a” in its word form. 3. Edgar Allan Poe married his thirteen-year-old cousin. 4. Jupiter is twice as large as all the other planets combined. 5. The Super Soaker was designed and invented by a NASA engineer. 6. Flamingos can only eat with their heads upside down. 7. Salt used to be a currency. 8. Alaska is the only state whose name is on one row on a keyboard. 9. There are only four words in the English language which end in “dous”: tremendous, horrendous, stupendous, and hazardous. 10. There are 32 muscles in a cat’s ear. 11. The chicken and the ostrich are the closest living relatives of the Tyrannosaurus rex. 12. Junk food is as addictive as drugs. 13. The largest bill to go into circulation in the United States was a $10,000 note. 14. In most advertisements, including newspapers, the time displayed on a watch is 10:10. 15. A cubic inch of human bone can bear the weight of five standard pickup trucks.
More Useless Facts Comin’ Up! 16. A dragonfly has a lifespan of only one day. 17. Honey is the only food that does not spoil. 18. Toy Story helped sell the Etch-a-Sketch. 19. Four out of five children recognize the Mcdonald’s logo at three years old. 20. Barbie and Ken broke up in 2004. (Don’t worry. They got back together in 2011.) 21. One single teaspoon of honey represents the life work of 12 bees. 22. It’s impossible to tickle yourself. 23. It’s also impossible for you to lick your own elbow. 24. Venus is the only planet that rotates clockwise. 25. Pope John Paul II was an honorary Harlem Globetrotter. 26. Mulan has the highest kill-count of any Disney character. 27. 3.6 cans of Spam are consumed each second. 28. The average American looks at eight houses before buying one. 29. Chalk is edible. 30. Most pandas in the world are on loan from China.
Even More Useless Facts 31. Oreo has made enough cookies to span five back and forth trips to the moon. 32. Dr. Seuss invented the word “nerd.” 33. A giraffe can go longer without water than a camel can. 34. Due to a genetic defect, cats can’t taste sweet things. 35. Queen Elizabeth II is a trained mechanic. 36. Cap’n Crunch’s full name is Captain Horatio Magellan Crunch. 37. Al Capone’s business card said he was a used furniture dealer. 38. The average American spends about 2.5 days a year looking for lost items. 39. Apple seeds contain cyanide. 40. The only real person to be a Pez head was Betsy Ross. 41. Montpelier, Vermont, is the only U.S. capital without a McDonald’s. 42. There’s a city called “Rome” on every continent except Antarctica. 43. There are around 16 million people alive today that are direct descendants of Genghis Khan. 44. Peanuts are one of the ingredients of dynamite. 45. Your body contains about 100,000 miles of blood vessels. 46. Alfred Hitchcock didn’t have a bellybutton. 47. A blob of toothpaste is called a nurdle. 48. If you plug your nose, you can’t tell the difference between an apple, a potato, and an onion. 49. Most babies are conceived in December. 50. A group of hippos is called a “bloat.”
And Still More Useless Facts 51. Slinkies are 82 feet long. 52. Most car horns are in the key of F. 53. New Jersey grows two-thirds of the world’s eggplants. 54. Almonds are members of the peach family. 55. Riding roller coasters can help you pass kidney stones. 56. Marie Curie’s 100-year-old belongings are still radioactive. 57. About 11,000 Americans injure themselves while trying out weird sexual positions per year. 58. Americans eat enough burgers each year to circle the earth over 32 times. 59. There are 293 ways to make a change for a dollar. 60. Pogonophobia is the fear of beards. 61. You spray 2.5 drops of saliva per word. 62. Mary Shelley allegedly lost her virginity on her mother’s grave. 63. If you open your eyes in a pitch-black room, the color you’ll see is called “eigengrau.” 64. A shark is the only animal that can blink both its eyes. 65. An ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain. 66. Barbie’s full name is Barbara Millicent Roberts. 67. If your stomach doesn’t produce a new layer of mucus every two weeks, it will digest itself. 68. Every time you lick a stamp, you consume one-tenth of a calorie. 69. The average person falls asleep in seven minutes. 70. Most American car horns honk in the key of F. 71. 101 Dalmatians, Peter Pan, Lady and the Tramp, and Mulan are the only Disney cartoons where both parents are present and don’t die throughout the movie. 72. A pig’s orgasm lasts for 30 minutes. 73. To escape the grip of a crocodile’s jaws, push your thumbs into its eyeballs. It will let you go instantly. 74. In 1912, a law passed in Nebraska where drivers in the country at night were required to stop every 150 yards, send up a skyrocket, and wait eight minutes for the road to clear before proceeding cautiously, all the while blowing their horn and shooting off flares. 75. More Monopoly money is printed in a year, than real money throughout the world.
Useless Music Facts 76. Finland has the most metal bands per capita. 77. According to research, fans of classical music and those who love heavy metal have shown to have similar personalities. 78. Singing in a group boosts morale. 79. In 1993, Rod Stewart hosted the largest free concert. 80. Somali pirates have such a hatred for Western culture, that the British Navy uses music from Britney Spears to scare them off. 81. Metallica is the only band to have played on all seven continents. (Yes, including Antarctica.) 82. Music has some pretty interesting effects on living things. It makes plants grow faster and cows produce more milk. 83. In 2016, Mozart sold more CDs than Beyonce. 84. Prince is credited with playing 27 different instruments on his debut album. 85. In 2015, Astronaut Chris Hadfield released an album while still in space. 86. Listening to music can improve your physical performance. (This could mean in the gym or between the sheets.)
Useless Facts About Women 87. Women make up 70 percent of the population that lives in “absolute poverty.” That means they live on less than $1.00 a day to survive. 88. Women hiccup less than men. (If you live with a dude who scarfs dinner in three bites and then has massive hiccup attacks, you’ll understand this better.) 89. The two highest IQ scores in history both belonged to women. (Honestly, we’re not surprised.) 90. Know the name Ada Lovelace? You should! She was the very first computer programmer. 91. Roughly six to 10 percent of incarcerated women are pregnant. 92. The WHO reports that one in five girls report being sexually abused before the age of 15. 93. Women see more colors than men. 94. It’s been calculated that the average woman will “eat” about four pounds of lipstick throughout the course of her life. Blech! 95. Every 90 seconds, a woman dies during pregnancy or childbirth. (The numbers climb steeper among women of color.) 96. Studies found that women also have a more heightened sense of smell.
Other Useless Facts 97. The country of Russia is bigger than Pluto. 98. Women have more tastebuds than men. So there you go, a reason for why women deserve chocolate more than men do. 99. Many oranges are actually green. 100. The opposite sides of a die will always add up to seven. 101. Playing dance music can help ward off mosquitoes. 102. The King of Hearts is the only king in a deck of cards without a mustache. 103. “Dreamt” is the only word in the English language that ends with “mt.” 104. A Greek-Canadian man invented the “Hawaiian” pizza. 105. It’s possible to turn peanut butter into diamonds. 106. A “jiffy” is about one trillionth of a second. 107. Dragonflies have six legs but can’t walk. 108. Linda Lou Taylor of Indiana holds the Guinness World Record for the most married person. She’s been married 23 times. 109. Joel Waul of Lauderhill, Florida won a Guinness World Record for the largest rubber ball coming in at 8,200-pound. 110. The world’s most expensive dessert from New York City’s Serendipity 3 cafe came in at a whopping $25,000. 111. You are 13.8 more likely to die on your birthday than any other day, something William Shakespeare can relate to. 112. Animals that lay eggs don’t have belly buttons. 113. Mosquitoes are attracted to people who just ate bananas. 114. Emus and kangaroos cannot walk backward. 115. Children tend to grow faster in the spring. 116. On average a human being will spend up to two weeks kissing in his/her lifetime. 117. Rhubarb can spring up so fast that you can actually hear it grow.
Useless Facts About Food 118. Due to their high oil content and lower water content, pistachios are prone to self-heating. In fact, if transported in large groups, they can spontaneously combust! 119. In the Middle Ages, black pepper was considered a luxury. It was even used to pay rent and taxes on occasion. 120. In 1965, astronaut John Young snuck a corned beef sandwich into space for a six-hour mission. Spoiler alert? The sammie didn’t do well in the zero-gravity environment. 121. The oldest known soup recipe dates back to 6,000 B.C. Among the ingredients? Hippopotamus and sparrow meat. 122. In the 1830s, ketchup was used medicinally. 123. The number of hot dogs consumed on the Fourth of July could stretch from Washington, D.C., to Los Angeles… five times over. (Cue Legally Blonde quote: “You look like the Fourth of July — it makes me want a hot dog real bad!”)
Useless Facts About Space 124. Space is completely, totally, and utterly silent. 125. No one knows just how many stars are in space. 127. A NASA spacesuit costs a cool $12,000,000. 128. The footprints made on the moon will be there for 100 million years. 129. Scientists have found a mass of water vapor cloud 10 billion light-years away from earth that is 140 trillion times the mass of water on Earth’s surface. 130. The moon was once a piece of the Earth.

Lifecycle Of Sloppy's Thinking (LOST)

1. Science Experiment: Tadpoles enter the baby-cave and conduct an egg hunt.
2. Alien Squirrel: Fatherly observation of first ultrasound. It's certainly not a human, yet.
3. Baby-Cave Dweller: Okay, now I am starting to believe the bowling-ball-belly is harboring a human fugitive.
4. Crib-Midget: No need to put a roof on the prison (Crib); The human is too small to escape.
5. Terrorist-Toddler: This humanoid can escape, and believes the chemical-cocktails under the sink are the Holy Grail of baby formula.
6. Mini-Human: Not a baby anymore, but not an adult either. It's now a medium-sized ball of chaos that is crotch-tall.
7. Tweenorist: Preteen sized terrorist. It "knows" things now, and constantly questions parental guidance.
8. Master Bates: Demands respect because they are "almost" an adult. They believe being taller than their four foot and eleven inch tall mother gives them superpowers. They eventually figure out that wooden spoons can be used for more than cooking applications. They believe deodorant is optional, but know how to extract the cream filling from their love-log. They are gross, and smelly creatures.

Dear Reader, I may have missed some prudent life-stages in my fictionary list, but I assume you get the point. Life is a constant transformation, and the final destination is the same for everyone. Life, is merely a journey to death. Nobody is going to outlive that inevitability. I simply wish for my ride to be an insanely wild, and incredible journey. I hope to drag my broken body across that finish line and ask Saint Peter if I got the High Score!
"Tempus Fugit," is Latin for "time flies. Our perception, or sense of time speeds as we age, and that sucks. Fugit though! I know there are numerous Fuckers whom have questioned, "Where did the time go?" It can be a sobering and powerful revelation.
PAUSE
Dear Reader, I had to take a moment to reflect. I wrote, "Where did the time go?" and then I started to ponder that very question. Where did it go? I still vividly remember numerous childhood moments, but life becomes a blur upon entering adulthood. I can clearly recall some more notable adulthood moments, but I credit the remembrance to my adolescent brain. The "in-between" adulthood moments are simply a blur. Why do I feel as if time is exponentially increasing?
Dear Reader, it's not! Time is a constant and our geriatric brain is playing tricks on us. Imagine being ten years old again. Time was likely mentally perceived as this slow moving object. Why? Cake and Kelly, my offspring, provide an entirely different perspective of time with regards to our human lifecycle. Ten years is approximately twenty-five percent of my life. However, ten percent is nearly ninty-one percent of Cake's life, and sixty-two percent of Kelly's life. That's pretty significant. One year is nearly ten percent of Cake's life, but it is nothing more than a drop in the bucket for me. Time is not flying, it's simply more valuable.
Time is precious Dear Reader. I don't care if it's one day or one year, time is a precious gift. We are bound to have both good and bad days, but I implore you to hunt that laugh. Thanks for riding in the Rant On Tale (ROT). There was a purpose to the ROT, and I will now disembark the Rantmobile, and get on with the story.
It is amazing how I have slowly morphed into this thing I swore I would never become, my Father.
Generally Energetic Narcissistic and Ignorantly Useless Sloppy (GENIUS) Circa 1996
Father: The Tiger Lilies look gorgeous this year!
Sloppy: What?
Father: The Tiger Lilies I planted. They look wonderful.
Sloppy: They're flowers.
Father: They're pretty flowers though.
Sloppy: Who gives a fuck about flowers!?!
Father: (Smile) Maybe you will? Someday!?!
The old man was off his rocker, and I thought he was clueless. My Drill Sergeants were fairly accurate with their initial assessment and on multiple occasions stated I was, "Young, dumb, and full of cum." I was a GENIUS when I enlisted in the United States Army, and the Four W's were my only concern. Women, Whiskey, Weights, and War. The order would change, and I eventually reduced four to three when I found the princess whom is willing to endure my particular brand of crazy. I still didn't give a shit about fucking Tiger Lilies though!
That was then! Let me tell you about my life now. "I ain't as good as I once was, but I am as good once, as I ever was." Thank you Toby Keith for articulating my life in a nutshell. I have the occasional back problems, but I am still a physical monster. The type of "work" has changed over the past year though. My previous "work" was rifle produced flash photography of sorts. My "work" now is more "Happy Wife, Happy Life" related. I still don't particularly care about Tiger Lilies, but I do care about their survival.
Sloppy Tip On Proficiency (STOP)
*Read The Fucking Labels
Full-Shade: Do not plant these plants in Full-Sun locations.
Full-Sun: Do not plant these plants in Full-Shade locations.
No, I still don't particularly care about flowers or plants, but I am not a fan of pissing away four-hundred dollars of plants I killed. I care the same about the plants as I do Kelly and Cake; I don't care if they are pretty, but I want them to live.
My days are divided between two factors: Business and Pleasure. I spend the majority of my day completing business related chore(s) and task(s). I then transition to pleasure related chore(s) and task(s) that provide me with indescribable gratification. I have fallen behind and I am still performing business related activities, specifically Christmas decorating.
Wife: I wish you had some Holiday Spirit.
Sloppy: My Holiday "Spirit" is bourbon!
Wife: (Scowl)
Sloppy: Are you asking me to start drinking at nine? I will.
Wife: (More Scowl)
My wife LOVES Christmas. I don't particularly care for Christmas, and I have my reasons. I have sixty-seven first cousins on my Father's side alone. The Family Christmas on my Father's side was a tornado of assholes and elbows during the unwrapping of presents. My Grandparents would give Aunts and Uncles twenty dollars for each Grandchild. Most parents, such as mine, would buy a thoughtful gift for twenty dollars. Other Aunts and Uncles would add hundreds of dollars to the twenty dollar amount as a means to tangibly display how much more Grandma and Grandpa love MoMo McFucko over Sloppy. Christmas were less about giving and more about receiving on my Father's side of the family.
My dis-concern for Christmas was only amplified due to my profession. My first three Christmas' in the Army were split-custody arrangements between Afghanistan and Iraq. I found that I was less concerned with Holiday Joy when people were actively trying to kill me. I am not a Grinch though. My children, and their happiness, slowly changed my perception of the importance of Christmas. Simply, a happy Cake is not a murderous Cake.
Here is my problem Dear Reader, decorating. I understand that "Me Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus." I have personally never visited Venus, but I surmise Christmas is a big fucking deal there. Please, I ask you to venture a guess as to how many Christmas Trees are at the Sloppy house?
Sloppy Is Xany

1. Department Store Christmas Tree: This particular tree is approximately nine feet tall, and is perfectly decorated, and likely stolen from a Department Store. It only took three hours to assemble and decorate too. I spent no less than one hour untangling lights and screaming profanities only to figure out that half the lights refused to provide Christmas Joy.
2. Pink Tree: The tree is pink and has more glitter than a well-oiled stripper. Don't use Cucumber-Melon hand lotion before assembling this tree or the Wife will accuse you of going to a strip club. The tree is an homage to her recently passed mother, and is full of pink flamingos and more fucking glitter.
3. Hawkeye Tree: This tree is a six feet tall and black like my heart. My Mother has kidnapped Cake, is devoid of commonsense, and continually insists that I knew a recently deceased human, but gifts me a new Hawkeye ornament each year. This is my favorite tree to assemble and is without glitter.
4. Cake's Tree: It looks like a mini-tree, but it can be a handheld weapon when needed.
5. Kelly's Tree: Nothing special, but it is tree number five.
6. First Tree: This is our first Christmas Tree. It's more Charlie Brown looking, and it is the reason I will meet u/itsallalittleblurry In Real Life (IRL). No, we have not organized a IRL meeting, but this tree is a fire hazard. u/itsallalittleblurry and I will toast our first warm beer together after we extinguish the flames, but only after they spread to the neighbors house. The red lights from the fire engine should provide holiday ambiance as we drink next to the warm heap of ashes that was my house.

Six Christmas Tree's Dear Reader. I miscalculated and thought I would be Mission Complete on Operation DICK (Decorating Is Causing Killjoy) last weekend. I sincerely believed I would arrive at Operation Pleasure: Airblown Inflatable. Dear Reader, I will not fail and you will have your picture. What's the different between a Snowman and Snowlady? Snowballs! I have snowballs Dear Reader, but today is not the time to scale the roof and erect a nine foot tall helicopter with two spinning rotor blades, and three Assaulting Small Skeletons (ASSs)
The weather is not being supportive today, and I don't feel like explaining shingle road-rash, and broken snowballs to the Emergency Room (ER) physician. I take solace in the fact that Ken and Karen have likely assumed my Fuck-Fuck game is over. I don't forget. I will falter nor fail. You will have a picture or video of an over-sized helicopter providing Christmas Joy to the Sloppy house. I have been mentally preparing for our verbal jousting match too. I anticipate it goes something like this...
Has Not Happened Yet
Karen: You're Christmas decorations are horrible!
Sloppy: You're just made that Santa never lands at your house.
Karen: You're trash. Just trash.
Sloppy: Did you know my Children thought Ken was Santa Claus when we first moved in?
Karen: WHAT?
Sloppy: Don't worry. I told them that Santa only comes once a year, but Ken never Cums (Comes)!
Karen: Just TRASH.
Again, the confrontation has yet to happen, but I know it will. I will continue to develop scenarios in my head, but I am pretty decent on the spot too. My brain works in mysterious ways, but I think I have a solid grasp on the time old art of Fuck-Fuck.
Dear Reader, this is my life story thus far. I have a few stories I need to edit, and then post. I will be writing about John again. John is the guy that "shit on the floor" at Basic Training. It's a great story, but I honestly believe this forthcoming story is much better. I also have a nearly developed story regarding Cake. I am still fact-finding though. I have yet to decide if he is truly that brilliant, or ignorantly naive. I honestly fear it's brilliance, and I don't know how a parent goes about having a sex toy conversation. Let's just pray it's a "neck massager" though.
Lastly, and I am serious! Please take a moment to be kind and help our fellow humans out. Happiness and laughter can be contagious, and I want to ensure I do my part to spread it. I will leave you with a Holiday Jingle I heard when I was no older than ten. It's short, but you may get a little giggle, and that's enough for me.
Old Saint Nick had a ten foot dick,
So he showed it to the lady next door,
She thought it was a snake,
And Chopped with with a rake,
So now it's only five foot four!
​
Cheers,
Sloppy
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​
​

Hello everyone, Hope you're all having a wonderful day! I'd like thank you all for supporting this series, it really motivates me to write. With that said, hope you enjoy this chapter.
Go to the first chapter: click here [OR] In case you missed the previous chapter: click here
Synopsis: The main character is unquestionably the most powerful character in all of fiction. That's all you need to know.
Chapter 10 - Is this the best day of my life?
When you have an inseparable God virus in your body like I do, dreaming can go one of two ways. Either the virus reacts to the dream as it would react to conscious behavior, or it will be aware that its host is dreaming and attempt to interfere. I thought about it and found more than enough reasons to believe in the latter theory. But that raised another question — in what way will it interfere?
A) Because dreams are a side effect to a natural brain activity during REM sleep, the virus will remove that side effect, preventing me from dreaming.
B) The virus will try to communicate with me, or vice versa.
C) The virus will give me lucid control over the dream, and since the virus is going to be involved, the experience will be somehow more exceptional than regular lucid dreaming.
Analyzing these theories any further would be a waste of time, so I decided to put it in practice. But in the unlikely event that the virus is going to burn down the kingdom while I'm asleep, I knew I had to take measures to avoid that.
So, I stopped by the inn after reverting the color of my hair and eyes. Yes, I mean ‘stopped by’ because I wasn’t going to do something dangerous like ‘sleeping’ in my own room, that would be crazy. You see, I had another destination in mind. It’s just that some preparations were in order before I headed there.
The blanket we had on our bed was the first thing I took, securing a fairly comfortable surface to sleep on. I folded it and tucked it away in an empty leather bag. I also needed a rope, which I couldn’t find in the room. ‘I guess I’ll just buy one on the way,’ I said to myself and resumed packing. Next set of items were a blank notebook, a quill and a bottle of ink. Because, in case my dreams end up being completely ordinary, I wanted to take notes of what I could recollect after waking up; since dreams are normally easy to forget.
For the last item I needed, I began preparing some UU enchantments. If you remember, UU enchantments are based on magnetically coded instructions electronically translated and converted into magic skills. Therefore, it doesn’t require the ‘enchanter’ to have an associated enchantment skill. Basically, I was manually encoding binary instructions into magnetic disks.
Knock! Knock!
“I have brought you tea, lord Zenith,” the innkeeper’s muffled voice came through the closed door. She apparently saw me enter the inn and prioritized on preparing me tea.
“Come in,” I replied loud enough for her to hear. I remained occupied with coding, as she opened the door and walked up to the coffee table behind me. “Leave it here,” I said, referring to the study table by which I was working. Obediently, she brought it to my side and poured the tea from the kettle into the cup.
“Lord Zenith, as you requested, the rumors about non-believers and ill-intended people being smitten by the one true God is being spread around. It was just as you predicted. We all received the news about the giant apple tree in the Kullu district, and now this whole city is talking about it in relation with the rumors.”
“Very good,” I didn’t take my eyes away from the task I was doing.
She set the tea cup and coaster off the tray and comfortably within my reach on the table. “I shall take your leave then,” she said and proceeded out.
Before she got to the door, I called out to her. “Oh and could you bring me two sets of ropes? Maybe also something sharp to cut it with.”
…
I boarded a shared carriage to get to my destination. I wanted to board a private one, but they were all pre-booked. The shared carriage was not too bad though, especially because I paid the coachman for an extra seat. You see, with shared carriages, you have to wait until a certain amount of time or a certain number of passengers to occupy the seats before departure. When I boarded, the coachman needed one more person to board, so I offered, “I’ll pay for two people if we start now.” Unsurprisingly, money speaks louder than patience.
On the ride, I continued working on encoding the enchantment instructions. Okay, I’ll admit that I couldn’t finish it at the inn like I thought I would, but in my defense, coding in raw binary language is a pain. So there I was, mashing buttons on a peculiar apparatus with every other passenger staring at me and it.
The magnetic disk was inside a disk reader the size of a toaster, and it was connected to an input device with 3 main components; two for reading data and one for writing. On the left, there was a numeric keypad. This was to set the pointer on a specific memory location on the disk. Right above the keypad was an analogue screen with all the data readable in binary form. The device can read up to 8000 bits of data, the pointer starting from 0 to 7999, which is too much to fit on a still screen. So to its side, there was a rotator to scroll through the screen. Last but not least, on the right, there were two buttons representing ‘0’ and ‘1’ used to write data.
Just to be clear, this apparatus was engineered fairly recently. When we initially made the UU enchantments, data was encoded manually by hand. After the demo, I designed this apparatus and Devon engineered it, making it easy thereon.
Ignoring the curious stares of my co-passengers, I finished overwriting the old code with the new one. I ejected the disk from the disk reader, and pulled out the enchantment device out of my leather bag. Then I connected the disk to the input mechanism of it, and hoped for the best. Seventh time’s the charm. I snapped my fingers in the air and the sound was heard by everyone in the carriage. Following that, I released a little mana to be processed by the enchantment. And snapped my fingers again near the enchantment’s output.
Voila! There was no sound this time. I didn’t hear it, and neither did the other confused passengers. My soundproofing enchantment was finally working. I put the device into my bag, and pulled out another disk to code the instructions for the second enchantment I needed. Fortunately, this one was simple. Because, what I needed was electrical insulation and I’ve already developed the binary code for that in the ‘lightning resistance’ enchantment that is among our line of products. It’s the equivalent of copy-pasting from stack overflow, except I’m the one who wrote the code in the first place.
Anyway, I was done with all the preparations by the time I reached my destination, or rather close to it. I was dropped off about 3 kilometers away upon being stopped by government officials who prohibited entry past that point into the perimeter. Moreover, people who lived in that area were being evacuated on priority due to dangerous levels of electrical currents.
Amidst this orderly confusion, I paid the coachman what I promised, and set my eyes back on the scene, specifically on the monster that was impossible to miss — the tree that penetrated the clouds and was generating several gigawatts of power every second. Imagine spotting a skyscraper from 3 kilometers away and it still manages to look breathtakingly massive, that pretty much sums up what I was seeing.
Even as people were primarily focused on evacuation, there were still plenty who just stood and marveled at the tree. I overheard one of them, a lady, saying, “Did you hear? They are saying that this was an act of our one true God, smiting upon evildoers that were doing something bad in that place.”
“Really? What were they doing?” asked the curious person to whom the lady gossiped.
“I don’t know. But whatever it is, the city guards must be aware of it and are not telling us.”
Surprisingly, the rumors have managed to spread so far in less than 10 hours; I suppose I underestimated my own followers. It looks like they are going to soon find out about the red mages who held captives for slave trading. And when they do… Needless to say, matters are moving in my favor.
Anyway, on to dreaming. I moved away from the crowd, and found a secluded spot where I settled down. I made sure no city guards or civilians were in sight, and began focusing on developing a much needed skill at the moment — flight. There are plenty of ways to fly using magic. Despite that, not many were ideal for me in the current situation. For example, I can use some sort of gaseous ignition to initiate thrust, but that’s going to end up burning all the items I was carrying. As for flight methods that are not a fire hazard, I would need better mana control to perform.
Not to worry though. I spent the whole carriage ride here, thinking of a solution. And the solution is simply brute force, by which I don’t mean jumping up, exerting force on the ground. That would be disastrous. I would be using pure mana as particles to carry me through the air. For anyone else, including the immortals, this would be a terrible method of transportation because it continuously consumes ridiculous amounts of mana. It's a good thing my mana pool is a bottomless pit.
> Skillset: … 3D Space Navigation (Complexity - C)
Based on its complexity, you could probably tell that this is a stupidly simple skill. I basically just need to input the 3-dimensional points in space (latitude, longitude, and altitude) and my mana will carry me to that point. Also, this was a really slow mode of transportation, so I activated my camouflage skill before performing it.
I felt my feet lifting up along with my body, and the ground beneath me getting further away. This is the part where you would expect me to use a metaphor linking the ability to fly with freedom. Unfortunately, it was not a comfortable flight. You see, with the mana literally carrying me up, the force exerted on my body from below, including on the crotch region, felt nothing like freedom. I was waiting for the ride to be over.
15 uncomfortable minutes later, I reached the branches of the tree. I was defended against the electrical currents by the virus, as was my leather bag which I held closely to my chest. I landed, stepping on a huge branch. The width of that branch was as big as a sidewalk, and did I mention that the trunk of the tree is 15 meters wide? Looking down from where I stood, I saw thunderclouds, and past that, the humans were practically just a bunch of ants.
I didn't waste much time admiring the view. I unpacked the enchantment tools and set them down between my legs. I pulled out the blanket and the rope and started crafting a hammock. The difficult thing was to ensure none of my items got knocked off by the altitude winds or lightning. Apart from that, things went not so badly. Although a bit crooked because I couldn’t find a perfectly straight branch, the hammock was set up with both the prepared enchantment attributed to it.
Holding on to my bag which still had the book, quill, and ink bottle inside, I laid on the hammock and released my mana for the enchantments to work. Slowly, the noises of thunder faded away and electrical current was getting nowhere near me. I spent a solid 5 minutes consistently releasing my mana to make it an involuntary process as I fell asleep.
For the purpose of lucid dreaming, I maintained a strong conscious awareness that I was going to be dreaming. You can try this out yourself. As long as your conscious is aware that you're in a dream, you'll have lucid control over it. Admittedly, it's easier said than done since it's not easy to maintain conscious awareness when you're in REM sleep. The trick is to slowly adapt to it and you'll eventually be able to do it consistently.
The reason I'm telling you this is to make it clear that prior experiences with dreams significantly helps with lucid dreaming. With that being said, I had never experienced a dream before, at least as far as I was aware. I didn't have a clue about what a dream looks or feels like, I just knew the theory behind it. So unless the virus interferes, I should not be able to lucid dream.
Now, what do you think happened? Did the virus interfere? Did it help me lucid dream? Yes, and yes. But, what I experienced was far beyond anything I predicted. To say it was extraordinary would be a laughable understatement.
First thing I remember was me standing on the same tree branch, staring on to the planet’s horizon. This was my first experience with dreaming, and my conscious was not aware of it. It’s like suddenly being spawned in a place with no clues or context — you have no idea how you got there, but you don’t have the ability to question it either. Another thing about regular dreams is that it’s annoyingly difficult to recollect, and if I try to explain it, it’s going to sound weird. So, bear with me while I do.
An apple dangled before me all of a sudden. It was not a golden apple. Or maybe it was. But I remember the color red, so I’ll go with the bright red apple for the sake of this explanation. I poked it repeatedly for some reason, and it broke. And from it, a creature emerged. It was either a crow or a rat, let’s go with the crow. It immediately fled, and I ran after it. It led me to a more dark and bleak environment where I saw the first group of red mages I consciously murdered in the eastern forest. They had apple trees grown through their bodies and poking out of their faces, just like I remembered. I approached closer, and they silently crumbled down into fragments of charcoal.
That’s the extent to which I remember that dream. The thing to note here is that this dream was completely natural, like any human beings would experience. Right after that dream ended, I remember blackness surrounding me. When I say ‘remember’, I don’t mean vaguely. I vividly remember myself standing in the middle of absolute blackness where I was the only visible entity. And then this information popped up in my head.
> Level: INFINITE
> Mana Capacity: INFINITE
> Mana Control: POSITIVE
> Skillset: … Seal (Complexity - S , ???) …
> Character Trait: Logical, Malevolent, Opportunistic, Calculating
> State of Mind: Lucid Dreaming
Either I accidentally activated my analysis skill in my sleep, or as per my theory (2-C) the virus interfered to give me lucid control over the dream. If it was a case of the former, then that doesn’t explain my level, mana capacity and control. So yeah, this was the virus’ interference.
With my consciousness restored, I decided to start testing out the limits of this lucid dream. I recollected the events of the battle with Heath. And sure enough, the blackness that surrounded me transformed into the wasteland under the night sky. The scene was exactly how I remembered it to be, to the point where the details were astonishing.
“So, it was you,” I heard Heath speak the words I remembered. He was wearing his white and gold cloak that he introduced himself with. “You’re the one responsible for killing our people in the eastern forest. I’m glad you showed up as I hoped, it’s nice to meet you…” Meanwhile, the dream version of me stood behind a regular apple tree with overgrown branches, without responding. The scene was going exactly how it actually happened, and I was watching it all from a third person POV.
That’s when I noticed something odd. I walked towards the scene, getting closer and closer to the characters. The sicko was standing on the sidelines, incapable of doing anything as the battle raged on between Edith and Heath. It was around the time when Edith shoved a punch to Heath’s face and broke his nose, the sicko just ran off. Away from the warehouse and away from the battle. Nobody noticed him fleeing, which is what I found odd.
Back at the estate, when I tried to recollect whether the sicko had survived the battle or not, I couldn’t find him in my memory. But now I was seeing every step he took as he was fleeing. ‘Pause,’ I spoke through thought, and the scene froze with Edith’s fireball hanging midway between her and her target with the handlebar mustache.
I immediately realized what was going on, but it was technically only a theory. So, I decided to test it and confirm. I walked all the way up to Heath and resumed the scene. Obviously, none of the characters could see or react to me; I was practically non-existent as far as the scene was concerned.
Heath raised his hand to use his magic to counter Edith’s fireball. ‘Slow down,’ I demanded of the dream, and everything was now in slow motion. Following that, I commanded, ‘Make the mana visible to my eyes,’ and white glowing particles clouded several areas of the battlefield, especially exuding out of the Edith and Heath. I further observed to see the flow of mana as Heath performed his cause and effect skill, whose functionality I was yet to understand.
Not only did I figure out how the skill worked, I also pretty much confirmed my theory — I wasn’t in control of this dream. I mean, I was able to control the dream, but not directly. My commands were being executed by the virus instead. That’s why I was able to see things like the sicko fleeing, which I never paid attention to during the battle. Moreover, the whole scene was extremely detailed like I mentioned earlier, which could be explained by the virus recreating this scene based on my command rather than my less detailed visualization.
As for Heath’s skill, it turned out to be very close to what I assumed. He basically uses mana to scan and determine the cause and effect of any physical action, and replicate it on a target. Additionally he can control which of the causes and effects to replicate in what combination, and to what degree to amplify it based on mana input. For example, take the moment he threw an unexpected gust of wind at me and Edith. His mana determined the cause of my breathing, which is inflation and deflation of the lungs. He replicated that effect and targeted it at us after amplifying it like a million times by consuming a ton of his mana.
I took my sweet time analyzing the flow of mana to figure this all out, which made me rather annoyed to find out there was an instant way to acquire details about a skill. I just had to ask the virus for the skill’s pseudocode. Well, there’s no use pondering over it now. So, I shrugged it off and carried on dreaming.
You see, I wanted to first know the extent to which I could make use of this virus-assisted lucid dreaming. That way, I can plan for ways to farm benefits off of it, perhaps even learn to control my strength. And that’s how I quickly realized the sheer extraordinariness of this dream. The so-called extent of this lucid dreaming was non-existent — there was simply no limit to the things I could do in there.
And how did I realize this? It started with me walking away from the battlefield where Heath and the dream version of me were fighting in slow motion. I walked further into Kullu district and soon found a neighborhood. Out of curiosity, I entered and checked the houses. Sure enough, there were people inside. Some were asleep, some were reading, and some were having sex. Don’t label me as a creep just yet, I was checking the people out to see if I would recognize someone. And I did.
I recognized 3 of the people I found in this neighborhood from an hour ago when I was watching people evacuate with the assistance of the city guards. In other words, the people I was seeing in this lucid dream actually exist in the real world despite the fact that I haven’t seen most of them. Furthermore, what I saw them doing is also accurate to what they were actually doing at that time. And yes, that means a couple was really having sex while I was battling Heath less than 2 kilometers away.
Are you seeing what’s extraordinary about this lucid dream yet? If not, let me tell you one more thing I did in that neighborhood. I roamed around and found the bell that was for alerting its residents of an immediate crisis. I physically rang it, and the people within their homes came pouring out, confused by what was happening. Their expression of confusion and the panicked chattering all stopped when the thunder and lightning came. They saw the glowing tree with their jaws dropped as it grew and grew to the size I was familiar with.
This lucid dream wasn’t merely a recreation of my past experience. Rather, it was the entire universe reconstructed at this specific point in time. So, I could go to the Andromeda galaxy and see whatever happened there during the time I was fighting Heath. If that wasn’t incredible enough, I was also able to interfere with the simulation, triggering the butterfly effect. All of this was being done by the virus.
Naturally, I wasted no time to make use of this situation the best I could. And there were quite a few things I managed to pull off. If I were to start explaining each and every one of them, this chapter could go on for a while. So, I’ll just give you a brief rundown.
1) I observed Edith and learned how to fight. Although, it wasn’t simply observation that allowed me to master 27 styles of martial arts; that would have taken way too long. I actually made use of the virus, and commanded it to embed Edith's martial arts knowledge into me. It sounds like bullshit, but it worked. The instincts, muscle memory, techniques, and all else were cleanly transferred over to me.
However, it wasn’t without problems. You see, all the muscle memory and instincts made me hypersensitive to potential threats. And you know what happens when I subconsciously react to threats. So, I reversed some of the effects, I gave up the instincts, muscle memory, and other aspects that made me touchy.
2) I tracked down the 3 remaining Immortals, and studied their skills. ‘Locate humans with S level complexity skill: Immortality. Search radius: the entire planet,’ was the command I thought of, and it revealed me the coordinates of all 6 of them. Ignoring Edith, Devon, and Heath, I teleported to the other 3. Two females and one male.
Unlike the dynamic between Edith and Devon where Edith is the strongest one, it was different among the castaways. Heath and the other male immortal were significantly stronger than the females, which further strengthened my suspicion that perhaps the Omnipotent faced an issue with coding the male robot as the fighter and the female as the supporter.
3) In addition to locating the other 3 immortals, I used them to sharpen my battle skills. I simply made myself visible to them, and repeatedly provoked fights. I won’t lie, I was having a lot of fun kicking their asses while getting super creative with my seed modification skill. Especially with my new athletic capabilities that came along with the martial arts techniques, I fought those 3 with style.
You may be concerned about my dream battle affecting the real world. But rest assured, there is no real danger as long as I’m lucid dreaming with the assistance of the virus. You see, the virus was occupied with listening to my commands and controlling this dream, which confirms that the virus is aware of my lucid dreaming state. So, there’s no reason for it to react to my dream activities in the real world. However, if I’m physically threatened by something in the real world, that’s a different story.
Anyway, that’s about all the things I managed to do during this dream session. Sure, there were plenty of other things I hadn’t tried out. But for one, they weren’t too important or I failed to realize it, two, I didn’t want to spend too much time in the dream, and three, I can lucid dream any time I want so it’s all good anyway. By the way, if you’re wondering why I didn’t just use this opportunity to look into the future and solve all of my problems immediately, the reason is I couldn’t. I mean technically, I could but it’s not as convenient as you think.
You see, the future is solely based on the present point in time. And the number of futures that can be derived from the present are infinitely many, all of which are equally probable. In other words, there’s no way to look into a specific future out of the infinitely many and make my life easier. Furthermore, looking into the future itself will create a recurring loop since there will now be more futures that are derived from the present where I’ll be aware of a particular future. It’s best not to think too much about this stuff. The concept of time travel is riddled with paradoxes, because it’s simply not possible to achieve in a practical way.
‘End simulation,’ I commanded as I was finally ready to wake up. My surroundings returned back to absolute blackness, and I concentrated to allow my consciousness to leave the state of lucid dreaming. I slowly opened my eyelids, and the blackness was replaced with branches and leaves, and the rope that was tied to my hammock.
I remained laying down for a few seconds to allow my brain to get booted up. There was still no sound I could hear other than my own breath, meaning the enchantments were still in effect. I pulled my body and got down from the hammock, on to the giant branch below. “Hm, that’s weird,” I mumbled, seeing the sun setting before me.
With the sun’s orange hue reflecting off my face and irises, I thought to myself, ‘Looks like only a few hours had passed while I was asleep.’ I was so sure that I was asleep for at least 12 hours though. But if only a few hours had passed while I was lucid dreaming… I brought up my palms to my face and triggered the analysis skill.
> Level: 387
> Mana Capacity: 54000
> Mana Control: A+
> Skillset: … Seal (Complexity - S , Activated) …
> Character Trait: Logical, Malevolent, Opportunistic, Calculating
> State of Mind: Thrilled
Is this the best day of my life? With just a few hours I managed to raise my mana control from F to A+? Based on this, I would say the peaceful life I’m aiming for is just around the corner. Wouldn’t you?
I stopped my involuntary release of mana, wearing off the enchantment, and the sounds of thunder returned. After packing up everything I had brought along, I was all set to fly back down and back home. This called for a huge celebration. Moreover, I didn’t have to use the same 3D space navigation skill to get down. With my current mana control, I could develop a proper flight skill. And that’s what I did.
> Skillset: … Flight (Complexity - B+) …
This skill was also quite simple. Just imagine Ironman with a see-through suit. Admittedly, it still burns half the mana required by the 3D space navigation skill, which is a lot. But the important thing is that this skill is more comfortable to use and easy to maneuver.
Still feeling immense amounts of joy, I descended the tree, passing the thunderclouds. And then I saw something that made my smile disappear — a huge wall surrounding the area of the tree that didn’t exist when I went to sleep. There was another thicker wall surrounding the trunk of the tree, which was connected to the outer wall through a roofed pathway. Surely, this couldn't have been built in a few hours.
Maybe, Just maybe… I’ve been asleep for a little longer than that.
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Chapter notes: Zenith's interference in the lucid dream does not affect the real world. The lucid dream is simply a simulation.