sb3audiotest

by Hankton

dont bother listening until I re-edit this!

1. Chapter 1

Nov 29, 2019

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#1

Well, it's been a year since I Posted anything. This is one of the stories I kept coming back to, and i've got a backlog of material to get through. I hope you enjoy it. Happy holidays!

-000-

Man was I ever unenthusiastic.

I looked at my latest attempt at a self-insert, and wondered if I should even bother. I'd been trying to get back into the writing game ever since I burned out on my last fic and it just didn't seem to be happening.

My latest attempt was to introduce a Case 53 character that looked like Steven Spielberg's Gremlins and the Vogons from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, complete with a set of growths on its back that looked like giant heart-shaped leaves for absorbing solar radiation, and a preference for walking around on all fours like a monster cat rather than on two legs. It would get picked up by the police, handed over to the PRT for processing, get a temporary ID and then go in for Powers testing.

The powers would come in two groups. The first group would show that the Case 53 had nine stomachs, a long lizard-like tongue, better eyesight, had superhuman strength, reflexes, stamina, condition, endurance, agility, an extreme tolerance to environmental conditions up to and including a complete vacuum, and a flight ability. In addition to all this the character had the ability to absorb solar energy, radiation, including draining it from radioactive materials, that makes its eyes glow bright green, enhanced all other features, and shoot the accumulated energy out of its hands and eyeballs.

Pretty much everything you wanted in an alien invading monster.

The other set of powers included Omnilingualism so that it could understand all spoken languages. After experimentation it was assumed that the character was pulling the knowledge of language out of people's heads through an unknown mechanism, including math and computer codes, sign language, illegible words, backwards speech and writing with little or no training. There was a dimensional storage ability, the largest item experimented upon was a PRT armored transport, and a rabbit. The ability to sense directions like a compass, knowing where a specific direction is to a thing, and north. These powers actually came from a secondary source.

There were a few other powers, but they didn't come into play until after a few events had run their course.

The twist came from the fact that the Case 53 seemed to be sick which was why it wasn't doing much of anything and allowing it to be put through power testing for eight days. Which was really weird since testing had shown that it had some form of advanced healing, could heal other people, and shape shift a tiny bit. When attempts were made to figure out durability the skin was cut as a part of power testing but also to see if needles would work. Each time the tissues healed, however, the damaged area was replaced not by its own monstrous lizard-like scales but by a more mammalian-like skin. At first this was thought to be some form of shape shifting. And on top of that every time this had happened the Case 53 started to get its own memories back.

At which point they called for Panacea, the world renowned healer, to come in.

I smiled just a bit at what I'd written so far. It was complete garbage, or so the little voice in the back of my head insisted, and I had no idea on how to keep it going. I wasn't very good at coming up with these long and complicate and incremental revealing of the plot and the twist things.

Unless I could just blab about them to someone else.

I saved the file and opened up a game and waited for it to load. Maybe someday I'll get back to it.

Then everything shifted and I knew that I was going to hate what was going to happen next.

I was right.

I blinked my large and mismatched eyes and winced as they hurt from the light and started crying. I looked around and found myself on a hospital bed big enough for a horse. Everything fucking hurt, right from the bones. I was congested, my guts felt like someone had gone at them with a chain sword, I was sweating out a thick pudding-like ooze and unhappy with the world in general. All of my diet had been in vain for I now weighed a thousand pounds.

"Ah-choo!" and my nose was too big and in the wrong place.

"May I have your permission to heal you?" Panacea, the one and only, asked as she held out her hand to me. The little girl was way too cute not to have the sparkle in her eyes. She had raccoon eyes and had this zombie thing down solid.

I said the first thing that came to mind. "You look like crap."

Nothing is Impossible! It Just Might be Very Hard to do

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Nov 29, 2019

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#3

I had a few seconds to put my brain together. I had a separate set of memories that were only a few days old at most and now I had pretty much 'regained' all that I had lost. I now knew whoever I'd been was someone my soul was destined to fill after my Author-self had died. In a way being sick was a boon since it had short-circuited any attempt at recruitment and it had prevented my primal instincts from leveling a few city blocks like the original character had.

And now this. On the one hand, I would weep for the person I had become after I died, and promise to punch the founding Trio of the Protectorate and Cauldron right in the face for erasing that person from existence. One part of me was secretly, hilariously overjoyed that I was now quite possibly one of the most powerful beings in the Multiverse. Unlike these human beings I didn't need an alien parasite to have superpowers. On the other hand I was in a bit of a tight spot and needed time for a power-up.

Case in point, progress.

"Excuse me?" Panacea the young girl blinked as her brain started working.

Well, nothing ventured, nothing gained, as some people say.

I hated how my voice sounded like a growling troll. "No offense, but you look like a zombie. I don't know what you do when you're not rearranging people's biology, but you need a hobby. You should try gardening, or working with animals on a farm. I used to garden all the time." Well that was half true, I did like animals, the other me had wanted to be a veterinarian and the crossover character did do gardening. "But I'm glad for your help. I've just remembered a few things about myself that I think will help. Tell me, what have the doctors told you about my condition?"

"Ah, not much, only that you're a Case 53 and they can't tell what's wrong with you?" the poleaxed expression is not going away. Young girls like her really should be in bed until it was time to watch Saturday morning cartoons.

I sigh. "You should consider taking some medical classes. You're bedside needs work and you sound like you don't know what you're doing, but that's okay. Here, tell me what you see." I held out an alligator-man's hand.

Panacea takes my hand in hers and her eyes glaze over, and glow a tad bit, as she uses her powers to do her thing.

I didn't expect the glowing eyes. But then again I never read the entire Worm web serial. Too depressing.

"My power tells me that your Pollina Potentia is trying to turn you into a Case 53, just like I've seen in other Case 53. I've never seen it happen, just the result. However, there seems to be some other power at work trying to turn you back into a human – I think? – and they're fighting. I tried to turn several case 53's back to human when I first started out, and this is similar." She concludes, letting my hand go. "You say you know what is going on?"

I nod from down on the super-reinforced bed. "Yeah. I'm gonna tell you some things, and I'm hoping that with your experience with super powered people that you won't think I'm crazy. Okay?"

She nods.

"I'm a reincarnated soul. This person I reincarnated into had their mind erased, so I'm working from past life experiences. I also happen to have the Spark of a Planeswalker. Do you know what that is?" I asked.

She cocks her head at me, frowns, then crosses her arms. "I have a pair of teenage gamer dummy-heads for villains at home. Yes, I know what a Planeswalker is. Go on."

"Best I can figure with my messed up head is that I was just on the Wheel Of Life until my soul ended up here in this world. Thing is that the same circumstances that make a Parahuman also work to Ignite a Planeswalker's Spark. Planeswalker's have a grab-bag of abilities. They have Immortality. They don't die of old age. If they happen to be old or hurt when their Spark Ignited they tend to regenerate until they're in their Prime with a capital P. I'm guessing that my Spark is now working overtime to fix me and since a Planeswalker's Spark is hellofa strong it's not going to stop until my Shard runs out of power. So either it's gotta go or I gotta go. And since I can live without it then it's gotta go."

"What? Do you really expect me to believe that?" she snorted. "Next thing you'll tell me is that you're also a princess from an alien planet."

I sighed. Looks like I was going to have to get all logical with her. "Here' let me show you something," I scooched and moved until I was lying flat instead of being curled up in a ball like I wanted to. My biology was really messing me up at the moment since the left and right sides of my body don't match. I pointed at my right shoulder where the Omega symbol that had been stamped into my leathery hide had recently transformed into clean human-ish skin.

"That is the symbol of the Planeswalkers. It's proof that what's been done to me is slowly being overpowered. You know that some Parahumans have the ability to leave their body and possess other people. Reincarnation isn't much of a stretch from that." I take a glass of water from the table and gulp it down, then wipe my monstrous face with a huge towel to get all the snot, sweat and drool off. "You also know that every time I hurt I become just a little more human. So either I can start damaging myself until I'm well enough to get out of bed or you can help me be a man again. Pick something. Because I'm not staying in this bed a moment longer than I have to."

Panacea is silent for a moment. She even closed her eyes to think before she sighs. "You're a woman."

Flat: "What?"

"You're supposed to be a woman," she says again.

Yeah, that was about par for the course. "Regardless. Are you going to help?"

"I think I will. But if I don't, what would you do?"

I held up my left messed up hand and made it glow green. "I'd probably start burning off my skin so that it could regrow normal, and go from there."

Panacea gives me a deadpan look. "Yeah, let's not do that."

"Are you going to help?"

Amy frowns, clenches her fists and is frustrated. "I don't know!" she threw her arms up, then starts walking around. "Every Case 53 I've tried always turned back."

"You've never been asked to take the Pollentia Potentia out of someone's head?"

"I don't do brains," she said with utter conviction. "And if the Pollina Potentia is destroyed the person dies anyway."

I considered pressing the point, and wondered how she knew that, but ultimately decided it didn't matter. I was a Planeswalker. If I got really desperate I could shoot myself in the head to get rid of it that way or go visit Bonesaw. And anyway, just getting the girl a hobby outside of auto-heal mode and take a few classes on actual medicine, or heavens forbid, psychology, would cure up a lot of other crap.

I had an idea. It should work. After all, this was all the beginning of a story I wrote a while ago. "What about interfering with the Pollina's ability to alter my body? Simply stop it from going beyond the brain? My Spark should take care of the rest."

The girl stopped moving around to consider it. "I guess we could try it? At least long enough to see if it works or not."

She came over and I gave her my mostly human right hand, the one the Protectorate had used to take a skin sample from the other day. I felt something tingly around my brain happen, like ants walking across the skin. "I'm trying it now."

"I can feel it."

My body was slowly deflating right before our eyes. Not fast, but about the speed of a like-sized balloon with a small hole in it.

"This is going to take a while," Panacea said, grabbing a chair to sit down in.

"I think I can speed it up," I say, realizing that there were powers I should be using.

Planeswalkers were supposed to be making connections to Lands. The Lands would generate Mana. Each mana had a color. Depending on the color each mana would give the Planeswalker a different power to craft spells that are so overpowered they're basically an all-encompassing superpower for a few minutes. The spells were like paintings, taking the colors of mana to make a picture worth a thousand enchantments. The colors reference was kind of weird since Planeswalkers were like the only people in the room who were not color blind, but it was a good analogy that I would be continuing.

The first color I tried to reach out to was the Green. Green was the color of wildlife, growing things, nature, forests. There was a sliver of Green nearby because the hospital was like the ones from home in that they had gardens and were built near small landscaped areas. With Green I could regenerate, rebuild and manipulate biology.

White was all about peace, law, organization, structure, selflessness and society. I got that from buildings and roads and man-made cities, which I was inside of, and a hornet's nest for some reason, so I had quite a bit of it right off the bat. I'm sure the church in the back of the Hospital helped a bit, as they both had heavy emotional connections to the people living here.

Black was usually found in graveyards and swamps where things are decaying. It was the color of raw power, death, growing strong while others grew weaker, consuming your enemies to survive. There was a nice chunk of Black to be found in the Hospital Mortuary. There was also a Funeral Home nearby down the road. And there was the sewage system. So I had three Black right then and there. It felt like pushing my hand into homemade mulch full of bugs and worms. And it stank. Like 'this aquarium full of mollusks have died and now you need to dump out the sewage-like water and sand before it can be cleaned' stinks.

Blue was the color of knowledge, to be found in libraries or in running waters like rivers and oceans. It felt like caution, contemplation, trickery, rain falling on your head. There was a pond outside and a library in the hospital and the place was full of computers with information racing back and forth from here to the other side of the planet. I felt smarter already. Like my nervous system was getting a tune up right then, right there. As an avid reader I liked Blue mana.

I didn't find any Red Mana in the Hospital. Red Mana was supposed to represent freedom, emotion, impulse, destruction and more. I could probably find it in a shooting range, or a hot spring, or a demolition derby, or a race track, or a steel plant. Good for raw speed, strength, fireballs and overpowering your enemies with a fist in their face. Not exactly something I wanted to do in a place full of sick people.

In total I had, two Green mana, three White Mana, three Black Mana, two Blue mana, and no Reds. Very, very small units of mana all in one area, and this was not a small hospital. Not a bad start. But not unsurprising either. This was a modern city that had only recently grown up from a town, with plenty of hills and rivers, and not so much town that you couldn't take a short walk into the wilderness.

Heck, I wasn't even sure I was in Brockton Bay at the moment.

I gathered up my White Mana and, with Panacea to help, forged my first Reverse Damage spell. Well, that is that Panacea wasn't helping me, exactly, but her power was fully active inside my body and now with Green mana I could see it. I was glad that my instinctive use of these abilities were as simple and as easy as I thought they'd be and was easily able to increase my own fumble-fingered abilities already.

Now fully active with Immortality and whatever regeneration abilities which had been gifted to me by my Shard I took control and proceeded to forge it into a more humanoid shape. The body deflated faster than ever before. My monstrous appearance faded away into a human one.

Before too long a time had passed my powers gave me another spell. With but a single Green the rest of my appearance peeled away as the blubbery skin transformed into leaves, peeling off like sunburnt skin, in many layers, until nothing but orange healthy and smooth skin was left behind. The hospital room was now full of dead leaves.

I'll call that one Healing Leaves.

The next spell came from the Black. With one land's worth I took back control of my body, my life, completely. And the only reason the Corona Potentia didn't die right then and there inside my head was because I didn't allow it. I was consuming everything it had otherwise.

Seems like I gained a life in exchange for my opponent's life. I'll call that one Vampire's Healing of the Necromancer.

Reverse Damage, Healing Leaves, Vampire's Healing of the Necromancer. Not a bad start if I do say so myself.

Now, whatever method was used to destroy this girl's mind hadn't been undone. The brain was fixed but the knowledge couldn't be retrieved. However, like Logan of the X-Men I did get some flashes and inspiration. Enough to confirm that, yes, the girl from before was now me, and it was time to stop thinking of myself as anything else.

My eyes crossed, my skull bulged, then split open, and what came out was a tiny bit of gristle that was still alive.

"Oh my god! Ew! Gross!" Panacea gulped. One hand went to her mouth, the other stayed attached to my hand. Professional all the way no matter what was happening. She was a good little trooper.

I reached up and took the thing from my hair. "Well, that was easy enough." I said with my new and feminine voice.

I felt immensely relived to have that thing out of my head. For what it had done to my body I wasn't sure I could forgive it, or myself for putting me into this mess. I mean how could I be angry with a deer just for crossing the road? It did give me superpowers after all.

It was going to die soon. And then the Shard would go off and try to find someone else to connect to. Not a bad plan but I had other ideas.

I concentrated-!

Connection?

Pattern? Agreement?

Connection. Trajectory. Agreement.

Copy?

Agreement.

-and suddenly just like that I had a Shard Summon and I had the language to talk to Entities. Planeswalkers really are the most bullshit creatures in the universe!

I get out of the bed and throw off the disgusting sheet that I'd been using. Revealing a body fit to cause heart attacks in old men and put teenagers in a coma. All covered in sticky, goopy, shiny stuff and in need of a shower.

Panacea's mouth nearly hits the floor.

I smile, strike a pose – I didn't know I could do that, just seems automatic – and use my now human arm to keep the girls from running wild. "See anything you like?"

She doesn't quite go as Red as a tomato, she's seen it all before, and it doesn't stop her. "You're thick!"

"Jealous?" I ask, giving the girls a heft.

Amy throws her hands to the sky in exclamation. "The East Coast would be jealous of that mountain range! That's cheating!"

"Well maybe we can do something about that when you're older," I gave her a wink, knowing that I probably can. I grab the towels and sheets and start wiping the worst of old monster-mes sweat off and the leaves. Thankfully I didn't need to do my hair since, with a bit of sunlight entering through the windows, it lit itself on fire and burned all that crap off instantly. Stank too. But I really need a shower.

Amy says, "You look like an alien girl from Star Trek."

"Guess my Planeswalker Spark just decided that being a Tamaranean is better. This is certainly better than my old human one or that caveman creature the Shard was trying to turn me into. And hey, I got a Summon out of it." I showed off the grisly meat in the middle of my palm. "Now I can give people superpowers!"

"That's super-cheating!" Amy exclaimed, pointing a long arm with a finger at me. "You can't just take out some cape's Pollina and make a summons out of it to add to your deck like it was a dragon!"

I gave her a somewhat curious look.

Amy realized what she said and her eyes go wide in a total 'oops' moment. "Ah, dang it."

"Panacea," I smiled as I leaned forwards. "Do you play Magic The Gathering?"

"I deny everything, and you can't prove it!" she yelled.

"But think of all the fun we'll have!" I say. "Course, I've never played the game. But just think of the possibilities! If I can copy your powers and then we can make monsters. Then I can make them into summons to use whenever I want!"

Amy's shaking her head. "No, no, no! I can't make monsters! Monsters are bad!"

"Oh come on, it'll be fun!" I teased.

"I won't make monsters. I won't let you copy my powers. And you can't make me! So there!" she stamped her foot down.

I sighed. This was going to be harder than I thought.

And then my senses went nuts as the floor underneath us disappeared.

What the hell … ?

I looked up through a hole in the sky and saw a woman wearing Red and a Fedora. Getting far away...

"The hell! Bitch!" I screamed.

"Path to Victory! You'll Thank Me Later! Bye!" she yelled before the hole in the sky disappeared.

No, I won't!

The ground was coming up fast. And now I have to catch Panacea.

Oh well.

-000-

Nothing is Impossible! It Just Might be Very Hard to do

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Dec 1, 2019

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#10

You know how people tend to have all these mental hang-ups because they're afraid of dying?

Yeah, I didn't have that problem anymore. I knew perfectly well that even if I hit the ground I would live so I wasn't scared. I also knew how to fly, so there was that.

Not sure how I knew all this, I was just glad that I had any info at all.

Which was nuts, because I used to be afraid of heights. As such I was able to calmly look around and find one screaming Panacea to catch from out of the air. She grabbed me in a few places I didn't care about, noticing that a moment later and changed her grip, but she never let go.

I'm also, just maybe, a tiny bit angry.

It's not just Contessa that I'm unhappy with. She's got a part of the absolutely livid pie all to herself.

The worst part is that I was never going to meet the guy who did this to me. I mean, for all I knew I always had a Planeswalker Spark and this was a result of normal events after you die. I think I actually died in a fire, so I'm trying not to remember that too much.

I'm not human. It took a surprisingly short amount of time to get over that. Sure, I'm missing a few parts and I've gained quite a few more. I have orange skin. I've got flaming hair and it can do stuff when I fly and more stomachs than before. I should be freaking out about that.

Did I forget to mention that I remember my past fairly well?

Actually I don't care much about my shape. I'm a fan of John Varley's work, like the Eight World's Saga, which included advanced technology to change your shape and its effects on civilization. I looked like a space babe that's used to lure space captains to their DOOM. But I'm alive too. I have most of my memories. I'm actually pretty well off when you consider some other folks. I've got awesome powers. Which I guess is good enough.

What to do, what to do?

Learn, I guess.

"You fly slow," Panacea mumbled as she was attached to the side of my body.

I held onto her with my right arm as I pulled my left out from underneath her. "Yeah, well, I've never flown before. Don't make me nervous."

We were in a bit of a spot. We were about a mile above the ground and there was nothing to see for miles around but mountains, with only a few patches of trees and endless amounts of grass, with storm clouds coming from over the horizon.

"I wish I had my camera. This is a picture for National Geographic," I say.

"Who?" Panacea turns her head to look. In the distance there are lightning strikes against the mountains. The sky perfectly clear over here. "I wish I had a camera too. But what are we going to do now?" she asked the adult, like I knew anything.

"We'll think of something. We'll be fine," I say as I flew away from the storm front. While I flew and held onto the girl I also got a Summon out of her. The pattern just filled my mind easy while I was holding her. One white mana along with any other color should do it, plus ten more green for the Shard in her head. It was pretty easy. I think it was because the Shard in her head wanted to be used and it grabbed at the opportunity for another connection with both hands.

I was all fine to being touchy feely.

"Who was that woman anyway?" Amy asks.

"You saw her?"

"No, but I guessed and I heard you two yell. And you confirmed it with your answer. So are you going to answer the question?"

"You're pretty calm."

"I'm a doctor. I do my throwing up later."

"Ah, okay. Well, to answer your question, that lady in the red coat and fedora-"

"Wait? Like Carmen Sandiego?"

"Yes, like Carmen Sandiego. She is the enforcement arm for a conspiracy group called Cauldron. They actually do a pretty good job of keeping the world from devolving into a super powered slug-feast. Like a witches soup, they brew up potions to give people powers. One of their key ingredients is a dead alien on an alternative earth they harvest for parts."

She's quiet for a minute. "I have more questions."

"You believe me?"

"I'm holding onto a flying orange woman a mile above the ground, and I can tell when you lie. Your DNA is like nothing on this earth and I'm actually having a very hard time trying to figure out what it does. I think I'm getting a thinker headache. You're powers are ENTIRELY biological. My sister takes me flying all the time. I'm more amazed than scarred at the moment."

As in, she might start freaking out later. And since this little girl can turn what goes for my spleen inside-out I should probably distract her. Okay, how to start?

"All right, I'll wow you with the secrets of the world. Then we can go into question and answer sessions later. That okay?"

"We're not on Earth Bet, right? I saw the hole in the sky."

"Nope."

"Then I want to be distracted. Please continue."

"All right. But let's get more comfortable. Let's land, and I'll make a connection to the Land for the Manna, and then we can figure out a better way of flying together."

It took a few minutes to get a connection to the mountain. But I think it was easier than it should have been. My emotions were all over the place and the alien equivalent of adrenalin was running in the veins around my head. Not that it affected me all that much to look at me. I used to have panic attacks from blood pressure when I was young and had to quickly learn how to ride out my body's reactions to stress. The hallucinations were the worse, but I was more afraid of freaking out my mom. I didn't have problems with my blood pressure anymore once I grew out of it, and I doubted I had it in this body, so keeping control was fairly easy.

But when it happened, ho boy was it a rush. I got this snapshot of fifty miles of the mountain in my head, just like I'd gotten this tiny snapshot of the hospital when I'd connected to it. But unlike those slivers that only covered a few acres this one was big-big-BIG. It was like I'd spent a year turning over every rock in this place. I knew where to find seams of iron ore, tin, bauxite, lead, asbestos. I knew where the hot springs were. I knew where to find pools of water and piles of sand and clay. I could feel the mountain range in the back of my head the same way I could run my tongue over my teeth.

Red Manna tasted and smelled like fireworks.

My hair, which was already burning under the light of the sun, became a ten foot long flaming extension of my head.

It was amazing.

"Where are you going?" Amy asked as I started walking in a specific direction.

"There's a hot water spring about a mile that way," I pointed. "I'm gonna have a bath. We can talk after we've cleaned up a bit." And never mind the fact that I'm barefoot and naked. My connection to the land let me avoid the pointy rocks and my powers crushed the rest under my feet like they were clay doe.

"Oh, good idea," she looked around. "I need to go. I'll be right back. Wait for me, okay?" she went and disappeared around a cliff.

Yeah, that sounded like a good idea. Only I didn't have towels. Thankfully, a flaming hand took care of most of it.

The hot spring turned out to just be a crack in the wall where hot water was shooting out. I spent a good many minutes under the small hose of hot water. I had to learn how to turn my hair off to keep the steam down and so I could actually wash my hair. But Amy was patient (heh!) waiting nearby until I was done. Then she used it herself while I politely turned my back.

What we ended up doing was having Amy stand on the tops of my feet. Since I was 6f 7in tall and the girl in my arms was just starting puberty this put Amy's face right under my breasts. She'd also given me her robe, which was a snug fit. Underneath her robes had been ordinary hospital scrubs. She looked like an intern. She put her arms around me and I put my arms around her and, going slow through the air, we could talk to each other normally.

"So, how long do you think it'll take to get us back to Earth Bet?" Amy girl asks.

"What makes you think I can get us back?" I ask.

She snorted. "Well if Planeswalkers are even half as strong as they're supposed to be then you should be able to take on an Endbringer all by yourself. And you walk between the worlds. And you've got a connection to the lands there, right? So you should be able to get us back. Right?"

I thought about what she said and wished I knew what was going through her mind. "You're a puzzle, you know that?"

"Must be the coffee in me and the whole falling to my death that made me wake up," she snarked. "So can you, or not?"

I thought about it. I reached out with my other senses, the ones I barely knew where there. They went in a direction I can't explain but I knew I could follow them. "Yeah, I think so. But it's very far away. I don't know how they did it, and I'm guessing they probably hurt the power when they did it, putting us so far away. But it's going to take us world-hopping through a lot of worlds or so to get there."

"Do you think that, if you powered up, you could take on an Endbringer?" she asked.

I shrugged. "I don't know. I've never been a Planeswalker before. I don't know what I can do."

"You need more lands," Panacea insisted. "The more lands the more power and the easier to make spells. You should be hopping around this mountain getting every single connection you can get. Then you could blow them up!" she said with enthusiasm, grinning. "Or I know, you could take them into the Blind Eternities! Then watch as they get ground up into dust!" she seemed really excited about that idea.

"Endbringers exist in multiple dimensions. They probably know how to deal with the space between worlds," I pointed out. But it was a good idea so I headed for the ground again.

"You just need more lands and spells. This is like a road trip. You'll pick up lands, and summons, and more spells. Maybe we'll end up in a sci-fi universe and get a spaceship!" she bounced off my toes as we landed. "And then we can get alien monsters and powered armor! And then you could-! And I could-!" she started vibrating in place and stopped breathing as her eyes went wide.

I was starting to get concerned. "Hey, are you okay?" I asked, ready to dash for the horizon.

"I just realized. There's nobody here to say no. And nobody here for me to hurt. Or complain to the PRT about. Or sue me. And my mom's not here to say no." Her head slowly turned to me. "And you know more about my powers than someone should."

Sheepishly I rubbed at the back of my head. "He-hee. You just noticed that, did you?"

"How'd you know I can do more than heal? Did you use your powers, or was it something else?" her excitement from her revelation seemed to have switched back to suspicion.

"I come from another world. Remember? Reincarnated? I'm proof of the World Made Myth."

Amy blinks. "Comic book?"

I smile at her. "This is why I like you Amy. You're the smart one. And it was an Online Web Novel. And to answer your un-asked questions, I probably know far too much about each person's power in Brockton Bay. You're fairly popular when you're not being a down in the dumps. Especially the whole powers classification thing. There's even a few CYOA."

"Are there Fix-It Fics? Please tell me there are Fix-It Fics! Do we get rid of the Endbringers?" she puts her hands together and gives me the puppy eyes, desperate now.

Eep!

"There are like a thousand Fix-It Fics about people going to your world and getting an entire rainbow of powers, and with their outside context knowledge they can fix up Brockton Bay quick. And, not really," I hedged. "The Endbringers contain about five times as much mass as an entire solar system, each. Their bodies can be destroyed, but the energy release would be fantastic. They were manufactured, like robotic alien tanks, and operate on orders. They're also operating on easy mode. Unfortunately I'm not sure about the rest."

"You don't? WHY?" she yelled.

"Because they're not the main character of the story!" I shot back. I took a breather, sighed, and rubbed at my face. "Look. I know all kinds of details. But the rest were made up in the Fix-It fics because the author didn't provide details."

"So how do we get rid of them? In the story, I mean?"

"You eventually figured out where they come from, who's Shard they're being controlled from, and use them to attack Zion the Golden Man. He then destroys them because he can't control them. And the distraction is used to land a fatal blow."

"And why do we attack Scion?"

"Because he's the source of Parahuman abilities. And when the experiment is over he's going to euthanize the rats to make sure the Shards are not attached to any human brains anymore, which makes them easier to collect once they've had time to breed."

Amy's silent for a moment as she looks at into the distance with big eyes, thinking about the meaning of it all. "And Shards are the organisms that give us powers, right?"

I nodded.

"Damn." And now Amy's all sad and stuff. She kicked at a bit of dirt, and in the background thunder rolled over the planes.

She seemed to want to be alone for a moment. I spent that time trying to grab the next land. Eventually I ended up with another Red and a Green because of all the grass and bugs everywhere.

I also made a big discovery. Normally my Planeswalker Spark tried to grab as much of the land as possible to provide me with one mana. Depending on how much I grab I can get a little or a lot and the – I shouldn't call it energy density, because it's not, but that's the closest analogy – the density of the mana can be rich or poor. These mountains are old and they're geologically active in some spots so I had no trouble grabbing four just standing there.

It was good to have different sizes and types.

When I looked up Amy had come back from her walk and was looking at me.

"Are you ready to go?" I stood up and looked at the storm clouds coming at us.

"Almost? How do most of those Fix-Fics go? I mean with me, that is?" she asked.

"Are you sure you want to know about your own future? Spoilers aside, future you has done some things you might not like." I warned.

"Did that future me meet a Planeswalker and go on adventures?"

"No. The future you kept on healing people at the hospital, doing the same thing day in and day out, ruining her own mental health in the process, until it ground away at her personality until she snapped."

"Then since that's not going happen, obviously," she said in a childish promise that sounded cute as heck, "I want to know."

"Mostly? The easiest way to fix things in Brockton Bay usually involve the Self-Insert character working to get the Parahumans to work together and get their heads out of their butts, sorry."

"That sounds like mom." She remarked. "People keep talking that she needs to take a chill pill and other things when they think I'm not listening."

She still calls Carroll mom, good to know.

I continued on. "In your case it's a multi-level thing. In the first, you have to have a better home life. That requires getting Carroll's head screwed on straight so she can get over her own trigger event, which she never dealt with, but also fixing up your dad and sister. You all need some time in individual and group therapy. With me so far?"

She nods. "But how do I fix . . . me?"

Avoiding pitfalls by ignoring it and pretending I don't know what she's talking about, go!

"Alright, skipping your family. First off, you start with accepting that there's more in your toolbox than a Fix-Human Button. You need to embrace your powers, and that means All of it. They're kinda like Pavlov's Dog. If you don't use them they're going to drive you literally nuts trying to get you to pay attention to them, and then you're going to do something you'll regret. Even accepting that you don't want to do brains there is still a lot more that you can do that doesn't involve working yourself to death in a hospital. For instance, back home in my world there are these implants that release medicine into the body, exactly when the patient needs it and in the right amounts. Which are much better than self-medicated injections, F.Y.I. And I know what I'm talking about because a co-worker went on a rant about them. You could do the same thing with an artificial pituitary gland for your dad."

Amy nods, her fingers twitching as if eager to get to work. "Yeah. I can do that!" and then her smile turns to a frown. "But what if they start thinking I'm the next Bonesaw?"

"They've got procedures in place, and they're a lot more competent about dealing with fallout than, sorry, you are. You can make bank on that. They're the PRT, they know," I reminded her. Amy's face went through various expressions that basically said she thought she was being a dummy head. "Hey, don't take it so hard." I went over and gave her a hug.

"I feel bad now," she grumps. "I could have fixed up daddy a long time ago. Would they … really have let me?"

"Bio tinkers are rare, but I'm sure there are a few in the PRT. If only as a counter to the other bad bio-tinkers out there," I reassured her, patting her on the head. She was really getting into this hugging thing. "The easiest thing to do is to tell the director what you want to do and ask for advice. You'll probably be allowed to make a prototype for testing. I'm sure the other members of the micro-biological community will be involved at some point. The centers for disease control at least. Except for being a biological I bet most Tinkers could make an implant that does the same thing. The doctors from my world have the technology to make it and we don't have Tinkers. They did it for people with diabetes. You could probably make a patent out of it and sic Carroll the Lawyer on the problem. And that would straighten out her head by making her do good with your powers, which will erode that unhealthy mindset of hers. And it would get you some money."

"But I do my healing for free." Panacea argued/stated, but was totally unenthusiastic about what she said. Somewhere in her head there were ideas about buying things she wanted and getting a car. I just had to bring them to the surface with the power of free enterprise and unassailable capitalism.

"That's your other problem. If you don't want to be bothered by every – " small child words please, "— by every fool with an owie, you need to do something that compensates you for your time and frustration when you could be hanging out with your friends and playing games. If you prefer some of the money can be donated to help keep the New Wave group going, the rest can go to a college fund and a car and house. Carroll would definitely get in your corner to help you with that."

Amy's face moved from sad to contemplative.

"Moving on from that you could open your own clinic. That way you wouldn't be rushing all over creation to get to people. Let the hospitals do their own thing and stop taking up their space and time. You can even have the doctors volunteer their time there and get the PRT to pick up the bill. You'd also control your own working hours. You could also set aside a day to work on animals."

"I do like animals," Amy says. "I wanted to get a cat once, but Mom wouldn't let me." She said that a bit more forcefully and without thinking.

At least she still thought Brandish was her Mom, I reminded myself. I wondered what part of the timeline I'd been dropped in that she still did? But who knows what Amy girl was thinking? It might be a conditioned reflex. In her head she might still think of her as that adult woman and be on the fence about whether or not she should love her.

"There you go. Work with animals on your off days. Your clinic can even specialize in operations that can't be done by normal doctors so you won't be taking work from them. Like cosmetic surgery, or helping women to become pregnant, or fixing conjoined twins, growing lost parts or a sex change. Offer the PRT the opportunity to give their people a brute and mover rating and they'll move heaven and earth to make you happy. Oh! And you should get a scooter and a private ambulance so you can get around town. With the money you make you can easily hire a driver. And one more thing?"

"Oh god, what else?"

"Get a greenhouse so you can experiment on plants and have fresh vegetables at home. Pharmaceutical companies and farmers do all kinds of experiments trying to come up with new drugs and better fruits. You can do the same thing. All you have to do is ask for their leftovers and ask what they want. They'll fork the money over to build the greenhouse to your specifications if you show you're willing to help them and ask if you want more money."

"What about breeding?"

"What about them? You can make animals without reproductive organs. Give one animal the ability to give birth to new creatures, make sure those birthed creatures are born sterile, and when the birthing mother dies of old age, that's it! Farmers do it with seedless watermelon all the time."

Amy looks poleaxed, then screamed, "That's so simple. WHY DIDN"T I THINK OF THAT?"

"Probably because you never heard of it. Seriously though, I suggest you take some classes in Herbology and Botany. Your powers give you knowledge but it's only a fraction of the total. Plus the teachers have answers to questions you've never thought of yet."

"I think I'm gonna have to," she muttered, taping at her lip. "I'm such a dummy-head, erg!"

I was quiet for a minute, letting her work her way through all that.

I also gave the girl the once over, really looking her over. She seemed so young. But more than that. She seemed a lot more willing to think of new ways to use her powers than I think she should be. I could give that up to being in another world and meeting me and all that. But it was more than that.

Suddenly I realized what was missing. In a few fanfics I've read Amy smokes. I'm pretty sure it was cannon. She didn't smell like smoke. Or at least, not now.

"Amy, just out of curiosity, how old are you?" I ask.

"14 and a half," she says. "Why?"

"Ah, cool, so that means we've got about a year before the story starts."

-000-

This chapter was kind of blabity, sorry. But if i ever had a chance to unload on a character this is pretty close to what I'd say.

Kids are also supposed to be inexperienced. I won't use stupid, because they're not. Not most of them anyway. I don't like being an overbearing guy and telling people that they're wrong, you should do it this way. I like the teaching method where you talk about the way one person does a thing, I talk about how I do it, and then we talk about how another person does it differently, and then we decide on the best method or at least try to understand why they're doing it that way.

I'm not a fan of swearing. When I'm writing I'm trying to talk like I talked when i was their age. Even when I knew the worlds there was always a voice in the back of my head saying "Don't Swear." It took me a good many years to get around to swearing easily and I rein it in when I'm in public. As such my written children not swear even when surprised or angry. The main character is an adult so she might slip up a bit now and again.

Last edited: Wednesday at 6:04 PM

Nothing is Impossible! It Just Might be Very Hard to do

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Spelling List of Comic Book Exclamations and Action Words

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NitroNorman

Dec 1, 2019

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NitroNorman

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Dec 3, 2019

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#22

Yet more talking was done.

More questions were answered. Trying to convey the totality that was the Worm universe to one of its more famous characters was not an easy thing. Eventually I convinced Panacea to stop asking questions and just let me tell her a little bit about each person in the story, their hang-ups, their problems, and the many ways in which each person could be 'fixed.'

I did not say anything about Vicky's aura power problem(TM) or anything else about her family. Mostly because I think she was too young and she was already, sorta, kinda, aware of it.

I might have caught her before the aura messed up her hormones too bad. Anyway, she was with me now. Given time for her head to normalize without being blasted with Glory Girl's Love Me Aura and she should be fine. She might figure it out on her own in a bit. Or it might be a non-issue.

Amy took the fact that I knew everyone's secret identity or that I could easily take steps to find out all the others I didn't know about as well as could be. However when you think about it most of the Parahumans in the Web Serial already knew each other's identities. Amy, for instance, could do DNA matching in her head. This mollified her somewhat.

Really when you think about it there's a reason why the young are called stupid. Lack of knowledge, lack of experience, lack of answers, the list goes on.

But again, it had her feeling bad for something that should be obvious with hindsight. Then again she's a kid and I'm an adult with outside context knowledge.

As a slightly younger version of the one from the story she hadn't been quite as burnt out as she would have been after she met the Undersiders and Skitter in the bank robbery. She's a junior medic, and she's taken all of the normal civilian classes, including Sex-Ed, that she needed to satisfy the medical community. But it seemed as if her powers made her skip a lot of the steps. Her powers and job had already allowed her to figure out other people's powers already but she hadn't mentioned anything because she didn't want to be labeled as an even bigger threat.

Fear. It's a stupid thing.

This was one of those secrets that did more damage as a secret than as an open factoid. After all Tattletale already knew who everyone was thanks to Coil and hacking. Coil could afford to kidnap the pretty females of Brockton Bay and murder/rape/interrogate them every night, undoing the damage with a literal snap of his finger, walk away satisfied, to his desk where he could write down all the new information he'd just learned. Bitches' dogs could track scent. The Tinkers could do facial recognition. Parian could smell clothes. Regent saw nervous systems like Christmas lights, each one unique. Gallant sees emotions on people like tie-dyed-t-shirts.

And finally the Protectorate and the police have a fully functional crime lab!

As I pointed out each thing Amy became amazed with my common sense. You could see the stress multiply and/or evaporate off her shoulders by inches.

What she should have been taking is Psychology 101. She was smart too. Once I explained how the alien Shards influenced their hosts she started re-thinking her life choices and figuring out what part was the Shard and what part was her.

It really was like having this annoying yapping dog in your head that you needed to train to shut up, and that's what I compared it too.

Out progress over the mountains went well. We covered a lot of territory, and some was covered in snow.

In truth we should have covered more. Once I figured out how to pull up small and big manna land grabs I had to go several dozen miles before I could get another one. The smallest was about seven miles apart, the largest fifty. I managed to grab 18 more Red manna with all these stops. I also managed nine more green and four blues from the rivers that ran through the place.

We could have gone farther without having to stop all the time but we were both worried that we might run into something unpleasant when I got to the next world. The idea right now was to juice up on power, maybe spend a week figuring out what we can do, and pray to the gods of luck that we didn't end up in Warhammer 40,000.

We still didn't know where we are.

"I'm hungry," Amy told me as we crested yet another mountain covered in greens. The tall grass waving in the sunlight like an ocean of wheat.

"How long have we been going?" I asked, looking at the sun in the distance.

It seemed to have moved some. We'd left the storm behind at some point. And we'd yet to see any large herds of animals. There was grass on the dirt, moss on the rocks, and bugs for pollination in the area we were at. The vegetation were all things we recognized. Maybe we didn't know the names of the species, but we saw lots of them in the backyard and in movies.

Amy looked at her watch. "23 hours. And we've yet to see a single strawberry bush or blueberry plant. What the heck is up with these mountains anyway?" Amy screwed up her face in confusion.

It was cute.

I nodded in agreement. "Yeah. You'd think we'd hit the ocean by now. Even with my stops, we've been traveling at well over 35 miles an hour. That's long enough to travel the length of the U.S. of A." I complained.

I started going higher into the air.

"What are you doing now?" Amy asks, bundling in deeper into the underside of my chest. With her robe covering the both of us to prevent wind shear she only had my body to keep her warm. I was fairly immune to the wind with my hair was on fire, so my alien biology counted pretty well as a body pillow and an electric blanket.

"Getting up high to see if there is actually anything to see. The sun hasn't set yet either, you know. If you have any trouble breathing just let me know."

"Kay." Amy replied.

Poor girl. She was just about to fall asleep.

My flight into the upper heights of the atmosphere was uninterrupted. What I saw was an entire continent covered in mountains. It was like someone had taken the various mountain ranges from the world and put them on one supercontinent. There were valleys and rivers and even places that looked like a desert, but they were folded up between crags of rock and cliffs with huge shadows of darkness scarring the land. There had to be dozens of Mt. Everest and Kilimanjaro and Swiss Alps and Rocky mountains in the place. Like someone had squished the continent up like a blanket.

As for my direction of travel. I could sense where my lands were and they made a nice map in my head. I could look right at them and my eyes would focus on the spot where each of them were claimed. I'd been traveling east because most of the rivers were going in that direction. But it turned out that I would have to cover about seven times the distance already traveled to get to the coast.

As the quickest way out it left something to be desired.

I guess we were on one of those super-giant planets that can only be found in fiction. The gravity should be much higher. I wouldn't have noticed but Amy would have. And it looks like the storms never end. They just migrate around from place to place making sure everything is watered and wind swept with regularity. I didn't see any hurricanes.

I wondered if there were any fish in the ocean.

On the way I stopped to pick up three more Red manna, a Blue manna from a beautiful lake, and two more Green.

On the way I saw plenty of fish in the waters. I didn't know their names, but I recognized them from fishing shows. They were Huge. They'd easily swallow my entire head if I let them. There were so many that, even with better eyesight than ever before and clear cool waters, you could never see the sandy bottom.

As it turned out, there was not a single crab to be found. Not from the mountains to the sea did we ever see anything resembling in any shape or form any creature that could walk on land other than insects. Which were all eaten by the fish as they jumped out of the water. Oh, some of the fish were capable of going on land, like mud fish with their incredibly capable and muscular fins, but no animals.

It was weird.

Once at the coast, with our bellies growling in thunderous mutiny, I went fishing. Firefly that I was, it took no time at all for the light of my hair to attract a deep-sea tuna of some kind and have it come leaping out of the water a good hundred feet to try to swallow me whole.

"Yipe!"

I dodged, surprised to find such a high-quality specimen so close to shore. "At least they have the instincts. There must be animals on this planet somewhere to prey upon them, or else they were transported here. I wonder if this world was someone's project once upon a time?"

The next time a fish jumped out of the ocean I was ready for it, and gave it two blasts of green Starbolts with both fists. Nearly swallowing me whole, I could hardly miss, and shot out the right eye with one hit and another put a hole in its head, both of which went all the way through its body. It fell to the ocean dead.

I went down to catch it before it landed in the water, afraid that I'd never get it back. I grabbed the tail, my fingers going right through the flesh into the bone underneath, and heaved for the sky. Just in time too, as a fin the size of a sail passed by in my shadow as soon I moved away quickly.

"Lively neighborhood." I muttered, gaining a bit more altitude before going to the shore.

I had a respect for animals and these creatures leaping abilities are awesome.

On the way there I gained the Pattern of the Epic Tuna, which is what I called it. I doubted that it was an actual tuna. TV has told me that there are several species, and this wasn't Earth Home. But it was big enough and if I hadn't burned its brain and dodged I would have been swallowed whole.

It took little time to smash open a rock and make a ten foot stone table that I was able to heat up with my alien blaster powers. In that time Panacea had used her control of biology to remove bones, scales, unwanted organs and filth, and parasites, leaving behind enough meat to cover the heated slab of stone entirely.

I ate almost half.

"You really do have nine stomachs," Amy commented as I tore the liver of the fish to bits.

I smirked. "Flying around at speed burns plenty of calories," I remarked.

She humped, then went back to eating her fish steak and blowing on her fingers. "Well we can't all have extraordinary physical beauty."

"Why not?" I asked.

"Why not what?" she replied.

"Why not give yourself a few upgrades?"

Amy frowned at me. "You know my powers don't work on myself. Or is this another thing from the fix-fics?"

"I don't know. You tell me. Little Miss I can engineer a creature from those offal," I pointed to the pile of 'scraps' from the fish, "Give it a copy of your powers, and use those as a proxy to create healing organisms, and fix yourself up with a retrovirus."

Amy's eyes got huge. Then she stood up. "Excuse me." Then she walked over to the pile of fish guts and started poking at them. In a few seconds the whole pile was smoking and covered with yellow bubbles as the materials started breaking down, even the nearby soil and sand, and was quickly being conglomerated into a thing that looked like a wooden barrel-like plant with one root enthusiastically growing towards the ocean.

"What are you doing?" I asked, as I leaned back in my seat to see around the girl. I smirked as I took another bite of fish. I knew what she was doing, or supposed I knew what she was doing. I was just waiting for the results of the things I had pushed into action to carry themselves out.

"Well, as we are alone, and I apparently have a chance to cut loose and have some dang fun, and you just happen to give me an idea that has my Shard dancing in circles to be used," she said in a condescending tone that let me know that she knew she was being manipulated, "I'm gonna try it out."

"Try what out?" I smirked.

"Making a healing creature. Although I'm not sure what it should look like," she paused in mid-action. "What should it look like?"

"Try for a cute and fluffy caterpillar look, that purrs when it's working," I suggested.

She nodded.

I watched her work for a bit. On top of the mass of bio-matter she created a doormat covered in fur. It cycled between several colors before settling down on some almost white blue, with yellow ringed black spots. She was muttering to herself, then sighing.

"I don't know how to give the creature superpowers," she whined. She picked up the creature she created and shook it out. It still looked like a fuzzy doormat. "I can make it regenerate really fast, but I can't figure out how to give it a copy of my powers. Any ideas?"

"Jeeze, give me an easy one. I have no idea," I tried to rack my brain and didn't come up with anything. "I think you copied some other people's powers into an animal, and then continually modified it by generations. Other than that, I have no idea. What'd you make anyway?"

"A very ancient organism that doesn't have a name. I saw them on a documentary once. Since it looks like a doormat that's what I'm gonna call it. No real brain or nervous system, even the digestive system's all over the place. If it gets out into the ocean it'll be torn apart. I've also given it a biological self-destruct. If I don't reset it it'll die in about two hours." She looks at the organism with sadness. "Now I don't know what to do with it. It's not what I wanted."

"What did you want?" I asked.

"I wanted to give myself powers like yours," she admitted. "I think I can use another creature to do the work, but it would kill me first. Humans aren't made to be like whatever you are."

I snorted. "Girl, you're going for the long jump. You need to learn how to walk and run first. Here, try this. First, create a creature to filter water from the ocean for water and chemicals, make it photosynthesis on sunlight, and generate a current in its gut to make chemicals. Make two storage tanks. One for liquids, like storage tanks, one for making bio-matter, like undifferentiated stem cells in potato skins, so you have all the materials you need. You should also make some kind of unit for digesting things like wood, moss, and biological remains. Also another unit so you can build up a DNA Cell Library. Once you have enough specimens you can mix and match as needed."

Amy was already working at creating perfectly horrible bubbling things that grew in weird ways like a particularly horrific B-Movie horror film, complete with all the colors of the rainbow.

Turns out that Panacea the hero is the kind of person that when she gets an idea tends to run it into the ground.

After collecting up some plants she made what could arguably be called a Bio-Extractor. Its main body was sort of like a tree but mostly like a cactus and it had a serious root system. It had hearts to beat and blood to move and something like a digestive system in its roots to eat through dirt and stone. A pair of special roots went to a Chemical Storage unit that grew in size.

During this development process I kept flooding my eyes with different colors of the manna spectrum one after the other, hoping to trigger some kind of Mage Sight. That actually worked and it allowed me to see what she was doing. Each color gave me a different lens, if you will, that allowed me to watch Amy's power do its thing.

As a result I kept getting these ideas for bio-manipulation abilities. Most of them Green manna based for regeneration, Red for powered muscles for kicking ass, Black for better digestion and absorption of food, White for a well-organized circulatory and respiratory system, Blue for enhanced cognitive functions. Most of them only took one manna and one colorless, or another color if I was mixing and matching.

After a half hour of this I didn't seem to be getting any more pings for any new ideas.

Meanwhile I had my own projects.

As a Tamaranean I had an instinctive use of energy manipulation. Getting the radiation I absorbed from sunlight to come out was as easy as laughing or spitting. Strange but true. Tapping into a Red manna was about as easy as taking in a lungful of air, from a chili pepper storage warehouse. There's a technique to it that I just assume that smokers develop, never being a smoker myself. But I do like spicy foods.

The first thing I noticed was that my hair went from this six foot long shimmering thing of burning coals to outright being on fire. It didn't hurt me but it started to char everything it touched.

The second thing was my Starbolts. Normally they're solid green bars that hit things with solid kinetic force that burned and/or exploded things, looking like a special effect from a 1970s alien movie or thereabouts. War of the Worlds comes to mind. Most Planeswalkers can make fire if they try. All I had to do was imagine my Starbolts getting more powerful and they went from 1970s special effect to become a forty foot long sickly green flamethrower with a yellow-ish core capable of setting rocks on fire.

It's how we cooked our food.

I blame video games and RPG books for this, but, if my instincts were anything to go by, it seemed that my powers were like one part painting and one part like the special effects on a stage. They worked, and the only reason they worked like that was because I expected them to work like that. With one color I could imagine what I wanted to happen and the spell would paint a picture, like a mono-color image in a photograph. It was tied to a mental command, like an electronic book of spells. I'd think what I wanted, get a flash of an image in the head from my imagination, and then that special effect would happen with me in the middle. If a person didn't grow up with video games, or movies for that matter, I can easily see them having more difficulty putting together a framework for their magic to operate in.

It was no wonder the Magic The Gathering ran on cards.

But this was great! It seemed that as long as I could come up with a mentally strong enough image in my head about what my spell should do and had the right colors than it didn't matter where the source material came from. It would work in the real world just as well as on the TV screen.

For instance I wanted a light. What I came up with was a step by step process to get what I wanted that was similar to being a painter. I grabbed a few units of manna of various colors in hand and thought 'Energy Expulsion: A Globe of Daylight'. All while thinking about flashlights, matches, neon, torches, etc. The nebulous concept crystalized around my idea and ran with it. What came out of the tips of my fingers was literally a sphere of True Daylight. The ball of light would even move around to where I wanted it because I was mentally toggling a pretend control stick.

It didn't stay as a globe of sunlight, of course. It annoyed my eyes like nothing else to stare up at a naked bulb. Because I wanted to change it I was able to change it. I didn't have a container, but I was able to dampen down the light on the sides of the sphere to a less intense illumination and change the color to blue and increase the output on one side as a yellow cone of sunlight so it was more like a Flashlight Ray .

I could easily modify this into a laser if I pumped up the power a bit and modified it more.

Other spells had a similar result. Energy Expulsion: Flame, gave me a torch with a knob in my head that I could turn to either light a candle or cut steel. Imagining the hand grip to a powerful spray gun with a head full of different fittings improved things remarkably. I could make a jet-like shot, a flat fan, a solid cone or a round cone, a flood or a mist. But the nozzle was my hands and the water had been replaced with either jellied gasoline or fireworks depending on what I wanted.

I was a real Jubilee.

Energy Expulsion: Lightning was quite a bit harder. I wasn't as familiar with electricity as I was with flashlights and power tools and it took a bit of time to get over the idea that I wasn't sticking my hand into a live wire. What I ended up doing was a combination of thinking about those Electrostatic science toys my teachers brought out in school, combined with all the characters I knew about who used lightning.

There are quite a few comic book characters that can do that.

Again, the mental tricks where I had a gun of some shape in my hand with buttons and joysticks helped control and make things happen.

It was about then that I realized that Sith Lightning as demonstrated by the movies was kind of weak and used by people who couldn't properly emote worth a damn about how amazing their powers are unless they're stupid Evil. Bummer.

So that's how my powers worked for me. I imagined a thing and if it was possible the manna would paint a picture in my head. Once the spell activated it was like I had a video game controller, in my head. There were some limitations because there were things I don't know how to do. Most of my spells were fairly solid in the Green because of watching Amy and I had lots of Red to play with. I was obviously going to have to stop by a library at some point so I can Science this stuff.

That aside, powers are fucking awesome!

I was throwing lightning, flame, lights, and whatever the hell Star bolts are at rocks and blowing them the fuck up!

I could fly!

I'd been given one of the better aliens of the DC universe. My hair was on fire and I liked it!

I was a Planeswalker whose Soul was literally something the Multiverse had to acknowledge as something important.

Does anyone see any problem with this? I don't.

Did I have any real interest in leaving this world and go somewhere more exciting? Nope. As they say, it's all fun and games until you end up in Warhammer 40k.

I was safe, the biggest super powered person on this planet (that I know about) and I had lots of fish to eat. I had powers that needed exploring and lands that needed claiming. I could easily see myself kicking back on the beach for a year with one leg propped up over the other and my hands behind my head. All I needed was an umbrella and some music.

Lazy? Yes. But I was making the best of this situation. Amy was busy doing lovecraftian work and was far too busy working her way through a lifetime of power suppression stress. I wasn't going to be poking the bio-manipulator any time soon. She might break me down for parts or something.

So I did what I always did when I was on the beach. Only this time when I started making a sand castle it was made out of glass.

-000-

And that's how I imagine my character's powers work.

Thanks for reading.

Last edited: Dec 3, 2019

Nothing is Impossible! It Just Might be Very Hard to do

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#28

Author's Note: I'm glad that some of you like the bio-tinkering.

On a sad note, my mother's cat got very sick and we had to have her euthanized. I brought my mom and sister down to the vet's for a final goodbye before the injection was given. I'd known that girl for 13 years now. I didn't even want to have anything to do with writing or posting, which is why I'm posting this now instead of a few days ago. However, if there was ever a reason to want bio-manipulation abilities this is it.

As I said previously, I have a backlog of a few chapters. But now I'm going to dedicate one of the world's Nova goes to involve Cats somehow. That's a promise!

Please enjoy.

-000-

Amy made a Bio-suit.

My head was running the Theme Song through my brain. I remembered it perfectly in Japanese but for some reason my Planeswalker Spark was also feeding me the translation:

"Life, an infinite energy beyond scientific understanding.

Now, this energy has been transformed into a new weapon."

GUYVER!

Emerging evil is born whispering.

A forgotten word of creation.

New life boils up from the ground, shattering the peace of our land.

Oh! on your journey to tomorrow!

Hey! as you make your own way!

If you know that someone is waiting for you,

You've got to make it through the raging fire!

Guyver! corpse of an ogre!

Guyver! a seething soul!

Invincible defender Guyver!

The first layer consists of the soft skin which is pliable to the touch but resistant to most forms of kinetic damage, and is waterproof and warm to boot. This skin covers the entire body, from head to toe in a thin layer of protection. The skin has its own decentralized nervous system and is connected to the host body through her nervous system in turn. All senses are unimpaired and improved upon wherever possible.

On top of the skin are densely packed chitinous plates. After endless numbers of modifications they are resistant to both Starbolts, lasers, electrical attacks, protecting the arteries and bones. Near each joint are several raiser-sharp bone spurts, which can be used for quick slashes and short stabbings. Chemical glands can mix and match to make the blades poisonous or merely toxic.

At the end of each arm is a powerful hydraulic spray nozzle capable of shooting various liquids, solvents and acids, and pheromones, from an internal supply of glands and bladders at short range. Surrounding these chemical sprayers are eight tendrils that can fully retract into the armor or extend for fine work, each equipped with a three finger claw on the end. The claws can inject or take blood samples, and other uses.

The head is encased in the same tissues and armor like a true helmet. Perhaps having been inspired by her manipulation of biology it's got a cute animal motif with two large eyes on the side near the top, a nose in the middle and a pair of horns on top, resembling some version of the Nain from Chinese mythology resting on her head.

This cute salable item that you couldn't keep stocked in stores contrasts the fact that you can no longer see Amy's face. The upper half of her face and cheekbones are covered with an armor mask. The area around the eyes is further protected by an organic crystal-like transparent visor. Color changing cells imprinted into the face mask gave the appearance of an unadorned face, which conveys expression.

The whole helmet is imprinted with millions of units of eyes and other light sensory organs recycled from insects. Other extra-sensory abilities were taken care of by the horns on top with sensitive membranes in the tips that detect a full range of sounds and a resonance chamber.

Additionally there are four long tendrils extending from the back twenty feet long that look like white Chinese dragons. But when commanded they divided into four fingers with webbing, kind of like a parasailing kite, with the colorings of a monarch butterfly.

Replacing Amy's worn-out hospital shoes were casts of armor equipped with four wheels for roller blading. The wheels are on the ends of bio-mechanical joints that fold up around the shoe and are made of the same material as the armor.

Altogether it gives the appearance of a girl who went into the store and came out wearing a complete set of the best sports armor in the world and likes bright colors and cute animals. She can also change the colors over time with the exception of the armor, which is made of materials similar to fingernails, bones, fish scales, teeth and the shells from barnacles.

I leaned back from where I lay, my head propped up on my right hand and elbow, as Amy skated around and expounded on the qualities of her personal bio-armor suit. Although skating wasn't the right word, as it mostly looked like she was moving around on the backs of super-crabs attached to her feet. With the more than functional eyes she had on her boots they were fully capable of avoiding the little rocks on top of the stone outcrop. But she wasn't going to be getting a mover rating on the sand and soil any time soon.

"Aren't you concerned about having wing-tendrils? They're kind of like a Simurgh, right?" I asked.

"They're just manipulators," she said as she rolled on by in a big circle. Then she came around again. "I can make them into other things if I want." She went around my body again. "And that way I can do this!" the tendrils flapped open for a second before folding up again, and brought Amy to a halt, and helped keep her from falling. She spread her arms out into the air. "Ta-da!"

I clapped my hands. "Very nice. Do you think you'll ever be able to integrate my DNA into it so you can fly?"

She shook her head, no. "For now I'm sticking to terrestrial life forms, which is what my Shard seems equipped to handle at the moment. I'm sure there's knowledge of alien biology in there somewhere, and I've gotten bits and pieces of from other Case 53s, but if I do I don't have access. I guess I'm like a tinker with one specialty after all," she gripped like a teenager with a car who has to be home by seven. "You don't even use DNA. You've got proteins, but they're like nothing I've ever seen before. Not even bio-Tinkertech. I think I can reproduce your flying effect field-thing with terrestrial parts and modified organs, it's just going to take time."

"I'm sure you'll get it eventually," I reply. "Pants?"

"Oh yes, here," she handed me an outfit that I was more comfortable wearing than any of the other Starfire costumes. "It can shapeshift a bit to stay attached, breathable and stretchy, but I'm not so sure about how it'll survive battle damage. The bioluminescence on the inside is set to reproduce the same exotic lights your body drinks up. The shoes will eat a bit of the soil you walk on and it'll absorb moisture to sustain itself."

I took the suit. "Thanks Amy. You're on in a million."

She blushed prettily with the complement. I think I was getting sweet on her.

The costume was definitely more working class than most comic book readers was used to. From the bottom up we started with a pair of practical boots which would be great for spelunking. The rest was a full body denim jumpsuit with pockets over the front where my kidneys used to be, all in black, with two inch wide purple stripes along the sides. There was a belt, but only for appearance purposes since it was all one lifeform that tightened itself everywhere for a perfect fit, and was inflated and stiff from internal bladders that held fluids. The sleeves came down just past the elbows. The gem at the neck was a polished rock I found on the beach. The material had to be black to photosynthesize. All in the shape of Starfire's Black Costume.

The difference from the classic idiocy of impractical comic book designs is that the boob window had been filled in for a built-in sports bra and that Amy had used some tricks with shells and pearls to create the silver outline of the costume to as best as I could remember it, so I was almost completely covered.

I also had a headband that resembled the Tamaranean crown, in purple, to keep my flaming and constantly on fire hair out of the way of my face and eyes.

You have absolutely no idea how hard it is to control this hair. It's on fire, so I couldn't just put a hair scrunchies in it and call it a day. I could control my body heat so the cold never got to me, heating my fingers up to cut through solid wood with a touch. But the weird physics-breaking traits of being a Tamaranean that were giving Amy so much trouble also turned my hair into a heat sink that could start a forest fire.

Unlike say, superman, I needed a heat sink.

Amy had done me a solid using the shells of various creatures as a template to create a ceramic that would survive the abuse I could give it.

Once I had everything on Amy put her hand on the outfit and some bits of it shifted around for a slightly better and more body-shaping fit. Just because I was above chafing didn't mean I wanted the material grinding in weird places.

"Thanks," I nodded, putting my hands in my pockets. I liked pockets and these were deep. "I can't believe that this thing is alive. I mean, I thought I was doing okay with the whole flying thing but this whole thing has been like a dream that never ends."

"That's what everyone says when they get powers. All done," Amy nods and takes her hand back. "So, are we ready to go?"

"I don't suppose I could get you to make some monsters?" I ask.

She shook her head. "I don't want to make monsters. These suits are just fine for me and," she gestured at the equipment she'd made which was now brown and dead, "I don't want to do anything that would hurt the ecology. If this place was made by someone I wouldn't want to upset them, you know?"

"I guess if that's what you want to do, that's fine. I guess this is it then, hua?"

Amy nodded.

"I'm ready to go. Are you ready to go?"

She pointed over her shoulder at her backpack. "Yeah, I'm ready. Got my DNA Cell Library all set to go." The top of the pack split open like a flower allowing a green vein to uncoil, allowing a face mask to attach itself to her face. "Ready for bad environments too."

Then she gave me one for my very own to use.

"Not a bad idea. It's a good thing I can go into space. But if I end up in an atmosphere of tranquilizers I might be in trouble. All right, come here." I held out my hands. "See you in a bit."

"See you in a bit."

Amy came and gave me a hug, and then I place the girl in my Hammerspace. In another moment I was flying.

I had a small moment of fear. Just a speck, just enough to keep me humble. The Blind Eternities were not supposed to be good for regular creatures. But the Rabbit in my Hammerspace was okay and Amy said it was healthy so she should be good in there.

Now I was alone.

The wind whistled and the surf on the sea sounded very empty now.

I swore that if I ever found a way to make a door I would use it. But right now this is all I had.

I flew out and, somehow, I was gone.

For some strange, inexplicable reason, I got this totally fourth-wall moment where I imagined that the hole in the world was suddenly filled by sharp wind which created a small tornado, pulling in the sand to form the shape of the Alternate Planeswalker symbol. And then it was covered by the waves of the sea.

This is my new normal isn't it?

Last edited: Dec 16, 2019

Nothing is Impossible! It Just Might be Very Hard to do

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#33

Author's note: Hey, this is your fic author saying that thing's aren't great at home. One of the mama's cat's granddaughter is depressed, and might be sick as well. I'll be taking her to the vet tomorrow.

I'm putting this chapter up both to mark the date and because it's better than staring at the wall. Depending on what happens I might stop posting.

Please enjoy, and make sure you take your animals to the vets.

-000-

When it happened my first impression of walking into The Blind Eternities was like trying to run through a tunnel at the water park while being battered by dozens of water spouts. I could feel it in my soul when my Spark flared and put up a shield to protect my fleshy bits from washing away like sand in a storm. Because that's what people are. Nothing but clay, sand and grit, in the face of the biggest storm there ever was.

It happened so fast I had no time to be scared. I was too focused on survival. I took a step and the next impression was like going down the aisle of a library. Everywhere I looked was another world, another solar system, another universe. A thousand of them in one place, filled with adventures ready to swallow you whole.

If you blinked you'd miss it.

My foot came stumbling down in a meadow filled with waste-high grass, wildflowers and butterflies. There was a rush of fresh air that was sweet enough to bottle as extract. All around were trees and bushes again.

There hadn't been butterflies in the last place. I gave one of them a squint and saw that they were feathery big things.

I looked up and saw a normal sun and moon in the sky. Bird calls filled the air, filling the air with full throated calls.

I looked to the land, turning my head and making a full turn. In the distance I saw a large beast crouching low over another animal, eating it. Couldn't tell what the victim was, other than it used to have horns. It was a fresh kill. The carnivorous beast was mostly tan, and shaggy, with a short striped tail and the biggest fangs. It gave me a look, a stance as if ready to pounce and attack, focused on a hair trigger and, since I didn't do anything for five minutes of a staring contest, went back to feasting, its eyes wearily on me.

"Oh, I've got to let Amy see this," I say to myself.

Amy popped into existent right in front of me. I put my hands on her shoulders. "Don't panic and don't scream, but look over there." I pointed.

Amy turned her head and her eyes got wide. "Is that a Saber Toothed Tiger?"

"Yes it is," I nodded.

"That's a Saber Toothed Tiger!" Amy squealed, but quiet-like and barely contained.

"Calm down girl, you'll spook it." I told her.

"Look at the teats. She's nursing," Amy said, filled with wonder.

We stood there and watched the extinct specimen do her thing.

"Isn't that amazing?" Amy asked.

"Yeah, it sure is."

"She's big too. Must be seven hundred pounds." She paused. "I want to pet her."

More moment of silence.

"I want her as a summons," I said.

"Yeah?" then she blinked. "How? I mean, how are you going to do that? She'd maim us."

"Ah, still a little squeamish, eh? You forget already that I'm a Planeswalker, I can do what I like." I frowned at her and came to a decision. "Listen Amy, whether you like things or not, things have to happen. My advice is to follow my lead and do what I say, absolutely. Understand? Things will go a lot easier for us if you do. We're out in the wild here and there are ump-teen billions of people's lives depending on us to keep them from dying on Earth Bet. We can't be pussyfooting around."

"Alright, alright, Jeeze, you don't have to lay it on me so thick, you know! I know that if you say you need that animal, I'll believe you. But you still haven't told me how you're going to do it."

"Well that's the easy part. You're going to do it."

"Me?!" she squeaked.

"Well, since I don't want to wholesale slaughter the beasts using my overpowered and completely inhumane fireball spells," Amy paled at that, and then got an idea about where I was going with this. "Then I've got to say that my answer is in tranquilizers, as in those which you will make. We'll need a gun. Here's my plan . . ."

My plan was very easy. Basically I just flew around holding Amy around the waste as she stood on my feet and when we saw some wild game I liked we came down like a helicopter for some rich prick and bagged us some game with Amy's new organic air-gun blow dart. It looked like one of those things from Warhammer 40k, two spines folded together with bladders and a few crazy-looking eyeballs to help aim. I saw her make it out of some wood from a tree and the corpse of some animal. It breathes.

BS, OP, mine Amy girl be cool!

I can see why rich dudes like using helicopters to hunt. You don't have to ride through places that may or may not have savages in them and you can ignore the terrain altogether. You can spot your prey with good binoculars; we didn't have telescopes but Amy's helmet came with eyes the size of my fist and were much better designed. Then, once Amy had tranqed the beast I could get a summon after Amy had fixed any health issues.

Plan Farming Summons was a go!

Without humans around North America was rife with extinct beasts. We got the Saber Toothed Tiger and her cubs and some kind of big white camel thing right from the start. There was this armadillo-looking creature that came up to my knee with a face like a hamster, and another armadillo-looking beast the size of a car with shaggy fur on its face and a more ball-like shell. There were bison, a couple kinds of wolves, a few more kinds of cats and panthers, bears and birds, and mammoths.

Amy loved playing doctor with the animals now that we had some. She also spent a few minutes each time tinkering with her costume now that she had some other animal DNA to play around with. Her backpack full of DNA samples was getting bigger and so did her suit.

In addition to that my plan was to try to get a set of ten of each color of Mana at each world we came to. Ten units of Red Mana from the Adirondack Mountains. Ten units of Blue Mana from the rivers on the way to the sea and in the marshes along the beaches. A few more Black Mana from the wetlands and swamps if I could manage it. And some Greens from the verdant forests and fields. We even took a trip down to Florida to check out the coral reefs.

For the life of me I couldn't figure out where to find White Mana. There was some in the big bee hives. But not enough to pull up a land's worth.

That all took the better part of a day. We'd eat a meal, sometimes a slab of flesh that Amy had grown out of the side of an animal before healing it up. A few hours of sleep was spent in a tent made from a bunch of trees that were folded down into a room for us to bunk in, which Amy made sure to fix in the morning. Then it was time to step into another world. Amy was put away in my Hammerspace and away I went.

Only it couldn't be as simple as all that. As soon as I entered the Blind Eternities it was like going down a tunnel full of water spouts "IN MY EYES!" and every world was this shiny stone to trip on.

I'd manage to dodge a few falls for a bit and then end up in another version of Earth.

Most of the worlds had forests. The trees were never in the same place. The vegetation changed a bit and so did the landscape.

Sometimes the trees leaves were so dark they may we well have been pure black.

Sometimes the trees were more brown.

Or the trees were twice as thick as they usually were.

Sometimes the grass was silver.

All of them indescribably the same.

Except when they weren't.

Amy knew about how far back the species of trees diverged from world to world thanks to her samples. But that was about as far as we went cataloging them. Amy's power was happy thou. And a happy Amy was a good thing in my mind.

There was this one world I instantly dubbed a Lava Planet because the entire surface of the earth, the crust, was moving up and down on an ocean of lava. I felt like an ant standing on top of a crust of scum in a boiling soup pot. Ash fell from the sky like the deadliest of snow and floated on the lava in huge cakes. Holes in the surfing islands of rock would send geysers of lava into the air as the floating stone moved up and down.

Oh, if you were wearing one of those silver thermal suits you could walk around the place for a bit. Maybe. My Tamaranean physiology worked great in that regard. But there was no way in hell I was living here!

Heck, there was still life!

The moment the rocks cooled down from red to black they were perfectly good places to live. Especially for microbes. I snagged as many of those fungus covered rocks as I could while getting my ten mana, some of the largest and most potent bits of Red I'd ever gotten.

There was also this tingling in my skin and guts, and my powers seemed to increase tenfold.

I cycled Mana though my eyes and put my hand to my skin. Obviously I couldn't get a pattern for myself to summon a clone, but this way I could see if there was anything wrong with me in the same way that Amy could use her powers on others. According to the Green Mana my cells were being damaged faster than they could regenerate themselves. According to the White mana, the organized structures in my cells were coming apart. The Red Mana showed me the free energy of radiation that was coming from the planet.

Looks like I need a shield. I have plenty of Mana now. I wasn't really thinking about getting one until now - well, I wasn't thinking about a lot of things, but this is biting me in the butt now. Fortunately I had a few hours before my new body is killed by radiation. The energy I was absorbing was offsetting the damage. But it would catch up to me in a few hours.

I found a relatively cool spot surrounded by blue, green, yellow, red, and black fungus. Yes, even in this hellhole, life persists. I didn't dare sit on them thou. Instead floating and sitting in the air like a guru who achieved enlightenment.

"…Azarath Metrion Zinthos…"

I needed a shield. Preferably something about 40ft wide, that lasts an hour, or until it's destroyed or canceled by me.

Unfortunately the only idea I can think up to make a shield is to wing it. But that doesn't mean I didn't know what to do.

First I summoned some colorless Mana that my body just naturally seemed able to absorb and generate. I'm not sure where it comes from since it's not coming from my lands. I think it just hitches a ride on my connections and comes to me naturally. Kinda like power lines and spiderwebs collecting water or due.

I emitted the Mana from my body in a continuous way, like steam-heated sweat. I imagined the Mana forming a soap bubble, protecting my body.

Would it work?

Well it sort of worked. I got a force field out of it. It was grey and weak and kept the atmosphere from coming inside. So the ash and junk didn't bother me much anymore. Didn't do much for the radiation thou.

A charge of Black Mana created a dark shield in front of my hand that was pretty good at taking the life force of whatever it hit. Since there was nothing but moss it was a failure of the situation.

A charge of Red Mana created a shield made out of fire like hardened obsidian. Everywhere was already on fire.

A charge of Green Mana removed the fungi from the rocks and created a shield out of their biomass. Somehow this worked?

A charge of White Mana made me glow like a freaking glow bug. Just an Aura power.

And the Blue Mana shield tried to collect the water in the air to make ice. There was no moisture in this air!

They all worked in their own way but they were not what I wanted. I think I was subconsciously distracted by the concept of the five elements of creation. Earth, Fire, Wind, Water, Lightning.

I had to spend a few units of Mana of Green to regenerate my damage. It took a minute, but I was as fully healed, whole and healthy as when I started out.

As I regenerated I had an idea. An idea that worked.

I had to burn through seven Blue Mana to figure it out. I used a Green and imprinted it with the idea of protection, the same way a cell uses its membrane to protect its innards. But bigger, and all around me. That worked. I had a glowing green bubble.

I should leave now. But there were also a few other things I needed to do first.

First I summoned up a few Green Mana and a colorless Mana and summoned a copy of Amy. I was pretty sure after summoning my little healer that if I opened up her mouth and stared down her throat I'd see nothing but a big dark hollow interior. The summon was just as vulnerable to radiation as a human being, but she had Amy's powers too.

Unaffected by radiation in my shield I had Summon Amy pick up the rocks and examine them for me. I was fairly interested in whatever could survive this place.

I wasn't disappointed. The majority of these bacteria and fungi were thermoforms and some kind of radiation eating fungus. They actually grew in the direction of radioactive materials, enveloping them, and using their particles and ionic energy for power. With a bit of Blue boosting my brain smarts I was able to come up with some upgrades to my shield that would not only protect me but 'eat' radiation for fuel. Another version ate heat fairly well. The shields were somewhat permeable and refreshed air with the same complexity as a working cell wall. They worked on the ash and a few splashes of lava and I was pretty sure they'd work in water as well as space if given the chance.

Have I told you how much I love being a Planeswalker? Because I love being a Planeswalker.

So many of my spells so far were based on shoving as much color onto my canvas to see something stick. This green bubble worked just like biology, as if I had some thick skin of my own design between me and the danger. But made out of energy. And now that I had the trick I could also get the shield to reproduce other biological processes as long as I used Green. I already had copies of bears and tigers and mammoths to play with, plus patches of my own skin. And they worked.

Heck, I bet if I had a poisonous frog to play with I could get the shield to act as a big old poison bubble to whatever touched it. And not me of course.

This was a nice spell. That I could reproduce it with different mana, split mana, more mana, and give it different effects was sweet. Sweet. Sweet!

I gathered up some more of these unnamed heat and radiation eating bacteria and fungi, managing to bag two hundred eager Red Mana out of the larger and more permanent stone continents, and create nine differently colored Mana shields. Altogether it was a fine five days of work.

The next couple of worlds weren't nearly half as interesting.

None of them had civilization. No noises, no automobiles, no ringing bells; no smells of exhaust, greasy food, sugar, rot, or toilet paper. Just the sun on your back and whatever weather the planet felt like having falling on your head with clean water in every stream. Each one a different variation on a theme, like a broken copier gone berserk.

Sometimes, but not usually, even the moon and the stars changed. Without the light of civilization to ruin things you can see a lot of dots in that great big bluish black thing.

The worst part was and still is that first step. One moment you're in the Blind Eternities, then next you're foot's coming down on ANYTHING. It could be dirt and grass covered ground, or the sand of a beach, or ten feet down at the bottom of a river, or the branch of a tree a hundred feet in the air.

And let's not forget the time I ended up in a hollow tree full of bees.

I really should think about getting something for Weaver.

The Blind Eternities really deserved the name.

Thankfully having serious durability and the power to fly covered a multitude of unpleasantness. I had no trouble stepping onto clean ground on a land I claimed on the few times I tested going back. For moving forwards, for most of the time? It was like bumbling around in the dark surrounded by lost toys ready to take my feet out from under me.

-000-

First world is up next. Wish me and my cat luck.

Last edited: Dec 16, 2019

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#43

Well, I believe I've worked my way through the five stages of grief all right. My cat is gone and buried in the backyard, the Mama's ash's came home in a bottle, and our last cat's going in for a checkup. I'm still getting ideas and the urge to write, so I guess I'll be continuing this.

This is the first of two worlds I had planned to visit and already written. The third world, which I've yet to write, will be about cats in honor of my pets.

I'm a little bit mixed about this world. When I was young I remembered watching this TV show at a friend's house with fondness. Now I can't seem to work up the excitement I used to have. The characters are pretty OP. And I don't want to get stuck with twenty chapters per world. The Idea is that they spend a few chapters in each world going on shopping trips and making the place a bit better along the way back to home.

I hope you enjoy.

"This world sucks," Amy declared, the green tendril from her backpack covering her face with a filtration mask.

"Yeah," I was in full agreement with her. My green shield flared out to protect me from the fumes.

When it came to gathering Mana from worlds I couldn't afford to be picky. Some planets had lands that were ridiculously powerful and downright eager to be bonded. So much so that I could get five different kinds all at once if I was in the right place. Others were harder, or nearly impossible, unless I spent an entire day meditating on them just to get one rinky-dink land. Those I had to leave behind since we had to keep moving. We only had a year to get back to Earth Bet.

Amy and I had seen a lot of things since we started this road trip. Animals both extinct and some that we were pretty sure only existed in the evolution of unlikely possibility. We'd seen many worlds that we liked.

But in this case we had definitely found a world we both didn't like. Imagine the world was one giant marsh and the only available water was some soup that glowed because the bacteria were feeding on an incredible number of radioactive particles under the soil. The heat was being contained under the earth from all the chemical reactions, like an underground coal fire, so there was a steady stream of fumes coming up from the earth. The place was like some Armageddon horror world, and that's what we were pretty sure it was.

"This," Amy spoke as the tendrils from the back of her costume extended into the soil and rooted around in it, disgust on her face, "Is awful. It's like someone took a bunch of magic mutagen and laced the clouds with it. And the earth is full of fallout. This junk is everywhere."

"Anything that we can use?" I asked. I wasn't going to ask if we could get anything good out of it, because 'good' had left the building with Megabyte and The King.

"My head swims with possibilities. I've come up with a good many ways to create hybrids. I could take a wolf and fuse them together with a man, create a shark octopus, even grow a caterpillar big enough to eat a train. Between the rocks you retrieved for me and this junk I can probably give them atomic breathe. Not to mention all the other movie monsters," Amy says.

"Any idea how this happened?" I asked.

"If I had to guess, I think this is a Food of the Gods scenario," she told me.

"What?" I blinked at that. No, that was exactly what I meant. "I am aware of a book called Food of the Gods, and read it, but I'm not sure what you're referring to."

"Imagine that someone created a Tinkertech potion that would give you a modification. One for a super soldier, one to make a female's breasts grow, one to lose weight, one to change the color of your hair. Kind of like the shampoos in commercials where you can look like a model after one set of rinse and repeat."

"I think I see where you're going with this. It's like a toxic waste spill, and you get an attack of the 50-foot whatever."

"Or maybe they were developing mutant bacteria to eat plastic garbage and it went out of control and destroyed an entire city by eating all the pieces," Amy shrugs. "More likely thou? There was probably a war and all the crap they had stored in bottles leaked into the environment. Anyway… I have absolutely no idea what happened here, and I probably never will," Amy retracted her tendrils and turned towards where the land was dry and free of wet glowing crap. "I'm gonna make a place to live so I can breathe without my mask on. Meanwhile you find civilization. If you find anything interesting in this death world let me know."

Then Amy flopped down onto the ground to look up at the sky. The vegetation underneath her body rapidly formed a solid conglomeration which started absorbing everything else and growing into the sky with Amy at the Apex. The trees were absorbed, the grass was absorbed, the dirt and mold was absorbed, and well you get the idea. The roots formed organic pumps and mouths that started draining the river dry and even the stones were collected, gulped down, and thrown into an acid pit stomach at the base of the tree Amy was leading onto an adventure into the sky.

I let her to it and started flying a search pattern.

Up in the sky things weren't much better. The overall color of the land was still green but with lots of shades of brown. Thunder filled the skies. The clouds were mostly a yellowish color with green clouds. In the distance I could see enormous fogbanks of smoke rising from the earth. I didn't want to think about what this would do to a person's lungs.

My new Green Mana Shield was keeping it away and working fine.

I kept on flying, going in an ever larger circle, on the lookout for anything interesting. If there had been any sign of civilization it must have been swallowed up long ago.

Mostly I was studying the ground, keeping an eye out for flying predators, not looking for anything specific. I had questions.

The puddles of water were few and far in-between. The rest was a never-ending march. Only instead of water there was at least a few inches of yellow lava calmly flowing through the place like it was the most normal thing in the world. Lakes of the stuff bubbled as it boiled.

The glowing soup of bacteria I could understand. But how could so much of the ground be covered in active lava? There weren't any active volcanoes that I could see. Shouldn't it have cooled and formed a hard shell over its surface, instead of running like water through the place?

The vegetation was some combination of plants and cactus and thorns, all covered in some kind of ceramic armor. Things like trees, bushes, tall grasses and even coconut trees grew up on islands of rock perched right next to the rivers of calmly flowing yellow lava attempting to absorb the light since there was no sun. Strange gasses wafted up through the heated earth and were absorbed by those plants.

There were rats down there too. No fur, no tail, wider face, another pair of limbs around its mouth, four legs, lizard-like skin. It ran through the lava like it was just a puddle of water.

Was it lava? It was hot like lava. How could a swamp exist in lava?

I cycled through my new Mage Sight. My senses expanded to infra- and ultra-violet light, high pitches, electrical senses, magical perceptions and something I was pretty sure was the beginning of psychic energies the way I saw them leaking from the nervous systems of animals. With all the big game cats, who are well-known to have a touch of psychic, and all the other animals I'd made a summons out of it wasn't all that hard to believe I was developing a touch of Metapsychic powers. My growth potential was unlimited after all.

I saw heat and light, I saw structure and life, I saw death.

I landed a few times and made a few connections to lands. Mostly Red with some mix of Black and Green. Not enough water for Blue. But I did get a few Blue/Red and Blue/Green mixes.

I should find an ocean, a lake, or river around here sooner or later.

I found a good spot to sit down at. It was a rock with a few plants around it, no more than a few dozen feet wide, situated in the middle of more lava. There weren't any of those weird rats to bother me but I would keep an eye out. I cast an Aura shield over the entire little island just in case. It was fairly big, strong too, but I couldn't move through the shield once it was cast, being anchored to the island.

Casting and marshaling my blue mana, I sat down to study.

Blue and white Mana seems to be the best combination to fuel my Mage-Sight. Green and white for organics. Most things have some kind of aura, plants, animals, or nonliving. It was good for finding animals in the forest, and if they were next to each other for telling which one was stronger and if one of them was sick. Now I turned my focus on the environment around me to learn what difference there was between normal and mutant and to see what kind of superpowers they had.

"…"

Primarily some form of Fire Immunity it turned out. No surprise there. But what gets to me is how it's been acquired by nearly every plant and animal and enabled them to evolve and live in this hellish environment. Most of these life forms probably came from the desert. If it wasn't for the mutations I'd be more suspicious about how a bunch of cactus managed to turn itself into a rainforest. The creatures here can even drink lava to gain nutrition from it. Their insides are especially interesting, as most of their bacteria are some kind of Hyperthermophile like the bacteria found in Yellowstone geysers, hot springs, and hydrothermal vents on the seafloor.

Yes, Amy knew the word for a radiation eating bacteria. Bio-tinkers know weird stuff.

In a very short time I'm able to magically recreate the effect. An new Amy Summon was even able to give me a touch up to my biology and the world becomes that much more comfortable. I'd never in my dreams thought that I'd be able to drink lava, but being able to enjoy spicy food that much more is always good. And now I have the beginnings for an Energy Absorption superpower for both pure biological functionality and magical applications. Currently this made me perfectly impervious to heat. It shouldn't take much to upgrade to make me immune to other things soon enough.

I'll have to share this with Amy when I get the chance.

One by one I went through all the worlds I'd grabbed lands from. 47, as it turned out. All of them covering a large part of the continent thanks to my flying abilities. At least ten of each color from each world minus the white. Sometimes more. I was seriously lacking in white.

Funny thing is that each of those spheres are moving. If I overlaid them one on top of another, or kept them in my mind close together, I could see them revolving. That Mega-Earth was the slowest moving one of them all and it matched up perfectly with the rotation of the lands I got on Earth Bet. If all of those other earths moved at twenty four hours in a day plus however many minutes, that means that each of the planet's Amy and I have visited are moving at a slightly faster rate. Which means that I had a fairly reliable way to tell time in that other world.

We could afford to spend a few weeks in each world so long as they were on a faster loop. What a fortunate thing this is!

Erg! I was going to need a dictionary to come up with new terms. Faster timeline? Yeah, that works. We could spend a week in one world and only a few days will have passed in another.

I spent a few minutes drawing in the dirt to get my thoughts in order. So far, very roughly, only two weeks has passed in Earth Bet while for us it's been 35 days. Boy won't Amy be surprised.

I felt cheaty.

One by one I summoned up the various birds of prey I'd gotten from different worlds. They flew, they knew where north was, they had a bit of phantom memories from the animals I took their patterns from, and had all their instincts. They acted like birds but I didn't know much about birds.

These Mana Birds as I called them were also each able to speak whether or not they were equipped to do so and could write out a message in the dirt. Which was damn ass strange if you ask me. They also didn't need food or rest and were pretty much impervious to harm. They acted like creatures from games. They flew but were unaffected by thermals. They flew through the trees and bushes but were unaffected by physical obstacles. I took a few swings with a stick to try and smack them around and it fell through their bodies more often than not.

Weird.

I summoned the Amy Summon again and tried the same thing on her/it. Same thing. And all of the Mana Summons could interact with the environment too.

It was kinda like having my own Emergency Medical Hologram, but one that's able to control its solidity!

Cheating again! I'm such a bad girl.

I ordered the Mana Birds of prey out to hunt. Gotta Collect em All time!

The Mana Birds picked up quite a number of those Lava Rats. Most of them were the recently dead by the time they got to me, but that wasn't anything my Amy Summon couldn't fix up. I got a few tens of thousands of those, just in case I wanted to go biblical plague at some point. There was also this flying insect creature that looked like someone had taken an Alien and crossed it with a praying mantis and dragonfly and then dipped it in gold paint.

The Mana Summons weren't very well equipped to hunt these things but once I had my birds annoy enough of them they swarmed/followed my Mana Birds back to where I was sitting. They were like locusts and nearly covered the entire sky with their numbers.

"Magic missile!" I calmly said as I shot them. There were so dang many, I couldn't miss!

Their bodies fell through the Mana Bubble, I copied their pattern, and then threw the rest into my hammerspace.

Oh, yeah, I'd also figured out where I am. Kind of easy considering everything had been mutated into a dragon version of itself.

After a thousand Grem wings and Lava Rats I got bored, and decided to go fishing. My Mana Gremwings were so cheap I could bring up a dozen of those bugs for every summon. I had to use those to clear the sky so I could leave anyway. I kept the dead bodies for bait.

I found a lake of lava which had eroded the ground into a deep gorge with cliff walls. There was grass growing on the normal dirt around it. Giant yellow bubbles popped on the surface. On either side were two giant thorn trees, at least three hundred feet tall composed of brown and black armored flesh. But what was more interesting to me were the football-sized Amber crystals floating in the lake.

If I was right I was in the world of Dragon Flyz.

After the Earth is destroyed by a nuclear cataclysm, the last remnants of humanity are on a floating island city called Airlandus, where they befriend dragons and fight the hideous mutants on the surface in order to collect crystals that can keep Airlandus afloat while they search for habitable land on the surface. Nice animation, incredible landscapes, dragons. And that's all I remember.

Can't remember much of the characters, but I remembered the theme song and the world it was placed in pretty well.

Plus Dragon riders are, I can't emphasize this enough, amazing!

And what Planeswalker doesn't want a few dragons?

But first, fishing.

I jumped out into the lake and snatched one of the Amber Crystals, returning to my place on the grass a moment later. Didn't want to be snatched like some bug.

Activating Mage Sight showed me that the crystals were alive. Some kind of meta-crystal metamaterial made to absorb radiation and get rid of it as pure heat. This explained the pools of lava without an underground source and why most of everything was smoking. Interesting and useful. I got the pattern, and found I could make these for two Red mana. Ridiculously cheap considering that they were used as a power source to keep an entire city above the clouds.

My face hurt from smiling.

But back to fishing. With my Gremwings summons help I managed to dash across the lake seven more times picking up Amber Crystals before a Lava Beast erupted from the depths!

Guess I don't need the bait after all.

It's head was a hundred feet across and it's body got thicker the more of it was exposed. Not a single limb was to be seen. It truly was like some snake with the head of a Dunkleosteus. Red as blood, with a black segmented belly.

I twisted aside as it reached for the sky three hundred feet long. Such an amazing beast!

One of its great eyes focused on me, a fish to a fly, angry that I had not been eaten in one gulp as prey should. The head snapped forwards and down and again I was forced to evade. I shot out with an empowered Starbolt and hurled the beast back for a moment, throwing off a layer of black scales for some grey ones underneath, a patch not even as big as I am tall.

The beast whipped around and tried to bite at me again. I dodged once more – the beast was pretty fast for being a giant heavy slowpoke – then took both fists and smashed them down at a soft spot behind the head. This took out a fair chunk of meat and gave me a place to latch on to. The Lava Beast whipped its head about to try and throw me off. But like most snakes that are of incredible flexibility there is still that one spot behind the head it can't get at.

The beast headed back into the lava, no doubt hoping that I'd be burned off. I cast my Green Mana Shield and depended on my new Fire Resistance buff to keep me safe. In the lava I couldn't see a thing. I got my Summon for the beast. But I wanted more than that!

So I quickly had my Amy Summon take control of its biology and head back to the surface.

So there I was sitting on the head of some kind of lava-swimming Elasmosaurus and being eminently pleased with myself. The beast used a very extreme sense of hearing to locate prey just like the echolocation systems in dolphins and bats. It could interpret shapes, distances, directions, speed, and exact location. It also had a number of eyes buried underneath its skin along its neck that were capable of x-ray vision so it could see through the liquid rock. And finally it could swim with immense speed and strength under the lava and breathe lava the way that fish do.

This was one amazing fish.

It took a bit of time to get my new beast back to Amy's Tree but we got there in the end. I also picked up four more summons from Lava Beast's brothers and sisters. The animals were pretty territorial so there was zero probability that they wouldn't have challenged the beast for trespassing. With the beast and I holding them down and my Amy Summon doing all the work in a quick flash and grab style I soon had the monsters in Hammerspace. Once those beasts were safe and stored away for later I used their summons to clear a path. There were even a few more Lava Fish and Lava Eels to catch and snack on and make summons out of.

Once you started collecting summons it was kind of hard to stop!

I had dreams now. Big dreams. Everything that I was learning through my Amy Summon said that the Lava Beasts, the fish and the eels, would do just fine in water provided it wasn't too cold. My summons were also getting pretty good at fishing out Amber Crystals. I didn't have very much to do other than to wait for my Lava Beast to carry me back to Amy's Tree. I even got some summons out of the local plant life.

Amy's Tree had grown quite a bit in the hours I'd been gone. It was getting close to night time. So it must be summertime here on this world. There was also some smoke coming from one of the branches that was now a burnt stub. However Amy looked fine. She flew right on over with a brand new pair of bat wings patterned after a monarch butterfly colors.

I waved as she flew down and landed on my Lava beast. "Hey Amy! You can fly! When did that happen?"

"Well you've been gone and some stuff happened," she preened. She looked down at the beast she was standing on. I saw that Amy's weird boots now had grasping claws. "So where did you find the dinosaur?"

"In a deep-lava lake. I've got several more in Hammerspace. They're called Lava Beasts. There's also Lava Fish, Lava Eels too, and Gremwings and Lava Rats." I told her. "So, what happened to the tree?"

"Well it turns out that this land is inhabited by gargoyles that ride on dragons!" she exclaimed, her wings puffing up and pulling her up, but the claws in her new boots holding strong to the flesh of my new ride. "Oopsie, still getting used to that. No wonder my sister has such problems." Amy settled down back onto the Lava Beast's head. "They were really cool, but total jerks!"

She takes a seat and starts waving her arms about. "Yeah, so there was this big guy called Dread Wing, like ten feet tall, with red skin, yellow eyes, sharp yellow teeth, big head, big muscles, and he's got these big bat-like wing-ears. Him and his people ride dragons! His is a huge beast named Blackheart. It's twice as big as the others. A real war beast. It's a massive four legged, red scaled dragon with the ability to consume lava and breathe it out as a gaseous incandescence. He's got a lieutenant called Nocturne, whose a green woman, also with bat-ears, and glowing green eyes, but she has retractable claws! They came to my tree with fifty warriors to take control and enslave me!

"So I said no. And then they tried to use these lava-cannon things to burn the tree down. Of course I used the same fire immune plants to make my tree, so that didn't work. I then wrapped them up in the trees vines while they were standing on it and used thorn-needles to pump them full of chemicals until they all fell asleep. Some got away, but I got the leaders." She smiled more.

It was disturbing to see all her teeth and I loved it.

I just blinked at that. "And here I'd gone fishing." I face palmed, slowly, and then shook my head. I'd missed the battle. "Amy, you are terrifying."

Amy just smiled beatifically, put her hands behind her back, and twisted on the spot as I praised her. "Thanks! Thankyou, thankyou, praise me with great praise! But you know I couldn't have done it without all your ideas. I even got a pair of wings and claws out of it! Only, I'm not sure what I should do with them now." She pouted. "I don't want to let them go and do worse things, but I don't want to be their jailer either."

She was acting more like Bonesaw every day.

"We can decide that after I get some summons out of them." I told her as we moved up closer to the tree. The rivers of lava were thinning out fast. "An army of flying creatures that can think make even better summons than birds."

"I guess so," Amy put two of her fingers together in a way that was most anime. "So, would it be okay if I bred a few dragons?"

"Amy, if you want you can have an entire flight of dragons. But you should know that I know where we are now." And then I proceeded to tell her all about the world of Dragon Flyz and its toy line, which didn't take much time.

"So you're telling me that I took out all the bad guys, accidentally?" she squeaked.

"Well you did set the perfect Venus dragon fly trap," I reassured her. "Although I was expecting more battle, really. But an easy win is an easy win. Anyway, check this out," I pulled up an Amber Crystal from my hammerspace. "So far as I can tell it's some kind of crystal that's programed to react to things. It absorbs the radiation from the last world war and emits it as an energy that is absorbed by the rocks and emitted as heat. Where you find crystals you find lava. You can use it as a power source too. And it self-replicates. Some of it's gotten into the animals and plants and mutated them. What do you think?"

Amy took the crystal and her eyes glowed a pale color as her power activated. "Holly molly! I thought I was doing pretty good with your tissues, those rocks and these fire beasts. But wowee! It's like I just had a whole library dumped into my head. Like a total dump of new information. Boom! New knowledge, new tech tree! I feel like I just became a prize winning nuclear physicist! It's like a Rosetta stone into fire-based and radiation based biology! I can totally fireproof and radiation proof my suit. I can give my suit your flight powers and starbolts too, now!"

"You going to keep the wings?" I asked. "They're very pretty."

"You bet your socks I am! I'm a flying, rockem-sockem fairy with vine whips! Nobody rocks the wings better than me!" she tried to look stern and cool but it came off looking cute as hell.

I laughed, I couldn't help it. Then Amy laughed and everything was all right in the world.

-000-

Last edited: Dec 16, 2019

Nothing is Impossible! It Just Might be Very Hard to do

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-000-

Deep within the bowels of the Amy Tree my friend Amy had stuffed the people of Dread Wing's army into these wooden pods so that only their heads stuck out. They were all asleep. The dragons were in their own pods recessed into the floor looking like rugs. I spent a few minutes getting a Summon out of each of them.

Then we had lunch.

"I don't suppose you could engineer us some fruits and vegetables out of the local fair?" I asked. "We're starting to run out."

"The biology of this place is super saturated with those mutant traits and radiation. So, no. But don't worry, I started a garden. It'll take at least a day for the plants to mature so we can pick them," Amy picked up her fish dish and sat at the wooden table that had grown up out of the floor. She wasn't very enthusiastic about her dinner, but what did you expect when you were having the same several days in a row? "So what should we do with Dread Wing?" Amy asked, picking at her fish. We were kinda getting tired of fish.

"Well they are the native inhabitants of this land and this IS their territory, so I guess we'll have to let them go. In a few days, of course. Wouldn't want them running around loose while we're here to enact some petty revenge scheme," I said, finishing off my fish steak and starting on the next. "My Mana Gremwings have yet to find this Airlandis place. I'll give it a few days and then I suppose we'll have to ask for directions. Their technology comes from the year 4,000 or so. And they're the last humans. As this whole planet is pretty much a waste I intend to offer them safe passage to another world in exchange for their technology. That'll be a nice technological advantage if we ever end up in space or on an alien world."

"Could we get some toilet paper from them too?"

"Sure, why not?"

While my Mana creatures spread with an actual goal in mind the rest of my Mana summons continued to hunt and bring back unique specimens for me to make summons out of. Most of the time I put their bodies in Hammerspace for later. Mostly so Amy can take them home. Or we might find another use for them. Or something?

Amy also had her own projects. This project was Dragon Breeding. She took DNA samples from each dragon and proceeded to combined them with the others. The number of total pairs she could generate from fifty dragons was about 1225 pairs. This of course ignored their sex in the first place. I assumed that Amy had to do something about them being related to each other. The original DNA samples went into her luggage which I stored in my Hammerspace. The new DNA was used to fill an entire room up with the eggs of baby dragons.

I had to put these eggs in Hammerspace too.

Man, I'm getting a lot of mileage out of that thing.

I asked Amy if she could help me give one of the Lava Beasts wings. She must have been feeling generous. Or maybe she didn't care because they were animals? After butchering fish and animals for their flesh I wouldn't be all that surprised if she had changed her mind a bit. She was a kid after all. Nothing really changes your mind about the wonders of pets and animals than working on a farm or helping out at the local butcher.

With Amy and my Mana Amy summon we soon had a beast that rivaled Blackheart. As the adjustments were made some of the bone structure became a white exoskeleton with metallic armor. The beast now had a dragon's head with two white spikes of bones coming from above its four eyes and a blade that grew from its nose. The flippers grew into a four-winged flight mechanism. The tail gained a morning star. Two large legs complete with metallic claws were added underneath so it could walk on land with the wings folded up behind it.

Amy's biggest contribution was that she'd finally reverse engineered Tamarin biology enough so that she could start hammering it into something an Earth Organism could support and use. The now flying Lava Beast Dragon could absorb solar radiation for fuel and all its symbiotic organisms had been adjusted for that. It could move through the air and go into space just like I could and had all the other physical enhancements we could shove into it.

With Green Mana I was able to increase its muscles to the absolute maximum of what was capable with just biology. With Blue Mana I was able to make it smarter and absolutely loyal. With Black Mana I was able to increase its digestion so that it got more out of the food it ate and was totally status affect immune to disease and parasites by altering the acidity of the blood when it became sick. With Red Mana I was able to increase its power further and enable it to produce a serious blast of incandescent fire at anything that annoyed us. With the piddling of White that I had I was able to improve on its bone structure a bit, to make it lighter and stronger while still flexible.

A medium-sized Amber Crystal added to its chest and another to its forehead gave it a power boost that it could tap into. The link was similar to the way a Parahuman taped into their Shard for their abilities. I could even fill each crystal with a complete set of colored Mana. The Amber Crystal in the Lava Beast Dragon's chest was programed so that the creature could shoot things other than flames from its mouth. So far those were the green Starbolt blasts which could come out like a machinegun and the totally overwhelming blast of fire that it could sustain for up to five minutes and a yellow gas of Amy's tranquilizer. The Amber Crystal in the forehead worked as a dedicated power source, kept its enchantments fully powered, enabled it with regeneration, and absorbed radiation much more efficiently.

I wished I was able to do more with White but my stock on that was practically non-existent compared to my Red. I had hundreds of more Red than I had Green, which had more than Blue and more than Black.

I needed some cities.

-000-

A Small chapter today. I haven't actually written anything much for the last 3 weeks and this is all backlog, as mentioned before. I've also done some spell checking and editing of the previous chapters. It's helpful when it's pointed out.

In bad news ... My number 3 cat is sick as well and isn't going to be around for much longer. Obvious in hindsight. We don't think the animals were well for a while now and they were just hiding it. We think that one of the fights they got into a few months ago infected them, and now the disease has run its course. The disease can't be cured either. I hope whatever infected my cats, be it another cat or something else, is dead. Or I'd drag it out into the street and shoot it, no joke!

It sucks.

Nothing is Impossible! It Just Might be Very Hard to do

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Well it's time for some good news bad news.

First the bad news. I no longer have cats. There was really no doubt in our minds that they would die. Hindsight is 20/20. We made our number 3 cat as comfortable as possible until she passed away. That was 2 days ago. They are no longer suffering. I've watched some old favorites, The Land Before Time and All Dogs Go To Heaven, An American Tail. Can't believe I've hung onto these videos for pretty much my entire life.

On the good news I'm back to writing again.

-000-

As things worked out I found Warnado first.

The place looked like an artistic jet turbine in the shape of a large skyscraper. Underneath the arcology ten large mechanical legs spread out over the lava-swamp like the legs of an insect. Like Airlandis it was supposed to fly above the toxic landscape. It was about the size of an amusement park. There was vegetation growing all around it.

However it was clear that these were hanging gardens, not nature running amok. There was some nature running amok as well. The ruins were well maintained.

My plan was the same as always. Make summons out of interesting creatures and get a couple White Mana out of their city. Amy wanted DNA samples. We both wanted loot. But this time we had to plan the encounter.

Before we left I had to kiss Dread Wing on the lips to use the Tamaranean ability to gain languages through lip contact. It was like kissing warm leather, and not at all unpleasant. Poor sleeping beauty wasn't awake to appreciate it. It was a bullshit power but I didn't want to wait for however long it would take for my Planes walking silver tongue to come into effect.

Amy did something to the tree to make it rot in a few days so that they could free themselves. She also gave me a perfectly organic toothbrush.

This was Lava Beast Dragon's first true flight after several educational falls off the Amy Tree launchpad. The Tammarian flight feature kept it from crashing too badly. As it turned out we had to keep the creature grounded for a few hours while it exercised its wings until it nearly pulled its claws out of where it was gripping the wood. Once it could coordinate all of its limbs and could flap the wings like a bird falling out of trees without hitting the ground was a lot easier.

Silly us. All aircraft test their engines first before getting off the ground. Live and learn.

It was doing pretty well and got us all the attention we deserved on approach. Dozens of purple and grey Dramen grew wings and took to the air with all kinds of melee weapons to surround us. Some even had guns. They shot blobs of lava. Nothing else would very much inconvenience a dragon.

I just smiled and waved. Lava Beast Dragon roared at a few of the Dramen who got too close, its black mouth opening bottom, left and right, revealing three long tongues with black barbs and big yellow teeth. It nearly snagged one of the other dragons out of the air.

They learned to keep their distance then.

We landed outside of the city. Other than a few more roars at the other beasts for getting too close, who were now thoroughly intimidated and keeping a great distance from the biggest player in the field, it was the perfect gentleman monster, just as Amy and I intended it to be. A nice thread of blue Mana from its brain to mine gave me a Brain Control spell that allowed me to control it. It wasn't exactly a Taming. I'd done some things to its brain when I was making it more intelligent to make it possible. Amy was of no help since she didn't want to do brains and I'd had to rely on the Summon Amy and what her copy of a Shard was feeding me with. But it was impressive enough to make it sit like a dog.

I flew from the head to the ground on my own. The Dramen saw that I could fly without wings. I could see their eyes widen in realization. Their eyes next went to my flaming hair. Amy had wings, but like the dragon men's they folded up and disappeared into the back of her suit like they weren't even there.

Time to put on a show.

Amy pointed to one of the creatures that came down as a group in front of us. A bald little mutant with green skin, tall ears, his back bent like an unfortunate hunchback, wearing a red shirt and pants. A pair of goggles covered his eyes, one eye was covered with a round lens, the other with a square one, both glowing yellow.

"I remember him. He's the one riding the Chinese-looking dragon. He's the one who ran away. While Dreadwing fought."

The tribe looked at the mutant. They didn't know what Amy said, but something was up. The creature looked left and right, but remained unmoved. He was brave, but his body was weak. He walked up to us and stopped ten feet away. He spoke some version of English but one so twisted it hurt the brain to follow.

"I am Gangryn of Warnado, head scientist of its people. You have taken Dreadwing, our leader, and imprisoned him. Release him to us this instant, and bow to your new masters, or all of us will fall on you like a plague of Lava rats!"

I looked at Amy for a long thoughtful moment, and then took another step forwards.

I raised my hands and spoke loudly as the mutant had done so all could hear the sound of my voice. As a special effect I had the Lava Beast Dragon echo what I said.

"Hear me the people of Warnado. I am Nora Ender the Orange Planeswalker. I am as far above the gods as they are above you. I walk the blind eternities between worlds. Summon beasts and people," I gestured to the side and summoned a dozen animals, saber-toothed tigers, mammoths, giant sloth, turtles, giant crabs, bears, some as big as some dragons. "And command incredible power!"

From both fists I shoot beams of green energy into the sky while my body becomes one giant green flair. I make it brighter, and brighter, and brighter still. The intensity become a white magnesium burn as the shadows on the ground are reversed in a miniature nova.

Then it was gone, the silence louder still.

"My intention is to go through the world and collect what I want. While I was away your leader attacked my friend, who defeated your men and dragons easily. As compensation you will bring forth every man, woman, child and dragon so that she may collect blood samples to add to her collection. I will go through your city to tour and take what I like. As for your leader, I am not keeping him. In three days when the tree rots you can break him out of the cocoon. We will be gone by then. Now move aside." I arrogantly commanded.

The little mutant did not seem impressed. He growled at me. Actually growled at me!

Then I threw down my trump card, literally. I had a Blue Mana spell ready to go and dozens of targets after giving Dreadwing and his people the once over at Amy's tree. One Mana to give it shape and form, two to make it affect an entire group, three to target and direct it, four to make it go through walls. Load it up with the impression of a Dramen right down to their DNA, thanks to Amy's biomancy, and couple it with the idea of them asleep and then let it rip.

"SLEEP," I intoned. A blue ring of energy blasting out of my body in every direction. The effect causing everyone to fall.

Amy went over to the crooked Gangryn. A few seconds filled with sick popping sounds straightened the poor creature's spine and gave him two new eyes that matched.

"Well, that worked," Amy said, putting a sliver of tissue into her backpack. "Shame about the casting time though. Think you got everyone?"

"No. I'll go through the place and spam the Sleep spell a dozen times more just to be sure. Then you can do your thing."

"Right then. I guess it's time to go shopping," Amy nodded.

Together the two of us went on a whirlwind tour of Warnado. It was just like a shopping trip, only with loot. We didn't need any of their stuff though. Amy took DNA samples and fixed bodies as we went. Mostly for practice, but also to keep her Shard happy with new stuff to do. I picked up some books and weapons. Really, the only interesting things we found were in Gangryn's lab. He had a sample of Crystal Fire that Amy and I found fascinating. Other than that were the usual one-touch and a summons for me. I also took some of the tech, but most of it was cobbled together pipes and salvage.

The place wasn't a legendary, but it was old. Plus the usual other colors. I did manage to pick up a few White Mana, finally!

-000-

Last edited: Dec 24, 2019

Nothing is Impossible! It Just Might be Very Hard to do

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Spelling List of Comic Book Exclamations and Action Words

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NitroNorman

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NitroNorman

NitroNorman

The Armchair Reader

Dec 24, 2019

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#66

Author's Note: Merry Christmas Everybody!

Please Enjoy this chapter.

-000-

With the help of Warnado's maps we found the area where Airlandis floated, easily. I was shocked by its size verses its lack of air patrols. Amy and I nearly got right on top of them before a set of dragon riders intercepted us in the air.

We waved at them. They waved at us. Then we landed on the golden city. Amy and I both flew to the ground off the Lava Beast Dragon's back. I turned around and padded the beast on the nose, thanking it for the ride. Then with a wave of my hand the creature disappeared into my Hammerspace with a whoosh of displaced air.

That made the people of Airlandus cautious, which gave me a minute to set up a connection to the city.

"Well?" Amy asked.

I grinned at her. "It's a Legendary all right. Gold mana." I didn't think gathering a land from a manmade object would work but it seems like it did, work out okay that is. This was the last refuge for all the humans on the planet after all.

Turning around we faced the gathering of humans on the edge of the airfield.

As the home of the dragons of Airlandis there were quite a few of them about. They had long and slender bodies, long necks, needle-like teeth, two legs and two large wings with claws that folded up so they could walk on them like pterosaurs, and lighter colors. The moment the dragons started paying us attention I felt a tingle on the backside of my brain.

"Nora?!" Amy said in alarm. "I can feel them in my head!"

"It's all right. Don't be alarmed. They're somewhat intelligent and it's the way they communicate," I explained.

"I don't like it." She grouched, frowning at the offending ones.

The group of officials that came towards us was heavy with Dragon Riders. They all wore crash armor made for falls and tumbles, complete with helmets with a Mohawk going down the center. The main part was some kind of violet muscle suit; but the armored bits like the boots, holsters, skirts, chest plates, arm bands and so forth could be any color as long as they were a matched set. And the muscular arms were exposed for some reason. I guess fashion existed everywhere.

In the middle of the group was an old man with an epic white beard. His outfit had a collar and the helmet was the bare minimum to expose his face. There was a headband with a wide stretched V symbol, like a bird in flight, integrated into the helmet.

Even with the differences between the cartoons and live action I recognized Aaron, the one of the council members of Airlandis. He could not walk, so moved with the help of a staff powered with a piece of Amber Crystal that allowed him to defy gravity and hover a few inches above the ground.

Ten feet from us he stopped. "Greetings to you visitors. I am Aaron of the council. Come in peace and be in peace," he said, his eyes switched between the both of us. "Please, tell us who you are and how you came to be here. We thought we were the only humans left."

"My name is Nova Ender. I am the Orange Planeswalker. I travel the Blind Eternities between worlds. I go where I wish and command great magic," I told him, summoning a ball of green flame to my hand. They were suitably amazed so I crushed it in my hand, snuffing my flame out. "This is my friend Amy, also known as Panacea, who has the power to manipulate flesh like clay. She can't speak your language, please understand," I introduced them, Amy waved.

We'd decided for the moment not to mention how these people were fictional in another universe. That was only for deep friends who would be traveling with me. If they decided to travel with me they might find out the truth. But for right now we were keeping that info from overturning their poor fragile minds. It would also keep things simpler this way.

Less headaches all around, too.

"Our intention was to settle down for a bit and study the various creatures here for a while before seeking out any civilization to be found. Unfortunately for him, Dread Wing attacked my friend's tree house construct and was soundly defeated."

Aaron shifted his eyes to Amy. "You are telling me that she defeated Dreadwing, all by herself? How did you do that?"

I relayed what they were saying as a translator.

"I'm a bio-manipulator," Amy's words caused shock to go through the crowd. "When the bad guys showed up and were up to no good I used the treehouse I made to shoot their bodies full of sleeping poison. I also made a cloud of sleeping glass to get everyone outside. Some of them escaped but I got fifty of his men and dragons locked up in my treehouse."

Aaron looked at Amy for a long thoughtful time, and then nodded. "Your armor is organic, correct? Did you also create that creature with the Amber Crystals in its chest?" Amy nodded. "Then if you can do that, then I believe that you can do as you say. Do you also have the power to heal?" Again, Amy nodded. "Can you heal me? If you can then your word will be as gospel."

Amy reached out her hand. "Sure I can. I heal people all the time at home. All you have to do is give me your hand."

"Father!" One of the Dragon Riders in blue armor and pure white hair yelled out. "It could be a trick!"

"Calm yourself Z'nith. If Dreadwing's army has been conquered once by these travelers then they deserve all of our respect," Aaron offered his arm.

The armor Amy had on peeled back along the side so that her arm and hand could come out and touch his skin. There was a faint ripple in the man's flesh from the point of contact, removing wrinkles and tightening up the skin, giving him the look of a man twenty years younger.

"All done!" Amy announced, letting go and slipping back her hand into her organic armor. "I've removed all the scars and fixed the nerves and did a general tune-up of your insides. You're going to feel really good and be hungry enough to eat for three men."

"Father, how do you feel?" asked the lady dragon rider in white and pink.

I was interested in the girl. From what vague memories I had of the show the lady had the ability to telepathically communicate with beasts. All I had to do was shake her hand.

That was another ability we were keeping a secret for now. It'd be a lot easier to get a summons out of people if they didn't know you could get one with body contact. All you had to do is be polite. Maybe meet up at parties or something like that.

"I feel better already. The sensation in my back and legs is completely different." Aaron took a deep breath and landed onto the floor. Both his oldest son and daughter were by his side to catch him. He stumbled but he did not fall. The man then gave his staff to Z'neath and took two steps without his help. "Well would you look at me. That is … that is amazing! I haven't stood on my own two feet in twenty years!"

The man then turned on Amy and nearly fell onto her, but the man was only hugging her. Tears fell from his eyes.

"Thank you, child. Thank you, thank you, and thank you."

"It's all right. It's the least I can do." I translated for her.

"If there is ever anything I can do for you to repay you for this you merely have to name it." The councilmember told us.

"Then if we have proven ourselves, we can begin at once," I told the man. "Our intention here is to gather resources, knowledge, technology and allies. You have all of these. I have a need of you, all of you." I gave the city the once over after I said this. Airlandis seemed to be all made of one single kind of metal, gold in color, and despite being old I didn't see a single bit of wear and tear in all its parts, as if it was beyond those things. I had no doubt that they religiously maintained their environment and so I was extremely interested in just about everything they had.

"Now then," I continued, taking one of the Amber Crystals from my Hammerspace and presenting it to them. if those people in the back hadn't been paying attention before, they sure as heck were now. He who could provide a power source for this city practically had all the political power as well. "It is obvious that your people's lives are extremely hard. You live from day to day, week to week, gathering these Amber Crystals to power your machines from the hell-world below. This is a large city and there are other cities on the ground, and yet you're not crowded with refugees. Your people are on the way out. You need a better place to live than this overheated radioactive wasteland. I propose to employ your people. I also intend to move you to another world and leave the troubles of this place behind. What do you think?"

Aaron let his eyes go wide. "That sounds amazing. But the council ... they might object."

"What about them? Are they not interested in finding a better home?"

"We are."

"Then what's the problem?"

"The idea of leaving our planet for another one is fantastic. We tried once before, and it didn't work out so well. They might not believe that you can do it, even with proof."

"Then let them see this for their proof!" I summoned up one of the larger fish I'd caught, which was about the size of one of the dragons. It came with a splash of salt water, and was alive and flipping out on the golden metal of the airfield. To it I added forty more and many gallons of water and a pile of seaweed fit to make a nest big enough for dozens of dragons. "Fresh fish, seawater, seaweed! An entire ocean filled with that. Uncontaminated soil and clear skies! I'll have your people there. Take a few days to think about it."

-000-

That was the beginning to one of the more interesting, boring, and exhausting weeks of my life.

Amy was equipped with a translator for old Ameri-English and was invited to work in the zoos curing radiation damage. That she was also curing the people she worked with of old age was yet another side bonus. They needed all the help they could get and the fewer old crippled people they had the better. Then she went into the terrariums to fix the plants.

It was not a subtle way to sway these people onto our side. When you're old you don't feel like doing much anymore even when you want to. Now they could jump in their beds without threatening of breaking something. Plus they were going a bit nuts rediscovering their sex drives. I had a feeling there was going to be a baby boom next year.

The council had about three days to make up their minds, which were made up for them. They were pretty much overseeing an island nation with emergency powers that had been active long enough to seem permanent. Everyone knew everyone else. From there it didn't take long for the council to give in to the demands of a populous who had seen the first bit of uncontaminated salt water fish in several hundred years. The assumption was that they would go and they couldn't fathom why they shouldn't.

I'd also heard a rumor that one of the wives of the councilors had threatened her husband with the couch if he voted otherwise. Ergo, we go.

Unfortunately we couldn't just Hammerspace the city and make off with it. The place was too damn big for me to do that.

More's the pity.

Amy was having the time of her life.

Ever since I'd abducted her and was thrust into this adventure with me she'd been pretty much using her powers non-stop in ways that would have labeled her as an S-Class threat at home. These were for her safety, comfort, and later for her enjoyment. Now she was working with medical professionals that didn't just treat her as the medical miracle she was, but were interested in learning everything about her as a person as well.

Amy blossomed.

Amy had hundreds of stories to tell. The doctors had their own stories to tell as well. They were both absolutely fascinated with the nightmare down below and each other's world. Amy's absolutely huge library of samples went right into the labs where people who knew the right questions to ask could get what they needed out of their computers. And they had no concept of Top Secret, so of course they shared everything with everyone who came around to listen.

I'd have been bored if people watching wasn't a hobby, and it was funny to see them running around all over the place. These people don't get out much.

Then there were all the books Amy had to read. Two months' worth of schooling at a level beyond what most people can imagine. Now she was plunging into the challenge of learning all the jargon of an advanced medical science that could not only explain what she was doing but replicate a good part of it as well. Learning how to stick people with needles by practicing them on each other!

I'd pass, thank you very much.

Amy could attest that if you enjoyed what you were doing, you weren't working, you were having fun.

There were no overbearing helicopter moms in sight, no oversight committee, no World Health Organization, no Youth Guard, no PRT, no supervillains, no Endbringers.

Well there was the one warlord. Since I'd given Airlandis new Amber Crystals for each day of our stay they hadn't had to go hunting for more fuel. The Dragonators have actually had a chance to relax.

Who knows what Dreadwing is doing?

Dreadwing didn't attack. But this might have something to do with the flight of Planeswalker Dragon's we created to patrol around Airlandis while it was grounded and evacuated.

There was also a bit of therapy involved. Professional head doctors can be an experience. But they're absolutely wonderful when you needed them. Now that I was confident that the little Wondergirl wasn't going to snap anytime soon I could relax as well.

We got a bit distracted bringing out all of our (mine!) animal specimens, comparing them to historical samples, and naming the ones that hadn't existed on this world before. Some of the creatures were really smart. Most were just variations on a theme. But everyone got to name at least one animal since Amy had run out of ideas. Other than using her name over and over again, I mean.

Then as the most perfect storage unit EVER I had to put the results back into my Hammerspace.

In addition to that I got to copy the artifacts of every item the citizens kept bringing me as luggage for the Big Move. I might not have been able to fit the city in there but I could make a pretty good go at everything else.

One of the things I learned by answering a bunch of questions that ranged from the stupid to the rude was how to create a constant spell. Basically, as long as I had a Mana tap on this Earth I could set it up to feed a particular spell for as long as the tap existed.

Could I create a portal?

The answer was yes. Amy was a big help with that since she'd actually played the game, so she knew which kinds of mana to use.

What I didn't have before were books on physics about how the universe worked and those helped. These people had tricks on physics that allowed photons of light to be teleported between components just like they'd done in the lab back in the twentieth century. It wasn't Star Trek teleportation but it made hash out of all the computer science I knew little about. It allowed a computer stuffed inside a helmet to override and download the contents of a year 4,000 spaceship, they were that powerful.

Amy got a brand new computer to take with her.

Multiverse portals were neat to have. I needed four Green mana, at least, depending on what I wanted to do. Amy called it a Planar Portal. Both points of the Planar Portal had to be near a forest and a source of water for some reason. I also had to have claims on both lands in both worlds.

I tied the spell to a pair of standing stones on the shores of one of the few lakes to be found in this rotten world and watched as the better part of a million people walked through a fifteen foot wide tear in the universe. Even some of the dragons went through.

Altogether it took us some 11 days to evacuate the entire city. Plus another nine or so just to transport equipment they wanted to keep. It helped that I could put the portal on Airlandus so they could drive their vehicles right on through. Most of everyone else walked.

I wasn't even involved with all that. Maintaining the portal was a lot like sitting at a toll booth. Most of my time was spent reading, looking up every now and again to make sure the portal was stable, and helping people getting their things through for a few minutes with the good old helping hand of super strength.

It was boring, and tiring, and involved. It was like counting cars on the highway. I could sleep, but it wasn't like I could take a day off while it was running.

But eventually it came to an end.

"Seems a shame just to abandon the place," Orac, the engineer was dressed in overall and had on a pair of big gloves. We were giving Airlandis one last look before we went through the portal. "I've spent my entire life on that thing. Caring for it. Fixing every dent and replacing the wires."

"I understand, moving can be painful," Amy told the man. "When I first started this trip I missed my home too. But home isn't a building. It's the people you're with."

"Have you thought about my offer?" I asked.

Honestly I didn't care at this point. I hated this good Sumerian idea I had and wanted nothing more than to go be unconscious somewhere. I had that weird floating feeling from not getting enough sleep and being too tired to sleep, if that makes any sense. I wasn't tracking very well at all.

The man shook his head. "As much as I'd like to go see more worlds, this new one is going to need all my help."

I shrugged. "It's up to you."

Once the man and his crew had passed through the hole in reality I shut the portal down.

There was a bed with my name on it that someone had sewn into the thing and it was all mine to abuse. I hadn't slept on a good bed in a handful of weeks, so once I found it I threatened all who were nearby that if they didn't leave me alone to sleep the first person to rouse my wrath would get a starbolt to the face!

The people left me alone. In the full light of the sunlight, under a tree, I slept for the better part of two days and only awoke when I needed to go to the bathroom. While I was in a coma things had happened.

A vote was taken and the people of Airlandis had decided to call their new city Grounding.

The naming conventions of these people astound me.

Amy's major contribution was to transform an entire forest into tree houses with hollow interiors so people had places to sleep and store their stuff. Each tree was also 'programed' to produce food so everyone had enough fruits and nuts to eat. She had completely exhausted the soil around a local lake in order to do this. They were also infertile.

Amy was adamant about not leaving behind any of her work that could germinate on its own.

-000-

The next few days were busy. One guy had located a source of iron and had convinced Orac to convince me to blow up part of a mountain to get at it. People were finding sources of copper, lead, tin, sand, and clay to make stuff out of while other groups were learning how to make farms in dirt again while others were learning how to fish. They'd taken along the vast majority of their equipment from Airlandis, which included factory farming, so it looked like they were having a good time of it to my amateur eyes.

Oddly, I ended up as the odd person out. This always happened at parties. People would talk and nothing they talked about would be interesting to me at all. Plus their talking points were about things I don't know about in any case.

For a lack of better things to do I took Orac up on his offer and started blowing holes out of the ground. It also gave me a good reason to get started to experiment with earth manipulation spells, most of which used a pair of red mana, but also some green and sometimes a black. Moving earth needs energy, which is best suited to the action in red mana, for some reason. I guess it makes sense since I get red mana from mountains. But I wanted less boiling lakes of lava and earthquakes and more earthen walls and ramparts. Still, by Split Wall spell mostly worked. It wasn't very scientific or safe but it was entertaining and allowed other people who knew what they were doing to move right on in. Thanks to my efforts we had an entire series of trenches dug out to be filled with all kinds of pipes for all kinds of things in less than a week.

Eventually I ran into a subject on whom I could talk about and understand: Food.

The people of Airlandus had been living on factory farming for so long they'd forgotten how to peel potatoes. Their rooted vegetables were so clean and their fruits were completely safe from pests. To keep sickness from spreading their city was nearly completely sterilized. Nobody had had to peel a potato or a carrot since before their grandfather's and his grandfather's time.

I transported an entire civilization to another world, blow up mountains, create monsters, dug underground fortifications with earthquake spells, and I still somehow ended up peeling potatoes for my supper. How does that work?

A few more days passed in general happiness while I rediscovered how to teach someone how to cook without burning the camp down and taught people how to make home fries and other things, and a good time was had by all.

Still, nobody wanted to come with us to other worlds.

Oh well.

A funny thing I found out before we left was a tidbit about lands. That the green mana I'd gotten from the nearby land had gradually shifted over to white as civilization had settled into place and a town grown up over it. With nearly a million people this process had taken about twenty days. It wasn't very strong either. More of a hint of white on a solid green. But there it was. There were roads and buildings now. So it seemed like the white would grow.

That was good to know.

I'd come back to check up on them later.

-000-

Dec 28, 2019

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#69

New Chapter, ahoy!

I looked at Amy and she looked at me.

"So, time to reassess," I said. "With the Planar Portal I could potentially get us to Earth Bet right now. The question is what should we do? Should we go to Earth Bet, or should we keep road tripping?"

Amy thought about it for a bit. "We haven't really found anything that could allow us to punch Endbringers." She stated.

"Not many places can go up against Endbringers." I reply.

"If we went home, I'd have to deal with mom and everyone else," Amy remarked. "We could keep going? How much time do we have?"

"At a guess, we've only used up about a month of Earth's Bet time," I say. "Minus or plus a week or two."

"One month and one good world. We have a lot of time."

"Yeah, but we're also talking something like three years for one year away from your home, give or take. That's a lot of time to be away from home." I shrug as raise my hands to her. "It's really up to you. We could get you home now, or we can keep going."

"Well home isn't very safe compared to some of the world's we've been to. I say we keep going, till we hit one year or twelve worlds, whichever comes first. If we haven't found anything by then then we probably aren't going to. We'll be well prepared in any case." Amy says.

"So we keep going. And hope we don't run into Warhammer 40,000."

"Amen."

"Wait," I paused as a thought struck me. "Should we at least pop over and let your family know that you're alive?" I ask.

"If you and I show up, will Cauldron know?" Amy asked.

I shrug. "No idea. They've got access to a heap of powers. I don't know if I can be predicted or not."

"Then let's play it safe." Amy sighed. "It's for the best."

I gave her a hug and we spent the night huddled up. In the middle of the night I woke up at some point to see her on her phone texting away, writing a letter to someone who'd never get it. It kinda made me think about soldiers out in the wilderness, writing love letters to someone who probably won't get them until after they're dead. Only difference here is that Amy might survive the end of the world with me around.

I pretended to be asleep and left her alone.

So we kept going.

It was just the same old routine now. Step through to another world, get a dozen lands, and then move on. I was getting better at this walking thing. Sometimes I was able to visit five or six worlds before the clocks on our wrists said it was time to go to bed.

At least this time we were better prepared to go out into the wilderness. We had tents and equipment and all kinds of gear. The Tamarian Crown that Amy had produced had been upgraded with stuff made out of a fabricator I'd gotten in Dragon Flyz, which allowed the two of us to communicate at range. We'd also recharged her cell phone and were now able to take more pictures and videos of what we were doing.

The only real different thing that changed was that I wasn't in a hurry to get the girl back home. I could take my time and try to steer myself over to anything that looked interesting on my walk in the Blind Eternities. It's amazing how having an easy link back to Earth Bet changed your priorities.

New world, new Earth. One with people!

But it was just Earth. Normal Earth with normal cities and buildings for as far as the eyes could see. Sad really, I was hoping to end up on an alien planet and do some more Sci-fi stuff.

Amy appeared at my side after I pulled her out of my Hammerspace and together we had a look around the rooftop of the skyscraper we appeared on. "I really don't like that," she grumped as she shook herself of the effects of infinite stasis before setting her many eyes to looking around. "Oh thank god, there's people here."

All around us was city. It was a bit cold and the air was clear. Thankfully there was very little pollution. Below us was the rail line. The building we'd appeared on was huge, about thirty stories tall, with ten foot high windows, in a style that seemed to combine a mansion for the super-rich and castles for a big city. On the side of the building there was a sign

Toronto: Royal York Hotel.

"Any idea where we are?" I asked Amy.

She shook her head. "Nope! I'm just as uninformed as you are." A smile lit her face. "I can't wait to check into a hotel."

"Well, at least this is earth. Maybe we should pick up some maps and brochures while we're here? Something with lots of pictures at least?"

Amy waved her hand back and forth. "Well it's an idea at least. Now let's go do some shopping and get some ice cream."

I nod. Yes, ice cream was involved. Everything will be fine as long as nothing gets in the way of dessert.

"Yeah, that's important. I feel like rocky road myself."

"Cherry fudge Sunday, with sprinkles!"

"Heathen."

"And proud!"

-000-

It took a bit to get off the roof of the Châteauesque building. The lock was handily defeated by my super strength. From there we followed the stairs down nearly thirty floors into the basement where we found the laundry so we could nick some clothes and place what we had into a pair of leather and canvas seaman's bags.

From the Fairmount Royal York we took the underground walkway to the Plaza and Union Station. We looked just like any other tourists caught out in the strange place with the wrong clothes.

Welcome to Toronto Canada.

From there we got a few newspapers out of the trash and learned that the planet had been invaded by aliens.

Perspective change!

Amy.

For as long as she could remember, Amy has always had to be careful with her powers. Like an evil demon on her shoulder, it has always been there, messing with her thoughts, giving her un-good ideas, giving her solutions to things that weren't even problems. It was the ultimate temptation: always there, especially when she wished it wasn't. Intellectually she knew that it was a form of training, giving pleasure and pain in response to her actions, so she made sure to do only what she wanted to do, obey her little checklist of dos and don'ts, and never tell anyone about it, even if she was curious about how other people used their powers.

But that was before she fell thought a hole in the world because of some other cape in a red fedora. It wasn't Nova's fault. She even trusted the woman to an extent. Because the woman was so free with her powers she should feel envious or jealousy, or rage. Instead they talked and flew around, which was different from how her sister and she flew and talked, and all of her problems seemed to have melted away somehow. Apparently talking really does work.

Now she'd used her Biomancy powers so much the nagging voice in the back of her head was almost silent. If it were a cat, she suspected that it would be purring.

These last few dozen days had been an amazing experience. She had gotten to pet saber toothed tigers! Rode on the back of a giant worm through lava in a far off future place. Flew with dragons to explore a golden city above the clouds. And she'd also made her own super suit. All tinkers made super suits. It's a fact! Her old life could go jump in a lake, because Amy was going to be the best Biomancer ever!

Everything Amy was, Nova wasn't. She was reincarnated, older, wise and fun. Where Amy was reluctant to do anything with her power, Nova was enthusiastic, unless she gave the older girl pause, at which point she would think about it for a minute and say, "You're right, that's a much better idea. Let's try it your way first." Amy was careful to plan out every step of what she was doing with an animal, Nova jumped in with both feet into boiling lava. Amy was experienced but only knew of her life on Earth Bet, Nova was new to the cape life and had outside context knowledge. Amy had problems, Nova gave a dozen solutions. So when they went into each new world Amy tried to treat each new world with a new fresh start.

Amy had built a biological suit of armor to protect herself from things they might encounter; upgrading it with every sample she could collect. Nova had approved of this because, as she had pointed out in the very beginning of their adventure, it was all fun and games until they ran into Warhammer 40,000. But she also knew now that the woman would have approved even without that excuse just so she could watch her do something cool with her powers.

It was for this that Amy knew that Nova was her very best friend and she wouldn't trade her for the world.

-000-

There were aliens on this planet. Actual, genuine creatures that claimed to be millions of years further evolved than humans and made of energy. She didn't need her powers nagging at the back of her skull to know that she wanted a sample of them.

Nova told her what she remembered of an American/Canadian TV show called Earth Final Conflict.

In short? This world was perfect for her, the aliens depended upon some really odd biological technology, needing a special blend of alien science where they had a use for 16 different dimensions that allowed you to bend the laws of reality to go into other dimensions so you can go faster than light, become alien quantum vampires with energy blade-like constructs on their fingers and drain life force, use portals to move around the world, and grow a ship capable of taking you to the stars. It was a bazar blend of alien organisms, super advanced technology and creativity that had to be giving every scientist and engineer and biologist on the planet green eyes of envy.

But for her, it had several great strengths:

The first was that it was biological, and thus she should be able to control it. All she needed was a sample, even if her power took time to unravel alien DNA like she had done with the Tamaran, she had experience now!

The second was that it was tech, reproducible by normal means, and had a database. These Taelons obviously knew how their tech worked and with a little effort her power should be able to download things from their computer brains and the internet that would greatly speed up the process. She wouldn't need her powers to maintain it either.

It also gave the both of them the chance to go to the stars. They only needed to get their hands on one of these Taelons shuttles and then she could make as many as they needed, maybe even growing one of them up into a new Mothership if she wanted.

Nova was all enthusiastic about this idea even before Amy started practicing her puppy eyes on her to "harvest a few alien butts for probing" as Nova referred to it as when they started talking about how to meet earth's new highly guarded alien VIPs. It wasn't like they had to make friends with them anyway.

Amy had asked if they were good guys or bad guys and Nova had been on the fence about an answer. The man who had reincarnated as a woman with the spark of a Planeswalker said that they were alien, and admitted that he wanted to blame the bad writing of the seasons that came later on. The aliens were also supposed to be dying from some weird species death and were also in a long cold war with another evolutionary offshoot of their primary species. That said they didn't care about humans.

It was pretty amazing, really, that the two of them were able to get from Canada to Ohio in very little time. Nova could go into any little shop and create summons out of whatever she touched, and this apparently included ATMs and motorcycles, so they'd never run out of toilet paper again. They'd also taken the opportunity to buy a few things at thrift stores and stop at each farmer's market. Places without cameras and where cash was king.

Nova had taken the opportunity to buy a few comics and as many MTG Magic the Gathering cards as she could find so she could start making an actual book of spells.

Amy had also taken the opportunity to stock up on seeds whenever they passed by a greenhouse or flower shop. If it wasn't for Nova carrying everything in her Hammerspace her backpack would have been the size of a truck.

Amy had known on an intellectual level that her bio-suit made her very strong and that the Tamarin was her own Alexandra package, but she'd never really realized how strong that made them until they'd run all night through the woods and over the mountains to get across the borders; just because Nova didn't want to fly and potentially alert their prey with her energy output. It was no wonder, in hindsight, that the Slaughterhouse nine always disappeared into the countryside.

Admittedly she knew that she would have to learn how to drive at some point, she just didn't think it would be on the backroads of Canada on a mana summoned Harley Davidson that Nova had picked up at a bar as they walked through town.

And then seemingly incredibly they were there in Ohio and it was her turn to do her thing.

Organic brains from animals, as it turned out, were horrible for being used as computers as they were too busy being the seat of an 'intelligence' to dedicate resources for other things. Most computers had mechanisms designed after parts of the human brain and this would be studied to death in the future in an attempt to make computers that can learn, plan and think. In the later 1990s that Nova remembered from his earth, this was an unremarkable progression of computer technology from the study of nature, and the guideline that he/she would be judging the technology of all the other worlds she would go visiting in the future. But to Amy who had only recently recovered from her experiences in the devastated Dragon Flyz world, it meant a literal quantum leap in the development of bio-technology as the entire world geared itself towards unraveling the mysteries of the Taelons technology, meaning that not only would she eventually be able to travel to Inner-Dimensional space herself but there would be a lot of people all over the world who would understand what she had done and be able to make use of it themselves. She might even be able to travel to other dimensions by herself and not have to rely on Nova. Maybe even make a Hammerspace pocket for her own use so that she wouldn't have to keep relying, again, on Nova, letting her pull out weapons and alien bio-slurry from nowhere.

Then Nova had come up with an idea, and together they'd made an Interpreter. The organism was stuffed inside of the largest cooler they could find and was nearly all brains, manufactured from the deer carcass of a roadkill they found as they traveled the countryside. At first she thought that they would have to work to create an interface completely from scratch so she could use it to hook up to the internet. Thankfully the Taelons had released enough of their technology that such an interface had already been made so the aliens could go web browsing. In essence it was her own computer and she'd been refining it ever since as she read more about the alien technology they had released to solve world hunger and fix the energy crisis. It was this device that Amy planned on interfacing with the alien bio-technology and making it her obedient and willing slave bitch.

Making the interface had taken the better part of an entire week. Samples taken from foods and medicines had revealed tantalizing hints of alien bio-technology, and there were entire text books to read on the subjects that everyone wanted to brag about. (In the future she would work on making their own medical kit, and her friend had been happy to find and provide her some Sector Hospital books from a used book store.) And most of that time was spent traveling once they'd been sure that she could drive and stop without falling over. Programming the creature had required both her power and her Dragon Flyz laptop for a lot of references, taking all of two hours and another hour to decode and debug.

After that it had taken her the better part of two days to get the Interface up to speed to the point where she could browse the internet with both her powers and her year 4000+ laptop, a day working over the metabolism so that it would be fed the nutrients it needed to get the job done, and another few days to make sure that it worked like a computer should when it went online and could use the software she downloaded from said internet.

Nova and her had spent a few moments climbing the stairs to a building across town from the Federal Building where Daniel Boone's office was. The pillar of cement and steel was interrupted by a growth on the front of the building, a purple blob at almost like a flattened lamprey with various roots attached, and a long tail trailing down the front that went to a platform about halfway up. On top there was a bulging creature on a tripod that might have been another machine. All the alien technology looked more rubbery and artistic in real life, and the glow wasn't coming from a lightbulb that was for sure.

"Should we target the thing on the roof first?" she asked Nova after staring at the building for five minutes with a pair of binoculars. Her suit had evolved enough that she could see out of the big eyeballs she had on her helmet, but it was nice to use the Mark 1 eyeball still. Meanwhile, in the back of her head, her power was sitting up and panting like a dog and drooling over getting its and her hands on all that beautiful alien organisms.

Nova stopped squinting and the green glow in her eyes became less intense. Apparently finding artifacts in the store to make summons out of allowed her to make spells that duplicated their effects, who knew?

"The shuttle is mobile, so we'll go after that first. Shall we?" The Planeswalker took a step back and got into a running stance.

"Yes, let's go," she nodded and sent commands to her bio-suit, a pair of wings unfurling from her back as the reverse-engineered Tamarian biology and the Damian Dragon Men's biology in the suit allowed her to fly.

Nova took a moment to cast a variation of invisibility that made them seem like smoky images. It would only last for a minute, but that was long enough, and it would also prevent them from being photographed by cameras.

Amy's trip across the city was measured in seconds and easy, having had more trouble flying in a rain storm on one of the many variations of earth she had visited before.

As soon as they landed Nova took the cooler with her Interface in it out from her Hammerspace. Another moment was taken to bring out the organic 'ropes', hundreds of feet of bio-organic matter made out of countless worms bought at every bait and tackle shop and gas station they'd come across on their travels. The specialized adhesive ends was slapped across the organic Shuttlecraft creature on the building, and then Nova took the longest and flew it up onto the roof to the organism up there. Meanwhile Amy attached the other ends into her Interface and flash-shaped them into the creature's connection ports. Once that was done she took the third cord and put it on the Shuttle herself. The fourth cord was attached to her suit allowing her to maintain contact with all the creatures through her power all at once.

The Taelon Shuttlecraft organism opened the front door as she approached, by her command!

Amy didn't hesitate and climbed right in. The seats were a combination of dead matter, like bones, and living tissues that folded up and formed a pilot's seat that she could move as easily as a reclining chair. Only once she was inside and seated did she relax and dedicate her full attention to her powers.

Her Shaper Shard was going an itty-bitty-kid-happy-in-the-candy-store-nuts and it wasn't stopping at any time soon.

Nova came down a second later. "Well, you got it?"

She nodded, "I've got it."

Nova and her squealed for joy nearly shook the virtual glass of the cockpit, causing her to hurriedly close all the doors before anyone noticed anything. The next few minutes were spent in contemplation as her power started unraveling the mystery of the alien DNA, of Inner-dimensional travel, 16 dimensional sciences, and all the rest. Nova nodded along as she tried to explain what she was finding as best she could, but was clearly lost.

She brought up the virtual screen, her powers feeding her all the knowledge needed to fly the shuttle in an instant, to show Nova what she was talking about.

Nova summoned up a duplicate of her cape-self, wearing her old smock from before she was forced to recycle it when it got filthy and before she started wearing the bio-suit. Nova used the girl to start understanding the alien shuttle in her own way, and then there was no need to explain anything anymore. She could feel the other girl's shard influence on the shuttle, poking at things here and there, and it felt like two people working side by side each other.

Her Shard power was a bit confused about that. She was too.

She wasn't exactly sure about everything the both of them were learning, but one thing was for sure, and that was she was becoming a Tinker with the unique ability to mass produce her stuff. The alien ship now had an organic connection to the building thanks to her Interpreter, which helped a lot, which she soon assimilated into the shuttlecraft. There would be other opportunities to use it, later. Her powers were connected, to this world's internet and the other alien technologies around the world, and she was downloading a whole lot of information right into her shard.

The Taelons had a lot of toys. The first was Virtual Glass, an energy field that looked like glass, could be programed to act as a door or filter out people and things, and was strong enough to be used to hold up structures like buildings and be used in automobiles, and obviously shuttlecraft and motherships as well. It was much stronger than any bone or shell or armor she could think of, that was for sure. The mothership also had weapons, nice spacy ones. Not in English, obviously. There was an energy blaster thing that could be programmed to ignore the atmosphere and cause tidal waves to destroy the sea coast. There were also some pulse defense cannons, red shootie beams for close up work, that were perfect for getting rid of asteroids out to a distance measured from the earth to the moon.

"So, how long do you think it will be before anyone notices we're in here?" Nova asked as she plants her adult woman's butt into a seat that folds up out of the ground.

She wasn't jealous, at all. She was still growing.

"They won't," she said, flicking through menus all about the development of the Skrill, looking up what Nova had been talking about and what the two of them had seen on public broadcasts. "I control the biological and the alien, and they have horrible security anyway. You'd think that they would have more than a fingerprint lock on an alien vessel, or at least a few cameras."

"I don't think they had security systems until they came here," Nova remarked as she got that far-away look that told Amy that she was trying to remember something from her past life. "All the Taelons are psychically connected, which makes it hard to have secrets. And unless a shuttle is programed to accept humans' apes like us can do nothing but beat on it."

"Um." Psychics are weird, you know?

Amy brought up a picture of a Skrill. "Check this out. These animals were living beings that have been modified into slave-weapons. We need to rescue them."

"Okay, but then what?" Nova asked. "Are you going to put a pair on your arms?"

"…maybe," she hedged. "At the very least they won't be in the Taelons hands. We can then drop them on some other Earth?"

"Sounds fine to me." Nova pulled up her own virtual screen to start browsing. "Gods this is cool. Beats the old pickup I had at home all hollow."

A few hours were passed in blissful silence as each pursued her own interests.

"I need to go to the bathroom," Nova admitted. "Shape me up a bathroom?"

Amy grinned; she knew it would happen eventually. "You should have gone before you left. It seems that the Taelons don't actually have need to go to the bathroom, they just switch back to their states of pure energy to fix things like that." A touch of her powers caused the back of the shuttle to fold up into a porta-potty.

"Thanks!" and Nova was off to the back, apparently having forgotten that she could flesh-change the ship with her summoned Amy clone of mana.

Once she was done Amy had to shape the 'extra' out of existence, which was fine because a little Tamarin DNA could help with a few of the shuttle's new features, which now included Starbolt guns and the ability to absorb solar radiation.

"So, what plans do you have for the ship?"

"In short, I'm draining the Federal Building dry. The object on the roof is a reserve of bio-slurry which the alien technology uses to feed itself, you can think of it as a nutrient battery. I've made a pipe to get the stuff down here and it's about empty now," she giggled. "The shuttle's going to get a bit bigger in the next few minutes. I'm actually surprised at how easy it is to control this thing. There's no junk DNA at all, everything is clearly a designed feature, and it goes together like Legos. Once I found where the mechanism for self-repair is it was like the thing practically handed me a manual on how everything works. Here, I even made a seed just for you." She hands the girl a lump of tissue that, when planted into the ground, would eventually grow into a new shuttle.

"Thanks. I'm going to look up Daniel Boone, see if we can help him."

She nodded; stopping the man's wife from dying would be nice.

Unfortunately it was a short-lived dream.

They were already too late to prevent the woman's death. They also didn't know how to contact the resistance other than through Daniel Boone, but that might get him in trouble with the aliens. And while it might have been nice to go around 'saving' these people they really weren't in a position to do anything other than a few snatch and grabs. Nova barely remembered the show.

For right now they were going to have to be satisfied with what they had and made sure they could get away with what they got. Dynamic world changing should not be done by amateurs.

When all of the alien slurry was drained out of the building Nova showed off her new spells. Apparently she'd downloaded a bunch of MTG Magic The Gathering pictures of cards as well. One of them was the inspiration for a brand new invisibility spell that used two Blue Mana and could be attached to a living creature. Such, for instance, as the alien organic shuttlecraft.

Once they left the Federal Building behind they took a quick stop at a nearby lake to fill up the shuttle's new water tanks and so that Nova could get herself another Green and Blue mana. There were about a hundred more places that Amy and Nova wanted to visit on their first Human Safe Earth. This was the first truly civilized world they had ever encountered and Nova was super hungry for white mana.

At the very least they could stop at the hospitals in the capitals of each state to bulk up on black death mana, blue mental mana, red power mana, green forests mana, and white organized mana. Some of the historical sites like the pyramids, not all of them Egyptian, and the Sphinx even qualified for Gold Legendary Mana.

And then of course there were all the zoos and aquariums and museums and swamps and …

-000-

Author's note: This was one of those places I wanted my characters to visit just because of Amy. Even after all these years I can't decide if I like the show or not. At the very least I do not hate the first season of Earth Final Conflict. The music is nice. Even people who liked the show more than I do have difficulty with it. But I definitely don't care for the rest of the show after the first season. I'll always remember turning on the SciFi channel to watch part of the middle of this episode, not knowing any of the characters or having any idea of what I was watching at the time, and only later finding out during the credits that it was Earth Final Conflict that I was watching.

I choose Earth Final Conflict mostly as a Power Up! for Amy and that's about it.

Last edited: Jan 3, 2020

Nothing is Impossible! It Just Might be Very Hard to do

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Jan 3, 2020

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#80

-000-

Nova's Perspective.

Fly up off the ground, hit the Inner-Dimensional drive to get us to another location, land, and then spend between ten minutes and an hour getting another land from another unique location. In-between hops use my mana-charged sight to study the engines as we go from location to destination. Get in some reading while I can about the Inner-dimensional drive straight from the Taelons computers in their own language. Try to figure out how to do it myself without the bio-tech.

Most of the locations we wanted to go to were already programmed into the ship, like the locations of every airport and helicopter pad that would accept the shuttle. But there were lots of other places we wanted to go to, so we had to learn how to program a flight plan ourselves. Plus all the other important places that I needed to harvest white mana from.

Tourist destinations were fun to go to. We actually went to Disneyland. All we had to do was park the shuttle nearby and fly over. Since we were invisible and all of that we could settle down in a crowd and nobody would be any wiser. That's how we got into a lot of places with fences.

Even knowing I can fly now, going on roller coasters was still not not my favorite pastime, nope. That much about me hadn't changed. I much preferred going down to the beach, going on waterslides at the water parks instead and swimming. (It goes without saying that shopping for clothes on the girl's side was an adventure all to itself. Amy had to HELP! ME! shop, which was also a new experience for her. She kept making comments about wondering if this was how Vickey felt with her every time she shopped, and so the nostalgia and awkward moments continued. I got a Black Off Shoulder High Waist Sexy Two Piece Swimsuit. :) Having powers changed your perspective on a lot of the rides so I could enjoy them a bit more. There's only so many times you can practice falling off higher and higher elevations before the idea of jumping off the sides of a building loses its appeal and I could actually move faster than the rides themselves. I mostly went on them for Amy's sake.

Amy loved this Earth. None of the cities were destroyed and there was a lot more stuff to spend on. There were toys on the shelves she had never seen before, TV shows by people she had never heard of, and so on.

Shopping was a big deal. Yes, we're girls in another universe, and we're shopping. But it was rather important. The people in the Dragon Flyz universe had needed all their stuff from their city and most of what I had were mana constructs and a bunch of supplies they could afford to give us.

We needed stuff.

Thanks to a little website called " /" that I got off the 1998 internet, whose dial-up tone was driving me a bit nuts every time we hooked into it from another place on the globe, we were able to visit a lot of flea markets. We were looking for the same things all pawn shops want. Precious metals and gems, electronics, tools and firearms. And being an avid reader, books for myself. Since we didn't know when and where in what world we'd end up in it was thought to be smart to get a wide collection of items. What would be dime store trash in the late 1990s would be worth its weight in gold if we ever ended up in the 1950s. Or at least be a collectable in the coming century.

Actually, one of the things I always wanted to do was to visit all these abandoned places. Buildings that hadn't had an occupant in years with trees growing up all around them and other places like that. So long as they were under a mile wide I could take out the entire building out like I was operating the world's biggest ice cream scooper. I got buildings, restaurants, schools, water parks, factories, aircraft assembly buildings with the aircraft still inside them, even an entire train yard full of locomotives and cars.

Surprisingly, it seemed that the more stuff I put in my Hammerspace allowed me to stuff larger items inside it. I think so anyway.

Meanwhile, in the last few days Amy has made many adjustments to the shuttle. It had grown an extra hundred feet long, and while it was still blue it now had a pair of orange racer streaks along the sides with black borders. She spent most of the time traveling to the jungles and zoos, gathering samples of almost extinct species at the zoos, making them pregnant, and flying around the arctic.

With alternating ten hour days and naps this schedule allowed us to tag-team our efforts as we moved across the planet like truck drivers. We were going to wait a whole two weeks from the time of our theft before hitting up ComTec Labs.

Other than the alien weapons Skrill there was only one other item I was interested in. Nicknamed the Scarecrow Probe the device had the ability to store DNA and make Replicants, life-like living creatures made out of technology. It could disassemble itself completely into a cloud of particles to seep through obstacles, and it could fly using anti-gravity. If I could get my hands on that, reprogram it or bend it to my will with a few mana in an all new mind-control spell, I could have a self-made army ready at any time.

I'd have also have liked to have gotten my hands on a summons of the Taelons, their ancestors the Atavus, or their space brothers the Jaridian. It really says something that I had to look up the details of that in the Taelons database to even remember their names.

More than the others I'd have liked to have gotten my hands on an Atavus, the space vampires with energy claws capable of sucking the literal life force out of an organism and use quantum energy to overturn gravity. I'd have been able to walk on walls, not to mention all the possible biological upgrades I could have given myself using quantum energy and psychic abilities. But unless I had a Jaridian and a Taelon to merge together to create the eight million years dead ancestor that wasn't happening any time soon, nope.

At the very least we could kidnap some of the aliens in their place of residence in the Taelon Embassy here in Washington DC. Then maybe I could walk the creature backwards through a few millions years of evolution. I was seriously thinking about doing that. As the place was an organic building Amy could take control easily.

I was morning for the loss of internet from a world where Earth: Final Conflict was a TV show. Without that I hadn't a clue of where to start looking for loot. There were probably all kinds of technology I could have gotten my hands on at this point. But other than the first season, some scattered episodes, and the ending, I really didn't know anything about the show. There were times I'd catch part of the show without knowing what it was I was watching, that new main characters in the later episodes being so different.

I had the Taelons database. I knew that a taelon named Ma'el had come to this planet two thousand years ago, but I didn't know where his body was located any more than the Taelon did. Nor did I have a way of getting my hands on a gun that could shoot virtual glass that hadn't been invented yet.

I was willing to wait a few weeks for the Amish to get attacked by the alien probe. If I knew where it would show up Amy and I could have waited for it there. As it is we had to wait for people to die so that it would get the Synod's attention. That was as much waiting as I was willing to do however.

I wasn't waiting months or years for the other happy accidents in this place to happen. We still had to get Amy back to Earth Bet and there were lots of other places we could be visiting in the meantime.

Damn it all anyway.

This place had been a most fruitful visit. Having real toilet paper was nice, along with all the other modern conveniences. A biological flying starship that could open wormholes to any place in the solar system was nothing to sneeze at.

But what was hands down the best were the alien sciences that I was learning. I had assimilated the languages as easily as I'd done to other languages when I was Powers Tested back on Earth Bet when I was sick. Perhaps I'd pulled the information from the ship's organic computers. Math was a language all its own so I wasn't having any troubles with that. I just had to look up the names of the things. There were translation programs aplenty. And with a summons mana Amy to help I was learning quickly enough directly from the alien machine. Any science that allows you to go to other dimensions can only help me in Planes walking.

Thanks to the books of Planeswalker magic cards from the MTG game I even had something like a list of spells. I didn't have artifacts or mythical creatures to study, so those cards were a bit of a loss. But the lava mutants from the Dragon Flyz world were another template entirely. I was already fairly unique in my arsenal of weapons and equipment.

So I studied alien science in its native language, picked up lands, and went shopping. I also had Amy teach me how to biomancer properly. All I needed were two blues and two greens to shape flesh without my summoned Amy clone.

Among the things I tried to experiment with were buffs. I felt pretty confident that I could give myself some boosts without risk now that we were on a plane that Amy could live on without me. I'd already given myself some boosts thanks my work with biomancy so now I wanted to try my hands with some spells.

So far my most successful buff, Enabled Creature, was to an overpowered Lava Beast Dragon that Amy and I had created. Other than using it to show off and protect the people of Airlandis it hadn't been useful. I planned to sik'em on Lung when we got back to Earth Bet.

So far I hadn't managed to stick any of my spells to my person in a permanent fashion. Whenever I went to sleep they tended to fade away. The only things that stuck were those that I had biomanced into my flesh. Which is fine and all for being a more powerful being. But I wanted to be a magically powered super woman.

I think my own spark was eroding any enchantments that were placed on my flesh. Which was good, because I didn't want enchantments from other people sticking too hard, you know?

I could get a tattoo, a magical tattoo maybe? It might be worth looking into for emergency purposes.

It seemed like I was going to have to grow some Amber Crystals and have a jeweler mount them into stuff that I can enchant. Even my super powered Lava Beast Dragon had Amber Crystals in its body.

Looks like I wasn't the kind of Planeswalker that could buff my body directly.

Easy come, easy go I guess.

My contemplation of magical superpowers came to an end when it was time to fulfil Amy's promise and storm the labs.

-000-

And another chapter done.

So as you can see my Planeswalker is a bit different from other people's planeswalker. Enchantments, magical effects, spells and whatnot don't really stick to her flesh. There was this one fic, Far Strider | Royal Road, that had buffed his character up so much that he wasn't really human anymore. As a tamaran Nova Ender can already take a full punch to the face from Superman and not go down, so I don't see the point. Magical artifacts and crafting going forwards is a thing to look out for.

Also as you can see my character dosen't have an encyclopedic knowledge of the show, which is about the same for me when I started writing about Nova being in this world. I did correct some things looking stuff up online because Nova has access to the Taelon database to help correct her spelling and history and whatnot.

And as I enjoy comments please leave plenty of helpful ones.

Nothing is Impossible! It Just Might be Very Hard to do

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#85

As things fell out we hit the ComTec Labs first.

Our arrival over the lab in question was met with pure unseen and extraordinary disinterest. Other than the muffled boom of our arrival from Inner-Dimensional space there was no sign that we had been detected by any of the people on the street anywhere nearby. The noise was covered up by a thunderstorm and the only indication we were there was because the vehicle was blocking the rain from falling on anyone below. The storm was perfect for cover, which Amy had been tracking while I was meditating for lands in Africa. Time had run out and it was time to go to work.

Or at least, nobody had looked up, those that were out.

So here we are.

The place was a big square building, with two cooling towers in the back for sucking out moisture and removing heat from cooled areas, with one corner hosting a round pillar-like entrance at the front.

Honestly I didn't like the place even keeping in mind what goes on here. The place was entirely industrial and while the entrance was nice for visitors that welcomed people to come dump their money into the place, most of the workers, the humdrum people working in shifts, came through a side entrance from the back parking lot. There were at least 60 people here.

We parked our ship in the air some distance away over a marker, invisible and undetectable. Our experiments had allowed me to adjust the invisibility spell on the living shuttle to account for alien instruments, so we were good for that at least. From the bowels of the ship there opened an airlock into darkness, the storm outside raging while our ship stayed still and cared not at all for the winds. We were anchored into place as if bolted to solid rock.

Into the air we fell. Amy was a tad slower as her suit carried a human being and its flight abilities made her dead weight. My personal shield was adjusted for minimal visibility, perfectly transparent and very good at keeping the water off of me. Outside the storm raged and covered Amy with water. The visible hatch in the bottom of our craft was the only thing you could see in the night's sky, and it was soon closed and was invisible once again. Anyone who looked up would have gotten their eyes full of water. This was the reason why we picked tonight of all nights.

"No speaking now." I warned. "My spell only covers for sight. Not that anyone can hear us in this mess. But let's at least pretend to be professional about this jailbreak."

Closely bunched, my cloaking spell made us invisible to all, but not to each other thanks to some glasses I'd given Amy to wear and the mana I was flushing through my own eyeballs. The personal cloaking spell would only last a few minutes since nothing I cast on myself tended to stick, so we had to be quick. In the future I hoped to give myself better invisibility by pairing up a cloaking spell with my personal shield, but I hadn't managed to make the leap yet even after making summons out of a bunch of animals that were experts in camouflage and color changing.

Cautiously we made our way to the building, keeping below the rooftops, praying that lightning wasn't attracted to my shield, a moving umbrella to anyone who looked up and wondered where the rain went. We made it to the roof, and because this was a Taelon facility, observed the extra-large landing pad there. There were also a bunch of cameras located all around to observe. Since this was late 1990s, even with alien technology making its way into the world, they were large and obnoxious devices. Most of them couldn't even move.

A minute or two to charge up my sleep spell then put the entire building into a coma. Blue Mana spells; I was finding out, were not my forte'. They didn't seem to come to me as easily and instantly as red or green. But that wasn't going to stop me from working on all the colors.

A shame.

I'd wanted to keep our appearances a secret and Amy had heartily agreed. My invisibility spells would keep the now much larger shuttlecraft from being seen but the ones on our person would only last minutes at most. In the future I'd have to anchor them to some trinket to make them permanent. So we went in completely covered in black. The boots, pants, shirts, gloves, and black rain slickers, all made us look bigger than we actually were. The safety goggles I wore had tints. The lower face masks came from a biker store.

I'd even managed to wear a wig without setting it on fire.

Once we were inside we used my fists of might to get us past any doors that were in our way. Somehow my strength was kept from my clothes so I didn't tear my gloves off. Dr. Larry Clark's name was on the map at the visitor center, it was also on one of the doors, and his office was full of model sailing ships. Easily found and all that.

From there we were able to find the terrariums full of Alpha, Bet, Charlie, and Delta generations. Different species variants of Skrill made to be adapted to human hosts. Amy would tell me that the genetic alterations were crude and unspeakably plane, guaranteed to work only because someone with more knowledge had told them how it was done.

That the man we had come to look for was out with a head cold was unfortunate. But with a war on you don't take hostages if you can help it. Which was a real shame. We needed someone of Amy's level in genetic engineering that could do the work. Anyone who can work with alien technology and biology qualified as a genius in my book.

Better off next time I guess.

I had sixty lab coated technicians to turn into summons who I could interrogate later. My summons had all the imagination of a block of wood, but they were loyal and perfectly able to tell me all that I wanted to know.

Amy managed to talk to each Skrill organism before collecting it. Apparently they had the ability to communicate using high frequency pitch, but had been neutered in early generations to stop them from annoying the literal shit out of people and making them water their bowels with tones aimed at their guts. Amy was easily able to restore their ability to talk in full amongst themselves and the large cart we'd brought was soon filled with bug monsters chanting her name and shattering glass with whistles.

I couldn't put the lot into Hammerspace fast enough.

Seven hundred and eight different versions of the same alien, plus the infinitely more intelligent and unneutered Queen, were soon to be transported to a special room aboard the Nautilus, Amy's new name for our home. It even smelled different. All we had to do was get out now.

When we left for the roof another Taelon shuttle arrived at nearly the same time as we stepped out into the rain. They landed in the street. Troops armed with rifles fell out. With them were William Boone and Ronald Sandoval. Sandoval gave orders to his men who spread out and prepared to enter the premises from the ground. Both agents had their sleeves undone and their Shrills fully exposed for firing their energy blasts.

Invisible and flying, we left the building and observed them from less than twelve feet above their heads. A few of the nameless soldiers had even tilted their heads up to get a good view of the building's roof and looked right through us.

"This is fun!" Amy whispered in our sphere of invisibility.

"Shush!" I cautioned as we landed behind the two Taelon Protectors. "I need a tranquilizer."

Amy silently gave me a tiny worm with the needed venom sac in it.

I left Amy behind me and reached out through the sphere of invisibility, using a green poison shield on my hands to dose the two protectors with a powerful tranquilizer that Amy had provided me with that would work on people with Skrill implants and not harm either one of them.

The two were lugged over my shoulder in seconds, and the soldiers were left leaderless behind us, who shouted in alarm and aimed their guns in every direction with no target to shoot. Gun control being a thing, they didn't spray and pray.

Safe in our cloak for a few seconds more we flew away Scott-free while the soldiers looked high and low around the building and the grounded shuttle.

Still invisible and counting down the last five seconds, that was enough time to get to the roof of another building, de-cloak, wait a moment, and then cast the cloaking spell again. We then traveled straight up to where the Nautilus stayed hidden in the air above a flag pole we used as a marker.

Amy got there first, grabbed onto the lip of the bottom entrance, folded her wings, anchored in place by her eight fingered gloves and the flight powers of her suit, and then climbed the rest of the way inside. The invisibility cloak failed just before she climbed in. I followed her a moment later, ascending into the living creature under Amy's exclusive control. The entryway closing behind us a moment later.

The two hostages had no idea that they were about to go through a greater experience than they ever had before as I deposited them into seats.

-000-

Last edited: Wednesday at 6:05 PM

Nothing is Impossible! It Just Might be Very Hard to do

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Jan 8, 2020

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#91

Author's Note: Now that I've done some editing I don't feel like waiting. So have another chapter!

-000-

The Companion Protectors sounded like a cute name for boy scouts, but these people took the title seriously. Both of our subjects were Implants, that is that they had a CVI, a Cerebral Viral Implant, and a Skrill. The creatures were easily removed and placed with their brethren. This left us the question, what to do with the computer chip in their brains? It was a computer chip made out of organic parts, a top of the line alien product, which was inserted into the neck via a long flexible probe and then around the tissues of the brain to an otherwise impossible to reach place.

They also weren't intended to be removed. Their brains now depended on the alien technology, or else they'd go mad and die. For this Amy was actually willing to work on brains, however reluctantly.

Sandoval's was fully functional whereas Boon's had been sabotaged by the Resistance. Sandoval's implant also had extra knowledge that Boon's implant lacked.

Once implanted Sandoval's complete loyalty had been programed into him by his new Alien Masters as a matter of course. Nothing had been removed, not a neuron damaged or altered; only added to. Anything superfluous, including being a loving husband, was cast aside in order to advance the Taelon agenda. That he still loved her and had decided against killing her and instead put the woman in an Insane Asylum was nuts.

Complete loyalty was something that had been dreamed of by rulers, the military and moms, by humans and animals, since forever. These chips made these Implants completely loyal to each other towards the Taelons. Any other group, the highest echelons of government, brotherly love, the bonds of family – is at risk of confusing the true purpose of the Taelons with their own private interests. For the Implants this is impossible. Literally, physically impossible. The task of discerning the interests of the Taelons fell to them.

Mutiny, treason, heresy, all was impossible.

The Taelons were, by definition, those who the Implants made completely loyal.

If anything could state it more plainly, Amy had lived in a world where Masters could completely screw up a person's brain, she knew much better than I, and became even more terrified than I was. What had once been an amusing twist in a television program was now in full view before my eyes. These people would have died as happy robots.

Amy removed the CVI immediately of course, and then handed them to me, however reluctantly. Increased recall of memories, increased intelligence, more of everything that the brain could and couldn't do for itself; in the right hands these would have been quite the boon to humanity, we both had to admit that. These people would have dug their own fucking grave, if the Talons had asked them.

There might have been a kind of horror, of outrage, for a few moments after awakening from surgery. This would be followed by calm acceptance as hope died.

These could have been implanted in people as a common technology to sell, and the people wouldn't have cared – except that the Taelons have become the most important things in their world.

The wonderful thing about a CVI is that it doesn't stop an Implant from learning, thinking, planning, or running simulations on 'What If?' You could think about overcoming the CVI implant on your own through horrific willpower or going someplace and then ending it all with a power line applied to the backside of your skull. Implanted into the heads of insane people through legal loopholes for experimentation that's exactly what a few of the humans in the asylums did. The Taelons didn't even have to hide their experiments to the governments of the world to go full Terminal Man. It was all legal under some pretext.

Implants like Sandoval just didn't want their CVI removed. Full. Stop.

The CVI takes no action to stop people from thinking about removing them from their heads or its effects; presumably thinking about what it could and can't and can do helps the Implants understand what's happened to them so they can balance the pros and cons of their new existence with their feelings and their origins.

As the first day of being a Implant comes to pass and they become adjusted to their implants you could say that the people become excited about their new jobs. The Taelons are important to them, so of course they want them to succeed. I'm going to work for the aliens! What more could I want?

Knowing that their feelings have been physically imposed doesn't alter the functionality of the CVI in the slightest. Part of it is obvious, part of it is paradox. You won't even go mad. Some people can alter their mental state with drugs, with physical activities, by eating foods they liked, by watching sport games, by going to work and cooperating with people you find personally unpleasant but at a job you liked. And now they want to work with aliens, more than anything they've ever wanted before.

Boon's CVI was programed to be loyal to him. The CVI increases the percentage of the brain that Humans are able to use and gives them a scientific calculator with superior memory recall features. It was also lacking the information about the Taelon mission on Earth.

With summons I'd found that I could bring forth a CVI unit of my very own. Since these two CVI units we had were physically the same but contained different information I could also program them with blue mana over the same link I used to control my other summons.

With this structure at hand I could now make loyalty and control spells and CVI implants of my very own, taking Joe Random and making him a loyal Implant.

One of the other things I learned while summoning objects was that if I had some scrap metals and plastics to play with I could overpower the summon and recycle materials to make a real object. This way I could recycle whatever we had to get any rare materials and chemicals out of our objects so we could try again. And if the summon was for an organism then it could take in food, excrete, and gradually make cells for a real body over time and stop being a summons. I could actually create real people and animals.

Human beings, or any Mana Creatures I made, were strange. They came with their own connection to the back of my head. They also came with skills and knowledge as if they were people in fact and not magical clones. They reminded me of what the CVI had done to Sandoval a little too much. I pretended that they were nothing more than robots and gave them assignments.

Since most of our shopping "List Of Stuff To Get" was done we only really went out when something new popped into our heads at random, mostly going "Hey, I got an idea, I'll be back in a bit!" Amy and I decided to settle down into one of those abandoned towns nobody goes to anymore and put the shuttlecraft inside a building. The soil all around us was contaminated with lead and zinc and tungsten due to an accident in the mountains during a mining operation, so there weren't even very many bugs to annoy us. A bit of red mana into some earth on my part put a stone roof over our heads and concealed us from any satellites overhead.

It was high time we got to work with what we had and started making some stuff.

With a few hundred summoned people to help, things progressed quickly and fast.

I summoned Orac, Airlandis chief engineer and a few others from ComTec labs to assist since they'd actually been working with Taelon technology for the last three and four years, to help Amy and I decipher this technology and make it safe for us to use. That is to say, we now had some good engineers and geneticists, plus a few technical specialists from around the world that had worked on utilities, cars and amusement park rides that I'd run into from around the world to help, and we soon had drawings of every single part of the Taelon Shuttle, the CVI, and the insides of the Skrill as they were when we found them and took them for our own, complete with user manuals.

Creating a "flying bike" out of the biological technology was one of the first things we did. This was little more than a variation of the Taelon Shuttlecraft turned inside-out and shrunk down into a mountable platform. It didn't have an Interdimensional Drive, but it did have a lot of the same holographic interfaces and was built on a frame of Virtual Glass. A disk of metal with an Amber Crystal imprinted with my cloaking spell was then screwed into place on top of where a fuel tank went like a normal gas cap, and actually contained liquid slurry of food for the organic machine. The spell would only work when the rider was sitting on it, so you could find the thing. Attached to a living creature the spell would last for nearly a day before it ran out of energy.

Designed to fit into the small hanger of our growing Nautilus, with four bikes total in the racks, for symmetry, it would allow us to enter and exit the craft with a minimum of fuss so we could carry a small amount of people and cargo. Thus, the vehicle could be used to take us nearly anywhere we wanted to go, at the operator's discretion.

Both Amy and I were impressed with it.

Amy also made herself a flying jetpack version with the same organic tech as the bike. That the stuff was being worked into her organic super suit was just assumed on my part.

Smaller Amber Crystals from the Dragon Flyz universe, I'd found, not only boosted the normal time limit of a given spell but provided a way to charge the thing without getting me involved by absorbing ambient mana from the area. That a mutated version of the same crystals, called Amber Fire, would allow the crystals to grow and consume an entire city in only a few hours on only sunlight opened a doorway to exotic energy absorption. By creating the Amber Crystals and Amber Fire crystals with different kinds of mana I could get different effects. Obviously, a blue mana spell worked better with a Blue Mana Amber Crystal than one made with black mana, and the same went with all the others. A spell that used different mana at the same time was best used by a Colorless Mana Amber Crystal. The number of color combinations was both exciting and nice.

Down the line we could see making more vehicles out of this stuff. All of them would be able to fly, and all of them would be able to use the Interdimensional drive to go about anywhere. They'd also have Amber Crystals installed, like the ultimate jewel-encrusted luxury Pimp-Mobile.

One of the things we quickly worked out about the Interdimensional drive was that it wasn't too hard to make a portal. And this part I was particularly proud of because I was able to make it myself. The Taelons were experimenting with the technology on earth only because the portals had to be made using earth technology made by human engineers and scientists. As I could understand the technology thanks to my rough formal education (ongoing, thank you) and my Planeswalker spark to study the meta-physical I could now make portals of my very own. Not only that but I could also open a portal from anywhere on Earth to anywhere in the solar system thanks to the Taelons efforts of mapping things through Inner-dimensional space, so I didn't have to do any of that groundwork. Supposedly this would also work on other Earth-like Planets I went to go Walking on as well.

Amy went even farther than that. She didn't understand the technology the same way as I did with my Spark, she had her Shard to do the data-mining for her, and so her viewpoint was quite irregular to my own.

The damn cheater.

Amy created a brand new tree. Instead of a bud of a flower the tree reproduced by creating a tame wormhole in space. The portals have two ends, inside and outside. The insides connected the guts together. The outside formed the completed circuit of an organic transporter system. In an instant Amy had rendered the entire plant kingdom obsolete. As long as one bud was connected to the mama the Synthetic Plant could survive in any environment on any planet in the solar system. Damaged cast off parts could be lost or grown no matter where they fell regardless of environmental factors, as long as one part of it was entrenched in rich soil. Practically speaking this one organism could not be destroyed no matter what competition the environment in total was brought against the organism.

Based on these principles a number of amazing and organic machines could be created.

How about a synthetic water Lily pad, with one end floating in the ocean and the other in your garden, from which you could fish for dinner? Or how about a plant in your shop, from which fell a line of clear water twelve feet tall with portals at both ends, connected to a thousand plants, all using falling gravity as a weapon, so that you could cut steel? Then there were the tricks you could pull using orbital ballistics of objects being transported through portals at the equator and the poles. Throw a rock into one and you had a gun. With part of a Synthetic Plant on top of a mountain, and another at the bottom of the ocean, it wouldn't be hard to evolve a system using different gradients of gravity at different levels, which the portals in the plants would take advantage of, to pull things in like a black hole, like wandering animals about to eat poor innocent plants, and shred them into a rich nutrient soup in a process not too unlike a fruit juicing machine?

Or how about a forest fire? Those things are plenty deadly to earth organisms, but some actually use the heat to germinate their seeds and it's good for the soil, to destroy old growth and make way for the new. The moment a Synthetic Tree catches on fire it could open a portal to where its roots were growing on the bottom of the ocean or a river and flood the whole dang forest. Or it could open an air pipe to a unit in the desert to keep itself warm in the winter and operating all year long.

Together Amy and I worked on making some weapons.

With one of Amy's Synthetic Trees in our garden we upgraded her dart gun. Materials would be ported in from the plant so it would have seemingly unlimited ammunition. The darts had portals as well, which acted as the most nefarious kind of parasite. Gasses ejected out of the creature during flight turned the dart into a guided missile. Amy could tranquilize the organism or take control of it from a distance. In addition the creature's own body would provide some nutrition back to the weapon and the Synthetic Plant as well. If the creature got sick then medication could be provided from another organism plugged into the network.

That girl was starting to scare me.

Next up was a brand new computer, or armband, or omni-tool, and boots. I was partial to calling it a Power Glove myself. Both units went over my hands and wrist, but left my fingers clear due to limitations of durability. They ate up the hairs on my skin and then changed to match the tone exactly. The both of them were one organism connected through the portals.

Amy touched them once, and suddenly it looked as if my hands had been amputated just below the elbow. "Chameleon-ware," she explained as my limbs faded back into existence. "For both stealth and fun. They can smell and taste and feel better than you can, so whenever you touch anything you should get a data-download of whatever you're holding. Chemical, biological, carbon dating, radiation sensing, electro receptors, heat and light, magnetics, north and south, everything I could find in an animal is in these things. Now turn around and lift up your hair."

I did as I was told. Soon I had the warm and cold sensations coming from the nape of my neck to the base of my spine. "Lots more sensors are in these to monitor your health and read the electrical activity in your spine. If you get into trouble they should know before you do. Now the front."

I turned around again. Amy took a two inch wide strip of the Synthetic Plant she was working with and placed one end to the right of my Xiphoid at the bottom of my sternum, laying the rest of the material in a straight line along the edge of the Costal Cartilage of my ribs, then took a ninety degree turn, following the contours of my stomach, to end up about an inch below my belly button, before doing the same on the other side.

The diamond pattern on my stomach tickled.

"Stop wiggling!" Amy groused.

"I can't help it! I thought it was supposed to hurt?" I put my right hand into my mouth and bit down, I could hardly feel it. "I can't even feel that."

"Stupid alien nervous system." Amy grumped as she started putting more of the material along my hairline and behind my ears, like a weird headband. "This is supposed to connect up to your nerves. When I put mine on it felt like fire was burning its way into my tissues, or cold like holding ice. And your sense of touch will come back in a bit. Be patient."

"But I'm pretty far immune to fire, and I'm not a very good at being patient."

She ignored my jokes. "A complication I don't need. Now, it'll settled down in a bit, and it shouldn't take more than a day before it starts talking to you, and a week before it starts sending pictures into your head. It hears the same thing you hear so it'll be easy for it to sync up with what the nerves in your ears are hearing, but visions are tricky and more involved. When it's ready you should be able to see what the different sensors on the different parts of your body see as well. You'll have to learn how it talks, which shouldn't be a problem for you. Thanks to those Skrill, CVI, and all that other stuff we got out of the Taelons database you're going to have a much easier time than I did. However we want to keep an eye out for any mutations or reactions, so pay attention!"

There were more pieces of flesh to be added to my flesh. A pattern of stripes, circles on the sides of my hips parallel to each other, lines following my nervous system, and footwear. The circulatory system pretty much didn't exist as standard thanks to wormholes, it was all one organism. The Synthetic Plant back in the Nautilus was bigger than both Amy and I put together.

Tiny little Amber Crystals were installed in a modified diamond pattern which gave me a look similar to Stacy X with her tattoos, made out of sequins. The amount of mana they could hold were tiny, it took a dozen of them to hold a one mana spell, only lasted a few seconds, were weak and the shield would only cover a few inches. But they did hold the entire spell structure. With the portals in the tissues they could connect back to larger crystals that held dozens of mana to power the spell up to full. Wth dozens of them working together I could have up to two dozen overlapping shields with different defense and offensive abilities working at the same time! Lots of spells only needed more power to get more effects, so it was all good. More control and efficiency of use was coming on its own.

This was my first issue of defensive clothing. Living tissues, plants, amber crystals, mana, advanced circuitry, spells, and alien DNA. All of it wrapped up into a thin garment that literally glued itself into place. It didn't even cover the important bits.

"What about offensive abilities?" I asked, as I looked at my arms again. Part of the Power Gloves had turned blue with black controls and the buttons were touch sensitive and interactive until the all-so important adjustment period was over so I could just think at it and command it. I checked them over and found that all of the Human science books and the Taelon science and technology database were fully loaded.

"Those will unlock once the mental link is in place and we're sure you won't shoot yourself in the foot for thinking the wrong thing at the wrong time," Amy assured me. "The Skrill shooters will work as the same as the old Skrill did, but without the Skill themselves. You'll also be able to shoot from your feet, as you had asked for. And this is your new helmet."

My new helmet was much like my other helmets. This one was made out of alien space age materials using Virtual Glass to be practically indestructible, but with the gold metal used in Airlandus as a chrome trim. It was fabricated in our new workshop thanks to the efforts of a hundred mana summons to our exact specifications and included everything Amy and I could think up.

It was a bit nuts.

Whenever Amy or I had to work on assignments with a bunch of other people in school there were usually a bunch of creative insights that all had to be combined together to make a finished product. There wasn't any of that here with a mana summons.

Instead they all came back with something that was almost exactly like what I had in mind in the first place with no new brilliant additions of their own. Since they were a part of me, a projection I created plus whatever was in there from when I made a summons out of the original, these people were absolutely incapable of doing anything original and creative. They didn't argue, go around your back, lazed around, arrange accidents, and never gave anything less than their 100% best effort.

Being inventive adventurers, Amy and I had found lots places where our ideas could improve things all over the place. These ideas were always digested by the summons doing the design, who would then work to incorporate them into the design, or to discard them if we were wrong, which we were occasionally.

If this was what it was like working with robots and AI, I can see how some societies in fiction would treat them like second hand citizens.

After she gave me my helmet she also gave me her new Tamarian CVI.

"This is it," Amy said as she presented me with the finished product. "Now remember, you're not human so this might not work as perfectly for you as it might for a human. You should get the enhanced cognitive functions and memories. I hope." She frowned at the small lump in her hand.

"'I hope?' 'If?' You're not too enthusiastic about this, are you?" I asked as I took the latest generation of my helmet and made a summons out of it, and then I took the CVI and did the same. This one was made out of three units of blue Mana for purely cognitive effects.

"You're not human. I'll let you install it yourself. If you don't go nuts in the next three days we'll call it a rousing success."

Amy did not do brains, still. The girl could do intelligence upgrades from day one. But implants were a safer work-around that she was willing to do as long as she didn't actually have to install them in people who can think and call her friend. Making an organism that could do it was one step removed from that. Working around my alien biology was harder. Using alien technology made her shard happy.

She was slowly easing into the idea. Working on a pair of humans with brain implants in Master-mode to make them better tends to do that. There were a few slip ups, but she was getting better about it. Honestly I think the idea of not doing brains was a good one to keep provided that you weren't too inflexible about it.

However, we weren't using surgery or Amy's shaper power to put this Tamarian CVI into my head. We weren't using the CVI at all. Instead I was using the Amber Crystal in my new and improved Tamarian Crown as a mana spell upgrade at my own attempt at a Tamarian brain-boosting Interface.

I summoned two units of blue Mana to my hand and put them to the Amber Crystal in the crown, anchoring it into place. There were two spells. This one would give whoever wore the crown the same abilities as a CVI. The second was to give them the same telepathic and telekinetic abilities as Apex from the Dragon Flyz universe. I should be able to telepathically download information from the organic ship's computers and anything else with a brain while I was at it. I wasn't as foolish as to place a new spell onto my brain meats this early into the game.

"Here I go." I put the helm above my head.

"Good luck," Amy said.

Then I just had to put the hat on and trust in the magic of my soul not to screw me over.

Tendrils of Mana as soft as a dream came thundering through my skull and slotted themselves into place between the tissues. Like my other Mana creatures it was almost holographic the way it could move around without bothering or being bothered by solid objects. Unlike a summoned organism there was no danger that it would absorb mass and become a real item that I'd then have to actually surgically remove to be rid of it.

I started to hallucinate. I couldn't stand up, so I stayed in the bed Amy and I had bought when we turned the Nautilus into a mobile home. She kept me calm while everything went out of focus. After about a half hour I was much better. The spells worked and I now knew better what to do next time.

"I think you're done," Amy announced with satisfaction. "How do you feel?"

"Like someone who had overdosed on flu medicine and had just now gotten it out of their system," I remarked. "How's my brain?"

"Working just fine as far as I can tell. Since the helm is making the connections with Mana I can't see it, so I just treat it as I would any other cybernetic Tinkertech. Give yourself an hour to calm down and then try and read something. Hungry?"

"Heh! Always."

We were having ricearoni. The other day we'd cooked a large turkey and eaten most of it. The rest of the turkey, the gravy and the stuffing that I hadn't swallowed as I massacred my way through our alien dining room, was then thrown into a pot and boiled the hell up into a soup with carrots. The result was thrown over a plate with seven servings of rice and eaten with relish.

Thinking brains need their sugars and fats you know!

-000-

An interview with the former Implant Protectors of the Taelons is in the next chapter.

As always, leave me some comments to encourage me to write.

See you next time!

Last edited: Jan 8, 2020

Nothing is Impossible! It Just Might be Very Hard to do

NitroNorman's Stories Thread

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Jan 11, 2020

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#99

-000-

I was studying the Skrill.

The Skrill's power output depended on its metabolism. Unlike humans who use electrical energy as a result of our chemistry these aliens used the quantum energy in their bodies directly. Since the creatures had been gutted, their aggressive tendencies made docile to be fused with a human, this output was weak. They could flash blind a human, zap a human, kill a human, and in seconds disintegrate a human into ash, and that was it.

The modified Skrill blast wasn't even as strong as one of my Starbolts. I could power those up and throw them as grenades. The Skrill barely qualified as an alternative weapon. It couldn't even pierce my skin to graft itself on, so I can't be equipped with it anyway. I was not weak.

A pure Skrill of the original species would be many times more powerful.

Therefore Amy had decided that we were going to go rescue the Skrill Queen in New Cape town in South Africa.

I was mostly interested in the Skrill for their quantum power effects hax. Somehow these creatures are able to turn from a biological organism into one of pure energy. According to the Taelons own notes it was similar in how they went from biological creatures to one of pure energy. But how a creature of energy could have DNA, get sick and eat was giving Amy's Shard conniptions. I wasn't having a great time understanding it myself.

Ever since I'd gotten my Tammarian Crown to go full Thinking Cap I'd been reading what knowledge I could.

All I had to do was think about something and the data would come flooding in. It wasn't completely all-encompassing but it was responding to both my thoughts and desires. The Taelons were all linked to each other psychically and the helmet did something similar to the implants which were also influenced by this mental network the aliens shared. The Taelons had a full working knowledge basis to explain their psychic abilities and knew all the physics. They'd even modeled quantum energies and even stranger things. Basically the smaller the thing you tried to work with the more strange reality became until you were able to make up your own rules.

Speaking of psychics and implants...

I'd almost upgraded my Crown immediately after only a few hours of use. I was on something like the 13th version and counting. Healing with Leaves took care of all issues that I might have had. The fact that I could take it off my head and still retained a goodly portion of what I'd read and even understood it was a real prize that I intended to abuse the heck out of. That I was getting better using the technology by an incremental .00003% per 253 seconds like I was undergoing some organic equivalent of a software upgrade that was slowly ramping up my ability to do anything was just the cherry on the cake. Given enough time and exercise, Amy says, and even a mundane doctor would be able to chart the neural growth in the brain the old fashioned way just by looking at the new structures it grew.

How did anti gravity work? How did the Portals work? How did Interdimensional space work? How did quantum energy work? How did the Taelons make the brain work better?

I had most of the answers but the answers didn't make sense. Understanding the weirdness of how this universe worked would come in time but at that point I'd probably be ready to move on to another universe where such things don't work as good.

But not now.

Now I had some people to talk to.

I watched as Boon and Sandoval woke up in the two reclining chairs provided for them. As one, they both reached up to their heads and groaned.

"What happened?" William Boon asked as he opened his eyes and looked around. He saw the alien organic interior of the shuttle, but his eyes quickly focused on me. "Who are you?"

"What's happened to me? Where am I?" Sandoval asked as he sat up and focused on me as well.

Both noticed that they were restrained, their seat belts refusing to come off.

I sat and watched them. On their side of the virtual glass my appearance had been altered to be a blob of incoherent darkness and static in the shape of someone sitting down. The controls of this new feature were in the organism all around us, now controlled directly with my helm.

"My name is Nova." I'd tell them that they were on a former taelon shuttlecraft, but they didn't need to know that. "As for what happened, I took you two prisoners and had a friend of mine remove your CVI and Skrill implants. You are free."

Sandoval looked at his arm where the Skrill had once been implanted; a few imperfect scars all that were remaining to show where the organism had buried itself into his arm. "Free?"

"The confusion will soon wear off," I reassured the man. "I am only somewhat aware of what you did while under the loyalty mods of the CVI. That is in your past. Now there is a rather important question that I must ask before we go forwards, otherwise it will result in your deaths."

"What sort of questions?" Boon asked.

"The CVI worked by altering some of the neurology in your brains in order to give you your enhanced mental abilities, to make your brain more powerful. If they had been removed after a few days there would have been no problems. But not now. Like a load-bearing structure to a building, you can't exist long without your CVI before crumbling into ruin in about twenty hours. My friend and I have created a new kind of CVI that will give you back all your abilities but without the loyalty mods. The decision is up to you, however."

It was strange to watch them go through their emotions from this side. I had never been the most perceptive of people and that hadn't changed much even after my mind had been given a slight upgrade. I'd spent my time reading from the Taelon database waiting for them to wake up and found what I'd been struggling with to be laughably simple. They were both in obvious states of shock. For William Boon it meant the end of his career as a spy. For Sandoval it was freedom from alien shackles.

"I don't want a CVI," Sandoval said with conviction. "My freedom is what I want."

"What would happen if we don't have a CVI to replace the old one?" Boon asked.

"You'll go insane," I warned him with the frank truth. "The artificial state of your brains must be allowed to continue."

"Then I'd like to have my CVI," he said.

Sandoval gave him a look, "I'll never have one of those in my head again. What are you thinking? This is our chance at freedom!"

"I don't want to die. And if their CVI is free of this loyalty programming I'll have it and live," the man reached with an arm to Sandoval, who was only just close enough to have his shoulder gripped. "Sandoval, I forgive you for killing my wife. It was not your fault. But if you want to atone for what you've done and make it right, help me take the fight to the Taelons. With you and me, together, we could give humanity a chance."

I'll give the man credit; the man found a chance to turn his wife's killer into a rock solid ally against his enemy and took it with literally his own hands.

"I don't care about the Taelons. I just want to see my wife and fix the damage I've done." Sandoval said.

"Then you'll have to take her to the resistance to hide her, or they'll use her as leverage against you," Boon replied.

"They will see us both as a threat to be terminated by any means necessary," Sandoval declared, then looked at me. "Is there any way for you to assist us?"

"We are here to gather technology, a sample of Taelon DNA, and as much information as we can get out hands on. We are preparing to leave at any time. Getting involved in a war on another planet is not in our interest," I informed them.

Amy and I were simply uninterested in doing so. Amy could engineer an illness to kill the Taelons, but I think that was done in one episode already.

"However, that does not mean we are unsympathetic. We have the ability to manufacture the CVI implants; we also have the ability to program them. And finally, we have a method to disable them through a virus which will render the CVI inert. Unlike your generation of implants ours will be capable of being removed at any time, having been built with that feature. We will also include a translation of much of the Taelon technology that makes it possible for you to make your own."

"If we had this ability, we could create an army of CVI humans," Boon declared. "What's the price?"

"A CVI can be a very useful thing. It is also a chip at the foundations of how your civilization works. A few will be an anomaly; a few thousand will change it utterly. The choice in how you use it will be yours," I reply. "We believe that two people who used to be slaves might use it more responsibly than some."

-000-

Perspective change!

Also note, this is the late 90s and not many people had a cell phone at this time.

Random Joe.

It was midmorning or about, I suppose, before I got a message on my Global announcing that someone had cracked some apparently mundane Taelon technology and was delivering it to people all over the world.

I took an early coffee break, as nobody complained, with their noses in their own Global getting the scoop, or using their own flip phones to talk to someone else who knew about it. The story was that someone had invented a machine that produced shots that would give someone a CVI. After an injection into the nose the programmable microorganisms would install the device on the surface of the skull's interior, programmed to produce a variety of effects, such as implanting skill sets, emotions, and altered states of awareness or, illegally, forcing and controlling thoughts.

It was pretty amazing, these new devices. In a global market where anyone can contact anyone with a Global in hand, you hear all kinds of rumors fast.

I thought this was all pretty interesting, and made a note to catch it later on TV when I got home.

However it was already on TV and everyone everywhere was already talking about it.

A man on TV sat behind a table with a curious purple organism in a glass box and explained that it was Virtual Glass, a virtually indestructible field of solid energy, apparently. Reminded me of something like from a Dr. Seuss book. He then explained that it communicated with his computer on the side through a complex wireless system.

The demonstrator pointed out features and explained that the purple organism was manufacturing an ampoule which would contain a single shot of the Cyber Viral Implant.

Within the bowels of these organisms was a seed that you could extract with a pen knife. Once planted in a pot with soil it would grow like any watermelon. However it also needed alien organic slurry provided by another plant to stay alive and healthy, or it'd die. The seeds were for sale at $119.85 a pop, but the slurry was going for $978.00 a gallon.

Six days later I got one of the ampoules in the mail autonomously, including a syringe in a sealed package with strict instructions in how to use it. Specifically, it warned me against using it if I had any brain damage whatsoever, and not to take any coffee or drugs for at least 24 hours beforehand.

I went to the window and took a peek outside. Living in an upstairs apartment I didn't meet any of my neighbors unless it was in the elevator. However it wasn't that hard to see a bunch of people out on the streets walking around with a bunch of plane cardboard boxes from the various shipping industries. White, brown, black, grey, all of them about the size of a stuffed envelope. The people with their heads on a swivel.

A knock on the door made my heart jump into my stomach. But that wasn't right because I hadn't heard any police sirens. I looked through the lens and found my neighbor Miss Perkins, the unmarried cat lady. Because our apartment was built on the side of a hill she was on the sixth level, but also had something like a backyard.

"Have you seen this yet?" she waved her torn open package as she plowed into my living room. "Ah, you got yours then? You gonna try it? Oh, wait, you're afraid of needles. I can give you the injection, if you want? You'd better hurry. The police might be here any minute and then you won't see another one of these for years!"

"Miss Perkins?" I was flabbergasted. "What-? Did you take the-"

"The CVI? Of course I did. Old as I am you don't get to enjoy life playing it safe. It's certainly a lot more fun than what I used to do in the sixties. Surprised? I haven't been this coherent in years. Did you know I have thirteen cats? Turns out that a few of the neightbors and their strays kept coming around like I had an open frap house or something. I haven't forgotten where my keys are yet today!"

"But Miss Perkins, what about the risks?" I exclaimed.

"What risks Johnny Boy? Walking down the road is a risk. Dying in your bed is a risk. I'm gonna spend my last years as fully functional as can be," she paused, barely a skip on a record player, and I was wondering where the dotting old grandmother I'd known went. "Listen, I've been going over my finances. Thanks to this CVI I can remember them back to almost my first paycheck. There are a couple gaps, but that's what happens when you lose a few brain cells. Want to know how much I've been losing and what I'm gonna get back this year? There's gonna be a run on the banks, just you see. The government's not gonna survive when the rest of us can remember every stupid thing they've ever done and are unable to collect. They'll put the crimp on you guys."

"You mean like that nut Alex on the third floor?"

"That nut kept me out of the old folks home, and now I can follow what he was saying. Man hasn't paid taxes since before he moved in here and has got a Cadillac. You want in on this or not?"

In the end he decided he did and let the woman give him the shot. Two hours later the police came knocking on his door. But Miss Perkins, or Jenny as she'd introduced herself to him three years ago, had already disposed of everything. The papers were burned in the barbeque and the glass bits were smashed with a hammer and mixed in with the ashes. He had a sinus headache, but nobody looked there.

The rest of the week was strange. It was clear that the government and the Taelon, whatever their plans, did not include having a large portion of the population getting about twenty points IQ jump on the rest of them.

Avoiding taxes was just the beginning. The rule books had so many laws that nobody could know of them all. However inside of a single day it was possible to visit a library, read a few books on speed reading, and then speed read most of the rest of the literature that was inside. So long as you could flip the pages fast enough without damaging them, that is. It all went into permanent memory and then you could enjoy a unique sensation in your mind as your brain chewed on the information.

Of course people could be short sighted even with a slighter more able brain. Cooks read through all their recipes so they wouldn't forget them. Mechanics might look up books on hydraulics and other self-help books to help them with their business. Stuff that the people were interested in before they got their CVI, with what they had on the shelf at home, they went after first.

Practically the next day after you got your CVI everyone woke up with an idea that would solve some problem that had been bothering them for a month.

At a guess, currently there were at least a million CVI implanted people around the world.

-000-

Yeah, I've decided that I'm not going to go around 'fixing' old sci fi TV shows and their totally wrong science. I'm just going to leave it up to that particular universe's brand of weirdness and magic and move on. I don't need to explain every single thing. It's enough to explain what's available, how to use it, and figure out how my character can abuse it.

Also, as far as I can tell, and I'll admit I didn't do a lot of digging, other than that one astronaut story there isn't a lot of government agents showing up to make the Taelons lives difficult. It's just the Taelons, their human stooges, the resistance, a bunch of guys in tactical suits with guns, a few bad guys of the week who usually are soundly defeated/killed, a few plot points almost instantly forgotten and a whole lot of nameless characters in the background. I'd use other characters but there really aren't any available. None comes to mind anyway and I have the first season on DVD. The lack of recurring characters is definitely a negative. Even if my characters had access to the knowledge of the TV show you still wouldn't know where any of these characters live so you could contact them in their universe!

I'll have two or three more chapters to finish up Nova Ender and Amy girl's looting of this world and then move on.

As always a few comments are appreciated!

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Jan 12, 2020

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#110

Hey guys! Stayed home this weekend with a cold and finished up this chapter.

Enjoy.

-000-

"Nova, wake up!"

My eyes snapped opened and I looked around. The room was completely dark, even the bioluminescence had been turned off. Because apparently an empowered Tammaraian is an awake Tamaranean . Sleeping in caves or the literal bowels of Amy's Nautilus made me sleep like the dead.

"I'm up!" I declared, throwing off the thick blankets. "What's happened?"

"Nothing!" she announced, fully awake, the wretch. "But I thought you should know: we're a few miles out from New Capetown in South Africa. We're in sight of the Skrill Development Center. Also (yawn!) Paradise, an Amish community, has recently reported a lot of deaths. Now get up, breakfast will be done in a few minutes."

I groaned. Then I turned on the lights in my room and waited for the ultraviolet light to hit my system like a cup of coffee.

Dropping off Boon and Sandoval in some nowhere place in Texas, unconscious and with their parting gifts, had been relatively simple. That had been a week ago.

But I had to figure that the aliens had cottoned on to figuring out where we were thanks to their alien sensors. Or at least I figured that our grace period had ended. It wasn't like we were trying to leave the atmosphere for Mars or something silly like that. I couldn't hide the portals the ship uses to travel through Interdimensional space good enough to escape the detection of the people who created the technology in the first place. To hide even better than before we'd been staying in the water, crawling around on the ocean floor, pretending to be a lobster. Thankfully Cape town was on the tip of the southern end of Africa, so all we had to do was walk up from the bottom of the Atlantic.

Slow and steady wins the race after all.

"Riiiiight. Okay, so we're going to the Amish community after Capetown. How long?"

"About an hour."

"Okay. So let me get a shower in and stuff."

To say that there had been a lot of significant changes to the Taelon shuttlecraft would be an understatement. At my suggestion we had been hanging around abandoned mining towns where some disaster had released all those beautiful poisonous chemicals into the groundwater. Rare earths, radioactives, platinum group elements, and some gold dust when we could find it. All good stuff for building things and it left the places better than when we'd found it after Amy's plant-fu had fed it to the shuttlecraft.

Grown to be about a two miles long the rear end had formed an impressive orange and gold spiral shell. Samples of various creatures acquired in the wild and from easily broken-into aquariums were used in its construction. As long as it could fit within the mouth of a mile-wide opening I could still fit it into my Hammerspace, so it was all good.

Progress, we were making progress.

The two main eyes of the Nautilus, unlike their more primitive cousins, were fifty feet wide and expertly engineered. A pair of rhinophores located near each eye which detect chemicals, and use olfaction and chemotaxis to find food.

Once the body had been finalized Amy had added 90 short tentacles that do not have suckers for mid-range work. The short tentacles were about the same length and thickness as fire hoses and could shoot water and other things from an opening and made me think of one-eyed snakes.

Four tendrils on the front for long range work made up two thirds of the creature's overall length. The inside surfaces of the arms of the tendrils are lined with hundreds of sub-spherical suction cups, 2 to 5 inches in diameter, each mounted on a stalk. The circumference of these suckers is lined with sharp, finely serrated rings of chitin. The perforation of these teeth and the suction of the cups serve to attach the monster to whatever it wants. Even with my strength and abilities the creature is fully capable of grappling and subduing a Tamaranean.

I had weird dreams for days.

The main tentacles club was a bit complex, including a wrist, a hand, and four fingers. Amy once demonstrated its dexterity by having the hand grip a flagpole and flipping it around its fingers the way some people flip a pencil around their fingers. The four fingers had hundreds of razor-sharp barbs capable of penetrating steel and ripping it free of concrete had only recently been added.

Weapons included a fairly capable brain/computer thing, an ever-evolving camouflage chameleon-ware, venom, inks, and since we flew through the air, a full loadout of sleep gas, tear gas, sick gas, toothache gas, sewer gas, smoke in nine different colors, flashing bioluminescent searchlights, green starbolts, red lasers, and, in case you hadn't guessed, the ability to dig into the soil and carry off entire buildings wholesale.

As it grew so too did its needs for fuel. Once there had been a problem figuring out how to feed this monster. Going out and swiping cows with alien abduction tactics had been amusing that first night but were impractical as all hell. A solution that was solved once Amy had convinced me to give up one of my Lava Beasts for the Nautilus, absorbing the creature into its biology in a very Zerg way, to integrate Amber Crystal saturated tissues into its biology.

Life inside of a living creature is amusing. The decoration was somewhat old fashioned with wood paneling everywhere, big fluffy rugs on all the floors that ate the dirt from your shoes and tickled as you walked, bright ceramic tiles in the kitchen and bathrooms, brass and other water-proof alloys where metals are needed, and bio-luminescent lights that not only could change colors but approximated star light enough that the potted plants that lined the hallways didn't have any trouble. It was pretty clean and with lots of rounded edges and bright features. Like something out of a magazine with an epic garden in the background. Most of the fixtures we used for our living arrangements were harvested from abandoned houses but it all worked together, somehow.

The exterior optical camouflage features is augmented by mottled skin that looks like the tops of trees seen from above and work to drink in sunlight for photosynthesis. As far as the satellites looking down on us are concerned all we are is a crop of trees, because that's where Amy got the DNA from.

Have I ever mentioned how much Amy enjoyed having alien DNA creatures to play with?

That was a rhetorical question. Don't answer that.

Besides all that we now had nearly an entire DNA cell Library of every creature I've ever heard of and a medical lab that was capable of creating animals to order, with artificial wombs growing them up and releasing them into the wild.

It was part of a project that Amy wanted to do to try and fix some of what humanity had done to extinct and near extinct animals and plants. If it worked Amy should be able to do it on other Earths and terraform worlds. Not that I was complaining or getting in her way.

Go Amy!

We'd gone to places no human had gone before. Eaten our fill of strange foods too.

As for Mana, well.

Let's just say that I didn't have to be physically present on the land to get a mana. So long as the portals that I opened were not to too close together I could maintain about fifty of the things at a time. I couldn't open them all at once, mind, but one at a time was all right. This had resulted in an epic uptick of land harvesting. About three hundred per hour. All while I was waiting for Amy to get done with her hunts sitting in the back seat of our home.

Our latest foray was into the Atlantic Ocean. Amy had wanted some Tube Worms so we'd gone to the bottom of the ocean to let the Nautilus feast on an active volcanic vent.

I don't think that any Planeswalker fic I've read about in my past life ever got a solid Red Mana from the bottom of the ocean before.

Go me!

There in the dark Amy had to make new instruments. New lights for new eyeballs, one set modified for X-ray so it could see the bones in other creatures and locate the cannons of sunken treasure ships, another to see heat. A few atmospheric vibration sensors for Sonar and echolocation. A hammerhead shark who got too close was captured and examined, then dissected and eaten, the resulting modifications done to the limbs allowing the beast to seek out the electrical activity in living creatures and notice the power signatures in underwater cables, sailing ships, and submarines.

And now we were on our way to Africa.

The other changes had been with our colony of Skrill. After Amy had undone what had been done to them they started looking less like arm bands made out of butt ugly wrinkly skin covered bugs with no bones and more like big fuzzy caterpillars with fourteen legs. They have their own room made with vegetation extracted from the Florida Everglades that they hung out in but most of them wandered the ship like cute carnival fluffy things.

I guess Amy was keeping them.

When I was dressed and ready I joined Amy in the breakfast nook. We had real refrigerators full of food now, and all our appliances were powered by the same kinds of fusion reactors given by the Taelons to humanity. They didn't work so well for biological systems, but then the Nautilus didn't have outlets for microwave ovens.

Throughout the wooden area were cabinets growing a literal groaning board's table of foods. Roots and potatoes grow in bunches and batches from out of the walls in the cabinets under the sink. In a walk-in cold room hung a thousand veins whose 'fruit' were actually the meats of various animals, like hanging sausages and bunny rabbit carcasses in a butcher shop. The larger meats, like the cow and pig, grew the body out of a box without hooves or head, suspended on cables, that was then sliced off like a sausage at designated points, each section containing an entirely new set of organs to support the half-creature, the cut soon healed over and stopped bleeding like the stump of a cut-off tree branch.

The blood-filled vegetation was a bit morbid to look at.

However the sparkly blue tree that hung upside down above the breakfast table held all kinds of fruits and would regenerate in a few hours was much nicer to look at.

Sugar cane and real maple syrup on tap is the best!

When Amy put the plate of sunny eggs in front of me along with another plate with two entire ham shanks loaded up with pineapple, I couldn't help but eyeball the eggs.

Maybe this was because they'd been enhanced with yokes of a burnt orange color with a dark purple dot on the sides. As a Tamarin with seven stomachs I either needed to eat a lot or consume enough radiation to make up the difference so I could fuel my biological powers. Amy had been experimenting with making Ostrich eggs from a biological factory that she'd created with each egg being worth roughly 24 of the normal eggs you get from chickens. My plate was 22 inches wide with sloping sides so it almost qualified as a flat and very wide bowl. There were over fifty eggs in there and it was kind of impressive that Amy had managed to fit them all on one plate.

On the sides of the table bowls filled with salt in different colors were arranged around the pick of the Indian spice trade. Hawaiian Black Volcanic Salt, Hawaiian Green Salt, brown Hawaiian Alaea Salt, pink Himalayan sea salt, Persian blue salt, and finally the Grey Salt Sel gris de Guérande from French Brittany. The different kinds of peppercorns, cloves, sugary rock and other things we'd gotten from Zanzibar were not outnumbered.

Amy was growing some of those as well.

I started eating, just to be polite. They weren't half bad at all and seemed to scratch an itch I didn't know I had. The ham were the normal things Amy produced, the bones to support the structure were frail, easily broken and eaten like a soft crab shell sandwich right after it molted, the miniature organs tasty, the nerves to twitch the muscles and the veins to feed everything hardly noticed.

"So, how healthy are these?" I asked with polite curiosity. I scooped up some of the hash browns and then dipped them in the miniature ocean of eggs yoke.

"Extremely," Amy said, putting down another plate, this one covered with hash browns with eggs on top. "These are healthier for your Tamarin body. I used the DNA from a lot of fish, foul, and snake to make them. They're pretty much perfect, and with all the good fats and much better than any other egg on this planet."

Amy's, I noticed, were the more normal variety

"You've been going on a healthy binge streak." I remarked as I worked my way at the lot of them.

"How can I not?" she asked. "Every time I touched something in the fridge I get a picture in my head of what I could do with this random thing. I eventually got my Shard to stop doing that all the time. But I always knew what I was doing to my arteries. I got into this habit of saying 'oh-well,' and now I don't have to do that. Mom would never let me make breakfast for the family, although she never seemed to care when I made my own. I guess she thought I'd do something to the food. Although if I had been making breakfast I probably would have snapped a lot sooner with all this in my face. Now? We can eat healthy forever."

"Taste pretty good too," I said as I covered everything with a hot yellow spice. "So, I've got a plan to assault the facility. Tell me what you think. As usual, I'll use my sleeping cantrip to put everyone to sleep. Then we walk in and break everyone out of their boxes. Then we just walk out."

She didn't speak for a moment, and swallowed her hash browns.

"That's the same old plan!" she complained.

"Yup."

"Well I've got a better one," she told me what it was, and I was impressed.

"I'm impressed."

"Thank you, thank you, I am brilliant, aren't I?" she preened.

"Yes you are, you little Elder Thing you."

"What about when the Taelons and their Implants show up?" Amy asked. "It's not going to be as easy as last time. There's probably a team waiting to get the drop on us. I think I can take care of them if you want? How are you on power anyway?"

"As long as I can keep banging out my sleep spell nothing should happen. That's why we're getting up so early in the morning, so there will be less people. I've got over a thousand blue Mana to cast, so I won't be running out of power any time soon. Honestly I'm starting to lose track of it all. I'm counting planets instead."

"That's good, that's really good." Then she changed the subject. "You know I finally looked up Village of the Damned?"

I nodded. "Which movie?"

"Both. So, can you do all that?"

"Pretty much," I said as I shoveled in my eggs and ham. After I swallowed I continued, "The M.T.G. cards showed me how. Sleep for two blue Mana. A pain of whatever type I wanted for a single unit of red mana. A bloodlust for war with single unit red Mana would turn people on each other with the weapons in their hands. I think if I used a green I could incite an orgy. The thing is that I have to actually experience those sorts of things to cast them on others."

Amy put her elbow on the table and put her head into her hand. Bad manners that, but it was pretty much her house. "So, if you wanted someone to feel the pain, like as if their flesh was being boiled off their bones, you'd have to experience it first?" she wondered.

"Or extract it from someone who has already had it done to them. I could make it up, but you can kind of tell when it's not real. Memories work better, especially when the person knows that the injuries are going to be permanent and lethal; it gets all the right brain chemicals going. But I don't want to be a Pain Caster."

"I should hope not!"

Once in the shallows of the beach the Nautilus was settled onto the ocean floor. We left the vessel through one of the openings using our new bikes, the new shields on the flying bikes keeping us from getting wet as we came up out of the ocean.

Along with us came a few dozen of the Skrill, having learned how to fly using their quantum energy. Apparently that was a thing.

Up on shore it was a simple task to move around in the pre-dawn light like a flock of birds. We stayed above the rooftops to fly across town so we were there in minutes and, as far as we could tell, were free and clear.

The moment I cast my new and improved sleep spell everyone that was out at this time became sleepy. In another minute they were drowsy and actively fighting to keep their eyes open, and then unconscious. From invoking, to casting, to unconscious, all that in less than two minutes. Compared to when I first started casting that spell in the Dragon Flyz universe on Warnado I'd managed to cut about four minutes off my time. I was also using much less mana. And the spell would last much longer too.

"That should hold them for at least four hours," I explained to Amy, who had been safe behind my green shield while not even the birds or the fish had been spared.

Down below us a small about of pandemonium reigned. We looked on with clinical detachment.

Cars were parked off the roads in a haphazard fashion, their owners drooling over the wheels as their engines ran. A few more were on the sidewalks in a sprawl, all sawing wood. Nobody seemed to be hurt too badly. There was hardly anyone around at this time of day other than the workers and the coffee makers. In people's houses and buildings, where I couldn't see them, I imagined that people were falling over for no reason, but all right otherwise.

"I hope we didn't hurt too many people," Amy remarks.

"That's why I did it slow instead of instant. We'd better get moving. We don't have too much time to fool around"

We flew over the remaining distance to the front door and got off our bikes.

"You're turn," I said.

Amy summoned up this black mass from between her fingers where some of the portals on her suit were located. Underhanded she threw the mass at the door where it stuck fast except for a tiny black line. Then we backed up.

Just in case, you know.

A Portal Beast was best described as a living fishnet with holes to nowhere land. From out of the portals in its tissues came more material that contained larger portals that also let more material come through, ad infinitum. Kinda like moving a larger door sideways through a smaller door. It was sort of like watching a computer 3D tesseract fold itself inside out, and it actually made my brain tingle watching it do its thing. The fishnet fairly exploded out of Amy's hand in a straight line and then spread out over the building as if it were made of silk being pulled into place by an invisible fish line attached to a weight, "Woosh!" and it went up and over and down the other side, in a flash. As the Portal Beast fell over the building it disappeared like it was an illusion that hadn't really been there at all, then contracting together at the bottom of a hole where the basement used to be.

I looked at my power glove and saw that it had taken less than five seconds to do that from start to finish. Most of that was from waiting for the silk-like material to fall to the ground as it consumed the air through its portals to move.

"Here," Amy held out her hand in which was another portion of the same Portal Beast.

"Thanks," I say, taking that portion from her. Through the portals in its flesh was the flesh of every human being it had just consumed, like some weird human flesh soccer ball, which I turned into a summon one by one by one, before returning it to her. "Are you curing them?"

"Of course," she replied. "I've got to keep in practice somehow."

When the Portal Beast was done collapsing its living web down to an object the size of a basketball the creature consumed itself, the ball racing back up into the air back to Amy's outreached hand where it disappeared into a tiny portal smaller than my Amber Crystal sequins. Like the most lethal Yoyo. Down below at the bottom of the crater were all the people from the building lined up in the recovery position.

"That was. So! Fucking! Cool!" I remarked. "Where did the building go?"

"I've got parts of it flying through a million portals back on the Nautilus. I'm working on the Skrill and their Queen even as we speak and breaking down their former prison for building materials."

"Ah, waste not, and all of that. " I put my hands on my hips. "You know that was kind of anti-climactic?"

"How is it anti-climactic? I just Twilight Zoned an entire neighborhood!"

"Well, how else am I supposed to enjoy looting if I can't, you know, loot?" I ask.

Amy frowned. "Well, I guess if we ever encounter a Cave Of Wonders I could always let you Daffy Duck and roll around in the gold, before vacuuming it all up?"

"Yeah, that works." I nod. "Of course now that you've said it, it'll probably happen. Just remember your promise."

Amy shrugged, not really caring one way or another. "I will. Now is there anything else you want, or should we get going?"

"Nothing I want here."

"Okay then. Let's go."

We were about halfway back to the beach when a thunderous commotion shook the sky overhead. The Implants had arrived with five shuttles.

Amy shouted, "Awe nuts! I jinxed us."

Without even thinking about it I case my Sleep spell. Four of the shuttles crashed into the landscape all around us, alien fluids and human blood leaking from the crumpled remains. Above another machine circled at a great height, suddenly warry as its brothers fell from the sky.

I was already airborne and abandoning the bike before the four shuttlecraft hit the ground. "Nuts. You take care of the crash test dummies, I'll get this one!"

"Looks like shotgunning the effects works. You didn't even wait to cast." Amy remarked to herself, but I heard it over the scream of the wind thanks to our communications upgrades. Portals don't need atmosphere or leak radio waves.

I'll revisit that little battlefield revelation later.

I leapt after the last shuttle. Surprised at the assault, the people inside dodged as if I was just another idiot who stumbled into the middle of the road. I managed to get

myself attached onto the side of their machine so I could look in. Nothing but ordinary guys in suits in here.

"Sleep," activating my spell one more time caused the shuttle to shut down. I caught it before it went too far and put the sleeping occupants down safely.

Amy came up to me as soon as it was safe, and then devoured it with her Portal Beast.

"Are you okay?" she asked. The Portal Beast sucked itself back up into Amy's hand leaving behind some perfectly fine Implants.

I nodded, gasping in breathe at the adrenalin high. "First time in combat. It was surprising. Kinda like getting into a car accident. I didn't have time to feel fear or think, and then it was over, then my adrenalin started rushing through my system. Huah! I didn't even do much. You got them?"

"Yeah. That'll happen when you get into sudden fights. I'm also fixing a broken neck and a few bones. Nothing major," Amy nodded. "And don't worry about the fight. It's perfectly normal."

The Portal beast extended from Amy's hand again and deposited twenty more people on the sidewalk. None of them had an intact sleeve on them and the holes where they had Skrill were missing.

"Did you get rid of their CVI as well?" I asked as I made summons out of them. Having a few more people who knew how security worked was never a bad thing.

"I replaced them with our benevolent ones, yeah. Also you should know that you're sleep spell is getting better. It worked on the Taelons machines! Which is weird since they don't have a consciousness or the ability to think, at all."

"Yeah, well, it is organic. Nobody said magic was supposed to make sense. I didn't think it would work on them either, since none of the lights ever went off in town and none of the cars shut down when I used it."

"You're also getting better at casting."

"So it would seem so."

I took the unconscious and formerly mind-controlled thugs and laid them on the ground in a row. A faint thread of mana went from my helmet to each of their heads.

"What are you doing?"

"Undoubtedly these people are well trained, and with many skills to show for it, since the Taelons are willing to bend and break the rules to acquire these persons it stands to reason that they'll be useful. I am going to enter their minds," I answer. "My crown will search through their memories like a computer and will tell me all that they know. They'll tell me how to fight. When I'm finished, my mind will have the skills I need."

The process was actually a fairly quick one. The estimated amount of data a human brain can contain is immense, though the full spectrum of guesses ranges from 1 terabyte to 2.5 petabytes. My crown was the culmination of human technology and alien bio-technology, which was capable of holding data for thousands of minds. The threads of mana reached into every brain and touched their tissues inside and out bypassing physical barriers in a way that not even the CVI could get to. As a partially biological creature the Tamarin crown was about as controllable as one of my summons, so it was easy to make it do what I wanted.

"And done! Let's get back before we waste any more time," I turned around and got back on my bike, waiting just long enough for Amy to get into the air before heading back to the ocean.

Amy went down into the Nautilus first. When we got off the bikes were shifted to the side of our embryonic hanger bay. The caps were popped off so that an intestine in pink and purple could fuel them up.

I grinned at Amy as we finished watching what happened. "Like a momma whale ready to give birth."

"Shut up!" she remarked, and turned pink in the face. She kept her hand on the flesh around the docked vehicle, snugging it up tight.

Did you know you can dimension jump from the ocean and to another part of the ocean? I don't think the Taelons did.

It wasn't like they were sharing their goods with humanity anyway. Other than making sure that everyone had a full stomach and supplying the secrets of creating a fusion reactor that you could haul around in the back of your truck, they hadn't been trading very much. But then, figuring out how to feed four billion people gave you a lot of weight to throw around.

So even if the military had figured out how I was getting around I don't think they were sharing those details. Or at least, I don't think they were.

Anyway, we came up out of a lake in Ohio and then used the Interdimensional drive to remove ourselves from one kind of airspace to arrive over the airspace of Paradise, the Amish community.

I was a bit mixed on a community that replicated the ways that the world worked hundreds of years ago. On the one hand it was their life to live. On the other hand they weren't suicidal, their medical needs were fairly modern, and I liked the idea of doctors making house calls. The needles they used to make their clothes were also mass produced. Plus all the other modern bits of hardware because there was nobody around to make two hundred year old stuff. A few of them even had cars.

What no one in the community had in their barn was a mass of exotic alloys the size of a generator wandering around the woods.

I flew on down from our mana-cloaked ship and found the thing floating around without a care in the world, butterflies floating up from the projector on top, a mass of metal strands wrapped around the green drum. Sure was a weird looking thing.

"Mind Control," I cast my Mana spell and watched as the machine turned blue for a second or two.

A mental connection appeared in the back of my head a moment later. Looks like those Loyalty Mods were good for something after all.

Since I already knew the Taelon language from their computers it wasn't that hard for my Planeswalker Spark to translate the dialect of the Jaridians. The probe really was nothing more than a really advanced and alien version of the Mars rover. Survival in a hostile environment, yes, designed for combat, no. Once you knew the language it was as easy to command as any other remote controlled drone.

"Well, do you have it?" Amy asked through my earpiece. A little convenience that we had deeply missed in the days when we didn't have cell phones, replaced and improved with the tech from the Dragon Flyz universe and portal tech to push the signal through.

"Mission accomplished. I'm just going over the logs and programming it to respond to English commands. How's the skies?"

"Clear. And you're power's totally unfair by the way."

"Say's the girl building her own organic spaceship."

"Shut up and get you big butt back up here. I want to work on the Skrill and I can't do that while I'm flying this thing and looking out for threats."

"If you wish to switch your focus you must learn to multitask. Be there in a moment."

I flew up and re-entered the ship by one of the side doors, the drone floating after me. We had to wait about an hour before all the butterflies it manufactured was returned to us.

Energy to matter replication was mine!

In a little while I joined Amy up on the bridge. "Coming along nicely?" I remarked as I took in the new features.

Amy was sitting in a recessed area of the floor with her own throne to sit on. Thanks to the original bubble window on the Taelon shuttle the new bridge was located inside a large Virtual Glass enclosure with four decks.

"Uh." Amy remarked when she saw the machine floating after me like a lost puppy. "How's the thingy?"

"The Scarecrow Probe is in my control, all reprogramed. It wasn't even that difficult to get the authorization codes. Course, I had an out-of-context way to hack the thing." I said.

"Ah. Well, that's good right? Is there anything else you want?" she asked.

I shook my head, no. "Not really, no. I mean, other than a sample of Taelon for the both of us, our shopping list is fairly complete."

"Can't remember anything else from the shows?"

"They were a long time ago, I never watched the whole series, and it wasn't all that great. I mean, there was this one time I watched part of an ending of an episode, and until the credits rolled around I had no idea what I was watching. I thought it was a government agents versus energy vampire show. There's nobody I want to talk to, and Boon isn't going to die, be resurrected and die again off screen. There's supposed to be a gun that's capable of breaking Virtual Glass, but I don't want to hang around for years waiting for it to be invented."

"So, should we go?"

"Yeah, let's go."

"Okay. Let me fix up the rest of all the Skrill, then we'll go on down to Washington to get that Taelon sample, and then we can leave." Amy said.

I nodded. "Sounds good to me."

-000-

This is the last of the pre-written stuff I've got. Hopefully I'll have another one next week or so.

As always comments are appreciated.

Last edited: Jan 12, 2020

Nothing is Impossible! It Just Might be Very Hard to do

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#119

As promised, the last chapter in Earth: Final Conflict.

In conclusion, and as a part of my writing of this world, I'd watched my EFC DVD while writing these chapters. I'm still on the fence of deciding if I like the show or not. Strange, isn't it? I didn't care for the show after Daniel Boone was killed. But I can't say that I hate it.

I thank everyone for your positive comments. Even those of you who don't care for the show or thought I could speed it up a little are helping a little bit, so long as you keep things civil. I like developing fictional technologies in fictional settings. It's been a part of fiction since Lensman and Skylark had our heroes visiting alien races to reverse engineer fantastic technology to add it to humanities own.

Now, as promised I'll be dedicating the next few worlds to my cats, who passed away one at a time, one week apart, over the course of a month from feline aids. I hope you like the first I've chosen.

Now, please enjoy the chapter.

-000-

For this last assault Amy and I had decided that we would be better off staying at the bottom of the ocean.

Call it a feeling.

A feeling Amy agreed with. The last time I'd decided that I would be okay to ignore my feelings I ended up sliding out into a snowbank and buying a new vehicle. So we were on the bottom of the ocean to stay. We had three miles of self-regenerating armor above our heads and even the Mothership would be hard-pressed to hurt us. Not that they couldn't, but they'd probably end life on earth before they could hit us hard enough to do anything.

There was to be no assault on the Embassy in Washington. No invisible infiltration quests. No power fists through walls and windows. No sleep spells.

Such things were fun but hardly necessary now.

I opened up one of my portals up to nearby the living purple weirdo building and Amy's Portal Beast came up out of it like a nightmare. Someone managed to get it on video and it hit the news only two minutes later. The entire embassy grounds where it once stood covered in black so that the building fell into a shadow. When the darkness shrunk down there was nothing left but a big round hole, the topside of the bedrock and a few hundred human being that had once been inside the thing.

Meanwhile Amy and I had 'speriments to conduct.

It wasn't necessary to mess with the biology of the Taelons directly. Amy got all she needed the first time she touched them and I'd turned their sleeping forms into summons just as easily. Tissue samples were taken and we started playing with them, for lack of a proper scientific attitude.

I kinda wished we'd run into the Super Mario world before trying this. Having a de-evolution ray would be a really great thing to have for something like this.

Unlike the Taelons who had routinely experimented on humanity, volunteers or not, both Amy and I had not felt any need to experiment on fully sentient people. We didn't need a test subject to turn into six different kinds of hybrid and then spend a few months experimenting on the poor soul. We had these things called petri dishes. I especially didn't want to torture someone and then give them superpowers. That's how Starfire and Blackfire ended up kicking ass and taking names, you know. Then it would all be over as go with "I cast FIST!"

Yeah, we weren't going there. If Amy could get the walls to produce animal parts on command and viable organs for transfer then we could definitely make any part of a body at any time.

We managed to create two tissues. One of Taelon, the other thanks to the Scarecrow probe who had the DNA on file from when it was launched into space thousands of years ago, of Jaridian. We compared this to what was in the Taelon database, and it was the same.

With both samples of DNA in the probe it was able to make a pair of Replicants, one of each species.

"This is amazing," Amy said as she overlooked the two alien robots the probe had opened up and let out of itself. "It's like looking at a creature printed out of a fabricator."

"Do you have what you need?" I ask.

Amy nods, holding up a piece of Taelon and Jaridian flesh taken from the Replicants. "I'll make it work."

I wave my hand and the two Replicants return to the embrace of the Scarecrow probe minus about five pounds of flesh each. Their bodies quickly broke down into light and energy. Then I return the probe to my Hammerspace where it couldn't get up to any mischief, even if it were so inclined.

One of the things I could now do since I'd had access to the probe is being able to break down an entire organism into energy so I could recreate it. No mana necessary.

New abilities unlocked, and all of that.

The clones I created using my mana summons were only given enough tissues to recreate the hands. Inside of the hands of the Taelons were the Shaquarava, the name of a character from Taelon myth and also the name given to the vestigial organs that allow the bearer to release energy through the hands.

The Skrill used a similar energy type.

This Planeswalker can now release such an energy type.

Thanks to the Taelons and the Scarecrow probe I now possessed the full working knowledge of and the technology needed to take an adult organism and go through every one of its cells one by one, making the same changes to them all without missing any, without killing them, and doing it all fast enough to outrun and overtake the continual introduction of new cells. I can model the result with a high degree of confidence and know what the result will be, and their children and their children as well.

For myself I could see it happen with green mana pumping up my vision to see life force without light. I could see my mana in the cell structures editing them down, reading DNA in real time just like any other language, allowing me to write out what I want. For those cells that threatened to turn into cancer a little black mana stole their energies and mass to feed to the rest to become stronger.

As the both of us worked with the samples of flesh in our own way, Amy with her Shard and I with my Planeswalker Spark, I couldn't help but think about how long it had taken us to get here. Thanks to Amy we now had a vast catalog of genes that we could use to splice. And to think I'd once thought that having a bunch of grad students using a bunch of standardized parts to genetically engineered E. coli bacteria to smell like mint while it was growing and to smell like banana when it was done so they could win a solid silver Lego brick in a synthetic life contest used to be hot stuff.

Spider silk produced from goat's milk? That was old stuff.

Splicing the bioluminescence of a jellyfish into a rat to produce the chemical so we can follow it wherever it goes? Not that impressive.

Better foods, medicine, cures for genetic damage? Already done and done.

Creating an organism that hasn't existed for 3 million years through a process of genome editing using two relatives? Now we're getting somewhere.

"Ding!" When the bell sounded Amy opened the machine to extract the tiny virtual glass bottle from inside. Inside of which was a tiny ball of cells called a blastocyst.

"All done," she announced, holding up the bottle to the light.

"And this will produce an Atavus?" I asked.

"According to my shard, the Taelons own knowledge of biology, and technology from the year 4,000? Yes, it will," she confidently said. "How about yours?"

I held up a piece of tissue with random bits of bone, teeth, muscle, fat, tendons and skin wrapped up in a tight knot. It looked like cancer had run amuck in someone's body and should have been pickled in a jar for scientific curiosity in a freak show. "Monster combining successful."

Amy nods. "And how many tries did it take you to get there?"

"Ah, shut up," I grumble, putting the tissue into her hands. "Well?"

"Very good. And now we combine our efforts together." Amy puts the contents of the bottle into my own grisly creation, merging them into a smooth softball of alien flesh. "Try that."

I took the yellow and pink softball from her; it was warm and fluttering with the beat of a miniature heart. I made a summons out of it, but it was weird.

Normally when I make summons out of living creatures they're alive and well. This was like making a summons out of a baby before it was born, before it formed feet and legs, before it grew a head. It didn't even have a soul.

But it worked gods of science damn it all.

I think my eyes dilated. "Oh wow..."

"Did it work?" she asked.

I took a can of root beer out of my Hammerspace, cold, and gave it to her, keeping one for myself, and tapped them together. "Cheers! It worked."

"Cheers!" we both yelled. We both sipped.

"So? Show me!" Amy jumpined in place with anticipation as I drank.

"Okay, hold my beer," I gave her the can. "Now watch this!"

"You're a nut," Amy said. "You've been waiting to use that excuse for a long time now."

"I deserve it!" I declare. "Now, watch this!"

Amy made some very good eyes on her suit. The first time I tried to run I moved across the landscape faster than Amy's eyes could properly track without being bothered by inertia. I know because when I circled around her I could see the eyes jerking as they tried to keep up.

"Wow you're fast!" Amy said when I paused.

"I know right?" I grinned, and then took off for the wall in the lab and ran up the side like spiderman in the older cartoon shows. I could stand on the sides of buildings unaffected by gravity and even my hair didn't give a damn. "I need a mouse!"

"Okay!" Amy reached into one of the enclosures in the lab; the eight fingers on the end of her suit grabbed one of the innumerable field mice we'd collected for experimentation. "Here!"

Still standing on the side of the wall, I grabbed the creature from out of the air. The first time I tried to do so I was able to extend five inch blades of white energy from my fingers. One of which went into the mouse. It did it so easily I'd say that there was no resistance at all. I could feel the energy flowing up my fingers and into my chest. It was almost like drinking hot chocolate and feeling the heat in your eardrums as it poured its way down your throat. Only in my arms!

"Now that is awesome," I came down and put the remains of the creature into Amy's hands.

"Wow that's dead," Amy said as she turned the animal over. "Even the bacteria are low on energy. How about you? Are you okay?"

I gave her my hand. "Better than ever!" It really was fascinating how having a good meal will change your outlook. "I feel like I just ate a whole batch of foreign chocolates. This is addictive. And I didn't have to alter my biology this time either." I pulled up the life-force blades in my hand again so I could look at them. "Snick, snick, snick! I wonder if I could move these to my knuckles?"

"Well, you're healthy at least. You don't have any of the Taelon or Jaridian or Atavus organs in your biology. Not any different than before. You're powers are acting like they're physically present."

"And I'm not spending any mana to do this either," I put the blades away before I hurt something.

"Well, so long as you don't go nuts I guess it's all right, I guess." Amy frowns as she gives me a long look. "I just wish I could move that fast."

"Did you upgrade your costume already?" I looked her over, and the costume did look a little different. It was more like the Guyver every day, but that probably was because we had access to videos and music now. Anyway, the costume seemed to change each day in little ways so I didn't bother paying too much attention to it.

Amy nods and brings up her arm. A trio of energy blades erupts from her forearm, dark purple along the edge with a white interior, which shut off a moment later. "I put these in while you ran around the ship. They're pretty good at cutting things."

"Um. What do you do with the energy you eat afterwards?"

"Mostly I feed it to my suit. It's not like I can use it. I think I'll give the Nautilus some barbs," Amy gets that 'I've got ideas' look on her face.

"Well, more killer-killy is okay, I guess. Let's just drop off the aliens first so they're not in the way, okay?" Not like I was going to get in her way of modifying her favorite project. Between the ship and the suit I'm not sure which she spends more time modifying for the heck of modification.

"Shall we go to the next world?"

I nodded. "Might as well."

We head for the bridge. "Too bad we couldn't find the alien ship you told me about," Amy says.

"Yeah," I say, looking up at the bottom of the roof of our ship. As if I could see the Taelon Mothership floating overhead. I had half a mind to go up there and get it. However it was better not to barrow too much trouble. The Taelons consider this place a backwater of very little import. If they got the idea that there was something here that could take out their ships they might give this earth a hard time. All their plans were already undone thanks to the Resistance handing out Amy's modified CVI Implants.

As it is the Mothership had come out of orbit early to come looking for its missing alien friends. They were doing active scanning, slow and steady. Even at the bottom of the ocean it was only a matter of time before they found us.

I directed a portal to one of the lands I'd grabbed on some nameless island in the south pacific and left them with a functional Global so that they could call their friends for a pickup. When the Mothership paused and turned around to go get them I opened up a Planar Portal to a world I'd already grabbed so that we could take Amy's Nautilus all at once.

Once we were out of the Earth Final Conflict world and on a world without humans, which have been far too popular for some reason, I hammerspace both the ship and my friend before walking back into the blind eternities.

Raw energy of all types batter at my body and soul like water spouts, just the same as they ever were. I make out a few details through the mess, noting worlds I've visited in the distance like fireflies in a background of stars, each one special in their own way. My destination is in the distance. All around me are endless possabilities, as dense as the words in a page of a book in a library with as many variations in more languages than I can count.

The time I can spend here is limited. Usually I can never get up to 'thirteen mississippi' before something happens. At seven mississippi I stumble and my foot comes down on a dirt road.

I seem to be across the river from some kind of town. There's a long wide road with steps every now and then to keep the road level as it elevates in height, going from the town wall to a Japanese palace that's at least as big as the town, with some kind of gold-colored coin on top and a pair of wings attached to make it even taller still. For some strange reason the structure makes me think of a pig's face with the wings as ears. There were satellite dishes on most of the rooftops in the town and street vendors along the main road.

Overhead a really weird red and white bird flew.

This might have been because it was articulated like an action figure. I could only guess that some combination of wood, plastic and rubber was involved in its construction. Its flight across the landscape was slow, about the speed of a fast-moving walk, articulating like a real bird but not resulting in a very lifelike action because if a real bird flew that slowly it would have fallen out of the sky. I made a mental note not to stand underneath them just in case gravity came around wanting to collect a reality check.

And then I knew where I was, and started grinning like mad.

I popped Amy out of my Hammerspace right next to a sign.

"Heeeeeey~!" I say mischievously. "Check out where we are this time!" I pointed.

Amy looks at the sign and holds up her wrist to summon up a screen on her suit's power glove. It wasn't fully holographic, yet, but it was getting there. "One moment, I'll have this translated in a flash. Oh, it says 'Welcome to Little Tokyo, home of the National Tag Team Mahjong Championship, the World's Third Largest Ball of Twine, and the Samurai Pizza Cat's Pizza Parlor….' Wait a minute? Wasn't that the name of a-"

"Cartoon show," I finished with glee, jumping up and down, my hands rubbing against each other in joy. "We're in a cartoon show! Somebody cue that bird!"

Be it ever so humble, there's large amounts of HAM in that cheese pizza ahead!

Yeah. So after my cat's died I was watching old shows it was this one that made me laugh for the first time in weeks. It was a pretty crummy Christmas. The shows are pure comedy gold and I didn't think I'd get so much enjoyment out of watching them. The Cats musical is coming up and I watched the old 1987 VHS I had on the shelf, that made me nostalgic. I feel a lot better now, but I still miss my cats. I keep expecting them to be lying on the bed or the chairs, or coming in through the door when I open it.

Going forwards there are a couple worlds that I'll be having Nova Ender visit that will only take a chapter or two, probably much less, so I can speed run through them.

Here's a problem with visiting some worlds. Unless you land on top of the protagonist you could be completely unaware that you're in a TV show. If Nova ended up in New York America and The Charmed Sisters are on the other side in LA then she'd have no idea that there was a bounty of magical stuff right there and then. So it has to be kind of obvious, right?

So, come back later for another exciting chapter. Now if you excuse me, I need to go find a meat lover's special pizza pie with my name on it.

Nothing is Impossible! It Just Might be Very Hard to do

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#126

As promised I'm fully dedicating this chapter to my cats. I had three of them. The first one who died was called Ell. Also known as "L", Elly-girl, and Whiskey-momma. She was thirteen years old, tended to leave the room when I showed up, and slept on my bed/ computer chair while I was at work. By order of their deaths he was the grandmother of the second cat and mother to the third cat. Appearance wise she was black with green eyes, white whiskers on the right side of her face, with a bit of brown in her undercoat on her chest. All my cats had five claws, where four claws is normal.

Be warned, music is inbound.

Please enjoy this chapter.

-000-

I popped Amy out of my Hammerspace right next to a sign.

"Heeeeeey~!" I grin mischievously. "Check out where we are this time!" I pointed.

Amy looks at the sign and holds up her wrist to summon up a screen on her suit's power glove. It wasn't fully holographic, yet, but it was getting there. "One moment, I'll have this translated in a flash. Oh, it says 'Welcome to Little Tokyo, home of the National Tag team Mahjong Championship, the World's Third Largest Ball of Twine, and the Samurai Pizza Cat's Pizza Parlor….' Wait a minute? Wasn't that the name of a-"

"Cartoon show," I finished with glee, jumping up and down, my hands rubbing against each other in joy. "We're in a cartoon show! Somebody cue that bird!"

For this wondrous time of weirdly tours on various worlds Amy and I went to Little Tokyo, a place where income is high, taxes are low, and home to some of the bravest people around: The customers of the Samurai Cat's Pizza Parlor.

"Hurry!"

"I'm going as fast as I can!" Amy grumped as we dashed over a cart full of fish to the exclamation of all.

"Hey, don't bump off my overhead!" the vendor called

"If we don't get there on time the lunch special is going to be over!" I groaned as we dodged yet more cybernetic animals. "Vehicle coming through!"

Amy doesn't say anything as we concentrate more on trying not to run people over. Used to attacks and weird stuff happening regularly the people cleared a path as we kicked up a rooster tail of dirt. Which is good for us, because we made it into the parlor and was seated at a table with just a half hour to spare.

"Yeah, made it!" I grin as I take up a menu.

The server had a face that was human enough to meet that uncanny valley effect, but was definitely a cat. In fact, if you had the right makeup artists plenty of humans could have pulled off the look. Where the looks failed was that her head was suspended on a neck that was too small, the rest of the body made up of over four hundred individual doll parts that were perfectly capable of moving in any direction without a problem.

The girl had blond hair, green eyes, green armor and ears on the top of her head, was cute as a button and seemed friendly enough. "Good afternoon and welcome to the Samurai Pizza Cat's Pizza Parlor. My name is Francine and I'll be your waiter today. Do you know what you'd like to order, or would you like me to come back and get some drinks while I'm away?"

I couldn't wait. "Our needs are simple; just make me one of everything!"

"Sorry, but the Buddha Monk Special has to be ordered in advance. Would you like to try anything else perchance?" Francine tilts her head to the side, a good sport even though she must have heard the joke a whole lot.

"We'll start with the Hot and Spicy Samurai Sensation and then work our way down the list," Amy announced from behind her menu. "My friend here has seven stomachs, so don't worry about us finishing it. I'll have a salad and some pasta, garlic bread, and muscles in red wine."

"Very good then. Anything you'd like to have for drinks?" she wrote everything down.

"Shakes, strawberry, three of them," I say.

"Root beer," Amy orders.

"Okay, I'll be back in forty winks," and then she was gone across the room.

"Does she always rhyme?" Amy asks. "And how does she move across the room like that?"

"It's a part of her charm," I say. "And rollerblading used to be very big back in the 1990s, so they can slide in any direction except across the water."

"I guess I'll just put it down to Mover abilities. Anyway, you know that on the way here I tried to get DNA samples from the people and nothing I did worked?"

"They don't qualify as organic?" I asked. "Makes sense, sort of. I was going all 'one, two, going to make a summon out of you; three, four, going to breach the interdimensional door, five, six, gonna get a bigger bag of tricks, seven, eight, putting my enemies into checkmate, nine and ten, time and again.' They're each made up of between four and five hundred parts. I got plenty of golem cards out of it."

Amy shook her head, no. "Do you know what they're made of?"

"Pen and ink," Amy gives me a flat stare. "No, seriously. This is a cartoon show you know. The people in it know it's a cartoon show. Speedy Cerviche (pronounced "ser-vee-chay") and Guido Anchovy even make remarks about having an Agent and a contract. It's kinda like Roger Rabbit. Pretty neat, right?" I bounced in my seat.

"Yeah, I guess so. Why are you so happy?"

"What do you mean?" I ask. "I just said why. It's a neat place."

"No, I mean besides that. I think this is the happiest I've seen you in a long time. I mean, that is to say, that you aren't un-happy. But now you're ecstatic. So what gives?"

"Well, it was a long time ago, but it's like this. One time I used to have three cats, right? But they all got sick. It's one of the reasons why I'm so happy to have green mana and your bio-kinesis on top now. See, the old one, a black Siamese, went first. At first we'd thought she'd just gone off to die somewhere, you know? If she hadn't gone and hid herself we would have taken her to the vets that day. She then came back two days later, but she wasn't all there in her head, you know? She just laid there and stared at nothing with her eyes twitching. So my mom rushes her to the vet, and they give her the IV and everything else, and even after four hundred dollars in doctors' bills we ended up euthanizing her."

"Oh, I'm sorry. Your poor cat. Did you stay with her while the shot was given?"

I nodded. "I did. My mom couldn't stay in the room. My sister was there. We'd had her for the better part of fourteen years."

"She must be regretting that." Amy remarked. "I know that if I had a pet and it had to be put down that I would stay with it. Of course, with my abilities, I'd probably break all my rules and fix it. Course, I'd do that anyway, now."

"I know, right?" I sigh. "But the thing is that all my other cats got depressed. My second cat, a calico, the granddaughter, started looking for her. We all thought she was depressed. And then she dies in her sleep, and I come home to her on the couch as stiff as anything. She looked like she was sleeping. I could have put her in a basket and you would have never have known that she was dead."

"Oh wow. Wow, I'm not sure what to say about that."

"Well the weird thing, for me? Is that my Aunt used to have some cat toys. So I'm sitting on the couch with my new dead cat, petting her fur for half an hour, trying to wrap my head around it, and I had an epiphany?"

"What was it?"

"I realized, just then, that the cats I took for toys in my old Aunt's living room must have been taxidermy cats. They were all curled up in their baskets just like mine was curled up in this towel I had, and I never knew it. Nobody had told me." I put my head on my fist and my elbow on the table. "Nobody had told me. And I didn't realize until then. I'd been playing with dead stuffed cats. I was five and seven years old when I was babysat at her house. I can still remember petting them, and now I realize that I was petting real fur and I can still remember the feeling of the cat's bones inside their bodies. I couldn't open their eyes because they were sewn shut. I'd forgotten all about them until then."

"Wow. That's really something. But I can believe that. So what happened to your third cat?"

"After the number two car died and I'd buried it in the backyard we thought we were clear. The first cat came home as cremated and mom put her in a jar. But we were expecting it, so we weren't surprised. So when our third cat got sick another week later it wasn't a surprise. And it wasn't like the doctor could do anything. The disease had already run its course. If we brought her to the vet they would have had to do all these tests and we'd have to pay another couple a hundred dollars for a dead cat and a biohazard fee and everything else in the world. Nobody wanted that. If we could have taken her to the doctor just for the euthanasia shot we would have done it. So we kept her comfortable at home. It was just our luck as that fattest cat she took the longest to die. But she did die. There was nothing we or the doctor could do. The doctor even said so."

"Sorry about your loss. But you stayed with her, right?"

"I did. My mom and I alternated taking care of her until she passed away."

"Well that's good then. I'm glad you were strong enough to be able to do that. Nova, you know from working in the hospital that I've had a lot of experience with death. Sometimes there are things that even I can't do. I'm not there in time, there isn't enough biomass to heal, or there's too much damage. But there are also a lot of people who can't visit their relatives in the hospital. They can't come in and see them as broken things. And in the vet's it's the same. They want what's best for their pets, but they can't stand to see them. They'll leave the room while they're euthanized. I'm glad you were strong enough to stay with them." She reached out a hand and gave mine a squeeze.

"Thank you," I gave hers a pat and let out a sad sigh. "Anyway, I'm really glad that I'm here. Why? Because watching the old Samurai Pizza Cats shows was the first time I smiled after my cat's died. It shouldn't be too hard to get summons out of the famous felines."

"I guess so. In the long run it's not much of a big deal, I guess. I can't do anything with cybernetic doll parts."

I shrugged, "Just so long as you don't make a big deal of it. We should enjoy ourselves. I mean, we're in a cartoon show after all. We might not be the stars of the show, so I guess that makes us a special guest appearance. So long as we don't get the audience mad at us or we break the fourth wall over there we should be fine."

Amy looks around, "Wall? What wall?" We were sitting at a table on the patio. There were no walls to be found around us.

"That one," I point.

Amy looks in that direction, then hurriedly looks away. "Nova, who is that guy on the other side?" she squeaks.

"Probably the Writer-Guy. He's the guy who's going to make it possible for me to pick up cartoon physics while I'm here. Don't look in that direction and don't think about it too much," I warn.

A few minutes of awkward silence then commences. Fortunately Francine comes back with our drinks and Amy seems to forget where the fourth wall is because she spends a moment looking for it with the various eyes on her suit.

"You know, this is pretty relaxing," Amy says.

I look up from where I'm leaning back in my wrote iron chair. "How so?" Amy's still looking around with the eyes on her suit.

"Well, we're in a world where a good number of the people are dolls or mecha suits. Nobody even notices my flesh-Guyver suit, and you don't have to pretend to not be orange. And nobody cares."

"Ah right. That. But I can make yourself look human if I wanted to. But I don't care anyway."

"You don't? Why not?"

"I don't need to. Something tells me that most of the world's where we're going to that having me look like this isn't going to be a problem."

"How do you figure that?"

"I looked at the bottom of the screen of the Writer-Guy's computer and saw that he had a list of planets he wanted to send us to. Thank you," I say to the waiter as she returned with our drinks. I sip at my milkshake and found it full of real strawberry ice cream. They even had to provide a special larger straw because of the chunks of fruit in the drink. It was wonderful.

Amy's mouth drops open and one of her eye twitches. "That's not … that's cheating!"

I pick up my second milkshake and take a small sip this time, then wave away her concerns. "Relax! I'm not going to be saying any spoilers. We'll be fine."

Amy settles down. "Okay. Just so long as you don't get the Writer-Guy mad at us. Perfect, I'm in a cartoon. The guy can do anything with us while we're here," she says, thinking on my own advice.

Things proceeded well for us as the time passed us by, the used pizza pies platters continued to mount up, and so did the bill. Half of them went into my Hammerspace for later, the rest went into my mouth. There was a small crowd of wide-eyed people that had stood around a bit longer just to watch me eat, but plenty of others who had left in disgust. The hippos, the pandas, and the elephant people had all given me a thumbs-up on the way out. Until at some point the expected, happened …

"If I wasn't your doctor and already knew you'd be fine, I'd say that something was wrong with you. You've been eating for," Amy looks at her power glove for a watch app, "Four hours straight!"

"Eaten but not forgotten. See?" I smile and pat my stomach in contentment. "Toon physics unlocked. Ahh~!" I slide out of my chair and reveal the rest of my gut.

"Wowe!" Amy said in slow wonderment, complete with wide-eyed looks as I attempt to stand up. "You've gotten … big."

That wasn't an exaggeration or something to be taken lightly. I'm sure we've all seen plenty of fat people. I'm sure we've seen them bend over. And I'm pretty sure we've seen them struggle with getting up. I'm even sure that some people were sat on by these fat people. I've even seen a really fat guy get tired of being picked on while in line to the ice cream parlor on the beach and take on guy with more muscles than brains.

The result of such an action should have never been in doubt. Yet it had completely blown away the expectations of my younger-self. The fat guy had turned around, got one hand on the muscular dude, and simply never let go. Eventually the fat man ended up sitting on the muscular dude. I found this hilarious.

Then the fat guy had intentionally farted. The man's farts smelled like cinnamon from ten feet away. And just like that it had gone from hilarious to sickeningly awesome.

I shouldn't have inflated like I had, but I did. It would have taken an incredible number of pizzas to be as big and as round as a meatball. At the very least I should have popped the limitations of my stomachs and ruptured instead of looking like I had stuffed a bunch of pillows into my coveralls.

My attempts to become upright were overcome by my new and awkward center of gravity. My glorious ascension was pretty difficult when your figure's gone to hell and you look like Violet Beauregarde after she turned into a blueberry. My coverall had stretched to cover … it … all … even though it wasn't size changing or had enough material to do the job, and the buckles on my stomach had come undone. Plus with all the Amber Crystals along my skin it made me look like I was trying to become the new Fabergé egg.

My eyes widened as I had a thought. Or, like a fat guy with bling about to do a music video.

"Hey, call it what it is." I sent my hand out and silently cast a summons. In front of me there appeared a hippo with a muscle shirt, a panda in blue jogging suit, and an elephant in white and black stripes. They reached out a hand and helped me up. "Did you know? I used to try to recreate the dance scenes in movies because my little sister wanted to be the Disney Princess at home?"

"So you've told me."

"Well, one of the things we had was a whole attic full of old clothes. Just like everyone, I guess. We had stuff from everyone, even my old baby clothes. One time I used my grandmother's old blue PJs and stuffed them with all the pillows in the house. Or something. Like this one time I put on a super duper sumo suit at the carnival to fight this other guy. Boy that was fun."

Amy's eyes were widening, and I could see that she knew where I was going with this. "Nova, you're not going to sing, are you?"

I then struck a pose with my right arm reaching for the sky, snapping my fingers with a little starbolts action to make a loud snap. "I'm just gonna state a fact, that I'm fat. Because I'm fat, I'm fat, come on!"

The panda, hippo, and elephant got into the act: (She's fat, fat really really fat.)

"You know I'm fat, I'm fat, you know it,"

(Fat, fat, really really fat)

"You know I'm fat, I'm fat, come on you know,"

(Fat, fat, really really fat)

"Don'tcha call me pudgy, portly or stout.

Just now tell me once again who's fat?"

I spun around and pointed, clapped, then spun around and made a motion as if pulling an invisible rope, clapped, then spun around in the opposite direction.

"Check, please!" Amy yelled in the direction of the open doors of the diner.

One of my favorite parody makers always was and always will be Weird Al Yankovic. I guess doing a good impression of his Fat video. There were plenty of anthropomorphic animals watching at least. The Writer-Guy must have been giving me the benefit of the doubt too, because there was music coming from somewhere.

I clapped and shimmied to the left a few times, "Come one Amy, there's always songs in animated features."

"Maybe the next number!" she smiled and waved me away as I danced away.

"I'll hold you to that."

Now it was time to get serious. I summon a microphone and hit it with a red and blue spell to amplify the power of my voice.

"My zippers bust, my buckles break,

"I'm too much woman for you to take,"

I reached down to my buckle and give my front a lift. Easy now, there's children present.

"The pavement cracks when I fall down," I fell on my ass, the road acquiring an imprint while four inch deep cracks radiated away, before bouncing back up. "I've got more chins, than Little Tokyo town."

People were starting to crack a smile. Progress!

I started walking away from the crowd doing an enthusiastic chicken walk, bouncing four feet into the air with my super strength, just bouncing my whole self all over the place, and then I turn around, pointed, and nodding in time with the music.

"Well, I've never used a phone booth," shake my head.

"And I've never seen my toes," look down and then up.

I point to the sky and then slowly bring it down to the audience, before "And when I'm off to the movies," snapping my hand at myself with a thumb at my chest, "I'm the one that's taking ups seven rows!" and then I'm pointing back to the audience.

"Because I'm fat, I'm fat, come on," starbolts snap!

(Fat, fat, really really fat)

"You know I'm fat, I'm fat, you know it," Chin ups!

(Fat, fat, really really fat)

"You know I'm fat, I'm fat, come on you know,

(Fat, fat, really really fat)

"Don'tcha call me pudgy, portly or stout,

Just now tell me once again, who's fat!"

I take a deep breath and start walking along the street, "Ohhhhh, yeah!" raising my arms, I got a bit of a rise out of the audience. I pointed, and the audience screamed, "Come on, come on guys, louder! Ohhhhh!"

"OHHHHHHHH!"

I nod. "That's what I'm talking about."

I spin around, letting my crew get into position around me, and moonwalk forwards without going anywhere, alternating the left and right arm with an open palm in the right and a fist in the left.

"When I planeswalk out, to get my mail, it measures on, the Richter scale."

Turn to the left, walk five paces.

"If I have one more pie a la mode, I'm gonna need my own zip code."

Turn to the right; take ten paces, with exaggerated hip motions with each step.

"When you're only having seconds, I'm having twenty-thirds, and when I go to get my shoes shined, I gotta take their word!"

I pause, the music cuts out, I'm hunched over looking at the pavement, and I take a breather. Then I straightened up, wipe the hair away from my face. "Because, you know, I'm really fat, you know that right?"

Pause of awkward silence, 3, 2, 1...

"Yeah! We know it!" some little kid yells.

I point at the kid and nod. "Thank you for your honesty."

Then I turn around and do another snap and point at the sky. Then the music cuts back in, and it's on!

"Yeah, because I'm fat! Because I'm fat, I'm fat, Shamu the whale!

(Fat, fat, really really fat)

You know I'm fat, I'm fat, my pants are about to fail!

(Fat, fat, really really fat)

You know I'm fat, I'm fat, you know it, you know,

(Fat, fat, really really fat)

"Lemme tell you once again, I got a couple belts in play," I reached down and give my buckle a lift, "If you see me comin' your way, you'd better give me lots of space. My appetites' insatiable, I tell you that I'm hungry then you've got to feed my face!"

I put one hand on top of the other, and start two stepping from the left and the right. "Ham on, ham on, pineabble and ham on pizza, all right!" I reach out with telekinesis and grab a slice of pizza from off the table that I hadn't eaten yet, flying it across the sidewalk and directly into my mouth. I give the mouth a wipe, and then politely burped into a napkin.

"Because I'm the Planeswalker of this realm, and! You'd! Better! Treat! Me! Right!"

Jump into the air and air guitar!

Red, green, blue, white, and black light flew into the sky from a circle in the ground, lighting up the day with a miniature explosion. As each light passed from one to the other I thinned out to my normal shapely self, with a tight stomach and nice round rump. Even the belt buckles that had hung off flew back into place.

I came down on both feet, microphone held to my face and pointed with my other hand.

"Because I'm huge, a big deal, I'm fat, you know it!

(Fat, fat, really really fat)

"You know I'm fat, you know, ho!

(Fat, fat, really really fat)

"You know I'm fat, I'm fat, you know it, you know!

(Fat, fat, really really fat)

"And the whole world knows I'm fat and I'm proud,

"Because I'm the biggest thing in this world! So once again I ask, who's phat!?"

Mic drop!

There was a bit of clapping as I returned to the table with Amy standing nearby.

"- but will that be all?" Francine asked as she came up with the check.

"Ah, yes, please," Amy takes the check and starts counting out the cash.

"So what did you think of that?" I ask as the music fades away.

"Ha! Pretty good. But I bet I could do better," Amy says as she puts down a block of cash for our whole bill. Seriously, the receipt is longer than my arm.

"Oh yeah?"

"Yeah!"

"Okay, sure, right, show me," I cross my arms.

"Sure, okay, watch this!" Amy summons a Portal Beast through the wormhole in her hands. The creature's skin is full of miniature portals that you can't see with the human eye, but they all start gushing more of the Portal Beast and getting bigger. However, the material being summoned up was also green as algae. She waits a moment for the creature to grow so it's as big as a soft ball, before winding up and throwing it.

The now green Portal Beast hits the street and breaks into two pieces. Each of those two pieces of the Portal Beast bounces off the ground again and split into two again. A few hit the walls of the buildings as they bounce around, leaving behind a spot of the portal beast attached to the walls, where their portals immediately unfold into big pavilion-like trumpet flowers.

Then all the blobs of giant green fall onto the sidewalk and form a line one after the other. They inflated up to look like little fat men with pudgy arms. Amy's costume starts to inflate and turn green as well.

"See, my but's bigger!" Amy shakes the inflated rear end of her suit at me before she goes into a dance routine. "MAMBO! One, two, three, four… One, two, three, four … Mambo, oh yeah!" and then she started cartwheeling her arms.

"Hey, hey, hey!" the little green guys start bouncing and running around in the middle of the street. They arrange themselves into a circle around Amy in a coordinated dance that's only possible because each and every single one of the Portal Beast is just one creature.

Amy knows how to mambo? How? We didn't practice any of those moves when we were doing powers testing!

"Hax! I call hax! And I've got perfect pitch," I reply. "Ah-ha-haha-haaaa-ha!" I take out a pair of maracas from my Hammerspace and a bowl of fruit, which I attached to my head.

My panda, elephant and hippo receive a bowl of fruit and a pair of maracas as well. I also threw down a guitar case with the words, "Donations please!" on a paper attached to the inside.

Out of the corner of my eye I notice that the Pizza Cats had arrived.

"Hey you! We didn't order a Dance Special!" Speedy yells at us, waving his arms.

"Block party!" I yell back as I make my way to them. Along the way I also plop down a table and cover it with a hundred glass bottles of assorted booze just to get things started.

I dance over and put my bowl of fruit on Polly's head and turn her and Speedy towards each other so that they held each other in their arms. "Here you go. Let's cut a rug, Guido!"

The tomcat screams as I run off with him. "Whoa, hey, stop you crazy woman!"

I smush the guy up to my chest, wiggling back and forth as I dance. "Sorry, but I can't hear you over the bees buzzing in my breast. Oh! That's you, you're purring."

Take one step left and one step right.

One to the front and one to the side.

Clap your hand once and clap your hands twice.

And if it looks like this then you doing it right.

I give the little guy a spin and then lift him up on two arms.

"Wha! I was just getting comfortable! Get me down from here!" he yells.

"All's fair in love and dancing!" I put him down and give the guy a pat on his head as he tried to remain upright, spirals swirling away in his eyes. "I'll be right back!"

As I flew away I notice Francine coming up to him with a drink in her hand. Guido falls into his seat as one dizzy cat, before taking the proffered drink.

Francine shrugs, "Ah well, what comes around goes around."

Amy had added a few more things while I was busy getting a summons out of the Samurai Pizza Cats and their armor and weapons. A quartet of the green Portal Beast now looked like inflated whoopee cushions attached to a variety of wind instruments, and they were doing a pretty good job of recreating an entire orchestra. Sonic weapons, you know?

I sent my panda, hippo and elephant over to a trio of blobs that split themselves in half and folded over to form large hollow interiors with a taunt skin so they could pretend to be drums and bang away.

"Energy Expulsion: Darkness and Light!" I cast and threw the result into the air.

The sky above us immediately turned dark as if a tent had been cast across the sky, putting the street into shadow. All except for two light sources that collected the sunlight into two units, which were then shown down into the crowd of little green blobs.

I went down to find Amy. "Shall we have this dance?" I ask with a bow.

"Oh sir, you flatter me! One moment," she took up my hand and then looked down at her suit which deflated, a skirt unfurling around the waist, "Okay, now we can go."

I was the taller of the two of us even with the elevator shoes Amy had put into her organic hard suit so I had to lead. With the spotlights on us I gave her a spin and dip, spin and dip, and then spent another minute chasing her around the street as the people watched.

A few of the guys and girls even dragged their dance partners onto the street with us.

When we extended from each other and then came back together I did a flash!—portal—step from one side of her body to the other so we wouldn't collide, but grabbed her arm before she could get too far. Only the strength of her suit prevented me from pulling the socket out of her arm.

What? You didn't think that we didn't do any physical activities while we were traveling between worlds?

Then I gave Amy a spin, and because neither of us was really touching the ground at that point I was able to spin her really fast and give her one rotation around my body like she was on an amusement park ride. I threw her into the air and kept her there for a moment with telekinesis before dramatically catching her. Then I swung her around my body, Amy's legs going in-between mine before I pulled her out underneath me.

I smiled and called out, "Smoke'n!"

Amy was laughing too hard when I pulled her up onto her feet to continue. "That was great!"

"It really was. How'd you do that? I didn't know you knew how to mombo!?"

"You got your knowledge of dancing from those Implant guys, right?" she asked instead.

"Well, yes. Oh, I played dance, dance revolution too, and I was in all the plays at school."

"Well, you won't hear it from me, but I'm usually too busy healing to know whom I was healing, and inquiring with patient confidentiality was a nono. But soon after I started some of the world's greatest minds, athletes and actors started coming out of retirement."

I put two and two together and got Amy. "You?"

Amy pointed two big thumbs-up at herself while smiling hard enough to see her back teeth. "Me! Course, once I realized what was happening it wasn't all that hard, you see. The athletes had worn out bodies with all kinds of muscle and bone problems, and the actors had too many surgeries to make them pretty with bodies full of plastic and silicon. I put them to right and a few were nice enough to do more than say thank you. Of course, it was easier when I can see the nerves in their bodies firing."

The more things you know.

"I had no idea."

"Of course you didn't. There are lots of things about me you don't know about."

This was true.

"I have been stuck in my room a bit too much, haven't I?"

Amy nodded. "After we built it, yes. Well it's not like we haven't been busy. You were meditating to gain lands."

"And you have been in the guts of your creations," I remarked. "Do you think we spent too much time in the belly of the beast?"

"Perhaps."

Together we started moving to the sidewalk. The street was getting filled with dancers who had kept going. I saw Polly and Speedy dancing away. So maybe something was happening there.

"So what should we do now? We started something and I kind of feel responsible about it." Amy gestured to the people who were all having a grand old time. "If we leave I'll have to take my stuff away, and I don't want to do that yet."

I reached down and picked up the guitar case that was now full of bills.

Amy's eyes went wide.

"We could go shopping for some more stuff?" I offered.

"What could we get? We bought stuff, stole, and snatched a lot of things from that other earth?"

"We buy rocks."

-000-

In total we stayed a week in the Samurai Cats Universe.

I had a prediction that proved to be somewhat accurate. There were quarries, rivers, museums, shops and outdoor markets where things could be bought for the right price. After using the common currency to acquire a lot of it the time for experimentation had once again arrived.

First I summoned up Speedy Cerviche and had a little chat with the mana clone about everything he knew about his magical Ginzu sword and his special attack, the Cat's Eye Slash. Dressed in white armor with blue highlights he reminded me the most of a classic Gundam as a Halloween costume with a human face dolled up to play a remake of the Cats musical.

As a colorless artifact I could summon up the Ginzu sword without mana even though it could perform a magical attack just as I would a computer or a set of clothes. Attempts at summoning variants with red, blue, green, white and black mana were also successful. Each had their own special effect added to the original Slash in line with their particular focus.

By examining the rocks and materials found around Little Tokyo I was able to find small samplings of the magical material that went into Ginzu sword and the Supreme Catatonic robot. I also found the giant robot in Mt. Coochie.

It wasn't like it was hard. I'd spent each day opening up three hundred different portals to different parts of the earth and switching them out after an hour or two. A little red mana applied to the nearby mountains let me find all the caverns easily.

And yes, I also opened up a portal into the Samurai Pizza parlor in order to get a summons out of the stuff hidden behind closed doors. I had the whole set.

Each variant of the Ginzu sword also summoned a variant of the Supreme Catatonic robot. They all had the same weapons, a big whale fishing spear and a blaster shaped like a fish. But because of the mana used what they did was totally different. The black mana S-Cat robot caused enough absolute death when I summoned it out in the countryside that The Writer-Guy didn't even allow me to put on a demonstration!

The Supreme Catatonic robot also wasn't. Like all the cybernetic anthropomorphic animals that inhabited Little Tokyo it was a big action figurine. The materials were expertly crafted and the design was definitely the best of the robotics technology that was available in 1990 but since the thing moved with magic a lot of the interior was either empty or solid metal.

There were no engines to provide torque to lift the arms, no hydraulics to move anything, no wires or computers beyond what was needed for some special effects, and no weight restrictions.

Both the armor that the Samurai Pizza cats and the Supreme Catatonic robot and the Goonie Birds with the Supreme Toppings armor all ran on solar power but there were no solar panels or batteries to collect and store this energy. And besides, the robot usually spent its days in a dark cavern in under a literal mountain named Mt. Choochi.

The magical devices also had none of the aerodynamic qualities that would go into a good flying machine and yet it could move at Mach 9 and ignore atmospheric reentry.

The material of the Ginzu sword and the little specs Amy and I found in rocks was interesting. It was actually meteoric iron and not really all that strong. The moment it came through the atmosphere from outer space and touched the planet it was as if someone had written "handwavium" into the fabric of reality.

An examination performed by Amy by feeding bits of the stuff to her various experimental animals and plants usually resulted in better bones, muscles, nerves, skin, organs and senses in animals, leaves and fruits in plants, and so on.

The mechanical bits in the people in Little Tokyo could heal as well. The animals were also capable of being melted down like metal toys.

An examination of the stuff using mana cycled through my eyes made it reactive to pretty much whatever I used.

"I feel like a comic book character that was suddenly given a sword made of 'insert magical effect here' and the knowledge of how to make more," I tell Amy later that day.

"I like it for the bio-metal I can make with it. Do you have a name for it, or should we just call it magic ore?" she asked.

That was a good question.

I'd made a bunch of the stuff using colorless summoning and we'd made a blade of the stuff by having one of Amy's bio-creations extrude the bio-metal bone in the shape of a blade.

It was able to cut the edge off all the blades we had and even cut an Amber Crystal in half. I could put the tip in the ground and, provided that the tip didn't cut through the rock with it at an angle, stand on the side of the blade and bend it nearly in half before allowing it to return to its proper shape.

"I think this is just a wishalloy."

"What's that?"

How to explain this?

"Basically it's the idea that says '…and that's why genies exist.' Maybe it's because the universe gets tired of following all these pesky laws. Maybe it's the emergency release valve of an otherwise perfect machine. Maybe it's the seafoam that exists for a brief time before becoming water again in the ocean of eternity. Whatever the reason, the universe has some resources tied up in an exception to the rules and we get glowing space rocks."

"So there are no rules except there are always exceptions to the rules?"

"Yes, also."

The next cybernetic cat I had an interview with was Guido Anchovy. Tall, dark-furred, red eyes and dressed in blue armor he was very much the more hansom of the two tomcats of the Samurai Pizza Cats team. I could listen to his voice all day long.

The guy's super shogun weapon is the Samurai Sunspot Umbrella, which can fire rings of energy that can trap enemies, fire a heat beam powerful enough to set an entire forest on fire, be spun to hypnotize enemies, and be used as a club (when closed) or a shield (when open). Its handle conceals Guido's sword (Pikapika) whose power is Ichimonji´s Fire.

This device was definitely Tinkertech so Amy wasn't really interested in it. Like most Tinkertech it looked like a machine drawn by an artist who's an expert in technical draft work but one who is lacking in how such a device would work. Once you open the thing up all you'll find is bunch of tech that looks like it does something but really can't do anything.

There was no mechanism to make energy of any kind. No device to control the output of the special effects. No reason why the fabric shouldn't have melted under the output of its own weapons or been cut to pieces with a blade. Other than being yellow with a red ring there's no visual effect to even attempt to explain why it would hypnotize someone, not even a swirl. Once the Pikapika sword was set on fire it should have burned the hand that held it, but didn't.

How were these super-lethal effects prevented from killing anyone?

Given a supply of the wishalloy there was no doubt in my mind that a given number of special effects artists in Hollywood could have made extremely accurate props.

The difference here is that they would have worked.

Make a suit with flamethrowers and that person would be both fairly immune to fire, air conditioned, and capable of extreme heat output without fuel.

Make a suit with drills and blades built into the gloves, helmet, and limbs and that person would be able to bore a tunnel through solid stone as fast as a deep sea diver could move through the water using a diver propulsion vehicle.

A deep sea diving suit made using the same material would be capable of a whole lot more.

Create a suit with wings and a propeller and they'd be able to flap like birds and out-perform military helicopters. Or you could make a jetpack and it would work without setting your legs on fire.

You could also create awesome weapons with their own special effects that could be taken apart and put back together to make a new wonder weapon that could do anything.

And finally we had little Polly Esther. She has blue eyes and wears red and pink armor. She is the only female of the team; as far as I was concerned, the most dangerous of them all.

She's the only cat that had superpowers. All the other characters, the Samurai Pizza Cats, the Rescue Team, Bad Crow and the rest only had the wishalloy Ginzu metal to work with and that was bad enough.

The Samurai Pizza Cats don't even have claws, they have fingers and thumbs! Because they're cybernetic human form animals with doll anatomy. And yet she still manages to grow some on both her hands whenever she's pissed off that can cut through flesh and wood and Ginzu metal. She just makes things happen, and that's scary!

Her projectiles are entirely made out of energy, are heart shaped because she wants them to be and have numerous effects from explosions, to cutting, to charming people into doing stupid things.

Ignoring the list of random objects that annoy me greatly to do maximum damage to, the ability to make fools out of people should not be underestimated.

This was a very successful world to visit.

Did I steal anything, go visit Seymour "The Big" Cheese, or go anywhere near the palace? No, because the Writer-Guy might have involved me in a plot!

I was glad to leave.

-000-

I was going to make this two chapters, but I made it one instead.

So the way I wrote this chapter is that I made a few paragraphs about visiting Little Tokyo and the Samurai Pizza Cats pizza parlor, then did the musical numbers, then added in a bit about my cats, then talked about their ill-gotten gains. Then it was over, and it was time to move onto the next world.

I was having the hardest time writing about our two heroes in this slapstick comedy world until the people living next to me started to replay all their old VHS tapes and their musical numbers got into my head space. From that point I couldn't write fast enough. Then I was done.

As I promised this is going to be the first of the one chapter one world entries. Some might get longer. No promises.

Something I've noticed is that over the last few world's Amy has gotten more in tune with her powers and is using them to full effect. Since most of them had biological creatures to exploit this was a given. However it has also resulted in Amy being a bit more powerful than my Planeswalker Nova Anders. How did this happen? I didn't intend for this to happen. And when I got done writing this chapter I found that Amy was showing off with a completely relaxed flair and only Nova had benefited from this world's visit.

Well, mostly. Bio-metal is a big deal.

Why did I make magic the exception to the Laws of the Universe?

I was honestly thinking about the books River of Dancing Gods by Jack Chalker. In that world the Laws that govern the universe were literally written into existence by powerful wizards. Since the Laws of the Universe is as prone to error as any system, computer, government, tabletop game, complete with abuses of powers with one of the most famous being "weather and climate permitting, all beautiful young women must be scantily clad." This means the female barbarian character must compromise between protection and conforming with the Rules. To act as a release valve to their Universe these wizards then created the Lamp to work as a loophole around all their stupid rules and the wishes it grants to let off the magical equivalent of excess energy before the whole system falls apart in a massive pile of error.

By that same token scientists have seen errors in our universe in various weird phenomena. So, since nothing seems to be perfect and the Universe obviously has some kind of error checking system, then that means that there must be resources tied up in finding, fixing, logging, and doing other things to repair errors. This dosen't stop the fact that they had existed. Nor does it stop our scientists from abusing these errors. There are some computers that write out and execute some fairly fast programs in the microsecond before the universe notices that they're not supposed to work, and for the life of me I can't remember where I got that Real Life reference.

So that's my take on magic. In this universe anyway.

Also note: The things that Nova and Amy say are based off a real conversation I had with one of my coworkers at work. Where I am Nova and Amy was an older lady friend. It was comforting.

See you next time!

Last edited: Jan 25, 2020

Nothing is Impossible! It Just Might be Very Hard to do

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Spelling List of Comic Book Exclamations and Action Words

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NitroNorman

NitroNorman

The Armchair Reader

Jan 31, 2020

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#129

Dedicated to my second cat named Monkey. She was the granddaughter of Ell. A calico with super soft fur, white belly, a mixture of caramel brown and chocolate black, with a white stripe off center along her nose. Like all my cats she had a bit of siamese in her, so had that crook in her tail that would wrap itself around my arm when I held her. She was thin, never came when I called, but also never left me alone when I ate. This one's for her.

-000-

My foot came down on a wooden pillar of a pier. A seagull coming into land fell into the water after bouncing off my leg. Its squawking calls of outrage went ignored except that I rubbed at the leg where it was hit.

"Stupid flying rats!"

I always hated seagulls at the beach. They stole my sandwiches and pecked at my sister and gave her an awful fright. They're disease carriers too.

A nasty thought popped into my mind, and without thinking about it much at all I called up a pair of green mana to make a spell. Then I spent a minute shooting every stupid stinky bird in sight. Now the males would be even more inclined to mate than usual and live longer while carrying a curse that would make all those females infertile.

Go extinct, and disappear forever!

MWA-HA-HA-HAAAA!

"So what world am I in this time?" Turning around I saw a world like something out of an old photograph. Lots of stone and some Asian influences, but most of everything seemed to be made of brick like the sidewalks. Shiny bricks from out of klin. Tile everywhere in every building for as far as I can see.

Taking a moment to claim a blue land from where the ocean meets the shore, I open a Planar Portal to the last world we were on so Amy could walk on through into the new one.

"I like Planar Portals better than Hammerspace," Amy says as she takes a moment to look around.

"Yes, we is a makin pro'gress," I drawl, getting my English wrong on purpose.

"Have you figured out where we are this time?"

I shake my head, no. "Maybe in a bit. I'm not counting on recognizing every world we go to."

"What about that list you saw on the Writer-Guy's screen?" she asked.

"Somehow my memory returned to the way it used to be before I was reincarnated and I forgot most of them, but I'm pretty sure that was his protection against extra-universal forces rather than an act of malevolence," I grumped. "Not that I didn't mind the impromptu musical number while I was there or anything. I've always wanted to something like that in public without the fear holding me back. But usually I'd take a few hours to come up with the lyrics."

"Yeah. I should be soo embarrassed too. But I didn't mind that either," Amy said. "Did he, or were we, mastered?"

"There's probably going to be a few worlds where we're going to have to act a certain way because we're in them. Laws of the Universe, and all of that."

A dozen worlds between here and there, and we were still talking about it.

"Let's just forget it and move on," I say. "So, what do you see?"

"I see a lot of people walking around with carts, no horses or cars."

"I don't see any high power lines, or any signs of electronics."

"The clothing looks well made, probably mass produced?" Amy reaches down to pier and runs her hands over it, a tendril of some kind coming out of the back of her suit snakes around for a bit and then goes into the water. Water clean enough that I can see it as it goes to the bottom swallowing up a big chunk of the muck at the base of the pier. With the way my body is tuned to take in ultraviolet light and different kinds of energy I could sense the radar in operation in the limb. "Some kind of ceramic variant used in construction. No signs of plastics or hydrocarbons in the water either. It's pretty clean for being besides a city."

"Ceramic you say? Like the tiles?" I reached down and touched the stuff. "Is this entire pier made of ceramics?" I walked up and down the pier until I found a crack where I was able to tease off a piece without damaging the rest.

"Find something?" Amy asks.

"A funny thing about summons is that I can tell which is which, so if I want a strong knife I know which is stronger," I say as I put the sample into Hammerspace. "None of the ceramics in any of the other objects I made into summons compare to this except for the best ceramic knives, and those are way more expensive to make than steel. That means that these people probably have way better knifes than that! It's resistant to fire, dirt and chemicals, the colors are permanent and you can't stain it, it's strong and durable, you can't slide on it, can't freeze it or scratch it. But all those tiles and knifes I have in Hammerspace have to be made in a kiln and baked. So how in the world did these people use it like cement near a wet place like the ocean and make it cheap enough?"

"Maybe we can ask?" Amy suggested.

"To the library it is!"

As we walked through the boardwalk we were seeing other kinds of inconsistencies where high technology was present while others were also missing. After seeing the clean-ups of hurricanes in person in my last life I know what a pier is supposed to look like and this isn't it. Most of that could be explained away by various ways like how ceramics were so much more popular than plastic or metal that it was used in everything.

We also did find the power lines, but they were underground in the sewers. ALL of them. It takes quite a bit of heavy effort to put stuff underground and since I was seeing a lack of massive machinery or cars I knew there had to be an explanation.

A mystery in another world usually means profit. Something here is not like the others and I was going to find it.

"Hey, do you smell that?" Amy asked as the Chinese dragon head motif of her helmet took in a big whiff of air.

I took a deep breath as well, "Yeah, something's cooking. Egg whites separated from the yolks, gallons and gallons of the stuff. Vanilla, pepper, flower, chocolate, honey, fruit, meats. Somebody's cooking outside with gas. Gas usually means a chemical industry and plastics."

"Well it's been a few days since we had all that pizza. Should we check it out?" Amy asked.

"I guess the library can wait a little while," I grin and wipe my mouth with the back of my hand. Unlike what Amy was getting through her construct I was getting it raw and what my instincts were saying is that I want that in my mouth!

We followed the smell across town to a stadium. In front there was a little sign on the bulletin board.

Amy read it out loud, "Foodon Tournament. All Foodon Chiefs are invited to compete. The finalists will be taken on a cruise ship, the SS. Food Fight. Sponsored by judge Mussels Marinara of the Glutton Gormandizers."

Right eye twitching! "This is Writer-Guy's fault."

"How do you figure that?" she asked.

"Because I'm pretty sure that wasn't on the list. On the other hand this is an amazing opportunity, and I'm finding it hard to argue with my stomachs. They've got me outnumbered!"

"Your ability to eat and remain under 24 inches fills me with the urge to kill." Amy deadpanned. "So what do we do?"

"Well, we're going to the tournament, of course. We should be able to get tickets," I hoped so. "The TV show Fighting Foodons is a ham sandwich chock full delectably delightful characters of all ages. No doubt the main characters will be there. A few people have the ability to use magic and they use it to create these things called Meal Tickets. Once you apply a Meal Ticket to a meal it'll transform into a monster ready for battle. I want it."

"You know Director Piggott would flip her pot lid if she saw that – oh Christ now I'm doing it!"

"Keep your cool; it's all in good fun. With all the chiefs that'll show up to this thing to slice, sauté and shred their way to the main prize I should have no trouble harvesting all the talent I need to cook up an all new seven full course monster meal of life!"

Amy groaned. "You're going to be doing that the whole time we're here aren't you?"

"Let's get going before they completely sell out."

They were completely sold out.

That didn't stop us of course. Both of us could fly and the security at this place wasn't what it could be. There were a couple of chiefs dressed all in black who I assumed were Gluttons from Gorgeous George's army hanging around. I mean they weren't trying to hide, they were legally employed as security after all. But the moment they saw me come over the walls with my flaming hair on full display and Amy with her suit they knew we were too hot to handle.

I guess as long as we didn't pick a fight it was okay.

On the way in I calibrated my Helm to look for anything in regards to cooking. Invisible threads of mana would reach out into the brains of every living human brain. This would allow the Helm to catalog and copy knowledge from people's brains so I could acquire several years' worth of skills. A side order of magic the Meal Tickets and Foodons would feed my brain's hunger for knowledge for days.

Rather than argue someone out of the seats they paid for I pulled out a set of foldable seats with footrests I'd gotten from a camping store. I also took out a few magazines I'd picked up out front and started reading them.

What to say about Fighting Foodons?

Well, each Foodon is fundamentally different due to the Foodon Chief's skill and also due to the flavor and quality of the dish made. Each is a Frankenstein creation of dead flesh and plants and dishware brought to life with a magical item called a Meal Ticket, an actual card.

There was no explanation for where the Meal Tickets come from in the anime and I wouldn't have any until my Helm came across the knowledge inside someone's skull. Nor were there any schools of magic. But that was all right. The number of cooking schools is a lot higher than they had any right to be and the creation of Meal Tickets was probably included as a common course. The things were as well known as pepper shakers after all.

Since the items had been around since the Middle Ages it was no wonder that the entire development of society and history looked nothing like it did in my world's history books.

The people cooking at the stations around the arena floor were just ordinary cooks. No different than most people on cooking shows. But perhaps they might take it a bit more seriously than most.

A dried-out plate of bad meatballs becomes Burnt Meatballs, a collective intelligence with no fighting prowess and even worse self-esteem issues.

Meanwhile Beefsteak, deliberately constructed out of "the most evil ingredients ever assembled" (rancid meat, putrid potatoes, moldy carrots, and tusks of terror), becomes a Godzilla-reminiscent titan made of beef stew that has a cow's head and horns and a "meatloaf lunch box" mouth that shoots lasers, is an out-of-control town-destroying giant, surpassing even its evil creator's sinister intentions.

Thus far I could honestly say that this planet had the most potential when it came to giving Amy-girl and me an answer to the whole Scion-Endbringer problem. Even when compared to the other worlds I saw this place as having the best potential so far.

Why?

Because even the little bit I remembered from the show told me how completely BS a Foodon is. My dad could make some pretty incredible meals and had even gone into the industry at a deli market making grinders. With a Meal Ticket from this world he would have been able to make monsters with elemental powers at $10.00 a pop capable of flipping an Abrams $6,810,000.00 million USD tank like it was a toy truck. That wasn't an exaggeration.

"Popcorn, get your popcorn here!" one of the rushers announced.

"Over here!" Amy yells, digging out a pair of fives. "I'll take a soda as well."

The man rushed right on over to get it to her as fast as possible, the money disappearing through some finger trick.

"You want anything?" she asks.

I shake my head, no. "I'm saving my appetite for the main event."

After about half an hour and a bathroom break each of us we finally got to see in real life what I'd only seen on TV.

The chiefs placed their chosen meal on a big table at the center of the stadium with the yin-yang symbol on it. There were soups, deserts, side dishes and appetizers.

It took a while but I managed to find Clawdia the cat-girl when she showed up. She wasn't exactly being subtle either. Like a bunch of other people who couldn't afford seats she was standing at the top rail at the top of the stadium. She was bright pink with slightly darker pink hair and wearing a cherry red outfit that I think was supposed to be a swimming suit. The green arm warmers and the green hair ribbon only made her more obvious.

Just looking at her made me want to go get a piece of bubblegum and chew the heck out of it.

A few minutes later in full anticipation of the crowd came the judge, Mussels Marinara. The man had been sitting on a platform a hundred feet up on a pole planted in the middle of the table, which made an entry by having the platform come down like an elevator. When it landed the man got up of his butt and took three steps forwards onto the table/platform.

The man was bald, dressed in a green pair of army pants, muscle shirt, two belts in an X over his chest, and had a pair of safety scissors held in a sheath on his back. The scissors were so big I could have fit my body through the finger holes. And I could tell even from all the way in the back here that the man wasn't happy.

However there was no doubt that the man was as powerful as his name implied. When the man took his right hand and smacked the table he was standing on it sounded like a gunshot and sent every single one of the dishes flying into the air several dozen feet. The dishes then fell right into the dirt and broke, splattering their contents all over the ground.

"Fairly decent brute rating for a human," Amy declared her humble opinion. "Could he be on steroids?"

"Perhaps he eats a special diet," I remarked. "What gets me is how each meal landed in front of the chief who created it. That had to be intentional."

"All except the rice dish," said Amy.

"On the go or in for the night, everyone loves fried rice!" Mussels Marinara cried out into the crowd. And he didn't even need a loudspeaker. "That's not all. Defeat me in a Foodon battle with this dish, and I'll even swear you in as a Gormandizer!"

I stand up. "Looks like it's time to wipe down the counter, tighten the apron strings, and deliver a fine serving of justice. I got to go do my thing. Don't wait up," I got up out of my seat and start making my way towards the aisle.

"Sure, you go do your thing, I'll enjoy the show," Amy takes a big sip of her soda and puts her feet back up after letting me scooch on by.

While Chase and Pie Tin tell Mussels Marinara where he could stuff his fine helping of Gormandizer hospitality I made my way around the arena to Clawdia.

The woman was once a young girl and rocket scientist, and so far I don't have one of those. The woman had been turned into this felonious cat lady by King Gorge who also transformed her animal lab partners into Gorge's Big 4. I only had a passing interest in her and her former animal companions.

At the same time I was also interested in the boy standing next to her. He was blond and pretty, which is fitting for someone on the cover of Foodon Chief Magazine.

The clothes I wore had been slowly changing to something a bit breezier since it was so hot out but we still had the zippers and pockets and buckles for reasons. As I got close I made a point of zipping down the front of my coveralls to just past the boobs so I could show them off to best effect.

"Excuse me." I say in a breathy voice intended to turn male heads.

I make a point of putting a hand on Clawdia and moving her to the side. I got a summons out of her right then and there.

"Hey, watch it!" she yells as I move around her. "Rude!"

I take a ball of yarn out of my Hammerspace and throw it at her. "Have some yarn cat girl."

"Oh thanks!" Claudia's eyes light up on seeing the ball and catch it with both hands, completely forgetting about me and the match going on down in the stadium.

It was always the simple things in life.

I turned back to the pretty blond boy in an apron who had been eyeing the chiefs down below with disdain. "Hey! Are you Albert? Can I have your autograph? You're like, so cool and stuff."

I swear I could feel my IQ points drop with every word I said. But it worked.

Like any new boy on the cusp of puberty the chief went as red as tomatoes as I got into his personal space. I put the magazine over my stomach and point at it. "If you could make it out to Nova Ender? That would just be the best!"

I am not giggling!

"Yeah, ah-ah, sure," he stutters as he takes the alcohol marker I give him and writes on the magazine over my stomach, his eyes twitching from the marker to my ripe fruit basket. But hours of practice paid off and the John Hancock was done with a flair that was much better than my own writing.

I held the magazine up to inspect and smiled at it. "Thanks!" then I took the boy's face with both hands and kissed him fully on the lips, running my tongue across his lips as I pulled back. "You're cute."

The kid looks dizzy.

Then I got gone.

Poor Albert was going to taste my strawberry chapstick all day long.

But enough with the side dish, let's get back to the first course!

Down below I got to see what looked like a man wearing a helmet shaped like a plate covered with a big round lump of rice complete with two comically huge eyes wielding a pair of stainless steel pans like they were some kind of swords going up against a little guy in blue ninja overalls with a shrimp on his head flying around and beating the absolute turkey stuffing out of each other.

The two foot tall guy was named Shrimp Stompura, a creation of Mussels Marinara. The shrimp on his head with the way it curled up in front and the tail on the back made me think that it was a ducktail hairdo with a ponytail. The little guy was literally flying around, dancing and dodging around, and kicking energy blasts right out of the air when he couldn't move fast enough.

The opposition was Fried Ricer, Chase's Foodon. The perfect side dish was saying his name over and over again as fast as possible as he shadow boxed the air, shooting some kind of energy from his fists like a machine gun.

Shrimp Stompura gets in one good head-butt, but is sent crashing down into the ground with a double serving of fist from Fried Ricer. The Foodon hits the ground hard, but bounces back up and gets some space while both of the creatures take a moment to catch their breath.

Then the power toppings and special moves come out. Fried Ricer is wrapped up like sushi with a Super Strength Seaweed Assault, but Chase feeds his friend a power topping of peas that allows him to break free. Too bad that even powered up the Foodon was taking more damage than he was putting out.

Shrimp Stompura gets in a few more good hits before he eventually head-butts Fried Ricer with a laser attack, his body literally glowing with power as he zips around using Fried Ricer as a punching bag. But Fried Ricer manages to catch him on his stomach, grappling with the little guy before leaping a few hundred feet into the air and then pushing the guy back down and into the ground like a meteor.

The effect is totally overwhelming. Rather than being squashed like melons from a good height the ceramic ground is shattered in a level 2 earthquake of the Richter scale. A blast of orange light destroys most people's eyesight and the entire arena is covered with a growing mushroom cloud of dirt.

When the light show finally faded away, when the dirt was blown away by the intense wind, it showed that the two Foodons were still alive, much to everyone's amazement. Shrimp Stompura was still floating around, but fell unconscious a few seconds later and fell to the ground. Meanwhile Fried Ricer barely managed to stay conscious even as he fell to both of his knees and one hand.

Then just like that the match was over and Chase had won.

After the fight Amy I met up to discuss what we had seen. Eventually we got to a library and started reading up a little into the world the both of us had found ourselves in.

Did Mussels Marinara go to jail?

Nope.

Nobody here cared that the Judge Mussels Marinara was a high-ranking member of the Glutton Empire. Or that he had put his size 12 shoe on the chest of a five year old boy who had attacked him because he was a Gormandizer.

Oh, the fickle crowd was glad the big dude had lost, but he wasn't getting arrested.

Mussels Marinara was in the legal right to defend himself from attack. He was employed by the army and under the direct authority of the king.

It didn't matter that Pie Tin was only five years old, four feet shorter than him and a fifth of his body weight. He was a Foodon Chief, capable of creating Foodons and all the destruction that could follow and turning the ingredients he touches into magical +1-up powers.

There were no age restrictions on cooking.

Chiefs ruled this world. It wasn't exactly a wuxia novel but it was close.

Nobody was going to put any money in developing military technology like guns and tanks and bombs that destroy the land during war when a short order cook can make a creature that can turn aircraft carriers into cheese graters. All of their efforts went into making better cooking tools and securing ingredients. If you wanted the best alcohol you needed good water, if you wanted good meat you needed clean land, if you wanted good vegetables and fruits and happened to have been developing your farms since the Middle Ages you're going to have a pretty fantastic natural pesticide and organic farming industry; so there was no pollution or synthetic crap in anything you'd eat because the chemical industry was geared towards different things. The only steel these people needed were in their tools and those were good for a few years before they wore out.

Those that controlled the food controlled this world.

I waited at the gate for the winners to come out. When the excitement was over I got to see them in person up close.

The boy in the chef outfit had to be Chase, who was pushing the M.A.C. Cart out of the arena. The girl helping him had green hair, so that had to be Kala. Floating along besides her was this cat-faced pillow-like creature with no limbs and only a tail that had to be the Foodon Omelet. On the ground hopping after them were a dozen burnt Meatballs. I'd keep having flashbacks to The Critters movie if they weren't so pathetic. A miniature human being all of two feet tall with grey hair and beard, going bald except for an elaborate swirl coming out of the top of his head, following them on a floating dish like it was his own personal UFO, had to be Oslo.

When in doubt just go up to them and ask.

"Hey kid, I saw your match. Great job!" I say as I approached them.

The group stops and stares at me. Their eyes naturally gravitate towards my hair which is shimmering with heat.

The boy puts his hand behind his head. "Oh it wasn't anything, all's in a day's work for a rebel chief."

The paranoia was (not!) strong with this one.

"No, I'm serious," I take a few steps closer. "You were able to battle it out with Muscles Marinara; arguably a more well prepared and experienced chief. That takes quite a bit of sauce to pull off."

"It's true Chase, has become quite the young chief," Oslo interjected. "But if you'll permit me to ask, just who are you young lady?"

I clapped my hands together, "Oh! I'm sorry. Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Nova Enders, a reincarnated Tamarin Planeswalker, and Defender of the Outer Dimensions. And today after coming to this world and seeing your match I've decided to become a Gourmet Hunter. And it's all thanks to you, Chase!" I pointed at him for the sake of drama.

The boy pointed at himself. "Me, Seriously?"

"What's a Gourmet Hunter?" Kala asked. God she's cute.

"A Gourmet Hunter is a provider of ingredients. They're someone who hunts rare ingredients from dangerous places. Due to the inherent danger in acquiring some of the ingredients the hunters have to train their bodies to superhuman levels of strength, speed, endurance, and immunity to poisons by injecting themselves with a solution made from poisonous plants and animal venom over a period of time: this creates various antibodies," I explain.

All the kids were in awe.

"I've never heard of a Gourmet Hunter. Is it really that dangerous?" Oslo asked with curiosity.

He was probably a bit suspicious, and should have been hairbrained paranoid considering his past, what with being transformed into a miniaturized version of himself. Oslo used to be a Dishwizard, one of the greatest Foodon Chiefs of his time. Now he was less than two feet tall, and was completely lacking the effects of PSTD even after he had been put to work as slave labor in one of the experimental food laboratories.

If nothing else that just emphasized that this world is not as dangerous to the individual as it is in other world's that I've visited. And if so it was for completely different reasons than what I was used to.

"Well I do come from another dimension, as I insinuated. Going from world to world doesn't give you much in the term of full-time and part-time job employment options. I have to cook for myself, a lot," I explain, my mind going back to those first few days when I cooked our meals on a hot stone with my superpowers. "There are worlds out there that have never felt the hand of man, rare and dangerous creatures with bazar evolutionary histories. Take this egg for example."

From out of my Hammerspace I take one of Amy's super Tamarin Eggs and hand the softball sized monster over to Chase who dumbly looks at the thing given to him.

"That is a Tamarian Egg. It's very good for me and provides for my full nutritional intake, but it would make a human ill. Go ahead and cook it and you'll see what I mean. It'll take up the entirety of one of your small pans so you'll need two to flip it over."

The boy nods. "Yeah, sure, just give me a minute. The kitchen is open!" he yells and hits the Mobile Attack Cuisine Cart, which transforms.

In defiance of the laws of machinery the M.A.C. Cart unfolds itself into a portable kitchen, complete with a counter and chairs for customers to eat at. Even if it was all hinges and built like a transformer Toy there was no way for all that stuff to fit inside it.

"Oh my god, that's so cool!" I gush as I reach out and touch it. Colorless item summons acquired. "How does it do that? What's it powered by?"

"Magic," Oslo says as he floats over. "Tell me more about being a Gourmet Hunter. I've never seen an egg like that before."

"And I've never seen Foodons before coming to this world, either. But if you need more proof then here, check this out."

The creature I took from my Hammerspace looked like a carp. Only instead of having fins there were tendrils like an octopus in their place, although the tail was mostly the same. The creature was also alive and started flipping out about being out of the water. I held it up in the air using telekinesis and summoned some water to put it in while I talked.

"On the world I got this creature from the fish developed octopus tendrils with webbing instead of fins. I call them Octo-fish. Pretty neat, yeah?"

"Oh my goodness!" Oslo cried out as he flew around the specimen on his saucer. "The dishes and combo platters you can make with this! Chase, do you realize that with these we could create Foodons that not even King Gorge has seen before? We must have these ingredients!"

"Yeah, take a look at this egg! I don't think it smells right but it's cooking okay just the same," Chase said, pointing out the purple spot in the yolk.

"Well it's not meant for human consumption," I explain as I keep an eye on it. Being more than twice as tall as anyone in the group had its advantages, looking over the Mac Cart's counter and splatter guard was one of them.

I gotta admit the kid cooked it up just fine.

"Here you go. One Tamarian Egg over easy," Chase handed me the plate of egg.

"Thank you. We give thanks to all the ingredients in the world. Itadakimasu!" I took a bite and it was good. The purple spot was still bitter, and the yoke was a tad runny just the way I liked them. "You're definitely a good cook to prepare an alien meal correctly on your first try." I turned around on my seat. "So you want to know more about what a Gourmet Hunter is?"

"Oh yes, please!" Kayla says. "But could you wait for Pie Tin? He's our friend."

"Where is Pie Tin?" I asked. I'd wondered where he was at.

"He should be back any moment now. The boy had to use the restroom," Oslo informs me. "We can wait a little while until we're all together again."

At least Oslo was a good babysitter. Still not sure if it was right for Chief Jack to leave his son and daughter in the hands of a man who had been altered and recently freed from slavery to go run off on his own and do gods knows what. But that's on Jack's head.

In a minute I was done eating and handed back the plate. "Thank you for the grub, Chief Chase."

"Oh it was nothing," he says, giving the dish the wipe and clean treatment in expert time. "It was nice to try something new.

Just then a little boy appeared. He was dressed in a way that reminded me of a pudding cup. White clothes with extra long sleeves so you couldn't see his hands, black features, and a hat that looked like a panda. "Hey guys what's going on? I've been looking for you."

His eyes go to me, so I wave. Hi! Look at the strange lady sitting with all your friends.

"Pie Tin, this is Nova Enders. Nova, this is my good friend Pie Tin," Chase introduces us. "Nova comes from another dimension. She's a Gourmet Hunter." He then pointed to the octo-fish that was still floating in a sphere of water near us. The creature was bigger than the boy. "Isn't that the coolist thing?"

"Well I'm new," I admit not to admitting how new I was.

While I was going to continue to find new technology and magica so I could get stronger I still needed a hobby. And since I didn't see myself stop eating any time soon finding new ways to eat and new dishes to prepare would probably keep me entertained for thousands of years to come.

I was still getting around the idea that I was never going to get old.

"Wow, I've never seen anything like that before. Not even my parent's mentioned anything like that," Pie Tin is easily in awe of something he had never seen before. "Do you have any rare ingredients?"

"Do I have any rare ingredients? Well most of my food does come from another world. I have to eat what I can get. Most of which is in the raw. But perhaps you'd be more interested in this?" I took from my Hammerspace an extra-large wooden turntable that's as tall as I am and contained over a hundred different herbs and spices.

"Wholly rockamole!" Pie Tin exclaims. "I recognize some of these. These come from India and are expensive!"

"They're common ingredients in other worlds. Though with their military applications in this world I can see how they might be a controlled substance," I say. "Now if you don't mind I'd like to talk about religion."

"Ah crackers," Pie Tin grumps.

"Now don't be like that, what I have to say is important," I pat him on the head and he ducks to the side. I turn towards Chase. "Now Chase I want you to listen closely. Are you listening?"

Chase nods. "Yeah, I am."

"Good. Now my religion is very simple. It doesn't even have a name, nor are the words written down. All I ask of you is to remember to respect the food," I tell him with all seriousness. "Remember that you are a cook. If there is one religion shared between those who cook the food like Foodon Chiefs and those who gather ingredients like Gourmet Hunters it is that those plants and animals gave their lives so that we may live. It would be bad for us to disrespect it. Never waste food: that's my religion. It dosen't matter if you cooked it, someone else cooked it, or it was prepaired by your mortal enemy. Always respect the foods you eat. Understand?"

The whole team nods as one.

I stand up. "Well I've got to get going. It was nice meeting you all. You can keep the spice rack," I tell Pie Tin.

"Thank you. I'll not forget this and pay you back some day, believe it!" the kid pulls back a sleeve so I could shake his hand.

I grab their hands and give them each a shake, "Pie Tin, Kayla, Oslo, Chase."

"Yeah, it was nice meeting you too," Kayla says.

"Omelet!" cried out the Foodon in Kayla's hand.

"Nice to meet you, and thank you for the fish," Oslo says.

"I hope we can meet again," Chase says. "I'll buy your ingredients any time."

"Just make sure you respect the ingredients and don't waste food. That's a sin."

Then I gave them all a wave and walked away.

It took a few minutes but I was able to find Amy. She'd recently acquired a big black shirt with hundreds of different chili peppers covering it all over the place with a giant blue spot on the front with an ice cube Foodon with big angular sunglasses on his face and the words, "Hot Chili Pepper," underneath. She was also eating an ice cream.

"Hey Amy, nice shirt."

"Thanks, I got one for you too," Amy gives me the shirt, which I see is a splash of every color of the rainbow.

I open up the shirt and see that it's covered in pictures of every kind of fruit, organized into a color wheel forming a swirl and converging on a white spot on the chest. The white spot is actually a plate. "Put the world on a Plate" it says.

"Nice!" I put it on.

"So what next?" she asks.

"Well before we leave I want to check out the SS Food Fight and see if the Big 4 is there. I'll make a summons out of them. And then we can leave," I say.

"You don't want to stay and help out?" she asked.

"I'd love to help out, and I did. Right now Chase and the gang has a new ingredient to use if they want to make a new Foodon out of it and an entire spice rack of rare ingredients to go through," I say, even though it was getting more difficult not to be involved.

I think I was trying to convince myself more than her. She probably knew it too.

"They'll be fine. It's not like anybody dies in this show. All of their battles are done using Foodons and King Gorge is plainly uninterested in killing people. Kidnappings and forceful servitude yes: rape, no; killing, no; death camps no. Even after conscription King Gorge still pays the cooks for their work. Nobody is dying of starvation. This is not Earth Bet."

There is something very weird about looking at a planet and thinking about it as you would a cow. I know I can get milk, leather, beef, and some other products from it but I had no idea how to go about doing that.

But not for long.

Amy and I only spent enough time in town to go shopping. We seemed to do that a lot.

Insert 'girls out on a town with credit cards shopping' joke here.

Regardless of where we went gold was still somewhat valuable and in a world without computers it was easy to get our hands on the local currency. With one of every ingredient stored away in Amy's Portal Beast and my Hammerspace all we needed to do was keep an eye out for any local mutations.

It was an anime, there had to be unique power toppings somewhere in the world.

A quick examination of the two cards I'd gotten off of Albert had revealed that they were already occupied. They contained the Foodons Cowboyritto and Crab Quake. Each time I summoned these cards I'd get the same Foodons, the same as they were when I made them summons.

While Amy looked away I had killed Crab Quake, dismissing the Foodon into purple smoke and leaving behind an empty Meal Ticket. I then applied this meal ticket to a Goulash my mom had taught me how to make.

The result looked like someone had used my goulash as part of a costume to make a ghoul with limp noodles for flesh wrapped around bits of meat leaking gravy.

Ghoul-e-lash was only alive in this world for about a minute. Long enough for me to know that I couldn't make a summons out of the result. When I dismissed him back into the Meal Ticket I wasn't able to make a new summons out of it either. It was already a summons. It just had a few modifications, a few minutes older and a bit altered but that was about it, that's all.

When I re-summoned the Meal Ticket card I got Crab Quake again.

This wasn't unexpected. My entire list of summons came back in their original forms in exactly the same configuration as they were when I made them summons in the first place.

So what this meant was that I needed to get my hands on a blank Meal Ticket. With a blank Meal Ticket I could turn any meal I make into Foodon monsters. Fortunately I'd done the right thing and met up with the Chase and the gang and gotten one off of Oslo when I'd made him and everything he wore into a summons. I could re-create the blank Meal Ticket summons at any time.

On top of that my Helm had provided dividends in gathering knowledge from the people around me. I also had Oslo to interrogate, the man who had taught Chief Jack, King Gorge, and who was now teaching Chase the magic in cooking Foodons. Between Oslo, Clawdia and Albert I was able to learn how to make my own Meal Tickets.

Now I can mass produce them if I wanted to.

Otherwise I'd have been stuck remaking the same meals and Foodons forever.

My efforts at the SS Food Fight were also a success.

I remember the first time I got to see a big ship up close. It was a school field trip to the ocean sub base in Groton. Standing there on the docks less than a hundred feet from an aircraft carrier while it slowly moved in the waves with my head tilted all the way back is a thing that still sticks in my mind to this day.

I snuck aboard the ship as an invisible flying blur, clinging to the outside like a suckerfish until I could enter one of the outside cabins unopposed. From there it was just a matter of reading the large maps and detailed instructions so I could get to the high paying sweets. Being able to walk on the ceilings to avoid the patrols of minions of King Gorge was just as easy as Spiderman made it out to be.

I found the Big 4, they each had their own cabin with their own names on it. Cinnamonkey, Cole Slawter, Rose Marinade and Grill were then put to sleep with a simple application of blue mana.

That sleeping spell was rapidly becoming my number one go-to spell for just about anyone I wanted to put down quickly without harming them.

The perfect Knocking technique.

With my Helm still active I paid special attention to interrogate and downloaded a copy of their cooking magic directly from their brains. Cole Slaughter could summon balls of food energy that would allow him to manipulate the water and summon fish from the depths of the ocean. Rose Marinade could summon lightning to cook a hot grill towards perfection. Grill had a cybernetic eye that was capable of targeting each and every fish and then use a laser to slice and dice it up perfectly, applying the technique to thousands of targets all at once with mental fortitude and precision. Cinnamonkey could separate the ocean water to extract sea salt directly and had an encyclopedic knowledge of spices and power toppings.

Not once had the group considered using their peculiar powers on human beings directly.

That was more amazing than anything I'd yet run into.

From comic book worlds on down one of the first things most would have considered is how lethal these abilities could be if used in a terrorist action. For the life of me I couldn't think of a world where they wouldn't have thought of that.

There was some kind of gentlemen's agreement where everyone fought duels using their monsters. These monsters used fists and superpowers and as the technology improved they eventually moved onto using guns as well. Admittedly violent and destructive, but not completely lethal. There is an honor code in it. Duels are fought not so much to kill the opponent as to gain "satisfaction", that is, to restore one's honor by demonstrating a willingness to risk one's life for it.

In a reversal of what I could find in the histories on my computers from what we'd gotten from Earth Final Conflict, the public opinion was completely in favor of duels using Foodons. In any case attempting to abolish dueling as the people of The Roman Catholic Church, the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, and civil legislation in the Holy Roman Empire in the wake of the Thirty Years' War had done was impossible. The most powerful beneficial arrangement of dueling with Foodons is that human beings don't die in such conflicts.

While attempts had been made to regulate Meal Tickets it was virtually impossible to regulate the people who knew how to cook since all you needed was a hot stone and a piece of grilled meat and you could make a Foodon out of that.

The era of Witch Hunters of the 17ths century would have come to a complete end if they had met a single Foodon Chief.

These people are not killers and thank the gods for that!

It was as if someone had taken notice of the differences in the mindset required to slaughter pigs and the mindset of a person who slaughters people and made sure the two never meet.

This convinced me that staying out of this place was the right thing to do. Whatever the cause of this gentlemen's agreement where Master Chief's did battle though duels was not something I wanted to end. There was a very real possibility that if I got involved with my outsider's viewpoint that things could be made a whole lot worse.

(It was kind of like overloading the massively powerful accelerating sublight engines in Star Wars and using it to one-kill shot the Death Star after it had become sufficiently fast enough to crack open a planet and then delivering the bullet to its target with a hyperdrive. Not even droids could miss a target that big. Of course, not only would it have ended that first movie quite differently without the need of an untrained Force user but it would have also given every scum-sucking criminal in the galaxy an idea that would allow them to ransom and blow up most planets with jetfire engines.)

King Gorge was considered evil because he was starting to take on tactics that went against hundreds of years of cultural inertia to get things done as a soldier would do from my world to take over the world. But in his own weird way.

I did not want to see what a Foodon Sniper looked like.

Should I fix these animals? Turn the Big 4 back from their humanity, their sentience, into unthinking creatures once more? To become a bear, bat, monkey, and fox as they were before King Gorge got their hands on them?

No. I was not getting involved more than I've had to.

But it was so fucking tempting.

Opening a portal and leaving before I could think on it some more, I was already regretting my non-action.

On the Dragon Flyz world I'd taken a bunch of human beings and transported them to a clean earth. Leaving the mutants and the dragons and Dreadwing and his army to rule what was left unopposed. That was a pretty drastic change and it was one that was arguably better for everyone.

But was that the right thing to do?

I could go across the land and end King Gorge right then and there. Transport him to another world. Make him forget cooking altogether.

In the Samurai Pizza Cat world I could have taken the Big Cheese mouse out of the palace and dropped him off on an island.

In the Earth Final Conflict world I could have flown up to the alien space ship and taken the aliens prisoner and dumped them in some third world prison.

But I hadn't. What were the reasons?

Well for one the people on the Dragon Flyz earth had no future. The series ended with no happy endings that I know of. Just the same one episode conflicts each and every time. All of them talking about how awful it was that they had screwed up their world while looking for a new place to live. It would take an act of Planeswalker to turn back the clock and make that planet good again. In the process I'd also have to eliminate every single mutant and I didn't what to do that either. Removing the humans to a new planet seemed like the best way.

The Taelons had an entire intergalactic empire to back them up if things went wrong. They might leave earth alone or they might exterminate it. I didn't want to press my luck.

I was still new to the Planeswalker game.

The Samurai Pizza cats had things well in hand in their world.

In the future of the Fighting Foodons world King Gorge was going to get his butt kicked by a ten year old and turned into a good guy. The Big 4 will be returned to their animal forms and reunited with Clawdia after she was turned human again so she could return to being a rocket scientist. Alls well that ends well.

I really didn't want to mess up that future.

This was a nice world.

Hell, with the way things were going I might find a way to transport an entire planet to another Realm in the next few years. Just look what I'd gotten my hands on at this point.

I can't wait to see where I'll be next week.

-000-

Hm lets see if I can hear all the lyrics. Ahem:

Spoiler: Fighting Foodons Lyrics

-000-

List of planets so far visited:

Dragon Flyz

Earth Final Conflict.

Samurai Pizza Cats

Fighting Foodons.

Last edited: Wednesday at 6:05 PM

Nothing is Impossible! It Just Might be Very Hard to do

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Spelling List of Comic Book Exclamations and Action Words

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Threadmarks The Fifth World: Lost in Space New

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NitroNorman

NitroNorman

The Armchair Reader

Feb 11, 2020

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#135

My foot came down on metal.

I found myself on a gangway in a grey steel hallway, futuristic, with glaring lights along the edge of the floor and rounded walls that I couldn't reach out and touch them unless I leaned over. After looking around for a bit I found a computer console shaped as if grown from a mushroom cap, all rounded edges made out of a purple material that seemed to have grown from this one spot on the floor.

This was also the first time I was experiencing full artificial gravity. I could feel it pulsing in my body as whatever did its thing was powered on and off as power was applied to the gadget. Probably not something a human would notice. But then again I can fly and figure out in which direction a planet is without looking at it, not to mention all the other forms of energy I've become acquainted with over the last half a year. It wasn't as smoothly operating as the machinery that kept Skylandus up in the air in Dragon Flyz universe either. I'd hardly noticed it there while on the planet. We were also rotating.

Empty, I explored the ship.

It really didn't take me long to figure out where I was.

Lost in Space, the Proteus Starship.

I adore the old Lost In Space TV series. It was campy and fun and weird and silly and nostalgic. Like the Partridge Family. It set the tone for every sci fi explorer that ever got lost after Odysseus, a cult classic.

I liked the Lost in Space movie for a few years right up until the internet developed and read the reviews online and had to admit, they were right. Space dad Robertson is the worst space dad ever, he's also boring with dumb science, and his only accomplishment is to push Spider Smith into the Time Vortex. Judy is a prodigy, is following in her father's footsteps as a doctor of some kind, gets hit on by Major West five or six times at completely inappropriate moments, and fires a flare gun. Penny is emo, wears trashy clothes in an attempt to make everyone who sees her in those clothes suffer, and gets a very ugly CGI space monkey with suction cups for fingers that may or may-not be a sentient alien baby. Why? BECAUSE THE ROBERTSON FAMILY IS OUT OF THEIR MINDS! Space dad has spoken to Judy once. He literally doesn't say anything to Penny through this entire film. It takes child prodigy Will Roberson to save the family, twice, once from the murder robot who's trashing the ship with a remote control and a second time to convince the future dome-headed MADMAX version robot to change his fusion power generator/heart, with words. Major Don West waves his gun around a lot, shoots things (somewhat useful in this and I like that he's shooting things), sexually harrases the Space Dad daughter, points his gun at Dr. Smith but does not fire, gets his ass kicked, can't figure out the off switch to a robot, and has weird eyes. Dr. Smith has more personality, is an evil doctor, is in it for himself, screams a lot, and gets punched in the face at the end of the movie. Momma Robertson has a totally angry wives moment three different times.

And that's about all I can remember about those people.

Why am I here again?

Oh right, cool technology and space spiders.

Let's start with some of my own science. Could I claim a starship?

The answer is, surprisingly, yes. It was just like claiming a city, except I could also summon it as well. It counted just like an Interstellar Spaceship. Two white, a blue and a red mana to summon.

Neat!

Thanks to the Taelon Shuttle we'd gone into space ourselves and nothing bad had ever happened. But that was near an Earth. Could Amy come to this starship even though we're not anywhere near earth?

I had a Corina Potentia I'd extracted from my own head that allowed me to talk to a Shard on the other end. The tissue was later grafted into a clamshell Amy constructed to keep it alive while outside of my skull. Sometimes I ask it questions. I was not surprised to find out that Shards had their own Hammerspace equivalent that allowed them to store energy and mass and their own version of blood and digestive fluids. When I took my Corona Potentia out of my skull I'd manufactured my own Hammerspace out of what I'd grabbed. They also had their own version of FTL just so they can move around.

I opened a Planar Portal to where Amy was standing by so she could walk over and so that the Shard attached to her brain could follow her over. No fuss no muss. "So where are we today?"

"Lost in space."

Amy raised an eyebrow at that. "As in we're in space lost somewhere, or…?"

"Lost in Space, the movie."

"Oh." Amy turned her head left and right, and then checked the ceiling, the eyes on her Nain helmet moving independently. There was one CGI space spider goop-hole on the hull for them to walk through at any time. "I didn't care for the movie."

I sighed, "Yeah. Let's just get some stuff and move on." Rubbing my face and groaning, I turned around and started looking for lootable items.

The ship came in four parts. The long pointy part of the ship up front contained a whole bunch of sensors that worked for real space and Hyper-space. (Hyper-space-space-space!) Section 2 contained its own O'Neal cylinder, as long as the ship continued to rotate there would be gravity, weather, and a functional rainforest. The bubble contained about a hundred years of growth and it made Amy very happy to find futuristic versions of all the vegetation going fruits and nuts in the greenhouse. Section 3 had a miniature Hypergate, a big ring thing. It was like the big one from the beginning of the film but combined that with Dr. Space Dad Robertson's I'm-a-Failure-of-a-Father Hyperdrive together so that the ship could take it with it when it went somewhere. Unimaginatively, they called it the Hyper-Gate-Drive.

Wow. These naming conventions are just blow me away.

And the last part was the engine, which was sufficiently impressive.

So Amy and I have been exploring and I've mostly been using the power of blue mana to magically control the machines in order to get them to do what I want. Whatever security authorizations and administrative passwords are needed, which we don't have, we're able to overcome. We also lock the doors behind us along the way.

Along the way we also picked up the remotes to the Class M3 Model B9 General Utility Non-Theorizing Environmental Control Robot, also known simply as the M3-B9 G.U.N.T.E.R., which I also hit with blue mana to reprogram, just in case , which also gave me an Artifact Creature Construct. Not only did I get a colorless summon out of the robots but I also managed to perfect my control magic along the way.

Our first order of business was to create a little care package. For some reason the compact disk was the main item of choice for information storage. Admittedly it does its job very well. Well they were just more and better versions of a record player after all. It's like they'd found a medium of storage and decided to stick with it.

Amy collected the seeds and put them in what she calls a medicine ball. The medical wing of the ship is pretty trashed and neither Amy nor I are qualified to figure out what's salvageable or not. Any container that's intact is thrown into my Hammerspace weather it's expired or not. Even the broken bits of machinery can be useful. At the very least figuring out the future's methods in canning and preservation will be useful.

I had questions about the cryo-suits. There were breast holders in the chest plates and a pouch on the front for the female characters while the men got an armored cup holder. Admittedly they were pretty much one-piece swimsuits suits, about as thin as paper and had some thickness added to smooth out the wires and tubes imbedded in the things and not much different from the under suit worn by astronauts. If you gained a pound, you were going to see it. However there was absolutely no need for the definition!

Comparatively, the shining silver suits of the original series and the purple outfits that came later in the original show weren't much better, and it was the 1960s before Star Trek. The girls had integrated skirts in their outfits, the boys wore pants with a belt and zipper, the girls had a V-neck, the boys a square neckline, but you never saw anything below the neckline because they were fully covered. Plus while they fit on the body very well they weren't skintight.

The old Lost in Space family Robinson space uniforms most certainly weren't as tight as the uniforms on, say, the girls in Star Trek who, while they also had skirts, were tighter, needed tape to hold them down and keep them from riding up as they walked, and had pantyhose instead. By the time Deanna Troi came around the trend was pretty much set in stone.

Being female myself, now, my mind kept going back to searches I'd done whenever the subject came up before I was reincarnated. If I ever had to design a spacesuit or an under suit I was going to employ the makers of diving suits. Link. The under suits were not only comfortable, fashionable, and sexy, they didn't set off my sense of moral outrage back when I was a man or later when I became a woman.

Wow it's been a long time since I thought about my former gender.

What was my sexual orientation anyway?

I'd spent a lot of time on worlds without people. Amy is the only girl I've spent so much time with. I'm not attracted to her however. Which is good because she's underage. But … I've also been to a few worlds with both good looking guys and girls and didn't feel any romantic inclinations.

Sexual curiosity? Yes. Yeah, that'll work.

Moving on.

Then at some point while exploring the Space Spiders come around to investigate who's knocking around their starship.

Amy and I watch as the spider crawls down from the ceiling, clickety-clanking all the way, before it lands and finds us.

I find it curious that the claws are curled up so it walks on top of them when it walks in gravity, as if it knows better than to try to grip steel with them.

Amy summons up six tendrils from around her arms so she looks like Kali, and then equips them with energy blade swords about two feet long. Two arms aim their blades in front while the four are held off to the side, her knees bent. She's not frightened at all as the nightmare comes near. "How is it able to get through the hull of the ship with that goop?" Amy asks, obviously referring to the fact that the atmosphere inside the ship is intact.

"Would you like to find out?" I ask as the creature roars. "Yeah that wasn't asking 'a fine how-do-you-do?'. I don't think they have a language, but just to make sure…"

I take a moment to create an all new bubble force shield and anchor it to the platform we're standing on so we had a safe zone to operate from. I took a step away from it. When the first Space Spider leapt for my face I quickly countered with Atavus speed, my hand moving so fast that even with my engineered eyes and mana sight it was hard to track, grasping the creature from its hind and stopping it in flight just a few inches from my face. The teeth are quite terrible, glowing with energy, and the claws at the ends of their legs are no joke. I step back into my safe zone with my prize before the rest of the monsters get here.

"Sleep," I command, and it is so. I hand off my prize to Amy and ask her what she thinks.

"Silicon based life, Adamantium shell, attracted to heat and light, equipped with biological lasers, and a hyper sensor that would allow you to feel the wind on the moon? Weird!" Amy smiled as she took the creature apart, the claws going into her gloves, the shell spread across her torso with the rest mutating to match its construction and protection. The antenna on the Nian helmet gained the sensors the spider had.

"Worth it?" I ask.

"Worth it," Amy nodded. We both turned back to the raging horde of many legs and teeth beyond the bubble. "We should collect as many as possible before we continue. It's not like we can completely ignore them. They're damaging the ship enough as it is."

I nod. "Right then, crab fishing time it is!"

The next thing I do is pull out a garbage trailer full of fish guts from my Hammerspace and put it in the corridor where the spiders could get at it. Why? Because I saw it in a movie once, that's why.

The delightful stench of fish guts lured the Space Spiders away like a bunch of horney stupid collage boys at the sight of a free booze bar maned by half-naked bunny girls. As the vast majority of the animals disappeared into the giant steel container and began to chow down on the pink sludge, Amy and I worked like a well-oiled machine. Amy reached out with her suit-tendrils, grabbing up the spiders one at a time and pulling them into our safe zone and half a second later I would take the monsters, make a summons out of them, and then make them disappear into my Hammerspace.

I tried to make a few of the spiders fall asleep using blue mana so they would be easier to handle but the other Space Spider's cannibal instincts would eat them before it could do me any good. It was just too bad I had to handle them all on my own to get a summons out of each of them.

The next hour went swiftly.

"I wish this Weaver you told me about was here. This would be so much easier and less tedious," Amy muttered with a high nasally voice after an hour of collecting the things, her nose plugged completely. "You alright?"

"I'm good."

We'd worked in silence mostly talking about nothing important. Mostly about the smell of fish guts. The way the fumes of rotting fish attracted the Space Spiders reminded me of that time I'd witnessed an exploded truck of air fresheners. As we watched them get their fill the Space Spiders would stagger away much like those people who had witnessed the flames and smoke of a thousand colors that had burned on the roadside that day.

Make no mistake; the spiders are still voracious little monsters that would eat six out of ten of the other movie monsters you saw on TV. Being in space they had no choice but to eat their own kind since food was rare. They could live for centuries floating through the void in hibernation. They were absolutely a threat to the ecosystem. Being eaten by giant spiders are in the top ten of the most awful ways to die on my list.

They are also the coolest movie monster. I didn't have arachnophobia in this reincarnation. And I wanted to give them to Taylor Hebert, just because.

I took a swig of Gatorade through the personal bubble shield I'd placed around my head to protect my nose from the smell and handed it off to Amy, who drank the contents without comment.

You would think we'd have something better to drink than a sports drink after facing down thousands of monsters. The truth is that Amy and I had collected too many animals from various wild worlds, plus broken into aquariums and zoos in the dark of the night, to let a little thing like this get to us. The shield was as clear as glass and if my fist couldn't breach it then there was no way these bugs were going to.

The summons I got out of the Space Spiders soon took over the work in any case.

Like my entire summons they didn't have a real capacity to think or be creative, nor did they hesitate to carry out their duties or play with their food. When given the order to attack they were brutal and predictable.

I summoned a baker's dozen of the monsters (52), gave them their orders, and watched as they left the safety of the shielded zone and headed straight towards the nearest other Space Spider. Instead of being alarmed at the intruders the natural Space Spiders only acted to defend their food when it was clear one of their own was coming near to them. My Space Spiders continued on at the same speed never slowing down.

When the my spiders got close the Space Spiders bared their fangs and roared, its mouth opening to show rows of prehensile fangs glowing with energy.

If these had been normal spiders there'd probably have been a lot of grappling involved. Instead my spiders went directly with the right-front limbs to take out the sensors above the mouth. The enemy spider screamed with damage and flail about. My spiders landed on top of the shell, bladed claws stabbing at the joints where they attached to the shell, biting the limbs where they could. Two of the summoned spiders would come together and take out a limb sometimes as well.

In a matter of moments the monsters that survived were eating their own kind. As they were distracted they would, in time, be taken out as well. My summoned Space Spiders would then seek out every egg sac, every spider, bringing them to me, until the ship was cleaned.

There was some amusement in my voice. "What do you think? A about a million spiders, yes?"

"If you include all the eggs in the sacs, sure there are," Amy smirked. "I think they have some telepathic control over their eggs. They don't hatch until needed or unless their parents die. Otherwise the place would be overrun. So you should work quickly."

Finding Blarp was also easy. Once enough of the Space Spiders had been farmed that I deemed it safe to do so I spammed my sleep spell throughout the O'Neal cylinder, putting everything else to sleep, and sent my summons into the jungle to hunt the monkey thing down. If the little monster had ever realized what had happened the thing would have freaked. I was half tempted to let the monkey wake up in the jaws of a predator just to see if its heart would explode from fear.

Other than the fact that the creature seems to be a bit adapted for space and is someone's pet there's nothing special about Blarp at all. Amy had already acquired the ability to change the colors of her suit from other lifeforms on earth and while it was a bit of a nice upgrade it wasn't all that special. We were both halfway convinced that this was the descendant of an animal that someone had manufactured.

Moving on from that it was decided that we were going to play a bit of Gipsy Switch.

I had to go out into space to do this, but, I was able to cloak the entire ship in invisibility. Then, with one hand on the prow and the other extended I managed to summon a complete duplicate of the original. Then I put some Space Spiders and Blarp onboard.

I was halfway interested in what might happen if I flew down to the planet and interacted with Future!Will Robertson in his space/time dome. But that sounded as smart as throwing rocks at dragon's eggs. If fiction had given me anything it was that of a healthy respect for causality. I didn't know its relation to space; I didn't know the first thing in how it works, its paradox, or its continuity. Everything I read about on Planeswalkers in the MTG game said that Paradoxes were no joke. Full Stop.

I was happy enough just to stay up here in space with Amy on my brand new slightly used million megatons of starship and claim lands through portals in this region of space/time. I wasn't sure if they'd work when the Planet inevitably turned into a black hole in a few days. How that was supposed to work with Future!Will Robertson twenty years into the future I had no idea.

I wasn't sticking around to find out.

The ship was cloaked for the better part of eight days when a time portal opened up in space. From one side came the Jupiter 2. Into the other side I moved by getting out and pushing with my own hands the original Proteus.

I'm hella strong.

You don't go poking at alien thingamagigs and magical artifacts unless you had a good reason and a long stick. Avoiding a black hole sounded like a good reason. Avoiding the Family of Robertson who created the paradox also sounded like a good reason.

So we left.

To my profit I got a very good look at the time stream when I went through the time portal.

"That was weird," Amy said when I went back onboard the ship.

"What did you think of that?" I asked as I joined her in the garden. It was looking much better now that Amy had done some basic care. "Kinda like stepping between two rooms, yeah?"

"My Shard didn't like it," Amy grabbed a pair of strawberries the size of an apple and handed me one to munch on. "It came pretty close to talking to me. I think it would very much appreciate that we didn't do that again."

"Riiight~" I drawled. "It's probably messing with their computer brains. Can't give correct results if your personal acceleration of time to give instant results doesn't work."

"So how far back in time do you think we've gone?" Amy asked.

"No idea. How old is the garden?"

"The oldest tree is 123 years old," she said.

"123 years then?" she shrugged.

We sat there on the grass for a while. Me eating the fruit and Amy with her hands in the soil, roots reaching out throughout the biosphere to every plant for her to manipulate.

Once I got done eating my strawberry I kept a seed and combined it with some soil. "I'm going to do some tinkering with my powers," I warned Amy as I went across the garden to a wall to some building that didn't exist anymore.

Amy looked a bit worried but stayed where she was. "What are you going to do this time?"

"This time? This time is time manipulation," I say as I put my dirt down on the grass before me. Then I went back to where she was. "I'm going to see if I can make a bubble of altered time and grow a strawberry in a few minutes without messing with its biology and burning the thing out."

I took out a music player and turned it on.

"When I get older losing my hair, many years from now, will you still be sending me a Valentine, birthday greetings bottle of wine."

"Good choice," Amy says as she lay down in the grass with her hands folded underneath her head.

A funny thing about being a Planeswalker is that when I copy something using a summons is that it always worked the very first time I tried to do anything. It didn't matter if I was summoning an animal or an object. Even a torch, which was on fire at the time, is summoned on fire and working when I bring it into existence.

The very first time I tried to summon a portal through time it worked perfectly, creating a hole in the universe through the membrane of which we could see the future. it even came with a membrane that kept the pile of dirt from being sucked through.

This meant that I could go backwards and forwards in time by about two hundred years right then and there. We could go to Earth Beta and set up a whole bunch of time game traps to end Scion on any given day of the week. However we still didn't know on what principles the thing worked. I'd managed it pretty easily, and there was no doubt that the Shards had some kind of temporal manipulation abilities.

If I went to Earth Bet and started breaking Grey Boy's time loops people were going to notice. However, my abilities were originally the result of a technological gadget made out of a hyperdrive by a genius child. With Earth Bet's tinkers there was no doubt in my mind that they could do the same thing. Given a few hints of real-world tech there's be thousands of Tinkers going Clockstopper nuts.

The temptation to go back in time to undo mistakes would be staggering.

I made slow but steady progress over the next few days. I managed to figure out a way to distort entropy on an object. I could age or de-age an object. Repair broken objects to new or age them into antiques in moments.

I could grow a strawberry plant from a seed to maturity in moments. As long as I kept it watered that is.

I was able to de-age the starship back to a like-new status over the next few weeks. Watching dents and tears in the hull reverse themselves never got old. The best part was that if I reverse the age on an object it will not retain its memories or digital information. Computers that were broken with purged memory banks were restored with all their data intact. Animals that were returned to their youth forgot what they learned.

After a bit of discussion, it was decided by the both of us not to attempt to restore the crew back from the dead. Not only would I have to de-age the lives of thousands of Space Spiders, some of which I don't have anymore, but we also did not have any idea if this universe had souls or not. With empirical evidence that reincarnation was possible, me, they were probably gone for good.

In any case it was decided not to play god.

Nothing new there, of course. We didn't really understand most of what we were doing. Even when the both of us were studying out brains out enough to make them pour out of our ears, this stuff was hard. Then again we humans – and yes, I included myself in that – had been messing around with forces we didn't really understand since time immoral and it was only until when we split the atom that we took a breather and started putting real thought into what we were doing. Thinking about it, each universe we'd so far visited had its own way of doing things and not all of them were related to each other. But I knew how to make phenomena happen, how to summon animals and minerals and plants, I had a brain and I could use it.

And that is all I need to know.

So I started to learn more about what I could do with this stuff Amy and I'd collected. We had lots of experience at this point using what we had for our own comfort. Not that everything worked each and every time.

Amy had once attempted to make a few things while we were stuck in the wilderness before we ran into our first world of humans. One of these objects was a superball. It worked pretty well. To practice and just to play around Amy and I would sometimes engage in a little ball throwing.

To stave off boredom Amy would throw the ball at me and I'd stop it using a little portal with temporal effects, sending it back in time to bounce off a force field and throwing it back at her just before the ball arrived in my general area so the two passed each other.

Sending things into the future Phased through time worked pretty well all things considered. We could make food and send it through time so that it all arrived at the table steaming hot no matter how long it took to cook all the various dishes.

And of course I made a weapon out of it. It was quite not hard to think of ways in which these could be used to do damage. It was something I had to think about if I wanted something to happen and not something else which would go horrifically wrong.

One of these was the Time Bomb. Basically it was a phenomenon that attempted to accelerate the entropy of what it contained a few thousand years into the future, but is held in place. When the phenomena is finally breached the unleashed entropic effects rapidly ages everything around it to dust.

It. Was. Awesome!

A laser-like beam of time-warping would also send parts of an object that intercepts the blade back in time a few seconds and displaced a few thousands of miles from my position allowed me to "cut" whatever it came into contact with. Even so called 'super-metals' could be destroyed by separating out its molecular structure across time and space.

This also gave me ideas into an Indestructible spell effect. Basically, I would enchant an object to be indestructible. However this description is deceptively wrong. Instead of making an object unable to be destroyed, and then including a list of everything under the sun in which it was immune to, which is as tedious as all hecks, I'd go in the reverse. I'd charm an object to be un-charmed only with a single specific action, like dunking a thing in a bath of orange juice, making it incapable of being destroyed in any other way except that one. I based it off a Russian folktale about an evil wizard who had his heart sealed inside an otherwise indestructible egg which could only be pierced by a special sewing needle.

For the first time since I'd become a Tamarin I was able to enjoy cutlery without fear of chewing off the metal with every bite I took!

No I didn't use the orange juice version for the cutlery! What did you take me for, a fool?

If it's for the kitchen, use it for something that would never be seen near the kitchen, I say. Like motor oil, say. If it's for the battlefield, something that you'd never find on the battlefield. Like cat hairballs or something.

Anyway, once we'd fixed up the ship and given what remained of the crew and the crew's pets a proper burial in the ship's gardens it was time to leave. Thanks to my studies into Hyper-Gate-Drive technologies I was finally able to open larger Planar Portals past my normal mile-wide limit. We stopped for a moment at a world I'd already claimed to get our bearings. From there we traveled into the future to just past where the Past Amy would go and join Past Nova. This allowed us to avoid causality.

On further note my run in with the blatant disregard for the time stream made me aware of new aspects to the Blind Eternities that I simply wasn't aware of before.

Where before I had been bombarded my streams of energy that felt like being attacked by a school of naughty children with water hoses, I was now able to identify the different streams of energy as different time streams coming from different realms of the multiverse. It wasn't much of a difference in my experience when it came to walking the Blind Eternities. But it was the equivalent of now having at least a pair of goggles to protect my eyes while running through the water park rides.

If that makes any kinds of sense.

-000-

So as you probably noticed I did not dedicate this one to one of my cats. Don't worry, I've got a chapter just for her. But it's taking me some time to write it out.

The way I'm currently writing I'm featuring Nova as she steps into different worlds. Each Microsoft document is dedicated to a different world. As the mood takes me or I'm inspired to write I'll write a bit more in each of them, working on about 8 different worlds at the same time. This one just got done first.

So even I am not sure which one will be done next.

There will even be worlds that she visits that I'll probably never publish. There are so many fictional universes to visit. And I might become bored with them or unable to finish them.

I'll see you next time!

-000-