Under 12 Parsecs…
Dingy bars are a dime a dozen in the multiverse. It doesn't matter if you're on a desert planet or in the middle of a high class, pristine utopia. So long as you turn the right corner and look down the right alley, you're bound to spot a dirty sign and a set of doors that welcome anybody brave enough to come inside and have a drink.
Of course, just because these places tend to serve to the scummiest scum to have ever been scummy, doesn't mean that what they serve isn't at least… unique. Some people find spots with good food, some don't, some find diamonds in the rough…
…And some people come in pairs where one person is looking at the food like it's a delightful treat while the other is staring at it in absolute revulsion. Case in point, Aria and me.
Apparently, Aria had a bit of familiarity with the cuisine of this universe since this was where her grandmother was born, so she decided to take the liberty of ordering food for the both of us during our stay, which I was fine with since I was always up to trying new food.
When today's orders came though, I regretted my decision.
"Aria…" I started as I watched my dish bubble. "What is this…?"
"Hm?" She was already tying a napkin around her neck and licking her lips in anticipation. "Grilled Thakitillo in a Tiehn slug roux. Why?"
I looked down at the dish. It looked grilled alright. Like a big, thick, green grilled tongue with curdled slime on it, neatly placed on sickly brown sauce that seemed to simultaneously coagulate and liquidate at the same time. I could swear that something in the sauce was moving too.
It also smelled like the carcass of a skunk. That had rabies. And was on fire.
I cringed, which Aria spotted and gave a soft snort. "What? Big bad space adventurer scared of a little food?"
"I'm less scared of the food and more scared of what it's going to do to when I eat it."
"C'mon, it's fine. See," she grabbed a fork and knife, cut off a piece of the tongue looking part, and ate it. "Perfectly safe." Under her breath she mumbled, "Creators that tastes good."
I felt my stomach dry heave and weep while watching her take that bite. "I'm pretty sure we have different anatomies so maybe I shouldn't…"
She swallowed. "Actually, we share pretty much have the same anatomical parts and functions. Only difference is that I'm made of magic and you're not."
Interesting trivia. Somehow it didn't inspire much more confidence in me.
But in the interest of both not going hungry and not wasting food, I sucked it up and took a bite.
…
"Wow… that is… surprisingly good."
Through her own chewing, Aria agreed. "I know right!?"
The tongue looking part was actually more of a fruit, and the slime was more of a pulpy substance what a tangy flavor. The actual roux, while still inexcusably foul smelling, tasted like a lovechild between a creamy vanilla and a smooth nutmeg. Together, it was like an exotic fruit dish. Strange, but neat.
We sat and ate for a while, listening to the sounds of the jazz band- sorry, "jizz" band- in the center of the bar. Whisps of smoke from hookahs and cooking Quor'sav-fried steaks wafted up into the rafters above. A group of Zabraks, human-like folk with small horns around their heads, sat in the corner playing Sabaac, though most of them seemed to be trying to gang up on a smug looking Duros, a blue creature with large glossy eyes, that held most of the money on the table.
Eventually we finished our meal but didn't get up. Instead, I kept an eye on the door while Aria twiddled her thumbs impatiently. After maybe fifteen minutes of this, she finally broke.
"Alright Leo, spill the beans."
"Hm?" I inquired, my eyes still locked on the entrance.
"We've been on this rock for the better part of a week now. You disappear for about four hours every day to Creators know where, and we have only been coming in to eat at this specific bar for the past few days. You're concocting something and considering how secret you're keeping it I'm actually a little scared."
Somebody walked in, a particularly stocky Rodian, green and reptilian looking, in dirty grey robes. I dismissed him and kept waiting. "Well, you would be right about the plan. I did a little research during our first two days that led me to here."
"What could possibly be here that you need?"
"Not something, someone."
It was then that a fat Sullistan, a short and smooth skinned creature with huge folds under its cheeks and large black eyes, walked through the door. He was obviously drunk from bar hopping, hanging off the shoulders of fellow Sullistans and all clad in red, stained jumpsuits.
I grinned a feral grin. "Target acquired."
Aria followed my gaze. "…eh?"
I stood up and started to adjust my clothes, a forest green vest over a white shirt and beige pants. "That, my friend, is Punllk Nund. He's a smuggler that spends most of his time working for the Hutt cartel making spice runs to and from the planet Kessel. Between that he tends to collect blackmail material to extort just about anybody he can find in the Outer Rim."
Aria scowled. "Sounds like a real scumbag."
I scooped a little bit of the roux and smeared it on my shirt. It looked like vomit. Perfect. "Oh yeah, and that's just the well-known stuff. Turns out he's also a slave trader on the side; likes to use the excess spice from his trips to keep his kidnapees docile." A dark look flitted across my face, one that Aria shared, before my grin returned. "He also has an astronomical bounty on his head, of which a whole host of bounty hunters are going to come and collected in about…" I checked the Watch. "…two and a half hours thanks to an anonymous tip of his current location!" I winked at her.
The look slowly bled off the jinn's face as she sighed in relief. "Then why are you been looking for him in a bar when you've already dealt with him?"
"Oh, we're gonna steal his ship."
Aria blinked. "What?"
I was already gone, walking towards him and his friends, stumbling a few times to look just as drunk as they were. As I got close, I unfocused my eyes to make them look glazed over, and then "tripped" into him.
We fell in a dog pile, one of the Sullistans hitting their head on the counter a clonking out right there. With a collection of groans the rest of us got up, before Nund socked me in the face hard enough to send me back to the floor.
"The hell is your problem?! Do you know who I am?!"
The beauty of having a multidimensional/time hopping method of travel on your wrist is that because it is so unbelievably powerful and compacted into such a small space means that nine times out of ten it has a bunch of other cool features. Prime example in my case, a translator for nearly every language ever recorded in some sort of database between the beginning and end of time.
And thank the Force for that because otherwise I would not understand Galactic Basic.
"You…" I squinted really hard and swayed for a solid minute, long enough to make Nund and his posse look at each other bemusedly. Eventually I gasped and grinned like a loon. "Tuco Benedicto Pacifico Juan Maria Ramirez, buddy how are you? I thought you were still in Mexico with that gold you and Blondie found! What are you doing out here on Fur… For… no, Farmus… no that's not it either-"
One of the goons clasped Nund's shoulder. "Let's just leave the kid alone boss, he's obviously drunk off his ass. No point trying to teach him a lesson he won't remember."
The spice runner eyed me suspiciously.
"…is it Formos? Yeah, I think we on Formos or something," I mumbled, still grinning.
The Sullistan shook his head, folds flopping as he did so. "Hmph. C'mon, let's get a table. This guy isn't worth it."
They strode off, carrying their unconscious pal with them while I continued to mumble. When they finally found a table in the far back, just out of sight of me, I stood up and walked back to a concerned Aria.
"Are you alright?" She asked, as I sat down. I touched my face lightly. It was probably going to bruise but it was just one punch so it would be pretty small. Probably.
"I'll be fine," I said before putting a floppy disk looking device on the table. "But he won't be."
"What is that?" Aria asked.
"It's a key of sorts. It unlocks that hatch to his ship outside." It's surprisingly easy to pickpocket somebody while in a dogpile.
Some pieces of the puzzle that was my plan started to connect in Aria's mind. "What are we doing with that ship Leo?"
I chuckled. It was not a comforting chuckle for Aria. "Oh, you'll see."
"Leo you can't fly a ship."
A darker chuckle.
"LEO!"
[-]
For those who haven't quite figured out where we are right now, let's just say that this journey takes place a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. And in this far, far away galaxy, there exists a LOT of smugglers. This amount only increased with the rise of the Galactic Empire, an imperialistic government that superseded the prior administration and proceeded to rule the galaxy with an iron fist.
Well, an iron fist that struggled to touch the Outer Rim.
The Outer Rim, as the name implies, is the region making up the outskirts of the galaxy, the final frontier before reaching the expanse beyond the galaxy into Wild Space. It is here that crime thrives, and many remain untouched by the Empire's rule. On these outskirts, deep within a raging space storm of ice and gas that is the Akkadese Maelstrom, lies a most infamous planet by the name of Kessel.
Perhaps one of the most prominent examples of the best and the worst that the galaxy has to offer, Kessel is a planet of slavery and luxury. To the south, beautiful, lush sanctuaries prospered, home to the high-class royalty that officially ruled the planet. To the north, barren lands of only stone and the mines made and controlled by both crime syndicates and the Empire. Most, if not all of them were manned by countless droids and slaves. This was the stuff that didn't go up on the Empire's propaganda posters.
What's mined on the planet, you ask? Well, Kessel is one of the main providers of the plague of the galaxy, the drug known as 'spice.' Kesselstone can also be found here and is often turned into a narcotic, and sometimes, however rarely, you could strike a vein of coaxium, the galaxy's most valuable form of fuel.
The thought of the place disgusted me, and the only things that stopped me from trying to liberate the planet myself were:
A: My severe lack of resources and experience in what would essentially be a one-man war.
B: The unfortunate necessity of Kessel's mines to the future of the galaxy and the timeline.
C: The knowledge that there would be a huge crackdown on Kessel in around a decade when the Rebel Alliance finally defeats the Empire.
But our little adventure wasn't about Kessel. No, even though the planet rotated slowly outside our window my goal today revolved around the path out of Kessel. You see, despite the fact that the planet is located in the middle of a nebulous maelstrom, there were paths within to get in and out. But for smugglers, only a few of them were usable in order to avoid the Empire, and the most famous of these trade routes is the Kessel Run.
Our stolen ship floated before a hole in the storm surrounding Kessel. The ship itself was a UT-60D transport ship with a few modifications made by its previous owner. The craft technically shouldn't be in the possession of anybody commercially since production never finished but this one was probably stolen off the assembly line… or from the Rebels that managed to get a batch before the company was overtaken by the government.
The ship itself was almost U shaped (hence the name) and had a cockpit and storage space where the bend in the U would be. The green paintjob was chipped and battered but the ship was still relatively new and well kept, especially the interior. The small box of a cockpit had four seats, two in the front and two in the back, with a door in the far back that led to a slightly larger room used for storage and accessing the fuel tanks that connected to the four thrusters in the back. In the cockpit, seated at the front two seats was me and Aria. Aria was staring at me and had been for the past hour. I sat innocently in my seat and waited for her to speak.
She finally blinked, snapping out of whatever stupor she was in. She opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.
"Leo."
"Yes, my friend?"
"May I ask you a question?"
"Oh, please do."
"When did you learn to fly a ship?"
I leaned back in my seat and grinned.
With no reply in sight Aria continued pressing me. "Leo there are no starships on Earth. The closest you guys have are those chunky cylinders that you call spaceships and I know you haven't had the training for those things."
My grin turned shit-eating.
"I'm pretty sure airplanes aren't even close enough to these either, how do you know how to fly a starship!?"
What Aria didn't know was that my disappearances this past week were only partly due to researching our soon to be captured Sullistan. In truth, I had been taking crash course lessons with a retired pilot who was running a small docking station on Formos.
To be clear driving a starship is not simple in the slightest, and most pilots train for months before even taking off. But those are official pilots. Half of the criminals you meet on this side of the galaxy had five minutes to figure it out before they got caught by whoever was chasing them.
Granted I'm not an ace pilot or anything, but I can certainly turn it on and drive it through a few tight spots. My landings are still shaky, but I'm not looking to land this thing anyway.
No, I'm looking to do something a lot more stupid. Something that I specifically asked my teacher to train me for so I wouldn't crash the ship (which would be mostly fine actually because the shields on this thing were surprisingly strong.) But again, worst case scenario the magical watch could teleport us out.
Oh, right, Aria.
I turned to her a shrugged. She jabbed me in the stomach from her seat and I fell back laughing. After a minute of her frustrated fuming and my cackles we got back into our seats and I began a little speech.
"About an hour ago you asked me what we would be doing with a starship. I understand your confusion, after all we have another means of transportation that is simply superior in every way, correct?"
She nodded hesitantly.
"Right. Well, I've told you about the Kessel Run, which is right in front of us. What I haven't told you is that there is a certain unofficial competition among those that make the Run to see if you can do it in as little distance as possible. In about a year or two, that record is going to be lowered to a whopping 12 parsecs by a man named Han Solo."
I paused to let the name ring out. Aria had no reaction to it, but when I was flying in a starship it only felt right to give a little respect to one of the greatest pilots in the galaxy, if not the multiverse.
I continued, pushing the ship into the tunnel. "But we aren't here to beat that record. I just want to mark my place in history by beating the current 20 parsec route."
We cruised through the tunnel for a while as I watched the navigation panel on the dashboard, waiting for the right spot. We didn't say anything for a time, and just as I approached my destination…
"Well, how are we-"
I pressed a button. The pointy end of the ship's U shape flipped back into two wings.
"-going to beat a record of distance?"
I turned the ship towards the storm wall lining the tunnel.
Aria blanched.
I punched it.
[-]
You would think that speeding through space would feel different than speeding down the street in a car. In a way, I suppose it is, though not in the way you're thinking. You see, you still experience the force of acceleration on your body, that "g-force" feeling. You might think that because you are in a spaceship with artificial gravity that is moving in the same direction that you are this would cancel out the g-force. Not so. The two forces of forward acceleration through space and the downwards pull of gravity are independent; they don't affect one another much if at all. So, you still feel yourself being pushed back into your seat as you zoom, but its not so different from any other vehicle in that sense.
But enough with the physics lesson, you're wondering how it is different.
Well, driving fast in a car is thrilling, assuming you enjoy that stuff. It can be fun to go fast, watching the world fly by and feeling the pressure of acceleration, both a testament to your incredible speed.
But if driving a car down the street is thrilling, then racing in a modified UT-60D transport class starship through the debris and raging storm of a cosmic maelstrom is absolutely intoxicating.
Like a man in Florida traffic who's late for work I barreled through the storm, dodging the obstacles the coalesced from the dark gaseous clouds that surround us. Lightning crackled beside the ship, a bolt licking our deflector shield. All the while I cackled like crazy.
Now that I think about it, I might be an adrenaline junky.
Aria screamed as I skirted by a hurtling space rock. She shrieked as I did a barrel roll, avoiding a slew of shredded ship debris that threatened to strike the hull. She yelped as I dropped the ship downwards to go under a gargantuan asteroid. She went silent for a minute as she realized that I was doing a surprisingly competent job.
A little laugh slipped out and she began whooping excitedly as we shot through space.
Checking the navigator, I saw that we were half-way through the route I had planned out prior to takeoff. It wasn't Han's exact path obviously, that route is way too dangerous for me to make. But the route that my teacher and I had planned out was a theoretical one patched together from the accounts of a bunch of other smugglers. I was confident in it since the Maelstrom was technically one big cloud; you could go virtually anywhere in any way you want, but often you just needed to find a path of least resistance. The shorter it was, the more perilous the route become.
I was just looking to make 17 parsecs, so I doubted we would suffer worse than what Han did during his go.
The dark clouds began to thin, parting as we finally exited the storm wall and entered the metaphorical "fire" to the storm's "frying pan."
What lay before us was surreal, amazing yet terrifying at the same time. As the cockpit was bathed in orange light, me and Aria bore witness to perhaps one of the most incredible sights in the galaxy.
The storm raged around us as if we were in the eye of a tornado. It was dark and unknown, a tempestuous final resting place for countless ships that had been foolish enough to recklessly dive into its violent depths without a path to follow. Debris could be seen as silhouettes and shadows beyond the wall, revolving and revolving around what was in the center of the "eye of the storm."
And what floated in that center was a testament to the beauty and horrifying dangers of space. A planet sized mass blazing angrily like a pure sphere of solar energy. Its gravity was immense, hungrily tearing at the storm wall as cloudy dust and debris was pulled into the rotating body. An entire asteroid the size of a city was dragged from the Maelstrom, splintered, broke, and vanished into the neutron star.
Its appetite was insatiable. It stood indifferent to what is consumed. It only devoured.
It was the Maw.
I made sure to stay close to the Maelstrom, not wanting to risk getting properly pulled into the star's gravity well. The point that I needed to reach for a straight shot out of the storm was on the other side of where we had entered, so we slowly rode the circumference of the storm.
As we did so, I gawked at the sight of the Maw. The idea of a neutron star was easy to envision. Just think of bright ball that pulls things in. Like a black hole but not, well, black. But imagining it and actually seeing it were two different things. It was a similar feeling to seeing a mountain for the first time or looking out the window of a plane when you're passing over a city. You feel so small, yet you can't help but admire the majestic sight.
I heard a squeak and looked over at Aria, who to my concern had turned a pallid white. And I mean her whole body was white and she was shaking in her chair.
"Hey, hey, it's okay," I said, trying to keep my voice calm and reassuring. "The gravity well is strong but at this distance our engines can easily keep us from getting caught in it."
She turned slowly to look at me, still shivering as she tried to form words. After a few false starts she just shook her head and pointed out the window. "N-n-n-ot the s-s-s-star. T-t-t-that!"
I followed her shaking finger to the side of the storm wall opposite us. My eyes widened when I saw a shape, partially illuminated by a collection of lightning flashes. It floated on the very edge of the Maelstrom like us, tentacle lazily drifting beneath its lumpy, grotesque body. It looked like a massive brain, leathery and fleshy with a tooth lined hole for a mouth. Countless eyes dotted the surface of its skin, pale and blue like they belonged to a corpse.
I recognized the creature as the monster that had chased Han in his Star Wars movie, and for a second my blood froze before I noted that the eyes were lidded, and it was barely reacting to anything around it. Heck, a rock clonked its head as it passed by, and it didn't even twitch.
It was asleep.
I felt a relieved smile grow on my face and I looked at Aria. "It's fine, it won't notice us. We're safe."
She didn't calm down. In fact, she got worse, her shaking becoming more violent as she clutched the arms of her chair.
"S-s-safe!?" She squeaked, the cushion under her fingers starting to tear. "W-we just t-tread on his domain! A-and he already k-knows we're h-h-here. He d-d-doesn't need to see us to s-s-s-see us!"
I was confused. "Aria, what are you talking about?"
"What am I talking about!?" She practically shrieked. "That's Y-y-y-" she had to breathe again just to get the word out. "That's Yog-Sothoth!"
Ah, I see.
I knew a little of the works of H.P. Lovecraft. I had read a few passages of some of his stories and everybody and their mother knows the name of his most famous character, Cthulhu. Yog-Sothoth I knew because of a bit research I did when I did my first dive into the Cthulhu Mythos. He was supposedly one of the "Outer Gods", primordial beings from before existence who sometimes dwelled beyond the edges of the universe. Usually, he would probably look like a mass of orbs, but the depictions of Lovecraft's eldritch creatures often changed or were bulbous and tentacle-like, so I could see how the creature before us could be mistaken for the Outer God, what with its multitude of eyes.
But it wasn't him, not by a longshot.
In the back of my mind, I felt terror at the sudden revelation that the Cthulhu mythos was real, but I smothered that to focus on Aria, who had started to hyperventilate.
I grabbed her by the shoulders, the action shocking her out of her terror, and looked her dead in the eye.
"Aria, look at me. That's not Yog-Sothoth."
Her disbelief was apparent on her face. But I kept my voice level and soft.
"If that was him, we would be going insane right now. The Outer Gods are beyond the comprehension of the thinking mind. And there's no possible way that he would just be in some random part of space in a random galaxy. That's just a space monster. We're safe. Breathe."
It took a few minutes of breathing before she was calm again and we were sitting back in our seats, though she was still unsettled. She kept stealing glances out the window like it would suddenly wake up and smite us.
She needed something to distract her. I recalled her earlier excitement as we raced through the storm.
"Hey, want to see something cool?" I asked, hoping she would say yes.
She did, if tentatively.
I put the ship on autopilot and led her to the cargo bay, which was still filled with crates of smuggled items from the ship's previous owner. I stopped by the fuel access port and opened it up before looking at Aria and pointing at an open crate that I had noticed when we first boarded. "Do you mind taking one of the containers out of there?"
She walked up to the crate, an inconspicuous gray box, and pulled out a syringe filled with glowing red material. "What is this?"
I gently took it from her. This should have been in a special storage device, but it seems that Nund had some prepared in advance for a quick getaway. "This is coaxium, which is essentially space nitro."
"What's nitro?"
"You'll see. Can you head to the cockpit really quick and tell me if we're in front of our exit?"
She nodded and went back up front, where a small opening in the storm had appeared, and through which she could see a tunnel that exited into the greater expanses of space. "We're there, yeah!" She shouted back.
I nodded even though she couldn't see me, taking the syringe and positioning it over the fuel tank. "Strap in!"
I pressed the plunger, a small drop of red squeezing out of the end of the needle, closed the tank, and ran to the cockpit. Behind me I could hear a whine that began to increase in pitch.
"You see that lever with four grooves?!"
Aria looked around the dash of buttons and knobs as I put on my seatbelt and spotted what I was talking about. Beneath the device in neat Galactic Basic was the word "Lightspeed."
I checked over the autopilot calculations and turned to her with a grin. "Punch it."
And she did.
[-]
The engines shut off when Aria pulled the lever and the ship started to pull into the gravity well. A spike of fear shot through her, already doubling her anxiety from the sight of the Yog-Sothoth look alike that resided in the Maelstrom.
Once you removed the limitations on their magic and give them proper training, there were few things more powerful than a jinn in the multiverse. In fact, Aria could count the species more powerful on one hand.
The Creators, the ones who were there before reality could even call itself such. They were the ones who personally molded the first jinn from the dust of the First Star.
Celestial beings, those with enough power to destroy, create, or run entire universes, along with their bloodlines or proxies.
Those who rose themselves up to greater heights and achieved the designation of New Gods by the Creators. People like Darkseid, Dr. Manhattan, and SCP-3812 (though Aria had no clue who these people were, she was just taught their names.)
The physical manifestation of concepts, like Father Time and Death.
And the Outer Gods.
Now Aria wasn't powerful enough to even consider getting into a fistfight. Her sealing in that rock was a rush job to keep the Watch safe and the limits on her abilities that came with that were severe. Even without said limits she was largely untrained and used magic instinctively.
But even if she was the strongest jinn to ever exist, she would still fear the Outer Gods. They were the subject of the horror stories that jinn parents would tell their children. They were the boogeyman's boogeyman. They were all-powerful entities that could dwell beyond the time and space, and while some were benevolent all of them stood in opposition of the Creators. And as the Creators' direct creations… well, it wasn't unheard of for a jinn to go mad and eventually perish after skirting too close to one of the Outer Gods' domains. Some simply disappeared, never to be heard of again.
She was raised on the warnings to never go near one, shown images of their horrifying forms, and taught to fear them and their children as the natural enemy to the jinn.
How Leo knew about them she didn't know. Probably the same way that he inexplicably knew so much about every place they visited.
The point is that Aria's panic attack had caused a load of anxiety to well up inside her, and the ship's engines shutting off certainly didn't help.
She recognized that Leo was trying to give her a distraction, but she didn't think it was working.
Then the whine from the storage room stopped and the engines roared.
Outside, though she couldn't see it, the propulsors lit up a bright blue. The whole ship, which had before started to fall back into the Maw, shot forward in a sudden burst of speed. The ion engine worked overtime, causing azure energy to shoot out of it in a trail of light. The front of the ship began to burn red as the sheer force of speed caused the dust particles of the Maelstrom to ignite as they hit the deflector shields.
Inside the cockpit, Aria felt her body practically meld with her seat. She saw the Maelstrom disappear as they exited into the depths of space. A trillion stars appeared; tiny white dots splattered across endless black. And then they extended into streaks as the hyperdrive finally kicked in and shot the ship off at speeds faster than light.
Somewhere on the dash a doohikie beeped and displayed the words "Distance Travelled: 17 Parsecs," and Leo whooped. But Aria didn't hear that as she just enjoyed the speed and the adrenaline and felt her fears melt away.
A few minutes later when the high wore off, the two travelers disappeared off the ship, leaving it to sail across the galaxy unmanned.
Until it ran out of fuel and promptly crashed into a parked TIE fighter on the world of Mustafar. Miraculously nobody was harmed, but the Stormtrooper that had left his ship there was royally pissed when he found it's remains.
A/N:
If Luke Skywalker, even with his latent talent, can go from flying in-atmosphere with skyhoppers and landspeeders to duking it out with the best of them in X-wings, Leo can certainly fly a U-wing on the Kessel Run. Better yet, if Anakin Skywalker can go from PODRACING to spending thirty minutes learning the controls of a ship to blowing up a Droid Control Ship on his own, then a dang Gungan can make the Kessel Run high and blindfolded for all I care…
I swear that the Phantom Menace doesn't bother me, I adore the movie, it's just Anakin in the Phantom Menace that messes with me XD
A couple of people asked about the spider's deal in the last chapter, and I went back to change some things so that it was more apparent. To confirm, yes, the spider (whom I have quietly named Morrison) does spin cotton candy webs, but the only indication that he did so was in one sentence. That's my bad, the cave was supposed to look a lot more like Shelob's lair from Lord of the Rings and I neglected to add "giant cotton webs literally everywhere" and the cave ended up just looking like… well a cave.
Again, went back and fixed that up.
As for Aria's "limits," this plays off the Three Wishes rules. Really, if a genie can make a person appear out of thin air, then they should be able to raise the dead or alter emotions, but the Aladdin-Disney genie can't do either of those things or grant more than three wishes. I'm interpreting that as weird ass limits that come with being sealed to an object, and they get more severe if the object sucks.
So, one genie sealed into a holy relic may not be able to be allowed to create matter from nothing.
Another in a pocket watch may be incapable of doing large scale magic.
Another in a comfortable armchair may be unable to do magic between four and seven-thirty and can't make anything with a shade of red or starting with the letter 'F'.
But Aria was sealed in a rock and is essentially just a well-read novice. Her limits are undefined but certainly extensive. I don't want to define them now but maybe in another chapter.
Also don't take this as me setting up some grand plotline, I really ain't. Just doing whatever and maybe something in the future will call back to this. I'm winging a casual story and I felt like giving my characters some lore.
Also, to clarify, the 'Celestial beings' that I mentioned consist of both gods and those that are essentially forces of nature. That means mythology like the Greek Gods and demigods, modern religions like the Abrahamic God, fictional forces the Anti-Monitor and Galactus (who I will technically consider celestial as he was there at the beginning of the universe), etc.
Basically, if they are strong as all hell then they can face off against a fully-fledged genie.
Comments:
Pokemonking0924: Thank you! And yes, they did give me a few ideas.
Kunoichi69: It's a great idea man, thank you for suggesting it (and for the review!)
And to clarify, Leo was the one who grabbed the gobstopper.
SkullGreymonX: No problem. And to be completely honest I haven't been meaning to keep slipping food scenes into every chapter, it just kinda happens and I get caught up in trying to figure out how this stuff tastes ha.
As for zombie plans? Anything is on the table, so maybe I'll throw them in one or two places. Haven't watched Zombieland yet though it's on my bucket list, but I'm familiar enough with Resident Evil, Walking Dead, etc.
Still need to watch Zombieland though…
TurboDriver07: To clarify that restaurant was on a planet that was like Bespin from The Empire Strikes Back, but not actually. I just completely made-up New Chicago. But here's some Star Wars stuff for ya.
And Nowhere is DEFINITLY on the list. Courage is one of the shows I grew up on, so I have a lot of fond memories of that dusty old place.
Before I go, here's a quick stop for you guys.
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Omake: I Hate Sand. It's Rough and Coarse and It Gets Everywhere.
We showed up in the middle of a desert. That's it. A dry, hot, annoyingly sandy desert.
Both of us stared at the Watch.
The coordinates we had put in were supposed to take us to the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, but this was very much not the classiest, most extravagant dining establishment at the end of existence. This was a desert. And deserts, frankly, suck.
"Should we try again?"
"Yeah, hand it over to me real quick."
I held out my wrist and Aria fiddled with the device for a minute. It beeped. It booped. We disappeared in a flash of light. We returned not even a second later. It coughed. A hologram came out counting down from five minutes. Underneath the timer were the words "Battery Low: Re-charging."
Aria handed my arm back to me with a deadpanned face. She summoned what looked like an instruction manual and flipped a few pages. "Evidently, it is recommended that we don't use the Watch while travelling at Lightspeed because it takes a lot of juice."
Of course it does. Because why not.
We sighed and started to look around for a source of shade against the blasted heat. We spotted a large rock a few minutes out and decided to walk towards it.
Our walk was silent, not because we didn't want to talk but rather because we were distracted. Aria by the unrelenting sun and me by both the sun and the sand that kept slipping into my shoes. She got to avoid it by floating above the ground.
I hate sand by the way. I've never liked going to the beach, I never enjoyed sandboxes as a kid, I don't even like the quote on quote therapeutic sand that people buy sometimes. It doesn't feel good, it manages to slip into my clothes at some point, and it's a chore to deal with in general.
So we walked silently across the dunes, my rhythmic steps being the only sound heard, possibly the only sound for miles period.
Eventually we reached the rock, but just as we crossed the border of light and shade, we heard a rumbling noise from below.
"The heck is that?" Aria said.
I looked around the desert again, seeing how barren and devoid of life it was. I looked up and noted the two moons that floated in the sky, despite it being clearly daytime. The rumbling below us grew louder and it clicked where we were.
Twenty seconds left.
About fifty meters in front of us the sand started to give way as something lifted itself from the dunes. Its skin was a dark brown with a tinge of orange, noticeably rough, and comprised of hundreds of scales that covered every inch of its incredibly long body. I knew it was long, even though only its head poked out of the sand, because I could see shifts in the sand behind it for almost a half a kilometer. Speaking of its head, its mouth it was massive. And by massive, I mean it was a massive, gaping maw that could fit a school bus lengthwise, lined with a thousand little teeth.
It's mouth was also its face. That's it. It was a giant gaping hole of a mouth that stared down at us.
Ten seconds left.
The heat that it exuded was intense, the kind of heat that hits you when you open up an oven. Aria and I stood there shell shocked as it washed over us, and in that moment I experienced what it was like to be a Thanksgiving turkey.
Then both of us furiously fiddled with the Watch as the Sandworm came down and tried to swallow us whole.
At the last second we vanished with a silent vow to never, ever visit Dune ever again.
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Haven't read the book but I'm gonna. Seriously I'm gonna, I literally just bought it not even a day ago (20% off, not bad.) But for now I'm not going to write a whole chapter on Dune. Maybe sometime in the future.
For now though, that's about it! Thank you so much for reading, if it suits your fancy feel free to leave a comment, and I'll see you in the next chapter, whenever that may be!
Peace!
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