Welp, here I went, finished the last chapter, posted it, and decided to start a little work on the interlude, and before I knew it I was already done. Don't expect me to post this fast in the future folks. Like, Ever.
On to the story.
Interlude 1.a: The Usurper
The Usurper trailed behind his prey as it moved through the vastness of space, seeking out another planet of intelligent beings upon which to carry out their vile cycle. By staying just outside of their attention he could avoid suspicion, yet be ready when the time was right. He consulted his favorite master thought shard once more as the targets discovered their next set of victims. Sorrow. It would require the sacrifice of said favorite master shard to eliminate this pair in an optimal manner. The shard would not even be recoverable afterwards on its host's natural death, as many of the lesser precognition shards that worked with it so well informed him that the Thinker would place limits upon it as a last attempt at survival. He had little use for a master thought shard that was unable to model the actions of fellow entities.
The Usurper moved the Master precognition shard to a place that it would be easily seen and taken by the Thinker, in accordance with the path it provided him, checking one last time to memorize the details of the optimal path; it would not do to forget what was needed, after all. Once the Usurper was assured of its memory it moved quickly, ramming into the Thinker to exchange shards, as was customary among their kind. The thinker took the bait without even a thought to the possibility of his insincerity.
But then, why should it doubt his sincerity? It was unthinkable to them that they would be hunted, much less by one of their own. They rarely met one another, so how was it to know that he was the Usurper? How was it to know of the dozens of their kind that he had slain and whose remaining shards he had absorbed or left to serve their hosts? How was another entity to know, to suspect that one of their own had allowed a Queen Administrator shard to be suborned by its host, or that said host would go on to slay the entity and take its shards for itself?
The Usurper watched as the Thinker, still distracted and misconfigured from the exchange, crashed to the planet's surface and lost its new and unsecured master thought shard. Glee. He watched as it realized its approaching death from the shard's new host, and frantically limited the shard using its unique signature. Loss (minor), Regret (minor). He watched as the shard's host worked around the difficulty, ending the Thinker's life. Satisfaction.
The next step in the plan was important. The master thought shard he had lost had offered him two certain paths to victory. In one, he would simply disguise one of the Queen Administrator shards from a former prey as belonging to the Warrior and release it limited to the prey's target host species, along with a few other choice shards. This would guarantee the death of the Warrior, and it would provide a 34.653793% chance of causing its slayer to become a fellow Usurper in time.
In the second path he would do the same, but the Queen Administrator shard be more heavily programmed. It would be tailored to fit a specific host, instructed to provide him with the ability most suited to him, and optimized to serve his imagination to an excessive degree, before being guided to bond with him some years after the entities' arrival. In this path the Warrior would die, and many less of the host species would die with him than the other, but the chances of another Usurper being created were only 00.461242%.
At this point it is important to note that while the entities exist in and travel between multiple dimensional planes, they are only capable of this along one dimensional axis. Along another axis, many versions of the Usurper made two different choices. While most follow the ones that made the first choice, we are concerned in this story with only a version that chose the latter path.
And so the world was changed.
-End Interlude-
A/N: Alright, so this is where those plotholes start filling in. What I decided to do here was to make this an alternate world of an idea I had inspired by Copacetic, by Materia-Blade. It also shows us a glimpse of why Jacob's tinker power is so freaking effective, diverse, fast-working, and just… OP, if you look closely. Also the first sign in-story that his field of specialization might not be exactly what he thought it was (I hinted at something to that effect on the Spacebattles forum thread for this story). More on the reveals can be found on the Spacebattles post under a spoiler tag, and I'm putting a link to the thread there on my profile page.