by Rien Reigns
I smiled with complete satisfaction.
My new hand was going to make my job so much easier. The ability to inject someone in an instant without them even knowing it, and not having to wear the tell-tale gloves anymore.
I also had micro darts installed that allowed me to shoot my concoctions up to twenty yards away.
“How’s it feel, little brother?” Sigmund, the new Victory asked, coming up behind me with Adham/Famine and Alvarez/War in tow.
Standing side by side, I was an inch taller than him. I turned my head towards Victory and looked him up and down. “Who you calling little?” I said with a smile.
Victory extended his shins until he was standing four inches taller and was looking down on me. “Like I said.”
“I see you actually went and adopted wearing green,” War said. “Though much darker than your predecessor.”
Since my vault had taken a beating during all the battles, I decided it was time to upgrade it. I’d found the original design in Sam’s files and had a new one built, but with some slight modifications based on years of use. Thanks to ever advancing technology, the armor was upgraded, and the fabric was now self-healing as well.
“I wasn’t going to at first, but after some consideration I felt I owed it to him for saving my life.”
“You look good,” Victory said.
“Yeah, like a Robin Hood,” added War.
“I don’t wear that type of hat, so don’t get any ideas,” I said, holding up my middle finger, scythe extended.
We all laughed
I turned back around just in time to see the sun dip below the horizon.
“You all ready to give the Devil his due?”
The End of Book 1
Thank you for reading
Chrono Inquisitor:
A Gods Be Damned Novel
Keep your eyes and mind at the ready for
Death Comes Knocking:
A Gods Be Damned Sequel
Glossary and Dramatis Personae
Shinigami – “death god/god of death” or “death spirit” – A psychopomp in Japanese folklore that makes sure people die at the appointed time and guides the spirit to the afterlife to be judged. In an over-simplification of things, they are essentially a Japanese version of the Grim Reaper. As opposed to the conventional belief of a single Grim Reaper, there are many Shinigami. They are a rather recent invention to Japanese culture.
Psychopomp – “guide of souls” – They take various forms throughout the different myths and legends of the world. Their role is to escort the dead to the afterlife. They can be animals, spirits, angles, even deities.
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Agnomen – “to name” – In the Roman naming convention, a nickname of a person.
Praenomen – “forename or first name” – A personal name chosen by the parents of a Roman child. It is the equivalent of a given name today.
Nomen – “name” It is the second name and is shared amongst the family clan, or gens, which was used to claim descent from a common ancestor. This was more or less originally a family name, or surname. There were only so many acceptable praenomina to choose from, so this sometimes resulted in men from the same gens having the same name. This resulted in the use of third names to distinguish individuals, such as; a cognomen and later an agnomen.
Cognomen – The third name. It began as a nickname based on a physical or personal trait in order to distinguish individuals who shared first and second names. Over time the cognomen took on the role of a surname and was passed down from father to son in order to distinguish a family from a gens.
Gens – A group of people who are all descendants of a single individual.
Note: this is an over-simplification of the Roman naming system and it changed over the course of the empire. By the end of the Republican era, a male aristocrat generally had at least three names known as a tria nomina, consisting of; a praenomen, a nomen, and a cognomen are referred to as the tria nomina.
Example: Michael Jeffrey “Air” Jordan – the NBA star.
(praenomen = Michael, nomen = Jeffrey*, agnomen = Air, cognomen = Jordan)
* Jeffrey would not technically be a nomen since it isn’t shared amongst all his family.
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Mnemosyne – (nee-moz-uh-nee) “memory” – Greek goddess/titaness of memory. Daughter of Uranus and Gaia. Mother of the muses who were fathered by Zeus over nine consecutive nights. Origin of the word mnemonic.
Mnemosyne – the tech. The collective name for the hundreds of millions of nanobots (mytes), specifically called Mnemosyne-mytes or M-mytes for short, inside a person’s brain. Occasionally referred to as The Spider, due to the initial brain scans which looked like hundreds of overlapping spiderwebs. Created by Dr. Kishnan Chandrasekhar, the first person to find a way to get mytes to penetrate the blood brain barrier. Originally created to study and record a person’s dreams. Later adapted to record a person’s memory perfectly.
Due to original fears at the time of their creation, they were designed to only record what occurred inside a host’s brain. Memories were uploaded to a person’s Arkhive, an Aether based secure storage overseen and organized by a person’s CerA.
Now decades later, fears have abated, which has led to the creation and pending release of Huginn & Muninn, a Mnemosyne upgrade which allows the M-mytes to take an active role in order to share thoughts and memories.
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Black hats – In old black and white Westerns, the hero used to wear a white hat and the villain wore a black hat. The term black hat has come to signify any villain. In the world of computer hacking, black hat has come to mean a hacker who illegally hacks a system for personal gain or malicious intent. There are different colored hat hackers, such as; white hat, grey hat, blue hat.
A white hat hacker usually works for a corporation to test their own system and to improve upon it.
A grey hat hacker will usually hack a system and then notify the administrator of the breach and offer to correct it for a fee.
A blue hat hacker is in between a white and grey hat. They are usually a third party hired to test a system’s security
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Eeyoric – someone who is generally pessimistic, depressed, gloomy, and not fun to be around. Someone who embodies the personality of the character Eeyore from the Winnie-the-Pooh books by A.A. Milne.
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aɪ-ware – (pronounced the same as eyewear, from which the name derives.) A pair of polarized photochromic computer lenses.
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Photochromic lenses- lenses which are made to darken when exposed to certain types of light, usually UV. When not being exposed to the specific light, they revert back to a clear state.
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Fitzpatrick Skin Type – A scale created in 1975 by a dermatologist, Thomas B. Fitzpatrick, in order to classify a person’s skin type by their response to sun exposure in terms of the degree of burning and tanning.
The Fitzpatrick Scale:
Type I: Light, pale white. (Always burns, never tans.)
Type II: White; fair. (Usually burns, tans with difficulty.)
Type III: Medium, white to light brown. (Sometimes mild burn, gradually tans to a light brown.)
Type IV: Olive, moderate brown. (Rarely burns, tans with ease to a moderate brown.)
Type V: Brown, dark brown. (Very rarely burns, tans very easily.)
Type VI: Black, very dark brown to black. (Never burns, tans very easily, deeply pigmented.)
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Methuselah Center – A baptismal (cellular rejuvenation) center. In the Bible, Methuselah is the oldest person ever to have lived.
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Cassius Otto De Haan – Owner of Baillieu Bioengineering – A spy for ChronoGen Inc. who infiltrated E3 in order to find out who the leaders were in order to bring them down. He spent three years trying to become a member and became one two years prior to current events in this book. Two months prior to current events, when he’d su
pposedly found out who the leaders were, he called for an extraction. Travis was the Inquisitor who brought him in. Cassius was killed in prison while waiting for ChronoGen to give him a new identity.
Cassius Otto De Haan murdered in prison while awaiting trial.
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Table of Contents
PART 1: The Devil of Pueblo
1: Francine’s Fulfillment
2: Chaos Monkeys & Coffee
3: Eeyoric Self
4: Shady My Ass
5: Inquisitioned
6: Don’t Let This Man Vomit on Me
7: Magnum Maelstrom
8: Myth & Legends Bloodline
9: The Peach Pit
10: Bible Thumping
11: Death Comes Knocking
Part 2: A Murderous Quest
12: Shooting Star
13: Liquid of a Privileged Life
14: Close Encounter 1
15: Whining & Dining
16: Do I Look Like a Fucking Lifeguard?
17: Reluctant Partners
18: Mocha Momma
19: Big Black Bear
20: Malfunctioning Machinery
Part 3: Death & I
21: Questioning Celestials
22: Close Encounter II
23: Lightning Strikes
24: Crazy Confrontations
25: Upgrade
26: Phoenix Rising
27: Kali & Death
28: Care to Tango?
29: Death is Dead
30: Eat Her Heart Out
31: Kama Catastrophe
32: A Proposition
33: Aftermath
Glossary and Dramatis Personae
