by Vowron Prime
“All right, well, nothing really new there. What’s the good news?”
“I am not sure if I would consider this good, but the parasite has invaded even more of your mind than a fully-indoctrinated candidate. By all rights, you should have no free will at this point, so the fact that you are still your own self indicates that it may be encountering issues with the takeover. Or perhaps it is affecting you in a different way than originally intended.”
“Because of my time in the mutagenic lake?”
“Likely so. Your brain has mutated in ways I have never seen before. Similarly, I believe it to be a combination of those mutations and the parasite’s influence that is responsible for your unique telekinetic abilities.”
“But the damn thing’s still trying to take over my mind, right?”
Nova’s complexion darkened. “Yes. While it may take longer than expected, your sense of self will eventually be no more.”
“Hey, at least now we know we have some breathing room to sort this mess out. Any other ‘good’ news, or am I all tapped out?”
“Well, the mutagenic water you have been consuming has made several alarming changes to your body, though we should be able to undo much of the damage with your autodoc technology. Of immediate concern is the extreme congestion it is causing in your arteries. I should be able to program Sareen’s medical nanomachines to fix whatever damage that might have caused. It will take several treatments, but they should eventually repair that damage along with the many blood clots present, and will actively help heal wounds after that, as well. Past that, we may have to operate to remove some of the tumors that appear to be manifesting, but thus far, they all seem benign.”
“Damn. If you’d told me about all of this back on earth, I’d have written myself off.”
“Advanced alien, remember?” she said, flashing a brilliant smile. “And one other thing. The parasite is designed to influence you, but you should be able to influence it as well. The very fact that it is embedded in your brain means it is affected by your emotions and thoughts to a degree.”
“You’re saying I can fight back?”
She shook her head. “No, it is likely impossible to alter the takeover, but you should be able to influence the direction it takes with respect to your abilities. If you strongly concentrate on a certain ability, you may find the parasite attempting to fulfill that wish.”
“So, what, I’m just supposed to constantly repeat that ‘I think I can’ in the back of my head?”
That got a giggle out of Nova, which in turn made him smile. She acted so innocent at times that it was hard to believe she’d lived for centuries.
“Guess I’ll give it a shot. Nothing to lo—”
“Ahem, ahem. SANCTUARY TO MY SHITTY EXCUSE OF A BROTHER. WHERE THE FUCK ARE YOU?”
Nina’s voice blared all over the base via the intercom system’s loudspeakers, prompting the two to cringe.
“Jesus Christ, that girl,” MC swore, leaping off the bed to mash the transmit button on the wall. He replied in kind. “WELL, YOU WERE SLEEPING, SO YOUR CONSIDERATE BROTHER DECIDED NOT TO WAKE YOU.”
“YOU MEAN UNCONSCIOUS, ASSHOLE!”
He burst out laughing.
Oh, how I’ve missed this.
“We’re at the medbay, we’ll be right up.”
Several minutes later, the trio regrouped at Nina’s bedroom. There were no such guest suites in the original plan, of course—he’d split the crew quarters into partitions to give his visitors some privacy. Of course, Nina was pretty much the only one who ever came over, and even those visits were few and far between.
“Why’d you take one of the guest suites? My master bedroom’s a lot bigger.”
“I dunno, it just didn’t feel right. And I wanted to personalize the place,” she said, gesturing to the various maps and missing person news articles that dotted the room’s metal walls. She’d really converted Sanctuary into her own private detective HQ. “Should I get your girlfriend a room next to mine, or will she be sleeping with you?”
“Nova will have her own room,” MC replied. “And as I said, we’re not together.”
“Uh-huh. Then why’s she blushing?”
“I am not blushing!” Nova replied, blushing.
“Ignore her, Nova. She’s just messing with you.”
Nina flashed a devilish smirk. “But more importantly, Magnus, what you said back at the hangar earlier… What you did.” The trepidation was evident in her voice. “I mean, aliens? Teleportation? I mean, are you sure?”
MC couldn’t help but laugh. “I had the same exact reaction, sis. Insane, isn’t it? I’ll tell you what. Why don’t you and I go outside for a bit? Let me show you what I can do. I think that ought to clarify things. Nova, you coming with?”
“Yes, I would like to gather some rock samples to judge the stability of our surroundings. We may need to reinforce parts of the crater walls to take Sanctuary’s weight longer term.”
Nina stared at Nova, eyes narrowed with suspicion. “So… you’re telling me those wings are really real? You can’t take them off?”
“They are permanently attached, yes.”
“So can you fly with them?” Nina asked, running her fingers through Nova’s feathers. “Damn, they’re so soft.”
Nova chuckled. “Magnus asked me the same question. Unfortunately, they are merely decorative. They were added when I was… captured. To please whichever Zevan I happened to be sold to, I suppose.” Her tone fell as she spoke. “Most Zevan-type Dyn use holographic projectors to simulate their wings. As you can see, real ones are quite inconvenient.”
“So weird. And did she just call you Magnus? You don’t let anyone other than me call you that! What gives?”
“It’s, uh, it’s a long story. C’mon, you want to go outside or what?”
The three friends walked down the long corridor and descended the metal staircase to the hangar.
He took the opportunity to make a quick detour to the armory to drop off the Dyn microwave emitter he’d picked up, swapping it out for one of the thousands of rail rifles that adorned the massive, L-shaped room’s walls. A fresh battery and a couple of magazines had him feeling a little less naked. He also picked up a rail-driven sidearm, which snapped onto the magnetic holster of his armor’s leg. The rifle hung on his back off a sling.
Walking over to one corner, he came to the half-dozen cybernetic arms that sat neatly on display. Each had a different use. One even looked like a genuine human limb—that was for formal occasions. Predictably, he almost never wore that one. Another was gargantuan, best suited for more direct ops where heavier firepower was required, though its bulk prevented it from fitting into any of his powered suits.
In the end, he decided to keep his current biomechanical arm. He wasn’t even sure if he could swap back to the others anymore, given how different their control mechanisms were. It’d taken so much effort to adapt to the new arm; he wasn’t keen on retraining his mind yet again. Besides, none of those arms could change their shape on demand.
He willed the arm to condense, becoming sleeker, slimmer, more refined. It responded by liquifying, re-forming into something somewhat resembling his desired shape. Not perfect, but there was always time for improvement.
Feeling pretty good about his arm situation, he stepped out of the armory to find a chatting pair of girls. Or more accurately, one angel and one amoeba. A sight he was doing his best to overlook.
“I don’t remember those things being there before.” Nina pointed to a corner of the hangar, now occupied by almost a dozen massive black objects.
“Yeah, we may have teleported in some goodies along with Sanctuary to help us out.”
“Are those satellites?”
MC nodded smugly.
“How the heck are you going to get them into space?”
A shit-eating grin plastered his face. “I guess that’s for me to know and you to find out.”
He walked up to them and held one on either side
by the waist before teleporting them all to the hangar bay’s entrance.
“Okay, this is so damn bizarre. I feel like I’m dreaming.”
“Nina, he is capable of far more than just this. There will be no end to your shock if you are surprised by this.”
His sister laughed nervously in response.
There was a personnel entrance beside the massive hangar bay doors, but as they walked up to it, they found nothing but rock. To fix that, MC relocated a corridor through that connected back to the large dark tunnel he’d bored earlier.
“How the hell did you—you’re telling me you can teleport anything? That’s so over-powered! Who the fuck balanced this game?” Nina quipped.
“This is real life, princess. There’s no such thing as balance. There are only winners and losers, and I prefer to be on the winning side.”
A few more teleports had them back at the entrance of the tunnel he’d dug earlier at the edge of the crater’s floor.
“Magnus, what are those sounds? Are you sure it’s safe to go outside without the powered suits? Isn’t everything irradiated out there?”
Scrapes and screams echoed from outside the makeshift semicircular wall he’d erected.
“Still don’t believe me, huh? Well, you’ll see soon enough.”
Nova disapproved of his explanation. “Do you want your sister to faint again? Nina, there are animals out there. They are fearsome, mutated beings, but there is no need to fear. Magnus is more than capable of protecting us from them all. I have witnessed him destroy them en masse with impunity.”
Nina didn’t look entirely convinced, but nodded, clinging to MC a bit more tightly than before.
“Magnus, you will want to remove this, if at all possible,” said Nova, pointing to the semicircular wall he’d erected to keep the werebeasts at bay. “The Insights satellite system may eventually detect it.”
“Right, I’d almost forgotten about that. I’ll dismantle it on our way back.”
MC walked past the mouth of the tunnel to gaze up at the sheer rock face. Using Midar in conjunction with the relocator, he created a sizable ledge in the wall several hundred feet up, then picked up the girls before teleporting them all onto it.
“Oh-ohhh, my god! What in the world!?” Nina reeled at the sudden experience of being transported sky-high, but at twenty feet across and about the same in depth, there wasn’t much risk of them falling off the platform.
The vantage gave them a sweeping view of both the crater floor, its denizens, and the tall rim that soared high above them. As a precaution, MC fused reinforcing beams of rock into their miniature platform and erected guardrails around the perimeter.
“Jesus, that magic’s pretty handy, huh?” Nina exclaimed as she saw the stone appear out of nowhere.
“I dunno if I’d call this magic, to be honest. Don’t worry, though. Magic is real, and it’s about what you’d expect.”
“Ha… right…” she replied, carefully peering over the edge at the sea of beasts below. “This is insane. I just… This is all really hard to take in.” She sat down atop the platform, apparently unwilling to trust her sense of balance.
“Tell me about it. We’re not alone in the universe, Nina. Aliens exist, and they’re bad, bad news. All those animals down there? Genetic experimentations. The Dyn have been at this for a long-ass time, enslaving the local population before moving on to the next world.”
At first, Nina didn’t reply. When she did, her voice came out as a whisper.
“When you disappeared… I had no clue.”
“Well, yeah,” he snorted, taking a seat beside her. “Can’t exactly blame you for not jumping to alien abduction right off the bat.”
“Your buddies couldn’t believe you pulled off that Liberación rescue by yourself. All those kids in those pods? They all made it out. Every one. When we couldn’t find you, your friends joked that you’d broken one too many rules, that you’d gone to killthe gods in their divine realm because you were just too fucking badass for Earth.”
MC let out a laugh. “They said that, huh? What a bunch of assholes.”
“They did,” she replied with a nod. “And to think, this is where you were.” Turning to Nova, she pointed a thumb back at MC. “This guy has a huge white knight complex, you know?”
“I do not have a white knight complex! Don’t listen to her.”
Nina rolled her eyes, prompting a melodious laugh from Nova. “I have never seen you this happy, Magnus. You two complement each other so perfectly.”
MC thought he sensed a hint of jealousy there but ignored it.
“So, what’s this world like? Jesus, it still feels bizarre saying that.”
“It’s actually a lot like Earth, which makes sense, I guess, given that it’s hospitable for humans. You’ve got forests and deserts and arctic tundra here, but there are some fun differences. You can’t really see them from inside the crater, but this is a binary star system, for one. Two suns.”
“No way!” she exclaimed like a kid in a candy store.
“And that’s not all. The locals—the Zevan—they’re kind of an offshoot of humans, genetically manipulated by the Dyn, but apparently they somehow altered them in a way that lets them use magic. I’m talking spell incantations, fireballs, lightning, the works. Straight out of a fantasy, Nina.”
“Shit. Magnus, you have to show me. I mean, maybe I’m still dreaming and this is all a virtual reality simulation, but damn! When can we go explore?”
MC laughed, throwing his hands up. “Hold on, princess. We’re not exactly secure yet. For one, there’s a massive satellite network up there, and a nasty piece of work with an army behind him, who’d like nothing more than to see us dead. We’ve got some housekeeping to do before we can start venturing out. But I promise that you’ll get your chance, as soon as it’s safe.”
They traded banter for another few minutes before noticing that the suns had begun to set. Their underground escapades had put them on a totally abnormal sleep schedule, and both MC and Nova were ready for a rest.
“I’m ready when you are, Magnus. Just, maybe give me some time to think all of this through? Can’t exactly turn a girl’s world upside down and expect her to just accept it like that, y’know?”
“Take all the time in the world. There’s no need to rush things.”
MC moved them onto an aerial energy platform before relocating the ledge back into the mountainside. They then teleported to the tunnel entrance where he simultaneously took down the semicircular wall and sealed off the tunnel’s opening from the inside, plunging them into total darkness. MC brought out his magic orb, though it was mainly for Nina’s sake. Her reaction at witnessing real magic for the first time was a bit underwhelming, but then, who’d be impressed by a lantern?
Using Midar, he teleported them back into Sanctuary where they parted ways for the night, each with a mountain’s worth to think through. Nova went off to tinker with the fusion generator, while MC visited the hangar to put away the X42 powered suit that was still standing near the hangar’s entrance.
He swept a nostalgic glance across the place—the bunker that had remained empty for so long would soon be bustling with life. The foundation of their new Resistance. A true, proper rebellion, unlike what the Dyn fighters had mustered so far. A daunting task, yet one that now felt just a tiny bit less like a pipe dream.
With the suit back in its docking station at the back of the Hangar, MC returned to the armory, only to spy a certain maintenance closet off in the distance. He froze in fear for a second, but his decades of experience powered him through it.
A ridiculous phobia. There was no way anything would be behind those cold metal doors.
Right?
Still, he was never one to ignore a threat. He brought the rail rifle to bear, grabbing several grenades before approaching the door.
His hand grasped the door’s cold lever and in a singular motion he slammed it open, leaped back, and sighted down his rifle.
&
nbsp; Nothing… just brooms, buckets, disinfectants, and a distinct lack of hideous parasites. He slumped in relief.
“Magnus? The heck are you doing?”
The sudden voice made him jump, whipping the gun around, but he had enough sense not to point it at the gelatinous humanoid amoeba that was his own dear sister.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost!”
“It’s nothing. I thought you’d gone to bed.”
“After you showed me all that? How could I possibly sleep? Shit.”
She hoisted herself up atop one of the several workbenches, her legs dangling in the air.
“What happened to you? You’ve changed. And I’m not just talking about those veins and your skin color.”
“If you knew all the shit I’ve been through this past month, you’d be surprised I’ve only changed this much. But what about you? I mean, after you were captured. You okay?”
Nina’s gelatinous face made an expression he couldn’t read, but he quickly deployed Midar to compensate—angst, he glimpsed, but only for a second.
“C’mon, Magnus, you know I’m tougher than that. It was just one day in there. Some of those girls? I can’t even imagine.”
MC approached her, placing his hands on her shoulders. He touched his forehead against hers. A squishy sensation, but he ignored it.
“Hey, you don’t need to act tough in front of me. It may have been just a day, but I know what those pods do to people. I’m here for you, princess. Now and always, you hear me?”
Silent tears streaked down her eyes as she wrapped her arms around him.
“Thanks, Magnus,” she whispered. “But really, I’ll be fine. Gotta say, it was pretty bad not knowing where you were, but now? I think I’ll be okay now. I just need a goal, you know? Something to set my mind on so I can move past all this. It’s all so overwhelming. I mean, a new world? Aliens?! And that’s ignoring that bit about magic. Because I think my head would explode if I believed you on that one.”
