Histaff

by Andries Louws

  Douglas carefully trickles mana into the freezing spell shape. The air softly hugs his bones as he controls the forming icicle. No longer roughly pouring mana into the shape, Douglas feels the workings and flow of the mana as it is guided by the formation. He learns a few more tidbits as he slowly feeds the spell, but his main focus is on control this time.

  Time passes as the sliver of ice grows, but the ceiling does not start flashing red nor does the wind around Douglas start roaring towards him. Katare even looks up from where she is slumped across his shoulders. The spell shape in Douglas’ mind is no longer a mere thought, the care with which he is casting the spell seems to bleed out into the world around him.

  Douglas has one hand raised, his palm aimed towards the red obstacle, his other around one of Katare’s still injured legs. Before his outstretched arm, a formation twists itself into existence. Blue lines and shimmering runes paint a rather complex picture. The resulting spell, a clear cone of geometric perfection, hangs a metre away from his palm. Katare stares with open mouth as she sees magic done in such a clear manner for the first time.

  Douglas only notices that the spell shape he is thinking of is projected in the outside world when he hears Katare gasp. Almost faltering, he manages to will the blue boxes away before he loses focus. He continues pouring mana into the spell, growing the perfect piece of ice. Then Douglas decides it is enough and softly pushes his hand forward. The cone of cold leisurely starts moving forwards, red slurry and bone freezing when it comes near. Douglas walks behind the floating spell, stepping over and through the crumbling hole that forms in the partially freezing amalgamation.

  Douglas walks through ten metres of frozen and shattering slime, the spell leaving a round, frozen hole through bone and slime. It stops in the air as Douglas stops willing it forward. He then walks past it and turns around. Grinning at the ice tunnel he formed, Douglas cuts off the flow of mana.

  The remaining ice all turns to air instantly.

  Douglas goes flying again, this time shooting ahead instead of backwards. Katare starts screaming but manages to get a hold of her vocal functions after the first time they both bounce off of the wall. She somehow manages to keep hold of Douglas as they start spinning madly. They narrowly avoid one of the high balconies, instead, careening away from that side after slamming through a series of hanging signs.

  Douglas starts trying to grasp a hold of anything to arrest his rather impressive amount of vertical momentum. He briefly thinks about how lucky he is that the concussive explosion sent him straight into the hall instead of right into the wall. Turning away from the remnants of the splattered mutated dog that had been flying just beside the duo, Douglas tries to look at where he is going.

  A random scattering of eyes set in thick bone plates stares in his direction. Then the mushy remains of the unfortunate dog splatters across the bone beast’s face.

  Douglas tells himself he saw nothing, and the duo continues bouncing through the mall. Their violent but fast trip comes to an end with a long slide across suspiciously clean flooring. Douglas doesn’t dare to move a single, splintered bone as he listens for a reaction. The bone beast seems to be agitated by sound, and the air explosion and consequent rains of debris must have made enough noise to drive a thousand reworked monsters mad.

  Only after all of the clattering has subsided and the calm shuffle of smaller Histaff monsters continues does Douglas dare to turn his skull. Although his skull happened to land pointed downwards, he manages to catch a glimpse of the hall he came from. The bone beast is nowhere to be found, but he does spot a faint trail of dog bits that leads further down the mall. Only then does Douglas dare to move around while putting his, once again, shattered legs together. His skull has stayed whole during the tumble, but it takes him a while before his legs and arms are in a functioning state again.

  Standing up, Douglas remembers he has a passenger sticking to his back. He peels the woman from his suit and lays her on the ground. Staring at the collection of minced meat and pale skin, he confirms that her skull is intact still. Piling the few bits that have fallen off on top of the mangled woman, Douglas starts silently searching around.

  A few minutes of rummaging through the stores later, he returns while carrying a large piece of cloth. One of the stores nearby turned out to be a clothing shop that has some supplies inside the building itself. Every single item seemed rather weak and cheap to Douglas. The fact that even the oblivious skeleton recognised the low quality of these items speaks for itself.

  Douglas fashions a crude form of sack from the alien piece of clothing. His first idea had been to encase the woman in a nWear suit, but he only found suits with too many or too few limbs in the emergency compartments of the stores.

  Hauling the silent sack of glowing woman over his shoulder, Douglas continues trekking through the mall. He patiently walks past shining billboards, remnants of improvised barricades, and Histaff beasts. He decisively rolls around in some slime whenever he starts getting bothered by the random Histaff beings. He also manages to resist the lure of food and vending machines whenever he walks past one that’s still lit up. He takes an occasional peek inside the bag he is carrying, finding a pair of dull eyes staring at him each time.

  A long while of walking later, he stumbles because Katare moved suddenly. He empties the sack on the floor and sees the animated face of Katare’s lively version staring at him. “I’m still not moving. I did not just get horribly injured again. There is no suited skeleton looking at me, no. Just do whatever. I’m not here.”

  Douglas picks her up and puts the dirty woman over his shoulders. Walking onwards and ignoring Katare’s feeble protests, he thinks of what to ask. “Protect my skull. How?”

  “No. I just told you, right? I’m not taking active action anymore. This way, I can plead an inactive stance, and nobody will be able to hold me accountable for anything. Can’t get thrown in jail and can’t get sued if I do that. Inaction in the face of incomprehensibility is a defendable strategy.”

  Douglas mulls this over for a bit. “Protect my skull, how?”

  Each time the skeleton uses the voice projection feature, it sounds a bit smoother. The racial trait turned out to be a small spell shape permanently engraved in the centre of his mana source, an area he can put thoughts into. His first attempt at speaking was done by throwing the mental equivalent of a massive protest signboard at the small spell in his forehead. With each sentence he says, he learns a bit more control.

  “Protect my skull, how?”

  Katare snaps from her sullen silence by the fiftieth time Douglas utters the same words. She glares at the back of his helmet for a while, only speaking when Douglas is about to repeat the question for the fifty-first time, “It’s just bone? No augments, infusion, or grafts?”

  Douglas closes his mouth, retracts the thought he was about to feed into his speech spell-trait and nods. It takes another minute of silence for the skull to realize that Katare did not see him nod inside his suit. “Bone.”

  “I'm not a crafter, maker, or developer, but I guess you could coat it in some patterned alloy?”

  “What is patter alloy?”

  “It’s a patterned alloy. Speak properly. It’s a way to print materials that emphasises one aspect.”

  “What is one aspect.”

  Katare is rolling her eyes in irritation at high speed but continues answering anyway. “Strength, conduction, isolation, cohesion, whatever aspect you want to increase. Protecting your skull from destruction … Probably focus on hardness, toughness, or strength. Bone can be superheated as long as it doesn’t come into contact with oxygen.”

  “What is condu-”

  “Shut up for one second, please!” Exasperation drips from Katare’s voice. “Just be silent for once. Stop being so incredibly annoying. Anyway, go into that store.”

  Douglas follows her pointing finger and sees a blank wall with a rather solid looking door in the middle. He walks up to it and passively watches as Kata
re presses a freshly regenerated and slender hand to the frame. Her hand lights up, and the door vanishes into the metallic wall without a sound. Douglas steps inside and lets go of Katare’s legs when she starts struggling. She stands by herself and unsteadily makes her way over to the bare metal counter.

  The shop they are in looks nothing like a store. Douglas is standing in a small room with an empty desk. Everything is naked metal, not a single decoration in sight. Katare rapidly goes through a holographic menu at such speeds that Douglas doesn’t even bother trying to follow her actions. Seconds later, she steps through the desk as it folds away for her. Douglas follows her closely and silently.

  Katare steps through the desk and back wall into a luxurious space. Richly decorated walls, ornate chairs, and loads of items and objects Douglas has no knowledge of litter the cosy yet stylish place. Katare walks over to a reclining chair and sits down with a long sigh. “Thank the warp they have a humanoid salon here. Full cleaning and do-up. All the bells and whistles.”

  The mirror in front of Katare flashes red. She opens her closed eyes when nothing happens and glares at the mirror. “Not enough power? Wait… How long now?”

  Katare gestures in the air as the mirror’s screen flashes with diagrams, text, and pictures. “Singularity take me … What're the reserves? Full power needed for life support? Yeah, get rid of the scrubbers for now, authorize override Auchinfon. Seriously, that’s not enough? Peezes then… Great. Temperature can fluctuate a bit. Just a wash?” Katare groans loudly. “Fine.”

  Arms fold from the chair as the mirror goes blank again. One of the mechanical limbs travels across her body, sucking up the few remaining scraps of cloth and all the dirt sticking to her skin wherever it travels. Other arms start kneading her flesh while other arms spray all kinds of liquids and foams on the relaxing woman. More groans escape from her mouth as the automated salon gives her a deep tissue massage and cleanse.

  Douglas stands patiently, watching the odd happenings. The ceiling folds out in more items as glowing tools follow the woman’s curves. A fifteen-minute long, complex process unfolds as her body is subjected to a wide variety of cleansers, scrubs, inspections, boosts, and more. This is finalized by a large display that drops from the ceiling, showing her a large number of canisters. She stares at the items for a long time before pointing at one. The canister is taken from the rack by another arm, which starts spraying it over her body.

  “Okay, done, and I nearly managed to forget about you. A shame.” Cleaned, washed, dried, painted, and clothed, Katare looks like a new being. A practical pair of hot pink slacks, combined with a bubbly green sweater and a black ribbon wound across her entire body have transformed the women into something unrecognizable. She looks at Douglas, contempt and disgust radiating from her expression now that she is clean and clothed once again. She somehow manages to look down on the much taller skeleton despite barely coming up to his chest.

  “I’ll make my way out of station myself. Don’t bother me anymore.”

  Douglas keeps looking at her with a slight hint of curiosity. He follows her as she struts outside, the black ribbon randomly shifting across her legs as she walks through the nondescript entrance room. She pauses in front of the exit, taking a deep breath and shaking her limbs out. She casts one last contemptuous glance at Douglas standing silently behind her and steps through the door.

  A mutated beast - a combination between an iguana and a squirrel with bulging muscles - bites her left leg off. Then a red slime plunges down on them both, smothering woman and beast as it falls from the ceiling.

  Her scream is cut off mercifully quick. Douglas just looks at the entire thing happening with an odd feeling in his heart. The vitriol that had started spewing from her mouth when she was clean again didn’t bother Douglas. He was simply curious about how she was going to leave by herself. Seeing her defeated one step out of the door is both disappointing and gratifying to the skeleton.

  Chapter Twelve – The Best Laid Schemes

  Douglas carefully casts another phlogistonation spell and slowly freezes the red slime. The amalgamation seems too busy with slowly undoing all the work the fully automated salon just did to bother with preserving its own life. Shards of red ice shatter as Katare is slowly revealed. Instead of struggling furiously like previously, she’s just curled up in a fetal position while crying. Douglas finishes removing the last blocks of ice while wiping away the majority of red slime. He then grabs her hand and keeps walking.

  Katare seems content with being dragged behind the slogging skeleton. She’s just mutely staring ahead, the only moving parts on her entire body being her eyes. She looks around a bit, dull eyes taking in the changing environment as Douglas drags her through piles of rubble and across slime covered stretches of floor. She doesn't even react when Douglas spends an hour going through all the stores, nor does she flinch when Douglas slowly and meticulously puts a nWear suit around her limp form.

  “Just bring the other one back–” These words flow out of her mouth just before Douglas puts her helmet on. The suit somehow fits perfectly, the limbs shortening to fit her smaller frame. She looks at Douglas, her own glowing eyes boring lifelessly into his barely visible socketed flames behind his reflective visor. Her own reflection overlays his head, giving the illusion that she is talking to a distorted version of herself.

  “No. That one is dumb. Tell me about printers and patterned alloys,” Douglas replies. His voice is once again smoother. There is a cadence and rhythm in his pronunciation now, an odd and slightly creepy reflection of her own way of speech.

  Katare sighs deeply, actually breathing for the first time in hours. “Fine. I think I remember some stuff from my basic education. What do you want to achieve?”

  “Hmm, achieve…” Douglas mulls over the new word for a bit. He locks the helmet around Katare’s head and drags her to her feet. “Make my skull … not able to destroy.”

  Katare just shakes her head as she follows him. “There are lots of traditionally indestructible patterns. Any form of double bonded stasis metal will require a specialized lab to destruct. These materials are rarely used because of their downsides, though. They all have a quirk or potential reaction that prevents them from being very useful. Double lattice diamond, for example, has great hardness and strength. It also doesn’t block radiation like most others, and it’s not very heat resistant. A few million degrees is all that you need to get through it eventually.”

  Katare pauses here, waiting for a reaction. Douglas is too busy understanding the influx of new data and meaning to really bother with asking questions. His understanding of this subject matter is nonexistent, and it takes all his mental powers to absorb the large flow of new information.

  “Carbon wired steel - or ceesteel - is widely used in armour plating. You just can’t coat something with it as it blocks everything. Even gravitic waves don't really propagate through the standard hex covalent bonded stuff. The need to leave gaps for communication channels reduces ceesteel’s general usage to armour plating instead of full suits.” Katare’s slightly tinny voice sounds from the air modulators woven throughout the suit she is wearing as she lectures nearly forgotten knowledge to the skeleton walking in front of her.

  “Maybe you should go for a biological compound? There are tonnes of those. Loads of them are found each time a new divergent evolutionary path is discovered. Cheap too, but they all have very specialized uses. Any of the open hydrogen-carbon compounds can be of use, I guess. Weave it in a single chain pattern around anything and it will survive all kinds of physical impacts. Not so good against heat and exotic radiations, though.”

  Douglas is still way too busy with the information overload. A small part of his mind has realized that the talkative version of Katare is accompanied by a boosted system, but he is too busy processing new info to really bother with trivia like that.

  “Any of the truly good materials are either restricted under patent enforced by military action, too energy intensive t
o be viable, or just not available on a backward shit system like the one that this station is in. I mean, those clothes hailed as new fashion in the salon just now were old rags in the central systems when I went for a nap. I’m not sure how long ago that was, but I’m guessing a few hundred years at least. There is just no way that anything properly advanced is available here.”

  They continue moving after this bit. Katare obviously has dredged up all the knowledge she can remember, and Douglas is still mulling things over. They keep walking through the mall, neither of them saying a single word.

  “And what is a printer?” asks Douglas a few hours later.

  A peal of tinkling laughter sounds out from Katare. The sudden question totally caught her off guard. She had been reminiscing about high society near the core, wondering if all those inbred aristocrats are still around when Douglas asks a question that even a toddler knows the answer to. “Hehe, a printer, it makes stuff from other stuff? Pushes around elemental particles into new and exciting shapes, I guess.” That last sentence has the distinct rhythm of a jingle, a hint of a melody making its way into the manner she pronounces the information.

  Douglas nods deeply, making sure that his helmet bobs along with his head movement, and continues walking. Katare seems unable to bear the silence. The only sounds she hears being the shuffling of cheap spacesuit against cheap flooring, the slowly dying systems of the station, and the oddly peacefully patrolling Histaff beasts.

  “There’s also the many, many carbon compounds. Those are all open source and totally customisable, so that’s great if you don’t have a lot of credit.” Katare looks at Douglas’ loosely filled gloves. “Or any identifiable implant, for that matter. Amorphous metals are nice, but the good versions need a central generator to keep the layered covalent bonds going or they will revert to standard weak stuff after a while. There are loads more, but those are the basics.” Katare does not tell Douglas that she can’t quite remember the rest.