The Outer Sphere

“And if you’ll look to your left, you’ll see the Mythic core bin, where the priceless unsprouted dungeon cores are collected as they keep tumbling in through our Receiving Portal.

Garth pointed to a big dumpster looking thing where Cores were rolling in at the rate of about one every hour or two. The bottom of the massive dumpster was filled with cores.

Garth took a page from his own book and used the first three Mythic Cores they managed to find in the asteroid belt to make space-worthy Von Neumann probes. 1 whole, one powdered, to create the first one, and one to create a receiver.

Garth liked to call them Stanleys.

Stanleys took the form of jellyfish looking creatures, with a tough, clear outer membrane that puffed out in response to the vacuum of space. Inside was a microcosm of life, like a closed terrarium, that supported all the functions necessary to keep the creature alive. The membrane let light through, allowing the inner plant to flourish.

Dangling below it were root-tentacles for grabbing Mythic cores and holding onto space-rock, bringing it up to the creature’s bottom, where it would either be teleported or slowly absorbed into the microcosm to fuel further growth.

Once the Stanley’s life cycle was over and it had enough raw material, it would grow thousands of babies inside itself, where it was warm and protected from space, before exploding violently, scattering aforementioned babies all throughout the asteroid belt.

Unfortunately Stanleys weren’t capable of interstellar flight. Matter of fact, they’d only harvested the tiniest amount of the asteroid belt itself.

Garth didn’t really design much of an ability to defend themselves either, as simply existing in space without dying and advanced teleportation abilities took everything he had. If they ever ran into more advanced probes, they would die, but that didn’t bother Garth too much.

Because the creatures were mindless, harmless, and couldn’t exist planet-side, he had felt more comfortable installing a magical backdoor that allowed him to control them.

The very next Mythic core went to adding that backdoor to his new Status band, allowing him to direct the Stanleys to go where they needed to be rather than spreading randomly while there were still only a couple hundred of them. There was one other ability, the ability to teleport the asteroid they were clinging onto to a location of Garth’s choosing, from any distance, and across realities, in exchange for their lives. Garth was going to build some planets.

It was well within the realm of possibility for them all to die out without finding another asteroid to breed on, so Garth made sure they were spread out real good, to give them a fighting chance.

Clunk.

As Garth was showing Caitlyn and the eggheads around, a Mythic Core dropped through the receptacle with all the pomp and ceremony of a soda coming out of a vending machine, dropping into the massive bin.

Halo swooped down out of nowhere, clutching a burlap sack with four stones while six more formed a tight grip around a trowel. It came down and started filling the sack with Mythic Core.

“What is that?” Caitlyn.

Several of the free stones of Halo turned to face them…sort of.

“Halo, this is Caitlyn, Caitlyn, this is Halo.”

Caitlyn waved and Halo bobbed acknowledgement, before returning to its duty.

“Halo’s our resident improvement specialist. Mark your name in its time sheet, and it’ll improve anything you want. You two will get to know each other well while you’re designing weapons systems for the Fertility. What are you up to right now anyway, Halo?”

Halo made a crude drawing of Bel with its available stones.

“It’s working on the command room.” Garth interpreted. A moment later, the sack was full, and Halo bobbed away, with some thirty cores in its sack.

“This is impossible,” Ixel said quietly, leaning over the edge of the dumpster to inspect the thousands of Cores littering the bottom of the huge container.

“Not impossible, Just unlikely.” Garth said, peering over her shoulder.

“I need you and your team to start mutating cores. Think you can do that?”

“Well, with this many, yes, but the mutation is…difficult to control.”

“You mean random, don’t you?”

“So far, that seems to be the case,” The Corio scientist admitted.

“Go nuts,” Garth said. “Mutate, identify, then label and store as many cores as you can. One of your goals is to find a way to control the change, but if you can’t, then it’s my responsibility to find something to do with them.”

“As you wish.” She said quietly, shaking her head. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”

“Course you haven’t.” Garth said. “Elves trained people not to look up a long time ago. Moving on!”

Garth ushered them away from the cores, and showed the eggheads to their new laboratory, letting them know where Halo’s time sheet was. Somehow the time sheet system worked, despite the original design being Garth’s Purpose only. Halo had become more self-determining than he expected.

Garth didn’t worry about it. Matter of fact, he wouldn’t worry about it. Thinking bad thoughts about Halo was the equivalent of shooting yourself in the foot. Halo was awesome, ‘nuff said.

Garth took Caitlyn to the Command Center, where Bel’s Core was surrounded by five boosting crystals made from pure Mythic Core. It was part of the reason the ship had the chops to steal large sections of land.

“So this is the communications section,” Garth said, pointing to a series of screens that showed so-so pictures of the goings-on around the outside of the ship.

“I know you’re a fan of divination magic, so improving communications will be your second task.” Garth said. “Your first, more immediate task is to design some really big fuckin’ guns. There’re ladders leading to large bays along the equator of the ship, where I’ve stored a lot of the raw materials you’re going to need, steel and all that. There’s no workstation yet, but I put a laser cutter and a heaping helping of cores in Bay A-1, to help you get started.”

Garth leaned forward and punched in the number on the simple communications array, and got a picture of a massive, empty bay, big enough to house a small town. in the corner of the gigantic room was a tiny speck, the laser cutter, sitting beside a literal mountain of different flavors of ore.

“That…” Caitlyn looked at the screen, uncomprehending. “That’s too big. There’s no way I could build something like that in my lifetime, let alone…” She glanced down at the map of the ship.

“Let alone hundreds of them!” Caitlyn was shivering, seemingly overwhelmed.

“Caitlyn.” Garth said sternly, forcing her to look at him.

“I built this place in six months, with little more than a couple well-placed rocks and happy thoughts. You are my apprentice. You’re going to build a belt of guns in three months.”

She started shaking harder.

“Want a hint?”

She nodded.

“Focus less on building one giant gun and more on creating something that can build giant guns in a matter of minutes. Bonus points if it can build other things too. Don’t be afraid to ask around for ideas.”

Maybe she would land on the idea of a 3-D printer, maybe she wouldn’t, but lighting a fire under a kid’s ass was a good way of encouraging them to grow.

“Understood?” Garth asked.

Caitlyn nodded.

“Alright, and…” She flinched as Garth took the palm sized disk out of her vest pocket and set it on the Comms panel.

“I’ll give you your little voyeur disc back when you build your first rail-gun.”

“You designed it,” she muttered.

“That was old Garth!” Garth said. “New Garth is appalled at old Garth’s lack of vision! A real voyeur disc should also be able to let you hear them and their thoughts, lower inhibitions, and implant suggestions!”

Caitlyn’s jaw dropped at Garth’s brilliance.

“That sounds evil.”

“Eh,” Garth said, waggling his fingers. “It toes the line.”

Alicia entered the room, and Garth mentally readied his squirt bottle. She gave Caitlyn a reserved glance that wasn’t a spray-able offence before addressing Garth.

“The Gate is spinning up. We should be ready to go in half an hour.

“Half an hour?” Garth whined. “that’s like…half a whole hour.”

“And you wish a machine that can create new gates on the spot and send a ship the size of a mountain range through multiple dimensions into completely uncharted territory with no chance of sending us into a sun or black hole, asteroid belt, meteor shower, solar flare, or any of a thousand things that could kill us…would do it faster than in half an hour?”

“Be nice, wouldn’t it?” Garth said, grabbing the voyeur disc and taking a moment to appreciate Alicia’s posture before he tucked the disc in his pocket, lack of skin contact shutting off the effect.

“Bel, could you let everyone know every five minutes, then do a countdown for the last ten seconds? I don’t want anyone getting hurt like last time.”

Last time, old man Beyate had bonked his head from the sudden teleportation, and Garth had realized he needed to warn everyone before he did things.

The large brown woman gave him a salute and began speaking into the P.A. system with a mom-like tone.

“The Fertility will be relocating in thirty minutes, sweethearts.” Her voice echoed through the supermassive ship, reaching everyone at once.

“Carrie and Fenson, stop playing in that cave and go find your mom and help her get everything ready to go. Buchard, your shelves aren’t safe, take them down before we go. No, Kinnei, you’re not going to be able to finish that before we go, just set it aside.”

“Do you think it’s weirder that the ship can see everyone at once, or that she’s taken a role as all the ship’s children’s hot new stepmom?” Garth asked Idly.

“Still need to know our destination,” Al said, keeping him on track.

“Right.” Garth tugged on the dimensional string that Origin had taught him to look for and the book manifested in his hand, the spatial pocket around it unraveling.

Garth flipped the book open.

“Where are the drugs?”

They are grown on several planets, the closest, and most lightly defended, is the Dan-Ui controlled planet of Kurm, where millions of their hopeful cultivators go on pilgrimage to petition for the right to advance to the third tier. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villany.

“Castavelle created you before A New Hope came out, didn’t he?” Garth asked, raising an eyebrow.

Time is an illusion.

“Well, that’s ominous.”

Garth briefly considered time paradoxes before the hair on his skin stood up. Nope, let’s not fall down that particular rabbit hole. The idea of predestiny gave Garth the heeby-jeebies, and it wasn’t aided by the fact that Jim truly had sent him a message through time, despite all the events in between that could have derailed it.

“Anyway, can you give me the exact coordinates?”

…I don’t want to.

“Give me the coordinates.”

The page in front of him began to spill forward with dense alphanumerical script, pinning down the sphere, hemisphere, galaxy, solar system and planet with excruciating detail, because nothing less than that would get them where they needed to go.

The numbers came to a halt, slowly shifting as their relative position did too.

“Awesome, thanks,” Garth tore the page out and handed it to Al. “Feed this to the Gate, and we’ll be on our way.” In his hand, Origin let out a high-pitched whine of pain.

Al took the paper and headed off.

Godsdamnit, that hurts!

“You can self-repair.” Garth said. “You’re fine.”

It’s like having your ball hairs yanked out all at once!

“Castavelle has gotten a wax before?” Garth asked before glancing up and noticing Caitlyn still watching him, unsure of whether or not to leave.

“Here, I’ve got something that will make both of you feel better.” Garth said, offering Origin to Caitlyn.

“Caitlyn, meet Origin. It’ll help you with the know how to get your project done.”

Origin, this is Caitlyn, she’ll help you feel better by holding you against her chest unconsciously because you’re just a book. Plus she’s a perv who’ll probably use you for something morally questionable.

Your terms are acceptable. Origin wrote in his exposed page.

GARTH, SOMETHING ITCHES. Grass’s overbearing mental voice echoed in his mind.

***

Knurt Correll waited in the lobby of the Elder’s palacial manor, to break the news that the Black tide Mercenary company had not only failed to secure their prey, but that aforementioned prey had escaped, along with the entire valley suspected to be it’s home base.

That was not a second tier level magic, Knurt thought, his toes bouncing his knees nervously as he waited. People whose classes were third tier and above were rare enough. One in millions managed to get that high in their lifetime, but what Knurt had just witnessed, he didn’t think it would be possible even for a Seventh-tier immortal like Elder Dragus.

Not that I’ll tell him that, Knurt thought. He was going to state the facts, offer a refund and wash his hands of this mess. Mercenaries had to know when to back out of a contract that was too big for them.

The floating…thing blocked out the sun, the gods-damned sun!

A stately corio woman approached, her posture elegant as she entered the room.

“Good afternoon. I am Teranda, I’ll guide you to Elder Dragus.”

Knurt rose to his feet and bowed politely. Never hurts to be extra polite with the clients. Especially when they can kill you with a thought.

The Corio in front of him was one such person.

She motioned for him to follow her, and lead him down a series of long halls paved with smooth white stone. Despite not seeing any servants, Knurt couldn’t make out any dirt on the smooth stone that had been polished to a mirror shine.

Do I really look that nervous? He thought, glancing down at his own reflection.

“Here we are,” Teranda said, pointing to a door. “You may enter, I will wait outside.”

Knurt swallowed and opened the door, revealing a cozy little office, where the elder was sitting in front of a rather large desk.

“So,” the elder said, hands folded, his bushy white brows drawn together in a scowl. “How’d it go?”

Please, by all the gods, just let me get out of this alive, Knurt prayed as he began his report.

Macronomicon