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Post by rvm45 on Jan 3, 2021 9:40:22 GMT -6
Friends,
Sometimes my imagination or enthusiasm for a story deserts me.
In this case, I have 3 or 4 chapters all mapped out in my head.
It is just that my toothache has came back with a VENGEANCE—and try to find a dentist ofver the Holidays—or even over a weekend.
The pain never goes, but the severity varies. There are times that I want to roll in the floor and paw at my head like a damned dog!
I have a nice chapter with about 500-words of being complete—and I wouldn't swear to finish it before my fated trip to the dentist…
SORRY!
…..RVM45
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Post by rvm45 on Jan 3, 2021 11:57:31 GMT -6
Friends,
I hope this is intelligible.
I co-wrote it, with my good friend and neighbor, Mister Oxycodone. I THINK that I edited it back to coherency...
I hope that this is intelligible. I also hope that I get to see a dentist soon, before my carefully hoarded supply of Pain-Killers gives out.
Chapter Twenty-Two
53 502
Benson survived Melancholy’s kiss. I hadn’t a clue what sort of world he established contact with, once he did his first slide.
I wasn’t worried. Even if he inherited an ice planet like mine or an airless rock world, or whatever, he had Melancholy to pull him back safely.
His father, Marshal, became far better disposed toward me, once he saw that his son wasn’t due to expire anytime soon.
The first kiss of the Night Ranger was the most dangerous of all the transformations. Benson had already cheated with Yōkai eyes and frost giant testicles that I’d given him to build his body and the Advance his father had given him to bolster his spirit.
“Live if You Can. “Die if You Must. “Always, "ALWAYS CHEAT!”
Practicing the body and spirit strengthening calisthenics in “The Slip-Sliders’ Manual” would further strengthen him against future trials.
At any rate, Marshal traded me the quartz spheres to make several more sun dogs at quite reasonable prices once he was happy about his son.
Despair brought me the first dose of Night Ranger’s milk. She said that the dosages and the number of doses required varied widely. Each couple had to play this part by ear.
I have no idea how she extracted the milk. I don’t suppose that since we were married, that it would be improper for me to watch, but I didn’t want to know…
Plus, I had the problem that Despair was becoming increasingly imprinted on my mind. I am very rarely sexually forward, but I didn’t want to get turned on, hit on her again, and oblige her to deny my request.
It was better to avoid temptation.
The milk, like every thing else about Despair, was unappealing. It was oily and rather foul tasting. Have you ever drunk milk from cows that have grazed a great deal in garlic? Yeah, the active ingredient in garlic will definitely come out in the milk. Maybe Despair had been gobbling garlic…
Maybe, I told myself, since Despair’s milk production facility had been offline since her birth many centuries ago, maybe I was getting colostrum. Never mind. I made a grim face and downed the milk the same way that I would down any other bitter medicine that come my way.
The milk was mildly psychedelic, but the visions that it gave me were insubstantial and vague. Never mind. I wasn’t trying to gain chemical enlightenment. I just wanted to synchronize my metabolism a little closer with Despair—preparing for that moment.
I have never been big on delayed gratification and long-term goals. In my experience, the longer I wait for something and the harder that I work for it, the less satisfaction that it affords once I finally attain it.
This is so contrary to conventional wisdom that I am sure there will be people sputtering and wanting to argue—or even kick my ass.
My life mainly revolved around guns—pistols, specifically.
If I was in the gunstore and I was flush and bought a pistol on the spot—I got a great deal of satisfaction from that pistol.
If I had to put the gun in lay-away and pay for it for 5 or 6 weeks before I finally took possession, while obtaining that pistol was nice, the satisfaction never approached the first case.
I even knew why—anticipation. The longer you wait for something, the more you phantasize and imagine how great that it will be to finally possess it. Nothing is ever quite as good as you imagined. The greater the anticipation that is built up, the bigger the let-down you’re due for.
Fortunately, my long-term synchronization with Despair wasn’t like that—I hoped.
I didn’t fervently want to go into tight clinches and practice insertion exercises with Despair—despite a few intermittent and random whims that came and went.
While I no longer found her repugnant—at least not on an emotional level—I still felt little attraction to her. Consummating our marriage and consummating occasionally in the future, was simply one of the sub-objectives on the way to winning the grand prize. The grand prize was to always have Despair by my side. I already had that.
VALUE is that which a man will act to gain or to KEEP.
“You are weird!” Despair said.
Apparently, she had dropped into my inner dialog as I was contemplating the endgame of our courtship. She can’t really help reading what is in the forefront of someone’s mind. Delving deeper or not is a conscious choice for her.
************* *************** *************************
In 2-years, the average temperature inside the forcefields surrounding Revna’s Valley had risen to a small fraction above 30-degrees.
Water freezes a 32-degrees. It would probably need to get to 33 or 34-degrees before the weird cold-weather crops from Jotunheim would be able to grow and prosper.
Make no mistake, the plants would grow very slowly at that temperature, in the wan sunlight, but they would grow.
We added a 10-mile sun dog and 3, 5-mile sun dogs. The sun dogs can’t be tethered too closely together and the second contingent of sun dogs pretty much maxed out the sun dog capacity of Revna’s Valley.
Revna was also colonizing a couple of nearby valleys, but they were single valleys and there was far less urgency, since the main emphasis was on the first and largest valley.
The light from each sun dog lighted a certain delineated area and tapered off rapidly with distance. The warmth tended to spread out and subtly warm the whole area—especially since the force field would bounce about 80% of the radiant heat that would have escaped, back into the valley.
Of course, the vagrant air currents that tried to leave the valley also contained heat and if they were allowed to escape, the net effect would be to cool the valleys.
The force field was mild and selective enough, that a frost giantess who wanted to walk outside in the vacuum, or a suited human, could simply walk through it, It simply restrained air molecules and most of the random heat photons.
The oxygen content of the atmosphere in the valley’s was still bit lower than the air atop Mount Everest. Coupled with the planet’s higher gravity, it meant that humans still needed respirators to walk around the frosty grounds.
Eventually, the temperature would stabilize at somewhere close to 50-degrees and the atmosphere would be equivalent to the slightly thick and rich atmosphere of Ice, partially compensating for the 18% higher gravity.
It would mean a lot to the tunnel-bound humans to be able to walk around outside without a respirator—even if the weather was nippy.
Revna’s valley was 68-miles from Tawn at the closest point. Eventually, we hoped for an underground tunnel to connect Tawn to Revna’s Valley. She also wanted tunnels to connect the main complex of valleys to the two nearby valleys.
Being able to go to Tawn to shop should do much to relieve the cabin fever of the human men. Of course, the tunnel was supposed to take about 35-years to complete.
Never mind. The human husbands of the frost giantesses would live very long lifespans by human standards. The frost giantesses had worked far too hard to land a human male. Do you think that they’d be satisfied with a mere 3-score-and-10?
Anyway, events were set to race ahead of strategy and the tunnel would get completed much sooner than 35-years.
************* **************** ***********************
Meanwhile, the frost giantesses had enough power to teleport—or whatever you wish to call it—to Ice, Earth or Jotunheim—and God knows where else.
Most of them couldn’t piggyback the weight of a living husband to Ice, but they could carry 50 to maybe 120-pounds of material per jump—depending on the power of that particular frost giantess.
One enterprising young frost giantess was paying premium prices—in silver, no less—for hundred-pound bundles of used baby diapers. Since she was paying premium prices for nitrogen content, the menfolk were urinating on the bundles of baby diapers before sealing them in plastic hampers.
It is amazing how 200-to-300 pounds of finely shredded, soiled baby diapers will speed up the growth of a patch of giantess mushrooms. Much of the “soil” that results from the combination humus and the stone decomposed by the mushrooms goes on to be the main ingredient for topsoil in the outside area.
This young giantess managed to make about 3 trips every month and add about 250 to 300-pounds of material to her fungus garden monthly.
I’m sure some folks wondered where all of the one-ounce silver coins with Jefferson Davis or Jeff Cooper on the face were coming from. Still, silver is silver.
Once word got around, the odd Tawn-printed coins started to have some collector value. When I heard, I had my mint start putting dates on the coins, just to help the collectors pursue their mania.
Some other enterprising giantesses found that the “mild” hallucinogen produced by one of their fungi, could be purified, refined and sold to the right people on Earth, for a great deal of money.
That substance—that was christened “Whoom!” –made psilocybin look like a Sunday school teacher.
I really have no objection to better living through chemistry. I was a bit leery of the people that dealing chemicals often necessitates association with.
Still, a frost giantess is at least a couple of inches above 7-feet tall and she will weigh well over 300-pounds. She has super human strength and skin that is very hard to pierce with better bullet resistance than a Spectrashield Level-IIIA vest—with full coverage everywhere but her eyes and ear holes.
That is assuming that she refrains from assuming her true form of over 30-feet tall.
And frost giantesses are warrior women. They are generally armed one way or another as well.
Some rough biker dudes thought that it would be a capital idea to rob the triplet frost giantesses; rape them and then set them to working in one of their brothels…
7-foot tall triplet whores…
So, I had to take time off from my hectic schedule to move 20-someodd corpses and a matching number of bikes to Revna’s Valley.
The biker’s bodies and the clothes that they were wearing had value as fertilizer. I was irritated at the triplets, so I made sure that they personally ran the bodies through the giant blender and watched the slush being sprayed on their mushroom beds.
I wanted them to see first-hand the results of them dealing with psychopaths and worse yet, going ape-shit and shredding over 20 psychopaths into scattered body parts.
The gasoline and the oil in the bikes had some value in Revna’s Valley. The bikes themselves, less so. There was no shortage of metal in the valley. At any rate, the bikes were there for anyone who chose to claim them.
IF the laws missed the bikers and they found the abandoned building where the fight took place, they could tell something from the blood patterns and such, on the walls and ceiling…
But there would be no bodies—and no bikes. I had also turned loose a blood-eating phage that would have thoroughly digested the blood patterns within about 3-weeks.
Pile aggravation upon aggravation! The triplets let a couple bikers get away. They reported to their club. The club declared war on the three girls and all their known associates—some of whom were my people.
I had to take Terry—the frost giantesses were kinda his and Revna’s responsibility—and totally eradicate the whole damned gang—more than 180-members.
The mushroom plots got a large influx of fertilizer slurry.
Thank God that the girls hadn’t ran afoul of the Hell’s Angels or the Gypsy Jokers.
I made a couple of introductions to people in the Rice Burners, Dragon’s Teeth and Pig Riders Motorcycle clubs to handle distribution of the drug “Whoom!” if the girls must market it.
The Pig Riders Motorcycle Club is an all-girl motorcycle gang—an exclusively black girl’s motorcycle gang.
New initiates shave their head and eyebrows. Upon becoming a full-fledged member, they take a pill that causes all of their hair to permanently fall out.
I don’t know how their anti-hair fetish started.
There are often men who ride along with the girls. I mean, all of the girl’s motorcycles and uniforms are identical and they always ride in formation. Their boyfriends must lead, follow or ride beside the rigid formation—where the way is broad enough to allow them to ride beside the formation.
The point is, that while there is a shaved head here or there amongst the men, most of them have normal hair and eyebrows. Many of them even have hair long enough to be called “manly.”
Also, there is nothing in the Pig Riders’ bylaws that forbids wearing a wig. I saw the Supreme Potentate of the Pig Riders being interviewed at a fancy-dress ball. She had on a long formal dress and a wig with long blond hair.
While wigs are allowed, the Pig Riders rarely take advantage of the loophole.
The last oddity about the Pig Riders was that over 90% of the Pig Riders who had boyfriends, had white boyfriends.
Anyway, the Pig Riders strict honesty and their abhorrence of any sort of sex-trade commerce made the Pig Riders very safe to deal with—if you could countenance their absolutely humorless and very laconic way of going about things.
*********** ************** ************************
About this time. Ixtli and Alejandro came to see me.
“Stillwater, there is a movement afoot in Central America, to eradicate the Lamia!” Ixtli wailed as soon as Despair and I was within earshot.
“Who and where!?!” Despair demanded.
“No one knows who is backing them. They are Outsider mercenary units—quite well-funded. They are quite well-trained and completely merciless,” Alejandro said.
“How can I help?” I asked.
“Can you establish a sanctuary for Lamia?” Ixtli asked.
“How many Lamia are we talking about?” I asked.
“About 2600, but the number shrinks daily,” Ixtli said.
“Is that adult Lamia?” I clarified.
“Yeah, only adult Lamia. That isn’t including children, human husbands and a few humans of goodwill, who simply chose to dwell among us, in our villages. They’re being wiped out as well.” Ixtli said.
“Get Terry here. I want Vicente, Cassadore, the highest-ranking member of the Rice Burners, Dragons’ Teeth and Pig Riders that we can raise on short notice. Also, contact Grandpa Liu and Marshal of Dayton. Get them on a 3-way conference call if you can,” I said.
“I know that minutes count, but help will be heading to the Lamia villages within a few hours. That is the best that I can do,” I told Ixtli.
************* ***************** ***********************
First of all, I hired large numbers of armed forces—expensive, top-of-the-line forces—from the various groups, to guard the small remote Lamia villages, until I could arrive to load them into the Sapphire World.
I sent word out on the grapevine, that I would greatly appreciate being allowed to deal with the Lamia “problem” in my own way. Failing a peaceful truce, I was not above being very vindictive and vengeful under the right circumstances.
Yeah, I know that I’m supposed to be forgiving. Hey, I’m saved, so the worst that happens, is that I get a good scolding on Judgement Day.
I would hazard a guess, that insofar as Lamias are one of God’s creations—one of God’s intelligent, semi-hominid creations—that he wouldn’t smile at their wanton slaughter.
There are a few other enclaves of Lamia in various isolated regions—but they are distinctive species—like the difference between a lion and a tiger, or an Asian Water Buffalo and an American Bison.
If the Central American Lamias were wiped out, it would mean their extinction.
It wouldn’t matter if Lamia were hanging from every branch of every tree and crawling out from beneath every rock and every cabbage leaf—that was still no reason to genocide them.
Ayn Rand said that whenever men refuse to use reason, that the only means left to deal with them are fists and guns.
Actually, that is too restrictive and dualist. There are also knives, swords, axes, flame throwers, high explosives, truncheons, bows and arrows…
There are many other ways to deal with unreasonable people, without necessarily invoking guns and fists.
The Central American Lamia originally came from the hot and dry Sonoran and the Mojave deserts. During an ancient pogrom, they found it easier to hide in the jungles than in the open deserts.
They weren’t reptilian or cold-blooded, but they definitely fared far better in warm climates.
I had a 3-pronged attack in mind. Some of the Lamia were welcome to settle in the Sapphire World. All of them were welcome to stay in the Sapphire World, so far as that went—except that I doubted that very many Lamia would like the Sapphire World and want to settle there.
Summers were long and Winters were unnaturally short in the Sapphire World. However, the 31-days of total darkness was rather brutal.
Some of the Lamia would settle into Tawn as refugees. I wanted to shake up the people of Tawn. Moving in several hundred non-humans certainly filled that prescription.
Additionally, the story of the Lamia’s persecution and need to flee should start to wake the people of Tawn and Ice as a whole, into realizing that the multiverse can be a vicious, feral type of place.
Grandpa Liu said that there was an enormous shit-storm brewing on the horizon. No one could guarantee that any particular timeline would be spared.
Ice had very advanced technology, but they hadn’t had a war for well over 3000-years. Yeah, they hadn’t had much conflict since the age of Ice had started over 5000-years ago.
Maybe, rubbing shoulders with the Lamia and the Indians—the husbands and humans who chose to dwell among the Lamia were almost all Indians of various tribes—would shake up the people of Tawn and subsequently all of Ice—put them on notice.
The third group? Well, Central America had about 200 000-square miles, but the Lamia didn’t come close to owning all of it. I had my eye on a shallow but very wide valley.
It could be sealed and turned into an artificially-heated valley of over 10 000-square miles. However, due to the slanted topography, over 5000-square miles of the valley would be a desert unless monumental amounts of energy was expended to pump water to the hardpan areas.
It would also take an enormous number of sun dogs to heat the jumbo valley.
What the Hell? The Lamia were my people now, since they were under my protection.
At present, there would be over a square-mile of cropland for every person who wanted to settle there—along with a humongous desert for the Lamias to enjoy…
According to Ixtli and others, the Lamia loved slithering over hot dry sand and basking in the sunlight.
Basking? Well yeah, if I really hung the sun dogs right, I should be able to get the ambient temperature up into the mid-80’s, at least.
If the Lamia valley ever got too crowded, there were several nice nearby valleys suitable for them to expand into—about half of them closer to Tawn than the original colony…
By the way, the Lamia colony was only about 18-miles from Revna’s Valley. Since it wasn’t in a straight line, Lamia Valley was about 13-miles closer to Tawn than Revna’s Valley.
Yeah, it was a waste not to have tunnels connecting two such close neighbors. Once the tunnel to Lamia Valley was completed, it would seem easier and more urgent to tunnel all the way to Tawn.
No, it was no sort of coincidence that the valleys were so close together. I wanted Revna’s Valley to be reasonably close to Tawn.
I had already surveyed many of the valleys there about.
Truth be told, Lamia Valley was a massive project that mostly wielded desert. It was ruinously inefficient and wasteful of resources.
And whose resources are we wasting?
Mine, of course. Mine and Despair’s, since she was my wife and technically, we co-owned everything between us.
Anyway, it would be a big waste of resources to terraform the valley for humans. It made a lot of sense to build it for the Lamia—even if I was totally bereft of sympathy—but I wasn’t.
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Post by rvm45 on Jan 7, 2021 16:30:32 GMT -6
Chapter Twenty-Three
56 917
Lester had come up with a whole handful of mathematical theorems and models for me to examine.
First let me explain my own views about “Society.”
People have wants, needs, aspirations, ambitions and probably a half-dozen other related concepts.
“Need” can be highly subjective. We may differ as to whether I “need” a Rolls-Royce. “Want” is not the least bit subjective. If I want a Rolls-Royce, then I want it. You have no say in the matter.
Nonetheless, lets stipulate that wants differ from needs. Why not?
Let us suppose that each want, need, aspiration—whatever—is a vector, each in its own plane. I mean one plane for wants, one for needs and so on.
Imagine all these abstract planes as different colors as well, just to add brightness—why not?
Now, if we dump everyone’s individual desire vectors into the same abstract multi-dimensional space, we can average all of the vectors together.
If 80% of people want a Rolls-Royce with 10% intensity—meaning that they aren’t going to strive really hard or put much effort into the largely hopeless task, for most people, of ever actually owning one…
I suppose that you’d get something like:
(80% Want) x (10% Striving) = 8%...what? “Working Purposely Toward”?
Well, some people think that they have a fair approximation of what you would get if you could add the wants, needs and every other desire vector of everyone together.
It can be done, but there are multiple inherent ambiguities, inaccuracies and contradictions. Almost everyone will agree to list a Rolls-Royce as a Luxury. A few obstinate people will not—and that further proves my point.
When we get ready to weigh things like a desire for freedom, privacy and dignity against a desire to increase safety, all sorts of arm-waving arguments result—with no 0bjective means of judging even possible.
Accuracy of our “Sum of Vectors” is not the main point. The main problem comes about when people point at the sum of vectors and make it a Heathen deity that everyone is supposed to kneel to and sacrifice their own welfare to—what is, in essence—no more than a sum of vectors.
I have coined a word for such people. I call them “Societists.”
We could call them Socialists, but not every Societist is a Socialist. Even a conservative or a free-market advocate, who believes deep down inside, that something called “Society” exists and that he owes it his allegiance and if it comes right down to it, when hard choices must be made, that the welfare of the abstract entity “Society” carries more significance than the welfare of actual living individuals—then, that man is a Societist.
That isn’t to say that you cannot milk useful data from applying statistics, economics, game theory and even military concepts to groups of people.
Just be careful what you extrapolate.
“Society” doesn’t Want or Need anything. “Society” is just an accidental sum of vectors. How can an accidental sum of vectors have wants and needs? I might as well agonize about the wants and needs of Fahrenheit.
At any rate, Lester had identified some heretofore unknown facets of group action. There seemed to be a number of heretofore unnoticed, semi-purposeful homeostatic feedback loops built into most large groups of people, that tended to resist change.
The resistance was automatic. Like Pascal’s Principle in hydraulics, pressure in the form of change, results in innumerable resistances to that change, spread over innumerable small social mechanisms.
He had identified a rather formidable social inertia.
In two years of feverish shuttling of material back and forth between Earth and Ice, I had increased the number of people heavily impacted by Earth from 30 000 to about 85 000.
The winds of change should be taking flame. Instead, the rate of absorption was slowing down.
Lester and I came up with a plan, such as it was.
There was some agitation to build parks that people could walk in with ceilings high enough to allow full-sized trees to grow. High ceilinged areas could be constructed inside the city proper, but that would necessitate taking out several old levels, relocating people and businesses and so on…
Quite tedious.
The city grew outwards to a degree, but it mainly grew downward. We got the city-fathers to steal a march and put in a whole high-ceilinged “city-beneath-the-city.”
Of course, not even the engineers and architects of Tawn could put in an unsupported high-ceilinged dome the size of the city in outline. Instead, huge supporting blocks consisting of dwelling places or other necessary buildings broke up the outline and provided room for many to live on the bottommost floor…
Only it wasn’t the bottommost. A couple of floors went in beneath, just for good measure, as the foundations of Bottomtown was being laid-just to save time and fuss later.
The new levels had room for about 280 000 people to live in an atmosphere much like a college dorm, complete with greens and commons.
Also, since the citizens of Tawn weren’t raised to be litterbugs and woods slobs, it was quite possible to allow walks through the orchards in apple, peach and cherry blossom time and to allow walks through the forests grown for timber.
All of the Lamia that didn’t want to stay in the Sapphire World until Lamia Valley was completed, could stay there. The 20 000 to 30 000 immigrants from other cities could settle there. The ever-increasing number of Earth people that I was bringing in, could settle there—as well as anyone who was pining for an address close to a terminal.
Hey, a certain number of frost giantesses and their husbands preferred to live in Tawn rather than Revna’s Valley. No one was required to live in one of the valleys.
Of course, no one was selectively sentenced to live in Bottomtown, if it wasn’t to their taste either. Most folks were lining up for the opportunity though.
If Bottomtown got too filled up upon completion, nothing prevented us dropping lower and building “Bottomtown II.”
Meanwhile, Bottomtown bulged another 15-miles closer to Lamia Valley and Revna’s Valley.
The Mongols, Esquimaux and Saami were starting to graze their magic caribou along certain routes. Magic moss and lichens grew slowly compared to photosynthetic plants. It could only be grazed once every few years.
In the meantime, the herdsmen were initiating contact and trade with a few cities that I hadn’t even got around to visiting.
The meat, hides and antlers of magic reindeer are valuable—for any number of purposes. The traders characteristically carried a few seeds and small animals like chicken, pigeon and sparrows to trade as well.
The nomads mainly traded for the finished products of technology—things that required a good lathe, mill and surface grinder to create well.
I was making a quick turn-around and making a heavy-duty haul every 3 or 4 days.
Since I had almost limitless cargo capacity, the main thing keeping me back, was finding more worthwhile stuff to haul.
That being the case, every run I brought in at least 250-tons of strawed manure for Revna’s Valley. Compared to the size of the whole valley, it was little, but it would eventually add up. In the meantime, it was a welcome boon to the mushroom-growers.
Just to be fair, I brought an equal tonnage of liquified pig and chicken waste for use by Tawn—mostly for the farms we were establishing in Bottomtown.
I brought other stuff. I found that with the right bribes, much of the “Destroyed” elephant ivory—and leather—from Africa could find its way into the Sapphire World and subsequently into Ice—or more specifically, Tawn.
Of course, I was paying almost the the tusks’ weight in silver for them, but who cared? I had more silver than I could profitably spend.
Casúr’s world, Forest, had mammoths, mastodons and African elephants—but despite the people’s rather primative technology, they had a well-defined concept of managing renewable resources.
Licensed hunters harvested “X” number of tusks per year and the number was adjusted upward or downward, depending on conditions.
Casúr bought a constant number of tusks each year on the open market and he wasn’t coming anywhere close to seriously distorting the local market.
There would be a sort of backlash if he did try to monopolize the ivory trade.
Trading ivory had jump-started Casúr’s career in the beginning, but at present, his main fortune was made in the monopoly he had on coal-tar aniline dyes, sulfa-drugs and some simple plastics like Bakelite and Celluloid on Forest.
He was the equivalent of a multi-billionaire on Forest and the ivory trade was now just a lucrative sideline.
Of course, Casúr’s fortune was lopsided. He was far richer on Forest than he was on Earth. That might apply to me as well, but less so, since I had far more products to import and could import far more of them.
Anyway, the mammoth ivory was sating the North American knife-makers, custom pistol grip makers and jewelry market fairly well, as well as expanding overseas a bit.
I had salted a few mammoth tusks away for my own use, but there really wasn’t such an unlimited supply that I could broadcast ivory all over Ice.
Instead, I got a solid sense of satisfaction by rescuing something precious from the fires of the barbarians—calling the anti-ivory-trade folk “barbarians”—not necessarily the Africans on the ground.
In fact, I recruited a few of the game wardens to move to Bottomtown…
I was just sad that none of the prince’s ransom that I paid for the ivory would go to help the elephants.
There would be homegrown ivory in ice soon. The magic mammoths grew to maturity exceedingly slowly, but they would have enormous tusks once grown.
Also, the techs of Tawn were working on getting ivory to grow in a test-tube as it were, taking the tooth-growing tissues, cloning them and letting them go to town in a nutrient broth…
Just as I was looking at my works and becoming rather pleased, Lester came to see me.
************* ***************** ****************************
“I have been doing a few archaeological digs at a few of the old metropolitan centers of Ice, pre-calamity,” Lester said.
I had gotten Lester a PhD from the University of Ur—yeah, Ur of the Chaldees where Abraham hailed from. Believe me, anyone alive today, who still remembers ancient Ur is either a non-human or at least an Outsider.
Still, there is an old-boy network for Outsiders who cannot publish their work amongst the mundane. There is also a University of Troy, a University of Jericho and a University of Sodom—I shudder to think…
Anyway, Lester had recruited a number of enthusiastic undergraduates in archaeology and comparative anthropology and they had done some cautious excavation.
All while a cadre of Advance enhanced historians combed through Tawn’s libraries.
Lester’s conclusions were as follows:
Ice never had any large trees to speak of. The people never managed to domesticate more than a few animals and plants. They never had pets or beasts of burden.
They were always a very understated, utilitarian people, with little or no use for bright colors, tattoos, jewelry or other ornamentation.
They lived like very much like termites before the red dwarf appeared in their telescopes.
Then some “higher power”—yeah, your guess is as good as mine—appointed a guardian for Ice.
The guardian was a “goddess”—yes, we know that I don’t like that term—and her name was “Neon.”
The way I understand it, is that there are layers of power in the multiverse.
Beings like humans—and even Despair, Morgan and Grandpa Liu are on the 1st tier.
Afrits are on the 2nd tier. I don’t fear Afrits. I slew one once. Is a man a higher order of being than a wild boar? Haven’t armed men been killed by wild boars?
Then there is the 3rd tier. Here you have some of the so-called “gods”—beings like Balder, Loki and Neon.
Some “gods” like Odin and Diana are still active in the human world—occasionally—and they really qualify as 4th tier.
God—God Almighty—alone knows how many other tiers of beings may exist between the 4th tier and Almighty God.
Saul of Tarsus said something about God having turned a partial blind eye to some of the pagan idolatry in times gone by, but after the Advent of Christ he commanded men to repent.
He seems to have laid down a host of restrictions on the old deities as to just when and where they can intervene in human affairs. Many of them seem to have lost interest in the Earth altogether. A few manage to have some small influence occasionally. And of course, if you insist on walking outside the “safe zone” then you are subject to meet a 3rd or 4th tier being—or worse.
I cannot picture God setting Neon as guardian of Ice—especially in lieu of what happened subsequently. God wouldn’t permit such fillying with his appointee.
Neon being “appointed” “Guardian of Ice” seems to presuppose a 5th, 6th or more likely a 7th tier being.
Anyway, Neon was one of those female, but perpetually virgin goddesses. She was appointed to shepherd the people through a remarkably difficult time and simultaneously brightening their lives a bit.
The ungrateful bastards managed to restrain her and gang-rape her—causing her to go mad…
The people were stricken with remorse and they and their descendants had been pleading with the Neon goddess to forgive their ancestors’ great wickedness for untold generations.
Meanwhile, Neon seemed to be in the midst of some perpetual mournful psychedelic trip that she never came down from.
And Lester had uncovered her temple, her postulants and Neon herself.
************* *************** ***********************
EE…I was trying to improve the life of the people on Ice. Why? Well, like Mount Everest, because it was there and because, like Mallory, I thought that I could.
I eschew Altruism, but I do enjoy jump-starting the prosperity pump for people.
Still, the “Tao Te Ching” warns:
“Do you want to Improve the World? “I don’t think that it can be done.”
Maybe that’s from the “Chang Tzu.” Memory fails me.
People throw the expression around:
“Playing God.”
That brings a picture to my mind, of a dude in a long white terrycloth robe, with a long white beard, wielding a stout walnut quarterstaff…
And he’s out of his blooming mind—leaping from molehill to molehill in his backyard screaming:
“Male and Freehale I created them! “I trod the mountains underfoot! “And on the 7th day, I rested… “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”
That would be “Playing God.”
Seeing a situation, and acting according to your best intention is not “Playing God.”
If you take a 6-sided decision die and color one side blue—to represent “do nothing.”
Dude, when that blue side comes face-up, you have still thrown the decision die and inaction is as much an action and as much a decision as any other course of action that you could have taken.
Only, Neon had come to Ice over 6000-years ago, on a mission remarkably similar to mine…
Brighten the people’s lives…bring in color and excitement…
And the people had raped her, spit in her face and trod her gifts underfoot.
Maybe I was casting pearls before swine.
I didn’t have the power of a 3rd tier goddess, nor did I have her ability to turn the other cheek. In her place, I would have initiated scores—no hundreds of funerals.
As a fellow in a movie said once, “The hills would run red with blood!”
At any rate, it was time for Despair and I to meet the Neon god they’d raped.
We had things to discuss.
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Post by rvm45 on Jan 8, 2021 14:17:52 GMT -6
Chapter Twenty-Four
59 575
Miguel Ángel sat grimly contemplating his future. He was poor and his village was poor.
In a good year, he could grow enough corn that he could sell some, to buy a bit of beans and sometimes rice—even a little coffee. Corn would not only form the backbone of his diet, but he could also feed a few chickens.
An egg or two with breakfast and the occasional boiled or roasted chicken was a welcome addition to a corn tortilla diet.
There were still some wild patches around. The little Lamia girl, Aiai had taught Miguel Ángel to make snares and deadfalls. She had also shown him a half-a-dozen edible wild plants that were common enough to be worthwhile to remember—and another half-a-dozen plants that had some medicinal effects.
He still had the bow and 3 of the arrows that he and Aiai had made together. The arrows stayed home as precious keepsakes, lest they be lost, but he still used the bow to hunt small game.
Even in a bad year, when most folks had to subsist on corn and little but corn, Miguel Ángel was a bit better off than most, with an occasional small bird, rodent or wild plant to add to his corn diet.
He might have learned a great deal more from Aiai, but men with guns and flamethrowers had came to eradicate the Lamia. Miguel Ángel’s father had been one of the human men who had hidden some of the Lamia—including Aiai—from the slayers.
His father wasn’t caught and he died a couple of years later from natural causes, leaving Miguel Ángel all alone in the world, since his mother had died several years earlier.
Some of the other children his age had teased Miguel Ángel. They had told him that if he wasn’t careful, that he’d end up being Aiai’s husband.
Miguel Ángel wasn’t sure why that was a bad thing. He’d seen a few of the adult Lamia in the marketplace, with their human husbands.
He’d been too young to have any strong sexual urges when Aiai was still around. Back then, the idea of embracing Aiai both intrigued and repelled him. He had wanted to hug her—as a very good friend—several times, but he never had.
Now, some unspecified someone had taken the Lamia away to where they would presumably be safe and Miguel Ángel had forever lost his chance to hug his childhood friend.
Strangely, when he tried to reminisce about the days when there were still Lamia villages in the jungle, many of his peers flatly denied that there had ever been such mythical creatures about…
Despite the fact that they had lived amongst them.
Others remembered, but they remembered vaguely.
“I don’t know, Miguel Ángel…Were there really Lamia, or was that a phantasy that we children agreed to play together?” one fellow mused.
“You have the eyes to see. In the olde tyme, you would have been a medicine man or a great war chief. Now, there is so little medicine to be had, that you aren’t likely to do anything with your eyes—but they let you remember while your friends forget,” a toothless old man told Miguel Ángel.
Miguel Ángel wanted very much to move to America. If one put in a visa request and followed the rules, the wait was interminable and the odds were stacked against him.
If one brazenly barged in where the rules said that he wasn’t welcome, the odds were excellent that one could obtain a visa and eventual citizenship.
It was as if the rules had been set-up with the expectation that people would ignore them—as if people were supposed to ignore them.
Miguel Ángel had no patience or acceptance of implicit rules over-riding the explicit rules. The rules were the rules. A system set up to run on unspoken rules was a corrupt system and he would have no part of it.
His pragmatic friends argued endlessly with Miguel Ángel about illegal immigration.
“It works!” they would bray like jackasses.
No matter how many times Miguel Ángel countered with:
“But it isn’t right!”
They would state even more emphatically:
“But it works!”
As if pragmatic considerations could ever have the slightest bearing on ethical considerations.
So, odds were that Miguel Ángel would never get his green card to come to America. His only qualification was that he was young and could do hard manual labor…
Then one day some men had come to Miguel Ángel’s village asking questions. Eventually they arrived at Miguel Ángel’s door.
“Are you Senor Miguel Ángel Mejia?”
“Yes, what of it!?!” Miguel Ángel said testily.
Since strange men from outside had raised the Lamia villages, Miguel Ángel had a deep-seated distrust of outsiders. You could almost call it a brooding hostility.
“Were you a childhood playmate of the Lamia known as ‘Aiai’?” one of the men asked.
“I was,” Miguel Ángel said.
He stared straight into the eyes of the foreigner. It was an overt challenge. If the man didn’t like his answer, he was welcome to initiate a physical contest—Miguel Ángel was ready to meet him halfway.
“Would you like to meet Aiai and some of the other Lamia again? We’re here to invite to visit the Lamia’s new home,” the stranger said.
It took a small leap of faith to go with the gentlemen. Who knew if they were working with the Lamia or with the government? Perhaps they were eliminating the last people who could still clearly remember the Lamia.
Miguel Ángel decided to take the leap of faith, because it wasn’t as if he had much to hold him where he was. Besides, if the government had you marked for elimination, they had multiple means at their disposal.
They told Miguel Ángel that while he was perfectly free to return to his home, that he may not want to—so he should take anything really precious with him.
The Irish had spread across the Earth in the wake of the potato famine and they were a prolific people. Miguel Ángel, like many people in Mexico and Central America had a small strain of Gaelic blood—and he had heard a few of the stories of folks carried off to Faerie lands.
That was very much what this sounded like.
Miguel Ángel packed his family Bible, his machete, his bow and arrows—especially the 3 special arrows that he and Aiai had made together. He took his pendant that his father had left him. He had two mixed-breed hunting dogs that he treasured—and apart from a few photos, that was about it.
************ **************** ************************
As Miguel Ángel stood in line, a fellow asked him if he had any pearl, mother-of-pearl, wampum, cowrie shells, conch shells etcetera on his person.
Someone in Miguel Ángel’s family tree had been near a river once and they had found a very rare—for that area—fresh water pearl. The great or great-great-grandfather had had the pearl mounted inside of one half of the mussel shell that it had come in—embellished with bone and amber.
“The spell that you’re going to pass through, is designed to kill any mollusk, including their eggs. Your pedant would have degraded considerably under the influence of the spell,” a tech explained to Miguel Ángel.
He scanned the piece.
“No living mollusk tissue detected. It is an interesting piece—over 100-years old,” the tech remarked.
Once Miguel Ángel passed through the spell meant to bar the dread adversary from the Sapphire World and Ice, and he retrieved his pedant, he passed through into the Sapphire World.
There was no way of faking the Sapphire World’s 60% gravity. The slightly thick, rich air could have been contrived, but added to the gravity, it added verisimilitude.
After a bit of inevitable jostling and chaos, a Lamia greeted Miguel Ángel and a few of his fellow travelers.
The Lamia was middle-aged and rather buxom. The human half of a Lamia was approximately human scale, but Lamia were long-lived. As they aged, they grew slowly.
This Lamia’s upper body was about on the scale of a 6-foot 10-inch NBA Player’s upper body—which meant that she was over 200-years old.
Never mind. The same good juju that granted frost giantesses and Lamia’s husbands extra longevity also caused them to grow a bit. The frost giantesses’ husbands would never equal their wives’ stature, but a Lamia’s husband would almost keep pace with her growth.
If this Lamia had a long-time mate, he was probably about 6-foot 5 or 6-inches tall now—regardless of his starting height.
The Lamia’s slightly bigger than life stature, resonated with the overall mysteriousness of this place.
“Y’all are friends of the Lamias. You will have an interesting tour,” the happy Lamia informed them.
First, they took Miguel Ángel’s group to a Lamia village. The houses weren’t jungle huts. Instead, they were quite substantial buildings built with thick double-walls of bricks that were about twice the size of Earth bricks.
“Summer is 5-months of perpetual daylight here, but Winter is 31-days of total darkness. The temperature plummets to 12-degrees below zero and it is important to stay warm,” the happy Lamia lectured them like a tour guide.
“Christmas and New Year’s both occur during the annual dark period. Except for necessary chores—like feeding the livestock—the 31-days of darkness is considered a time of rest and celebration,” the Lamia said.
“Our years are only about 9 of Earth’s months long. That means that good things like Christmas and Thanksgiving Day come around about 25% more often for us. We are a very festive people,” the happy Lamia said.
“Still, many Lamia find the cold Winters here unpleasant. You will get to see a valley being prepared for the frost giants on the planet Ice. Very few Lamia chose to live in Revna’s Valley. It is always chilly there—by our standards. Still. there is no accounting for taste,” The happy Lamia said with a smile.
“Lamia Valley is under construction. It isn’t currently habitable—but it will be barely habitable soon,” she enthused. “Finally, most of the expat Lamia are currently living in Bottomtown—a subsection of the city-state of Tawn, on the planet Ice. That is where most of you will meet your sponsors,” the happy Lamia said.
Miguel Ángel’s teeth were very bad. They had grown in malformed and years of abrasion by stoneground corn and malnutrition had further degraded them.
A tech gave Miguel Ángel a capsule. He told him that it would grow him a new set of perfect teeth—but he warned him that first all of his present teeth would need to fall out, much the same as he had lost his baby teeth.
Only in this case, Miguel Ángel would need to be totally toothless before his new teeth would start to grow in.
He shrugged and decided to trust the tech. If he had placed himself in the hands of tricksters, he was already hurtin’ for certain. His teeth sometimes ached and sometime in the next few years, they would need to be pulled anyway. The capsule would—at the very least—spare him some painful future extractions.
His front four teeth and the front-bottom teeth had already been pulled by the time he toured the Sapphire World’s seemingly endless groves of Pecan trees and orchards.
Pecans were a huge staple in the diet of the people of the Sapphire World. They had many slices of peaches, cherries and strawberries at every meal, along with cottage cheese, tomato and orange slices.
Ordinarily, citrus trees could not abide the abominable Winters, brief though they were—but the geneticists of Ice had modified the tree’s genomes so they could thrive on the Sapphire World.
By the time that Miguel Ángel toured Revna’s Valley, he had lost most of his premolars and he was largely gumming his food. The capsule killed the teeth’s nerves first and Miguel Ángel often found himself losing a tooth while chewing—like a small puppy losing teeth to a sock ball without even noticing.
Revna’s Valley was cool. The valley was up to about 41-degrees at that point in time. It had was a cloying humid cool climate.
The tunnels where most of the giants still lived, on the other hand, was swelteringly hot and humid.
Unlike the unfriendly giants of Jotunheim, these giantesses went out of their way to welcome guests.
The main item on the menu in Revna’s Valley, was various mushrooms. Some tasted like the finest sirloin. Some tasted like fried chicken while some tasted like deep-fried catfish.
There were fungi that tasted like turnips and fungi that tasted like cantaloupe or bell pepper. All of them were extremely tender and Miguel Ángel was not inconvenienced by being over half toothless at that point.
The frost giantesses could cavort in the vacuum and have snowball fights with the solid nitrogen that covered much of Ice’s surface—or they could have comfortably existed at temperatures that would have roasted a human.
There was no need for them to overburden themselves with clothing in the sweltering tunnels. No need to add layers when touring the chilly valley. No need, actually, to add clothing, even if a frost giantess decided to walk the 85-miles or so across the frozen nitrogen, to Tawn to meet with friends or kin in Bottomtown.
The frost giants of Jotunheim traditionally wore Winter style clothing—especially the womenfolk.
The rebellious giantesses of Revna’s Valley often wore naught but a silken tunic that amounted to a rather short skirt with a revealing top.
They were, quite frankly, competing to attract and land a man. Though some were more modest, many were quite forward about putting their charms on display.
The giantesses had elaborate parties for the visitors—including the chance to indulge in several hallucinogens that originated in mushrooms or other fungi.
The parties often featured multiple hookahs where a wide variety of smoking materials could be sampled.
While the giantesses were a bit forward in their courtship, they were not promiscuous. They were only interested in people willing to make commitments—not in one-night stands.
One-night stands might have occurred in the aftermath of the chemically enhanced social gatherings—but it would be rare enough to be remarkable.
The giantesses were quite serious about saving themselves for their future husband.
Miguel Ángel wasn’t discomfited that the giantesses didn’t have round heels. He wasn’t looking to hook up with anyone in the short-term anyway.
Anyway, the idea of almost toothless Miguel Ángel—accompanied by his two hunting mongrels that he would not trust out of his sight in this strange world—seducing a frost giantess was a bit phantastic.
On the other hand, if Miguel Ángel had chosen to gum a proposal of marriage, he could have had almost any of the unmarried giantesses on the spot.
His group briefly toured the site of the future Lamia’s Valley—from inside a heated and sealed tour bus.
The sun dogs were all up and burning.
Miguel Ángel wondered what it would be like to have so many suns in the sky. Well, they were a bit less than true suns, but far more than the most powerful conventional artificial lights.
Finally, it was time to arrive at Bottomtown.
It was time for Miguel Ángel to be amazed again. The upper layers of Tawn were like some sort of Cyberpunk dystopia—to a degree. Everything was uncomfortably close and a bit dolorous.
Then he arrived at Bottomtown.
Bottomtown was…Well, it was much like depictions Miguel Ángel had seen of America in the mid-70’s or 80’s—with just a bit of cyberpunk futurism thrown in.
There were actually Pizza Huts, Subway, Kaintuck Fried Chicken and Burgher Chef fast food restaurants.
There were wide open spaces with trees—sapling trees, it is true—and thick grass underfoot along with frequent flower beds and koi ponds.
High overhead, the ceiling was painted a non-descript blue-gray.
Some night and some Winter was necessary for the temperate hardwood trees to prosper—but more light meant faster growth—so the spectrum was skewed toward both longer days and shorter Winters.
A riot of brightly clad people wandered the grassy sward. Some had pets.
There were quite a few Lamia in the area that Miguel Ángel was shuttled to.
There were also a number of children with blue or red skins, oversized eyes, large fangs and small horns on their foreheads.
As Stillwater had remarked, there was an unusual number of orphaned and abandoned Oni children. No one seemed to care even a little what happened to the children…
Tawn needed future citizens committed to the new path, so Stillwater had imported large number of orphaned Oni.
People warned him that mixing Red Oni and Blue Oni was akin to mixing gasoline and open flames—but surely the Oni could learn to get along if they were raised together…
That is where Miguel Ángel met Aiai again.
Aiai was the size of an adult woman now.
“I should call you ‘Gumby’ now,” she joked.
Miguel Ángel bared his toothless gums, where just the bare tip of his new front teeth—top and bottom—were beginning to show.
“I’ll bite you,” he said.
He grabbed Aiai and hugged her tight—like he had never quite been able to bring himself to do when they were children.
“I have missed you so much!” Miguel Ángel said.
“I thought that you might wish to move here or to the Sapphire World or to the Lamia’s Valley. It is so much better than the poverty you were raised in. Besides, I wanted you to be at my wedding,” Aiai said.
Miguel Ángel felt as if he had been kicked in the pit of his stomach by a drunken mule. He had assumed that Aiai had arranged all of this so that she could court him to be her husband.
Somehow, he got through their brief meeting without breaking down. He pled tiredness and a bit of illness due to his teething.
When he was finally alone, he allowed himself to break down and cry.
He had cried that hard and long when his mother died and again a few years later when his father died. This was only the third time in his life that he’d cried so long and so hard.
His dogs gently pawed and nuzzled at him in a futile attempt to comfort him.
When Miguel Ángel was through crying, he took stock. Who was to blame for this situation?
Certainly, the man who had won Aiai’s favor was on his shit list. You could wrong someone—you could grossly disrespect someone—without even knowing that they existed.
Mainly though, Miguel Ángel blamed the commandos with their automatic rifles and their flamethrowers.
If those knob-gobblers hadn’t driven the Lamia off, he would likely have ended up being Aiai’s husband.
There was talk that they were still at it, in other parts of the world—wiping out whole enclaves of enchanted beings. There was also talk of a counterforce being raised to combat the men with flamethrowers.
‘That is what I want to devote my life to,’ Miguel Ángel thought.
‘If I’m not happy, why should anyone else be spared unhappiness?!?’
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Post by texican on Jan 8, 2021 17:38:58 GMT -6
rvm,
So many enjoyable layers to this epic you are writing.
Thank you.
Texican....
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Post by papaof2 on Jan 9, 2021 0:17:13 GMT -6
I see that rvm has penetrated the minds of the Democrap leadership: ‘If I’m not happy, why should anyone else be spared unhappiness?!?’
One look at Nasty Pigoso should confirm her thoughts...
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Post by rvm45 on Jan 9, 2021 2:06:47 GMT -6
I see that rvm has penetrated the minds of the Democrap leadership: ‘If I’m not happy, why should anyone else be spared unhappiness?!?’ One look at Nasty Pigoso should confirm her thoughts... The only possible rationalization that I can come ups with for The Democrats, Most of the Republicans and MOST OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE is that they're all closet Nihilists—maybe only in the depths of their unconscious for many…
Not ALL.
Nihilists believe "Break Everything that CAN BE BROKEN."
This is an impossible philosophy to follow.
If destruction of everything is good, then why not destroy your own weapons of destruction; bite your own fingers off; break your own teeth on the curb AND THEN find a stake that you can gouge your own eyes out…?
Ah well, I VALUE my axe, my sledge hammer, my body and my explosives, because THEY ARE THE MEANS TO GREATER DESTRUCTION!
But, you hypocritical piece of shit, you VALUE! Even after saying that everything has NO VALUE and nothing is worth saving.
If you are the type of Sadistic Ass that likes to throw kittens, piglets and even human babies into tree shredders, just to hear them squeal…at least drop the pretense of civility, high art, egalitarianism and other high-minded ideals…
Just admit that you're a homicidal psychopath and at least be an honest murdering psychopath!
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Post by rvm45 on Jan 11, 2021 13:10:57 GMT -6
Chapter Twenty-Five
62 804
The number of people that I was recruiting to disappear from the Earth and move to the Sapphire World or Ice was increasing toward a threshold.
Once that threshold was surpassed, it would become almost impossible to conceal what I was doing.
On the other side, the steady influx of improved firearms, improved drugs and improved computer technology was also causing a stir. All of the mammoth ivory and mother-of-pearl that I was helping Casúr distribute was also causing a stir...
All of this was happening as the United States was becoming far more tightly controlled and more and more things were becoming much more regulated, or completely outlawed.
Big Brother had far more eyes watching the people, the last few years, and there were plenty of snitching Little Brothers hiding, snickering in the chigger weeds, watching for something to report to the gendarmes.
I had become largely beyond the ability of mundane law enforcement to restrain.
“Arrest me? Fine! I’ll simply slip-slide to Ice or pop into the Sapphire World!”
I couldn’t say the same for all of my friends, let alone my employees.
Most of the things that I wanted from Earth were simple: straw, manure, seeds, saplings, livestock, pets, books and videos—but above all: People!
A considerable percent of the world’s prime livestock was in North America. I hadn’t yet checked into it, but I supposed they had some prime livestock in New Zealand and Australia.
New Zealand is deucedly small though. Makes it harder to move around undetected. Australia is about the size of the Continental US, but the population is much less…
Maybe I could pick up some animals in Sweden, Norway, Switzerland—maybe Argentina. Much of Europe’s markets are far more closely monitored than in the US. I didn’t trust much of the livestock—or even seedstock—of the 3rd world.
Ice’s geneticists and biologists were gifted. They could cure almost any disease that I accidently imported, but why strain them unnecessarily?
On the other hand, Grandpa Liu, and now several other creditable sources, were telling me that some massive interdimensional invasion was about to commence.
God knows how often such things happen, not terribly often—maybe about once per geological era.
Most humans have a built-in mechanism that largely suppresses noticing Outsider activity in the first place. Second, even if oddball events are seen and remembered, they tend to be largely forgotten, seldom thought of and even less often spoken of aloud.
Don’t despair. You can definitely over-ride this mechanism with determination—even if you aren’t shaman material.
However, this partial cocoon of neglect and forgetfulness does not apply to times of great crisis. That is one reason that you have legends of giants, Oni, Faeries, Lamia, Immortals and so forth.
Another reason is that the old gods were allowed more access to Earth and more latitude to work their projects before the advent.
When the barriers separating the various parallel worlds ruptured, there would be no denying the existence of Outsiders—for the duration of the event.
Once the rupture occurred, the Earth’s survival was not assured and neither was the survival of Ice. The only prudent thing to do, was to prepare. If that caused a few threadbare protocols dedicated to ignoring us to fade or unravel a bit ahead of time…O, well…
I might be lacking in imagination, but it is hard to conceive how the barbarian hordes could invade the Sapphire World. I could retreat there and wait out the chaos.
With my enhanced longevity, I could cast about until I found new, untouched worlds to slip-slide to and set up new networks. My new life expectancy might stretch for millennia, but I was highly unlikely to survive long enough to see another large-scale interdimensional rupture.
The thing was:
Sovereignty.
When a medieval monarch—a sovereign—spoke of “My people,” he meant it quite literally.
The people of Ice were my people. They were given to me, by providence, to protect and to coach.
I hadn’t yet been to Forest, but they were my people too. I had, without meaning to, stolen a march on Casúr. Casúr was Steward of Forest—think of him as a knight with a feif.
I was a Guardian—more like a baron—and Casúr’s feif was a sub-unit of my own super-fiefdom.
At least a couple of hundred years of collective bargaining have firmly established that Seniority is the only fair way to determine advancement.
Without a bona fide Seniority system, many, most—maybe all the good jobs will go to the brown-nosers. And make no mistake, continuously and conscientiously going above and beyond the call of duty in hopes of being noticed and promoted, is an egregious form of brown-nosing.
Eager-beavers like that, cause everyone’s production quota to be raised—when many are already floundering hopelessly, trying to keep up.
Favor isn’t fair. We may desire fairness in the workplace and in our everyday life. We may pursue it and we may even approximate it—though never perfectly.
God’s aims and many of his means are beyond the comprehension of men. God cannot be constrained by fairness.
Take the story of Jacob and Esau. Esau was a hunter—a man’s man. His brother Jacob was a sissy—and worse yet, he was a momma’s boy. There are few things that I hold in greater contempt than momma’s boys.
Esau sold his birthright for a pot of Lentils?
A.} Esau was literally at the point of death.
B.} The BLESSING was not part of what he bartered away.
That story was a stumbling block for me for a long time. Well, for one thing, we don’t know the whole story. Maybe Esau was reprobate. Maybe he ate mayonnaise, put ketchup on his hot dogs and spoke with a British accent…
But God cannot only see the future, he can see all possible futures—infinitely many. He had reasons to select a worthless piece of drek like Jacob to inherit the Blessing.
No, it was not fair! God has no obligation to be fair.
It wasn’t fair that I held a higher position than Casúr, but there you have it.
So, I was recruiting and importing and exporting almost to the point of recklessness, trying hard to strengthen my forces.
Someone noticed that a tiny, but significant number of people who played “Revna’s World” were disappearing mysteriously.
The game had really caught on. It used bleeding-edge graphics. With 100% real-looking cut-scenes and several blockbuster stand-alone animated movies.
My hackers had added in a virtual equivalent to Bottomtown, Lamia Valley and the Sapphire World—though the Sapphire World was disguised more than a bit.
Not everyone chose to stay on Ice or in the Sapphire World. As I said, we extorted no promise of secrecy…
And you know how the fictional villains selectively erase parts of people’s memories…
Wait a moment Stillwater—there are heroes who use that technique too…
No, there are not! If you erase all or part of anyone’s memory—even at their explicit request—then you are a black-hearted villain! I’d sooner have my brains blown out than have my memory altered—even slightly.
I would have far more respect for an executioner than an alterer of memories.
Anyway, there were enough loose wingnuts running around unfettered in the world, to give a fair description of my operation, if anyone cared enough to gather them together and winnow the wheat from the chaff.
Hundreds of millions of people played “Revna’s World.” We had recruited a very few thousand, at most.
We prioritized people without any close relatives or friends. If there were only a couple relatives, sometimes we took them as well. Few people should miss them.
If a good prospect had a network of friends and family, we worked with him to help create a cover-story, so his face wouldn’t end up on a milk carton somewhere.
Still, there was a tiny, but statistically significant number of folks who had played “Revna’s World” and then disappeared.
Most people wrote it off as paranoid conspiracy raving.
Note:
“Just because you are Paranoid does not, a priori, prove that there are not people who are scheming against you.”
Most people ignored the slight blip in the data, but Red China chose to ban “Revna’s World.”
I never had the patience or the mentality to be a devoted hacker, but I heartily concur with the hacker’s creed:
“Information longs to be free.”
I have little use for any government. I spit on totalitarian governments and I will go even farther, and spit on the shadow of collectivist governments.
Jeff Cooper found the mere presence of the Iron Curtain very disturbing. He just felt that such an evil, oppressive thing had no rightful place in his world.
I had similar thoughts about the information firewall that Red China keeps around its mutilated, multiple-amputee version of the Internet that they field.
Unlike Cooper, I was in the position to do something about it.
I had several hundred hackers working for me. All of them had been through the 5x stage of Advance and had their IQ raised by 37%. Advance was rather expensive, but my hackers could afford to use enough to stay in the 2x zone indefinitely.
And Tawn’s chemists were close to creating a whole new wave of IQ enhancers.
My hackers had no material worries. Most of them had had the mind-expanding experience of visiting Ice and the Sapphire World.
They had unlimited access to all the advanced chips, RAMM, super hard drives, super-servers and advanced algorithms they wanted or needed.
Now, I told them to recruit as many of their compañeros as they felt helpful, and make an all-out offence on the Red Chinese firewall.
Ban my game, will you, knob-gobblers!?!
Screw the Red Chinese! If someone is defiant enough to play the black-market, hacker’s version of “Revna’s World”—and if he is a good fit—recruit his ass, and all of his associates too!
Never mind what sort of hole that leaves in Red Chinese society. They have such a bad reputation for veracity, that no one—including their own people—will take their pronouncements seriously when busloads of people start disappearing, at least, not for awhile.
************* **************** **********************
If he had lived in the previous era, Wang Wei would have been amongst the first people carted off to the re-education camps. Once in the re-education center, he would have been among the first people that the cadre gave up on, and shot.
Wang Wei would not mouth things that he thought were falsehoods—not even if you placed a Magnum against his temple. A fist or a gun is not an argument.
He had never heard of Ayn Rand. If he had, he would have disagreed with the crabby atheist philosopher on many points. However, he would have heartily concurred with one of her axioms:
“One must never fail to pronounce moral judgement.”
If Wang Wei disagreed with something, if he thought that something was unjust or if he simply thought something was bullshit—he never failed to lift his voice up loudly and clearly.
Wang Wei was from Sichuan about 30-miles from the Tibetan border—but since Red China claimed to have annexed Tibet, one might ask:
“What border?”
The people in his small village had gotten used to Wang Wei’s outspokenness. They had come to think of him as a scruffy, irascible, homegrown Chinese Diogenes.
He had made it to late in the third year of college, before his outspoken character got him expelled. He had worked at several office jobs, but he argued with his boss or his co-workers to the point that he had to be fired.
He had been accepted as an apprentice at several trades, but he drove the owner’s customers away with his ill-timed outbursts.
Eventually, Wang Wei ended up unemployed and all-but-unemployable. He had zero “social credits” and he had been considered to be sent to one of the few re-education centers maintained for the most iconoclastic of the iconoclasts.
He got by, by doing day labor, rag-picking and occasionally, he was reduced to begging.
Wang Wei wasn’t ashamed to beg. A man’s money was his own. He owed it to no one. However, if a man had more than he needed and Jesus laid it on his heart to help another, that was a chance for the donor to gain merit.
If a man refused to donate to Wang Wei, even though God had laid it on his heart, that was between the donor and Jesus. Wang Wei was remarkably unconcerned with how he was done by.
Someone once pointed out to Wang Wei, that much of the bread and cutter that people donated to him, had been earned by dint of practicing the very hypocrisy he decried.
If people chose to practice hypocrisy, that too, was between them and God. There was no Hypocrisy affixed to their cutter. It looked like any other cutter and spent the same.
The one mental respite that Wang Wei had, was to go to the small local digital café and get online.
Wang Wei had no interest in hacking. He also had no interest in working for social change. He only sought escape in computer games.
Technically, Wang Wei could only afford to play for about an hour per day, but the owner and the customers were people that Wang Wei went to school with and grew up with. They knew about his situation.
People quietly donated. Eventually, a small alcove was set apart for Wang Wei and he became a sort of attraction.
He spent much of his time happily online. If people carefully waited until he was unoccupied and asked what he thought about current events, he could always be counted upon to say something outrageous and unexpected.
He could also be quite cutting and insulting when he felt that he was being looked down upon.
People were willing to go considerably out of their way and pay to be insulted—by someone considered to be a jester. Jesters had a sort of immunity to offence.
Wang Wei was outraged when his favorite game was banned from China.
He tried to log on to “Revna’s World” every day, only to be greeted by the same “Error” message—and every day, he sent a scathing letter to the people in charge of the server, complaining about his favorite game being blocked and banned.
The 4th day that he tried to log onto “Revna’s World,” there was a small pop-up in the lower right-hand corner of the screen.
It said:
“Click here to play ‘Revna’s World’.”
Several screens later, Wang Wei realized that he had been skillfully led into the darknet.
O well, O Hell…
Wang Wei was a little leery of entrapment, but then again, it wasn’t as if he cared. Being arrested for practicing freedom online would give him a chance to berate the judges and the gaolers. He was incapable of caring about consequences to himself.
As he got up to leave, the screen said:
“We hope to see you here again tomorrow, Wang Wei.”
Only, he hadn’t given the system his name—only his game username and his password.
Odd.
*********** **************** *****************************
The game had expanded a great deal. There were far more positions and roles that one could play, besides just being a frost giantess’ fiancé.
Truth be told, Wang Wei thought that the original premise and setting people up with a—presumably female—frost giantess partner, was rather cheesy and cringe-worthy.
Shortly after he started playing the darknet version of “Revna’s World,” Wang Wei got a friend request from someone named “Hilde.”
Hilde…
Well, none of the frost giantesses had facial hair—that would be grotesque.
Their nose and chins were stronger and robust than the average human woman’s though. They had stronger cheekbones and more noticeable supraorbital ridges.
It was a fact; a man’s nose is almost always more robust than a woman’s. Never mind looking at the Adam’s apple to spot trannies. Many men have no visible Adam’s apple and a few women have a modest one. Look at the nose!
The most common optional facial alteration when having a sex-change, is to reduce the size of the nose.
Which is to say, that Hilde—and many of the other frost giantesses—looked like trannies—if you only looked at facial portraits online.
Still, this persistent Hilde was determined to be an online pal of Wang Wei’s.
When Wang Wei wasn’t taking pride in his brutal frankness, he was an easy-going guy.
He told Hilde, that if she wanted to be a GIRL online, that she should at least photoshop “her” headshot. Then he forgot the question of Hide’s gender, as she asked him a number of insightful questions about Wang Wei thoughts on life in the modern world.
Hilde insisted that she was a giantess. She told Wang Wei that she was 7-foot 4-inches tall and weighed 370-pounds.
Wang Wei cried, “Bullshit!”
Hilde included photos of herself—in a skimpy mini-dress tunic—standing with a few human friends.
Wang Wei could spell “photoshop.” Still, there were people who had giantism. It was within the realm of the conceivable, that Hilde might genuinely be a giantess.
At any rate, it didn’t really matter. Wang Wei enjoyed conversing with Hilde. Whether Hilde was a Scandinavian giantess or if she was a very obese otaku from Hokkaido, who was a GIRL—it hardly mattered. Wang Wei never expected to meet Hilde.
Then the “men-in-brown” came to interview Wang Wei.
These dudes looked Chinese. Some were Indians or Mexicans, but they had jet-black, long straight hair and swarthy complexions. It was all in vain though, because they spoke Mandarin with either thick American or thick Hispanic accents.
Besides, why select Oriental-looking dudes to infiltrate and then have them dress in brown Yamikaze leathers from head-to-foot?
Hell, they wouldn’t be much more conspicuous, if they had sent Blue Oni or Frost Giantesses to infiltrate Sichuan Society.
None of the big custom-modified Yamaha Motorcycles were licensed in the province—or anywhere in Red China…
But the dudes had beaucoup gold, and silver—and other things—and they had largely suborned the local law enforcement.
In fact, the Yamikazes had almost as much diplomatic immunity in some 3rd world areas as the Mexican Drug Cartels had in parts of Mexico.
The difference was in how they used their power.
The final upshot was that they recruited Wang Wei and he and his grandfather disappeared.
Wang Wei—like Miguel Ángel Mejia—had some bad teeth. One of the first things that the Yamikaze did, was to give Wang Wei—and his grandfather—capsules to grow new teeth.
The sooner one has good teeth, the better.
Wang Wei mentioned, during his interview, that the people of his village had been quite tolerant of him and had done him many kindnesses.
He said that he wished that there was some way to pay the villagers back.
A couple of weeks after Wang Wei left his village, a small cadre of techs came by with a new vaccine that everyone was required to take. There were only about 485-people in the village, so the vaccinations didn’t take long.
The techs were genuine Red Chinese healthcare officials, but the vaccines were something that the techs had been bribed to administer.
The injections were vicrodes that re-wrote part of the villager’s DNA.
After the troubles, things would be in disarray for a long while. It would be 2 or 3-genrtations until someone noticed that the people in a small Sichuan village had some interesting mutations. Everyone in the village had perfect teeth and if one was pulled, broke or worn down, another perfect tooth would grow in to replace it. The teeth were proof against any sort of dental carries or gum disease as well.
In addition, no one in the village ever suffered the slightest arteriosclerosis and they were about 5-times as resistant to developing cancer as normal people. The Yamikaze agents who had interviewed Wang Wei had been touched when he said that he wished that he could do something to show his appreciation to the villagers. The vicrodes were Wang Wei’s unwitting and anonymous gift to his people.
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Post by rvm45 on Jan 11, 2021 21:05:52 GMT -6
Chapter Twenty-Six
66 196
Miguel Ángel and Wang Wei ended up in the same orientation class. The students were fed a steady diet of Advance and taught several Ice languages, as well as Old Norse, simultaneously, while the 5x phase of the IQ enhancing drug was in effect.
They also got a sound grounding in Ice history, science and mathematics—enough to give them a big boost in all of their future endeavors.
At first, their only common language was American. The Red Chinese stressed American—though they insisted on calling the language by its obsolescent name: “English.”
Likewise, Miguel Ángel had always wanted to go to America. He had diligently studied the American that was taught in school and he had read what books and magazines in American that he had been able to lay hands on.
The pair were fluent enough in American to communicate and they ended up being roommates.
Hilde came by to talk to Wang Wei.
“Wang Wei, do you think that you might choose to settle in Revna’s Valley when you graduate in a couple of weeks?” Hilde asked.
“No way! The tunnels are too hot and humid. The valley is too chilly and damp. I find the whole place terribly depressing,” Wang Wei said.
“Are you going to settle in Bottomtown?” Hilde asked.
“If I have a prefrontal lobotomy, then I might choose to settle in this sordid termite mound. I’m moving to the Sapphire World and I’m going to plant pecan trees—and fruit trees—and eventually start my own plantation,” Wang Wei said.
Hilde sighed in frustration.
“I don’t mind where you chose to settle. Would you like to have me settle with you?”
She finally came right out and asked Wang Wei.
Wang Wei’s concept of reality had been stretched a great deal. There really were alternate dimensions. Frost giantesses, Oni, Night Rangers and Lamia were real. He had seen all of them with his own eyes.
Since he had played “Revna’s World,” he knew that the frost giantesses were pathologically short of menfolk. Nonetheless, he had never taken the lead to try to get closer to Hilde or any of the frost giantesses—or Lamia, or any female.
Wang Wei was a bit startled. Outside of a gift for making scathing—and often insightful—observations…
Well, his social skills were very rudimentary.
He looked Hilde up and down—as if seeing her for the first time. The low-cut silken mini-skirt tunics that Hilde invariably wore, left very little to a man’s—or anyone’s—imagination.
Hilde came from a race of frost giants who had mint green skin. From the neck down, she wasn’t a bad looking woman. She wasn’t the least bit obese, but she was definitely heavy-boned—like a female discus-thrower.
Her face—well, once you convinced yourself that yes, that was indeed the face of a female—she wasn’t ugly. She could even be considered modestly attractive.
“I can have you?” he asked.
He doubted that he’d understood correctly. The conclusion that forced upon him was too improbable.
“Yes! Do you want to marry me?” Hilde asked.
“Okay,” Wang Wei said.
He promptly went back to studying the textbook he’d been reading when Hilde came in.
“Wang Wei! When you ask a girl to marry you. It is customary to give her a kiss!” Hilde said.
She snatched the book out of Wang Wei’s hands. She looked angry.
“Hilde, I have never understood this sort of thing. If I make an advance on a woman, and she accepts my advance—then all is well in the world,” He said.
“However, what if I make an advance and she turns me down? It is an intolerable gaucherie for me to think that she might welcome my advance, when in fact, she would not,” he said.
“I have just said—in effect—'Hey, you might be interested in me’—to someone who has zero interest in me. That is supremely insulting. She would be completely justified in slapping my face,” Wang Wei said.
“Since I can never be sure and since being wrong casts aspersions on a woman’s good name—the only mannerly thing to do, is forebear,” Wang Wei said. “You will end up dying celibate, with that attitude,” Hilde scoffed.
“It is better to die celibate, than to get hooked up via presumptuousness. Besides, we are going to be married. I presume that, if Jesus spares us that long, that we will consummate our marriage—so barring outrageous catastrophe between now and then, I should not die celibate,” Wang Wei said.
“Very few Red Chinese talk about Jesus,” Hilde observed.
“I am not Red Chinese. I am Sichuanese and my country is occupied by the Red Chinese. My parents, my grandparents and most of my great-grandparents have been Christians—pogroms or not,” Wang Wei corrected pedantically.
Meanwhile, Hilde had been edging closer. She wrapped her arms around Wang Wei and kissed him.
Wang Wei was startled. Once he realized what was going on, he stopped struggling.
He had never been kissed before. Nonetheless, by his rigid and idiosyncratic code of conduct…
When the larger and stronger Hilde grabbed him and refused to let him go, to his mind that implied certain permissions. He let his hands roam and be somewhat naughty—not beyond all bounds of propriety, that wasn’t Wang Wei—but his hands went places that they would have never otherwise gone—at least not before his wedding night.
Meanwhile, Miguel Ángel had been laying in the top bunk out of sight. Wang Wei knew he was there—and frankly, he did not care. Anyway, up until Hilde stole a kiss—well, a series of kisses from him—there was nothing that wasn’t pure G-Rated in the activities.
Even the kiss, which Hilde might—presumably—have been shy about in public—was, at worst—PG.
Miguel Ángel had turned out to have an IQ of 148. After the full course of Advance, his IQ was well over 200 now.
Miguel Ángel, who hadn’t yet fully accommodated to his new intelligence, had turned into a rather rigorous logician—working out the logical consequences of myriad mundane things, and sharing his exhaustive conclusions with his sometimes-bemused conversational partners.
“You presume that the fact of being married gives you a moral sanction to make sexual advances to your bride. The logical inference is that being engaged gives a similar, but lesser permission to pursue some sorts of physical intimacy with your fiancé,” Miguel Ángel said.
Thankfully, Hilde had turned loose of Wang Wei by that time. He might have been injured when Hilde was so startled that she leapt 5-foot straight into the air.
“I would have to say that your analysis is correct. As always, you are able to deduce things to their logical conclusions faster than me,” Wang Wei agreed.
“You are an aberration!” Hilde said to Miguel Ángel.
She was angry that he’d spied upon her and she was angry that he’d startled her.
“And you…You aren’t 3-inches behind him. You are two of a kind!” Hilde added.
“There is a difference between us. Miguel Ángel is from Guatemala. I am from Sichuan. I am your betrothed and hopefully, your beloved—while Miguel Ángel is merely a family friend. Miguel Ángel, if you ever make a move on Hilde, I won’t spare you out of friendship,” Wang Wei warned.
“I’m going to a wedding today. You two may as well go and waste some of the groom’s generosity. It is a pity that in this economy, his hospitality won’t impoverish him in the slightest,” Miguel Ángel as he leapt from the bunk fully clothed.
“Do come. The bonds of civility may break down completely and I may challenge the worthless shit to a duel—right out in front of God and everyone. You’re my best friend, Wang Wei. You and Hilde are my only friends. You can be my seconds,” Miguel Ángel said.
“What sort of man is the groom?” Hilde asked.
“I have no idea. I have never met him,” Miguel Ángel said with a slight hitch in his voice.
************* **************** ***********************
Miguel Ángel not only wore the saber and the revolver that was considered acceptable formal wear in Bottomtown, he also carried a quiver-full of flint-tipped arrowheads over his shoulder. He had knapped and fletched them himself, back in Guatemala. He carried his bow in his hand.
A line from a book ran through his mind repeatedly:
“A man goes to knowledge as he goes to war: wide-awake, with fear, with respect, and with absolute assurance. Going to knowledge or going to war in any other manner is a mistake, and whoever makes it might never live to regret it.”
Aiai’s mother Ichtaca greeted Miguel Ángel with amusement.
“One would think that you were going to war,” she said.
“Aiai and I made this bow together. I still have 3 of the arrows that we made together,” Miguel Ángel explained.
He handed the bow to Ichtaca to examine. He also handed her the 3 precious arrows. They were carefully tied together, so that no matter how caught up in the moment that he might be, that he would never accidently shoot and risk losing or damaging one of them.
Ordinarily, he left the 3 special arrows carefully put away at home—wherever home was.
As Miguel Ángel spoke of crafting the bow and arrows with Aiai, his voice broke just slightly and the tiniest bit of a tear condensed in his eye, but he quickly recovered and turned away.
‘I can do this, because I must. My capacity for suffering is a bottomless pit,’ Miguel Ángel told himself, over and over.
Miguel Ángel was quoting one of his instructors who was also a Chiricahua Apache.
Ichtaca caught the brief emotion and her face showed her compassion and her concern. Miguel Ángel didn’t see the look on Ichtaca’s face, because he had quickly turned away.
Hilde and Wang Wei looked at the Lamia and shrugged. They had no clue what was going on.
The ceremony went off rather quickly, though at great cost to Miguel Ángel’s lifetime supply of willpower. Then there was a huge gala celebration.
Miguel Ángel took a modest-sized mug of beer and threw the beer out on the ground. He walked over to the bar and snatched a bottle of single malt Scotch.
He used the precious Scotch to rinse the residual beer from his mug and then he poured the 8-ounce mug full of single malt Scotch and threw it down as if it was a shot-glass full of whiskey.
He took 2 fifths of Scotch and went and sat down at a long table next to a baked and partially sliced ham. A couple of times, when someone reached for a piece of ham, Miguel Ángel made it plain that he was staking exclusive claim to the ham—by dint of stabbing at the offending hands with the meat-fork.
However, he asked Hilde and his friend Wang Wei very nicely, if they would like a drink of his Scotch or a slice or two of his ham.
Miguel Ángel was hoping that one of the unknown guests would take enough offence at his actions to challenge him. Instead, the other guests gave the trio a wide berth.
They used a piece of a jump-rope song to advertise this premium Scotch in Bottomtown:
“O Hippies, Rednecks—Winos Too! “They All Crave the Mystic Brew! “If You Tried It—So Would You! “If You Tried It—So Would You!”
As Miguel Ángel drank ever-increasing quantities of the premium Scotch, it became ever more important to him to remember the rest of the jump-rope song.
Trying to recall the lyrics was one of those fool’s errands that a drunken brain sends itself on. Since Miguel Ángel had never heard the song in its entirety, there was no way that he could recall it.
Neither Hilde or Wang Wei knew the lyrics. Most of the people at the wedding were from places besides the US—and Miguel Ángel had effectively driven away anyone who might know the rest of the lyrics by stabbing people’s hands with his meat fork.
Drugs were legal in Tawn.
Waiters came by with lines of cocaine all laid out ready to snort. Miguel Ángel had always avoided cocaine. It seemed like a potential bumpy lifepath to choose—but today, he didn’t care.
He commandeered a whole tray of coke lines—enough to serve several guests and he greedily snorted the whole thing.
That much coke might have caused him to overamp—maybe even go into seizures—except that he had already imbibed enough Scotch to put several ordinary folks under the table.
The stimulant and the depressant partially offset each other…
Plus, God alone knew what the quantities of Advance already in his system contributed to the mix. Mixing drugs was potentially heap bad juju.
A little while later, a waitress came by with a supply of mushrooms.
“They give a very relaxing, mellow Psychedelic experience. You will see some beautiful multi-colored streamers around moving objects. You will experience an enhanced appreciation of 3-Dimensional space and you may have some sort of epiphany,” the pleasant young lady patiently explained.
“I’m up for that!” Miguel Ángel said and then popped five of the mushrooms into his mouth.
“You should really only take one,” the waitress said dubiously.
“Really?” Miguel Ángel said as he expropriated the rest of the bowl of mushrooms and ate them one by one.
He waited until he was seeing streamers around everything and then he leapt atop the table. He danced the length of the table, kicking hams, turkeys and platters full of side-dishes onto the floor—while singing some sort of doggerel war song that he made up as he went along.
He stopped right before an enormous punch bowl.
Miguel Ángel raised up his voice until he had everyone’s attention.
When everyone had gathered around to see what Miguel Ángel was screaming about, he told them:
“I want to prepare a toast for the groom, just to show him what esteem that I hold him in.”
Miguel Ángel pulled out his Wee-Willie-Winkie and pissed in the punch bowl. He shook himself clean; zipped his manhood away and leapt on the ground.
He half-filled his beer mug with Scotch and then topped the mug off with the punch from the bowl that he had pissed in.
He rolled a little as he strutted up to the groom and extended the mug to him.
“Drink!”
The groom—Miguel Ángel had forgotten the man’s name, if he had ever learned it—stared at him in horror.
“Either drink the toast, or I will challenge you to a duel,” Miguel Ángel said in a flat monotone.
He was right-handed, so he used the saber or the Bowie in his left hand to leave his right hand free to grasp a pistol. He proffered the drink right handed, while he placed his left hand menacingly on his saber.
Aiai came up.
“Miguel Ángel, please don’t do this,” she said.
He cast the Scotch and beer and piss on the groom and tears rolled from his eyes.
“I give you your life, because Aiai asks it. But know this: I am a better man than you by every possible measure of a man. I’m stronger, braver, more intelligent, more loyal and more beloved of God. I am a top-ranked swordsman…”
“You have taken my beloved. If you ever mistreat her, I will wipe everyone in your whole damned family from the face of the Earth,” Miguel Ángel said.
Then he semi-deliberately puked all over the man—huge amounts of Scotch, baked ham and half-digested mushrooms showered the man.
“If you have the balls, now is the time to strike me—while I’m weak,” Miguel Ángel taunted.
He knew the man would not. He wasn’t a killer. However, for the rest of his life, he would be second-guessing what he did with this one opportunity to clear his honor.
If he was wrong—Miguel Ángel didn’t care to die. The fact that he had killed would haunt this weak man for the rest of his life. That too, was a way of taking revenge.
“Wang Wei, Hilde, I want to go back to my room,” Miguel Ángel said.
His purpose accomplished, he had lost the power to stand, let alone to walk.
His friend Wang Wei tried to walk him along. Hilde snorted in derision and threw Miguel Ángel over her shoulder and carried him as if he were a small child.
As Miguel Ángel slept off his colossal bender, his friends watched over him.
Getting blind drunk and challenging people to death duels was an accepted part of frost giant culture. Wang Wei’s notions of propriety were so nebulous, that he had no opinion on Miguel Ángel’s actions.
************* **************** ***********************
“You don’t understand, do you? Miguel Ángel loved her, but he hadn’t seen her for many years. When he saw her again, she was already engaged to marry another,” Hilde said.
“Do you love me, Wang Wei? Or have you just consented to marry me for some other reason?” Hilde asked.
“If you give someone gifts, they should love you. Even a dog will love you, if you gift him a warm place to sleep and food to eat,” Wang Wei said.
“There is nothing really wrong with that—except, once you’ve taken the gift, you cannot turn around and bite the hand that fed you. Even if the food has run out and the hand is empty, it will always be the hand of a friend,” he continued.
“Nor do I claim that is the only reason for love.”
“If you are willing to give yourself to me…”
“Well such a fine big gift is more than enough to make me love you forever,” Wang Wei said.
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Post by rvm45 on Jan 13, 2021 10:56:21 GMT -6
Chapter Twenty-Seven
69 187
Lester had discovered a forcefield buried under many feet of frozen oxygen and nitrogen.
Lester had recruited a number of gifted, but over-worked and under-financed archeologists and geologists from Earth—undergraduates, for the most part.
Then he had paired them up with high-tech detecting equipment from Ice.
Also, everyone in Lester’s team had their IQ raised 37%. I hoped the Ice pharmacists would come up with an improvement on Advance soon. The more I thought about Advance, the more of an embarrassment that it was.
I mean. Raising a smart fellow’s IQ by 37% was better than poking him in the eye with a sharp stick—but unless someone was already a higher-ranking genius, 37%+ only made someone Bright—not Brilliant.
Anyway, they found a number of ancient pre-freeze cities that way and they were studying a couple of them diligently. We really didn’t have the manpower to do justice to more than two excavation sites at present—and even then, we’d be at it for many decades.
Still, we were recruiting ever increasing numbers of archeologists and anthropologists lately—and never mind if that got us noticed.
O well, O Hell…
At any rate, they had discovered the forcefield.
The forcefield was a little over 20-miles in diameter. It was bright—it was positively iridescent. All the colors of the rainbow writhed in psychedelic patterns on the surface of the forcefield.
The forcefield held in atmosphere and most of the heat, but it posed no resistance to people.
I had Despair and a small entourage of about 20. I had several frost giantesses along, along with Terry’s sister Cissy. When Terry became the ruler of his own kingdom and had married a frost giantess princess, several of his family were encouraged to reach out to him.
He had insisted they cut off contact previously, lest they also end up on the Blue Oni shit list.
It was remarkable what being the sovereign of a postage-stamp-sized kingdom does for a man’s—or a Blue Oni’s—reputation.
The forcefield enclosed over 300-square miles—about one-third the size of Rhode Island which was 1000-square miles.
Neon’s Temple occupied over 20-square miles. The rest of the territory was given over to park-like meadows, flower gardens and forests—such as they were. Ice’s best and most imposing trees were little more than large ferns with an attitude.
There was also some farm land where crops were half-heartedly grown.
Yeah, there were people there—about 1800. The people who lived inside the forcefield were all mental cases.
Their cult stressed penitence to atone for the great wrong that their ancient ancestors had done to Neon.
They were all starved and anorexic-looking with racoon eyes with bags and dark circles. They practiced flagellation and other forms of self-abuse with rare abandon.
Lester assured me that the temple was over 6000-years old. I was absolutely amazed that these demon-possessed idiots hadn’t died out long ago.
I mean, not to be vulgar, but it is a fact that when women are starved to a certain point, that they stop having periods.
Supposing there is the odd boy in the crowd with a stiff willie and that he was willing to stop flagellating himself long enough to do something semi-enjoyable...
Where is he going to find a nubile young fem with enough meat on her bones to conceive—let alone carry a healthy infant to term?
You know all those movies, where the mystical space self-destructs and disappears shortly after being discovered by man? Well, there is a reason the novelists and the screenwriters love that plot contrivance.
If you set your story in the real world—for those who believe in reality—and your treasure hunter discovers an enormous Ancient Egyptian city buried in the middle of the Sahara Desert—where is it?
Well, you’ve never heard about it because it self-destructed without a trace, shortly after being discovered…
There was no reason to suspect that Neon’s Temple would self-destruct and disappear—but what if it did?
The place was a priceless time capsule full of plants, songbirds and small mammals long extinct in the rest of Ice.
There were massive numbers of biologists, botanists and geneticists collecting samples, specimens and seeds—just in case. Carefully, not like a horde of crazed Walmart shoppers on half-price day.
Archeologists and architects were busy taking beaucoup photos, videos and making measurements with LASERS and sonograms. Anthropologists with video cameras and tape recorders interviewed the crazed inhabitants…
And everything was very redundantly backed up.
As far as taking blood tissue samples—it was like shooting fish in a barrel.
These masochists would bend over in front of God and everyone and let you insert a colonoscope up their rectum without anesthetic, as long as you took the time to explain that it would be painful and humiliating.
Now when I recruited people to come to Ice or the Sapphire World, I didn’t leave out Ministers of the Gospel.
I have no idea what the official position of C.O.G.I.C.—Church Of God In Christ—is on Outsiders and alternate worlds. More than likely, they pretend that the situation doesn’t exist—although in the days to come, this position will become increasingly untenable.
However, I am on a first-name basis with the Bishop of Western Kaintuck. I don’t mean to sound cynical—because the Bishop is a good man, a sincere man—but it was a number of multi-million-dollar donations here and there, that brought me unambiguously to the Bishop’s attention.
The Bishop promoted—we call it “elevated”—a couple hundred bright young Ministers to the rank of Elder and gave them permission to charter churches on Ice.
The Bishop of Western Kaintuck is also Bishop of Ice and the Sapphire World? Isn’t that like the tail wagging the dog? What would the National Headquarters think if they knew of our under-the-table-dealings?
Who cared? I didn’t.
I was running things. Things would run my way, or they would not run at all.
Anyway, as I walked the 9 or 10-miles to the temple proper, I encountered at least a dozen classical Street Preachers haranguing and debating the crowd.
I was fortunate enough to witness Brother Jed and Max Lynch preach in public, back when Brother Jed was in his prime and at his most confrontational. These brave Preachers did his method proud.
Some of the crowd that had their tempers fanned, turned their attention to my small group.
You can shut Despair out of your consciousness to a degree—I mean that wouldn’t help if she was ripping you in half, but still…
I’m human—or I was. You cannot choose not to see me.
I unfurled my great black wings. I couldn’t use them to fly yet. They were still diaphanous and incorporeal. I could use them to harness the power of the Realm of Nightmare though.
Despair had hair. She had breasts and she could and did produce milk of a sort. I presumed that she had nipples—I still had to presume at that point.
Nonetheless, Despair wasn’t a mammal—not in the sense that she had any heritage or solidarity with any mammal on Earth. Despair had vertebrae—but she wasn’t a vertebrate. She wasn’t even an animal on the animal, vegetable and fungi trichotomy.
Despair was as alien as those little green men or gray aliens that you see on the Idiot Tube.
Take a Lamia. There might be considerable debate as to whether a Lamia is more mammalian or reptilian, but they are definitely a creature of Earth.
Oni are of Earth. Even the Yōkai that I had promised Grandpa Liu not to believe in, were of Earth.
People from Jotunheim, Asgard, Alfheim etcetera are all closely linked to Earth and there has been some exchanges of DNA and personnel over the millennia.
Night Rangers and the Realm of Nightmare are fierce outliers to the system.
With Despair’s semi-human façade, it was easy to forget how different she was—and how different that she was making me.
I had imbibed enough of Despair’s milk to consummate at any time with an excellent chance of surviving the encounter. However, the longer that I delayed and the more of her bitter oily milk that I could consume first, the stronger that I would be after the transformation.
Meanwhile, I pretty much qualified as Night Warden on paper—despite never having consummating my marriage to Despair. I was acquiring more and more Night Warden abilities as time went on.
So, when I unfurled an endless vista of nightmares, these clowns backed off.
After a modest hike of 9 or 10-miles, we ended up in front of the temple. A large squad of about 20 temple guards moved to block us.
“Do you think that y’all can stop us from entering?” I asked.
Indeed, I don’t think the squad of anorexics could handle one of the frost giantesses if she chose to transform. Cissy couldn’t transform, but she could probably have whipped the whole group without raising a sweat.
The captain looked me in the eyes earnestly.
“Friend, it isn’t a question of whether you can force entrance. The goddess has been driven mad. Can’t you feel her madness even here? I am so weary of this job. I imbibe the aura of madness continually without respite or end,” he said wearily.
“If you go through the temple barrier, you will experience the full madness of the goddess with no buffer or source of easement,” he said earnestly.
I examined him and his men earnestly, using the senses of a Night Warden.
The rest of his squad was stark raving mad. I mean, most of the postulants were a half-bubble off plumb and many of them were demon possessed—but these dudes took madness to its logical extreme.
Demon possession isn’t uncommon, but it is far from as common as some seem to believe. Humans have a built-in resistance to demons—otherwise the human race would have died out many eons ago.
Some folks just seem to have little resistance to demons. Certain depraved practices weaken the soul’s resistance to demonic possession. Inviting “spirit guides” or “cosmic consciousnesses” into yourself largely compromises your natural defenses.
Jesus left his disciples the power to cast out demons using his name. However, without belief, simply name-dropping Jesus’ name accomplishes little.
A few powerful demons are quite resistant to being cast out, even when using Jesus’ name. One has to have spent many years fasting and praying to gain the faith required to cast these demons out.
Incidentally, there are natural remedies that can sometimes pry a demon out. Reference David playing the harp for Saul. The big problem is that if nothing is done to shut the door, the demon will come back as often as not.
Casting demons out is a simple matter of ordering them to leave. There is no need to throw “holy water” around and have an elaborate and lengthy voodoo ceremony like the Romish Papists do.
I can sense the heap-big juju “requires much fasting and prayer” type demons, but I’ve never had much success exorcising them. I largely try to ignore them.
Demons cannot possess a Christian. Once you’re saved, regardless of what sins you may fall into, you have lifetime immunity from possession.
While the demon cannot come inside you of you, if you insist on clowning around with Satan’s playmates, they can fasten onto you like a leech and cause you problems.
I try, inasmuch as possible, to ignore them. If it becomes necessary, killing or disabling their host will deal with them quite effectively.
This captain’s clear gaze showed that although he wasn’t a Christian, that nonetheless, the omnipresent demons in this place hadn’t succeeded in indwelling him.
Beyond that, he was showing an earnest concern with a fellow man’s welfare.
The captain and his men dwelt in the periphery of the goddess’ aura. While the aura had driven the others mad and it had made the captain’s inner being weary beyond comprehension, it had strengthened these people’s constitutions.
They were all several hundred years old and the captain was almost 2000-years old.
“You blaspheme Captain! It is our pride and our honor to serve the goddess!” one of the men said.
Ordinarily, I am not so impatient. These masochist morons annoyed me. The whole ambience of this place oppressed me. The shards of scathing madness escaping from the barrier around the temple was almost as annoying as having to hear Country “Music.”
I used my telekinesis to break the speaker’s arm.
“The next one to interrupt me, as I speak to this good man, will have both of his arms broken!” I snapped.
I reckoned without the madness of these postulants. They started clamoring for broken arms like children begging for jelly beans. Asses!
“Despair?” I asked.
I could summon the nightmares on my own now. I don’t know why I tasked Despair with the task. Habit, or being preoccupied, I suppose.
I don’t know what—apart from their crack-brained goddess—what these people living this very confined and sheltered life had to live in terror of—except perhaps a partial presentiment of Judgement Day.
Never mind. The nightmares from the Realm of Nightmares come with their own context. Everyone in the squad except for the captain, fell to the ground cradling their heads and screaming their throat’s raw with terror.
I can’t say that it made it any easier to converse, but they had screamed themselves into hoarse near-silence shortly.
The captain looked at Despair in pure horror. I was about to reassure him, when he spoke.
“Goddess, why have you left your temple? I have never heard of such a thing!”
“Despair, I’ve heard you called a demon, a harpy and a Ch’į́įdii. This is the first time that I have had anyone mistake you for a goddess!” I said jocularly.
“You’re not the Goddess Neon…” the captain stammered.
“This is Despair. She isn’t a goddess.”
“I see that I was momentarily mistaken. I ask your pardon,” he said.
“Stillwater, I like this human. Can I have him?” Cissy asked.
“He’s a human being. I cannot gift him to you, like a sack of flour,” I said.
“Man, if you consent to be my husband, I will take you far away from this place to a bright happy place,” Cissy said.
Several of the frost giantesses started to complain, feeling that Cissy had stolen a march on them.
“She can indeed take you to a better world. You needn’t make a full commitment to her at this point in time. Cissy, you can take this man to your plantation in the Sapphire World, with his consent. Don’t make a formal engagement or consummate until he has a chance to look around and get his bearings,” I ordered.
“Solveig, would you transform for the good captain? I know that quite a few frost giantesses will want to try to woo him away from Cissy. I want full disclosure,” I said.
Cissy gritted her teeth in anger. She seemed to think that the giantess ability to become over 30-feet tall was a plus, rather than a debit when trying to attract a human male.
“Trust me, if you Hulk out and get those great big green veins all over your face like your brother does when he is furious beyond all restraint, it won’t help your case courting this brother,” I said to Cissy.
I was afraid that the captain might perceive the blue-skinned and horned Cissy as something demonic. Apparently though, he didn’t judge by appearance—or he was so desperately unhappy in his present circumstance that he just didn’t care.
“I would be honored to travel to your home, Honored Miss,” the captain said.
That was kinda borderline. He definitely was not close enough to Cissy to add “Miss” in front of her name—but if she allowed such familiarity, what was it to me? Still, using “Honored Miss” as a title was not quite the same thing as addressing her as “Miss Cissy.”
I think Cissy would have been satisfied to be addressed as “Asshole.” She was that enamored of the captain.
She wrapped her arms around the captain and teleported to the Sapphire World. Yeah, Blue Oni can travel between the worlds to a degree. Her title to land in the Sapphire World acted as a sort of key that let her enter.
“His aura was especially robust. Cissy and the frost giantesses are drawn to it, like bees to nectar,” Despair said.
“Come Despair, let us go meet the mad Goddess Neon,” I said as I stepped through the shimmering barrier.
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Post by rvm45 on Jan 13, 2021 13:18:03 GMT -6
Chapter Twenty-Nine
71 973
When Despair and I stepped through the second forcefield, the jangled mental aura increased exponentially. The relative strength of the aura guided us to the goddess.
Neon was about 6-foot tall, thin but very busty. She had long green hair and eyes that were a bit over-large and solid green—I mean, both Iris and sclera were bright green.
She wore a very revealing, frost giantess style mini-skirt tunic that continuously shifted its psychedelic patterns.
She had full pouting lips and they were green too. When she opened her mouth or stuck out her tongue—all of the inside of her mouth—tongue and gums—was green. Her ears were long and came to a point—much like Despair's.
She had very nice straight white teeth—except that she had a set of well-developed “vampire” eye-tooth fangs.
Neon reeled drunkenly about and laughed uproariously. Then she fell backward off the stool that she had been sitting on and wallowed on the floor momentarily.
She climbed to her feet and then hopped atop the marble table and squatted like a baseball pitcher.
Er…yeah, she wasn’t wearing any panties.
“A sister goddess and her husband have come to call on me. Where are my manners?” Neon asked rhetorically.
“Do you want to ravish me?” Neon asked me—as if it was a perfectly normal inquiry.
No, she wasn’t offering herself to me. It was more a matter of inquiring what new torments we held in store for her.
“We have come to set you right,” Despair said.
“Cannot be done! Cannot be done! She is broken beyond any capability to ever function normally,” Neon chanted joyfully.
“Neon and I are different. I have a deep-seated urge to find a mate and bear children. Neon is of a class of goddesses intended to remain perpetually pure and virgin all of their lives,” Despair said.
“She called you a sister goddess,” I said.
“Yeah, I know that you don’t like the term ‘goddess.’ I avoided using that term to describe myself. I am what you would call a 4th tier goddess,” Despair shrugged off my inquiry.
“Neon was a 5th tier goddess, tasked with being this planet’s guardian. Somehow, some of the ancient Ice mages, scientists, black priests—or whatever—contrived to restrain and rape her. She has fallen in power to the 4th tier and she has lost her mind,” Despair said.
“So, how much of this have you known all along?” I asked.
“I had no idea this temple existed on Ice or that Ice had an appointed guardian, until Lester uncovered the place. The longer that I’m in this place, the more knowledge that I acquire,” Despair said.
“Stillwater, I am very much the real Despair, but in some senses, I am a bit of an avatar of Despair. There are secrets about myself that are locked away even from me—until you become the key to unlocking the totality of myself. Here though, some of my ancient knowledge comes back,” she said.
“Okay, back to the main topic—how do we help Neon?”
“When a virginal goddess like Neon loses her chastity, there is no going back to what she once was. The rule is, that she has to conceive and bear her replacement. Once she has accomplished that, she has to resign herself to existing in a somewhat different state,” Despair.
“She might—conceivably—go back to being a 5th tier goddess. Even if she gets to be a 6th tier goddess though, she will always feel a sense of loss and diminishment,” Despair said.
“So, will getting pregnant make her sane again?”
“No. Bearing her replacement is simply her geas. That and her sanity are two separate issues. Why, are you volunteering for stud duty?”
“You wrong me, Despair.”
“I’m only teasing you. To cure her madness, you and I need to partake of her terror and lead her out of it. If I had any other partner, I wouldn’t risk such a thing. You though—you elevate obstinance to a whole other level,” Despair said.
Meanwhile, Neon had gathered some golden orbs from somewhere. They looked like a spherical ball—a little bigger than a softball—of beautiful golden-colored Jell-O.
She offered a plate with one of the golden orbs to me and another one to Despair.
“It is a slime—a highly psychedelic slime. It is one of the main substances that Neon has been using to stay stoned out of her mind. If you and I eat one, it will help us to enter her nightmare,” Despair explained.
I looked at the slime very dubiously.
“I swear to you; the slimes are not mollusks. They are more like gigantic amoebas—though of course they have many, many mitochondria and nuclei distributed through their single-celled bodies,” Despair said.
“Well alright then!” I said.
“You will nonchalantly consume the slime, knowing that it may very well kill you or drive you mad—but you’d rather die than touch a live-saving mollusk!?!” Despair said.
“Well, of course,” I said as I slurped the slime down.
Neon’s nightmare was repeated over and over ad nauseum.
The high priest with his thin pencil moustache and his supercilious attitude came strutting into Neon’s private chambers and bragged how he had spiked Neon’s food with substances that bound her power. He was so insufferably pleased with himself.
Yeah, I know. Neon is supposed to be a “goddess” but she has to eat food and she needs to sleep occasionally—and although it is monumentally difficult—she can be poisoned. That doesn’t go along with my idea of divinity…
I don’t know what the fool’s purpose was. Probably something more complicated than simple lust. Especially since he called in a couple of dozen acolytes to pull a train on the deflowered and degraded goddess.
There were things in the temple’s memories that never made it into Neon’s consciousness—but I could access them.
After a delay of a couple of hours, the high priest and all of his henchmen were driven mad by the goddess’ returning aura. They didn’t die shrieking madmen, because long before they died, they had damaged their vocal chords beyond the ability to make sounds.
They died miserable deaths though, locked in a nightmare of indescribable horror.
I chuckled merrily. I was becoming a connoisseur of nightmares since becoming a Night Warden.
Ever hear of homeopathy? It is partly based on the premise that “Like cures Like.” Like, if you smell fresh-cut onions, it may make your nose run—but if you have a cold and a very runny nose, cut onion vapors may actually improve the situation.
Much of homeopathy is quackery, but this bit of homeopathy worked. I ran the nightmares that drove the priests who had raped Neon mad, through Neon’s mind again and again.
It let her attain some measure of serenity and composure seeing what a miserable end the miscreants came to. It didn’t heal the wound. Such wounds can never heal, barring a miraculous healing from God. Still, wounds like Neon’s can scab over enough to let someone function.
After many hours, the effects of the golden slime ended and I found myself back in the chamber with Neon and Despair.
“I wish very much, that you weren’t already taken,” Neon said.
She regarded me earnestly with her uncanny green eyes.
“Neon, if you leave here—will this temple collapse?” I asked.
“No, the temple is not dependent on me to exist,” Neon said.
“Can I have some of these slimes?” I asked.
“Help yourself,” Neon said.
I had radioed a tech. As soon as we stepped out of Neon’s Temple, he met us and I handed over about 60 slimes.
“The golden ones are very strongly psychedelic . They eat simple starches and sugars and reproduce by fission. Their biochemistry should be quite interesting,” I said to him.
“Come Neon, these cretins may regain a modicum of sanity if you give them a respite from your presence,” I said.
I could have taken Neon straight to where I wanted to take her, but I couldn’t repress the temptation to take her to church and then to Linda Liu’s to meet Grandpa Liu and eat Memphis pit bar be que.
Let the church mothers gossip about how Despair’s “sister” was a goddess with green hair and lips and a terrifying aura.
************ ***************** ***************************
I had a dedicated bay to teleport stuff to, in one of Marshal’s warehouses.
Marshal came rushing into the bay.
“What in the Hell are you doing Stillwater!?! What are you doing!?! Have you brought me trouble!?!”
“I certainly hope so. You said that you haven’t had a nightmare since Torment died. This is Despair’s sister Neon. She isn’t a Night Ranger, but she has her share of nightmares to share with someone,” I said.
“You have brought me a debauched virgin goddess! I hate you, Stillwater!” Marshal said.
“My name is Marshal. I was betrothed to the Night Ranger Torment, but she died in a faraway war—a war beyond my comprehension, or so she told me before she left to fight,” Marshal said.
Since Marshal was partially transformed, he was on the shortlist of human men who could sire Neon’s child and retain his sanity. Of course, they would have to get better acquainted first.
“Can you find your own way back to your temple?” I asked Neon.
“Of course, I am a goddess after all. Stillwater, you are guardian now, not me. However, I still have certain abilities—with your permission. One of my missions was to establish a network of underground railroads to connect all of the cities together,” Neon said.
“How?”
“I can harness the energy of continuous creation for this purpose—though I cannot harness that energy without let or hindrance for any purpose. The railway network is a special case,” Neon said.
“How long?”
“Vance and Lour are both relatively close—2-years. I can connect Tawn to Kesser within about 4-years. Total coverage? Maybe 27-years—maybe 37,” Neon said.
“Carry on! Good show!”
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Post by rvm45 on Jan 14, 2021 13:55:59 GMT -6
Chapter Thirty
73 648
Neon having been taken care of for the moment, I received word that my friend Cassadore wanted to see me.
As Cassadore walked into the office—one of them—that I maintained on Earth—I was surprised to see that he was accompanied by Ordeal.
“Cassadore, Ordeal,” I greeted them.
“Some fool is running a dating site online, where you can meet haints that wish to miscegenate,” Cassadore said, by way of explaining Ordeal’s presence.
“You deliberately went on my site, with malice of forethought, to meet a Night Ranger!?!”
“Why do you think that I sicced you on Despair? I wanted to talk to her, but I was afraid,” Cassadore confessed.
“Despair looked like something that you’d want to date!?! Really!?!”
I was inordinately fond of Despair—now—but damned nation! Her hideousness was an extreme stumbling-block in the beginning. Even now, if I am objective—she is hideous.
“What can I say? I’m an Indian,” Cassadore shrugged.
“Night Rangers are not the most forthcoming of God’s creatures. Has Ordeal told you that she is a tier 4 goddess?” I asked, just to shake Cassadore up.
Cassadore is very taciturn and enigmatic and I often have no idea where he is coming from. It was fun dropping a bombshell like that in his lap.
“Actually, Despair is like royalty among Night Rangers. I’m still tier 3 goddess, though I am close to promoting,” Ordeal said.
I told Cassadore about Neon and how I’d introduced her to Marshal. Marshal was a businessman—a bit of a hardnosed businessman. However, he was fanatically honest and his trading company was a boon to slip-sliders and other Outsiders with alien produce and wares to peddle.
Marshal looked like a very vigorous 40-year old, but he was over 200. I don’t know if he ever told his deceased wife his true age. Of course, the children needed to be told, as they became old enough to take part in the family business.
The single kiss that he had shared with Torment all those years ago, had done him good. He had also had access to a variety of longevity-increasing substances in his capacity as an interdimensional broker.
The fact remained, that Torment and Marshal had only shared a single kiss.
I introduced Neon to Marshal, because they were both sad and damaged people. Perhaps they could heal each other.
The fact remained that Marshal might not survive Neon’s embrace. His odds would be better if his transformation was further along.
I had asked Despair, if saliva, blood and milk donated by another Night Ranger could advance Marshal’s evolution. It turns out that while the milk is highly specific to the betrothed, any Night Ranger’s saliva or blood will advance one’s evolution.
Then, wouldn’t you know It? Despair’s saliva and blood could not be used. Despair was evolving. She wasn’t a pure Night Ranger anymore—like a zebra ain’t a horse or a Neanderthal ain’t a homo sapiens.
I arranged for Ordeal to drop some “materials” earmarked for Marshal’s exclusive use.
“Isn’t Marshal’s son, Benson, betrothed to Melancholy?” Ordeal asked.
“Yeah, but Benson spends large blocks of time in his world and the sooner Marshal can strengthen his mind and body, the better it will be for him,” I said.
“Where is Benson?” Cassadore asked.
Cassadore had never met the boy, but the reputation of the other Night Ranger consorts gets around.
“A late 23rd century Earth-like world, with over 30 000 O’ Neill colonies at L4 and L5. In this solar system, just beyond where we have Pluto, they have another sun about the same size as ours, Benson dubbed the place ‘Solaris’,” I said, filling Cassadore in.
People will say:
“Well, if there was another sun just beyond Pluto’s present orbit, the solar system couldn’t possibly have evolved similarly enough to have a planet much like Earth, complete with human beings!”
The thing is, if there are an astronomically huge number of alternate universes, some will come to be quite alike, just by coincidence. Never mind how hysterically improbable it may be, the numbers will support it.
If you have two similar systems, the “like attracts like” phenomena will draw them very close together—close enough that the distance can be spanned by an entry-level slip-slider.
“Anyway, I wanted you to see these,” Cassadore said.
He laid a half a peck of withered roots on my desk.
“My world is named ‘Saguaro.’ It is as if the Sonoran Desert became a world-spanning phenomenon—not exactly, but that approximates it. Anyway, there are more than enough mescaline and psilocybin analogs on Saguaro to send Alexander Shulgin into paroxysms of ecstasy.
“The folks there stay whacked a large percentage of the time. Anyway, these roots have something like mescaline in them—but different. It will drastically increase a slip-slider’s ability to visualize multiple-dimensional space…” he said.
“It also seems to allow even the mundane to experience 4 and 5-Dimensional space in their mind’s eye. If you take the drug long enough, the effects become permanent,” Cassadore said.
“What do you want?” I asked.
“Weapon factories and a few staple crops genetically tailored to grow on an arid world,” Cassadore said.
“I will personally shuttle everything you need to create weapon-making technology—EE…how many weapons are we talking about? —within 3 or 4-months. I’ll bring enough temporary techs to get it up and running,” I said.
“For the crops, I’ll need more detailed information. Never mind, I will bring some genetic engineers to scope out the local biome, when I deliver your factory,” I said.
“It may take a few years to genetically engineer your crops. Meanwhile, do not—for the love of God—do anything that might cause this game-changing root to go extinct. However, if you can—I want plenty of dried roots like these, fresh roots, living plants and seed,” I said as Cassadore nodded.
EE…We were casting around looking for an improved Advance.
Visualizing 4-D and 5-D space and being able to vaguely intuit 6-D space—like our best mathematicians and physicists can vaguely intuit 4-D space at present—well…
That would be of use primarily to mathematicians, physicists and people like statisticians and economists who try to model multi-dimensional systems.
I mean, I cannot prove it, but it would seem that a man that could think in 5-D, could handle 17-D equations with more facility than a similar mathematician who could only clearly visualize 3-dimensions.
Still, mathematics is at the foundation of everything—well, most technological things. If our theoreticians became more able, it should create wide-spread changes.
************** ****************** ************************
I stopped by Revna’s Valley to deliver some of the roots to the best frost giantess alchemists, before I took the rest to some of my laboratories in Tawn.
I found the usually ebullient Terry in a rather morose and contemplative mood.
“What is up, Terry?”
“You have met my sister Cissy. She seems enamored of an evolved human that you found in a temple. Fine, fine! I’m broad-minded. I married a frost giantess, after all…”
“My sister Misty…er, well…she married an Oni,” Terry said distastefully.
“Would you prefer that she marry a frost giantess?” I joked.
“Frankly, yes. A female Blue Oni can become male, if she sets her head to it—though it doesn’t work the other way,” Terry said.
“Words fail me. Summon my sister and her consort,” Terry told an attendant.
Misty was a somewhat shorter, lighter built and younger version of Cissy. She wasn’t quite full-grown—though I have no idea how long it takes a Blue Oni to become full-grown.
“This is ‘Eiji,’ Misty’s husband,” Terry said in embarrassment.
I saw why Terry was so grumpy. Eiji was a Red Oni!
“Are Red Oni and Blue Oni cross-fertile?” I asked.
“I don’t know. So far as I know, this has never happened before,” Terry said gloomily.
“I am very pleased to meet you!” Eiji said.
“I am an artist—a painter and a sculptor. I heard how you were trying to introduce art to a frozen world and I contrived to get the coordinates to travel to Bottomtown. I met Misty when I was trying to sell some of my paintings to the gallery she managed,” Eiji enthused.
He seemed unaware of the hostility that Terry was sending his way.
“Always good to meet an artist. Invite some of your fellow artists to check Bottomtown out,” I said.
“This is your fault, Stillwater! If you weren’t opening all those art galleries…” Terry said.
“I even gave him a slip-slider’s manual. I was hoping that he’d get some ungodly place, get stuck and die,” Terry said gloomily.
“He’s a Red Oni. He has limited powers of teleportation, even without using the manual. How likely do you think he is, to get stranded and die?” I asked.
“You wear the sapphire that is connected to the Sapphire World. Did you know that the Sapphire World was created by Blue Oni? Only, by some miscalculation, Oni couldn’t bond with it—only someone with human blood,” Eiji said.
I glanced at Terry.
“That is news to me. I don’t much like the boy, but I’ve never known him to be a liar,” Terry said.
‘Don’t much like’, my ass! If Terry seriously objected to this gushing loquacious fellow, he’d rip his head off.
“The Red Oni were very envious that the Blue Oni could create a whole world—even though it gave them no material advantage, it gave them considerable bragging rights,” Eiji said.
“After more than 3000-years of diligent research, we have matched the Blue Oni’s accomplishment—not that I give a rat’s ass about such sectarian bickering,” Eiji said.
“I persuaded the Elders of my clan, that you are the perfect one to advertise the Red Oni’s great accomplishment. I present you with the Ruby World!” Eiji said.
So saying, he pulled out a big tear-drop shaped ruby and a ruby ring and presented them to me.
“They are safe. They are very similar to the gem that you absorbed from Morgan,” Despair told me.
I placed the teardrop gem on my glabella and absorbed it. The ring went onto my right index finger without much cogitating on my part. The moment was structured that way.
While the sky in the Sapphire World was cobalt blue, there was just enough extra, scattered rays of red light to dye the sky in the Ruby World a deep crimson color—like a beautiful sunset—only in full daylight.
The world was empty!
“You will have to customize the world to suit yourself,” Eiji said.
“Eiji, thank you!” I said.
“Terry is my brother-in-law and you are Terry’s sworn brother. You are family,” Eiji shrugged.
Terry sat on his throne and brooded. Most Red Oni were morose and belligerent—always looking for an excuse to fight. This extra-friendly young Red Oni was hard to dislike.
“Look on the bright side Terry. If Misty had married a frost giant, you’d have to worry about him eating your nieces and nephews,” I joked.
“I’d let him eat his own head!” Terry exploded.
O my aching head! At Eiji’s behest I had to put a new section into my game. Now there is a section for Red Oni males, wanting to meet Blue Oni females for cooperation and possible dating.
How could I turn him down after he gifted me a world?
Fortunately, there were only a score or so perverted Red Oni with a fetish for Blue women.
EE…and due to Terry’s casual remark that female Blue Oni can become male, if they chose to—that was not general knowledge in Revna’s Valley—now the frost giantesses are sometimes seen, making impassioned pleas to Blue Oni females, to turn male and marry them.
They promise them the world, if only…
************** **************** *************************
“Sniper, Sniper, in a Tree; “Ya Got My Buddy; “But Cha Won’t Get Me!”
Miguel Ángel had trained in the Sapphire World, to be a crack commando. In view of his skills in stalking, camouflage, tracking and marksmanship, he was offered the chance to become a sniper.
He had just completed his training, when he was put on notice. The mysterious mercenaries with their flamethrowers were attacking a small enclave of Lamia in Tibet.
Miguel Ángel’s eyes turned red and he clenched his fist in rage. Then he dropped by to see Wang Wei and Hilde. He needed someone to watch over his hounds while he was gone and to adopt them if he never came back.
“Hilde will be glad to look after your dogs. I’ll be going with you,” Wang Wei said.
Wang Wei had an IQ of about 280—extrapolated, since it was difficult to impossible to measure such an IQ—since taking Advance. He had gone into genetic research—when he wasn’t fussing over his pecan grove.
“If we can save any of the Lamia, that’s best. If we cannot, as long as I can collect samples from a fairly fresh corpse, I may be able to clone them. It is a tragic thing when a mythical creature becomes extinct,” Wang Wei said.
“Do you approve of Wang Wei putting himself at risk?” Miguel Ángel asked Hilde.
“He is male. He wouldn’t be male, if he wasn’t ready to take risks,” Hilde shrugged.
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Post by texican on Jan 14, 2021 16:37:48 GMT -6
The shards of scathing madness escaping from the barrier around the temple was almost as annoying as having to hear Country “Music.”
Now rvm, that is just cruel and not at all true.
Texican....
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Post by rvm45 on Jan 14, 2021 21:28:05 GMT -6
The shards of scathing madness escaping from the barrier around the temple was almost as annoying as having to hear Country “Music.”Now rvm, that is just cruel and not at all true. Texican.... You Win:"The shards of scathing madness escaping from the barrier around the temple were nowhere near as annoying as Country "Music." Happy Now?
…..RVM45
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Post by papaof2 on Jan 15, 2021 0:11:15 GMT -6
rvm,
You need to hear "I Got Tears In My Ears From Lying On My Back While Crying Over You" before you lump all country music together ;-)
Yes, real song. No, I don't remember who recorded it or which year.
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Post by rvm45 on Jan 15, 2021 9:34:13 GMT -6
Friends,
Country "Music" was the drek that my parents listened to.
When I was in 7th grade, I spent about 30-weeks being forced to take Organ-Playing lessons very much against my will and better judgement.
Understand, it wasn't just that I did not want to practice. I violently objected to having my mental landscape cluttered with the ability to play the organ. I felt that I was forcibly having a portion of my inner world warped into something that I felt was repugnant. I also felt that the damage would be irreparable, once it fully took ahold of me.
I can remember frantically working equations in my mind as I practiced each song the required number of times, hoping that the multi-tasking would prevent me from actually assimilating the lesson.
In retrospect, I SHOULD have resorted to outright defiance.
"Do it, or get a whipping!"
"Frankly, I'd rather have a daily whipping than degrade my mind by studying music."
"You will get a whipping AND you will have to practice the organ!"
I don't know how, if I resolved to accept and ignore the threatened daily whippings, just what means he'd have had to force me to practice—but he SAID that he would force me to practice and I was given to taking his word without too much analysis.
God, for five or six years, I violently HATED any and all music! If I could hear it in the background at all, it put me in a VERY FOUL MOOD.
I Googled, "What do you call the psychological condition of HATING ANY AND ALL MUSIC?"
All I could find, was reference to a rare and hereditary condition that makes very few people incapable of ENJOYING music. It is like super "Tone Deafness."
{True Tone Deafness is like "Color Blindness of the Ear" and it is very rare.}
Not being able to appreciate music isn't the same thing as hating it with a burning passion.
Anyway, I Loathed and Hated ALL MUSIC from 7th grade until College. There were so many stereos and so much classic Rock music playing in the background at Purdue in the mid-70's, that it kinda slipped up on me.
I never lost the loathing for the Country "Music" that I grew up with, and over the years, my Loathing has grown stronger—for a number of reasons.
….RVM45
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Post by papaof2 on Jan 15, 2021 16:08:48 GMT -6
Sorry that you didn't have a positive opportunity to embrace nusic - you might have liked it had it been presented as another form of mathematical notation ;-)
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Post by rvm45 on Jan 15, 2021 16:54:57 GMT -6
I had made attempts to learn the Tonette, the Double Bass, the Tuba and the Guitar. In each case, I was the one who initiated the activity; but when I tired of it and wanted to quit, I was forced to remain at it against my will, until I stubbornly proved that we were wasting everyone's time trying to force me to do something I was determined NOT TO DO.
My father bought the organ, largely at my younger sister's continual pleading.
I had fun learning to play a few songs, from the included literature.
Then it come time to sign us up for lessons.
"Hey wait a moment—it is easier to get into these type of things than to get out. I'm going to play it smart and never start—UNLESS I'm assured that I can quit anytime that I choose to."
"Do I HAVE TO TAKE ORGAN LESSONS?"
I was astonished to hear, "Yes."
I'm thinking:
Wait a moment. I didn't ASK for this shit! I tried to be prudent and never start in the first place…AND YOU'RE GOING TO FORCE ME!?!
This isn't fair! It is a gross offense against everything good, and right and proper in the world!
Well screw you! I may have to PRACTICE and GO TO LESSONS, But I WILL BE DAMNED IF I MASTER ANY OF MY LESSONS!!!!!!
Knowledgeable people told me that I had real talent.
IF I could have gotten the simple promise:
"You can quit anytime that you wish," I might have studied the organ diligently for 9-years like my sister—and honestly, I had far more talent than she did.
Instead, I grimly battled it out for a few months, but by that my father finally let me quit the organ, I had convinced myself that music and musicians were something unclean and evil…
I am a fanatical contrarian and I go to great lengths.
Anyway, it took a long time to rid myself of the Anti-Music Mania that I had been forced into.
…..RVM45
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Post by misterjimbo on Jan 15, 2021 20:53:26 GMT -6
So which country music artist do you like the best?
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Post by texican on Jan 16, 2021 21:36:59 GMT -6
The shards of scathing madness escaping from the barrier around the temple was almost as annoying as having to hear Country “Music.”Now rvm, that is just cruel and not at all true. Texican.... You Win:"The shards of scathing madness escaping from the barrier around the temple were nowhere near as annoying as Country "Music." Happy Now?
…..RVM45rvm, A little johnnie cash, merle haggard and so many more can help to lighten one's disposition, but in your case, a roaring honkey tonk would probably help a lot more. And country western gals are pretty and very friendly. Texican....
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Post by rvm45 on Jan 18, 2021 16:18:10 GMT -6
Well,
If I had to pick the LEAST OBJECTIONABLE:
Johnny Cash, Hank Williams Jr, Willie Nelson, Glen Campbell…
And I have great respect for Jerry Lee Lewis—though he was only marketed as a Country Artist, Cause he was black-balled by the Rock Industry.
Jerry Lee Lewis deserves a genre all his own—cause no one ever came up with a sound remotely similar to his.
Folks that have me reaching for my ear plugs:
Billy Ray Cyrus, Miley Cyrus, the Dixie Chicks, the Judds, Shania Twain…
O, what is that blond-haired girl who is half-Vietnamese—or some such…Finally, I remembered her name: Taylor Swift.
Buck Owens, Roy Clark…
Old 40's genre shit…
Like "Your Cheatin' Heart."
On the other hand, some of the "Truck Drivin' " songs can be tolerated.
I don't believe in Evolution, but IF I DID
Rock & Roll singers and the later Rock Singers are like apes who evolved into men—back in the 50's…
While Country "Music" "Artists" are like monkeys that decided to continue to live in the trees, throwing Coconuts and Feces at their Evolved Cousins.
…..RVM45
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Post by misterjimbo on Jan 18, 2021 20:12:02 GMT -6
Jerry Lee Lewis is indeed one of a kind. Tennessee Ernie Ford, Johnny Duncan, Tex Owens, & Marty Robbins... Okay, I'll quit yanking your chain. Thanks! On with the story.
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Post by rvm45 on Jan 19, 2021 10:49:05 GMT -6
Chapter Thirty-One
75 878
“Into this Universe, and why not knowing. “Nor whence, like Water willy-nilly flowing: “…And out of it, as Wind along the Waste. “I know not whither, willy-nilly blowing.”
From “The Rubaiyat”
The Death Rangers—as Miguel Ángel’s unit had dubbed the assassins, were already attacking the small Lamia village when the Friends—as their division dubbed themselves—arrived.
Miguel Ángel had grown up carrying a machete as part of his everyday apparel. There were a couple or three locals, near his village, who had taken lessons in either Jamaican machete fighting or a bastard form of Silat brought in by poor Filipino immigrants in the early 1800’s.
Miguel Ángel had eagerly learned everything he could about blades and martial arts as a youngster. When he was in Bottomtown, he seized the chance to study Kendo and Polish Saber Fighting—while under the 5x stage of Advance.
When he saw the Lamia’s village burning and he heard the anguished cries of the children, he wanted to cast away all thoughts of survival and tactics, draw his Hanger and his Bowie and see how much blood he could stain his hands and his blades with.
But he was supposed to be a sniper.
Miguel Ángel’s captain understood all sorts of men—both human and non-human. He understood the underlying berserker fury and suicidal nihilism that drove Miguel Ángel. Such people had their uses if they were handled properly.
For his part, Miguel Ángel had been allowed to come on this mission, despite his relative inexperience, with the understanding that he would function as a proper sniper and not go ape-shit and get into personalities with the Death Rangers.
He went to kneeling behind a tree and took out a flamethrower team consisting of a flamethrower wielder, accompanied by two riflemen to guard the flamer’s back and to carry spare napalm packs.
They were just over 300-yards away. It only took 3 precise rounds of 275-Grain .338 Winchester Magnum Rounds to satisfy 3 clients.
Firing 3 shots from one location was pushing things a little.
Miguel Ángel moved a good 4oo-yards laterally. He took the time to screw an 8-inch moderator onto the muzzle of his rifle.
One could only stifle the muzzle-blast of a supersonic projectile. The projectile would still have its own miniature sonic boom. Thoroughly suppressing the muzzle-blast did keep the clients from having the vaguest idea what quarter they were being fired upon from.
The small moderator that Miguel Ángel favored would muffle no more than about half of the muzzle-blast, but it was compact and didn’t make the rifle much harder to maneuver through the brush with. It would make him somewhat harder to locate.
Of course, it would alter the point of impact, but Miguel Ángel was thoroughly acquainted with exactly how the moderator affected his point of impact.
Miguel Ángel’s IQ was now over 200. He practiced his marksmanship as diligently as if it was a Holy Crusade—and he habitually practiced in the 2x mode of Advance.
It was fair to say that Miguel Ángel’s skills as a sniper were a magnitude of order higher than any mundane sniper…
But then again, the Death Rangers were not mundane clients either.
Miguel Ángel spotted another flamethrower group. This group was over 500-yards away. He coldly gunned down the flamer, but it took longer to get perfectly sighted in at that range and by the time the first rifleman’s head exploded, the second rifleman had escaped.
“Filthy knob-gobbler! How dare you try to escape your geas!?!” Miguel Ángel raged.
After making his second shot, he quickly descended to find a new vantage point…
But his position had already been discovered.
The client who awaited Miguel Ángel was a brute. If he hadn’t been a brute, he could have simply shot Miguel Ángel and ended him conclusively. Instead, he waited for the sniper to climb down so that he could get into personalities with him. Just as Miguel Ángel unslung his rifle, he felt his weapon ripped from his hands by someone or something with incredible strength.
The client was wearing the high-tech chamelonflage.
Chamelonflage wouldn’t quite make a man invisible. It was more like he was almost—but not quite—transparent. That was only when one was motionless. Chamelonflage couldn’t quite keep pace with the changing surroundings when one moved.
Miguel Ángel favored ultrablack. Ultrablack absorbed every single photon of light or infrared that struck it.
Someone wearing ultrablack could only be seen as a silhouette or a shadow. From many angles, in many positions, an ultrablack silhouette didn’t look like a human.
The human eye and brain tended to ignore ill-defined ultrablack silhouettes. Even if someone was completely focused on an ultrablack wearing client, it was harder—not impossible, but harder—to get a good sight picture on an ultrablack target.
Chamelonflage relied on scores of tiny hexagonal, solid-state television screens and hundreds of tiny pinhole video cameras—and lots of distributed and non-centralized computing power.
Its photocell batteries needed to be recharged by sunlight and if the fabric was ripped, it took a well-equipped, high-tech electronic workshop to repair the rent—although the undamaged part of the suit could continue to function unless it was practically destroyed.
On the other hand, if Miguel Ángel’s ultrablack clothing was torn, he simply had to sew, to repair it. He had ultrablack thread and a bit of patch material in his pack, but even if he’d put a jeans’ hip-pocket-sized patch of regular black cloth and sewed it on with white thread, he would only lose a small bit of his ultrablack’s efficacy.
So, the two of them resembled the “Shadow” and the “Flash” from the old Jack London story—though neither of them even approximated invisibility when engaged in hand-to-hand combat at close range.
Miguel Ángel would have known immediately if he was fighting an Oni—he wasn’t. There were at least a dozen races that might fall under the ill-defined categories of “Orc”; “Troll” or “Ogre”—not to mention hybrids and Hobgoblins.
The thing was, the Death Rangers were human purists, so his client was “none of the above.”
This knob-gobbler had been taking some sort of fruitful juice though and it wasn’t steroids. Even the witches' brew of steroids, growth hormone, thyroid hormones and insulin taken by modern day professional bodybuilders, wouldn’t give someone this sort of physique.
This dude was maybe 6-foot and 4-inches tall. He weighed maybe 420-pounds and he was strong enough to give a silverback gorilla a run for his money.
Miguel Ángel’s eyes danced with pleasure and excitement. He was mad at almost everyone and everything. He had lost the woman—at least the female—that he loved. He hadn’t lost her once, but twice. He largely blamed the Death Rangers for his life’s situation. Now, this considerate Death Ranger was stepping forward to stand in as a whipping boy and let Miguel Ángel take out all of his frustrations out on him.
Miguel Ángel wanted to simply rush in and make it a contest of strength and grappling skill, but it was unprofessional to fight barehanded when he had a blade at hand.
A saber was—frankly—too cumbersome to carry around in the woods. A Hanger was a shorter version of a saber. The captain had shaken his head when he saw that Miguel Ángel was carrying both a Hanger and a large Bowie, but he hadn’t forbade him.
They weren’t a military unit. They were a paramilitary group and it was necessary for the members to be reasonably happy with their weapons.
Miguel Ángel drew his Hanger with practiced ease. The brass basket hilt around his left hand gave Miguel Ángel a set of super brass knuckles while the 18-inch blade extended the reach of his “left-jab” by over 50%, while making it potentially lethal as well.
Every time that the man-mountain charged at Miguel Ángel, he would do the matador thingy, step to one side and thrust about 4-inches of razor-sharp steel into the client.
Miguel Ángel was afraid to thrust too deeply, lest he lose control of the Hanger.
The fourth time that he assayed to step aside though, the client anticipated him. He grabbed the naked blade with his bare hand—and what was this shit!
He squeezed his hand while twisting and the blade of Miguel Ángel’s Hanger shattered. Pieces flew out in all directions. A 5-inch long shard sank deep into Miguel Ángel’s left shoulder.
“I have wasted enough time with you. After we kill all the adults, we will rape and torture the little ones before we send them to Hell,” the man-mountain taunted.
He came at Miguel Ángel with both hands opened wide to grasp and grapple.
Miguel Ángel dropped the basket hilt onto the ground. His left shoulder was stabbed, but it wasn’t terribly disabled yet.
“So, that is the way that you want it,” Miguel Ángel said.
He grabbed the man’s right wrist with his left hand. He pulled the arm out straight and struck at the elbow with his right forearm, to dislocate it. Once would have sufficed with a mundane human.
He had to strike this enhanced client 5 times to dislocate his elbow.
“Fool! Did you think that a member of the Friends wouldn’t have an enhanced physique? You dare to pit your puny strength against me? Idiot!” Miguel Ángel told him.
He lifted the man up by his waist and bashed his head against a nearby tree until he saw brain tissue splatter.
The shard had sunken too deeply into his shoulder to be extracted easily and he was starting to have trouble using his left arm.
He slung his rifle diagonally across his back, since he wasn’t able to climb trees well or to shoot a rifle well either.
He headed to the village. He drew his pistol—one of the 5906 pattern .38 Supers. He hadn’t used it against the man mountain, because the man’s chamelonflage was probably proof against pistol bullets.
These knob-gobblers wouldn’t have bulletproof heads though. If he went into the village and engaged the Death Rangers up close and personal, his odds for surviving were dismal.
However, when he thought of the Lamia children—children like Aiai had been—being tortured…
Well, if he could slay just one or two more Death Rangers and if he could save just one Lamia child from such a grim fate—that was worth spending his one life to pay for.
Only by the time that Miguel Ángel reached the village, the Death Rangers were naught but a happy memory.
The field medics put Miguel Ángel to sleep and extracted the sharp shard of steel. They filled him with pain-killers, antibiotics and mystic healing brews and let him sleep.
************ ************** ***************************
Shortly after Miguel Ángel woke, his friend Wang Wei came to visit him.
“You have 6 confirmed kills—5 from sniping and one from hand-to-hand combat. That isn’t bad for a first mission,” Wang Wei complemented him.
“I came to ask you a favor,” Wang Wei said.
Wang Wei explained that the Tibetan Lamia were different from the Central American Lamia. They were smaller, for one thing. A second big difference was that they were born with a fixed lifespan.
Tibetan Lamia lived 300-years—no more—though they would be in their prime until they fell dead from the exhaustion of their life force.
Parenthetically, there was a very rare mushroom that could add 15-years to a Lamia’s lifespan, but it could only be used once and it was only efficacious when taken close to the end.
Most Tibetan Lamia were philosophical by the time that they were at the end of their lifespan, but there were a few stories among the Lamia, of folk who feared death enough to resort to foul means and treachery just to seize a mushroom and postpone their demise by 15-years.
“The Death Rangers were using a gas that causes an accelerated erosion of the Lamia’s life force. Most died, but we have a few with a few weeks or months of life force left,” Wang Wei.
“I have a sweet young lady. She is 24-years old and she has about 8-months of life force left,” Wang Wei said sadly.
“You want me to find her a mushroom? Do I have to beat a Yeti insensible to claim it? Fine! Point me at the trial—whatever it is,” Miguel Ángel said.
The quest seemed worthy. Concerns with success or failure; survival or death were the delusions of a sick mind. Miguel Ángel was incapable of caring if he died.
“Unfortunately, the mushroom would only work for a Lamia in the last decade of her life—even if we had one. No, I need something else from you,” Wang Wei said.
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Post by rvm45 on Jan 19, 2021 14:11:16 GMT -6
Chapter Thirty-Two
78 018
“Well, there's a rose in a fisted glove “And the eagle flies with the dove “And if you can’t be with the one you love, Honey “Love the one you’re with…
“Don't be angry, don't be sad “And don't sit crying over good times you had “There's a girl right next to you “And she's just waiting for something to do…”
The Lamia was, above all else, little. She had the upper body of a tiny 100-pound Oriental girl. Even up by the base, her serpent half was no thicker than Miguel Ángel’s thigh and it tapered fairly rapidly. On the other hand, it was comparatively long compared to a Central American Lamia’s.
Some men liked petite women—even fetishized them. Miguel Ángel had always found petiteness a turnoff.
The Lamia’s eyes were extra almond-shaped and golden colored—with vertical pupils. and she had fangs like a vampiress. The effect could either be interpreted as sexy and exotic or enigmatic and sinister—maybe both—depending on the viewer.
“My name is Ekadzati. Ordinarily, we bear live young like human women. However, when the end is near, we can lay a clutch of eggs in the hope of keeping the species alive,” She said.
“So many of us have been slain. I want to do my part to ensure the survival of my people,” she said while tearing up.
“To do that, I need a human mate. Wang Wei has a wife and he would never cheat on her. You might not think so, but there is a paucity of human men both willing and able to mate with a Lamia,” Ekadzati said.
“I love another,” Miguel Ángel said flatly.
“You don’t have to love me—simply mate with me. I have maybe 8-months left. If I lay, that will shorten that to only about 2-months. You won’t have to endure my presence long,” she said.
“Please, don’t deny me the opportunity to be a mother,” she pleaded.
Miguel Ángel shouted for Wang Wei.
“Find a chaplain. I cannot have children of mine being born bastards,” he said with as little emotion as he had initially refused.
Ekadzati sighed. At first, she thought Miguel Ángel was summoning the doctor to berate him and shout his categoric refusal.
************ *************** *****************
Later, when they were alone and it was time to consummate their wedding vows, Miguel Ángel experienced a marked lack of enthusiasm for the project before him.
“Yeah well…” Miguel Ángel said.
“It doesn’t matter. Your DNA needs to be altered slightly before you could impregnate me anyway," Ekadzati said.
She embraced Miguel Ángel with her small arms—that had surprising strength. Then she wrapped her serpent half around Miguel Ángel’s lower body tightly.
She hissed and buried her fangs deep in Miguel Ángel’s shoulder. Miguel Ángel felt something being injected into him.
Yeah about that…
It seemed that the venom of a Tibetan Lamia was a super-powered aphrodisiac.
Miguel Ángel would have never believed that he had such base and powerful cravings deep inside himself. In point of fact, he hadn’t until the Lamia had injected them into him.
After perhaps 30-hours of frenzied insertion exercises, the venom finally ran its course.
“You see what I mean? You are enhanced. A normal human wouldn’t survive a Lamia’s embrace,” Ekadzati said.
“So, what? Do you only pair with enhanced humans, or do you usually sacrifice your mates?” Miguel Ángel asked.
“In the ancient times, men died. For at least the last 1500-years…Well, if time isn’t of the essence, a potential husband can be nurtured over a period of months, years even,” Ekadzati said.
“You should have warned me what you were about. There was a moment that I almost panicked. I could tear you in two quite easily. Thankfully, I waited to see what you intended,” Miguel Ángel said sourly.
In point of fact, while he was physically capable of ripping Ekadzati in half, it would have strained his muscles a great deal. That wasn’t to say that escaping or slaying her would have been terribly hard for him—even with his stiff shoulder.
“And if I had poisoned you, and you had died in agony?” Ekadzati asked.
“If I fell, Wang Wei would have avenged me. If he fell—you have never seen a frost giantess on the warpath,” Miguel Ángel said.
“You would still be dead.”
“Death means nothing to me—nothing!” Miguel Ángel said.
“That is the point that I’m trying to make. You are going to be a father soon. You will soon be a single father. You cannot afford to throw your life away on the slightest whim,” Ekadzati lectured Miguel Ángel.
Once again, Miguel Ángel summoned Wang Wei.
Wang Wei stared at Miguel Ángel.
“What!?! Am I covered in scales like a snake now?” Miguel Ángel asked sarcastically.
“Not quite,” Wang Wei said.
He handed Miguel Ángel a mirror.
“Yippie-Kie-Ayy!!!” was all Miguel Ángel responded.
His brown irises had turned a beautiful gold color and he now had vertical cat’s—or snake’s—pupils in his eyes.
“Can I have a blood sample?” Wang Wei enthused while shining a light into one of Miguel Ángel’s pupils.
“Get on with it, then! Can Ekadzati leave the hospital? Find us a place to stay and arrange rations. We haven’t long to spent together,” Miguel Ángel commanded.
When Miguel Ángel walked through the ruins of the Lamia village and past the tents of the Friends bivouac area, while carrying the weak Tibetan Lamia like a bride being carried across the threshold…
Only her tail was wrapped around him every which way, so that it wouldn’t drag or trip him…
Some admired his courage while others admired his good fortune. Most of them, while they didn’t hold with exterminating the Lamia, would not have had relations with one under any consideration—and that was more than a little based on fear.
Ekadzati ate enormous quantities of food and her serpent half got so fat that she could hardly move.
Miguel Ángel fed and took care of her in her weakened state.
She never became too weak for certain activities—and it seemed to take her mind off of her impending demise.
Six weeks after their wedding night, Ekadzati laid 8 leathery eggs a bit larger and a bit blunter than a football. She also molted and she somehow crafted the cast-off skin into a bag for Miguel Ángel to carry the eggs in. The mystic bag held a certain warmth somehow, to help incubate the eggs.
“It seems that I will soon be meeting this God that you speak of,” Ekadzati said breathlessly.
“I cannot prove that you have a soul,” Miguel Ángel recalled the words of the evangelists that he’d heard talking to non-humans.
“I do know that the Bible says that Whosoever calls upon the Name of The Lord shall be saved,” Miguel Ángel said.
“Ekadzati, I cannot say that I never lie—but I hate lying and I try very hard to never bear false witness. I can honestly say that I have come to love you,” he said.
“I know that I’m not your first or your greatest love. That is okay. I love you with all my heart and soul,” Ekadzati said.
After she said that, she closed her eyes and gave up the ghost.
‘I swear, as I am a holy man, I will make sure our children are well provided for—but afterward—I will find out who sent these Death Rangers. I will take the fight to them. I will destroy them root and branch and when I destroy their villages, I won’t even spare pigs, goats and chickens. It will be an act of considerable mercy, that I don’t wipe out their dogs as well,’ Miguel Ángel vowed silently to himself.
************ *************** **********************
“How do these Lamia handle their dead?” Miguel Ángel asked his friend Wang Wei.
“Cremation,” Wang Wei said.
“Have her remains sent to my plantation on the Sapphire World. Her ashes should wander my pecan groves. Now I’m glad that I listened to you and planted groves,” Miguel Ángel said.
Miguel Ángel shouldered the duffle-bag-sized snakeskin bag and raised his voice.
“You may not know me, but you will recognize what I am from the bag that I carry. I’m going home. My home has long warm Summers and short but brutally cold Winters,” he said.
“Few of our Lamias care to stay on my home world, because of the bitter Winters. Y’all done been from the steppes of Tibet. Bitter cold is no novelty to you,” he continued.
“Y’all aren’t safe here and we cannot guard y’all indefinitely. Whosoever will, come with me to my home. Build your village on my plantation and help me tend my groves—or branch out and find lodgings elsewhere,” Miguel Ángel said to the crowd.
700 adult Tibetan Lamia, assorted Lamia children and almost 400 Tibetan men travelled with Miguel Ángel to his Pecan plantation.
There were fewer men because not all of the Lamia had husbands. Besides, the Tibetan Lamia—unlike the Central American Lamia—were not Amazon warriors.
Their husbands had been in the forefront of the fighting and had borne the brunt of the casualties.
Of course, that wasn’t all of the Tibetan Lamia—or even the majority of them.
The now habitable Lamia refuge got an influx of Tibetan Lamia. Bottomtown got a few hundred too.
Unlike with the Red Oni and Blue Oni, there was no deep-seated animosity between the two different species of Lamia. Some from both groups, hadn’t even been aware that the other group existed.
They met each other with open-armed goodwill and a certain amount of understandable curiosity.
************* *************** *************************
Miguel Ángel stood looking at the glass incubator where Ekadzati’s eggs reposed. The bag that she had made for him occupied a place of honor on the wall.
There were 8 cribs in the oversized room. Once the children hatched, this would be their nursery.
Miguel Ángel heard a knocking sound and he turned to see Aiai—of all people—standing in the open doorway.
While he never expected to see Aiai here, she was on the short list of people that the AI who ran Miguel Ángel’s house would allow to enter without specifically being instructed to.
“¿Puedo entrar?” Aiai said.
“Sure, come on in,” Miguel Ángel said.
“Miguel Ángel, I never thought that your children would hatch from eggs,” Aiai teased.
“Funny, the curves that life throws a man,” Miguel Ángel said.
“Miguel Ángel, I never knew that you loved me. You should have told me. I would have canceled my engagement,” Aiai said.
“It isn’t too late to make you a widow,” Miguel Ángel said.
“Actually, it is too late for that,” Aiai said.
“The knob-gobbler is dead!?!” Miguel Ángel said in astonishment.
“No. It is quite easy to annul a marriage that is never consummated. Do you think that I would give myself to Dern, knowing that you loved me? If you hadn’t passed out from your drunken binge, I would have told you then,” Aiai said.
“So, why haven’t you contacted me earlier?”
“I was afraid that you hated me. By the time that I worked up my nerve, you had left on your mission. If you had died, and I never got a chance to tell you…” Aiai said as she started to cry.
“Er…well…about this…” Miguel Ángel stammered.
“Wang Wei told me all about it. I am proud of you!” Aiai said.
She embraced him.
Miguel Ángel felt a strong stirring deep inside himself.
“The eggs are getting ready to hatch!” he said.
Of course, all Lamia were female. There were 7 daughters, but surprise, surprise! There was a single human male—well, almost human—with golden slit-pupil eyes.
The Lamia could control the sex of the eggs. Since the idea was to perpetuate the Lamia species, it only made sense to have Lamia children.
There was a tiny fragment of Ekadzati’s consciousness left within the human egg. As the egg split open, it entered Miguel Ángel’s consciousness.
“I would not leave my beloved without a son. All fathers long for a son. I love you!” exploded in Miguel Ángel’s mind with Ekadzati’s voice.
Tears ran down Miguel Ángel’s face without a trace of embarrassment or shame.
“They all look exactly like you!” Aiai said.
Miguel Ángel quickly checked his lower body. He’d always THOUGHT that he had a normal pair of legs like everyone else…
“Wait, don’t touch them! If you touch them, they will imprint you as their mother,” Miguel Ángel warned.
“¿Puedo ser la madre de tus hijos?” Aiai said—lapsing into Spanish in the grip of her passion.
“And the mother of many more,” Miguel Ángel said.
His face fell.
“What is wrong now?” Aiai asked.
“When I had nothing to lose, I swore a sacred vow to avenge the Lamia,” Miguel Ángel said.
“What is your IQ, Miguel Ángel?” Aiai asked.
“A little over 200.”
“What is Wang Wei’s IQ?” Aiai asked.
“Close to 300.”
“And is Wang Wei smarter than you?” She continued cross-examining Miguel Ángel relentlessly.
“He isn’t bad, but no, he is not my intellectual equal,” Miguel Ángel said.
Aiai almost rolled her eyes. Miguel Ángel would never admit to being second best at anything that he thought mattered.
“Wang Wei fights with his brain. Would you scruple to use weapons of mass destruction against the masters of the Death Rangers—and fight from behind the lines?” Aiai prompted.
“Here, hold your son. Let him imprint on his father,” Aiai said.
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Post by rvm45 on Jan 20, 2021 11:12:33 GMT -6
Chapter Thirty-Three
80 289
Vance, Lour and Tawn were now tied together in a triangle of underground railroad lines. Several other cities underneath the surface of Ice were now connected.
There was little meaning in connecting distant cities, one to another. If they were too distant from the recent influx of plants, animals, people and non-humans from Earth…
Well, the cities were all very much alike. It wasn’t as if Post had something that was badly needed in Krize—or wherever.
Still, one day one of the ever-growing rail-lines would connect to one of the privileged cities. Then, many folks would be very grateful that they hadn’t waited until the last minute to build railroad connections.
No one knew when or where the next rail-line would start forming. The rail-lines would start midway between two cities and grow toward both of them simultaneously, while lines also reached from each city toward the halfway point.
The railroads seemed to just condense out of nowhere. No one or no thing was in evidence building them. Each of the 4 growing tips advanced about 3-miles per day for a little over 12-miles daily. At that rate, two cities 4000-miles apart could be connected in less than a year.
Ice was about 28 500-miles in circumference at the former equator. It would take about 6.5-years, at the rate of 12-miles per day, to lay a rail-line around the former equator.
Only…only a bare handful of cities lay near what had once been the equator. It would seem to be without meaning to lay a band of rail around the circumference of the planet.
Nonetheless, rail-lines connected to nothing, sprang up at 6-equidistant points along the equator and started laying rail East and West.
Meanwhile, 6 equally spaced rail-lines started reaching from each pole toward the equator, and in both the North and the South hemispheres, 6 points equidistant from both equator and pole, started a pair of lines—one moving toward the equator and one moving toward the pole.
The rail-lines between cities proceeded as if the great circle rail-lines didn’t exist—except cities within about 1500-miles of one of the “Ley-Lines” also built a line to connect with the Ley Line—in addition to, not instead of connecting to several other nearby cities.
Neon had kicked off the rail-laying function, but she seemed to have no other special knowledge as to what the railroad was doing or how or why.
There were double lines of rail on 3 different levels, for a total of 6 tracks, not counting rail yards and sidings.
There was a level between each pair of rail lines, so the railway was 6-levels deep and there was a half-mile wide band of apartments running continuously on each side of the rail.
The apartments were largely empty, since there was more than enough room in the downside cities to house everyone.
Once the equator circling rail-line was laid, the speed that rail was laid increased from about 3-miles per day, to about 4.5-miles per day. The number of newly started lines seemed to be growing a great deal as well.
All this while, a number of “latitudinal” globe-circling rail-lines, parallel to the equator started to form.
*********** ************** ***********************
Meanwhile, while the railroad fascinated me, it wasn’t as if I could afford to spend large amounts of time idly pondering it.
I was trying hard to build up the Sapphire World, the Ruby World, Revna’s Valley, the Lamia Valley, Tawn and Ice in general.
I was trying to bring ever-increasing amounts of consumer goods into Tawn. Meanwhile, I was trying to get at least a few distant cities to have decent quantities of livestock and Earth plants. Once those distant cities started to link up with other, unimproved cities, it would speed up the rate of spread a great deal.
The thought preyed on my mind: what if I died?
I am no one. I come from nowhere. I wander aimlessly. My eventual destination is inevitable oblivion. Strike me down… You have accomplished NOTHING!
Still, if I knew that I was going to die next week, is there anything that I want to import to Ice now, so they will always have it?
Well, the Lamia, Night Rangers, Oni and frost giantesses would still connect Ice to Earth to some degree. Nowadays, it was largely a matter of degree.
What if it was possible to make a mechanical “railroad” though—I guess that you could call it a railroad—that could connect two worlds without the personal intervention of a slip-slider?
I was supposed to meet a young scientist headquartered on the Sapphire World, who claimed that he was close to a breakthrough.
He had an IQ of over 200. He had been a member of the Friends, but he only went on one mission with them. Seems that he became a family man and didn’t want to fight in the front lines anymore.
According to his personnel file, he’d been having some excellent results from eating the mescaline analog that Cassadore had supplied to me.
“Your name is Miguel Ángel? What can I do for you, Miguel Ángel?” I asked him.
He noticed my eyes. My eyes are yellow on yellow—yellow iris; yellow sclera—with slit pupils. They glow as if backlit. To think that I once had nice blue Irish eyes.
He had golden irises and vertical slit pupils himself.
“I am close to understanding how time and space are woven together—at least partially, in some limited instances. I need a slip-slider’s manual to go the last mile,” he said.
“If I give you a slip-slider’s manual, it doesn’t truly gel in your mind until you successfully take your first slip-slide. You may very well die. You’re one of our top scientists,” I said.
“I’ll give you a manual, if you insist. Your life is your own. Still, I’d be loath to lose you,” I said.
“They say that you used your Night Ranger wife to cheat on your first slip-slide,” Miguel Ángel said.
I Quoted the proverb:
“Live if you can. “Die if you must. “Always… “ALWAYS CHEAT!”
“I plan to cheat as well. My wife is a Central American Lamia. She could carry me back to the Sapphire World in a crunch,” Miguel Ángel said.
“I’d say that you have the eyes of someone who was bitten by a Tibetan Lamia. Tibetan Lamias cannot travel between the worlds,” I said.
“My first wife was a Tibetan Lamia. She died. My current wife is a Central American Lamia,” Miguel Ángel patiently explained.
“Wait, you’re the one they call ‘Bolsa’?” I said.
Yeah, this dude came back from Tibet, carrying a big snakeskin Bolsa—Spanish for pouch—full of Lamia eggs and leading a cohort of Tibetan Lamias into the Sapphire World. I’d heard his story, but I hadn’t connected it to this Miguel Ángel.
“Here,” I said.
I handed him a slip-slider’s manual. I had finally given out my 5th copy. Of course, you can throw the manuals out broadside, like casting liquid manure on a field. You reap what you sow though. Sow carelessly, reap a bolloxed harvest.
Not that Casúr went about it wrong. The moment definitely seemed structured to receive Casúr’s actions that day. I’m not Casúr though.
“There is something else that I need from you,” Miguel Ángel said.
“O?”
“I need to meet King Terry’s brother-in-law Eiji,” Miguel Ángel said with a straight face.
“Well. As long as I’m trying King Terry’s patience—would you like him to hook you up with a harem of frost giantesses as well? How many giantesses would you like and what type of females do you prefer?” I asked sarcastically.
Miguel Ángel missed the sarcasm completely.
“No, I’m sure that Aiai would love to have 2 or 3 sister-wives to take over some of her duties. Don’t ever let a Tibetan Lamia bite you. It makes you all but insatiable. Thing is, I cannot afford to raise anymore children right now,” Miguel Ángel said with a wry shake of his head.
“Really? I could arrange a food and clothing allowance, if raising your children is a hardship,” I said sweetly.
I’d love to see this fool’s Lamia wife beat him half to death, when he proposed bringing home 2 or 3 frost giantess “sister-wives.”
“I have plenty of money. A good father needs to spend some quality-time with each child, though. It is hard to do, when there are 17 of them,” Miguel Ángel said.
“Be nice!” Despair snapped at me.
“Why do you need to meet Eiji?” I asked.
“I need an introduction to the dude who created the Ruby World. I’m pretty sure that I can recreate his process—only in a far easier and less time-consuming manner,” Miguel Ángel said.
“And I’m sure that he will be happy to share and update with you,” I said sarcastically.
“He will, when I show him why humans can refine the worlds but Oni cannot,” Miguel Ángel said.
“Dude, it is like: I give up! I don’t know if you’re some sort of genius, a prankster pulling my leg or a simpleton,” I said.
“Will you do me a favor? If you ever figure that out, let me be the first to know,” Miguel Ángel said.
“In exchange for ‘The Slip-Slider’s Manual’ and an introduction to King Terry and Eiji, I want a favor from you,” I said.
“And?” “You seem to have a gift for relating to Lamia. There is a small population of Sub-Saharan Lamia in Uganda. They are at risk of being attacked by the Death Rangers. Could you speak to some of them? Persuade at least some of them to relocate to one of my enclaves of Lamia?” I requested.
********** ************* *********************
“That fellow is more fatiguing to talk to, than anyone that I’ve met in years,” I remarked later to Ixtli.
Since she was related to his wife Aiai, I had consulted her about the strange young man.
“If you think that he is strange, you should meet his best friend, Wang Wei,” Ixtli said.
“Sichuan Wang Wei—the dude who improved the mescaline analog—that’s his best friend?” I asked.
“They were roommates during the orientation in Bottomtown. They both took part in the Tibetan Offensive against the Death Rangers. Neither speaks of the atrocities they witnessed, but their hatred for the Death Rangers is as weighty as a mountain,” Ixtli said.
************* *************** **********************
Neon took Marshal to Ice—to see the railroad that she had commanded built—with his own eyes.
At first, Neon was happy to be showing Marshal around her world, but then she abruptly turned gloomy.
“Why do you like me? I’m ruined!” Neon said and then she burst into tears.
“I won’t lie to you, when a woman loses her virginity, she loses a sort of virtue. That is why a woman who has had sex—even if she is raped or is legitimately married—is no longer a virgin,” Marshal said.
“While the first male sex partner does the most damage, a woman loses a bit more of herself with every new male sex partner she takes on. That is why promiscuous women are known by pejorative terms,” he said.
“You were innocent, but nonetheless, a great deal of your virtue was stolen from you. I think that you still have value despite that,” Marshal told the debauched goddess.
“Then, according to what you say, if you become my lover, I will lose another tiny piece of myself,” Neon said.
“Sadly, that is true. There is no way to get around that fact. That is why a man should never pursue sex aggressively—at least not with a woman that he cares about. It should be entirely up to a woman, if she wants to give him a piece of herself—without any deception, seduction or high-pressure sales tactics on his part,” Marshal said.
“I am not ready yet, but I feel that I will be soon,” Neon said.
Marshal smiled gently.
“I am patient and by human standards, I am very long-lived. Unlike you though, I am not immortal,” Marshal reminded her gently.
************ *************** **********************
King Terry sat on his throne. He was in a gloomy, brooding mood.
It turned out that Red Oni and Blue Oni were cross-fertile. His sister Misty was in labor.
Terry wondered if she would give birth to some sort of monster. Worse yet, what if she bore some sort of mule-like, sterile offspring?
Whether a man intended to ever sire children—or not—the ability to sire children was an essential part of being a man.
That is why the concept of eunuchs would never come into focus for Terry. Sure, enough strong men could hold a man down and castrate him. Why though, would that man turn around and serve those who had ruined and dishonored him?
If Terry was ever castrated, he would commit seppuku at the very first opportunity. He had scathing contempt for any man who would not.
If he was the hybrid child of Red and Blue Oni, the day that he discovered that he was a mule, was the day that he would commit seppuku. There would be no meaning and no honor in continuing to live after that.
Was his sister going to give birth to a mule—a child condemned from birth to live a life worse than death?
Anyway, while he was waiting to hear the results of his sister’s labor, he gave an audience to someone, as a favor to his friend Stillwater. The fellow was a scientist and he needed to meet Eiji for some obscure reason.
Terry examined the fellow sourly. He had snake eyes and he had the odor of snake—or, more properly, Lamia—on his body.
“Eiji is about to become a father. You are welcome to wait with me, until he is free to meet you. Sweet Jesus, hear my prayer. Please don’t let my niece or nephew be born a mule,” Terry said.
“Blue Oni and Red Oni are fascinating objects of study. Y’all look enough alike to be twins, except for the color,” Miguel Ángel said.
Terry gave the young man a very sour look. He dared insult him, right in his throne room!
Miguel Ángel was indifferent to Terry’s displeasure. If he offended someone, they were welcome to challenge him to a duel—though, truth be told—Miguel Ángel had a very weak handle on what was and was not offensive.
“Genetically though, a Red Oni and a Blue Oni are as different as a reindeer and a jaguar. I believe that both of y’all done been created races—though why it amused someone to make y’all look so much alike outside, but be so different inside…” Miguel Ángel said.
“Then there is the inborn loathing that y’all seem to share…”
“Is there a point to all of this?” Terry interrupted angrily.
“Why yes, there is a point. What would you think if a jaguar could get a reindeer pregnant? I’d say that someone had designed them that way. It is too much of a coincidence to come about by accident,” Miguel Ángel said.
“If I wanted hybrid reindeer/jaguars, why would I design them to throw sterile offspring?” Miguel Ángel said.
“I would say that the odds are very much against your sister’s child being a mule. My best friend is Sichuan Wang Wei. I can ask him to examine the child’s genome at the earliest opportunity, to set your mind at ease,” Miguel Ángel said.
Terry felt grateful to the young scientist and he was comforted by Miguel Ángel’s speculation. He took the time to enquire into Miguel Ángel’s purpose in meeting his brother-in-law.
“I have no influence on what the Red Oni do. Truth be told, I have almost as little influence in the Blue Oni territory. However, Eiji will get you an audience with the scientist that you wish to meet, or I will beat his kidneys into plum pudding,” Terry promised.
Miguel Ángel was puzzled. Kidneys could be beaten into a pulp, but no amount of beating should be able to turn a kidney into plums…
Just then, a nurse walked into the throne room. She was carrying a pair of twins to present to the king. The children were both well-formed and interestingly enough, both the boy and the girl had bright purple-colored skin.
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