Mark 2.0: Book 4: Love

by Prax Venter

  Mark chuckled. “And how are we going to get her to come down again?”

  Abby sent them a small pout through their bond and Angel sent back data regarding calibrating her gravitational generators to factor in the tandem effect of Abby’s growing telepathic ability. She’d already increased their top speed by 13% when joined.

  “I bet they can see the whole place from up there,” Jezebel whispered out loud.

  The pair above zipped upward before shooting off over the curved landscape, and Mark couldn’t ignore the fact that he was seeing far better through their eyes than ever before.

  “She’s adjusting,” Jezebel muttered, her face vacant as she focused totally on their perspective.

  Mark nodded. “And their two streams of perception overlap. This will be great for more efficient scouting.”

  Abby flipped on her Mind Cloud ability on a whim, and there wasn’t any target to test it on, but it appeared her innate skill was not only functional while flying, but she now also received a silence boost from not touching the ground.

  Then, Angel spotted a building in the distance she recognized, and the pair tore through the cold vacuum of space heading toward it.

  “Okay,” Mark said, disconnecting. “Looks like they are going to be poking into things for a bit. We agree our best bet now is to find people who already know something about the orb, so let’s plan that next move with the centaur.”

  “Having Super Abby is going to help if they get violent,” Sasha said, hooking her thumb over her shoulder to indicate the distant exploring duo. “Maybe you should copy Jez’s centaur form and… infiltrate the enemy, Mark.”

  He rolled his eyes at his sex demon. But, before this was all over…

  “Actually,” Jezebel said, rummaging through her condensing bag. After a moment she pulled out a small plaster recall charm in the shape of a pumpkin. “I’ve been thinking more- eh… comprehensively ever since Sasha called me out back there. When Klax gave me this after we finished the door code mission, he said this went to his personal arcane sanctuary. There is a good chance that it goes nowhere, but I would like to try this option first.”

  “Goes nowhere?” Mark said, his brows coming down. “Don’t get me wrong, I want to see what happened to Starglade too, but what happens to us if we teleport into whatever erased-reality nonsense clouds are reported there?”

  “You’ve missed several meetings while focused on cracking the orb…” Jezebel sighed. “Mark, many have tried recalling back to megacity after it’d been attacked- especially right after it happened. The heavily used charms suddenly crumbling with no effect was the first sign to the world something was very wrong there. However, this one just might go somewhere else. If not, we find a way to safely contact the centaur. We need to keep moving forward toward regaining system-access.”

  “We will, Momma Bear,” Sasha said, clomping up close to the other horned woman. “I’ll kick your cute butt if we don’t.”

  Power Armor Abby came zipping down back through the magic membrane over their heads and landed gracefully right where she’d started.

  “Hold this,” she said to Jezebel as she thrust out a foot-long future-tech canister of black dust. Then, after a few pressurized snaps of unfathomable magic flashes, his slender abyssal horror and her red-lipped Lunar Power Droid stood separated once again, back-to-back.

  Abby immediately spun around, wrapped her smooth green tentacles around Angel, spun her around, and began kissing her deeply.

  “What is this I’m holding,” Jezebel asked, watching the jagged particles tumble from one end to the other as she turned the canister in her hands.

  Angel answered after Abby let her come up for air. “You hold what I remember as microscopic droids designated as Blood Scrubbers. All Time Walkers eventually had them in their bloodstream, even at birth, and each instance has a minuscule storage device. I found and collected data regarding their use in health monitoring, but their main purpose was to facilitate breathing different atmospheres.”

  “How many of these are there?” Jezebel asked, hugging the small container to her chest.

  “Jezebel,” Abby said, resting her tentacle on her wrist. “All of them. There are countless vats overflowing with these miniature robots. Apparently, they were designed to return here if they were separated from their biological host.”

  - 23 -

  “You were right, Sasha. You saw this variable where I didn’t want to look.”

  Jezebel thought she was all out of tears and seemed genuinely surprised when a fat splatter of salty liquid fell from her cheek and hit the container of ancient miniature droids. She wiped her eye and put the canister into her bag before continuing. “When I did my real-world search and replace that caused this world’s Cataclysm, it targeted entities that held a certain level of technological advancement- a wide, quick and dirty net. The other races’ physical ancestors had mostly survived because they hadn’t merged their biology with their magical machines- or at least not fully. Fortunately, if we get out, it looks like I will have all the tools I need to reverse engineer every virtual datapoint of their Crystal Heart core files.”

  “I cannot wait to witness your world,” Angel said, and Jezebel nodded.

  His brilliant strawberry-blonde Druid turned her eyes on his, and he saw she’d reached another level of personal understanding. Searching the moon had ripped open her heart, but what she’d rebuilt had made her stronger and more sturdy than ever.

  Jezebel held up the plaster pumpkin and mentally communicated a recap of the earlier conversation to Abby and Angel about testing this lead first before searching for clues to the whereabouts of the cyborg centaurs.

  “Be ready for anything,” Mark added out loud, figuratively unclasping the safeties on all his abilities.

  Abby and Angel looked each other before turning to merge again. A handful of flashes later and they were one.

  “We are ready for anything,” they said in perfect unison and where once he might have felt weirded out by that, he’d become numb to weird. Instead, he chose to feel exultation that his team was always growing in power.

  They all linked hands, and he focused on the deft control of his Armored Horror’s warm tentacle between his fingers before the Druid’s countdown caught his attention.

  “Three, two, one…”

  Snap.

  The incomprehensible sci-fi moonbase vanished and was replaced with darkness that hit him with the scent of pungent wet earth. Abby flooded the area with light from her chest to reveal a small cave of dirt and twisting roots. A red flash from his True Strike ability drew his attention to one particular root moving among the others before Jayna of the Grove came rushing forward, screaming.

  Jezebel was closest and shifted into an armored bear but took a savage gouge to her cheek as she wrestled the enraged tree woman. Flashes of searing magic bounced between the powerful beings, and Sasha moved in to help as Mark and Abby searched for any other ambushes.

  Sure enough, the pumpkin-headed man in the black robes himself stepped out from a twist of roots and lifted his magic wand.

  “Drop it,” Mark Commanded, and white energy from his latest emergent ability radiated out from his mouth. The initial effect of being frozen in place stiffened Mark’s joints until the paralysis wand slipped from the pumpkin man’s hand and the effect ended. The other man’s massive round head angled downward as he watched it fall, but his surprise lasted only an instant before he tried manually casting another spell. An Angel-coated Abby was already zipping forward, and her armored tentacle cinched around the mage’s throat, swiftly ending his incantation.

  That foe was disabled, and so Mark turned back to see Jezebel had trapped a violently struggling Jayna with both the weight of her Stone Form combined with her constricting Vines spell. The powerful tree creature tried obliterating the stubborn rock with a bevy of nature attacks, yet they rolled right off the naturally aligned target resting on top of her.

  “Relax or I’ll zap you in
the face!” Sasha yelled.

  “I won’t let you finish us all!” Jayna screeched from under Jezebel that devolved into her own imbued voice attack that was a step below bees stinging his eardrums directly.

  Mark couldn’t tell if Sasha meant to or not but she discharged an Arc Bolt directly into the wooden woman’s face. The screaming stopped suddenly, smoke filled the small chamber, and Klax started losing his mind.

  “Ease up, but keep him back,” Mark ordered at Abby as he stalked over to the smoldering mess on the ground under Jezebel. “Get off,” he said, and Jezebel shifted from stone to fur then bear to a satyr before pulling away- from a very pregnant tree woman.

  “What the fuck!” Mark shouted as he dropped to his knees and assessed the damage.

  “What have you done,” Klax asked, despair dripping from his words.

  “If you fucking morons would have thought for a second before…” Mark closed his mouth and then closed his eyes. He held out his hands, and both Jezebel and Sasha leapt to clasp one each. Using his bond with them as a protective barrier between him and the pure cyclones of raw data above and beyond, Mark sought to undo what had just happened here.

  “What are you doing here?” Jayna asked near his center of perception. He turned to see a green ball of mist hovering next to him within the black void.

  “Saving your life, you idiot.”

  “Only to take it again? End my pain! No! Save my existence! Stop! How have you strangers become so powerful?”

  Mark mentally shoved the chaotic buzzing wisp away from him as he got to work cataloging every snapped bit of cellulose, every mote of ash, and every chipped section of bark before him. The huge seed this mystical creature carried in her midsection was comprised of eldritch magic yet way beyond what he could see even here with partial system-level access. It didn’t really matter at this point as her baby inside or whatever seemed untouched by both Jezebel’s crushing and Sasha’s face-blast.

  The damage to her face was the biggest problem though, and Jayna would have been lost in seconds if he hadn’t acted to heal her. Mark found that much of her important parts were copied throughout her whole body, and with some careful searching, he manipulated her flowing life energy to rejuvenate what was once disintegrated.

  His disembodied perception noticed Jayna’s nature-rich consciousness pushing against her lifeless outer shell, and he helped guide her mind back into the voluptuous pile of wood she called a body.

  Mark snapped back to base-level physicality first and quickly added his own pure white Salivis energy to augment Jezebel’s lingering Vines. It wouldn’t do anyone any good if this crazed pregnant tree started causing trouble again.

  Her wooden eyelids fluttered open over wooden eyes, and she immediately started fighting to break free of her bindings.

  “I thought you were both supposed to be super smart,” Mark said and the wooden woman screeched again at being trapped, but didn’t try any spells this time.

  “She is not herself,” Klax said and he turned to face him. Where once his head was a vibrant orange, under Angel’s floodlight, he looked more like a soft, sickly yellow.

  “You’re going to hurt yourself,” Jezebel said kneeling by Jayna’s side. “Please, we aren’t here to hurt you.”

  “I will protect this seed with my life,” the wooden woman said, seeming to see the other Druid for the first time.

  “And guess what,” Mark said. “Now so will we.”

  “Logic dictates believing you are deceitful is the safer course of action.”

  Mark thought that answer was a good sign. She was actually talking to him now instead of losing her shit. He sighed and sat down next to her in the darkness.

  “Your logic is flawed,” Abby said.

  “If you let me go, I will not attack you,” the tree woman responded desperately, but his odd eye told him otherwise.

  “You know I’m a seer,” Mark said, making sure his solid energy was firmly in place around the powerful nature spirit and noticed that she was also fighting the pleasure she felt from the intimate contact of his ability. He continued softly. “No one is here to hurt you. We’re here to rescue you and save the universe.”

  “You just killed me.”

  “A second lie?” Mark said, raising his eyebrow. “You don’t seem dead to me.”

  “I only singed you because you attacked first,” Sasha said, her tail snapping behind her twice. “And again, pretty dumb considering the enemy of your enemy is your friend.”

  “All that remain are enemies,” Klax muttered, and Mark could tell the pumpkin man was on the verge of utter despair and a vision of a sad gourd rotting underground flashed before his eye.

  “I have about forty-five minutes before my portal to anywhere is ready,” Mark said. “We could take a recall charm, but I don’t want to risk moving you two through all three levels of Thomellia, so we have some time to get caught up on everything. And there is obviously a lot to catch up on.”

  “But before we do,” Jezebel said. “You both look horrible. It’s been many days since Maliah’s attack, do you need anything? I have several Jitso beans left.”

  “We desperately require sunlight,” Klax said, hanging limply by wrists still held over his head by Armored Abby. “But we dare not expose ourselves to… her. She is inescapable.”

  “I can emit all wavelengths of light.” It was Angel’s voice from Abby’s stomach behind Klax’s back. “Will you promise not to attack if we let you go?”

  The Kalorplast let his pumpkin head fall forward under its own ponderous weight.

  “I will not attack.”

  Both Abby and Angel set their focus on Mark first who nodded once. It wasn’t a lie. The two petite women bound to his heart then separated once again before their Lunar Power Droid hovered up to the roof of the cave. He felt her internal processing as the bot’s photon emitters spun up, and he became fascinated by her utterly unique mind. She thought so fast, but her thoughts weren’t as efficient. Angel did a lot more with brute force than common sense intuition, but she was so quick about it, on the outside, there was no difference. Once she was happy with the lens positions and frequency modulation for both infrared and ultraviolet coverage, she opened one of her larger panels, and a mild yellow glow showered down on everyone.

  Klax and Jayna turned their faces toward the hovering bot and there was no mistaking the relief they felt. Mark sent the message out to his bonds to please remain still until these plant people had a moment to suckle from Angel’s glowing teat.

  The imagery of his thought got a digital giggle from the horizontal bot pressing herself up against the dirt ceiling of the cave. He’d never heard her laugh before and after a glance at the others, Abby, Sasha, and Jezebel had noticed it too. Mark sighed and put that “first” away before focusing on the black-robed mage before him.

  “We’re past playing games,” he began. “We control the orb. Starglade is gone, and Maliah is responsible. Now you can help us fight her, or you, your child, and all of reality will be switched off as if you never existed.”

  “Child?” Klax said, trying to keep up. “Collector, that seed within Jayna is Starglade- what we could save of it.”

  Mark felt a jolt of hope from all of them, but especially Jezebel.

  “Please…” the satyr breathed next to him. “Are you telling us the city was somehow saved?”

  “It was a rushed ritual. And as you can imagine, such grand magics aught not be rushed. Many did not survive casting it, and I do not know who was or wasn’t in the great tree when we began emergency condensing procedures. The Tender of the Grove was not prepared to contain such a legendary potency of nature and life and is not in full control of her mind.”

  “The metal construct’s light is… helpful,” Jayna whispered, her eyes closed. The unending pleasure from his Salivis energy still gripping her swollen body wasn’t hurting either. He secretly used it to massage her stiff wooden nipples and got a small groan in response. The erotic distrac
tion was helping her mind cope with the insanity they were talking about. The whole mega-tree and its hundreds of thousands of citizens- inside her? He shook it off and reminded himself he was supposed to be numb to weird.

  “Meet Angel,” Mark said, pointing upward the source of the soothing light. “She is a Lunar Power Droid and may be the only one to survive the Cataclysm. She is helping us unlock the powers of the orb.”

  “But some asshole wiped her mind,” Sasha added. “So, it’s why we came looking for you.”

  “But you betrayed us…” Klax muttered, trying to think quickly. He internally struggled with what happened to his people, with what he perceived of Mark and his team, and with his insatiable desire to touch the Orb of Legend.

  “Fuck you,” Mark said quickly. “No, we didn’t. The deal was your Crystal Heart Shards for the Centaur door code frequency, and we gave you exactly what you asked for. No, we didn’t steal the immovable Orb you covet. It returned itself to the people who created it. There is a whole facility in another dimension where it patiently sits waiting for us to finally figure out how to pick it up and bash Maliah over the head with it.”

  Sasha’s tail began to sway back and forth as she crossed her arms.

  “And you’re never going to believe who’s responsible for creating the orb.”

  Mark looked up over his shoulder at the still-standing sex demon bathed in artificial sunlight, and the smug, fanged smile splitting her pretty face was one he would never forget.

  While Mark’s ability to open a doorway to anywhere reset itself, they used the time to bring Jayna and Klax up to speed with everything involving this and every other world now linked by the Gods. The Lagomorph and their dimension, their technology. The Awysai, the Blazar, and the living ocean of Eternal Echo growing on the Wrongside. Time Walkers and their achievements. The pantheon of continually active deities and the real stakes. They discussed the reality of their virtual existence- including who Jezebel was and how she created the Cataclysm.

  He could tell these magically potent creatures didn’t understand or believe what they were saying about “real-world” stuff yet, but like everyone else, the best way was to just let it go.