“Where?”
“Where what?”
“Where go?”
“Where are we going, you mean?”
“Where?”
“You wanted to join the GalaxSec Corps, right? I can’t even imagine how someone, no, how something like you would even come across that idea, but you can fail their ridiculous entry exams there. There are no big-shots to give you a boost into the middle ranks, so have fun doing shit-all for a few years before you’re kicked off the force for failing to produce results.”
“Okay.”
For reasons Douglas truly can’t fathom, the woman is now staring at him. The intensity in her stare makes even the unfeeling skeleton slightly uncomfortable, as if every move and sound he makes will be forever saved in the recesses of her mind.
The woman then bobs her head up and down once, in a rather fierce manner that makes the short mop of black hair on her head bounce around. “Let’s go then. I don’t believe for one second that you've been behaving yourself since you got here, so we need to hurry.”
“Behaving?”
“Did you keep calm, not make any noise? Did you keep to yourself without waking any of the amalgamations?”
Douglas has a relatively short think before answering with a definitive “Yes.” He kept his calm most of the time, after all, and the one time he sort of lost it, there was not a single red slime in sight.
“You didn’t start a fight, right? Else, we might as well just lie down and let ourselves be swallowed right this instant.”
Douglas hears the power behind this question. Even though they are both walking once again, Douglas following behind the much shorter woman, the skeleton senses the emphasis she'd put in those words. He goes through all the things he has experienced on this planet so far, from flaming re-entry to wild air-explosion fueled trip to her horn. Douglas concludes that he has not started a single one of the many fights he has been in. Every time, he was just doing his own thing, when the beasts came to steal his bones. “No.”
The woman’s shoulders slump visibly as her steps falter. Douglas does not stop in time, and bowls her over. Wondering why she suddenly stopped like that, he continues climbing the next dune, ignoring the harshly whispered yelling behind him. The red ridge lying in front of him is one of the larger ones, and it takes him a good few minutes before he manages to make it up the long hill. This is where the woman catches up with him, as he is staring at the landscape.
“Just a bonehead. No need to get upse-” Softly muttered words are cut off as she joins the skeleton in gazing out over the foreboding landscape. Tall structures tower over the dusty red vista, forming thick caterpillars of rubble that tower hundreds of meters into the air.
“Blue?” asks Douglas, pointing at the rather impressive amount of building debris. The mountain that is taking up a good quarter of the city seems kind of out of place, even Douglas can see that. From everything he knows about designing a city, building one partially inside an odd mountain like that does not seem like a good idea at all. “Blue?” he asks again, pointing at the odd yet impressive sight.
“N-no. This is… I don’t know what city this is, but it isn’t the capital. There was no mountain…”
“Then, where?”
“I…”
Douglas is usually pretty patient, but the idea of being just like the images he has remembered so well is tantalising. He is utterly uninterested in finding out why he has this odd desire to wear that shiny blue uniform. He just wants to. Having this woman imply that there is a GalaxSec base nearby before refusing to tell him more is slowly igniting a minuscule flame of emotion inside the skeleton.
The ruined city is quickly taken from his view as Douglas strides down the steep dune. He climbs up the next one with hastening steps, ignoring the babbling of the woman behind him. The amount of mana flowing to his legs increases as he starts moving with more haste, red sand spraying up behind his quick steps. The yelling behind him increases in volume, but Douglas is no longer bothering with listening to her. In the end, Katare is the best, he concludes. All this one has been doing is flapping her mouth at him. She doesn’t even do the slightly amusing thing of going red in the face while veins pop up on her forehead, like Katare had done many times. Nor has she been displaying the same cleverness and mysteriousness.
The knowledge that she has been providing to the armored bonehead has also been rather lacking. Katare said a new word every other sentence at the minimum, teaching him lots of new stuff all the time. This one just repeats a lot of the same stuff, and the few new words he hears don’t make any sense at all. Instead of spanning broad concepts, like copulation, wishing bad things upon someone through magical means, and melting entire planets, the additional words spewing from the woman behind him just mean covered in red liquid, and having a behind for a face.
Instead, Douglas decides to move forward with his life, the still rather foreign feeling of wanting something for himself burning brightly in his empty chest. The next red rise he crests shows him yet another dune, this one slightly smaller than the last. Douglas also sees more of the city beyond. He sees that it is not the same one he landed near initially. There is a similar theme of absolute destruction and ruin going on, but the sheer amount of rubble is on a different scale entirely. Instead of a central core of half destroyed skyscrapers, the center of this place is made up of a tower of crumbling concrete, shattered glass, and twisted bars of metal. Fallen and decaying giants, wrecked grids of windows decorating their collapsing sides, that dwarf the previous skyscrapers he has seen are stacked into a massive and vaguely pyramidal pile.
It takes him a mere six additional dunes before the waves of sand stop interrupting his path entirely. The number of metal poles, half-legible signs, broken vehicles, and other detritus is sticking up from the sandy floor increases as he walks closer. Here and there, he manages to read a word or two. He even recognizes some of the logos and letters from the various ads he has been exposed to on the space station. Those are few and far between, though. Most of the chipped paint he sees tells him of cheap clothing, vehicles, or services. Walking across a road in severe need of maintenance, Douglas stumbles and falls on his metal-clad face before reaching the first crumbled ruins. Looking back at the source of his sudden downward move, he sees slender hands grip fast to his stone-covered tibia and fibula
“Just stop, please.” The red-faced and hard breathing woman is clutching his left leg with both hands. “This is not the capital. Please, I request that you do not enter that place.”
Douglas stares at her expressive face for a little longer. He might not feel much himself these days, but that does not mean that he doesn't recognize obvious emotions when they are this clearly displayed. The wide eyes, the rapid breathing, the constant and rapidly looking around; it’s all rather obvious. This leads Douglas to a single conclusion. He shifts his bony body into an upright position and sits down. “Okay.”
“If that mountain is what I susp… Okay?” Her terrified visage changing into a rather dubious one, Douglas feels doubting eyes on his frame. “What’s with the sudden okay? Are you okay yourself? No, why did I ask a magically moving skeleton with a couple of kilograms of high-tech super bonded junk on his skull why he is okay? Come on, woman.”
“You okay?” Douglas is seriously starting to doubt whether or not this version of Katare is broken. Little she says makes sense.
“I’m not really okay, no. Thanks for asking.” The genuine smile of appreciation that is suddenly aimed at him makes the skeleton want to shift around. The woman dusts off her knees - her legs having regrown up to her ankles - and rights herself on her stumps with minimal wobble. Wrapping her hands around her upper arms and rubbing them slowly, she looks around. “But who cares, right? Physically, I’ll be okay in a few days, and that is the only thing wrong with me at the moment I can’t change with just force of will. Or a few rounds in a psych conditioning space. Anyway, that’s one of the old spaceports that surround the capital. Tho
se long things you see lying on the ground used to be mooring pillars. That pile of cable over there was a high altitude lift. Those buildings used to be either offices, processing rooms, or storerooms, I think. I can’t see any markings or labels anymore, so it’ll be hard to figure that out without entering that place.”
Douglas is grinning again. New words in new contexts continue spilling from the woman’s mouth. Maybe going to get her horn has turned out to be a smarter move than just an effort to get rid of the irritating pull on his mind.
“Those areas used to be solar reflectors. The place we just came from used to be covered in mirrors too. You can see the collector lying over there. Those stupid Centrally-produced items never break, after all.”
Douglas waits for more new stuff, but the woman standing next to him just keeps staring at the large mountain sticking up from the central part of the ruins. This goes on for a little while, one staring at the other, while the other just keeps rubbing her upper arms. “Blue?”
Shaken from whatever was eating her up on the inside, the woman takes a shuddering breath as she starts looking around. “We should find a vehicle, I think. The dropped bases are all inside the capital, a few hundred kilometres to the north, if I recall.”
“Why a vehicle?”
A few giggles of surprised laughter later, she replies with, “It’s not like we can walk there. Come on, maybe one of the Central pieces of expensive junk still works. It’s not like the locally produced cars worked that well when they were brand new. Look for something that’s similar to your own head.”
Running a bony digit across the angular smoothness of his skull armor, Douglas starts puttering around. The road beneath his feet is made from partially shattered rock, the dark surface covered in thick layers of fine dust and sand here and there. The rest of the ground Douglas sees is either barren and cracked dirt, not a single sign of vegetation or recent life to be seen. The smaller wrecks of vehicles are still rather scarce this far out from the city, but a little bit of walking never stopped Douglas. He moves towards the nearest hunk of rusting metal, inspecting the odd shapes with a careful eye.
The entire pile is covered in a thick layer of dust, but the skeleton does recognise some of the same forms and structures that he saw back on the space station. There, they had been all shiny on their display stands.
“Leave that one. Feerd repulsors barely work brand new, never mind after a long time out in the open.”
Douglas obediently walks over to the next heap he sees, dutifully inspecting the decaying remains. A large ring holds four mud-covered orbs evenly spaced, the oval capsule in the middle nothing but a half-rotted shell. Vague silhouettes of seats are visible through the dirt-caked and shattered glass, the entire interior nothing but rusting support beams and stamped frames.
“My nephew had one of those. Even when I managed to climb in the thing, all it did was keep shocking me with electrostatic spillage.”
Hearing the disapproval in her voice, Douglas moves over to the next one.
“That’s a pile of furniture.”
This pattern repeats itself for an entire hour before Douglas senses that something isn’t right. They have passed by a large number of public sculptures, oddly stacked lamp posts, and several heaps of what Douglas recognised to be food packaging.
“Why do we need a vehicle?” The woman holds her hand to her mouth the moment he asks this question.
“Because it’s a long way away. You can’t walk to the capital.” Smiling at him, she continues. “I nearly forgot you could actually speak entire sentences. I think we will have better success by circling around to what used to be the affluent area. We will have better luck in finding proper transportation there.”
“NO!” replies Douglas with force. She is getting on his nerves now. “Why do we need vehicle?”
“Shush! We don’t want to wake anything.” Looking around frantically, the woman keeps staring at the large mountain sticking up from the city. “And there is a massive lake between here and the capital.”
The word ‘lake’ is rather interesting, but Douglas doesn’t believe that he won’t just be able to cross it on foot. A bit of water hasn't managed to stop him so far, after all. This entire search for a vehicle has been slightly informative, but not enough to offset the fact that he isn't getting closer to fulfilling the single most powerful desire he has felt in his entire life. “No problem. Where is capital?”
“Somewhere north, but come on. The rich district is over there. We’ll need to circle around those dormant Reworked.” Any levity in the woman’s face is gone as she stares at the clumped heaps of white a few hundred meters away. She starts walking perpendicular to the group of still Histaff, only stopping when she notices that Douglas isn't following her.
“Vehicle,” is the result of Douglas’s sudden bout of inspiration. Smiling at his own genius, he starts walking towards the dusty heaps of interlocking white plates. His mana stone-filled skull is spinning with all the new information provided to him by his Magical Animation, Engraving and Logic skills. Instead of combining simple patterns and formations in complicated ways, he now thinks of simple ways in which to apply complex patterns. His Histaff mount version one had needed at least four separate engraved patterns for each articulating joint. Two repulsor patterns to keep the bone in place combined with a pushing and pulling formation.
The newly levelled skills of his Apprentice Arcanist class all churn through his mind’s eye. Not a single bit of information Douglas is methodically going through hints that any of his plans are even possible, and thus have likely never been attempted in the magical wizarding and arcanist community that created Douglas, but that isn’t about to stop the stone-clad skeleton. His newest skill, Logic, is the missing ingredient that is connecting all the other skills together.
Meditation, Mana Sense and Mana Control are all useful for casting and forming the magical patterns, but are less than necessary when it comes to creating magical engravings. Spell shaping is helpful in coming up with new pattern variations, but all this does is speed up the process instead of facilitating new options. Mana stone production is useful, as his increased mana capacity can attest, but is just a required part of the entire process when it comes to magically animating items. Magical Animation itself contains a whole slew of interesting building blocks, but Douglas has come across the limit of that skill with his first Histaff Reworked animation. Engraving is a skill Douglas was familiar with prior to its inclusion into his new class, and the ability to actually carve lines instead of merely pushing mana through them until something sticks is nice, but not groundbreaking.
It’s his newly earned Logic skill that is now feeding Douglas a massive amount of new hints, tips, and ways to look at problems. Walking closer to the slumbering piles of bone-plated Histaff slime, Douglas is totally lost in adapting complex spell shape parts to their mathematical optimum. He uses complex formulas that he doesn't understand at all in order to create the best possible floating hinges. He calculates optimal mana channel width by instinct, somehow knowing that making them too small will only prevent the formations being used fully. Making them too big will only create a blockage in the mana flow upstream, thus preventing the entire animation from working properly.
Lost in a daze, he reaches out a hand to touch the closest still pile of interlocking bone plates. These specimens are lying inside an empty clearing, small structures dotting the otherwise clear field. The sign of ‘playground’ is ignored by the skeleton, who is way too busy with thinking up how to start to see the woman running after him from behind.
Instead of gently laying a bony hand upon the four-metre-high white pile of slime and bone, the woman tackles him, slamming him into the unyielding white pile. “NO! Don’t wake them, please for the love of heck; don’t wake them!” Her tone goes from a panicked squeak into intense whispering as she pleads with the skeleton lying partially under her.
Turning his burning eyes to the creature clinging to his legs, Dougl
as opens his mouth. “Vehicle!”
“What? No, we need to leave, come. Leave them… Oh, no. This is why no one bothers with Histaff planets. This is why. We are dead. Oh heck. Warp take us.”
The fact that the Histaff Reworked around them suddenly jump into action does not surprise Douglas at all. Slamming into one of them, combined with all the noise that they have been producing is sure to wake even the deepest sleeper. The skeleton knows what he must do, though, and the first thing he does after freeing himself from the blubbering woman is to spin up a phlogistonate spell. The small needle of ice that appears after shoving mana into the spell shape hangs above his open palm. The compact bone shapes around him unfold into all kinds of complex beasts, from small forests of stabbing implements to long-limbed stilt walkers. Unlike before, though, not a single one lunges at the skeleton.
Opening his other palm, Douglas brings up his dephlogistonate spell shape. The pathetic smidgen of fire that springs into being is a stark reminder of the lack of moisture and water around, but that isn't about to stop him. What Douglas does not expect, however, is that the mountain sticking up from the city also starts moving.
[ Mana Control III lvl 26 ]
“This is why. Oh heck. This is why we need a vehicle.” The woman, and Douglas only then remembers that this non-Katare is named Evot, is now curling up into a ball, sucking on her thumb while not looking at the dust cloud billowing from between the ruins. A ground-shaking stomp follows as the mountain towering over Douglas unfolds into the biggest Histaff Behemoth Douglas has ever even dreamt of.
Immediately, the few priorities that he has inside his skull get rearranged. Getting into one of those amazing blue uniforms is still life-goal number one, but controlling and riding such a magnificently massive bone beauty is firmly lodged in place number two. Feeling like he should wipe the drool from his mouth, Douglas furiously starts using his Logic skill to calculate how much mana and mana stones he would need to animate it.
GalaxSec: A Sci-Fi LitRPG (Skeleton in Space Book 2) Page 10