“Hi, Evot!”
The skeleton actually has the gall to sound chipper. “WHAT THE FUNK!” Unable to avoid the ingrained habit of not swearing, she trembles while furiously staring up at the skeleton.
“Look!”
Her eyes involuntarily sliding over to where Douglas is pointing, she sees a six-sided star attached to his ribcage. A number is accompanied by the Galaxsec logo, some official looking decoration, and a bunch of official looking text. “You…”
“GalaxSec Trainee Constable. How can I help?”
Evot is at a loss for words. “I’m at a loss for words.”
“What do I do now?”
“What the crack do you mean, you metal headed petfood? What do you do now?”
“Hundred days of food here?”
“What?”
“Lot of rules are broken here, right? GalaxSec assigned governing body?”
Memories of a conversation a long time ago flash through her mind, and Evot feels like giggling. Out of all the things the stupid skeleton could have brought up, he brings up the one time she tried to bait and switch him. The way she made him follow her wish by telling him that the long-dead governor of this planet is not providing enough food for herself is immensely funny now that she thinks about it. She did technically succeed, she muses, but it was more of a mutually beneficial cooperation in the end. She would never have gotten here, and he would never have made any headway with the SI. “That’s what you want to do?”
Douglas nods at her, the serious manner in which he tilts his black skull up and down nearly having her pee the pants she isn’t wearing with stifled giggles. Holding her blanket in front of her to hide her suddenly blushing face, she fights to keep her roiling hormones and emotions under control. “So you want to… go after the people that let this entire planet die?”
“Shield small one.”
Peering over the thin blanket at him, she once again sees the seriousness in his stance. “Well, there is nothing criminal happening on this planet. Not for a long while, I think.” Douglas just keeps staring at her, his burning eyes never leaving hers for even a single second. Evot takes deep breaths, unable to calm down her racing heart. “SI, any ideas?”
“Minimum volunteer personnel count is not met. No operations can be started.”
“Well, there you have it. You need to do that soul thing on more people.”
Douglas doesn’t move a single bone, but Evot still sees his face light up. His hand stretches out towards her, and she stops herself from flinching backwards. The fact that she is already seated against the wall had nothing to do with that, she tells herself. She also tells herself that the shivers of enjoyment running through her body at his touch aren’t anything weird. “H-hey,” she stammers, trying to keep talking while the head-melting pleasures of being scratched on her cranium flow through her. “I was thinking, and I think I’d like to become a cop too.”
His fingers stop for a few seconds. “Please, no.” Looking up at him, she reads something weird in his flaming eyes. He then repeats himself. “Please, no.”
“Why?”
Evot nearly loses it as Douglas traces the horn jutting from her forehead. How did she not notice the sensitivity of that thing earlier? It feels like he is running a hand across the centre of her being, the housing of her soul, and the main nexus of her nervous system all at once. Then the clear thought strikes her that it might very well be all that, and more.
“You’d… please, no.” Douglas is vocalizing softly, and she realized that it’s a first for him. Up until now, each word coming from his mouth had been like he’d just pounded the meaning out, harsh in volume and sound. He resumes talking, but Evot has to pay close attention to somehow emotional and trembling catch to words. “Please don’t leave.”
Her mouth flapping open and closed, she is at a total loss for words.
“I can break. I can corrode. I can burn. I can freeze. I can fall,” Douglas continues.
Her heart aching at his slow and soft words, she can’t turn away from him even had she wanted to.
“I don’t know if you can. Maybe yes, but that would be long.” Douglas’s other hand fumbles with the shining badge attached to his ribs. “Too long. Please.”
Her eyes fly open wide. GalaxSec officers can deputy a single person. This fact flashes through Evot’s mind. The mystic and legendary figures of actual, official GalaxSec officers are extremely rare. Evengi, in its history of many thousands of years of sapient occupation, has never even been visited by one. Only the volunteer corp - which is made up out of decently paid paper pushers, clerks, first responders, and maintenance personnel - have worked in this place up to this point. And now, GalaxSec Trainee Constable Douglas is handing her his deputy star. The badge on his chest is missing its middle part. She sees the telltale fragmented flickering reflections of official badges, the inlaid circuitry too fine to see with the naked eye. All kinds of authentication protocols and hyper-advanced electronics are embedded into the seemingly simple thing. This artefact of an era long gone could most likely buy the entire Evengi solar system, and then some, if sold on the black market.
“Please,” begs Douglas, and Evot just can’t refuse him. She gently holds the silver star, its shine only losing out to Douglas’ gold one. She feels the thing heat up as it scans her from top to bottom, binding to her life signs. Then Douglas nods once, flashes his broad grin at her, and strides out the door, off to parts unknown.
Evot lies back down, now truly tired as the silence returns to her room. She clutches the softly humming badge to her chest, the small trinket undoubtedly performing all kinds of complex tricks and procedures to make sure she’ll be able to uphold the duty that comes along with it. Closing her eyes, she no longer sees the images of her family and friends dying. No, now the displays of magic and might involving Douglas replay themselves on the back of her eyelids.
Evot wonders once again where everything went wrong. How did she go from having a cushy archive job to being a magical unicorn soulbound undead girl, who is apparently - and in hindsight rather obviously - madly in love with a retarded skeleton.
“SI, do you have any information about Stockholm Syndrome?”
“No, Deputy Evot.”
“Okay,” she replies weakly, burying her head in her pillows.
Chapter Twenty-Four – On Repetitions and Keys to Happiness
Douglas simply can’t stop touching himself. The feeling beneath his metal-clad fingers that comes from him running his digits across the small metal badge transmits clear and crisp to his consciousness. He feels every groove and ornamental ridge, each inscription and line of text with clarity. He never really paid any attention to this aspect of his undead-ness, but feeling for fine detail using nothing but hard bone is surprisingly easy for the skeleton. His finger catches on the thin slice of missing material going through the entire badge, and Douglas thinks back on the encounter with Evot just now.
The fact that she tried to join up with the force had honestly scared him a little. Not really in the sense of creeping dread, but more in the sense that a future without Evot will be less. Less in what sense exactly, he is not sure, but he just knows that the likelihood of her coming through the entire medical examination is exceptionally slim. None of the fleshy beings he’s been Soul Binding will do well, he reasons. It’s almost like the entire medical test is designed to only let him through. This is odd, but not something he will be complaining about anytime soon. Then there is the fact that Douglas deems it unlikely that she will be able to get through those doors between the rotten test scenes like he did. She has no exposed bones to cover and protect, so there will be no need for her to destroy those metal doors.
Looking around, Douglas follows yet another painted sign pointing him towards the core room. Walking down this new set of rather steep stairs, he contemplates whether or not talking to the Synthetic Intelligence again will be worth it. He tried to make conversation with the thing earlier, but the fake voice blast
ing from the walls was the worst conversation partner Douglas had ever come across. None of the questions he asked it were answered in a direct and concise manner, if it could answer them at all. Instead of bothering with conversation, Douglas decides to hurry up and get down to the core, just to be done with it.
Stepping through one of the many, many doors he previously melted through in order to get to this core thing, he retraces his path downwards.
Having just come from the place, the core was honestly underwhelming. There were just two still bodies, one a drooling mess of semi-transparent grey slime, the other a dense pod of a similar color. Douglas hadn’t been able to make any sense of the immense amount of pipes, monitors, racks, locked doors, and other objects and installations that filled the very well protected center of the base. He’d just grabbed the badge sticking from the slot that the SI indicated, and legged it out of there.
Then it’d cost him a mere few hours to get the SI to divulge Evot’s location, after which he found her chilling on her bed. The flush covering her entire body was immensely interesting, and only the tears dripping from her eyes managed to break his confused ogling session. Now he has a new mission, though. The SI had spouted something about there not being enough personnel, and Evot asked him to go and Soul Bind more people! Always eager to spend time practising something as exciting and repetitive as casting the same spell over and over and over, Douglas had a little think about this task after walking away from Evot’s room. The amount of bodies in the higher levels is honestly overwhelming, and Douglas would hate it if he were to miss any of the corpses in the chaos that will undoubtedly follow. So the best way to perform this amazing task would be to begin at the beginning, and the last place Douglas remembers seeing corpses is in the core room.
Determined to start at the bottom and work his way up, Douglas steps through the still smoking hole that used to be the GalaxSec Base Core Vault door. Entering the cramped space once again, he ignores all the flashing warnings, scrolling lists of critical defects, and racks of densely stored equipment. Instead, he makes his way over to the slumped grey form. His bony hands already glowing with mana, he starts casting.
[ Soul Binding IV lvl 18 ]
Watching the blue glow return life to the body is as fascinating as ever.
“No!” With many flailing limbs, the thing jolts upright.
“Hello,” says Douglas politely.
“What? Hello? Who are you?”
“I’m Douglas.”
“Hello, Douglas, I’m Overseer Ungud. What's happening?”
“Is that someone?” asks Douglas, pointing towards the shiny egg behind him. Talking to new people is fine and all, but he’d honestly rather be casting magic.
“Incorrect statement noted. Overseer Ungud is deceased, logged over fifty years ago,” interjects the SI’s in a synthetic voice.
“Yeah, that’s my friend. She’s my friend, I should say now. Wait, I’m deceased? I finally did it?”
Douglas looks at the moist being. Why does it sound so happy about being dead? Douglas just points at the blob of grey flesh covered in a hard shell, ignoring the sloppy fumbling of the many-armed being behind him. As this Ungud person isn’t answering his questions in an interesting manner, Douglas just walks up to the shell and wonders where its forehead might be. He then decides that the entire thing is probably a forehead, and casts his spell once again.
[ Soul Binding IV lvl 19 ]
“…must be an error in this log. Fifty years? Not a single piece of scrap should be left by then. The infection should have reduced this base to pulp, and should have carted off all the biological matter present. Wait, the stasis generator plasma capacitor ran out? Since when do we have that? Stop denying me access. I’ve got plenty of clearance to look at this stuff. No, I will not get a form to contest my deceased status. Wow, what’s this, a skill has generated? ‘Log Auditing’ isn’t really a separate skill, though. Wow, the description is blank? Wow, more blue boxes? This is odd. I'm sensing a resonance feedback loop? Learning data begets more data, wow, this is trippy.”
Douglas is fascinated. Something weird is going on, and Douglas is all for it. At the beginning of his undead life, the amount of information coming into his mind from the outside was slow, limited to a single topic at a time. As his skills evolved, the complexity of the information he could learn got higher, the speed didn’t. Reviving Katare seemed to give the blue boxes a boost, and he'd noticed a slow yet marked increase in information inflow with each new person he has Soul Bound. Now, though, now something else is happening.
The grey being called Ungud is glowing, steam wafting from its semi-transparent skin. A blue flicker accompanies the shining cords of nervous system tracing its body as its movement speed increases. His four arms which were previously leisurely tapping away at the many screen and input devices are now a blur. Its monologue has also sped up, and Douglas only occasionally catches phrases like ‘mental statistics,’ ‘skill gaining compared to skill generation,’ and ‘blue boxes.’
[ System boon earned; added working UNKNOWN brain to system, calculating suitable reward… ]
[ Greater Arcane skeleton lvl 1 reached ]
[ Greater Arcane skeleton lvl 2 reached ]
[ Greater Arcane skeleton lvl 3 reached ]
[ Greater Arcane skeleton lvl 4 reached ]
[ Greater Arcane skeleton lvl 5 reached ]
[ Greater Arcane skeleton lvl 6 reached ]
[ Greater Arcane skeleton lvl 7 reached ]
[ Greater Arcane skeleton lvl 8 reached ]
[ Greater Arcane skeleton lvl 9 reached ]
[ Greater Arcane skeleton lvl 10 reached ]
[ Congratulations, you are now a tier 4 race; choose one permanent racial trait ]
[ Congratulations, choose two permanent racial traits ]
[ Desiccated Form ]
[ Entrenched Soul ]
[ Spread Soul ]
[ Incorporeal Form ]
[ Changing Form ]
[ Mana Soul ]
[ Shifting Bones ]
[ Reinforced Bones ]
[ Anchor Shift ]
[ Please add more UNKNOWN brains to the system in order to earn further rewards ]
Not sure what to feel at this blatant attempt to bribe him, Douglas decides to make use of this opportunity. If the blue boxes want to reward him for Soul Binding Ungud, then Douglas is more than willing to receive. Ten free levels in his race, and an extra racial trait? Yes please, he thinks. He vaguely remembers what most of the racial traits will do for him, but he also spots some new ones. Checking them over, he sees that the old ones are unchanged.
Mana Soul turns out to be a similar deal as the Gem-filled Skeleton race. It’ll basically focus his entire being on having a much higher affinity for mana at the cost of less power reserved for his physical side. Shifting Bones will allow him a slight bit of control over the shape of his bones. Reinforced Bones simply makes his physical body stronger and harder, but much heavier. Anchor Shift is odd, and besides the description that he can shift his anchor, there is very little actual information available. Instead of choosing right now, he decides he might as well pick once he actually needs one of the options.
The speed with which he read through the text boxes surprises him. As he noted before, the system seems to be running on overdrive. Instead of gaining just enough information to get by, now the mere thought of his Magical Control skill gives him a mental overview. What used to be a steady stream of repeating information now feels like a stack of books laid out in front of him, letting him read and peruse all the data at a moment’s notice.
“Hello?”
Turning around, Douglas sees another grey being standing behind him. This one has distinct curved and graceful lines of wet flesh as opposed to the blockish bruteness of the other grey being. “Hi,” Douglas waves back.
“Could you tell me what’s going on? Ungud over there isn’t getting anywhere like this.”
“GalaxSec Trainee Consta
ble Douglas. How can I help?”
“You’re an actual constable?” A bright network of root-shaped lights becomes visible inside the being. At first, this is a pure white glow, but slowly the entire display is overtaken by the same blue shine that he recognizes as his own mana. “I know it’s a lot to ask, but we seem to have lost all admin privileges. Can you deputize me?”
Tapping the badge on his chest, he runs a finger across the empty slit.
“Right, sorry. That was rude. I guess we’ll have to reapply to a volunteer position then. Ungud, are you coming?”
“These boxes are rather slow. Oh, hello. Uhm…”
“Hello, Ungud.”
Douglas looks between the two grey beings for a long while. He might not be the smartest cookie on the block, but even Douglas can feel the super awkward tension and raw sexual charge in the room. Just when he feels like he should realize something very important about Evot, the two beings rush each other and hug. Looking at the slimy and squelching spectacle, Douglas makes his way out of the room, leaving through the still glowing and molten hole in the thick door.
“Hey, Douglas, wait up!”
Stopping just outside the slagged door, he looks back at the duo clinging to each other. The larger one starts speaking. “We’ll…”
“We can’t just walk across molten alloy. We will need to wait for it to cool off before we can get out of here,” answers the curvy one. “Can you tell us how you got us back to life? Soul Binding, I think? That's what it says in my status data.”
GalaxSec: A Sci-Fi LitRPG (Skeleton in Space Book 2) Page 29