Chapter 227: Insurance (Patreon)

The monster holding them captive blinked, pulling itself out of it’s thoughts as it tried to copy her movements.

“Where’s Caitlyn?”

“She went out for groceries.” Alicia said, glancing up from her cards to inspect the doppleganger in front of her. Because the monster was bound by some verbal agreement not to cause Garth apprentices physical harm, he was instead ‘cobbling together’ his own version of Alicia and Caitlyn to use as infiltrators, using what he called ‘chunky personality soup.’

Sitting across from her was an identical Alicia, whose movements and mannerisms were slowly becoming more and more similar the longer they spent together.

“Oh, right.”

“Something wrong with that?”

Her doppleganger paused, pouting lips frowning. I am pretty damn sexy, now that I get a good look at myself.

“…No? maybe? I can’t put my finger on it.”

Alicia tapped her cards on the table.

If the monster couldn’t handle the aura granted to Caitlyn by her Patron, then chances were he couldn’t handle Gorn’s mana either. Although it was a matter of time before he put two and two together, Caitlyn was long gone, off to warn Garth.

“She should be here, though, right? So why did I let her…”

Ah, there it is, Alicia thought, watching the creature puzzle it out for itself.

“Ah, AAH!” Alicia’s doppleganger raised a finger while the entire house shook with laughter. “She’s an apostle too!”

“Too?”

“As well? As well as me?” The doppleganger glanced at her, then up at the rafters of the living house she was trapped in.

“Do you think I could do this without some serious help from my Class and God?”

Alicia shrugged. “How would I know? I just assumed you were some monster.”

Her copy gasped, holding a trembling hand to her breastbone. “How could you even say something like that?” Her eyes watered, a hair’s breadth from crying.

“I don’t act like that. That’s my slut sister Benedette.”

“I’m sensing some reflexive hostility. Traumatic event that drove a wedge between you and the rest of your family?”

“Shut up.” Alicia snarled.

“Cool. I got a whole dumpster full of those to plug in.”

Her doppleganger’s blue eyes went vacant as her fingers twitched, seemingly rifling through something.

“Help me out on this one. Was it sexual in nature? That’ll help really nail the behavior patterns.”

“You know what?” Alicia said, leaning forward, her blood slamming through her veins, prickling her fingers as anger began to build in her stomach. “Yeah, it was. My Aunt sold me for a night to a fat, old noble with nothing but slime under his skin who liked hurting little girls.”

“Oh, thank you, the specificity really narrows it down.”

“But you’re never going to be able to pretend to be me.” She said, her voice low.

“Why’s that?”

Alicia slammed open the gates to Gorn’s mana, channeling a lethal amount of lightning through herself. The table exploded away from her as she writhed in pain, the dopppleganger caught full in the face.

The house came alive. With an inhuman groan, the false boards erupted outward, sending living spikes of flesh down toward her, burying themselves into her body.

They fried.

The entire house began shuddering as lightning coursed through it, emanating out from Alicia.

She struggled through the pain making her knees weak, and clawed her way back to her feet, every inch of her body coursing with compressed mana.

With a scream, Alicia tugged crispy spears of flesh out of her shoulder and stomach, then began walking toward the door, her legs unsteady from the sheer rush of pleasure as painful lightning continued to course through every inch of her body. Some inches more than others.

On the way past, she spat a boiling gob of spit on her doppleganger’s face.

****

Dr. Daniels lay there, blinking the after-image of a lightning-woman out of his retinas. She killed Housie! He wiped the scalded spot off his forehead and blinked some more before sticking out his tongue and tasting the spit.

Nah, the DNA’s fried. Bummer.

He sat there for a moment longer, a tugging in his heart.

I miss Leanne and Sass. Dangerous women make me happy.

He could make pretty accurate replicas out of personality soup, but it just wasn’t the same, seeing as he would still ultimately be linked in to their minds. It would be like trying to amuse yourself with your own puppet show…or masturbation.

It could only get you so far and smacked of loneliness.

Millions of his mouthpieces subtly shifted their activities across the Spheres, adding Find Sass and Leanne to their list of things to do.

Companionship and Ikigai helped maintain sanity, and he needed as much of that as he could get.

Except…he had thousands of bodies on thousands of worlds, and those two could only hang out with so many of them.

My bodies need friends of their own, preferably dangerous women.

***

Garth spun the Genocide Blade in his hand, considering his options. Would a creature born from a stabbed Dr. Daniels clone be able to handle the creature’s sheer power? Being able to shapeshift as naturally as it could, as well as use magic…it was nearly unstoppable.

Garth could see several ways this could turn out poorly.

1. The creature turned out as powerful as it needed to be, but it wasn’t as benevolent as the goblin hunters, and wound up being just as much of a problem as the original Dr. D.

2. The creature had none of Dr. D’s inherent abilities, seeing as they were derived from a god’s blessing, and wound up just being a Kipling-eater.

3. Dr. D. held a grudge for breaking the treaty when his hunters inevitably escaped Kurm.

4. The resulting creature had a taste for Garth.

It was only because of the Laws in place across the ship that Garth hadn’t completely lost control of it. As it was, losing Mrs. Banyan had been a huge blow. Right out the gate, she marked several thousand people, who were now creating their own camps dedicated to hampering the ship and it’s government any way they could.

At least everyone is having a good time, still.

Garth put the Genocide Blade back in its case with its fellows and enclosed them in layers upon layers of living protective wood.

It wasn’t what he needed right now. Right now, he needed to study the offshoot of his doppelganger and figure out what made it tick before annihilating it. It had abilities similar to The Thing, but that didn’t mean Garth knew the disease, merely the symptoms.

If he could figure out exactly how he worked, he might be able to find a glaring weakness.

Such as being mentally connected to all the other pieces of his whole.

If there was a mental connection that transferred ideas, there had to be a way to exploit it.

It could range from an unconscious tic or behavior they could use to find them, or something as powerful as a machine to hijack the signal and wipe them all out at once.

Am I really thinking about killing my doppleganger? That’s so stupid. He’s got nothing to do with me.

…Except the whole ruling a third of the known universe thing, of which I am part. That and being scary as all hell.

As far as Garth could tell, developing a superweapon without Dr. Daniel’s knowledge was simply a good piece of insurance in case his Clone-lenient attitude led to the end times.

So, the first order of business was cutting off the signal between this particular offshoot and rest of the creatures in as believable a way as possible so he could then start experimenting on him mercilessly.

How do I cut off a signal I’m completely unable to detect?

Goddamnit.

His first instinct was to lean on Halo, but Halo was busy helping Bell rearrange the Laws.

Wait a minute. Lineage Keys maybe?

No. Lineage Keys was for identifying bloodlines and tripping Boolean logic, not severing weird psychic connections with hive-minds.

“Bel.”

“Yep?” Bel asked from across the table.

“I need you to make a couple Laws for me, but rather than having it slowly grow into the entire ship, I need it to snap into place on my command. Can you do something like that?”

“I don’t know,” she said with a shrug. “It’s hard enough trying to make the other ones you asked for.”

“Listen, the only way I’m going to steal a viable test sample out from under Dr. D’s nose is if I can trick him into thinking his extension was destroyed instantly. Otherwise we’re back to just stabbing him with the Blade, which could get pretty bad.”

“Saying that isn’t gonna make it easier.”

“True.” Garth said, dragging his fingers over his face.

“I need to get back to my Clan.” Nabeya said for the umpteenth time.

“If you go back to your clan, you’ll die,” Garth responded for the Umpteenth time. “Not only will you die, your body will be taken over by an evil parasite in a matter of hours and you’ll become a danger to your friends and loved ones.”

“Loved ones?” she asked coldly.

“Clan members.” Garth said, waving a dismissive hand. “You know what I meant.”

She sat there a moment longer, staring at him.

“I’m not wounded.”

“You’re infected.”

“I feel fine.”

“Because you’re in an invulnerability field stalling them out, and besides, brain cells can’t feel. The only thing you’d feel is a little woozy, and then the next thing you know you’ll be touring the afterlife of whichever deity you prefer – I suggest Beladia and Munasei, by the way – while a monster wearing your skin makes increasingly poor decisions.”

“I mean, has no one in the rest of the millions of planets in the universe come up with T.V.?” Garth scoffed.

“Right.” Nabeya stood. “I’ve humored you long enough. You’re spinning your wheels up here in space while the calamity planetside grows out of control, inventing reasons to keep me from acting.” She slowly clenched a fist in Garth’s general direction.

“If it weren’t for your damned ship, I’d crush you where you stand.”

“Yeah, well – hey, what are you doing?” Garth perked up as Mana began to flood into the room, drawn from the fabric of reality to condense around the Elder.

“I’m leaving.”

“No,” Garth said, sitting up straight for the first time in hours. “Bad!”

The mana in the room grew so dense it began to tingle the tastebuds on Garth’s tongue. An absolute torrent of Space mana whirled around her, forming a thick cocoon.

One second the Elder was there, and the next she was gone.

“fffuuuck. Hopefully the anti-teleportation thingy tore her apart.” Because the alternative was an extention of Dr. D. walking around the Dan Ui clan in an elder’s body.

Which…wouldn’t really bother Garth except for the fact that the Corio woman was the metaphorical King in their little mini-war/chess game.

…that and she’d heard a fair amount of their conversation about experimenting on Dr. D. just now, and Garth had no idea how much of that conversation the doppleganger was going to retain when it finally consumed her brain.

“Nope,” Bel responded. “The anti-teleportation field was overwhelmed by the rind.”

“The rind?”

“The rind of the spell.”

Garth blinked. “Okay, sure. Can you send us wherever she went?”

“Sure, it was big enough that I can trace it and take us there.”

“All right, let’s go. Engage.” Garth said, making an authoritative chopping motion with his hand.

“It’ll be a half-hour warm-up on the Gate, Garth.”

“Damn.”

Well, we got a whole half an hour until the next move.

“So, I noticed you look like a corio now. Tell me about this new guy.”

“Oh, he’s so nice. His name is Veyers. He works as the voice of Rigor that I fell in love with. He’s kinda shy, but not bad in bed. I’m gonna have his babies.”

“Like, his babies, or his ship’s babies?”

“Umm….”

Garth chuckled.