Chapter 13: Your Grandma Lays Eggs (Patreon)

Jeb let out a slow breath. The bombs were out of Jeb’s control now.

“Was that supposed to do something?” the Vex asked with an arched brow.

“Let’s just say, breakfast was C-4 balloons with a side of Myst-sensitive detonators,” Jeb said, patting his stomach. Getting it in there had been a thoroughly unpleasant experience. He wasn’t looking forward to passing them either. Assuming he lived that long.

“If you cast anything, I will become a red smear all over your nice furniture. I’ll stain it but good.”

“Seems counterproductive and petty.” The sindio said, steepling his fingers. “I like it. Where are you going with this?”

Jeb’s heart beat against his ribs like an iron hammer, slow but strong as he reached into his pocket. “I’d like to purchase Casey Thompson from you, in exchange for these.” Jeb said, pulling out a handful of thumb-drives and placing them on the table between them.

“Blueprints for more than a dozen different kinds of unique non-magical weapons, primarily using sound, light, and electromagnetism. In addition, some designs for military CPUs that weren’t even available to the public before the Stitching. I know there’s more value in there for you than a teenage girl could possibly represent.”

“I don’t know, the Giver of Life class makes her a uniquely valuable test subject. I haven’t quite cracked how her primary Ability works, do you think maybe you could come back in a week?”

Jeb took a deep breath. “Either you let her go today, or you miss out on these,” Jeb said, motioning to the thumb-drives. “And your cleaning bill increases drastically. I may not be able to beat you, but I can make damn sure it’s more expensive to keep Casey than it is to let her go.”

The keegan’s eyebrows rose in their skull-faced form of a smile.

“I like you, kid.” He tapped his fingers on the table. “You said today, correct? Give me three hours and I’ll deliver the young lady in question to the surface where your companions are listening in on our conversation.”

“Alive and whole.”

“Alive and whole.” the sindio repeated.

“I consider comatose or mentally damaged beyond functioning to not be ‘whole’.” Jeb added.

“As well you should.” Vex said. “Something I find myself more curious about, is how on Pharos you got as far as you did without tripping any alarms or getting yourself vaporized. Care to tell me how you got on the whitelist?”

Jeb shrugged. “I have no idea.”

“Interesting. Her creations were able to enter the dungeon because we’ve already keyed them in, but you specifically should have had a lot more trouble than you did. You aren’t a wizard in disguise or related to anyone I know, are you?”

Jeb thought about it for a moment. Actually, I might be related to someone he knows...

“I...don’t know.” Jeb had his suspicions, though, and they rhymed with ‘Grab’. Jeb was fully aware that he’d been called a ‘prodigy’ by Smartass for his Deals with her and other fairies, and he was fairly sure it wasn’t entirely because of his own effort. There was something more going on.

A half remembered thought from a dream touched Jeb’s mind, sending a thrill of fear through him. No scion of mine is going to accept what something as petty as fate has decided for them. Jeb glanced up at the ceiling, his emotions telling him it was about to crush him.

Solid stone. Not even a crack. Jeb didn’t realize his heartbeat had peaked until it started coming back down, the pressure behind his eyes slowly diminishing.

“What was that?” Vex asked, frowning as he followed Jeb’s gaze toward the ceiling.

Jeb shrugged. “I’m not sure.”

“Color me intrigued. That bomb in your ass, is it based on ambient Myst fluctuations, or does it detect Chugoth decay?”

“Answering that question seems like a bad idea,” Jeb said, hedging his bets.

“Screw it. It can’t be that advanced.” The sindio reached across the table with his unnaturally long limbs and grasped Jeb by the back of the head, hauling him painfully halfway over the table, until their foreheads were touching.

The sindio’s eyes glowed a brilliant, scathing orange, the light seemed to sear into Jeb’s nerves, travelling through his brain and mapping his entire body before spreading out through his limbs, leaving them weak and tingling.

And Jeb wasn’t a smear. Either Elliot had lied to Jeb about the detonator in his stomach, or Vex was so powerful it didn’t make a difference. Jeb’s heart sank, but he kept his face as straight as he could.

That was my trump card!

“Ah, there it is,” the sindio said, letting go of Jeb’s head and reclining back into his chair. “You’re four percent fairy. That was plenty to confuse the sensors. Can’t go vaporizing the pests willy nilly without inviting serious mischief. Was there a lot of incest in your family history?”

Jeb blinked.

“What?”

“Most humans that I’ve studied have a fraction of a percent of fae in their ancestry, which is part of the reason they get along so well with the little buggers, but you’re a freak. No offence.”

“But…they lay eggs.” Jeb said, frowning.

“Mmn, yes. An interesting form of neoteny. They transition from insectoid to mammalian reproductive behavior as they gain Impact, which fuels their maturation, allowing them to grow to their full potential. I’ve never seen another animal quite like them.”

Jeb was still processing.

“I don’t suppose you’d be interested in a temp job as a guinea pig? You’re even more interesting than I’d thought before you shot me. I offer fair pay and a comprehensive health package.”

“No.”

“I suppose I’ll ask some other time, when you don’t have half a pound of C-4 in your butt waiting to go off.”

“Answer’ll still be no.” Jeb said.

“Ah, but your answer might not matter so much at that point, yes?” Vex gave him a keegan smile.

Note to self: make a permanent self-destruct button.

“Well,” Vex said, clapping his hands together with finality. “If that’s all you’re here to discuss, then Lien here will escort you outside, and we’ll deliver Ms. Thompson for the exchange in three hours.”

“One more thing.” Jeb’s Deal with Vresh nudged him into blurting out. “What are you gonna do with the nukes?”

“Oh, them. Nothing I’m comfortable discussing with an outsider. Why do you ask?”

“I made a Deal with Vresh to eliminate the threat of nuclear bombs originating from Nellis Air Force Base. It would be good if we could come to some kind of arrangement.”

The Sindio shrugged. “Sure, I’m not unreasonable. Four more W88’s, delivered to me before the end of a month, and you can have my two, to fulfill the technicality of your arrangement with the emperor’s hunting dog.” He stood to leave as Jeb was processing what that information revealed.

Or in other words, he’s not going to use them for anything until then. Jeb had no idea what would take a month to arrange. As far as Jeb knew, the bombs were ready to go. They even had makeshift external detonators so they didn’t have to be launched to prime them.

Either there’s some kind of event happening a month from now, he’s building something to synergize with the bombs, or it’s an arbitrary date. The one thing Jeb could be confident of, was that the sindio wouldn’t use them before that month was out, because it would be rather difficult to follow through on his side of the deal were the nukes spent.

I hope. If the wizard had a way of magically stamping out copies of the bombs, The world might be in a little bit of hot water.

It’s times like this I hope my ‘They can’t be totally crazy’ theory is right.

“I’ll make an effort to get some extra W-88’s,” Jeb said. In order to perfect a Mystical disarming technique. He and Eddie could take several apart and figure out the quickest, easiest way to render it inert without obvious outward changes.

“That reminds me,” the Sindio said, spinning on his heel at the exit, nearly running over the scaly midget trailing behind him.

“That ring of yours. The one you shot me with. Where did you get it and what would you want in return?” He glanced down at Jeb’s wooden foot. “I could grow you a new foot, if you like.” He pointed to his head. “I could take care of that backlash for you, too, if you like.”

“As much as I like the idea of getting my foot back,” Jeb said through his teeth. “I’m starting to believe my Appraiser might be worth a lot more than a foot and restful sleep.”

Jeb was fairly certain a normal Appraiser didn’t let its user directly interact with the Fate dimension, and by extension, The System. The domain of the gods.

The sindio’s brows twitched.

“…two new feet?”

Jeb scowled at him, and the keegan threw his hands up in surrender.

“I kid. I suppose I’ll have to do it the old-fashioned way and take it off your corpse when you inevitably commit suicide by throwing yourself at me.”

“Goodbye, Mr. Trapper,” Vex said, nodding once before his entourage followed him out of the room. The rifle-bearing keegan shot Jeb one last glare before he ducked out the door, leaving Jeb alone in the room with the fancily dressed melas butler.

“What’s his problem?” Jeb muttered to himself.

“He’s failed to kill you three times now, and takes it as a stain on his professional integrity,” the butler said, pushing in Jeb’s chair as he stood up. “This way.” He motioned toward the door.

“Oh!” Jeb slammed his hand into his palm. A few months back a keegan had tried to kill him a couple times. Unfortunately the bastard had been wearing some kind of hood over his face that wiped Jeb’s long-term memory of his facial features.

“That guy!” Jeb immediately began devoting his features to memory. “Next time I see him I’ll…do something.” Jeb said, shaking his fist, unwilling to commit to a course of action that might not fit the situation.

“I’m sure.” The melas butler said. “You mentioned the detonator being Myst-sensitive, correct? I’m going to ask you to follow my path exactly. It's practically a miracle you’re still breathing.”

He motioned to the door.

Jeb squared his shoulders and followed.

The butler led Jeb out of the room and rather than leading him back through the show room, he guided Jeb to the left, through a brightly lit hall that transitioned from plain concrete to marble.

They crossed through a door and suddenly, Jeb’s ears picked up the faint sounds of the street.

“Huh, that’s odd, we weren’t-“ Jeb glanced over his shoulder at the door they’d just stepped through. The butler smoothly reached up and grabbed Jeb’s head and wrenched it forward, his orange-red hands acting as blinders.

“It’s best you don’t look back.” He said politely. “Keep moving.”

“Um..okay,” Jeb muttered, continuing his march forward, going through another door and up a flight of stairs, leading up into the main hall of a flophouse. There was peeling paint and graffiti everywhere, matresses made of piles of cast-off clothes packed with hay.

Basically awful.

There were half a dozen doors on either side, and Jeb could hear the chatter of the pink men on either side, along with the occasional sound of power tools.

Interesting.

Lien guided Jeb to a rickety front door and held it open for him.

“You may wish to stand back if you don’t want to explode. Good afternoon,” he said, giving Jeb a nod before shutting the door in his face.

Between one blink and another, the scummy flophouse in front of him vanished, leaving nothing but an empty lot.

“Eddie, could you turn off the detonator? I feel like someone’s gonna sneeze and blow me up.”

“Oh that?” Eddie’s voice came through Jeb’s earpiece. “I disabled that remotely as soon as you were out of eyeshot. According to my readings, you would’ve tripped the detonator sixteen times. You took your thumb off the switch by accident when you were crawling through the first hole, and would’ve exploded about…two seconds later, when you killed the guardian, a minute later Myst levels fluctuated again when you entered the first room, and every room in between.”

“Oh,” Jeb felt his limbs go a little numb. “Thanks for undermining my plan I guess.”

“No problem,” Eddie said through the earbud. “The key point of the plan was that you believed you would explode if he tried something, and the wizard couldn’t disprove it, because he’s not tech-savvy enough yet.”

“Would I have exploded though?” Jeb asked.

“Oh yeah, I’ve been listening in on the whole conversation. I could’a put you out of your misery if it went sour.” Eddie said.

“Good to hear,” Jeb said, picking himself up with Myst and lifting above the city, orienting on the mountains with his arm outstretched like Superman. “Prepare the laxatives! I’ve got some explosive shits to take!”

“Roger, prepping the laxatives.” Eddie said into the mic before his voice clicked off.

***Emperor Pikaku, Uniter of the Continent, Ruler of Mestikos, level 327***

“I’m troubled, father.” Pikaku admitted.

“Cry me a river,” his father muttered, the flames of undeath flickering in his empty sockets as he considered his next move.

“One of my Enforcers stumbled across Xen.”

“Who?”

“Xen? Worst of the sindio, broke the line of Jestan?”

“Oh, him. Do you have any threes?”

“Go fish,” Pikaku said. “He goes by Vex now.”

“Unoriginal,” his father grunted.

“Anyway, one of my Enforcers stumbled onto him on an airforce base with nuclear weapons. My informant in Xen’s employ tells me the sindio has at least two of the bombs.”

“And? Is he planning on destroying Mestikos or some other major city? If not, better not to step on a sleeping veek. It’s not actually a drastic change in the monster’s destructive capability. Simply a change in method.”

“He plans on detonating them in the Fate dimension.”

His father’s jaw swung open.

“You mean…”

“To destroy The System, yes. That is what my information points to. I believe the sindio plans on using the nuclear blast to scour the landscape of the fifth dimension so thoroughly that The System will simply cease to exist within it. If that proves successful, he will replicate and deploy them on a global scale.”

“That’s…how on Pharos would he be able to do that without killing every living thing on the gods-damned planet?

Pikaku drew a three.

“…I don’t think he cares. Do you have any threes?”

“Go fish.”

“Give me the three, father.”

The skeletal Kitri growled and handed Pikaku the card in question.

“What are your options? Do you have a six?”

“Go fish.”

“Damn you, boy.”

“We have to assume that now that the sindio has gotten his hands on one bomb, he should be able to recreate them with relative ease. Even if we eliminate all the bombs in the world, he can likely make his own. If he continues to pursue that avenue, we’ve either got to commit to killing him or cross our talons and hope his plans don’t work.”

“Those are bad options. When Xen fails, he fails spectacularly. He also doesn’t take kindly to empires trying to kill him, either.”

“I’ve heard the stories.” Pikaku said, nodding.

“Any way to reframe the problem?”

“Not that I can see.”

“Hmm…any way you can summon him into a sealing chamber? Put the problem off for a few thousand years?”

“Not without some serious backlash from my Ability. The temporal forces might cause a cataclysm just to get him standing in front of me. And there’s a chance my ability could fail, or worse yet, drag me to him. And even if all that works, I’d have to pin him down personally and share the sealing chamber. I’d rather not starve to death so soon.”

“We’ll call that plan B. Where does that leave us?”

“Screwed.” Pikaku said with a soft honk.

“My son, let me let you in on a little secret.”

“Eh?”

“There’s always something threatening to destroy the empire, wipe out all life on pharos, or fling us out into the cold depths of space. And yet here we are. Deal with this problem, and you’ll soon find yourself with another steaming pile of world-ending shit in your lap. It’s the nature of the job. Delegate the problem and assume the world will keep spinning, because doing the opposite is meaningless.”

“That makes me feel better,” Pikaku said, nodding.

“Really?”

“Fuck no,” Pikaku said, his mind filled with a stormcloud of conflicting worries and doubts. He was facing impossible odds, and he needed a…someone…who regularly defied impossible odds. Pikaku’s eyes narrowed as a rough plan began fermenting in his mind. It was just as counter-intuitive and underhanded as the man who’d inspired it.

A clever workaround to the destruction of his empire, so to speak. And it involved Jebediah Trapper.

“Thank you father, our little talks always help me think.”

“So what’s your plan?”

“That’s a matter of national security, father.”

“You cheeky shit.”

When Pikaku finished with his father, he asked for three things: A scroll with a list of names containing a pair of young adults from every town larger than a thousand people, A bunker deep in the earth and warded against any form of interference, including the fifth dimensional variety, and an audience with Vresh.

The bunker was essentially a sealing chamber buried far enough to survive nuclear blasts, regardless of what dimension they took place in.

Two things about his Ability that Pikaku had noticed in the past, was that if he summoned someone, they arrived at his feet alive, and second: His ability exercised the least amount of energy in the temporal weave to arrange things so they resulted in his summon arriving in front of him, change a small decision, shifting a small rock. That sort of thing.

If Pikaku were sheltered from any form of cataclysm, he could survive anything the sindio could do to the planet. Individually, his people might not be as strong or as experienced as the ancient creature, but together, they could build something he couldn’t crack.

Once that was taken care of, Pikaku simply needed to be able to wait until the danger of Xen’s nuclear experimentation had passed, then Summon his representative sample of young citizens.

Being young and weak, the amount of energy it would take to Summon them would be minimal.

His future self Summoning these young men and women would feed Pikaku’s temporal Myst into the past – the present for Pikaku – and keep them alive, while delivering them to his audience.

If the easiest way to keep this representative sample of young men and women alive to be delivered to him, was to subtly disrupt the sindio’s attempts to harness the atom, then all the better for Pikaku.

As for the bomb shelter, he needed to be able to survive into the future to use his ability no matter what happened. He wouldn’t need to use it, he only needed to be able to use it.

Causality magic is weird, Pikaku thought, shaking his head. Sometimes he wasn’t sure if he was the master of his Ability, or if it simply dragged him around behind it through its sheer power, like an untamed tarruk on a rope.

And if the worst should come to pass, and the sindio succeeded in destroying the world, Pikaku’s Myst would offer an umbrella of protection to those select young men and women.

Pikaku sat on his throne and flexed his Myst.

“Vresh Tekalis.”

Vresh let out a squeak as she tripped through the entrance, her face not quite hitting the floor.

“You summoned me, Emperor?” she said, recovering quickly into a kneeling position as she brushed dust off her shirt.

“Yes. I’ve got a job for you and your charge.”

***Jeb***

Jeb was standing beside the rest of his team, trying to stay watchful for Vex, but he kept returning to the same thoughts, in a spiral of quiet contemplation.

So great-great-great grampa Trapper banged a fairy? Did great-great grampa come out of an egg?

Jeb glanced at Smartass sitting on his shoulder. The tiny creature gave him a grin and a thumb’s up.

Jeb shuddered, having a tough time getting the picture out of his head.

Wait a second. Has she grown again? Jeb thought, measuring Smartass with his finger.

The fairy put up with it stoically, giving him a sour look, but not protesting as his knuckle pressed against her cheek. She was about a knuckle past the size of his hand a month ago…it seemed like she’d gained another knuckle in size.

And one of those egg-laying ancestors was probably Mab, Jeb thought, ruminating while they waited for the sindio to deliver Casey.

Jeb didn’t know whether or not he should have pressed the creature to deliver her immediately, but he decided not to. General Meyers had managed to pull it off after all. Jeb had to believe that the man could be reasoned with, because the alternative was a no-win scenario.

As for Mab, Jeb didn’t know anything about the woman other than cultural osmosis. She was that evil bitch in the Sam Neil Merlin movie. It was most likely highly inaccurate, as Hollywood tends to be, but it provided a frame of reference.

If you filter out cultural slants on various aspect of the stories Jeb had absorbed through his life, he knew only a handful of things about the figure:

Mab was female, a fairy, told other fairies what to do, powerful, and had a bit of a reputation for having a mean streak.

And the gods were practically afraid of her. They might talk a good game, but Jeb knew emotional decision-making when he saw it.

That part I saw with my own eyes.

Jeb searched his mind, tapping into the wellspring of cultural osmosis using his superhuman Nerve, trying to figure out exactly what happened to ‘scions’ of fairy bloodlines.

It was about 50-50 really good, or really bad, all things considered. As far as Jeb knew, he could slant the odds in his favor by avoiding Mab as much as possible. If Jeb took what he knew about fairy behavior and extrapolated what a very powerful fairy who the gods were wary of might behave…

It might be best to give great-great-great-great-etc..gramma a pass.

By their very nature, an old fae would try to put you into their debt, constantly scheming. Like your typical loan shark crossed with Hannibal Lecter. Jeb was good at scheming… for a human. But he knew when to fold ‘em, and measuring himself against someone who was literally mythical could only end in sorrow.

Avoidance was the best course of action, Jeb decided, nodding to himself.

“Ooh, ooh, ooh, there they are!” Smartass said, tugging on Jeb’s earlobe and pointing.

Down the slope was a tight knot of people, marching up the winding path to where they stood. Jeb’s heart began hammering as he recognized the sullen teenager being prodded to walk in front of her captors, making her way slowly up the mountain.

Why do business on the top of a mountain? Less likely to have collateral damage in the city. That and Eddie was watching them through Legolas, ready to drop that bunker-buster on their heads if necessary.

Myst-enhanced heavy artillery was like a condom: Jeb would rather have one and not need it, than need it and not have one.