Last Command of the Witheld Arc 1: Rebirth

Griffin Tucker Vasilias, Great House Scion, Lvl 1

Mount Discovery, Province of Aragonia

Over the next three weeks, Griffin tentatively explored outside of his sumptuous rooms in the abandoned laboratory/residence he'd been teleported to. He was deathly afraid of the plasma cybercentipedes, but the monsters, while numerous, weren’t everywhere. Griffin had discovered that they liked to congregate in the darkest areas of the complex—they hated the light, though it didn’t seem to hurt them.

He had discovered that even though he couldn’t manage anything as complicated as a flashlight with his Adaptive Conjuration quite yet, he had no problem with making an oil lantern. He even created a mirrored reflector in the lamp and a pint of lamp oil in a plastic container. The lamp worked well, providing him with a dependable source of light that lasted for as long as he needed.

His first explorations were just short jaunts that lasted no more than half an hour to establish where the plasma cybercentipedes liked to congregate the most. He made sure not to antagonize the monsters and he practiced one of the stealth anima configurations that Kismet was trying to teach him. Either he was more talented with his anima than he’d been led to believe or the monstrous insects didn’t notice him, and Griffin was able to observe them and take notes on the Systablo he’d gotten from August Vasilias.

He'd looked in the Systablo to see if there was any mention of the facility he was trapped in. Maybe there’s maps or blueprints or records that’ll help me find the way out of here that doesn’t involve any giant cybernetic bug monsters, he thought. But the facility didn’t show up in the Systablo’s files anywhere. Kismet was able to use one of the programs on the Systablo to map his explorations and note down his observations while he did the actual exploring. It was an arrangement that worked out well: Kismet was a meticulous and thorough note-taker.

Today was the day he had decided he’d start exploring the rooms that the countless doorways in the labyrinth of halls contained. They’d mapped out all the hallways that weren’t completely infested with monsters and marked all the doors that weren’t locked. There were only a few that he could get to and none of the doors were close to his room. The closest was a three-hour hike at least, assuming that he could avoid monster attention the entire time.

“Y’know, you’d have made an awesome player at my D&D table,” Griffin muttered as he looked at the hologram being generated by the Systablo and painted directly on his eyeballs through his DEMI Port racial gift. “These notes are simply incredible.” He tapped his lip as he read through Kismet’s latest observations about the way the monsters congregated. “You think they’re gathering around tensa leakages in the walls?”

He was crouched at the end of a long hallway with a single door near him and then another one almost a hundred meters down at the other end of the hallway. He’d decided on this door because it was one of the only doors that were close to his saferoom that had a route that was clear of plasma cybercentipedes. Just about twenty-five or thirty meters away was a group of disgusting cybernetic monstrosities.

“That’s the most logical explanation,” Kismet said. She was dressed in black tactical gear—cargo pants and combat boots with a vest that had too many pockets—that copied what Griffin had created with Adaptive Conjuration for himself. “The maintenance and lighting enchantments are the most vulnerable and we can already see how they’re beginning to break down.”

Griffin nodded and looked at the door across the hall. “Do you think there’s anything…unsafe in the room across the hall?” He asked. He knew it was a stupid question as soon as it came out of his mouth.

Kismet simply looked at him with an arched eyebrow and Griffin blushed. Of course, there was a deadly monster in there. Or maybe it’d be a trap. Or a riddle. I hate riddles, Griffin thought. I really hope it’s not a riddle. He glanced over at the pile of plasma cybercentipedes on the wall just down the hall and swallowed nervously. I also hate plasma cybercentipedes, he thought with a shudder.

With one last glance over his shoulder at the monsters on the wall, Griffin crept across the hall with his lantern and tried the door. To his surprise, it opened soundlessly into a completely dark room. Griffin almost left right then: plasma cybercentipedes preferred the dark after all. But a quick scan with his lantern showed that the room was more or less empty.

He looked back over his shoulder at the plasma cybercentipedes. They hadn’t moved since the last time he’d looked, three seconds ago. He took a deep breath in and slipped into the dark room. Before he went any further, he used his Adaptive Conjuration to create a little rubber doorstop which he wedged under the door.

“Just a little insurance policy,” he said quietly when Kismet looked at him.

She nodded and floated past him into the room, “Let’s see what’s here.”

Griffin nodded and held the lantern high, peering into the darkness. They were in a large room with a high ceiling and dozens of desks that had once been arranged in neat rows but now most of them were scattered around as if tossed by a giant. Dust and debris lay everywhere. There was something in the middle of the room, but Griffin’s light was too dim for him to see it with any kind of detail. It looked like a big lump of darkness to him.

He made his way further into the room as quietly as he could, not wanting to disturb any sleeping guardians being careful not to trip on any loose bit of rock or whatever other stuff lay underfoot. The lantern revealed that this room, at least, hadn’t benefitted from the maintenance enchantments that had kept the rest of the facility in pristine condition. Mold and dust covered every surface and a thick, musty smell permeated the air.

The desks that remained standing had odd implements on them: delicate tools like the ones used by archeologists or jewelers. He noticed something on the ground and picked up a Systablo just like the one he had. He brushed away a layer of caked-on dust, coughing in the resulting cloud. The Systablo wasn’t cracked or anything, but when he tried to activate it with his tensa, it did nothing. He tossed the broken thing back onto the floor and proceeded deeper into the room, pausing to poke through the odd pile of random junk.

“What happened in here?” He asked quietly. “It looks like a bomb went off. Look at this place! It’s a damn mess.”

The desks seemed to be all alike, and enough broken Systablos were lying around amidst the debris that Griffin thought they’d been pretty much ubiquitous. There were also the delicate metal tools he found everywhere, glittering in his lantern light, as if the people who’d worked here had been skilled technicians used to working with extreme precision.

Kismet, meanwhile, was flying around the room, making her own investigations. He had gotten engrossed in trying to figure out what a device that looked like an exploded microscope with different colored gemstones stuck to it did when Kismet interrupted him.

“Griffin, I think you should see this,” she said. She sounded serious.

Griffin put the mysterious device down and followed Kismet as she led the way to the center of the room where the big dark lump of shadow was. The lump turned out to be two and a half or maybe even three meters tall and wider than it was tall. It was made out of a shiny black substance that looked like obsidian to Griffin, though it had an odd iridescent sheen to it that he’d never seen on a piece of obsidian before. The obsidian wasn’t shaped or carved but was a huge lump of misshapen rock with odd twists and whorls on its surface. There was an opening of some kind in it that was a little bigger than half a meter in diameter but Griffin had no idea what it was for. To him, the thing looked like an enormous, shiny rock.

“What the hell is that?” Griffin asked, walking around it with his lantern. “And why was it so important to the people who were in here?”

Kismet didn’t answer right away but flew around the lump of obsidian very slowly. Eventually, she said, “It’s covered in enchantments. There are so many microrunes on and in this device that the tensa required to activate them would be in the teraspark range.”

Griffin whistled. That was three orders of magnitude more tensa than he had now. “What could you do with that much power?” He asked nervously.

Kismet completed her slow circuit of the thing and shook her head as she came to rest on Griffin’s shoulder. “I’m seeing a lot of complex interplays of the different layers of enchantments,” Kismet said. “It would take me about five weeks to decipher what the creators intended for this device if we did nothing but study it for that long.”

“Well, what if I just…y’know…yoink it for myself?” Griffin asked, grinning.

He walked up to it and touched it, willing it to disappear into his Unlimited Inventory. The obsidian device didn’t disappear and Griffin grimaced. “It really would have been too much to ask I suppose,” he muttered, sighing in resignation. “Well, I guess it’ll have to remain a mystery. Oh hang on, what’s in this hole?”

His lantern’s light had caught on something that didn’t look like obsidian when he shone it into the half-meter opening. Whatever was inside it looked oddly organic, like a melting lump of wax with grapefruit-sized translucent balls stuck into it. The misshapen thing was about a meter and a half tall and was a disgusting, greenish-brown hue. Griffin wrinkled his nose: it stank like death and rot.

His lantern’s light caught on something shiny stuck into one of the translucent balls—or maybe it was something growing out of it? He brought the lantern close to the opening and frowned, putting his shirt over his nose as the smell became intolerable. The thing sticking out of the ball was a flat crystalline shard with incredibly sharp edges. It looked familiar…

“Those are ethershards!” Kismet exclaimed, pointing. There was more than one of the shards sticking out of the disgusting translucent balls. “Get one and see if you can identify it with the System. I think most of them are drained already, but you never know.”

Kismet thought for a moment, then added, “Also, even though all of those eggs look to be dead, you should still keep an eye out for a Mother. She’ll be around here somewhere. And check each egg for ethershards that are still good, though I don’t hold much hope.”

“Who put the shards into the eggs?” He asked uneasily. “It looks like they were deliberately placed.”

“Boss monsters—like the plasma cybercentipede Mother—are driven by complicated instincts. All monsters are attracted to tensa sources and ethershards are enormous sources,” she explained. “Regular monsters will horde shards. They can’t ingest or absorb them, but they desperately want them. Boss monsters, on the other hand, will use them in different ways. Some will increase their Classification like Reborn increase their Rank, but driven by instinct and bloodlust. Others—like the plasma cybercentipede Mother it seems—will try to make more Boss monsters by feeding the young the ethershards.”

Griffin shone his light into the obsidian device, checking all the eggs he could see for ethershards and finding several. “But I thought normal monsters couldn’t absorb them,” he said as he looked.

“Normally, no. But monsters aren’t actually born. These eggs aren’t the result of reproduction and Mothers aren’t truly mothers,” Kismet said.

“Glad we got that cleared up,” Griffin quipped. “Mothers aren’t truly mothers? What?”

“Monsters are tensa accretions. Boss monsters can attempt to empower any other regular monster, assuming it has the ethershards to do so. Your box of ethershards from August Vasilias must have set the local monster ecology into turbo mode. Any monsters that absorb the shards from the Mother will become Boss monsters in their own right, though weaker than the one that created them.”

“Minibosses,” Griffin muttered, chuckling to himself.

“That’s not an inaccurate summary,” Kismet said. “It appears that plasma cybercentipede Mothers empower them when they’re in the egg. Now check and see if any still have potency.”

He found eight shard-like protrusions in total, but they had all been drained of their potency already. Curious, he tried to identify one with a System query as Kismet had been admonishing him to do. Meanwhile, she flew around to the back of the egg casing within the obsidian device.

Enhanced System Access: Item Identification Query

Item: Drained Legendary ethershard

Value: 10 credits

Description: Drained ethershards no longer hold any tensa and their utility has been lost. The structure of the ethershard is weakened and the crystal becomes fragile. Drained ethershards are typically used as decoration.

Even their worthless trash is valued at ten credits, Griffin thought. I wonder how much a credit can buy. More importantly…are there any 1 credit cheeseburgers down in Heldon? Despite the environment, his stomach rumbled. Okay, making a perfect cheeseburger is my next Adaptive Conjuration project, no doubt about it.

Kismet interrupted his thoughts with a surprised shout, “Griffin! There’s one that hasn’t been drained!”

“Great! Hang on, how the hell am I supposed to get it?” Griffin said.

Kismet’s hologram appeared next to him and she pointed at a spot near the ground, “It’s not that far. If you push in and reach around to the back, you’ll be able to get it.”

Griffin grimaced and looked dubiously over at Kismet, who smiled back at him encouragingly. His eyes bounced over to the enormous stack of dead cybercentipede eggs and he shuddered involuntarily.

“I’m going to have to press myself…into the dead eggs?” He asked slowly.

Kismet nodded, “And you better hurry before whatever Mother laid these comes and checks on them.”

There’s no fucking way I’m gonna bathe in dead insect egg goo, he thought. Hang on…New Adaptive Conjuration project: Project Hazmat suit.

He focused inward, doing his best not to close his eyes—Kismet had been on his case about that—and accessed his Adaptive Conjuration graft, feeding tensa into it as he formed as clear a picture as he could of one of the big rubber yellow suits he’d seen the terrified doctors wear in The Stand and Outbreak. He even remembered to include the pressurized air tank and tubing.

As power flowed out of him, he could tell already that this one was going to be a good one. It was a strong image and mental association and he’d found that his power worked best when his intentions were engaged like that. It also helped that he really really did not want to wash dead bug guts out of his hair, so he certainly had the motivation. He saw the item fuzz into existence like it was being teleported from the Enterprise and smiled. It looked just as he’d imagined it.

It took another half an hour to put the damn thing on. He didn’t realize just how accurately he’d gotten it since he didn’t know how to work the air supply or how to make sure the suit was properly sealed. His clear plastic facemask started fogging up immediately and he couldn’t get it clear until he figured out the air supply. Kismet didn’t say anything during the whole process, but he could tell she was mystified by his actions.

Once he finally got the suit on and the air supply turned on, he crouched down in front of the opening in the obsidian device. He hesitated for a moment before he looked over at Kismet and asked, “Which side was it?”

She rolled her eyes and pointed to the right. “It’s about ten centimeters up from the ground and at a 30-degree angle, pointed towards you. Be careful or you’ll slice your hand open on the shard, even through that glove.”

Griffin took a deep breath and nodded, “I’m going in,” he said.

He moved forward slowly, inching his hand around the base of the cluster of eggs. He was trying to move slowly, but his balance shifted and he slipped on some goo, face-planting directly into the eggs. The sound alone nearly made him puke and he’d never been more glad of his preparation with his air supply since he couldn’t even imagine the stench.

Brownish-green slime was smeared all over his faceplate and it took him several flailing moments to pull himself out of the squelching and ruined egg cluster. The suit saved him from most of the sensation, but he could feel through even the thick rubber of the suit that the slime was cold. With his balance regained, Griffin reached once more for the ethershard, this time finding it quickly.

He managed not to slice himself open with it as he pulled it carefully out of the egg. Griffin was practically hugging the egg cluster, his whole face and chest pressed into it for the reach. He knew he was completely covered in the greenish-brown slime and was doing his best not to think about that. He slowly backed away from the cluster holding onto the ethershard with as firm a grip as he could without cutting himself. Finally, he managed to stand up and examine his find after wiping the goo off his faceplate with a conjured towel.

Legendary Ethershard of Data

Description: This [Legendary] quality Ethershard contains an infusion of [Data]-aspected tensa.

Note: As a [Legendary] ethershard, this shard contains 10 gigasparks of tensa.

Use: Reborn may use ethershards to unlock grafts, increase Attributes, upgrade grafts, and empower grafts, spells, or other effects requiring tensa.