Fresh From the Mad Science Kitchen.

Averting Epsilon Chapter 6: Something's Not Right

2015-08-01T11:02:00.000-04:00

Helma groaned, slowly sitting up, shaking his head, “I think you need to work on your landings.”

He looked around and suddenly realized he was alone. He was in the middle of a city that looked bombed out an abandoned. He got to his feet and checked to make sure the stitches on his wing hadn't come loose.

After making sure they were all still in place, he started looking around. The silence was eerie. Not the physical silence; he could still hear animals in the distance, but he couldn't pick up a single sentient thought for at least a mile in all directions. The emptiness of the city wasn't so concerning as the fact that included his traveling companions.

He began wandering around, sure to keep within monitoring distance of the spot he arrived at. He'd seen areas ransacked in gang wars before, but never anything to this degree. At least in gang wars, grave diggers were allowed to clean the streets between engagements, but the number of charred and chewed bones in the streets told him either they were shot at too, or simply weren't left alive to clean up the dead.

He found his way into a convenience store and found a sight that explained the situation in full. Two skeletons, the cashier and a customer, still halfway through a transaction, moldy money still clutched in the skeletal hands. Nobody cleaned up the bodies because everyone died at the same time, if they had even half a second's warning, they'd have dropped that money.

He pawed through some newspapers for clues, thankful they were written in english, and the headline that greeted him was unsettling,

CS Daily Letter | January 7th | 2019

WE'RE AT WAR!

UN peace talks break down

Queen Fairweather declares marshal law in controlled territories; no quarter to be given to combatants. Confederate States of America military mobilizing to secure own borders. The President called for Russian aid, but was denied, the CCCP Prime Minister claiming they wished to remain neutral and continue to honor the original treaty between Earth and the Pimmerian state despite sacrificing portions of their own land in the process. Alliance between CSA and CCCP considered broken in light of failure to assist us in the coming battles.

Japan to deploy their navy in full force to secure the Pacific islands, Admiral Hito speaks on the matter: (translated into english for your convenience) “We had high hopes for peace between our worlds, and we still have hopes peace will reign for our children when this passes. Until then, we will honor the Wolven concords, and fight them with the same honor they have shown...” (continued on page 3)

His heart sank slightly. 2019 wasn't the right year, and the CCCP was supposed to have been disbanded decades before, and he had no idea what the Confederate States of America even were. Whatever was going on here, it was completely wrong.

He felt a sudden twinge of danger and ducked out of reflex, seconds later, gunfire ripped through the air, raining pieces of drywall and splintered wood down around him. Laughter echoed outside and a voice called to him,

“Come on out, xeno! We just wanna play with ya a little!”

He hadn't picked up any thoughts at all, this person managed to sneak right up on him. He reached for his sidearm, finding it annoyingly absent, then slinked across the floor towards the outside wall, peeking through a bullet hole, seeing four men in a technical, a mounted machinegun pointing towards the building.

He focused on them and was able to begin picking up their thoughts, but it was faint. For whatever reason, his abilities were severely dampened here. One of them noticed him and he scrambled deeper into the building seconds before machinegun fire started filling the air again.

The maniacal laughter was more irritating than it was intimidating, and as he carefully moved across the second floor of the building, he began contemplating how he was going to get out of this situation. Car doors slammed down below and he heard rifles being readied; they were coming in after him.

He slowly made his way towards the window and gathered his thoughts. His telepathy was crippled, but he figured he could still generate one good pain surge, at least strong enough to let him wrestle a weapon from one of them.

As he prepared to jump, he suddenly felt dizzy, the room began spinning around him and he felt like he was going to puke, then a hand reached for him, emerging from thin air. Before he had a chance to react, it grabbed him and pulled him through into blackness.

He landed violently on a rather soft surface, blinking as he realized his muzzle was resting between a pair of breasts. He hastily got back to his feet to find a much less disturbing environment, a laboratory similar to Michael and Marcus's, complete with a machine similar to theirs, but much more deliberately designed to house a gateway for people to pass through.

Veronica got back up, resting upon serpent coils still, but substantially smaller than before. She only had four wings now, and similarly fewer arms. She simply looked like an oversized naga, and not the embodiment of Quetzalcoatl. As she dusted herself off she apologized, “Sorry about missing the target there. I forgot dragons have a slower metabolism.”

He raised an eye ridge at her and she continued, “The potion, it didn't have time to fully kick in on you, so I had a hard time adjusting where you landed.”

A voice came from nearby, Marcus's voice, “Potion?”

Helma looked towards him to find Tanya clinging to him already, her eyes no longer glowing, and her markings invisible. Even the slits on her back were hidden. He scoffed at the sight of the whitewolf, “I thought you were dead.”

“That's the same thing the vixen said when she got here, now would you mind telling me who you are and where the hell you all arrived from? This gate is only supposed to link to Gamma.”

Helma looked towards Veronica, “About that, just where the hell was that place I was in?”

She winced slightly, then sighed and looked away, “A place you weren't supposed to see.”

“I saw a newspaper there, it said 2019, that's four years from now, and that place was a wasteland, somebody bombed it to oblivion and back, what aren't you telling me?”

Marcus blinked, “2019? that's...twelve years from now...not four.”

Tanya's ears perked up, “You sent us back in time?”

Veronica rolled her eyes, “What part of fourth dimension was so hard to understand?”

Marcus pried Tanya away before commenting, “Okay okay, wait. You're telling me you came backwards on an 8 year leap? How'd you generate the energy for that?”

Veronica went past him, picking up the backpack and shouldering it, “The less you know, the better. Suffice to say we're only stopping here as a slingshot to our actual destination.”

Tanya looked back and forth between them, her and Akaila both confused, “so...we went back in time, but we went to a world that's not ours, where not only is Marcus still alive, but he's already perfected inter-dimensional transit, and isn't completely freaked out by a group of time-travelers arriving on his doorstep?”

Marcus smirked, “Welcome to infinite universe theory.”

“So then where are we now?”

A loud thump came from nearby, Jagra unloading an armful of food onto a table, “Wherever we are, they've got some of the best pork I've ever tasted.”

Marcus's ears went back, “That's not pork. That's homo-sapien, and it's supposed to be for lab use only.”

Jagra shrugged and took a bite of it, “Whatever those are, they taste great.”

Marcus just blinked in disbelief, “Well that's just horrifying.”

Tanya smirked, “Welcome to hill dwarf theory. Homo sapien is Human, Jagra, you're eating human meat.”

He paused, “I thought that sounded familiar.”

After several moments, he took another bite, “Well it's cooked now, no sense letting it go to waste.”

Marcus shuddered, “So...how soon can you lot be out of here and on the next leg of your trip?”

Veronica shrugged, “No clue. I can't create a portal of my own without risking damage to this reality, so it would be whenever one can be created with local energy sources.”

He nodded, “Right, so you picked this place because you expected me to help you.”

“Not so much expected as hoped. We need to get to Beta Prime, and we need to arrive at a date before August of 2015.”

“Beta Prime? How the fuck did you get here from Beta Prime?”

Jagra chuckled, “You tell us, it's your parallel self who sent us.”

Veronica interjected, “Actually, he sent them to a void between dimensions and it was a combination of luck and a distress beacon that saved them. Can you get us there or not?”

He sighed and sat down at a desk, rubbing his forehead, ears back, “It's not that easy. There's a reason we don't go to the Beta series. Well hell, if you came from there, you should know why. The channels between Beta and Gamma are way too unstable. You might have been better off going to Alpha.”

“But Alpha's a wasteland.”

Helma's eyes darted over to them, “So I was in Alpha then?”

Marcus looked over towards him, “Possibly, describe it.”

“Bombed out city, newspapers dated to 2019 and declaring war, and four humans were shooting at me and calling me 'xeno'”

“Yeah, that's Alpha. They probably mistook you for an alien.”

Helma's eyes narrowed, “Aliens now.”

Tanya mused again, “Welcome to infinite universe theory~”

He sighed, then looked around until he found a door labeled “exit.”

He went towards it and looked back towards the group, “I think I need a few moments to process all this. I'm not going to find killer robots on the other side of this door, am I?”

Marcus shook his head, “No, of course not.”

As the door was half-open, Marcus suffixed his statement, “Iris is the nicest android I've ever met.”

Helma growled under his breath and hastily exited the room. Tanya went to follow, but a snake tail coiled on one of her ankles, Veronica stopping her, “Let him go. He's not used to not being in control of things.”

Helma made his way through several corridors, following exit signs, coming outside into the light just in time to cross paths with a vixen...a very familiar vixen.

“Sapien?”

She looked up with a smile “Oh good, my letter did arrive first. So, what do you think of my qualifications?”

“Oh, I, Uhm...I don't work here...j-just head on in and talk to anyone in a lab coat.”

She bowed to him and continued inside, leaving him staring in disbelief, she was eight years younger than the Sapien he'd seen just a day ago, barely even an adult, but she was still a dead ringer, fur patterns, voice, even the tint of her eyes was exact.

He found himself wondering if he could run into himself here, and his thoughts piqued only seconds later; running into himself was exactly what he needed to do. This timeline was a little different, sure, but he knew exactly what city he'd be in.

He spread his wings to take to the sky only to wince in pain as his stitches were tugged on. In his excitement he forgot he was still grounded. Thankfully the parallel Sapien had arrived by car. He was sure with what she was about to see, a missing vehicle would be the last thing on her mind. With a couple touched wires under the dashboard, he was on his way.

[Poem] Incendiary Accolades

2015-07-23T09:35:00.001-04:00

Once upon a time I laughed
Once upon a time I cheered
Once upon a time I crashed
now it's Once upon a time I fear

In another time I was perfect
I did what was right all day and night
the might of the light was bright, it felt right
to smite the blight in glorious fight

Accolades achieved were abundant
failure a thought most repugnant
if a friend was on fire then I'd douse them
if a friend was alone then I'd house them
if a friend became upset, assuriedly I'd help them

But time has a way
a way to make fools of all
and time has a way
of surprising you with the fall

nobody saw and nobody cared
nobody noticed when the fire flared
the weight of the accolades was a clever foe
it attacked in a way you'd never know

being adorned then admonished
being all knowing then astonished
it's a torque on the mind
a weapon best left unharnessed

being expected to be perfect, covered in brass
layers of medals so thick they never heard the crash
my suit stood alone, though inside I burned
the face they loved held, but the mind behind it churned

naught but a shell, melting metal of medals and accolades
a circle of badges, once wreathed in fire
becomes a new forged shackle
transformed in the pyre

They leaned on me still, thought I held up the world
as my incendiary accolades slowly unfurled
They still see me standing now
never knowing I crashed

Deep in my new prison, the fire slowly dies
Deep in my sorrow, my once great strength defied
I wish they could hear me, now that I finally learned to cry
I wish they knew the tenderness inside

They'll never know
They can't ever see
Because no light can shine
Through the incendiary accolades around me

Years will pass, it will become once upon a time
With nothing to hold them, my medals won't shine
one by one, I know they will fall
one by one, the shell will seem to crawl

people will wonder, will stop and ask
people will question why I dropped all my brass
They'll finally see that something is wrong
but it's been too late for far too long

Yes, it's once upon a time I fear
because it's now I need them, I need them near
because when today becomes once upon a time
they'll crack open the shell and find nothing in here.

Averting Epsilon Chapter 5: Out Of The Loop

2015-07-16T16:59:00.000-04:00

(sorry for the delay this week, I've been going through hell and couldn't get around to uploading)

Akaila and Jagra searched the facility from top to bottom, but found no trace of the mysterious fourth man, and found that Michael was affected by the same memetic effect as Marcus. Tulpa hadn't been working there long enough to bother learning people's names or identities in the first place, and as a result they were able to explain the situation to him, coupled with a brief demonstration of its effects on Michael to convince him it wasn't a trick or some complex prank to play on the intern.

They decided to remain vigilant, but beyond that they couldn't do anything about it. Two days passed uneventfully while they stayed at the research facility, waiting on the insurance claim to be processed. Helma never appeared like he said he would, but given his abilities he could have come and went without being noticed.

At the dawn of the third day, Michael arrived with exciting news. Marcus's findings turned out to be accurate, and he'd prepared an experiment to put them to use. Everyone was asked to gather in the main laboratory, around a quite sizable array of magnets and crystals. The majority of the facility's power grid was entirely dumped into the machine, and by time they entered it was already humming with energy.

Marcus sat proudly at the control panel, “There's a whole load of technobabble I could wow you with, but I'll save time and spare ego and put it in lamens, I'm going to attempt to do with a machine what Akaila did with her mind. We're going to attempt to push a batch of radioactive molecules into a parallel universe, then pull it back out again. By observing the radiation from the isotope, we'll be able to tell not only when it makes the jump, but how much time passes, in case it's a non-euclidean plane. In order to get accurate readings, we're using a very volatile isotope, so get behind the radiation barrier before we begin.”

Jagra, Sapien, and Akaila got behind a foot-thick sheet of glass and Tulpa entered wearing a radiation suit, holding a small lead wafer on a pair of long tongs, a tiny pellet in the middle, glowing orange hot from its own radiation. He slowly moved it to the magnets and a large ring began spinning among them, mist wafting off of it as it was drenched in liquid nitrogen, turning it superconductive and lifting the pellet into the air.

He made a hasty retreat to the radiation barrier and Marcus continued the startup sequence. Soon the ring was a blur and the pellet was spinning rapidly in the center. Neutron reflectors moved into position and the isotope began heating up further, soon becoming a white-hot glowing blob. The heat of the globule and the cold of the superconductor caused a steadily building air current, growing stronger and stronger and starting to distort the air around it.

The current reached critical mass and a bank of capacitors began charging, ready to fire the pulse to send it through. As Marcus began the countdown, however, there was a sound of gunfire from the hallway outside. Marcus called over the whirring of the machinery, “I can't shut it down at this point, Tulpa, find out what that wa-”

He was cut off before he could finish by Helma stumbling through the doorway, one wing torn to shreds by claw marks, and a bullet hole in the opposing shoulder, “You've all got to flee, now!”

Tulpa pulled a shotgun from under a table, aiming it at him, “And why's that?”

“There was a power shift in the syndicate, they're killing off the Edor family and all of our accounts, that includes you!”

A half-feral jackal ran into the room, lunging at him, but was shot out of the air by a volley of buckshot, then reduced to a mangled, quivering mess by three more rounds from Tulpa. Right behind it was a man in full-body armor. Tulpa fired at him, but the buckshot just buried itself in Kevlar and ricocheted off steel.

The man brought up an assault rifle and fired back, but Tulpa jumped out of the way, hiding behind the radiation shield. The volley of bullets hit the capacitor bank and they began violently shorting out, sending electricity arching across the entire room. Marcus's entire control booth was wreathed in unpenned energy and only his screams gave evidence he was still there. As the capacitors ran dry, the lightning subsided, and a charred corpse fell onto the control panel, dials and levers being spun and moved randomly, causing the machine to completely destabilize.

The assassin brought his aim to Helma, but started struggling to keep his gun on target. A strong wind started pulling towards the magnetic array, and multiple metal objects across the room started lifting from their mounts, flying through the air and slamming into it, being reduced to a torus of churning shrapnel.

Tulpa's shotgun and the assassin's rifle both flew into the grinder, being reduced to nothing but fragments in seconds. Tulpa braced himself against the wind, but the assassin's own armor was beginning to drag him across the floor.

Both Akaila and Helma were crying out in agony, their amplifiers being drawn towards it, but their mere ounces of titanium and mythril weren't producing nearly as much pull as the fifty pounds of steel on the man's body armor.

Without warning, the mysterious fourth member of the research team arrived, running through the door and ramming into him, knocking him off his feet before grabbing onto something himself. As the assassin was sent flying through the air, the fourth man pulled a necklace from under his clothes, a glowing pendant on it. He flipped a switch and it began emitting an ear-splitting beeping noise.

Blood and bones were sent churning in every direction from the mangled assassin hitting the vortex like a blender with the lid off, and the sheer intake of mass expanded the torus until it touched the globule in the middle. In an instant, it was grounded out against the magnets and crystals, exploding and sending shrapnel in all directions.

The grinder of debris was gone, but the magnets remained, and now there was a very distinct void hovering in the middle of them, a black disk, sucking air in with all the potency of space itself. The pull of wind was getting stronger and stronger, and eventually the very objects they were mooring themselves to were broken loose, sending several of them spinning into the abyss.

Sapien hung on for dear life, but she was inevitably drawn through. She felt herself being pulled apart from all directions. The air was sucked out of her lungs, she'd have passed out if not for the searing pain of her blood boiling to keep her alert, though through her distorted and darkening vision, the things she saw made no sense at all, she could see flavors and smell space, taste thoughts and touch sounds, every sensation was shorted out and without meaning.

Through the encroaching void, she could barely make out points of light in the distance, a starry night sky. It occurred to her she was looking at space, somehow suspended in nothingness. Her last waning vision was a large creature slithering among the lights before everything went black.

As her senses started coming weakly back, she heard faint, distant voices. She struggled to make them out, but then suddenly heard Akaila's, clear and distinct, “Hello, is anyone there?”

Sapien tried to reply, but her throat wouldn't respond, she couldn't even draw breath, so she replied in thought and hoped Akaila was able to hear it, “I'm here, I'm alive, I think.”

“What the hell happened?”
“I don't know. I can't move...I can't feel anything either.”
“Neither can I.”
“Are we dead?”
“I...don't know.”
“I think we are. If this is being dead, then being dead sucks.”
“Wait, listen, the voices, I think I can make them out.”

They both quieted their thoughts and strained to listen, and the two voices became clearer, one male, one female.

“...Really, you're fine. Quit worrying about it.”
“But I fired the beacon at max power, I know it was panic, but a committee won't see it that way.”
“You're right, they won't, because it wasn't panic. The situation warranted it.”
“The situation warranted a class four distress beacon? How?”
“That gateway was unstable and expanding fast, if your beacon hadn't called my attention to it, that entire reality would have unraveled, and more agents than you would have been lost to the void.”
“Speaking of lost people, what about the four that came through with me?”
“The dwarf and the dragon endured the void with survivable injuries, but I had to use some drastic measures to save the wolf and the fox.”
“What kind of drastic?”
“Look for yourself, they've been listening to us for the last few seconds.”

Sapien mustered a strong thought, “You can see us? How? Where are we? What's going on?”

The female of the two voices came closer and spoke softly, “Don't strain yourself. You were exposed to the void without any shielding. It's a miracle I was able to keep so much as your souls intact, let alone any remains of your bodies.”

“Remains?”

Akaila spoke up, “So we are dead then.”

The voice chuckled slightly, “Not quite, but you came very close. There was less than half of each of you that could be saved by time I got there. I was forced to merge your souls together to keep them from each breaking apart. I'll give you your senses back so you can see, but I need you both to promise me you won't flail about. The body I gave you will be durable enough to even handle the void when it's ready, but right now it's fragile, the glue hasn't dried yet, so to speak.”

They both calmed themselves and responded as one, “Okay, do it.”

Proper sound returned first, a crackling fireplace, then smell, burning hickory and incense, then touch, lips upon their own, and finally vision. A shapely human face was directly before Sapien's eyes, save for a pair of horns on the brow, and the oddity of her own eyes, swirling violet pools of energy.

She found herself gazing directly into them hypnotically, unable to look away. The swirls seemed to be getting larger and closer, stronger, she started to feel like she'd actually be sucked into them until the woman blinked and the trance was broken.

Akaila saw all of these images as well, but they felt somehow distant, like images in a dream, not seen with her own eyes, but no sooner than her focus shifted to perceiving the room around her, she suddenly became incredibly aware of every single sound and noise. She could hear them, yes, but she could also feel them. Every sound brought with it a vibration that might as well have been touch on her own skin.

Skin. Not fur, skin. She moved to try examining her own body and found herself to be incredibly flexible. Her arms and legs seemed to not have any joints in them anymore, and the bulk of her body felt like it was nestled inside a very close, very warm bed.

Sapien shivered as she felt cold air on her back, and Akaila was startled by her bed suddenly vibrating. The woman only chuckled again, “As I'm sure you're noticing, one of you is now living inside the other. I had to improvise to keep you both alive, but I think I did a decent enough job, what do you think of it?”

She moved away and a body length mirror was brought before them, but Sapien's eyes didn't go to the mirror, they went to the woman. Her face was human enough, but the horns curved back around her hairline in a decidedly demonic way, and everything below the neck was anything but human. A dozen arms hung at her sides, and a dozen breasts adorned her chest. On her back, fuzed to the arms themselves, were several complex wings, still massive even in their folded state. Where her hips would be, her body instead flared out to twice as wide, becoming a massive snake's body, periodically adorned with massive purple gemstones, pulsing in a heartbeat. Looking at them was equally as calming and hypnotic as her eyes.

Eventually, Sapien pulled her gaze away from the snake maiden to see her own reflection. She was still a vixen, for the most part, but she was far taller and more robust. Her petite vulpine traits now had a tint of wolven bulk to them, and her bright orange fur was now charcoal and black, and on several portions of her body were glowing red patterns, pulsing in heartbeat just like the snake woman's, even her eyes had a glow to them, but a piercing, almost glaring glow, even though it was her own gaze she was looking at, it made her blood run cold staring at the two slit-pupiled crimson orbs.

She saw something slithering behind her and caught herself halfway through a reflexive jump, remembering the caution not to strain the body quite yet. As she looked at the objects more carefully, she realized they were part of her, though moving of their own accord. Four violet tentacles, adorned with three-jawed mouths on the ends.

Akaila's words came to her faintly, sounding just as shocked as Sapien was, “That's me...that's why I feel so flexible...that's why I can't see right...”

The woman responded, a little saddened, “Yes, it is you...I...I didn't have a lot of material to work with.”

Sapien cautiously approached her, the caution born more out of the fact she was a full foot taller now than out of any actual fear, and embraced the woman, holding her tightly, “You don't need to apologize for saving our lives.”

Akaila added in, “I'll just have to get used to it, I guess. I seem to have echolocation now, so that could be handy.”

She smiled and hugged back with all twenty-plus arms, “I'm glad. You can call me Veronica, by the way.”

Sapien took a look around and noted where they were. It was a very nicely decorated room with stone architecture, clearly ancient but well-maintained. There were windows, but no light came through them, there was only a saturated blackness outside, not even starlight came through, and simply looking at the inky blackness was somehow giving her motion sickness. Her focus went from the windows to the furnishings and she saw many bookshelves and framed works of art, and a large fireplace. Sitting there was the mysterious fourth man.

It was still his face, but his skin was now red and there were a pair of bat's wings behind his back. She narrowed her now glowing eyes at him and she could smell the twinge of panic her new gaze sent shivering through him as she spoke, “So he worked for you then?”

She looked back and forth between them and responded, “Keely is one of several agents the Abyss put in place to monitor the fractured planes. You should be thanking him, if he hadn't fired that distress beacon, you and everyone from that plane of reality would be scattered across a dozen dimensions and destroyed irrecoverably.”

“You mean the whole universe, destroyed?”

“Yes. Normally the fabric of spacetime is thick enough to handle a little tear hear and there, but that gateway opened on a spot that was already weak and cross-braced against other realms, and it was like pulling a seam out of a dress, the entire thing was starting to unravel. I put a quick patch on it, then grabbed everyone I could that had been pulled through.”
“So we're not in our own reality right now?”
“No, not in the slightest, you're inside me.”

She blinked and Veronica smirked, “I'm a goddess. You're talking to my corporeal body, but my true form is all around you, and this castle is suspended inside it, I am my own self-contained plane of reality, so I have a place I can go to when I need privacy.”

Sapien looked down at her feet for a moment, then glanced at one of Akaila's tentacle tips which was looking back at her, then sighed, “Is there any way to send us back to our own world?”

“At the moment? no. That reality is being held together with glue, string, and wishful thinking right now. It's torn right at the fourth dimension. If I were to dump you back in from this side, I'd have to go forward or back by at least a century to avoid breaking it completely, and even then there'd be significant risk. The only way you could possibly get back there would be to go to a neighboring realm and come in from that side. And since all of my power is on this side, you'd be reliant on a local power-source. To put it bluntly, your reality can't handle me. If I so much as touch it outside of a mortal body, it'll be completely annihilated.”

Sapien sighed and collapsed to her knees. Akaila coiled a tentacle on one arm, attempting to comfort her, and spoke mentally to them both, “Even in this demonic body, we need to get back. The syndicate was going through a restructuring, if somebody doesn't step in, a lot of innocents will get caught in the crossfire.”

Sapien whimpered, “Assuming the island's even still there...they're probably all dead, my friends, my parents, Marcus...all dead.”

Veronica wrapped her coils around Sapien, lifting her from the floor and carrying her into her many arms, wiping away the tears at the edges of her eyes, “It's still there. When I stopped the tear, it was no more than a few feet across. Anyone who wasn't in the immediate area should still be alive and well.”

Akaila commented, “That's her parents at least, but we know Marcus is dead, it was his corpse falling on the control panel that caused the tear in the first place.”

She grimaced at that, “At the very least, if he died before the gateway opened, his soul likely escaped in one piece.”

“I don't think that's very comforting.”
“I didn't say it was.”

Veronica lifted Sapien's muzzle, kissing her on the nose, then gently stroked her mane back, “There's a fire in you, I sensed it while I was piecing you two back together. Keep that fire alive and you'll be fine.”

She set her back down on the floor, then slithered over to a bookshelf, grabbing some scrolls from it, “Keely, watch the castle while I'm gone.”

“Gone? Where?”
“I'm going with Tanya to help her find her way home.”

Sapien looked up, one ear back, confused, “Tanya?”

“That's your true name, isn't it?”

She blinked, “How did you-”

“I'm a goddess, remember? You didn't desire that name just out of a passing fancy, it's your true name. Knowing it actually helped me in patching you up.”

Akaila commented in, “What about mine?”

“Fair-Weather. Ah, here it is.”

She pulled a massive book from the back of the shelf, hidden by the many scrolls in front of it, carrying it to a table which already had Tanya's brass book on it. It was easily as large as a pizza box and three times as thick and bound in odd, darkly-tinted metals, with the leather of the cover suspiciously similar to human faces.

She laid them beside each other and began reading through one of the scrolls. After several minutes she tapped a finger on one passage.

“I can take a more human-friendly form, and I can disguise you two as an ordinary grey fox, but hiding this will take something a little more potent.”

“Like?”

She picked up the massive book and set it on top of the brass book, the two fusing together. Leather bindings appeared and shrouded the dark alloys, then the faces, and finally the runic markings that covered all of the remaining surface. The pair shrank and reformed until they took on the appearance of an ordinary leather backpack.

She picked it up and handed it to Tanya, “Here, you'll be carrying my grimoire.”

“Grimoire, like, history of a bloodline grimoire?”

“Yes. And if you don't want to spontaneously explode, only open the second pouch for storing things. Opening any of the others will break the illusion.”

A cork popped and Veronica turned around to see Keely already pouring himself a glass of wine. She narrowed her eyes at him disdainfully, “That bottle is 300 years old.”

“And I saw well over a thousand just like it in the cellar.”
“It's from a planet that doesn't exist anymore.”
“And you haven't read the second half of that passage yet.”

She picked up the scroll and skimmed through it, “Helghen berries...how the hell...”

“They used the same spell to put me in her dimension.”

He grinned and handed her the glass, “I can keep the rest of the bottle, right?”

“You're the reason I hate working with Incubi.”
“And yet you're willing to trust me to keep up your castle while you're gone.”
“Only because I know you know I'd erase you from existence if you broke anything.”

She took the glass of wine and put it on the table along with several sprigs of dried herbs. With some minor preparation, she had three glasses prepared of a very strongly scented and thick liquid. She handed one to Tanya and took the other three each in one hand before slithering towards the door to the hallway, “Go ahead and drink it now.”

“What is it?”
“A stabilizer. It will make it easier for me to make sure we all arrive in the same location and at the same time. It might not surprise you to know that aiming in the fourth dimension is a lot harder than aiming in the third. To say you have to lead your target is an understatement.”
“Do we both have to drink it or just me?”
“Both, split it evenly with Akaila.”

Tanya drank half of the thick liquid, nearly gagging on the overlapping mint flavors, then held it out for Akaila, who spent more time figuring out how to drink with a tentacle than actually consuming it. By time the glass was empty, they were in a trophy room, where Helma and Jagra were waiting.

Tanya took a quick look around the room as Veronica was handing the potions to them and explaining their purpose. There were suits of armor made for species she'd never conceived, weapons who's use was alien, to say nothing of their names, and entire galleries dedicated to full indexes of ammunition variants. It wasn't so much a trophy room as a museum of the last millennium of warfare.

Her attention finally went back to the others as they approached. Helma's wounds were patched, but his wing still looked unsuitable for flight, and Jagra appeared fine except for bruises on random spots over his entire body.

She took note of them and asked, “How was it we were ripped to pieces, but you two are unscratched?”

Jagra chugged down the liquid, apparently unaffected by the potent flavor, “Feeling like every piece of your body is being ripped apart, the dimmest lights like knives pressed to your eye sockets, air ripped from your lungs and blood on your lips as everything burns and freezes at once? That just describes a monday hangover for me.”

Veronica chuckled to herself at that, “Apart from moderate bends syndrome, Jagra wasn't in too bad of a shape, Helma was a bit harder to save.”

Helma set his empty glass down, “As it turns out, having open wounds in the vacuum of space is like leaving a valve open in a water line. Regardless, I'm ready to get back to my own reality and get a little revenge on the Laguna family any time you are.”

He turned to Veronica and held a claw out, shaking her hand, “If we don't land in the same place, I want to thank you now for saving me. Once this affair is dealt with, the Edor family will owe you a huge debt. Speaking of debts...”

He turned to Tanya, Akaila, and Jagra, “It seems we have a common enemy, if you stick with me until this is over, I'll consider your own debt paid in full.”

Veronica began focusing, four of her hands pressed together, the rest in a large circle around them, light beginning to distort around her. As she was preparing the portal to send them back into the physical world, Tanya took one last look around and a thought flickered across Akaila's mind,

“Shit! Where's Tulpa!?”

Veronica glanced towards her, “Tulpa?”

“A vulpren, he was in the room with us when the portal opened, a human, Michael too.”

“I only saw you three when I arrived. The portal's ready, everyone exhale, and don't try breathing until you feel air around you again.”

She parted her four central hands and everything went black and silent around them.

Averting Epsilon Chapter 4: Multidi-what now?

2015-07-06T13:41:00.000-04:00

Jagra looked over a rack of equipment curiously, “The hound at the mining camp said electrical gear resonates on the crystals, but I see a lot of electric motors on these digging supplies, how do you prevent interference?”

Marcus looked up from a terminal and responded, “Farraday cages embedded into the housings, we duct it all into a cell on the hazmat suits that stores the static for safe discharge later.”
“That strikes me as technology a mining company would value greatly, why do they not use it?”
“The cells are made using silver and they're only good for two or three trips before needing to be scrapped and rebuilt. It's not worth the expense to use it for mining.”

Akaila glanced over at them while sitting at a table. There was a coin on the table in front of her, balanced on one side. She was practicing her telekinesis by attempting to keep it slowly spinning, but her lack of experience showed every time it shot several feet across the table, sometimes falling to the floor and forcing her to retrieve it. After one such trip, she asked, “So what exactly do you guys do here, besides collecting data all day?”

“We study the multidimensional manifestations of the psionic, temporal, and ethereal anomalies which proliferate the vicinity of the seven superior magicka majoris formations, with the end-goal of manipulating and potentially nullifying their detrimental effects while multiplying, magnifying, or otherwise amplifying their beneficial factors.”

She stared blankly, “You lost me at multidimensional.”

Sapien stifled a laugh, “They try to figure out what makes magic tick, so they can control it. You could have just read his mind to figure it out, you know.”

“It doesn't work like that. If my mind can't readily grasp a concept, it comes across as equally confusing gibberish. I peeked at what he was thinking when he said it, and trying to pull that from his mind was like being shoved snout-first into a trigonometry book.”

He just grinned at that and Jagra spoke for him, “Smart enough to stump a telepath, I must say that's a first for me.”

Marcus went back to typing on his terminal and after typing in a few more numbers, leaned back with a slight yip, ears forward.

Akaila looked over at him, “Something interesting?”

“I just finished crunching that month's worth of survey data Sapien collected. First off, I'm going to assume whatever buried the needles on every single one of our scanners earlier today originated on your ship.”

She whimpered, looking down at the coin, remembering the pain, actually thinking about the moment before she lost consciousness, hearing the thoughts of every single person on the planet, knowing absolute pain, pleasure, hunger, energy, exhaustion, and a dozen emotions so complex they lack a title, and the sheer, overwhelming, indescribable sensation of absolute godly omnipotence before her mind overloaded and couldn't contain it.

“Hey! Hey! Akaila!”

She blinked and looked up, seeing Marcus leaning over her with Jagra also looking down...and a ceiling fan in front of her, “How did I get on the floor?”

“I mentioned that energy spike and you went glassy eyed for a good three minutes, you don't remember that?”

She shook her head, slowly sitting up, her head spinning, then she noticed several overturned items on a nearby shelf, her chair on its side, and the coin she'd been practicing with folded neatly in half, “I get the feeling that's not all that happened.”

“Hell no it's not, when we noticed something was up, Sapien tried to shake you out of it, you screamed like a banshee and fell to the floor, damn near broke everything in the room when you did it too, just what the fuck was that pulse you sent out?”

“I honestly don't kn-wait, where's Sapien?”

He grimaced and pointed towards the corner, where she was sitting pressed against the walls, ears back, hugging her tail and gently petting it, clearly traumatized. She glanced over at them, and nervously spoke, “I, I'll be okay, it's just...I saw it, it was second-hand, but I saw it, god, no wonder you blacked out, no mind should be able to handle that. It's too...it's just...that can't be right, my mind must have filled in the blanks, censored it, you know? Replaced the stuff I couldn't comprehend with something I could.”

Marcus looked back and forth between them, then at Jagra, “One of them explodes when we mention it, and the other is shell-shocked, would you mind telling me what the ever loving fuck happened up there on that ship?”

“It was mythril that syndicate rat was smuggling, a good three crates worth, and not an ounce of it shielded or grounded out, one of the crates busted when we went to throw it overboard, Akaila was standing in the middle when they stopped sliding across the deck.”

He groaned, collapsing into a chair and burying his muzzle between his hands, “Yeah, that would do it. It's a miracle she's not dead, and anyone standing nearby for that matter. And I'm not even exaggerating, an overexposure to mythril is supposed to be fatal to a psycher, so what, she screamed and let out a pulse, like she did just now?”

“Aye, but a good ten times stronger, we had to hit the deck to avoid being hit by shrapnel, and the storm reached right up and pulled us in right after, if I didn't know better, I'd say the clouds took on the shape of a hand just to grab at us.”

“You probably wouldn't be too far off. I think what happened is her brainwaves got amplified so much she was able to see between planes, it's exactly what we've been trying to do here, but we're smart enough to let a computer handle the number crunching, and to keep all energy sources behind a shitload of shielding.”

Sapien glanced up at him before going back to nervously stroking her tail, “You mentioned survey data?”

“Yeah, yeah, the survey data, well Akaila plugging herself into the fabric of spacetime inadvertently gave us the final piece we needed to do something practical with it. That pulse was like a massive psionic sonar ping, and an order of magnitude more powerful than anything we've been able to make using machines. Since your ship was sitting at the epicenter, the sensors got perfect resolution when that ping came back. We now have a snapshot of the entire anomalous region, frozen at one instance. It's like a decryption key, I lined up each energy field reading to the exact second that range peaked, and all those random numbers started to come together into meaningful sums. To put it bluntly, she hacked God's computer and stole a copy of the map to the universe off it. I'll need to give Tulpa and Michael a chance to run some equations first, but I think we could prove multiverse theory with this.”

Akaila blinked a couple times, “And the other guy?”

“Who?”
“The fourth guy who works here.”
“Fourth?”

Jagra shot him a look, “There were three of you that greeted us at the door, then Tulpa was inside, that makes four, there's a fourth member of your team, is there not?”

He rubbed his head, wincing slightly, “Yeah, now that I think about it...but I can't for the life of me put a name to the face...Oh, if you guys are hungry, there's a fully stocked pantry here, just down-”

“Fourth man.”
“Huh? Oh, yeah, just thinking about that is making me nervous, Michael is supposed to run all new hires past me...oh, hires! Akaila, you're going to need to fill out some forms, I almost forgot all abou-”

She growled and slapped him as hard as she could, then before he had a chance to react, grabbed his head with both hands, staring him in the eyes and focusing on him directly, exploiting the shock of the unexpected actions to look deep into his mind. He started whimpering and shaking slightly from the mental intrusion before she let go.

She sighed, “He's using memetic cloaking. People see him, but he's not seen as important, and thoughts about him get redirected.”

Jagra asked, “So then why isn't it affecting us?”

“Because we haven't been exposed to it directly, and he's not present in the room right now. I don't know anyone who could pull off a cloaking job like that though.”

Marcus tilted his head, “What kind of cloaking job? Who?”

“Yeah, he's not gonna be any help here, it would take a couple hours of hypnosis to fix that.”

Sapien looked up at them, “Anybody slipping a cloaked person into a research team can't be up to anything good.”

“No, they can't. And I'd bet money they'll want the numbers Marcus just came up with.”

Marcus grinned, leaning back in his chair, “Damn straight, the academy is gonna flip when they hear about this.”

“I'm not going to keep explaining the situation every time his memory blanks.”

Sapien got to her feet, still a little shaky, “I can stay here and keep Marcus and the computer safe, lets face it, I'm fried after that pulse hit me, a psycher could play me like a musical instrument right now.”

Akaila nodded and the two of them headed towards the door. Marcus got up and spoke, “oh, hey, before you guys go, I found something amazing in the numbers Sapien collected.”

“You might want to make it fast, I think it cuts deeper into his memory each time his focus is pulled towards the topic.”

Marcus looked towards her, “What cuts deeper?”

“Please hurry.”
“No, seriously, what cuts deeper?”

Averting Epsilon Chapter 3: A Plot Emerges

2015-06-29T15:05:00.000-04:00

Kessler looked over the tools on the shelves skeptically, “Haven't you people ever heard of electricity?”

The mining office manager just glared at him, “Haven't you ever heard of resonance? Electrical mining equipment is no good here. Just like with the storm around the island, it interferes with the crystal deposits too. Even the phone network has to be grounded out and insulated.”

Jagra smirked, hefting a drill as long as he was tall, “Ah be easy on the crocodile, he knows as much about mining as I do flyin, it's his family pride that put him here.”

“Ah, another one of those types, eh?”

The aging dingo leaned back in his chair with a wide grin, “I'll give you three to one standing odds he's dead by the end of the month.”

Sapien and Akaila both rushed in, Sapien calling out, “Fifty eagles that he lives.”

Akaila ran to Kessler and Jagra, “We need to move, now!”

Jagra furled his brow, “The little brat fingered us to his boss to save his own hide, didn't he?”

“That's about the size of it.”

Kessler sighed and shook his head, grabbing a pickax and tossing a fistful of coins to the dingo, “You can head off, I'm staying.”

Jagra looked at him in confusion, “These are no regular hoods you're dealing with, they're organized criminals! They don't play around.”

Sapien and the manager glanced at each other, then back to the others,

“Is it too late to change my bet?”
“All sales final.”
“Sonofabitch.”

Kessler shouldered the pickax and responded, “I've been running from one thing or another all my damned life, and this is the last place on this planet left to run to. If they want to take me out, then so be it, I'll make them work for it.”

Sapien growled and pulled money from her bag, handing it over to the dingo, “If you make it five to one he's gone by the end of the week you might be able to squeeze more out of people.”

“I just might. And whoever said it's bad luck to bet against a fox?”

She went to the front door, gesturing for the others to follow, “If he's staying there's nothing to be done. I know a group of scientists who could give us shelter while we work on our next move.”

Jagra put the drill back on the shelf with a sigh, “I'll be coming back for you, don't go ta rustin before we get to rend the earth together.”

As they headed out, Sapien called to the manager, holding up a keychain, “Oh, Kyle, I'm borrowing your truck.”

He checked and found his keys missing from his pocket. He ran to chase her, but tripped on his own shoelaces. He stared at the perfect knot in disbelief, “How the fuck?”

Kessler smirked at him, “I guess maybe it is bad luck after all.”

Jagra and Sapien climbed into one of the mining company trucks, with Akaila getting in the back. They took off quickly, and were relieved to see nobody giving chase.

Akaila called over the wind, “You do know we just committed grand theft, right?”

Sapien glanced towards her, “Your nose is bleeding. And no we didn't. Kyle's a good friend of mine, I just like fucking with him because he's got this chip on his shoulder that dingoes are better than vulprens. He calls me a drunken Irish, I call him a redneck Aussie, then we each pull a prank on each other, it's become something of a game.”

Akaila wiped her muzzle, finding the blood, “That explains the headache. Speaking of Irish, Sapien is an odd name, isn't that Latin?”

Jagra commented back, “Aye, Latin for wisdom.”

“He's right. My parents noticed I was smarter than other kits my age, so when it came time for names, being catholic, they picked a Latin one, wisdom. I wanted Tanya, but nooo, no Russian names they said. The oil war's been over twenty three years, but dad still expects Russian troops to pop out of the bushes and start shooting at him again.”

Akaila slipped the mythril ingot she'd been carrying with her back into Sapien's bag, giving a sigh of relief as her headache began fading, “So these scientists we're going to, do they ever do work with psychers? I might want t-”

She was cut off mid sentence by a loud crash in the distance, followed by echoing alarms. They looked back to see a column of smoke rising from the mining camp. Sapien looked at it in the rear view mirror with a sigh, “Well there goes fifty bucks.”

Jagra came back in from leaning out the window, pushing his windblown beard back down, “We'll be next if we don't come up with a plan.”

“I've already got one. I wasn't going to say anything yet, but the scientists might be a little pissed when we get there.”

“And why would that be?”

“That ship was indeed a prototype. I lied on the insurance forms though. The most valuable part survived the wreck, my backpack, take a closer look at it.”

Jagra picked it up and studied it, looking over the clasps and hatches before finding a way to open it, “by the gods, you built this thing out of a brass book!”

“Camouflage so I could sneak it out if a competing company came after the ship. The entire hull was one big antenna, that book's been collecting survey data of the Bering storm on every trip I made. The ship was insured for three million Eagles in case I crashed.”

“So that purge system that dumped half the ship into the ocean?”

“We were dumping the sensor array. Honestly I could have cut the balloons and sailed us in that last couple knots, but I had orders to destroy all equipment and pull the data recorder if anything compromised the mission. I wrote the wreck up as a total loss on the insurance forms, though, so they don't know yet that I was able to save the data. That was partly to reduce the chance of a competing company trying to steal it from me while I'm moving it, and partly to squeeze some overhead out of the insurance claim. I'm hoping I'll be able to convince them to give me the value of the book out of the claim, which we can then use to pay off the syndicate, and hopefully get them off our backs.”

Akaila nodded in reassurance, “So you're going to ransom the black box to them? That's the closest thing to a solid plan I've heard so far, sounds good to me.”

Jagra was slightly less enthused, “Were my life not on the line, I wouldn't be willing to go along with you on such a criminal venture.”

“And if mine weren't, I wouldn't be willing to execute it. There's the facility up ahead.”

A complex of several buildings loomed up in front of them, most looked like prefabs that were hastily assembled into place, but a few half-built structures looked designed for a more long-term assignment. The most sizable and heavily built of them was a massive dome, appearing to be an observatory shroud, but it was hanging open and the device inside was no telescope; in fact it looked more like a high-energy sensor array, and it was pointed at the horizon, scanning left and right occasionally.

As they crested the last hill between them and the facility, several dots emerged from the buildings in the distance. As they got closer, it was revealed to be three people; two humans and one whitewolf. The whitewolf and one of the humans were wearing typical button-up shirts and jeans, but the other was wearing a lab coat and holding a pair of binoculars. After looking through them towards the incoming visitors, his expression furled and he said something to the other two, which made them both change in expression as well.

Sapien grabbed her bag as she exited the truck and was sure to hold it up in a visible place before making her way to them. Jagra followed closely behind, but Akaila was having trouble, one eye continually squinting and twitching, and completely unable to un-fold her right ear. She couldn't see or sense anything causing it, but her body was reacting as if she was looking straight at a bright light any time she tried to look towards the buildings in front of them.

One of the men took the bag from Sapien and quickly examined it, “What the hell? I just got off the phone with the insurance company, they said you reported a total loss.”

“The ship is a total loss. I managed to ditch the sensor array where nobody will ever find it, and the rest hit the beach hard enough there's nothing to salvage.”
“I meant that you reported the brass book as lost too.”
“Yeah, actually, there's a problem with that...”

one of the other two quickly grabbed it and began looking over it, “Dammit, what did you break?”

“Not that kind of problem, a--”

She stopped mid-sentence, noticing Akaila's difficulties, “...a syndicate kind of problem, Akaila, are you alright?”

She whimpered, nodding, “Yeah, there's just something hammering me right now, it's actually starting to hurt.”

“You think it might be the syndicate trying to track us?”

The man in the lab coat looked over to her, looking at her tiara, “Are you a psycher?”

“Yeah.”
“It's the scanner.” He gestured towards the massive device in the observatory dome, “It creates a lot of psionic interference while it's running, we should head inside.”

They all headed indoors, and as soon as the heavy metal door sealed behind them, she finally had a respite, and not just a normal one, the thousands of whispering voices she constantly heard suddenly fell silent. The only voices he could still hear belonged to those present, and were much quieter than normal.

He chuckled at the look of relief on her face, “First time standing in a shielded building?”

She blinked and looked at him before he continued, “This entire facility is shielded from interference and grounded out. Electrical, psionic, tectonic. You name it, there's a dampener in place that cancels it out.”

She looked directly at him, her voice suddenly steeled, “You can cancel out psyche fields? Is it something passive, like an alloy or composite, or do you have to create an active counter-field?”

He grinned wide, “Sapien, I should hire you to find more test subjects in the future.”

Sapien glanced at him, then at Akaila, “I don't know if that would be the right term for it, her motivation is a so-called 'cure' for her abilities.”

“Is that so?”

He rubbed his chin, “You know, we've been needing the help of a good telekineticist around here, you ever tried your hand at it?”

Akaila shrugged, “I guess I could try it. I've always done everything I could to lessen things, it's maddening hearing whispers and sensing people's intents all the time, like a TV you can't turn off that keeps changing the channel all the time.”

He grinned and nodded along, still holding his chin, “It's an alloy.”

“Hmm?”
“We came up with an alloy that doesn't insulate psionic energy, it absorbs it, kinda like solar panels on sunlight, and it likewise makes electricity as a byproduct. Our last psycher quit unexpectedly, now, I'm not promising anything, since the alloy's expensive as all hell to make, but if you're willing to replace him, I can put a crowbar into the wallets of the bosses to try to get you a helmet made from it. It's not a cure, so to spe-”
“I'll take it.”
“That was fast.”
“Actually it just got boring waiting for you to finish saying what you already thought.”
“Oh we're gonna get along just great.”
“Yeah, and as cute as it is, please stop spamming me with images of rabbits.”
“Sorry, it's a bit of a reflex.”

Sapien smirked, “Just be glad it's not porn.”

“Oh I get plenty of that from you. Your mind is one of the most perverted I've ever seen, it's a miracle you haven't flirted with Jagra yet.”

She blushed brightly, glancing at Jagra and hastily replying, “heh, yeah, funny, but I don't think anyone would uhm...believe that.”

The man in the lab coat nearly fell over laughing, “All of the busted.”

The wolven man had been tinkering with the backpack during the entire conversation and finally looked up to enter the conversation, “The recorder is fully intact and functional, aside from some of Sapien's trinkets in here. Now would you mind explaining what you meant earlier when you mentioned a 'syndicate problem?”

A voice came from the front door, “She meant she owes us quite the sizable amount of money.”

They all looked to see a drakkani standing in the doorway, taking off a fedora to reveal a very ornate headband, woven directly into his horns. Instantly, Akaila's nosebleed came back, along with her headache. Her mind raced, and some images in her memory flickered, like TV static, before adding him to the background, including when they were at the skydock and Tristan was whisked away.

She spoke telepathically, too shocked to use actual words, “That's the psycher that slipped away with Tristan, he's been blocking our perceptions and stalking us this whole time.”

He nodded appreciatively, “It's a testament to my abilities, and yours too I should say. Usually when I cloak up, nearby psychs get splitting migranes and their defenses flare up, but you, you're barely even hurting from it.”

Jagra pulled a dagger from his belt, pointing it at the half-dragon, “Get to the point already, if you're here to kill us, quit wasting time on words.”

He walked around them, seating himself at a table and pulling a flask from a pouch on his hip, taking a sip from it, “You can relax, Akaila's right, I've been shadowing you, and from that I now know the full story and just how full of shit Tristan was when he tried to say this was all due to an angry captain's wrath. It's worth noting he directly asked I kill Sapien before giving her a chance to speak. Quite the vindictive prick, no?”

Sapien lowered Jagra's hand, “Then you also know the plan I have to compensate the syndicate for their loss.”

He nodded to her, “And that's the exact reason why your truck didn't crash into a ditch on the way here.”

The man in the lab coat coughed indignantly, and spoke with a heavy sarcasm, “Hello, how are you? Oh me? I'm fine, the name's Michael, by the way, and may I say it's quite delightful that you not only knocked before entering, but announced your name at the door too, so respectful and dignified of you!”

He just grinned back at him before taking another sip of alcohol, “Human wit never fails to entertain. Helma. Helma Edor. My orders are to balance the books, there's no prices on anyone's heads specifically, so you can tell your intern it's safe to put the gun away.”

He craned his neck, looking around a corner behind him and grinning wider, “Hi there.”

A vulpren walked into the room, holding a combat shotgun at his hip, keeping it aimed at the assassin, “I'll be the judge of that, and don't try any of that will pusher mind trick shit, or I'll specifically aim for your genitals.”

He laughed, putting the flask away and standing up, “Sapien, I'm sure you can handle explaining the situation to them, I merely revealed myself to make your case more convincing. The shipment was valued at two hundred and fifty thousand Eagles, but moreover it was meant for building a sizable amplifier to give us full telepathic coverage over the island and ensure a continued foothold. You can compensate us financially, or you can find an alternative means to give the same results such a machine would have allowed, I'll leave it up to you. We'll contact you again in twenty four hours to hear your decision.”

With that he gave a wink and Akaila yelped loudly. The instant the attentions of the people in the room were pulled towards her, he was gone. The intern fired a shot where he'd been standing and hit the wall behind, then he aimed at the front door and fired, the buckshot ricocheting off the door and thankfully not hitting anyone.

Michael jumped towards him and pulled the shotgun out of his hands, “Goddammit, Tulpa! I ought to bitchslap the fur right off that crooked face of yours!”

He whimpered, pulling away, ears back, “I panicked.”

There was a muffled laugh from the exterior door right before it closed and Akaila gave a sigh of relief, “He's gone.”

Jagra raised an eyebrow, “Can you be sure of that?”

“I started tracking him as soon as he exposed himself, he's outside now, I lost him when the door closed.”

The wolf sighed, carrying the backpack to a rack of gear and attaching some cables to it, then spoke over his shoulder, “I'm gonna go out on a limb here and stitch the story together from what I've heard. This Tristan guy is a syndicate lackey, and when the ship went down, it took some expensive syndicate gear with it to the bottom that he was carrying, and in order to not have her fur used as a carpet in some mob boss's sitting room, Sapien arranged some insurance fraud with the data recorder, and was hoping that we'd play along to keep our best field researcher from becoming a throw rug.”

“That's about the size of it, yeah.”

Jagra commented in as well, “And her head's not the only one on the line, mine and the wolf's are too. There was a dragon with us, but they got to him before that assassin heard our side of the story.”

Michael groaned, taking off his glasses and pinching the bridge of his nose, “Marcus, what do you think?”

The wolf scoffed, “Me? I think it's a clusterfuck. However we don't have any choices at this point except continuing with the fraud.”

“And why's that?”

Marcus turned around, leaning against the equipment rack, a sadistic grin on his muzzle, “Because, we're all witnesses now, and I know you're too much of a pussy to fight back against syndicate gunmen, and too much of a prude to share any research data with them either.”
“Anybody but you, I'd have fired you on the spot for that language.”
“All the more reason to get my fill. On the insurance forms, it's just listed as a data recorder, right?”
“Of course, it would defeat the purpose of the backpack camouflage to list details.”
“Then we'll justify the successful data recovery as an emergency transmission. That huge spike we got on our long-range scanners earlier happened just before the ship went down, we could write that up as a beacon firing an encrypted signal to us, and other monitoring stations on the island would confirm our story. The only angle that doesn't cover is Sapien suddenly losing her backpack after arriving, an observant investigator would notice such a decorative and expensive looking backpack going missing. Since we don't need it anymore, I say we retire the recorder and let her keep it to maintain the cover story. Corporate would see this as the same unavoidable loss as the insurance company does, and our budget would be adjusted to buy a new one, unless there's an angle I'm missing here.”
“Yeah, witnesses, Tulpa's only been here what, a week? I don't trust him not to talk if we tried such a plan.”

Tulpa growled, bearing his teeth slightly, “You could at least pretend like you care if I'm in the room, and besides, there's another vulpren's life on the line here, if I talked, they'd try to kill me before I could testify in court, then I'd be a head on a mantel right above that throw rug.”

Sapien shrugged, “Tulpa's right, we're all implicated in this, but we should make sure it doesn't go beyond this room. Anybody else we tell about this situation is potentially in just as much danger as we are if it falls apart.”

Michael groaned, his own human imitation of a growl, “Fine. I don't like a single bit of it, but...you did get it here in one piece, despite unforseen complications...so I guess...you...”

Marcus rolled his eyes, “Good god, man, just spit it out already!”

Michael glared at him for a second before looking back at Sapien, “You did good, you completed your assignment with satisfactory performance, but if you want hazard pay out of this, you can take a flying leap.”

She grinned, responding coyly with her head and one ear to the side, “But I already took a flying leap today.”

“Then take another!”

Michael stormed out of the room with Tulpa and the third man following, and Jagra scoffed, “I hope not everyone hereabouts is as soft-spined as that runt, or trigger happy as his assistant. If they are, I think I'd be safer back at the mine with Kessler.”

Averting Epsilon Chapter 2: A Minor Debt

2015-06-22T18:17:00.000-04:00

Tristan gathered his strength and started rummaging through the debris in a steadily growing panic. He managed to find three mythril ingots still embedded in the helm where Akaila's blast launched them. He collapsed to the ground, holding them, sobbing.

“No, no, no, I can't, no, no, this isn't...no.”

Sapien sighed and rolled her eyes, “It's just money. I lost a ship I built with my own paws, you don't see me crying over it.”

“You just don't get it, do you!?”

He threw one of the ingots at her in a rage before collapsing again, “Those belonged to the syndicate! When they find out...I'm dead...I'm already dead, and not just me, no!”

He got to his feet and ran towards her, “You're dead too! You let it happen! All of you! They'll hang our corpses up in a town square as an example!”

Sapien just smirked and poked his nose, “Boop!” and walked away, ears and tail both up, humming a tune to herself.

All four of them were left staring in confusion until Akaila probed at Sapien's thoughts, then she started laughing uncontrollably before following behind. She took up step next to her and said quiet enough for the others not to hear, “I won't tell them if you won't.”

“Aw, you spoiled the surprise! I'll have to wear a tinfoil hat next time.”

“You know those actually amplify brainwave transmission, not block it, right?”

“Exactly! I'd wear a foil hat and think about nothing but porn as loud as I can.”

“...You never take anything seriously, do you?”

“You've clearly never spent time around Vulprens.”

Jagra, Kessler, and Tristain caught up after gathering their things and they continued walking along the beach towards Nikolskoye, the town they were originally headed to.

The silence was growing steadily more uncomfortable until Kessler broke it, “So what are we going to do? I've dealt with those syndicate types before, they don't fuck around.”

Sapien glanced up at him with a chuckle, “Trust me, it'll be fine. So since we're apparently all waist-deep in this, we might as well get to know each other. You already know I'm a courier and Tristain's a smuggler, so what brings a dwarf, a drakkani, and a wolf to this corner of hell?”

Jagra spoke first, “Mining! What else would call a dwarf? I've mined in everything from limestone to obsidian, and I've never had an ore that bested me. I came here to try my pickaxe against Radeite crystal, and maybe gather some coin and women in the process!”

Kessler commented next, “While I don't share the midget's enthusiasm, I also came here for profit. Everyone else in my bloodline made it big in one industry or another by time they hit my age. Psionic ores are the only way I could profit fast enough to make up for lost time, and if I die trying, I still uphold the family honor, because I risked my life to make my fortune.”

Sapien glanced over at Akaila, “And you?”

“Well...”

She whimpered lightly under her breath, ears back, and rubbed at the amplifier on her head.

“I came here for a cure.”

All four of the others stopped mid-step. She sighed and continued with more strength in her voice, “I came here to find a cure for psyching. Lets just leave it at that.”

She continued walking and Sapien hastily caught up, pressing for more, “Okay now you should know how those words are gonna hit a vixen. What do you mean cure? Since when is telepathy a disease?”

She snarled and started walking faster, but Sapien kept up with her, “I'm not gonna just drop this, I've never heard of a psycher referring to their abilities like they're a disea-”

She stopped and whipped around, her teeth snapping shut inches from Sapien's snout before growling at her, “You saw me on that deck, you saw the pain, what, you think that's the first time that's happened!? I never asked for this, I never wanted any of it, these abilities were forced on me!”

She turned and continued walking, leaving Sapien standing there as the others caught up again. Kessler smirked as they all started walking and commented to her, “If I were you, I'd drop the topic before she eats you.”

“Oh please, like anybody would eat me.”

“I would.”

She glared up at him and he suffixed the comment, “I do love my junk food, after all.”

There was another period of uncomfortable silence before they spotted a group of small airships, painted bright orange, leaving the town and heading towards the wreck in the distance. Tristan fired a flare and one changed course, making a landing nearby them.

A human man climbed down, heading over to them, and Sapien greeted him, “I take it you're the rescue team?”

“If you're from that ship that just went down, yeah, we are.”

“I'm the captain. It was just the five of us on board. The cause of the crash was our fuel running out, so you don't need to worry about explosion risks.”

“Were you hauling anything hazardous?”

“There was unshielded mythril on board, but as soon as I discovered it, I had all of it we could find tossed overboard, we might have missed a few ingots though.”

“Unshielded mythril? Did you find out what dumb smuggler was sneaking it onboard your ship?”

Sapien glanced at Tristan, “He got confrontational, we had to throw him overboard too.”

The man noticed her glance and looked at Tristan, “Right...we can give you transport into town. If the ship or cargo was insured, I can drop you at the skydock so you can file the claim.”

“That's exactly where I need to go.”

She smirked and looked towards Tristan, “I had the ship insured for a sizable amount, it's an irreplaceable prototype, after all.”

He furled his brow at her, but remained silent even as they boarded the rescue vessel. It wasn't until they were stepping from the ship onto the skydock that he spoke, “You knew the whole damn time and you were going to leave me thinking I'm good as dead.”

“I'm a vulpren, it's kinda what we do. I am going to need you to keep quiet for now though.”

“And why's that?”

“If the insurance company hears I'm handing over part of the settlement to a third party right away, they'll believe it was insurance fraud.”

“Fair point.”

After several silent moments, he gave a sly remark, “So how much is my silence worth to you?”

Jagra reached up and slapped him hard on the back of the head, “If they think it's fraud, she never sees a penny, and neither does your strawboss, so we're all dead. That includes you, ya greedy bastard.”

They arrived at the shipping office to find several people already waiting. Two vulprens, one a fox and one a vixen, both advanced in years greeted Sapien with a worried hug and dozen questions, but as they all stood in the corridors outside the insurance office, Akaila's eyes kept twitching, and she couldn't seem to keep one ear from folding back. She kept trying to figure out the cause, and turned to ask Tristan if he brought any of the mythril with him, but when she did, he was gone, as was her twitch.

Kessler and Jagra gave their testimonies and answered questions before being allowed to head off their own ways with Sapien's assurances she'd handle any Syndicate issues that may try to follow them. Akaila on the other hand stayed there, not giving an explanation as to why until after Sapien stepped back out of the insurance office, pulling her aside quickly,

“They're coming for you.”

She looked up at the wolf quizzically, “Come again?”

“The Syndicate, they grabbed Tristan while we weren't looking, another psycher must have clouded our perceptions or something, he told them everything, and they decided it's easier to just eliminate witnesses than risk you going to the authorities.”

“That would mean Jagra and Kessler are in danger too.”

“Maybe, my clairvoyance is limited, I didn't get any foreboding from them.”

“Well thanks, regardless. Did your crystal ball happen to say when or how they'd come after me?”

“Not how, but it happens the second you leave this building, your life ends there if something doesn't change the course of events.”

She looked around the building for a way out. It was a sizable complex, a large central room with several branching halls and offices, and a guard at every corner. High-end recording devices scanned over every passageway, and glints and glimmers of hidden amplifiers gave away that several of the guards were also psychers, nobody in their right mind would perform an assassination there. As she pondered an escape route, she questioned Akaila,

“Isn't clairvoyance usually restricted to people the psycher has a close relationship to?”

“Usually.”

“So is that your way of saying we're friends now?”

“Don't read too much into it, there's a reason I want to get rid of this...it's...unpredictable.”

“I know you're the psychic here, but I can't help but get the impression there's something very important about those abilities you keep trying your damnedest to hide.”

“Am I that obvious?”

“More noticable than the wings on your back...bingo!”

“What?”

“How much weight can you carry in the air?”

She blinked in confusion, ears back and head tilted. Sapien just giggled and pointed straight up at an open skylight.

Before she had a chance to say anything, Akaila grabbed her by the brass backpack and lifted her into the air, flying up towards the skylight rapidly. She tossed the vixen through, then grabbed the frame and climbed through herself, getting the attention of several guards in the process. Akaila could feel the eyes of other psychers on her, their minds prying at hers, so she just broadcast a beacon back to them with two words, “Danger. Outside.”

She grabbed Sapien and moved her behind a cooling unit, both of them seeking cover, and she waited, probing the situation around them. She growled in frustration as her senses couldn't reach out far enough, but was suddenly snapped out of it by her own thoughts reverberating off a nearby source. She looked down to see a small mythril ingot being shoved into her hands.

Sapien just grinned, “I kept one for evidence, just in case we had to go to the police.”

“But how...”

“Brass backpack. It insulated it.”

She smirked back, glancing sideways at her, then focused on it, using it as an antenna. The foggy area around them was suddenly much clearer and more vibrant. She was able to pick up the thoughts of everyone nearby with ease.

She patiently and silently listened. Several guards were sent outside, and a twinge of alarm came from several spots outside, positioned at all the exits, hired guns. One stepped away to make a phone call to his boss, there was her window. She grabbed Sapien again and both of them took to the air, sailing right over his head as he was looking down to dial. By time his gaze went back to the skydock station, they were already gone.

Sapien called above the wind to Akaila, “We need to head for the Eastgate mining office, that's where they said they'd be if I needed them, and odds are there's already somebody on their way to arrange an accident.”

“Right!”

Akaila banked sharply and took off towards the mining office as fast as her wings would carry her.

Averting Epsilon Chapter 1: Brace For Impact

2015-06-17T16:54:00.000-04:00

So, you want to hear the story of Epsilon? Well that, as cheesy as it sounds, starts and ends in the same place.

You see, you can't beam radio signals into infinite space, with a functional possibility of infinite worlds, and expect nobody to pick up the phone. And when that phone is picked up, you better not piss off the guy on the other end.

Well, somebody did pick up. And somebody pissed them off. I don't want to ruin the surprises for you, so I'll hold back exactly what happened next. In the meantime, our story, like I said, begins and ends in the same place, a perpetual storm around the Bering islands.

This odd storm appeared one day in 1908, and simply never died down. Other inexplicable weather events happened at the same time, equally as unusual, and along with them came various new forces of nature that at first were simply called magic. If the inhabitants even knew half the reason for them, they'd realize magic was the least of their worries.

Shortly after the appearance of these new forces, it was discovered they were orders of magnitude stronger and more prevalent near these weather flukes, so despite the risks, people would venture into these regions seeking fortunes. Very few could get safely past the one surrounding Bering island, but those who could made a decent living by ferrying fortune seekers through the never ending typhoon.

We start our story with one such pilot, a young irish vixen named Sapien. Oh, did I forget to mention that? Part of the appearance of those storms and forces of magic were the appearance of non-human sentient creatures. Barring total retrograde amnesia, they were perfectly normal people, and quickly integrated into society after the initial panic subsided. Or at least, that's what the history books say.

Sapien looked out over the clouds with a troubled sigh. She'd made this crossing several dozen times before, but she'd never seen currents this bad. With a turn on a dial the bank of crystals below decks glowed brighter, broiling heat rolling from them and flushing the balloons with scalding hot gasses.

Between the ballast and the steam turbines, she was pushing the crystals to dangerously high temperatures, but she didn't have a choice if she wanted to stay above the hurricane force winds looming below. The feeling of unease she got when she picked up her passengers for this crossing was only growing stronger with every lightning bolt in the churning carpet spanning the horizons.

She went below decks and roused them, tossing her telescope to the nearest, a disturbingly large half-dragon, “On your feet, Kessler, you lot have some questions to answer.”

He grumbled, lifting a blanket from his face, “Since when do I answer questions from a kobald?”

“It's Vulpren, not kobald, and if you take that tone again, you're gonna be flying on your own wings the rest of the way.”

“Okay, so, since when do I answer questions from food?”

“That's better. The storm's picking up as we're nearing the island, I need everybody awake in case we need to start dumping cargo.”

A dwarf, Jagra, looked up from his napping, “What do you mean 'picking up' I heard that storm's been the same for centuries.”

“You heard wrong. It has a mind of its own, and something about you four is upsetting it. Normally I have a policy not to ask questions, but if any of you is harboring something that might be agitating the energies here, I need to know about it, preferably before we're falling to our deaths.”

Akaila, a winged whitewolf, grimaced before tapping on her tiara, a gold band that hooked over her canine ears and crested her brow in a gem-tipped V shape, “This might be doing it. Psionic amplifier.”

“No, I ship things like that all the time, it takes something bigger to upset this storm.”

The dwarf scoffed, “You mean like something too big to fit on this ship, something maybe we're not carrying and you're accusing us over for nothing?”

A human with the group gave out a long, distressed sigh, “I think I know what it is.”

Kessler raised an eyeridge, “Something you care to share, Tristan?”

“You could say that...would 200 stone worth of mythril interfere with that amplifier of yours?”

Sapien's eyes went wide, as did those of the others. She jumped across the room, her clawed fingers digging into his shoulders and her feet both planted in his gut, shouting “That's what's in those crates!? What kind of dumb ape moves that much mythril in a single shipment!?”

Jagra snarled the words at her, “That kind, apparently.”

Tristan pried her claws away, “We needed a currency light enough to ship by air, the syndicate never said anything about a damned psycher being on board this ship.”

She growled at him, baring her teeth, “Well thanks to your ignorance, the syndicate might just find their shipment waiting at the bottom of the ocean.”

Sapien rushed back out to the decks and took another survey of the clouds before making a course adjustment. Akaila hurried out behind her and timidly asked, “Is it still possible to turn back? I wouldn't want people to be in danger because of me.”

“It's too late for that, we don't have enough fuel to turn back at this point, and besides, it's not your fault, it's monkey of the year back there and his blood money that's likely to get us killed.”

Sounds of yelling and a struggle drew their attention back to the doors leading below decks and to Jagra and Kessler both struggling to bring a crate on deck despite Tristan's efforts to stop them.

Sapien ran towards them, scolding, “What are you morons doing!?”

Kessler responded while parrying Tristan away with his tail, “We're dumping this stuff before it gets us killed!”

“You're bringing it too close to her!”

Akaila was already on hands and knees as Sapien said those words, clutching her head tightly. Thunder was crackling in the storm below, and the clouds started rising rapidly.

Sapien shouted above the rumbling, “This ship's hull is brass! It was insulating her from the mythril!”

Jagra looked back and forth between her and the crate, “Well just get that amplifier off her head then!”

Akaila whimpered above growing pain, “I can't! It's fused! Don't you know how a psycher even works!?”

“We've got no choice but to toss it then.”

He picked the crate back up and made for the railing, but a strong current of wind rushed up from the clouds below and slammed into the ship, making him lose his balance and drop it. The crate smashed to the deck and sent mythril ingots scattering, several dozen coming to a stop around Akaila. She screamed in agony and blacked out, releasing a massive psionic pulse, sending the bars flying away as chunks of shrapnel, the passengers dropping to the deck to get out of the way.

As several ingots fell overboard and into the storm, the energy they'd been leeching from her was released, fueling the currents around them. In only seconds, strong winds grabbed the ship and pulled it down into the tempest.

Sapien took the helm, turning off the auto pilot and doing her best to keep the ship level as it rapidly lost altitude. Freezing rain sprayed from all directions and hail pummeled the decks and started clogging the turbines, their steady roar turning into ear-splitting clanks and groans as they struggled to keep their speed against the onslaught of icy debris.

She called to the others as loud as she could, “Jagra, get Akaila below decks and secure her in my cabin, Tristan, go to the galley and pull the red tabs above the range until you hear a crack, then do the same in the bilge and hold on the tabs you find there. Kessler, get all of your lot's valuables out of the hold and crew quarters and move them to my cabin, and leave the damned mythril!”

Tristan did as instructed, and found three massive steel pins above the range, painted bright red and anchored into the brass superstructure of the airship. It took all of his strength to wrench them out, and with each one, the entire ship shuddered and loud cracks rolled through it.

He went to the hold and did the same, crossing paths with Kessler as he frantically carried their possessions towards the captain's quarters. Kessler unloaded an armful of boxes and bags to the sight of Jagra tying Akaila to a bed.

He barely had time to secure her in place before Tristan pulled the last of the pins and creaks and groans rolled through the entire ship. Splits began opening in the hull and he ran towards the bow as fast as he could, jumping the last of the distance as he saw nearly half the ship's bulk falling into the inky blackness below, splashing on the surface of an alarmingly close ocean.

With the bulk of the ship's weight gone, it was no longer a cruiser and was suddenly a frigate on a cruiser's balloons, slingshotting back into the sky, all of them gripping tightly to whatever they could as wind and hail lashed at it. As the crystal bank began smoking, and the pummeled turbines began knocking against their housings, sunlight started filtering through the clouds again. Seconds later, they rocketed through the canopy and into clear blue skies again, but only briefly as they peaked in altitude and the battered engines finally gave, a deafening clang signaling the end of the starboard turbine, rotor blades falling into the clouds below.

With Akaila unconscious and most of the mythril cargo jettisoned into the ocean below, the storm started calming, but the damage was already done. The drained crystals flickered and fluttered before going completely dark. Sapien shut down the port turbine to compensate for the lost engine and left the aft running on residual steam, but it would only be a few minutes before she lost pressure.

The three men staggered onto the decks, but her glance back towards them wasn't reassuring, “We've lost all heat in the boiler, we're gonna lose pressure soon. The reserve fuel crystals were in the section we had to dump, so I've got nothing to relight the boiler with.”

Kessler raised an eyeridge, “You've got me.”

“Those boilers are designed to take type III fuel crystals, even dragon fire can't get that hot.”

“It'll limp it along though. Just keep us pointed towards the nearest land and I'll put as much fire in those as I can muster.”

Jagra stopped him as he went towards the door, “Open my pack, there's a small keg in there, dwarven ale, that should kick up your flame by a good margin.”

“Will do.”

He went to Sapien's cabin, now the only cabin on the ship, and started rummaging in Jagra's supplies for the keg. Akaila woke to the sound and struggled on the ropes tying her to the bed, “Hey, a little help here?”

He snipped them away with his tailblade and kept looking for the keg, finding it moments later. Akaila blinked and looked around, sniffing at the smoke in the air, “Did we land yet?”

“Far from it, but nearest I can tell all the mythril went overboard when we dumped the aft section of the ship.”

“When you dumped the what!?”

He gave her a half salute and a chuckle, then hurried to the boiler room. He opened the access hatch to a blinding wave of heat, scalding even to his dragonscaled face. Before he had a chance to second-guess it, he took a mouthful of the ale and released a torrent of flame into the heat chamber.

With the alcohol augmenting his flame, he was able to restore some power, and each exhale from him brought with it a slight increase in the ship's turbine speed, but between the rapid deep breaths required for the flame, and the potent ale seeping into his tongue and piercing his sinuses, he was growing rapidly dizzy and light-headed.

Eventually the keg ran empty, and so did his stamina. He closed the hatch and slumped down next to the boiler, not sure if it was the ship or his own head spinning, but the extra heat bought them valuable altitude, and Sapien managed to clip the inner edges of the clouds, escaping the storm and declaring “Land ho!” as the island they were destined for approached on the horizon, dead center in the typhoon's eye.

She siphoned what steam she could into one of the auxiliary tanks and held it there as they steadily lost altitude in the now stable and gentile breeze. She warned them to brace for impact as the ground approached rapidly, and released the boiler's final breath into the last remaining turbine to slow them right before landing.

The slowing was significant, but not enough to save the ship's keel, which buckled and collapsed on impact and rendered the vessel a total wreck. With the exception of Sapien they all climbed out and onto the beach, collapsing in both exhaustion and relief, except for Kessler, who's movements were closer to drunken slithering.

Sapien emerged from the wreck several minutes later, dragging a massive brass slab, big as a backpack compared to her small vulpine form. Indeed, as she climbed down, a pair of woven chain straps assembled themselves from two corners and she put it on as such.

She looked at the wreck with a disdainful sigh, then at the four weary travellers, “You do realize you all owe me a new ship now, right?”

Coming In Hot!; Why things burn up when they enter the atmosphere.

2015-06-03T06:25:00.001-04:00

Have you ever seen a shooting star? If you have, then you've seen why aeronautic engineers don't take hyper-sonic speed lightly. Anyone who's felt wind on their skin knows what wind chill is. A common misconception is that it's the wind itself that's causing the cooling.

Human skin is usually warmer than the surrounding air, and as such slightly heats the air around it. Any given person walking around is carrying their own thin bubble of hot air. When the wind blows, your protective blanket of heat is blown away with it, and you're exposed to the real air temperature. In higher humidities this is more pronounced because water is a very efficient thermal conductor.

In commercial airliners, the ice that can form on their wings isn't due to wind, as some people believe, but due to altitude. The same temperature gradient that allows snow to fall on mountains while it's 80 (F) degrees in the valley continues as altitude increases, getting as low as 40 degrees (F) below zero at the altitude commercial airliners fly at. It's not surprising ice will form when it's that cold out.

Now we get to the part those two paragraphs were leading up to; frictional and compressive heating. When air moves, it's just like any other moving object, and there's friction involved. In the form of air movement it's called "wind resistance" and at high velocities it can translate into a lot of heat. Wind rubbing over an aircraft hull can be just like rubbing your hands together, and at supersonic speeds generates just as much heat.

Compressive heating works slightly different and is best compared to a diesel engine. Diesel engines don't use spark plugs to ignite their fuel, instead they use incredibly high compression ratios and very rapid compression speeds to heat pockets of air until the fuel vapors in it ignite from the heat.

What's happening is that any given volume of air has a certain amount of thermal energy in it. When you compress the air, that same energy is now taking up a smaller space, meaning the energy density is now higher, and in diesel engines this is high enough to set things on fire. This heating, while significant and very useful in industry, has its limits, and these limits are actually used to protect spacecraft on re-entry.

Ever since Project Gemini heat shields have been used to take the brunt of that atmospheric heating, exploiting the limits of compressive heating to allow them to handle re-entry with slightly less cooked astronauts. These heat shields have deliberately high drag, compressing air in front of them. This compressed air forms two distinct layers called the shock layer and the boundary layer.

The shock layer is where the bulk of heat takes place. Incoming air is displaced violently by the supersonic vehicle. In the case of the now retired NASA space shuttle and the ill-fated Buran shuttle, this heating was intense enough that it actually broke down atmospheric molecules into their base atoms.

There's no denying that the shock layer is a violent place, in fact it's the pressure wave created by the shock layer around supersonic planes that causes the sonic boom you hear as they rip by overhead. Hypersonic re-entry vehicles are able to survive this through a combination of heat insulation and the compressive heating. By making themselves have a high drag, they drag a pocket of air with them, this is called the boundary layer.

The boundary layer acts as a buffer between the vehicle and the intensely heated shock layer, like the oil in a pan that keeps cooked food from scalding; yeah, it's hot, but it's not as hot as the metal pan below.

So.

This will probably make you ask the question; Why do they have to enter going so fast?

Well that's a matter of orbital mechanics. As The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy famously states: "There is an art to flying, or rather a knack. Its knack lies in learning to throw yourself at the ground and miss. ... Clearly, it is this second part, the missing, that presents the difficulties."

Orbit is achieved by moving sideways so fast that by time you fall down, that direction is no longer down because the planet has moved beneath you. In Low Earth Orbit This takes moving at 15,000 miles per hour (24,140Kph) which translates to mach 20, 20 times the speed of sound.

Getting up to that speed is one thing. Getting up to that speed and still having enough fuel to slow back down is another. Orbital spacecraft have to rely on chemical thrusters to operate outside of our atmosphere, and these engines, while powerful, are far less fuel-efficient than those that take advantage of the readily available oxygen in the air around us.

When spacecraft re-enter, they can slow themselves down a lot, but they're still typically travelling above Mach 10, and at those speeds heat in the shock layer around an aircraft causes the atmosphere to heat to incandescence, the separation of molecules into atoms energizing the atmosphere so much it forms a glowing charged plasma around it (this is the "fire" you see around them)

Now comes the fun part. Surely, you must be asking, if something were light enough and wind resistant enough, it could slow down to safe speeds long before hitting the thicker lower atmosphere and thus avoid burning up.

This is not only possible, but it happens all the time. If you have ready access to a rooftop that doesn't see any foot traffic and happen to have a high powered magnet available, you can collect your own meteorites. Most meteorites contain iron, and tiny, nearly microscopic ones are impacting earth all the time. These meteorites are so tiny they slow down long before heating up and fall harmlessly to the ground. Large, flat, impermeable surfaces make ready-made collectors for these.

On smooth metal roofs, rain water will wash them away, but if you live in a desert there's no rain to wash them off, and if you have tar shingles, they can become wedged among the pieces of gravel embedded in the tar. A few passes with a magnet and you've got a fistful of stardust.

As propulsion technology continues to advance, there exists a real possibility of making spacecraft that slow down just as efficiently as these bits of space debris, removing astronaut's worries of a very toasty home trip, and opening the door to colonization of space. Indeed, the day may come when our great great grandchildren look at pictures of a space shuttle and ask "What kind of crazy person would think that was a safe way to land?"

Wise Words Of The Day:
"Later, I realized that the mission had to end in a let-down because the real barrier wasn't in the sky but in our knowledge and experience of supersonic flight."
~Chuck Yeager

F2P MMO; Why The Shiny Bits Cost Extra

2015-05-25T06:00:00.000-04:00

We've all been there. All of us gamers have heard about a new Free To Play game coming out, so we find it, make a profile, download it, then finally install it and start playing. Then, just a few minutes in, you see some guy with a rainbow suit of armor shoot you with an ion cannon and proceed to loot your corpse from fifty feet away before flying away like superman. You think "Wow, I want to be that overpowered on this game!" so you look up the gear you saw him using, and bam, paywall.

Rainbow Cape; $15
Personal Ion Cannon; $5
Telekinetic Corpse Lootatron; $9.95

It's an infuriating situation; while some of us are perfectly content paying for those awesome bits (and nobody can argue a gay pride caped crusader is something of awe and wonder) we can still feel ripped off sometimes. So why is it that a game that brands itself as "free to play" then proceeds to try to get you to pony up? Well, the answer to that depends entirely upon the company that's doing it.

Theres something of a triangle made of the three primary motivations for charging money for premium content in a game, and those are; Turning a profit. Paying your employees. Keeping your servers online. And to that end, I'm going to reference three companies that represent the three farthest corners of that triangle and how it's affected the type, pricing, and selection of premium content in their titles; EA Games, FreeJam Games, Wargaming Public Co Ltd.

1: Turning a Profit.

There's no denying that EA games milks money out of their players at every opportunity. From their now discontinued $10 Online Pass to their $50 premium package on top of the already $50 Battlefield 4, it always seems like EA is trying to siphon money from people with half-baked, heavily rushed games...but why is this?

The Programmers at EA games certainly show pride in their work, and never fail to deliver stunning eye-candy and special effects, but the number of glitches, errors, and broken content always leaves us feeling like we're playing something that they weren't quite done working on. Well the explanation for that is as painful as it is simple; EA Games is a publicly traded company.

Being publicly traded means that EA games has an obligation to the stockholders to maintain maximum profit at all times, and good programmers cost money. Due to the 20/80 rule, this means that from a financial perspective, hunting down every single bug and glitch becomes a point of diminishing return, and in the corporate world, saying those words gets your mouth washed out with soap.

EA Games executives are forced to make a call, to determine when the game is "done enough" and release it in whatever state they managed to get it to. After that, they still have an obligation to get as much money as possible out of it; enter the premium content.

Premium content is what pays for continued updates and repairs on the games, and it's so pricey and draconian with EA Games titles because the only way they can justify that to the stockholders is if the continued maintenance of the game is generating more money than it's consuming.

Suffice to say, they're not lying when they say "It's not extortion; it's just good business practice."

2: Keeping Your Servers Online

Even with only one game on the table, Robocraft, FreeJam Games has proven themselves to be a solid contender in the game community, holding a top 50 position on Indie DB for several months, beating out titles like Space Engineers and Minecraft. They've managed to garner a lot of respect from the community, which is saying a lot considering their paltry development team of some 18 individuals (exact number unverified)

All of this popularity comes at a price, however. At the time of writing this article, Robocraft's gameplay is 100% online, even player vehicles and progress are stored on remote servers. This means a lot of data handling, a lot of bandwidth, and a lot of processing power are needed to keep everything running smooth; and those servers cost money. A lot of it.

In early 2014, Mark Simmons, CEO of FreeJam, was quoted as saying their server costs at the time were $1200 a month. Since then, the game has continued to grow, currently averaging between 15 and 20 thousand players online at once.

I've had a few chances to talk with Orcun Adsoy about how FreeJam pays for this, and the one point that has always remained steadfast in our discussions was "We don't do pay-to-win." even going so far as to say there was a note in the meeting room reading "We will never make gold ammo" in reference to the borderline game-breaking premium ammunition available in World Of Tanks, purchased with "Gold" premium currency, thus, gold ammo.

So if they're never going to make gold ammo, how are they going to make the money to maintain the servers? Enter the rainbow cape from our gay pride caped crusader. Not all premium content has to give you a competitive edge; sometimes just having extra eye-candy is enough. This appeals to a primal part of the brain, an instinct known as peacocking, and lets attention seekers get their attention at a nominal fee, while not leaving those who can't afford it feeling like they're being victimized.

All cosmetic items in Robocraft's shop have T1 armor, that is to say they have the same durability as the weakest armor in the game, meaning they flake off readily in enemy gunfire. This can even endorse a kind of counter-play, in that the player who can't afford cosmetic items will feel great satisfaction in shooting that gold-plated tophat off of Mr. Moneybags, sending the battle-ready millionaire scurrying for cover.

They have premium membership, just like many other MMO's, but in their case premium players give a splash effect to other players in the match. While the premium player gets double the payout from his match, everyone else gets a 5% paycheck boost, and it stacks. Four premium players in a platoon together, enjoying that one extra platoon slot premium players get, will be conferring a 20% paycheck boost to all other players in the game, making them feel like they're getting a little premium too.

This seems like a very Utopian approach to premium content, but FreeJam can only afford it because they're a small company with minimal expenses; they don't have to sign the thousands of weekly paychecks of our next entry.

3: Paying Your Employees.

Wargaming is a household name, many people are familiar with their flagship title World Of Tanks and of their numerous publicity events and seasonal promotions. Of all the things Wargaming is and isn't, one thing people can be sure of is they keep their name prominent in the online gaming world.

One thing people might not realize is that a company spending that much on marketing is going to have some big bills to pay. Convention centers charge rent. Manufacturers charge licensing fees. Servers charge maintenance, and being a world record holder for the most people online at once means that's a pretty big server maintenance bill.

One could argue that since server maintenance is proportional to the number of players, and that since player generated revenue is per-capita that it can't be considered a factor for a company remaining profitable. One would be arguing correctly and legitimately if not for an outside factor; Wargaming employs 4000-5000 people at any given point in time, not counting contractors, freelancers, and hired external companies. Wargaming has to tip the scales just a little bit in their favor to keep their budget in the black; enter Gold Ammo.

Premium ammunition, or Gold Ammo as the community has come to call it, is a type of ammunition unique to each weapon in World Of Tanks, which gives the player a competitive edge against other players. A tank that normally only has high explosive or armor piercing ammunition choices could buy HEAT anti-tank rounds for premium money, ensuring not only armor penetration, but a nice bit of damage on top.

By charging premium money for a consumable resource instead of a one-time purchase, Wargaming ensures a steady stream of money from the players willing to pay for it, but this does put a sour taste in the mouth of those who can't afford it or just don't want to spend real world money on a digital item.

The premium content doesn't stop there, obviously. Wargaming also has FreeJam-esque cosmetic content, allowing people to put decals and custom paintjobs on their vehicles, train crews faster, get better equipment loadouts, buy premium-only high-end tanks, and in general smooth out the entire gameplay experience. In fact, grinding in World Of Tanks is deliberately slow for the expressed purpose of motivating people to buy premium content.

So Wargaming, while wanting to deliver a quality game, is forced to make compromises to keep the bills paid, and EA games is held on a leash by the stockholders. While everybody would love to be a community-minded company like FreeJam, sometimes it's simply not possible, and corners have to be cut.

So the next time you see a commercial for game pre-order content, or get prompted to buy gems, or gold, or galaxy cash, don't think "God how much money do they want?" think "God how much money do they need?" because odds are, it's just them trying to stay in business.

Wise Words Of The Day:
"Our incomes are like our shoes; if too small, they gall and pinch us; but if too large, they cause us to stumble and to trip."
~John Locke

Signal Attenuation; why DSL is "Up to X speed" and not "Available at X speed"

2015-05-18T09:25:00.000-04:00

--A thanks to Compwiz for his help in research and fact-checking for this

We've all seen the commercials, a communications company saying their new DSL service is available "up to" a certain speed, or with speeds "potentially as high as" But why is that? Surely if their hardware can handle those speeds, then it should be available to everyone, right? Well, it's annoyingly wrong because of the X-factor of an aging infrastructure in the United States and a behavior of copper wire known as "signal attenuation" which is, in its basest explanation, the loss of signal over distance.

Data sent by DSL modems is an electrical packet, which is power. Power running through copper wire, or any metal wire for that matter, will entropy over distance due to resistance and interference causing attenuation (decay) of the signal. If you think of a wire like a hose and electricity like the water, resistance is the friction in that hose which makes it harder to pump it over longer distances. Sending data packets is like sending pulses of hot and then cold water down that hose. The worse the attenuation in the line, the faster the hot water cools down and the cold water warms up. To get data from one end to the other, it has to not only arrive, but still be the right temperature.

In a smooth, featureless hose, that would be simple, but that's not the case. Old and worn out networks, different gauges of wire used, and splices made improperly are like kinks, connectors, and different size hoses on the line, and with each of those the water passes through, the hot and cold are going to get a bit harder to pump and a bit more mixed together.

A single packet could be: 1110010110101011010110110010110

But how can you know it's still the packet that was sent with all these things affecting the line?

The answer is with checksums. All of the "1" data in that packet adds up to 18, so a checksum would be sent with it that says "18" If the packet gets damaged, then the data will no longer add up to 18, and it's considered corrupted. Likewise, if the checksum gets damaged, it could suddenly read "7714" and the same applies.

When a modem connects to an ISP's server, it performs something known as a "handshake" tossing packets with these checksums back and forth at ever-faster rates until they begin failing. When the failure point is reached, the modem backs up a little bit, sending the packets slower, with longer 1's and 0's at a higher power level, to ensure they won't be lost.

If the interference in the line increases, though, then it can begin dropping packets. if the packet loss gets above a threshold, then the modem severs the DSL connection and performs the handshake again, to calibrate itself to the new speed limits. This is what's usually happening when a DSL connection goes out for a few minutes at a time.

Fiber lines, which have already replaced copper in the nation's backbone infrastructure solve this by using light signals inside a fiber optic cable. Fiber optic still suffers from attenuation and resistance, but at radically lesser values. Also, the data is being sent with light, which travels...at the speed of light. This is why most landline internet connections will have low latency, because the bulk of their travel distance is now handled by these high-speed, high-reliability lines and very few checksums fail due to interference.

So why isn't fiber available everywhere?

Well, running aerial cables is expensive, and there's a lot of cable in the United States. A government article covers just how expensive it is maintaining the grid, let alone upgrading it. In the past, when one electrical system was being phased out by another it was as simple as waiting for a section to need repairs then taking that opportunity to upgrade it cheaply, but with the leap to fiber optic that can't be done, as it uses an entirely different method for transmission and whole regions need the upgrade at once, or it fails to deliver.

It all boils down to how expensive it is to deliver fiber optic service to an end-user, and sadly there's simply not enough motivation for the companies with the money to afford it to go and make that kind of investment.

There's good news to be had, though; As computer usage continues to expand and the demand for high-speed, high-reliability internet continues to grow there will be a turning point when companies start seeing it as being worth the expense, and delivering the next generation of high-speed service to the end-user.

If you'd like to learn more about this topic and get into the technical nitty-gritty of it, there's a very informative blog by Directcom and an article on HowStuffWorks that both get into the science behind this.

Wise words of the day:
"Eloquence is the power to translate a truth into language perfectly intelligible to the person to whom you speak."
~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Two year hiatus? A retrospect and a revival.

2015-05-14T15:52:00.000-04:00

The title says it all. Two years of silence and now I'm finally blowing the dust off this old thing and resurrecting it. Looking back on my old posts I realize just how emo I was back then; but no more. That was a dark chapter of my life, yes, and I had a lot of reasons to be like I was, but about a year ago I had a stunning realization;

Sad Tanya is Boring Tanya.

I've dedicated myself to being a calmer, happier, more light-hearted person instead. With that in mind, the Mad Science Kitchen will finally be earning its namesake; as each week I'll be bringing you all bits and pieces of the latest mad science and Tanya level Tech Talk. My main focus will be on emerging sciences, but if I spot any cool gadgets or make some weird contraptions myself, you can rest assured they'll find their way here!

So sit back, relax, and enjoy that warm radioactive glow as the Mad Science Kitchen cooks up some food for thought.

Wise words of the day:
"The roots of education are bitter; but the fruit is sweet."
~Aristotle

Sometimes You've got to Deal With It

2013-09-03T11:37:00.001-04:00

As I type this, I'm sitting outside the DMV, waiting for them to open so I can get my ID renewed to match my new feminine appearance. The purpose of this, among other things, is so that I can donate plasma. Previously when I've tried to donate, they turned me away because my face didn't match my ID. Hopefully now that won't be an issue anymore.

Once that's done, I'm going to be walking all over town to look in even more places for a potential job. Such are my days lately. More and more it feels like I have to walk a kilometer for every dollar I make. Just getting by day to day feels like a struggle, but I still manage. I manage because I must.

This life we're all in varies in difficulty for each of us, and I'm sure at least one person reading this will look at my complaints and laugh, knowing they survived far worse; but it's that laughter that is why I persevere.

My situation feels bad and it may be a struggle, but I know there are those out there worse off than I am. I know that there are people even worse off than them. I may have to work for my money, but at least there's money to be had, in some places they have none.

I want you, the reader, to consider that the next time you're waiting in line at the grocery store. Think about the places in the world where they don't have stores. Think about the people out there who don't have the money to buy food.

The next time your phone is having a bad signal, be happy you've even got a phone in the first place. Just keep this in mind: Life is tough, sometimes you've just got to deal with it.

Farewell, Fluffy Prince

2013-09-01T12:40:00.000-04:00

My posting has been slightly delayed because we experienced a loss yesterday. Duncan, one of our beloved cats died. He'd been ill for a while and it finally claimed him. We buried him on a hill at the edge of the property where another cat had been buried. Since the site was now officially a cemetery, I went hunting for stones and built cairns for both of them.

This is a valuable reminder of how we must treasure every day we have. Duncan was one of a litter of three and the only one of them that made it to adulthood. A genetic defect caused his two brothers to die, and he only barely survived. That defect, however, is what eventually claimed him.

Duncan stands as a reminder to me of how frail and short our lives can be. Before too long, every one of you alive to read this will be dead. For some it'll be forty years, for others sixty, or if you're young and living a healthy life you may just be regaling this story to your great great grandchildren a hundred years from now. But you'll still die eventually.

This is why we must live for today. Planning for the future is fine, as a matter of fact I highly recommend it. But, don't let your plans for the future cause you to waste today. Embrace the moment, take joy in the small things. Life's too short for petty things like rivalries and grudges. Life's too frail for politics and he-said-she-said.

Life is something we only get one of, and when we leave it, we're leaving our descendants with lives of their own to experience, so stop worrying about what everyone else is doing, and just worry about you. So long as you're doing the right thing, so long as you're living up every moment, and so long as you're doing your species and your family proud, the actions and the emotions of others are nothing but fluffy clouds, brushing past as you soar.

“Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.”

Marcus Aurelius

Lemonade

2013-08-29T15:41:00.000-04:00

Life loves to give us lemons. You know it, I know it. What we do with them is entirely up to us. My lemon of the day is a sore back and what I suspect to be a sprained foot. This means that I can't make the five kilometer walk I planned on doing today in my never-ending search for a job. But, just because I'm stuck at the house doesn't mean I can't do anything. I'm using that time made free to make phone calls and process some paperwork. This is what people like to call making lemonade, and it's easy once you learn how.

Any time you're given a lemon, you've got some options. You can just sit there and suck on it with a sour look on your face, waiting until it's drained so you can move on to sweeter fruit down the road, or you can find some sugar and make lemonade like other people do. You could demand life take them back, stand proud like Cave Johnson and threaten to make incendiary weapons out of them, or you could get crafty, wait for them to ferment and make some sour Limoncello.

There's a lot of options you've got when you get stuck with a lemon. The only variable is how creative you're willing to get to make the lemons work in your favor.

"When life gives you lemons, don’t make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back! Get mad! I don’t want your damn lemons, what the hell am I supposed to do with these?"

Cave Johnson

Sometimes Fate Has To Slap You

2013-08-28T14:03:00.000-04:00

My position in life is hardly notable or brag-worthy. Often times it feels like a difficult struggle for me but I carry on. I remind myself that there are people worse off than I am and that I shouldn't complain because I've got more going for me than they do.

One of those things I've got is a five kilometer walk to the nearest place I can apply for jobs. Roughly three kilometers of that is forested and the rest is rural residential areas (AKA trailer parks). Several times while walking that road I've been offered a ride, and I've accepted them.

This has been universally described as stupid and reckless by my roommates. They say that you can't trust the people around here, that I'll end up raped and dead in a ditch. This morning I was ground down enough that I was ready to believe that.

I set out on my daily routine of job hunting adamant that I was going to refuse anybody who offered to give me a lift. I was telling myself that people are bad and that I can't trust them. Fate slapped me when the oddest thing happened.

A man driving the opposite direction I was walking, and in a Camaro no less, offered me a ride. Before I had time to respond he did a U-turn...right into a ditch. This well dressed twenty something in a shiny sportscar got stuck and he felt embarrassed, but he kept a cool and level head, and he was kind and courteous despite that as he tried to rock it free the mud guard got broken off of his front bumper.

Together we cleared a mass of fallen branches with the intent of him making a small circle through the woods to come back around to the road, but then Fate gave me a second slap. Two men in a 4WD truck stopped and offered help. Both were bearded beer gutted baseball cap wearing epitomes of the visual stereotype one usually associates with "good ol' boys" yet both were nice as could be, offering to help push the car backwards so we could get it out of the ditch.

Together the four of us got the car free, though with some minor cosmetic damage. Despite all of that, he was still offering me a ride. I accepted, largely because I felt an obligation at that point, and he not only drove me to the market plaza, he took me door to door to every stop on my list for my job applications for the day and even took me to an interview.

Not once did he come on to me. Not once did he pry into my personal life. Not once did he ask for my phone number.

One man who was visually the epitome of a spoiled rich kid, and two who would best be defined as hillbillies reminded me that you can't judge somebody based on looks or environment.

I woke up this morning ready to doubt everything, I'm going to bed tonight knowing that at heart, people are decent. You've just got to give them a chance.

"¹Do not judge, or you too will be judged. ²For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you."
Matthew 7:1-2

Climb or Whine?

2013-08-27T14:25:00.001-04:00

Life's full of obstacles. Some of them random chance puts there, others we bring on ourselves. Any given day we face one hundred hurdles to jump. At any point in time we've got one we're working on.

For some of us they're huge and feel like mountains, for others they're just a little speedbump. And there are those who try to pretend they're not even there. However you interpret them, we each have a climb before us. That straight, smooth track we envisioned when we were young always looks rougher when we see it up close.

When we come to one of these walls, we have two choices before us.

Option number one, you can stamp your feet on the ground, pout and complain, and blame the builder for putting it there, then try to find some way around or arrogantly stand and wait for somebody to clear the path for you.

Option number two, you can suck it up like a man and start climbing.

It may seem unfair to have to face an obstacle others don't. It might seem like the lane you're on always has more boulders than the person next to you, but complaining won't change what's in yours. The solution to an obstacle always starts with the one who's faced with it, so when life throws up a wall, I give you two choices;

Are you gonna climb or are you gonna whine?

Determination

2013-08-26T21:51:00.000-04:00

It's been a long time since I've posted anything, but I've come to a point in my life where I feel it's worth the effort again, because I have more wisdom I'd like to share for anyone willing to hear it.

There's a guy I know. I won't say his name and I won't say how I know him, but for all extents and purposes he's a total dick to me. for certain reasons I'm stuck with the guy. The type of behavior he exhibits is the kind that most people would get annoyed and angered at, and I've even had people tell me as such about him, but why is that?

What, as humans drives us to be aggressive towards those who show us aggression or show us hatred or dislike? The obvious answer is that we're compelled to, emotions react on their own, feelings surge and rage, and you just explode, retaliating. But what does this accomplish?

Sure, at any point in time I could have blown up in his face, but where would it get me? A moment's satisfaction, maybe, but what good would it do for him? for me? for humanity as a whole? I'll confess that for a while I had temptations to be passive aggressive. I felt like getting him back for how he was treating me, but then I asked myself, why?

We're supposed to be the smartest species on the planet, and once upon a time we here in the United States were supposedly the most advanced. Why the hell don't we act like it? He acts like he does because that's what he knows, because that's what he learned from his environment. And that environment was formed by people doing the same. Just getting mad propagates that.

That's why instead I'm going to show determination, and you, the reader, I ask you to do the same. When somebody says you're a failure, when they say you're no good, when they call you a piss-ant and say you'll never get anywhere, you look them right in the eye and say "watch me." Fists will win you nothing, you'll only prove their point in their mind. The best revenge is success, and you'll come out better than you were before.

So put down the bat and pick up a book, you'll do better in the end.

"No, I won't kill him, No matter what he's done I can't do that. When you build this new society, I want you to base it on that, on the man who wouldn't."
Dr. Who

Mourning Day

2012-09-11T09:49:00.001-04:00

On this day ten years ago, two towers, a government building, and an innocent corn field were attacked by rabid jet planes.

Okay in all seriousness, people did die, and it was a shameful example of holes in national security, but what many might be missing here is it's been 10 years now, meaning it's officially okay to joke about it!

So get out there and think up funny commentary, draw a sex based conclusion about two shafts and a structure shaped like an anus, point out that if they'd tried it in california they'd be dead before they finished the sentence "we're highjacking this plane"

It's not disrespectful, it's memorable. think about it, when you hear a good joke, don't you tell it again and again, doesn't it randomly come to your memory months later? and isn't turning tragedy into comedy the ultimate proof you've overcome a pain?

So go on, flex your funny bone! Should you lack a sense of humor, you know where the comments section is.

Steampunk assault rifles? yeah, we've got that.

2012-09-04T08:52:00.000-04:00

I had a sudden spur of inspiration a few days ago. My tablet's still broken, but that doesn't mean I can't kick ass with pixelart and texturemapping!

I present to you the Sapien Technologies Autobolter!

and as an added bonus, here's the lineart for anybody who wants to tweak it or use their own color pallet. Remember, everything I make has always and will always be creative commons, so go nuts with it ^..^

That was easy~

I'm not dead yet! oh, and death rays.

2012-08-30T15:41:00.000-04:00

I know I haven't updated this blog in months, but I've finally got a reason to breathe new life into it; Phoenix Protocol got a shot of life and now we're back on the right track.

For those who don't know, Phoenix Protocol is a website I run dedicated to discussion and debate of cutting edge technologies, science fiction, and everything mad science. The site is also tied to a micronation project that many of us have been working towards for people interested in that field.

And on unrelated news....I'M MAKING A DEATH RAY, HOO-HA!

I gutted a 1200 watt microwave not too long ago and the magnetron, inverter, and capacitor are all intact. I plan on spending no less than a month ensuring I've researched all I need to know to prevent cooking myself and I'm employing the help of my dad. My dad is a perfectionist and used to work with a construction crew where he operated radioactive equipment, so if anybody in my family would be competent with high voltage RF pulses, it'd be him.

I plan on designing it on an underslung rifle frame with portable power supply and laser sights. Maybe some glowing fiddly bits for a real mad science look if I have parts left over. Given the appearance of the magnetron and the heat sink, as well as the shape the housing will have to be, I'm going to be basing the design on the laser rifle from the Fallout games, as pictured below.

The notable difference, however, will be that mine will likely be underslung due to how heavy the battery and power supply will be.

The One Thing Everyone Needs

2012-04-22T06:43:00.001-04:00

Through my entire life, I've realized something. There is one thing, one event and one object that everyone needs. And I can virtually guarantee you it's not what you're thinking right now. This thing completely changed my life and the way I look at it, it changed my whole mindset and the way I approach my own existence in general. You're probably thinking I'm gonna say "god" right now, right? Wrong.

It's Turmoil.

The one thing everyone needs in their life is a chapter of turmoil. One period in your life in which everything seems lost, one chapter where it feels like everything's gone down the crapper. There are two types of reactions I get when I say that. The first is utter shock and disbelief, those people have never felt real turmoil. The second is a nod, those people have. It's something you don't know until you've truly felt it.

When you've felt real turmoil, suddenly your normal life doesn't feel half bad. You stop complaining your steak took a little longer than normal for the waiter to arrive with when you still have memories of eating out of trash cans. You stop whining about your hard day at work when you've had to collect soda cans for enough money to get a breakfast. And you stop looking at those ads on TV for the "perfect mattress" when you've had to sleep on cardboard before.

Turmoil. Gives. Perspective. Everything in your life feels a lot better when you know what it's like to not have anything at all. We as americans have been spoiled. Don't act like you don' t know it. It's so seldom that people in the United States endure real suffering that they're not only numb to the pain around the world, but even to people who may be living right next door, or that bum on the street.

That "lazy bum" probably works harder on the streets in a single day than you do in your air conditioned office all week. So my word is this, America, hit the bricks. To wealthy an affluent who took the time to read this, I hope you gleaned something from these words, if it sounds like horse crap to you, then that should be a sign, that should be proof you've never felt real pain, because you're getting worked up over text on a screen and nothing more.

To my brothers and sisters out there who've felt real pain, to those who've endured being homeless, and to those who've lost everything but clawed their way back up into a position where they've got access to not only a computer, but the internet itself, my hat's off to you. You know what's what and what the real meaning of life is, so you sail strong, keep going, keep spreading your message. Remind the pompous and the bigoted, remind the elitists and the spoiled, remind them that everything they have is nothing, everything they have is just numbers in a bank account and luxury items they bought from the mall. Remind them that all those material possessions pale by comparison to the true human experience.

"The secret of success is learning how to use pain and pleasure instead of having pain and pleasure use you. If you do that, you're in control of your life. If you don't, life controls you. "
Tony Robbins

"Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding."
Khalil Gibran

Furries and Homosexuality

2012-02-26T02:07:00.001-05:00

Well it's been a little while since I've posted, and given some stuff that's happened, I think it's most apt that I discuss the fur fandom and the countercultures therein, namely the 30 or 40% who are homosexual.

As I type this I'm holding a flashlight in my mouth to see the keyboard and watching the laptop battery meter because the power's gone out again. If not for a tethernet internet connection I wouldn't be able to post at all; so I apologize in advance for any lack of tact or perception as I'm trying to crank this out before the battery runs out. Consider it a challenge I've presented to myself to keep life interesting.

Keeping life interesting, that actually kind of blends into what I was going to be discussing as to why furries exist in the first place. Of all the various fandoms, furries seem to get the most heat. Admittedly this has died down in recent years and has been replaced by a seething hatred of pokemon, digimon, yu-gi-oh, and now ponies in that order with intervals of about 1 year between each.

Now many would claim this heat would be a deterrent towards people who are just in it for the fun and not as a matter of self-identification, but I counter under the same context that a well known pony has been subtitled-captured-still-image as: "I'm gonna love and tolerate the shit out of you"

Some people in the fandom seem to thrive off drama and hatred, they seem to be entertained by rage and stress. This isn't to say all are like that, and this isn't to say it's entirely their fault. There's an old saying "we're the product of all our experiences" so if you continually hate a person for trying to express themselves, of course they're gonna turn into an absolute dickwad, and speaking of dicks that brings me to my next topic; homosexuality.

Maybe 1 in 10 of those reading what I just wrote probably had the thought "but what about lesbians, there's no dick there" and you'd be right. The problem is that lesbians seem to take a back seat to gay men on the internet in terms of hatred or disgust. It seems that by large, lesbians are seen as sex objects and gay men are seen as an unholy scourge, what misogynistic bastard made that a rule?

There are just as many gay women as gay men I've met in my travels, and quite frankly the only difference I see between them and heterosexuals by large is that they've had to put up with a lot more shit. This has one of three effects.

1; It turns them into a soft and easily damaged person who's been worn down to a nub by a cruel and dark world.

2; It turns them into a cold and unflinching person who could watch the twin towers fall and just shrug it off, kind of like me and how I've been for a good portion of my life.

3; It turns them into a hard and callous uncaring monster, who doesn't give a shit about the world anymore and would rather punch you in the face than hear one more gay joke.

Now the degree to which a person is turned into those has at least a dozen governing factors, and no two people are exactly the same. But there's one piece that plays a huge role, and that's in how they're treated.

This brings me back to the initial topic and how they connect to one another. People in the fur fandom are by large people who've said fuck the world and have come out and become open about who and what they are and what they like. They like animals, so they will behave like them, dress like them, read stories and look at art made about them, it's just who those people are and what they like.

In a community that exists on the basis of being open and honest about who and what you are, it only makes sense a larger portion of people who are homosexual, bisexual, pansexual, transsexual, transgendered, or any other obscure alignment I forgot to mention would come out about it. but this brings up another issue, if you find somebody who's both gay and a furry, you shouldn't hate them or yell at them or scream obscenities. You should be damned proud you live in a world of freedoms.

The very same freedom that lets you shout those obscenitis, the same freedom that lets you tell the world what religion you are or what political party you follow without taking an arrow to the chest (or knee, should the situation apply) is the freedom that lets them be who they are and not have to be afraid. Beyond that, I've found that by large gays tend to be more compassionate and open with their feelings, and furries are some of the biggest animal lovers I've ever seen, and no not in the sexual way.

And for that matter, if you're one of the big over testosteroned musclebound meatheads that see fit to berate and harass those of that community, cut them some slack, the gays can't genetically have kids and the furries are statistically less likely to find love and eventually have children with another human. If anything darwinism is on your side, so why add insult to injury by picking on somebody who's already got a hard lot in life? How about next time you trip I kick you in the ribs a couple times while you're on the ground, or if you turn your back I put a knife in it, wouldn't be fun, would it? So what makes you want to show the same behavior to them?

If anything, you straight and homophobic or furaphobic, yes, I made a word, shut up. If you people of those inclinations out there see what they do as so wrong and so bad, how about instead of fueling their hatred, you instead show them the good side. if you want them to see beauty in humans, then show them what makes us better than animals, if you want to show them how straight guys act, then display some fucking chivalry.

Don't do these things because you have to, but because it's the right thing. And in a final note just to act as a catch-all, if you want to say Jesus hates fags and "animal fuckers" then I ask you one question. When Jesus met a whore, did he stone her, or make her one of his best friends?

lack of posting

2012-02-09T12:54:00.000-05:00

I know there's been a lack of posts to this blog in the past week, but that's largely due to lack of inspiration. I've been going through what's best summed up as a "blah" mood and I've been unable to think of insightful things to post about.

Fear not, I'm going to a furmeet in a week, and I'm sure I'll bring home plenty of stories with me to fuel new blog posts pertaining to the furry community, so until then...patience.

Tanya Reviews "Fallout: New Vegas"

2012-01-27T11:58:00.004-05:00

Warning: PG-13 content below.

I finally finished it! And according to Steam's game time counter it took me 83 hours of grinding to complete the storyline. This is by no means because it's impossibly difficult, but because it's so bedazzlingly massive.

That being said, there's a lot to say about this game. Fallout: New Vegas is the fourth (fifth if you count Fallout: Tactics) in the Fallout series. Built on the same engine as the renowned Fallout3 and boasting it brings back things from the earlier titles it had a lot that it needed to live up to, something I feel it managed to do to an excess.

The sheer amount of things to do is incomprehensible, of that 83 hours it took me to beat it only maybe 10 was spent doing the main storyline and everything else was just dicking off. I have to admit that I cheated a little by consulting the Wiki, but that's like saying you're cheating at life because you read an instruction guide left to you by your dad, an apt comparison when you consider that the game has about as much content as the average person's life.

It was on the Wiki that I noticed that this game holds the current world record for dialogue at over 65,000 unique lines. Good Lord, no wonder I was left staring at the screen for twenty minutes at a time listening to a bearded man droll on about his day like so many visits to the old people's home. This by no means makes the game boring because if you pay attention to little hints and notes they drop all over in those hours and hours of audio you start to pick up on subtleties and unspoken truths of this fully developed world. This kind of sleuthing is the sort of thing that NCIS¹ nerds masturbate to.

So my initial response was one of jaw-dropping awe, but I feel any open field role playing game is only as good as how long it can keep you glued to the screen, and New Vegas understands that in that it has exactly a bagillion and three different places to explore, all conveniently placed just far enough from each other to be looming on your horizon and begging you to investigate them while you're teetering at the edge of how much you can carry, making the precarious decision between keeping your medical supplies or throwing them away to make room for more loot.

it's only when you drop your mass of consumable food items and go to that thingy on the horizon that you see it's decorative and you can't actually get inside, so you go back to your dropped loot only to find a swarm of deathclaws have found them to be quite tasty. This is basically the gist of the game as a whole; a lone wanderer who just keeps trying to do their thing despite that the entire world seems intent on killing you.

This sort of treatment is what causes people to go insane, and indeed I did. Right around player level 26 or so I decided I was fed up with obeying the rules so I made a backup save and went crazy.

"what do you want?" why I want to blow your face off good sir! "move along please" not until after I've used your insides on the wall in lieu of paint. And that's why this game had some primal satisfaction to it. It's like yes you're following the rules but at any point in time if you get fed up with how people are treating you then slaughtering everyone in the room is always a viable option.

so my final consensus on the game is:

1: the crafting system is well done, although I'm annoyed that it simulates the real world in that no matter how long you plan a crafting project you always forget exactly 1 piece you need to finish it, leaving you scouring the ruins of a robot factory because you swear you saw a fission battery there a few hours ago.

2: the reloading system is also great, the ability to tear down 1,000 useless 9mm bullets and turn them into 3 armor piercing rounds that will finally shut up that securitron that's laughing at you has something very satisfying about it, even if the conversion rates from one ammotype to another seem to be more than a little borked.

3: on the same topic as the crafting system and stemming off of the reloading system, the ability to have more than one type of ammo for an energy weapon is rather nice, even if your options are only big bigger biggest.

I found myself routinely compressing hundreds of regular rounds of ammunition for energy weapons into only a handful of max power rounds just for the enjoyable finger of god feeling when a laser pistol one-shots a raider, which you then find out ten shots later was a bad idea because like any electronic, if you run higher current than it was designed for through it, the magic smoke escapes and it stops working.

4: perks perks perks. while some of the perks have rather dubious benefits, there are others that are obvious right off the bat. two of my favorites that actually compliment each other and serve to directly engorge that part of my brain that triggers violence are Bloody Mess and Corona.

As the name implies, Bloody Mess is a perk that once taken increases the chance bodies will fall apart upon death. this chance increases by how much you overkill them by, which when you get your hands on the .50 caliber sniper rifle usually means their meat chunks will land in houston some time three days from now.

The Corona perk is a varient of Bloody Mess in that what it does is when you kill an enemy using an energy weapon their body gives off a blast similar to a plasma grenade. Combine these two together with a high powered energy weapon with a shot impact effect like the Gauss Rifle, which gives a blue flash and lens distortion where shots land, and what you're left with is every shot results in a massive explosion and nothing left but meaty bits. Again, primally satisfying. You pull the trigger, that person is Cntrl + Alt + Deleted from existence.

5: Factions! This game takes the factions of Fallout3 and takes them to a whole new degree. should you choose to be a nice person and talk to people instead of decapitating with a chainsaw before taking their wallet, you quickly find yourself in a lot of political positions. Helping person A will make person B hate you unless you explain to person B you're helping person A because person C wants to kill you. it gets very complicated if you want it to, but if at any point in time you just say "fuck it" then killing everyone and everything, as I've said repeatedly now, is always an option.

6: guns. oh god so many guns. I spent 83 hours perusing this game in detail, and even googled the locations of a few unique weapons like the Telsa Baeton Prototype shoulder cannon, which is like a personal ion cannon for all extents and purposes. Through all of this gameplay, I still haven't seen all the guns, especially not all of the unique ones. Again, it's the sheer content of this game that keeps a person going.

If you're a person that likes games with deep immersive plots, this is for you. if you're a person that likes big gunfights but is okay with waiting hours between engagements, this is for you. If you only like pointless carnage and you're not willing to work for it....GTFO. This game is designed so that should you so choose you can just kill everything you see, starting with smaller and weaker things like wildlife and working your way up to civilians, then soldiers, then robots, then main characters...but that's kinda cutting out all the pure substance that makes the game awesome.

Bethesda has found the sweet spot between pointless shooter, exploring free-roam, and deep plot RPG. And for that, I give this game a 4.8 out of 5. that 0.2 taken off is because you can't duct tape a minigun to E-DE.

Oh, almost forgot, gotta end with a quote.

"war...war never changes..."

¹NCIS is actually a very good show that I enjoy greatly.

Enjoying life and why it matters

2012-01-20T14:48:00.000-05:00

I know times are tough and there's a lot of messed up schist going on in the world, but I'm gonna shift from my normal super serious attitude to address something slightly more important than religion, politics, sports, or even the next year's line of iFails.

And that thing is enjoying life.

Something I see quite often in this world is people stressing out over stuff, especially stuff they can't control. Why? I'm sure you could give me a list of about ten things right off the top of your head, but stop and think, how many of those can you honestly tell me are of world-shattering significance?

No general has ever won a battle by panicking, no great inventor was remembered for being paranoid about people stealing their ideas...well except maybe Edison, but in all fairness he stole about half of his ideas from Tesla. No, what set them apart was their coolness. Their calmness and logic is what made them great.

I know that there's probably a lot going on in your life right now. You're worried about that bill that was late, you're afraid a family member won't be accepting of something you feel or believe in, or maybe you're worried somebody you know has a viewpoint you can't accept. Why worry? Does it do anything? All it does is keep your mind racing too fast to work out the problem and makes you blurt out things you may not mean when crunch time comes and you have to do something.

So relax, chill out, take breather and laugh at life.

I'm not exactly in the best of affairs, but I don't let myself worry over them. I just lean back, take a nice deep breath, and then laugh; because that's all you really can do when there's nothing you can do.

When you laugh at life, suddenly it doesn't seem so bad. It's a great high and doesn't cost a dime. This is something that a lot of people could benefit from, namely people in Washington.

Day in and day out, all I see is worry and mud slinging. I see people going "but he's gonna ruin america" "but he's atheist" "so what if I'm athiest, he's a fundie and wants to kill gays!" Does this really get us anywhere? Is this really how mature adults should act?

Get one thing straight and clear. We all have mud. Every single person on this planet, including you reading this and me writing it has done something they're not proud of. Does it really benefit us to be throwing that mud around like monkeys at the zoo?

I say we don't throw that mud around, we own up to it. We laugh at our problems and worries. We bake that mud down into bricks and make a house we can be proud to call our own, because that's the true mark of being a mature adult.

Being an adult is not the ability to make a good argument, but the capacity to benefit others without needing one.

"Courage is not the lack of fear but the ability to face it."
---- Lt. John B. Putnam Jr. (1921-1944)