Luca DR
patreon
Punishment reincarnation 32
🕑 Added 2024-02-18 17:46:32 +0000 UTC32 – Old friend Mekano
Melina sat and watched as Ishrin and Lisette assembled something on the ground. It didn’t look like a ritual to her, but then again Ishrin’s rituals rarely did look like normal rituals.
They made a great ring of black stone, taller than a person, with small little crystals inscribed with glyphs at its four cardinal points. Then, they took the Tier 6 core and lifted it up in the air, where it began to float. Below it they constructed an altar, with the crystal in the middle and spikes of the same black stone as the ring all around, protruding like growths following the rough shape of the crystal.
When they were done Ishrin motioned at Lisette to move away, and he crossed his legs and closed his eyes. The Tier 6 core began to glow, and an image of many stars, galaxies and planets appeared in the air above it. It moved around, panning, zooming, and shifting at great speed. Sometimes the firmament there depicted was like the night sky, at other times it was alien and strange, different, and never seen before on this earth.
Neither she nor Lisette had ever seen the sky like this. So used they were to how the night sky looked from the surface of Prima Luce, it took them a while to get used to what they were seeing. To think that planets were arranged in neat formations around their parent star, which in turn orbited the center of a large collection of stars so big that it boggled the mind… something shifted within her, and she found her energies restless. It had been a long time since her cultivation had felt so restless, stirred into motion by the cusp of an insight.
Beside her, Lisette was having a similar epiphany. Melina wondered what the girl was thinking, how she thought, but she had never been truly able to understand her strange mind. She could deal with it, although at times with great difficulty, but she could not really get why Lisette was the way she was. There had been great trauma in her past, but then again who could really claim to have lived a life without sorrow? Certainly nobody in their field of work, or else they would have little drive to put their own lives in danger, be it for the thrill of the hunt, for the pursuit of power, or for the righteousness of the world.
***
Ishrin browsed the multiverse like he was going shopping. At times he stopped at a specific star or planet, or maybe at a small construct that looked like a palace or was like a conglomeration of technology, either sleek and elegant, or rugged and rough. These things just hovered in the emptiness of the space between the stars, lit by their dim lights, tiny and insignificant yet so many like little swarms of insects. At times, entire stars were shrouded in a fine mist of artefacts, like a swarm of insects. Other times, the stars were encased in prisons of steel and glass, their energy siphoned out of them.
Ishrin was not after such advanced civilizations. They were always tricky to deal with, and most of them had some sort of insight into magic as well, despite their technological tendencies, which made trying to pierce the veil of the universe much harder to do undetected. No, what he was looking for was Mekano’s world, Terrigenysis.
A cyberpunk dystopia. Exactly what he needed.
He found it easily enough, the pale grey marble no longer blue and green under the light of its parent star, but shrouded in fog and smog. Now, he needed to find his target. Images of people, alien visages of all varieties and queer appearances appeared and disappeared in a flash as he dismissed them one after the other, until finally he found what he was looking for.
“Mekano. Hi.” He said with his eyes still closed, and a smirk on his face. “I wonder what face he will make when I summon him here.” He chuckled.
Then the whole light show died, and in its place a vortex of swirling energies was born inside the ring of stone, taking its energy from the Tier 6 core to fuel some sort of portal. It was nothing like a true multiversal travelling portal, but it didn’t need to be.
“I’ll be back soon,” Ishrin said and vanished inside the portal, only to return not a minute later.
With him was another person. Mekano, the brown, scaly alien with deep green eyes and a beak that they saw in the hologram. Except he was transparent, translucent like a ghost like he was not really here.
“Girls, this is Mekano. An old friend.”
They got up and waved hello.
“Mekano,” Ishrin turned to the grumbling alien who was still complaining about being summoned here without a warning. As a ghost no less. “This is Lisette, and this is Melina, our party leader.”
“Mekano says hello.” Mekano said. “Mekano wonders, old friend Ishrin, where is your wi—”
“Not here. And you will not ask again.” Ishrin’s reply was artic, colder than the ice that surrounded them.
“Mekano understands.” The alien squeaked. “So, what is it that you need Mekano to help you with?”
“That.” Ishrin pointed at the door.
“Party leader Melina,” Mekano said with his croaky and yet very high-pitched voice. “Do you wish for Mekano to open this door like old friend Ishrin says?”
Mekano winked. Ishrin sighed. “Come on dude…” he groaned.
Melina smiled. “Yes, please.” She laughed. “If Mekano could help us, we would be very grateful.”
“Mekano will help you gladly, stunningly beautiful party leader Melina. Mekano will help you gladly.”
As the alien turned to face the console, taking out a great multitude of tools from his belt, Ishrin turned to the girls.
“Gladly, he says.” He said. “I paid him a fortune to come here on such a short notice.”
Melina narrowed her eyes. “Did you pay him before or after kidnapping him?”
Ishrin did not reply. He had tried to access Terriganysis’ datasphere with his old implants but had failed, either because he no longer had said implants or because of his ghostly appearance on the other side. Hard to tell. He had to settle for a promise of payment, which had taken some convincing.
Mentioning the money elicited a grumble from the alien, although the grumble didn’t seem to be connected to the conversation, because then Mekano kept talking to himself, complaining about the terminal and the console, and the fact that they were frozen and needed to be heat fried, as he put it.
Ishrin shrugged. “I might have been a bit forceful, yeah. But Mekano is lazy, he needs to be… motivated or he won’t do anything. Especially now that he’s rich.”
“Rich!” Mekano cried out. “You say Mekano is rich? Then what are you, old fiend Ishrin? You are Greedy Rich Old Man Immortal Demon Ishrin, that’s what you are.”
Ishrin smiled flatly at him, a face that seemed to silence the man immediately.
“Ah, but Mekano is dredging up a past long gone. Ishrin is now old friend Ishrin, and nothing more. Mekano respects his choices.”
“Good. How’s the work on the console?”
“Going well. Going well. Mekano found something. Look.”
There was a thin wire connecting the mountain’s console to a small tablet in Mekano’s hands. He was holding it up with his thick digits, brown and scaly, for everyone else to see. Ishrin studied the text with a stoic and impassible expression on his face, however his emotions were clearly visible to all, shown by the behavior of Liù, his pixie. She flew up and down the air nervously, fluttering and humming in reflection to her master’s troubled mind. The others didn’t know if the two had a telepathic or empathic link, or if Liù could simply read her master well due to the two spending so much time together. None asked.
Preliminary activation sequence: 29%
Atmospheric magical saturation: 42% [THRESHOLD: 80%]
Executing directive 1.
“What does this mean?” Asked Lisette. “What is directive one?”
“I’m afraid Mekano cannot answer that.” Mekano said. “Mekano does not have access to the systems from this terminal. Now Mekano will work to open the door.”
After the half avian, half lizard man said that, he turned around and went back to fiddling with his tech.
“Do you have any idea what any of this is? We can probably blow up the mountain, there must surely be some sort of reactor we can overload or something but… you know, maybe the quest items are hidden somewhere in here.” Ishrin said.
“Do we still care about completing the quest?” Lisette interjected. “We have gained enough already.”
“No, we continue,” Melina said, “with Syrma at the guild, anything other than exemplary behavior will get us in trouble. The same goes for other cities, if you were thinking about moving. He’s smart, it’s very probable that he flagged us all as under review by the guild system. Besides, it’s not like we have encountered anything dangerous yet.”
“And you had to go and say it, didn’t you?” Ishrin chuckled.
“There’s another thing. I know nothing more than you do about the quest, however I do know something about this mountain. I think it’s safe to assume that it’s the same mountain as the one in the records I read.”
“Do tell.” Ishrin was interested.
“There were tales,” the adventurer sighed, “I found them early on after I assumed my position at the Noctis guild. Records of an ancient battle between strange beings, humanoids but not quite so, and something. Something big. Something dangerous. That something – and it’s never mentioned what it actually was – needed to be stopped at all costs. After they won, and the powerful presence vanished, the strange beings suddenly all turned to dust, but the evil was sealed away never to be found again. Or so the records say.”
“It sounds strange,” Lisette said.
“Mekano agrees. But Mekano found something in the archives while he was hacking. Come see, old friend Ishrin.”
Ishrin sighed, but made his way to the terminal. What he saw there made his breath catch in his throat. Holy shit. Nanomachines. This stuff can grey goo a whole planet if it isn’t stopped.
“What is it?” Melina asked.
“Nothing,” he replied a bit too quickly. “Nothing good, that is. You had it backwards: the strange beings were sent by the mountain, and not to fight the mountain. Nanomachine soldiers, capable of replicating and assimilating pretty much everything. No wonder they sealed this place away.”
“Who did?”
Ishrin shrugged. He could only think of one class of beings capable of exerting the kind of pressure Melina was talking about.
“A Tier 16.” Lisette said.
Ishrin inhaled sharply. “You’re too smart sometimes.”
“Is it true?” Melina asked, concern in her voice. “Are we involved in Tier 16 powerhouse affairs?”
“Their consequences, at the very least. And it could be that the person who sealed this realm was stronger than a measly 16, ‘cause… the kind of power they would need…” he trailed off.
Was it Albert? Was it one of his lackeys? He could sort of smell it now, the extradimensional power lingering in the air. It tasted like the white space. But why would they seal this place away? Why was it here in the first place?
His theory that this place did not belong in the current universe was beginning to sound too solid for his tastes. If this really was a remnant of an earlier iteration of existence, then it was dangerous indeed.
The party spent some time in silent contemplation, waiting for Mekano to finish his job with the door. They said nothing, each of them with their own thoughts occupying their minds, theories and ideas popping up to justify what was happening.
“Mekano is done.” A voice cut through their thoughts.
“Ah, nice.” Ishrin said after clearing his mind and putting on his best smile.
The door whooshed open.
“Thank you Mekano. Your help was very appreciated.” Melina said.
“Indeed.” Lisette said.
“Mekano is happy to help! Mekano will be seeing you, beautiful girls Lisette and Melina, once fate or old friend Ishrin wills us to be together again. Whichever happens first. Mekano just hopes it won’t be too long.”
Ishrin laughed. “Silver tongue. Go away now.”
“I’m not into… whatever species he is.” Melina said after he was gone.
“I am not either.” Lisette said.
Ishrin laughed. “Come on. Let’s see what’s up with the evil mountain.”
