It was a few weeks after that gathering of the immortals. We’d gotten a few invitations to other smaller events, but Jack and I had only really gone to the ones that the dragons had invited us to. We were shoring up our standing with allies first, before branching outwards to the rest of the immortal community.

I was in my workshop which by now was looking suspiciously like some evil villain’s lair. The workshop had been greatly expanded to accommodate all the tools and equipment I used on my various progress. A multitude of mechanical arms that ended either hands, claws, or the ends of the tools I tended to use most, hung suspended from the ceiling and the wall.

There were all sorts of shelves and tanks, and drawers that held biological, mechanical, and magical materials. The actual worktable had been replaced by a plane of adjustable gravity where components would just sort of float while I was working on them.

A worktable that only looked like an actual table when I wasn’t doing anything. Instead of standing at the table, there was a chair a few feet away, where I could sort of see everything, and spread my spiritual energy across the space evenly. I’d mentally interface with and/or psionically control all the tools from there.

I generally came here when I needed to prototype an idea before I went to the trouble of learning enough about the particular object, or invention, to create a spell-macro that would print more of the item into existence using my powers of data-manipulation and reality-alteration.

The things I worked on varied wildly and thus the tool-set included within my workshop was ever-expansive. For example, right now I was working on a modular upgrade to my empty-network’s user interface. A construct of pure data that I’d semi-materialized to make it a little easier for me to see the interactions. That of course meant, using semi-material tools and tools that were meant for manipulating non-tangible objects.

I was currently looking at a mass of floating blue text, complex, crystal puzzle pieces, a tangled nest of wiring and spinning gears, and a deluge of free-flowing elemental essences. When I was done all this would go back to being the numbers and code that made up the update. The update itself wasn’t anything groundbreaking. It was just some of those quality-of-life updates and bug fixes that often popped up and ate up a few minutes of your life.

The biggest reason I was doing the update was to cement some of the logic improvements that certain users had triggered through their use of my virtual-world and plug a fair number of holes, and security issues. Normally, I’d do this kind of update directly within the Empty-Network, but this time the number of changes I was making were large enough that it wouldn’t be wrong to say that I was basically re-making the entire network from the ground up.

I was making the update out here in the workshop, because at this point, a fair portion of the Shattered-World were essentially living within my Empty Dream, and it’d be kind of a problem to log them all off all of a sudden. Thus, the real trick of the update was essentially building it to write the network, in much the way a virus might re-write the genetics of a cell. Thus allowing the update to work and spread to the entire network without causing major interruptions of the Empty-Network’s operations.

“Hey, babe?” said a light, posh, voice.

“Hon?” I said. Continuing my work.

“Could you do me a teensy-tiny favor?” said Jack.

“Sure,” I said. Answering perhaps a little too quickly.

“Cool. Go on a date with Kalpana and do a little house shopping while you’re at it,” said Jack. Finally managing to knock me off course, and causing the data-structures I was working on to partially collapse.

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In hindsight, I probably shouldn’t have been “that” taken by surprise by Jack’s little request. Jack and I had been talking about expanding our little clan for a while now, Kalpana’s was just one name that Jack had brought up a couple of times as a potential candidate. Now it was becoming increasingly clear that Kalpana was probably more than just another “maybe” for Jack, which made me think I should probably give the prospect some serious thought too.

[Jill: Hey, Kal are you busy?]

[Kalpana: I’m always busy, but go ahead and ask anyway, maybe I’ll be able to squeeze you in? :P]

[Jill: *KEK* Okay, so I’m about to go house shopping...Or rather, mountain shopping...Whatever you wanna call it. Kian’s giving us the pick of one of the empty mountains on the dragon’s side of the Prism Spine. Jack’s busy with something, so I was hoping maybe you’d want to come with...Maybe we could grab something to eat afterward?]

[Kalpana: Alright, give me a few hours and I’ll be ready to go.]

[Jill: Cool. See you sevenish then?]

[Kalpana: Sevenish it is then…]

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Kalpana closed out of the Empty-Network’s messaging app after staring at the final message she’d sent for an additional minute and a half. Then she extruded the second pair of arms she normally kept tucked within/around her lower torso to speed up the shelving work she was doing in the Empty-Archive. Once all the work was done, she marched over to the harvester princesses, soldiers, and drones that worked alongside her in the archive, her hands on her hips.

“Sisters, I’m going to need your help. Apparently, I have a date coming up tonight,” said Kalpana.

First, there was silence. Then a chorus of hushed screams echoed out from the depths of the archives. A shrill war-cry from an unyielding and unified army. Shortly after the excited screaming, a harvester war council was called to help their precious sister plan for the upcoming battle.

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When I popped over to the main Harvester homeworld, the one with the biggest cities and habitations, Kalpana was waiting for me. Waiting inside a surprisingly ordinary-looking apartment considering how high her position was in the Colony. Kalpana wore a short and slinky purple-red shirt-dress that she wore over dark blue jeans.

She carried a purse that we both knew was almost entirely decorative thanks to the storage abilities of the Empty-Network’s interface, her own personal inventory, and a multitude of other storage items that she no doubt owned.

She also wore just enough makeup, the coloration of the blush and lipstick matching well with her golden-brown skin. Her straight black hair had been allowed to flow loose, though I could see that Kalpana had given it a light curling.

“Well, you look quite lovely today...Uh, Are you ready?” I said. Trying to be casual and failing miserably.

“Uh...Thank you. And yes. Yes, I’m ready. Let’s go,” said Kalpana.