***Tirnanog, Mount Aerie***

***Magnus***

“Mh!”

I was pushed, rolled, and landed on the cold floor before I was fully awake. Then I groaned and squirmed in the fresh air. Whatever devious entity had exiled me from the bed had also taken the sheets!

When I looked up, I realized I was inside the shelter and that the devious entity was no other than my wife, slash, partner.

The sudden breeziness caused me to shudder, but I didn’t want to get up. Just why did the climate in Aerie's caves have to be on the chilly side? Wasn't the temperature supposed to go up the deeper you went down into the Earth?

Asking the question reminded me we were inside a mountain and not deep down under.

With a huff, I lay my cheek back onto the cold stone. It always took me some time to get going in the morning. The fucked up dream from last night felt distant, leaving me unsure whether it had actually happened.

“Why are you always on top of me when I wake up?” Astra grumbled from her cosy spot on the cot.

“I could ask myself the same question,” I grumbled but grinned nonetheless at the memory of burying my face in her rack while she slept. Being on top also meant some fun time for me if I happened to wake up first.

Who would have thought coming to this world had such a wonderful perk?

“I've a headache,” Astra moaned. “We shouldn't have eaten the mindflayer. Gambling with your evolution is always bad KarmaaAAAAaah!”

My eyes shot instantly open at Astra’s anguished scream and my pulse rose from fifty up to two hundred. I hammered my arms against the floor, performing a push up that propelled me from horizontal to vertical in a single, powerful motion.

“Where?” I circled, searching for the attacker.

“My... my fingernails!” Astra complained with an indignant wail. “They are white! And too long!”

I turned to face her, my eyes wandering to her hands.

Her fingernails had turned a bony white and looked thicker than the whimsy things which a normal human couldn't even call natural weapons. The change didn't quite make them genuine claws, but they were as close as one could get without it being a hindrance.

To my taste – which was shaped by Earth's culture – Astra's new assets were just a normal woman's fingernails. Even if the length was a little on the eccentric side.

Astra looked at my own hands. “You too!”

When our eyes met, she glared and I instantly knew what was up.

She had some hangups about her appearance being less human than others.

It felt petty to oust fellow humans in a world with bug-people and cannibals, but children could be unkind about the smallest things. From what Astra was willing to share with me, her filaments had cost her more than one friendship with other teenagers when she was younger.

It left her with a trauma which she just couldn't get over. Even now she became discouraged when people were intimidated by her looks.

I had a different point of view to offer, but I was wary of the discussion which would follow once I shared it with my mate.

Her fellow clansmen were only partly intimidated by the Cuthulu theme we had going on. People weren't freaking out just because of Astra's appearance, but because she was a Frost. The tentacles were a clear sign she belonged to a powerful family and people reacted to her family's clout at least in part.

Not to forget, Astra also displayed a somewhat mean character when she set her mind on a goal. My memory was drawn to the guardsman who she made an example of when we arrived. There would have certainly been ways to handle the situation differently, but she had chosen to send a man on a trip to the hospital because it promised the best results.

Seeing her darkening expression, I was reminded of the issue at hand and my brain immediately went into damage containment mode. “They are so pretty!” I exclaimed while trying to hide my horror upon turning my attention towards my own hands.

My fingernails had grown out some... like a woman's... or a hobo's!

I hoped it was possible to clip these things! Or file them down!

“You are trying to distract me with compliments!” Astra complained. “You are good, but I can tell when you put on your social mask.”

Her words made me realize that here on Tirnanog, I hadn't seen anyone with something other than economically trimmed fingernails. The women of this world were too focused on practicality and survival than to waste time polishing and prettying up their claws.

At least as long as said claws weren't mutation-induced.

“No, not at all,” I denied quickly. “Back on Earth, all the women I knew preferred long fingernails! It is a symbol of beauty and status. They even paint them and have them manicured. Some draw little pictures onto them. There are people whose entire job revolves around prettying up fingernails. Please don't think I am lying. I am only a little freaked out because it's... normally restricted to women. Do you think the nail clipper still works on these?”

Astra's tight expression relaxed somewhat. “I think I remember my... real mom doing that.”

When I noticed I had shifted her agitation to a different and maybe worse topic, I quickly leaned in and hugged her, not knowing what else to do. In a way, we had both lost our families, but I had been an adult when it happened. Astra was a teen when the government took her.

“It’s fine.” Astra pushed me away.

Thankfully, it turned out that I hadn't made her sad, only contemplative about the past. After all, it had been over a decade since she came to this world. To her, it was enough time to come to terms with fate.

As it turned out, the nail clipper didn't work.

The ones we brought with us bent immediately and were useless. To trim my fingernails back to a more manly style, I had to use the metal file and the whetstone which were intended to maintain our weapons.

“Are those things made out of metal?” I complained after I was done. Trimming my fingernail ended up taking an hour and caused a groove in the whetstone which hadn't been there before.

“Who would have thought that of all traits the mindflayer could give us, we get its famous chitin claws,” Astra commented with a huff while I gave my nails the final touch.

She had already filed hers to shape, following my suggestion of keeping them long. It had required less work than mine.

“I do hope the change doesn’t extend to our bones. That would be bad since we already have a bone mutation,” my partner continued. “But mindflayer chitin is famous for rivalling steel in its sturdiness.”

She kept staring at her hands. “The mindflayer mutation is notorious for its unpredictability, but I've never heard of someone getting a physical trait from it. Did you notice any other changes? My headache implies we should have gotten more than the claws. Maybe it’s just one of these unpleasant side effects.”

I also felt a slight twinge in the back of my head, but I wouldn't have called it a headache. “Something like that. It's more like that tired and disoriented feeling right after waking up.”

Astra sat up on our cot and stretched, then punched the air a few times with supernatural speed. Her expression was intense as she performed the same exercises as every morning.

“Oh, wow!” Astra got up and grinned stupidly. “Check this out!”

I watched while she performed a series of punches and kicks. It took me over a minute, but I finally realized Astra's movements were much smoother than I remembered.

Using the zippers' supernatural speed required extreme concentration. Astra and I had been stonewalled by the need to restrict the skill to certain parts of the body. Leaving us with no choice but to perform just a single punch or kick at a time. Due to our training, we had gotten extremely good at chaining the skill, creating the impression we could do more.

What Astra was doing right now surpassed anything I had seen from her before. She was moving her entire body at the same time.

Astra stopped her performance with a shit-eating grin on her face.

Then she drew in her filaments close to her body, turned all of them into clothing, and vanished, reappearing on the other side of the room.

“Astra!” I raised my hand, elated about her breakthrough and worried at the same time.

Before I could stop her, Astra flashed back to me, flicked my nose, then flashed away again.

“Whomp!”

The hollow thud of a powerful impact shook some dust from the ceiling.

Astra reappeared against the wall to my left, stumbling backwards before landing on her butt.

“Ouch!”

“Astra!” I quickly ran to her side upon seeing the oval dent in the wall right at the height of her face.

“Nh am hine.” She waved me away before a small river of blood spilled from her nose and down her chin.

I winced. “That doesn't look fine to me. Be more careful! A normal human would have broken her nose or neck! If not mashing her brain to paste!”

“Hut I hid it,” she retorted stubbornly. “Did it!”

If she wasn’t ready to admit overdoing it, then she was fine, allowing me to let out a sigh of relief.

I rolled my eyes and helped her to get to the small washbasin which was fed by the shelter's water tank. No matter the enhancements to our muscles and bones, I wouldn't be surprised if she had suffered a major concussion from this.

“How?” I asked once she had rinsed off her face and I was sure she wouldn't collapse on me.

“You have to concentrate and treat each movement as a different task...” Astra explained. “It just came naturally to me when I did the exercise. Once I tried to split my attention on two movements at once, it was suddenly like there were two of me, each one able to take care of a different task. Like a Parallel Mind!”

I frowned at her, slightly unsettled by the term.

When Astra saw my expression, she pouted. “I am not bullshitting you. Just try it! I am not making it up. There's no finagling out of our bet!”

Right... Astra and I made bet some time ago on who would be first to unlock superspeed running.

“No.” I held up a hand. “I believe you. It's your win.”

The name of the mutation. It was exactly like Gaia said in the dream. Did my unconsciousness tell me about Parallel Mind in advance? Or was it instinct? Thalia's mother mentioned many mutations come with a set of instincts that help use them.

It was probably something like that. Certainly more believable than some godlike energy being, or avatar of life, or whatever, recruiting me for its war.

“Then what is it?” she asked.

I shook my head. “Probably nothing. This ability... just surprised me. Shouldn’t it have been something more esoteric?”

“Just try it!” Astra cheered me on.

A single look at her face and the spreading red of burst capillary veins in her eyes convinced me of taking it slow.

I started with our morning workout and was pleasantly surprised when the ability came to me just as easily as to Astra.

There was no proper way to describe it, but if I had to, I would have said it was like sufficient concentration allowed me to split my attention and have another me perform tasks that a single me couldn't. The other me was me, but also not at the same time.

After half an hour of trying out my abilities, the true extent of this new skill came to me. Controlling our supernatural speed was just one aspect of the new possibilities which had opened up.

Keeping up the exercise, I tried to set one aspect of myself on counting the tiles which made up the shelter's walls and ceiling.

Another part of me was directed towards calculating the logarithm of the first three prime numbers.

It took a few tries until I succeeded and felt my mind split.

My body flashed from one side of the room to the other and the answers to my questions popped into my head, disorienting me slightly.

I now knew the room was laid out with approximately 800 stone tiles and the answer to my other question was ‘0.301’, ‘0.477’ and ‘0.699’.

This also taught me the limits of Parallel Mind. My other selves couldn’t accomplish tasks that my main identity couldn't. They weren’t some omnipotent calculator which whispered answers into my head.

For example, the one which I had tasked with counting the tiles hadn’t counted every single one. I knew that the other me… I had counted the number of tiles along the length and height of the walls and multiplied the result out, giving an estimation.

A method which the ‘original me’ would have used too.

“You did it too!” Astra came hopping to my side like a little child, giddy about our new powers.

“And I found another application for this Parallel Mind.” I quickly explained my findings to Astra, which set off a whole new set of experiments and exercises as we tried to find the limits and the best applications for this new mutation.

“I think this might even be better than stupid telepathy,” Astra commented after an hour of us going wild. “I wonder what my friend might sense from us now. Will she get conflicting results once we ‘split’ our minds?”

“I wouldn’t get carried away,” I warned and wiped a bead of sweat away from my eyebrow. We had gone on for some time but compared to our regular training routine we hadn’t done all that much. “This ability is taxing. We have to be careful not to overdo it in a real combat situation. One speed burst every few minutes is fine, but I doubt I could do it consecutively more than five times in a row.”

“Probably the reason why zippers do only short dashes,” Astra commented with a click of her tongue. “But the mental thing seems to have no serious limitations apart from our natural limit of concentration. It’s like doing serious math without pause. So… maybe an hour before the brain conks out.”

“We have to test it out,” I mused. “Maybe setting up a Parallel Mind for less taxing tasks is possible. Maybe having one do nothing more than to listen for suspicious sounds. Like an early warning system.”

Astra clapped her hands together. “Oh, that sounds totally like a possibility!”

“Could you please try your experiments somewhere else?” the mummy on the cot across from ours shifted. “Because of you two, I couldn’t sleep all night. Every thirty minutes you shift around and switch places as if you are in an unconscious wrestling match.”

“She is awake!” Astra ran over to our survivor, slash, prisoner. “Do you need water?”

“No,” the mummy replied in her croaky voice. “But some soup would be nice.”

“Coming right up.” Astra went to get some from the minimalistic stove in the shelter's corner.

I walked up to the mummy and tested her injuries at the shoulder. The combination of raw flesh, bandages, and Astra’s salve had caked up and dried out, creating something of a cocoon around the person.

“It’s honestly surprising that you are still alive,” I commented. “After seeing you coming out of the monster's guts, I wanted to just put you out of your misery.”

“Maybe it would have been better,” the mummy croaked.

“So, what’s your name? You think you can be transported?” I asked.

“Ginevra,” the mummy stated fatalistically. “And the sooner I get out of this accursed cave, the better.”

Astra returned with the soup. “We will need you to stand witness once we get you back to the clan. What was your reason for being out here?”

Ginevra wasn’t the most forthcoming prisoner, but she answered all of Astra’s questions with enough prodding.

Astra threatening to withhold the food might've been an additional incentive.

Ginevra's group of hunters came from the third strata and had been poaching in the Frost’s territory for quite some time. The venture was successful enough to earn them a decent living. From time to time, they even escorted influential people from other stratas on a guided tour through Frost territory.

It all came to an unfortunate end when they ran into the mindflayer.

Astra leaned back when she couldn't think of any more questions. “I still don’t understand how we could run into the remains of Ginevra’s group. The belly is a limited hunting ground, yes, but it’s still large and the carrionworms and other wildlife clean up traces of any camp within days. It should be extremely unlikely for us to come across them.”

“You are thinking of it the wrong way, Astra,” I gestured at Ginevra. “From the sound of her story, she did this for a living. This implies frequent trips into your territory. Maybe we should ask how her team made sure they wouldn’t run into one of your hunting groups.”

Ginevra shifted around on her cot, clearly uncomfortable with my line of thinking.

Astra returned her attention to the patient. “Do I have to ask? Maybe I should make you sit up again? It’s so much easier to feed you that way, even if moving is painful.”

“Please, no,” Ginevra begged. “I honestly don’t know the details. We were just the grunts who did our superior’s bidding. All I know is that our contact from the third strata always gave us dates on which it would be safe to venture into your territory. We would travel up an old mining shaft from the third strata and take one of the Belly’s side entrances. Then we would hunt for game and leave within the allotted timeframe.”

Astra pursed her lips. “It’s still so unlikely...”

I shook my head, becoming slightly frustrated with Astra. “Don’t you get it? They have someone who tells them when to come here. They know when it is safe to poach. I bet they have someone with access to that ledger of yours. The one that large woman keeps at the clan’s exit. I bet their poaching operation fills up most of the available time with their people.”

After a moment of thought, I added, “Heck, if I were them, I would even bribe the one who manages the hunting groups and have him or her make some opportune windows for my poachers.”

Astra’s mouth stood open while I put everything together. “Someone is betraying the family? Then how didn’t they know about us...” She shook her head and covered her face. “Forget it. Of course, they didn’t know. I went to my father to clear our trip above the organisation's head. We strong-armed ourselves through without the proper legislation.”

I nodded. “If we hadn’t run into Ginevra’s group, then we would have encountered another. It sounds highly unlikely to me for someone to bribe what must be a high official to get those timetables and then not make full use of them. The only coincidence here is that Ginevra’s poachers got themselves eaten before we arrived.”

“If you are right, then this might be a bigger concern than I thought. Sadly, it makes too much sense,” Astra commented with a sigh. “I guess I didn’t want to believe it because it means all the more that we have to get Ginevra back as soon as possible. Just why did our honeymoon have to turn out this way.”

“Just get me back and I will testify anything you want,” Ginevra begged. “Preferably, without you running off to hunt a mindflayer! You two are insane. What would I have done if you hadn’t come back?”

“Been eaten upon trying to leave the shelter?” Astra commented without a hint of empathy. “Starved inside the shelter? Succumbed to your injuries? Be glad that you are worth more alive than dead.”

I looked at her, wondering whether Astra would have left the woman for dead if it meant we could continue our honeymoon.

Ginevra glared at Astra before she whispered, “There is a word to describe the two of you. And that is psychopaths! The two of you, you deserve each other! Who in his right mind would do such a thing?”

I sighed and turned away from our patient. “Come, Astra. Ginevra is obviously tired and not in her right mind. We have to pack our gear. I bet if she feels well enough to curse us out, she can be jostled around a bit while we transport her home.”