Chapter 39: The First Step

With the University taken care of, I was at something of a loss with regards to my projects.

Really, that was an advantage of running a feudal fiefdom; so long as there wasn’t some serious issue, a lot of the lower level management just happened, and I got taxes. As for the things that were my problems, well, those were all running very smoothly.

My Ravens and Hounds had reduced crime and corruption to practically zero, and any violations were recorded, tabulated, and forwarded for my rubber-stamping by my legions of feathery, furry justice. My peasants pretty much had to try to starve given the recent explosion in agricultural productivity from better grain and farming, and all the micro-loans I’d made available to buy new and improved animals. There were hundreds of maesters and healers to protect against illness and injury. Business was booming. And any of my neighbors would have to have been idiots to pick a fight with me; I was not only a KYAG (Kiss-Your-Ass-Goodbye) level sorcerer, but I was also the King’s favorite. Plus I had probably the best army in Westeros under my banners.

Suffice to say things were going pretty well. But I had a lot of time on my hands. There were two possible projects I had scheduled. My dragons, which I had yet to hatch, and beginning to explore other planes. I decided to go for the exploration, mostly because I’d had enough of Westeros. As awesome as having dragons would be, it was sort of like having a child – a massive responsibility. To steal an RSPCA slogan, dragons are for life, not for Christmas.

I wanted a vacation though, not a new magical pet (no matter how awesome it would be). So I started Sending out pairs of summoned Ravens to scout planes that I found nearby. Unfortunately the active communications link didn’t work over the inter-planar distances, but I could still Call one of the Ravens and then review its memories. The second Raven provided a beacon I could teleport myself to if the world proved interesting.

It didn’t take long for me to find a world that was basically science-fiction, with hovercars and spacecraft. It was a fairly green, unpolluted world, with a lot of swampland and water coverage. The people seemed happy and healthy, the government unobtrusive – really, things seemed almost worryingly paradisiacal.

The locals called it Naboo.

I had my vacation spot.

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I had to make some last preparations before leaving. Jon was used to being put in charge of things, and was already my military commander. He had done well during the war games, was a knight, the bastard son of the Hand, and I trusted him; in short, he was the perfect candidate to be my right hand. But this time, he wasn’t staying back. I was going on vacation, but that’s always more fun when there’s a friend to share in the adventure.

Instead, I was leaving Nevermore in charge. He was my normal diplomatic envoy, messenger, and voice; people were used to assuming that I was speaking through the bird, and he was clever enough to keep up that pretense. Not to mention as my Director of Intelligence, Nevermore did more to run things than I did. I’d check messages from him via Raven a few times a day in case of emergencies, but I wasn’t anticipating any issues.

Before I left though it was time to improve my enhancements. I had grown massively in mana stores over the years, with about sixteen times as much mana capacity as I had had last time I upgraded. I was reaching the stage of being inhuman rather than superhuman though; issues with the passing of time when using an accelerated mental state and the like could make the experience of having superpowers uncomfortable, so I was also adding in an adaptive scaler. I’d be able to feel like I was fully committed in a physical endeavor with a more human-level partner, but all of the power would still be waiting for when I called on it.

As per usual, I started with improving my mana senses and thought acceleration. I moved onto precognition, which had boosted enough that I could use it to simulate other potential mental states by precognitively predicting them in real time. That stacked further with actual mental partitions that I could run via my improved cognition and thought acceleration. When I chose to devote true focus to an issue, I was as much a mentat, a human supercomputer, as I was an ordinarily (highly) intelligent person.

It was just a shame that I mostly thought faster, clearer, and more, as opposed to more creatively or better. Improving baseline thought metrics was something I had shied away with for fear I’d do myself some damage.

With that done, I updated my mental ward to be as effective and powerful as possible, and improved the finesse and reaction time of the spell that was meant to rescue me from hostile magics which were able to shunt me into some hostile dimension or location.

Next I turned to my Green based boosts of Physique, Oakflesh, Regeneration and Dragon-Bones. By the end of the upgrade cycle, I was a the point that my unrestricted full strength made steel feel as weak as jello. My flesh when attacked was ridiculously hard, not quite as much as diamond perhaps but close, while still maintaining the toughness and ductility that you get out of steel. It behaved strangely as well, soft and supple until stressed. The speed and completeness of regeneration was approaching that of Wolverine or Deadpool from the comics. Meanwhile my skeletal system was effectively a magical superconductor and supercapacitor, while beyond any natural material in strength and toughness. Even without the magic active, I was twice as strong and fast as a professional athlete. With it active, I was well within super-hero range.

The Red upgrades gave me the instant reaction speed to take full advantage of my improved physical potential. Beyond that I could hasten, breaking free of the constraints of time to the extent of near instantaneous movement of limbs, seeming to teleport short distances when seen by an outside observer. I estimated my fire-proofing at four thousand degrees Celsius, hotter than molten tungsten or boiling uranium. When I allowed my blows to have the full increased impact, they hit more like artillery shells.

White’s defensive upgrades increased as well. My stored heal, when tested on some Science! animals, proved capable of healing from two vaporizations. The shield spell was improved both in strength of each individual shell, as well as the number of shell layers to the point that I doubted a modern military could defeat it. I suspected a spaceship’s armament might still be able to though. The conceptual armor that lay underneath was, as far as I could tell, equivalent to the more armored section of a battleship, or perhaps a reinforced bunker. My anti-undead aura would likely destroy any zombie before it got within striking range, and my defense against being exiled was further reinforced.

From Black, I improved my defense against disease and toxin. I doubted that even a magically enhanced disease or poison designed to harm me specifically would be effective for long. The improved ability to consume meant that I stripped anything organic that I ate for all of its possible benefits, whether nutrition, energy, essence, or even natural benefits from different types of biological mechanism.

The highly efficient strength of a chimp, speed of a cheetah, eyesight of a hawk, reaction time of a spider… all of these were mine naturally as I stripped the food for its benefits and incorporated it into myself. Soon I would be able to do similar to concepts, eventually even to inorganic materials. Similar to the protagonist of RE: Monster, I would be able to gain the conceptual advantages of everything. I was looking forward to it greatly.

With myself upgraded, and similar upgrades pushed out to Jon, our animals, and my Paragons, we were finally ready.

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I Walked to Naboo’s main spaceport in their capital, Theed. Walking is… indescribable. There literally aren’t words in the human language for it.

Mechanically, I think of it as moving in the direction of not, passing through the interplanar chaos, and then coming out the other side into some local reality. It’s sort of like being on a soap-bubble, with lots of other soap bubbles all occupying the same space but shifted just out of phase so that they normally don’t interact with each other. Any soap bubble, or plane, that happens to have part of the soap, rather than the air it contains, in contact with my own part of the soap is close enough to easily reach. The further the soap surface is though, the harder it is to reach without a beacon to jump to.

But that doesn’t express the sheer awful, terrible, majestic wonder of passing through the space between. A thousand times more hypnotic than watching a dancing fire, more visually impressive than watching an exploding volcano, more pressing down on the sense of self than zooming out and seeing the earth in relation to the galaxy for the first time in a planetarium.

And then I was back in reality.

What a trip.

I pulled Jon to my side. He was pale, sweating, wide eyed.

“Are you alright, Jon?” I asked. No reply. “Jon!” I barked out, startling him from his daze.

“Bloody fucking hell,” he muttered. “What… No, I don’t want to know. Just, lets avoid doing that as much as possible, alright?”

I laughed.

He scowled. “It’s not funny.”

I just laughed harder at his grim, stony visage.

“What in the Gods’ name is so funny?” he burst out.

I was in stitches at this point. “It’s just,” I gasped, “it’s just your face. You look just like a young Ned, when he’s scolding Robert! It’s too funny!”

His eyes widened in horror. “No. No! I refuse. I will not spend an eternity being your responsible adult, Odysseus.”

I just laughed harder. “It’s too late! You’re doomed already.”

As this was going on, we were walking into one of the customs offices arranged around the spaceport. The customs officer we approached just looked at us and shook her head at our antics.

At first I’d been worried about how to infiltrate Naboo, but the scouting from my Ravens showed that to be unnecessary. One of the Ravens had daringly flown into the customs and immigration hall, then spent days perched unmoving on the wall. Humans don’t tend to notice things like that, and it was days before the Raven was detected. Afterwards, the person who did so assumed that someone was playing a subtle prank, and left it unbothered, too happy to be in on the joke to risk disrupting it.

Security wise, Naboo was a joke. But it made sense. The Galactic Republic that it belonged to was huge. Naboo itself was the capital world of its sector, Chommell, which included over forty thousand systems with some sort of sentient presence, even if it was just a prospector who was mining unclaimed asteroids. More heavily colonized over the past thousand years, the sector had a relatively low population of about fifty billion. The Republic had over a thousand sectors, and at least a hundred trillion citizens.

Keeping track of that many people was next to impossible without being a complete technological police state; the Republic was somewhere in between the EU and the UN for its collective influence and effectiveness, and couldn’t manage that.

Beyond that, there really wasn’t much of a reason for Naboo to have strict policies for visitors. Terrorism wasn’t really a thing. Naboo had extensive welfare for its citizens. As long as a visitor wasn’t trying to get welfare benefits, and didn’t commit a criminal act, they were happy for people to be there. Even then, it was relatively easy to immigrate, especially if you were willing to get an education and join the workforce. And if you were a criminal, Naboo’s philosophy was that you’d eventually be caught and dealt with then; that was, after all, the purpose of the security forces. I assumed there were automated face-readers, or the like, to catch those who had been banned from Naboo, but visible security was very light.

The world had less than a billion human permanent residents, and reminded me quite of bit of a very cultured, architecturally beautiful New Zealand. Philosophy, art, and architecture were some of the most common fields of work – note, I don’t say employment because many of the people doing so lived purely off of the state’s money. Luckily for Naboo, they had vast reserves of high quality plasma. Like Saudi Arabia with its oil, they got a lot of money from the Trade Federation. But there was still work to do, a populace that didn’t see much need for it, and a lot of spare land, so immigration was easy.

Thus, customs officers on Naboo were as much greeters, facilitators, and tourism bureau as they were actual law enforcement officers.

“Good morning,” the customs officer greeted us perkily. She was wearing a neat uniform in friendly, pastel colors. “How are you today?”

“Very well, thank you,” I replied with a grin. “Happy to be on your beautiful planet.” It always pays to be polite and friendly in these situations.

“Yes, Naboo is a lovely place. May I ask what brings you to Naboo?”

“My friend Jon and I are planning on doing some independent study, then perhaps study at one of the universities.”

“Oh, that’s great!” she replied. “Let me give you these pamphlets about free educational resources, higher education on Naboo, and the work scholarship program. The work scholarship program allows just about anyone to study for free; they even pay you a stipend. After you graduate, you owe a year of work per year of education. You do get paid for that work, pretty well actually, and afterwards its very easy to get Nabooian citizenship. I did the program myself, and its just been fantastic!”

This is what I meant by their customs process being easy.

“Now, if you can just place your bags on the scanner. It automatically checks for any restricted chemicals and biologicals; we don’t want to ruin the environment, after all!” she chirped. “Did you have any other luggage, by the way? I noticed you each only have a carry-on.”

I grimaced in mock pain. “Unfortunately, we lost it halfway through the trip. We’ll need to replace most of our clothing and toiletries.”

“Oh, that’s terrible!” she gasped. The scanner turned green. “Well, it looks like everything’s good. You can use the information terminals to show a map to the spaceport’s shopping centers. There are also money changers in case you need to exchange currencies. I hope you have a nice day, and welcome to Naboo!”

“Thank you, you too,” I replied. And that was it. We were through.