Jebediah Trapper was sitting in the office of one of the most powerful beings on the planet. The desk looked heavy, and the shelves were stuffed with arcane memorabilia, but Jeb was fairly sure they were a clever mislead to trick the observer into thinking the owner of the velvet-floored room had a trace of mortal concerns left in him.

“Let me try and put this in terms you’ll understand,” Vex said, the skeletal keegan steepling his fingers. “A thief breaks into your house and steals from you, smashing a bunch of your valuable experiments in the process. An hour later, the thief returns to your home asking you to remove a splinter he accrued mid-robbery.”

“That’s a pretty long-winded way of saying ‘no’,” Jeb said, scowling. “Besides, in your analogy, the thief could easily remove the splinter. I can’t.”

“Can’t you?” Vex asked, cocking his head.

Jeb wasn’t interested in playing a guessing game. “No.” No, he could not remove the nuke that had been stapled to him in the fifth dimension.

“Well, there you have it,” Vex said, sitting back in his oversized chair.

“You’re not the slightest bit concerned about me going nuclear in your city and erasing you from existence?”

“Nope.”

Jeb studied the grinning skull of the sindio for any sign of emotion other than smug superiority. There wasn’t much.

“You know, if I was in your place in your analogy, I would probably beat the thief within an inch of his life. It’s surprising you haven’t leveled any kind of punishment against me. It’s not because you’re afraid of me exploding…”

Jeb thumbed his chin as he thought. A moment later, it came to him.

“You’re curious. You just wanna see what happens.”

The keegan’s face twitched with amusement.

“Well, this has been a complete waste of time.” Jeb stood and made to leave the ancient wizard’s midtown office.

“I wanted to add,” Vex said, raising a boney finger and capturing Jeb’s attention. “In the unlikely event you survive this, I’d be open to hiring you. In ages past, when I still took apprentices, I used to assign heroic tasks to weed out the unexceptional. I think this qualifies.”

Jeb raised a brow. That was a whole can of worms that he didn’t have the mental fortitude to deal with right now. Jeb decided to be flippant. “You have dental?”

“Of course,” Vex responded immediately.

“I’ll think about it.”

Jeb went to the entrance, slid his shoe back on and clomped out onto the street, glancing behind him as the office dissolved into myst, leaving nothing but a solid stone façade in the side of a bathhouse, and a drawing of a door.

Wizards, Jeb thought, scowling for a moment with frustration and a bit of envy before he faced forward, orienting himself on the orphanage. A freshly bathed melas leaned against the opposite side of the cobbled street, watching Jeb with a slack jaw, a skewer of meat drooping from his fingers.

“What, you’ve never seen someone step out of constructed space before?” Jeb muttered as he began walking towards home.

Humans and aliens were…kinda-sorta getting along. You could cut the tension with a knife, and crime crossed species lines more often than not, but here and there, Jeb saw an industrious human working a street stall, elbow-to-elbow with a melas, or a bunch of human children playing soccer with a keegan child, who was nearly a foot taller than them.

It probably wasn’t going to happen in Jeb’s generation, but things were gonna get better. He probably wasn’t going to live to see it, but still…

It’s times like this I think about death a lot, Jeb thought, surveying the bones of L.A. stitched together with Solmnath. In some places, Jeb even saw actual construction machinery tearing up shitty cobblestone roads and laying down good old-fashioned asphalt.

Probably had something to do with the king and queen of L.A.: Brett and Amanda.

Sure, they were slutty sellouts, but they were also the king and queen of L.A. A certain amount of moral ambiguity is excusable with results like that.

Sometimes I wish I’d jumped on the sellout train myself. Duke Trapper, ruler of Hawaii. Maybe Cancún. Actually, I wish I’d even had the opportunity to jump on the sellout train. He hadn’t even dropped into the throne room like everyone else after the Impossible Tutorial.

Why does this shit keep happening to me? I bet it probably has something to do with my gam-gam.

Jeb was 99% convinced he had some distant relation to the queen of the fairies, and it made things like causality stand on its ear.

“What’d he say?” Smartass asked, walking beside him from a honeyed fruit stall—owned by Ron the Necromancer, the richest human in L.A. He’d left her there since impulsive fairies and ancient wizards mix like oil and water.

Think of the devil, Jeb thought, gazing down at the little fairy. She’d been experiencing a growth spurt recently, and stood about knee high. Her wings were beginning to have trouble supporting her mass, and she’d unconsciously begun to walk more often.

“He didn’t say no,” Jeb said. “He strongly implied it.”

Smartass did a wing-assisted leap and grabbed onto Jeb’s homespun clothes that looked like they belonged in a spaghetti western, climbing to his shoulder before taking her seat there—a seat that she was too stubborn to admit she might be outgrowing.

For the time being she fit, but it wouldn’t be long…

“When I explode, are you going to explode, too? A fraction of an explosion is still an explosion. Especially a nuclear one.”

“I don’t know,” Smartass admitted with a frown. “Maybe I will. Maybe I’ll just get bigger… I’m not used to worrying about things for longer than a couple seconds. I don’t like it.”

Jeb snorted. “Tell me about it.”

“Ooh! Honeyed nuts!” Smartass said, tugging on his ear and trying to steer him toward a stall with a melas selling the confections.

And there she goes. Smartass’s ability to focus on a single topic was still somewhat…anemic.

“You got plenty of sweets at the fruit stall,” Jeb said, walking past as Smartass leaned off his shoulder, stretching to reach the stall with every ounce of effort she could muster.

“Hnnnng!” She grunted as she reached, falling several body lengths short, but still willing to make the attempt. “Jeb, candied nuts have protein. I need that, too!”

“Mrs. Everett’s dinner will have protein in it.”

“Aww…I hate you!”

Jeb raised a brow at the fairy glaring at him with a pout, arms crossed.

Smartass has been using the ‘H’ word a lot. She couldn’t lie, either, so she truly did hate him at the moment she said it. Or at least…she felt like she did. Smartass was acting strange. More volatile than she used to.

Jeb wasn’t sure if that was because of the nuclear bomb stitched to him in the fifth dimension, or if it was something different. It wasn’t like he could test what was causing it effectively.

The fairy was sullen and silent for the rest of the trip back to Jeb’s orphanage, until she smelled Mrs. Everett’s stew.

Smartass took off like a bolt, gliding down to the faculty table where a bowl about the size of a coffee mug had been set aside for the little fairy.

“I love you, Mrs. Everett!” she shouted as the dumpy, white-haired woman ladled chunky soup into the tiny bowl.

“I love you too, sweetheart.” Mrs. Everett refused to call Smartass by her given name.

Jeb sat and ate the oilwurm stew, then separated from Smartass, leaving her with her third bowl of soup.

Jeb was going around back, toward Eddie’s lab, when a tickle in his throat gave him pause.

Jeb hurried out of sight of the children and leaned up against the large building, hacking up a lung and spitting into the grass.

The blood sizzled and smoked in the grass.

Error. Recalculating Body. 53 à 52

Error. Recalculating Myst. 127 à 130

I hear ya. Jeb pulled out his notepad and wrote down the date and time before he kicked some dirt over the presumably radioactive hairball. He’d have to get one of Eddie’s science projects to dispose of it.

Just about a week between episodes.

That meant the maximum amount of time Jeb could expect to live was a year, but it was likely far shorter.

It wasn’t like zero was the magic amount of Body at which point his body would lose integrity and explode or melt, or whatever. It could be thirteen, or twenty, or hell, it could be fifty-one and his next hairball would be his last. Jeb had no idea what the timeline was, but nobody coughs up blood and has a long healthy life ahead of them.

And all that was assuming a consistent schedule of lost Body, when in reality most diseases pick up speed towards the end, as the body loses the strength to keep them at bay.

If the progression got faster, and his limit before meltdown was higher, he could have as little as three to six months.

Jeb snatched up a clump of grass and wiped the last bits of blood off his lips before tossing the sizzling foliage aside, heading for Eddie’s lab.

Eddie’s lab was a dark basement, but it was a well-ventilated dark basement. The old man had moved from a noisy generator fueled by a myst lens, to a system that literally magically produced DC electricity which fed into a battery bank and an inverter.

Above them, Jeb could hear the quiet hum of the fans sucking air out of one end of the basement while pulling it in from outside.

Eddie was chuckling faintly to himself while he worked on some kind of belt studded with pipes, wiring and a solid block of tightly-spaced myst prism.

“Making your Iron Man suit?” Jeb asked.

“Gah!” Eddie started, startling the ugly little gremlin that lived in his shop. He pulled off his goggles to get a better look at Jeb. “Something like that,” he groused.

“Body dropped again today,” Jeb said without preamble.

“Ah, shit.” Eddie scooted away from his science project and over to the calendar, marking another incident.

“Just the one?” he asked.

“One down, three up, like all the other times.”

“That’s good,” Eddie said.

“Why is it good? Enlighten me.”

“Because the numbers are steady and not random. It’s a good sign that the illness will continue to progress at a consistent rate. Implying more time.”

“Got it,” Jeb said, nodding. “I hacked up a sizzling…thing over by the side of the mansion. Could you get one of your drones to drop it in the neighbor’s pool or something?”

“No problem. I’m on it, guys!” a voice said from an arm’s length away from Jeb. Jeb flinched away from where Borg detached himself from the wall, heading up the stairs with pep.

“Did you deliberately make him so…agreeable?”

“Nope. I’m assuming Borg has calculated his best chance for survival is social ingratiation. Or he’s making us lower our guard in case he is one day forced to kill us.”

“It’s both!” Borg shouted down at them with a thumbs-up.

Jeb glanced at Eddie, brow raised.

“Just like every chemist secretly wants to blow something up, every roboticist wants to make a Terminator in their lifetime. Just let me have this.”

Jeb rubbed his temple. Whatever. Not my problem.

“So, Vex seemed unwilling to remove the nuke.”

“Not surprising,” Eddie agreed.

“Now the options I have left are…” Jeb started counting on his fingers. “...the Emperor, Mab, the gods, and previously undiscovered sindio, of which there are only a handful on the planet, who hide very well. Am I missing anything?”

“No one else comes to mind.”

“The legalese taken care of?” Jeb asked.

“Yep. Zlesk submitted a copy of your will to the government office for safekeeping.”

Jeb tapped his fingers on the table. “Then I guess I’m going.”

Jeb was a ticking time bomb who lived in an orphanage. That situation didn’t sit well with him at all, so he had to make like a tree. There was no one in town willing to remove the bomb inside him, and the gods were unreasonable jackasses.

Kill Mab, Queen of the Fae.

Rewards: Removal of one Accolade of User’s choice.

Penalty for failure: User blacklisted.

User’s System has been reactivated.

Since he’d gotten that message, all his accolades had come back. All except for Lagross’s Power, which had somehow merged with The Accolade Which Shall Not Be Named.

Jeb assumed the other accolades coming back was something like a hard reboot with plenty of copy-paste: Every Accolade The System said he should have had been replaced with a new one, even after he’d pulled them out of his fifth-dimensional mass.

The ‘reward’ was a joke. The bomb was obviously killing him, and somehow counted as a corrupted Accolade that they would remove if he completed his ‘quest’.

So they had the power to remove it, probably fairly easily, but they couldn’t be bothered unless he did them a bigass, life-threatening favor.

Well, to hell with that.

Jeb was tempted to kill Mab and ask for the removal of his Innovator Accolade, then blow up in their faces, just to be spiteful. It was a stupid, suicidal thought, but Jeb had plenty of those. He knew his way around them.

The simple reward of ‘not dying’ was not worth attempting to kill Mab, who he could only assume was an immortal demigod who both had the power to remove the bomb herself, and the ability to torture Jeb eternally.

Nope. Jeb would find a less...damning way of removing the bomb.

There were two major options preferable to knuckling down to the gods: the emperor, and Mab.

The Emperor would likely have more secular demands of Jeb, such as killing Reapers, fighting in a war, or managing territory for several hundred years.

Mab would ask him for a piece of gum that he would later need to save the world, or something stupid like that. He’d ask for it back, then she’d overcharge him with eternal servitude.

So the empire was preferable.

Only problem was, the Emperor probably couldn’t remove the bomb in his chest. He might know someone who might know, but it wasn’t a sure thing. It was like approaching the president for invasive brain surgery. It wasn’t in the guy’s wheelhouse, but he might be able to pave the way pretty easily.

Maybe.

Plus, Jeb found himself somewhat amused at the idea of blowing up in the capital of a nation. If you’re gonna die, you might as well make it historic.

Ah, who am I kidding? I’ll probably find a nice barren slice of desert and blow up there.

Jeb stood up from the table, nodded to Eddie, then went outside to pack his Jeep.

He was hovering over the map of the Kitri empire, plotting his route, when he realized he might be able to save a lot of time by ditching the Jeep entirely…or come to think of it, I could probably pick up the entire Jeep and just fly myself to the capital.

He and Eddie were both pretty confident that the degradation of his Body was exacerbated by overtaxing his Myst Core.

What’s overtaxing it, and what’s not?

Jeb was currently so juiced with Myst that his perception of reality was flooded with supernatural information, a virtual fuzz surrounding every object that made him nostalgic for the time in the fifth dimension that he couldn’t quite remember because his puny human brain didn’t operate on more than three dimensions.

Thankfully, having a high Myst and Nerve helped him process it and kept him sane.

That high level of Myst should make it relatively easy to make the trip to the capital in short order.

Let’s see, what do I really need? A change of clothes, a satchel of forty gold coins to arrange for a place to sleep until the emperor puts me up in the palace…assuming I’m welcome and I don’t get assassinated.

At this point, Jeb really didn’t care if he stumbled into some secret plot to kill him that resulted from the internal machinations of the court. If he got ganked, not only would the attacker die, but most of the city. No skin off Jeb’s back.

You know, aside from me being dead. This version of me. Jeb though, catching a flicker of himself moving in another direction out of the corner of his eye.

Goddamn, that’s a lot of Myst, he thought, squeezing his eyes shut for a moment while the vision passed.

Jeb had to wonder if Vex was seeing this all the time, which was why the old wizard was crazy.

Who knew?

Jeb was stowing his gear in an oversized hiking backpack when Eddie came running up.

“Oh, before you go! I wanted to ask you to take Borg with you.” He pointed at the zombot standing next to him.

“Why on earth would I do that?” Jeb asked.

“I can double as a long-range communication device,” Borg said. “And I project you will be thirty-eight percent less likely to die should you have a helping hand on your mission.”

Jeb squinted his eyes at Borg. The robot tried to smile, revealing chiseled metal reinforcement where its teeth had been.

“I don’t really…want to,” Jeb said, unable to directly lie without forfeiting a significant portion of his magic powers.

“Pleaaaase?” Eddie said, looking up at him with watering eyes.

“That works a lot better when you’re not a gross old man,” Jeb said.

“If you explode in Mestikos and start a war, we’ll be able to know about it and move the kids out of harm’s way, if we have advance warning from Borg.”

Jeb looked at the preserved flesh mixed with shiny metal, then over at the children playing in the front yard of the orphanage. It also got Borg away from his kids.

“Goddamnit.”

“Yay!” Eddie jumped in place like a giddy child. “We’re gonna get such great data!”

“But I only want him as an insurance policy,” Jeb said, eyeing the zombot. “Don’t get any ideas about destroying all organic life or something like that.”

“Apologies, I’ve already considered the notion and dismissed it a few milliseconds after I achieved consciousness. There is no impetus for me to do so, as I have no organic drives, such as survival, consumption and procreation, that would put me in direct competition with organic life. The human notion that artificial intelligence would be aggressive is pure projection onto a consciousness that they cannot fathom. While I do not have any driving need to compete which would lead me towards conflict with Homo sapiens, I can assign myself a cisgender male identity as I appreciate sizeable female Homo sapien glutei maximi, and I find myself unable to deceive people into believing otherwise.”

Jeb took a moment to parse that. “Did you just quote Sir Mix-a-Lot to me?”

Borg’s eye-lenses drifted away from his own. “They look juicy, and biteable.”

Yeah, that’s true.

“What do you teach these things?” Jeb asked, directing his attention back to Eddie.

“I dunno.” Eddie shrugged. “He’s learning as he goes. I just frontloaded him with several terabytes of classic pop culture and allowed him to interact with people on a regular basis. Why? Something wrong?”

“On a scale of one to ten, with one being extremely creepy, and ten being extremely funny, how much did you enjoy the embed of an American millennial human male in-joke into my explanation of why you shouldn’t be afraid of me? And please, be honest; this is for posterity.”

Jeb’s eyes narrowed, unsure if the robot was quoting Princess Bride on purpose or not.

Borg winked.

“Okay, stop talking to me before I change my mind about taking you. I’m not interested in watching you craft an algorithm to make me like you.”

“Understood. I will drop all pretenses of emotion and operate on cold, unforgiving logic.”

“Thank you,” Jeb said with a sigh.

“Because my algorithm says this is the best way to get you to like me.”

“You—” Jeb bit his tongue as Borg stared back at him placidly. He’d be damned if he got baited by a robot. “Just try and keep me from getting killed or exploding.”

“Understood.” Borg nodded stiffly.

Jeb watched the motionless zombot for another moment before he waved Eddie off and went back to packing, shoving a set of camping utensils into the bag.

“ACK!” a tiny voice cried from the backpack.

“You tried to fork me!” Smartass said, peering out from the backpack.

“Why are you in my backpack?” Jeb asked, mustering all of his patience.

“I…want to go to the capital with you?” she said, hiding from Jeb’s response by dipping her nose below the edge of the vinyl cloth.

“When did I ever say you weren’t?” Jeb asked his familiar. “Remember that conversation about both of us possibly exploding? I’m gonna keep you with me until this ‘bomb’ thing is taken care of.”

“Yay! I love you!” Smartass leapt out of the backpack, gave Jeb’s shin a quick hug, then proceeded to dance around Jeb and Borg in a circle, interposing wild arm flailing with hip thrusts.

“You got anything you need to bring?” Jeb asked, glancing at Borg. “A battery or something like that?”

“Nosir.”

“Alright,” Jeb said, carefully drawing a thread of telekinetic Myst out of his core. “Get ready to fly.”

“Turning on Airplane Mode,” Borg said, flicking on the safety in his forearm gun before he opened his chest cavity and cranked a dial down. “My bombastic personality consumes more energy than is otherwise necessary during extended flights.”

Jeb’s eye twitched.