The competition is three days long, and I’ll arrive in time for the final matches, Bath reasoned after looking up Avery’s competition schedule for the Junior Dragonleaf Olympiad. The competition permitted only competitors in the 7th and 8th grade, though it placed all children in one bracket. As a result, Avery would be at an age disadvantage as a 7th grader.

But according to the results posted online, Avery had done well the first two days of the competition. Even though her performance was commendable, it seemed like some other kid was the highlight of the olympiad: Peter Beady. He was an 8th grader from somewhere in North Carolina...and that was the extent of his bio. In the competition, however, the kid was, according to a small local news reporter, notorious his aggressive tactics: using other competitors as both bait and shield.

Bath touched down outside the competition dome, quickly assuming his guise as a normal, non-COTD-uniformed human. He paused for a moment, ultimately deciding to change his eyes to a less-recognizable brown color.

While most people in the area lacked the more-elaborate armor designs of Basalith’s core Dusk and Dawn factions, they all wore some kind of dragonleaf drape on their person. This universally contained their CSLs–COTD Storage Leaves–which acted as a key to their residences, holding the saved configuration of their home’s dragonleaf. With the key, they could immediately shape a standardized COTD dwelling to match that of their permanent residence, making traveling much more comfortable. People stashed various other assorted tools and small personal items in their drapes as well.

Bath styled himself a drape in the fashion of the people nearby, wearing a pair of shorts and a crewneck underneath. Satisfied with his appearance, Bath walked over to the Stadium’s main doors where a number of people were verifying tickets. Mouth upturning into a crooked smile, Bath disappeared, reappearing inside the bustling atrium. He immediately noticed a series of screens projecting the current match schedule for the final day. Bath’s eyes pinpointed Avery’s event, dragonleaf soccer: She was set to compete at 1:00 pm EST in the dome. It was currently 11:39 am, so Bath had more than an hour of time to kill.

It’s probably best she doesn’t know I’m here, right? Wouldn’t me being here put a lot of pressure on her? Bath wondered. Or would knowing I’m here give her some encouragement? Bath debated whether or not to seek Avery out before her match.

First, let’s see what she’s doing now... Bath murmured to himself. After entering the main atrium, he’d seeded his essence out to encompass the entire competition grounds.

They really weren’t messing around when they made this place, he thought wryly. They actually made a domed competition area out of spineroot two miles in diameter, even going as far as fully populating it with assorted trees and foliage. He figured that they must have built the dome for larger events: A junior-high tournament felt somewhat undeserving of such an expansive and meticulously constructed center.

He quickly located Avery, who appeared to be in some kind of waiting room with another boy Bath quickly intuited was Avery’s team member.

“...try the spinning top defense, stack that on a layer of spearing needles?” the boy offered to a pacing Avery.

She waved her hand dismissively. “No, it’s not going to work. We need to think of something completely different to catch him off guard. He’s practically seen every defensive trap in the book at this point.”

The boy seemed a bit put out by her words. “But that idea is different,” he grumbled.

Avery appeared not to hear him, her head bowed and feet padding along rhythmically as she mulled over strategy. Seeing her so intensely competitive made Bath smile.

“Miles, has anyone ever done a pitfall defense?” she asked, head snapping up.

So that’s his name. “Obviously,” Miles replied.

“But...on what scale?”

Miles raised an eyebrow while pressing a few keys on his laptop’s keyboard. “What did you have in mind?”

“How can Peter escape once he’s in the middle of a GIANT pitfall trap? Like, one that’s a full 200 meters across. With a small area in the middle with the goal and myself that’s protected.”

Bath considered Avery’s vision. So, a large circle of land that appears to be firm ground, but that collapses on Avery’s command, all but a small circle at its center that stays level.

Miles opened his mouth, closed it, then opened it again: “That sounds nice, but how are you actually gonna pull that off in a minute or so? You’d have to dig pretty deep for the trap to do anything, and you’d have to make the collapse nearly instantaneous and inescapable. Sounds pretty impossible to set up.”

Avery’s brow furrowed. “It does sound pretty hard,” she admitted. “But that’s why Peter wouldn’t expect it, right?”

Miles shook his head. “We need a strong, actionable plan.”

“We have over an hour to make it actionable,” Avery replied. “Pull out the dome map.”

Bath decided to leave the pair alone to devise a game plan; there’d be plenty of time later to talk. While walking the halls of the atrium area, he decided to keep one essence ear close to a collection of quasi squirrels manning the ticket booths, finding their chatter expectedly...entertaining. Especially when one of them brought out a signed picture of Dean shirtless, throwing the entire squirrel contingent into a frenzy and slowing up the entire ticket line. He wondered what Dean would think about a picture signed during the vanguard trip finding its way to a sports dome just outside of Norfolk, Virginia.

–––

David stared intently at the monitor while crushing a stress ball in his left hand. He only had two arms at the moment, with his other two stored in a small cryo-chamber, ready if he wanted to reattach them. Four arms was a hassle for a number of reasons, not to mention that they made him immediately identifiable whenever he went outside.

He felt like he was doing that less and less nowadays. It was all fun and interesting creating a sex-paradise like Sodom, but the shock-value and rush that came with establishing such a ridiculous city had long-since worn off. Looking outside my window and seeing the skyline...David shook his head. It just feels...tacky. He assumed that most people who lived in the city probably felt the same way: Since it was easy to relocate in the era of COTD, lots came to the city, stayed for a few weeks at best, and moved on. It was immensely touristy, cheesy, and nonsensical.

Fun for the first month or so, but now Susan and I are stuck here as long as we want to keep our steady stream of PP as Sodom’s city-seed co-rulers.

Narrowing his eyes, David zoomed into the 3D model of a heavily-damaged limb. At least I’ve found another way to keep busy.

While David had never been to medical school, he was serious about his desire to leave finance and become a doctor. Before COTD’s apocalyptic coming, he’d already invested in taking prerequisite classes at a local university, and had filled his free time by reading numerous notable scientific papers.

Earth post-COTD ushered in a wave of new scholarship. All of it was preliminary at best, given the fact that COTD wasn’t even six months old; however, David had already absorbed over 100 of these poorly-researched, question-identifying-rather-than-answering papers, and had decided to conduct some research on his own.

A number of preliminary papers focused on the caretaker boon, and the way that it heals the body. On the surface, the boon seemed impossible: how can someone, just by making physical contact, heal another person (or themselves), and so quickly? How can they repair not just scrapes and bruises, but things like serious structural damage, organ function, and limb loss?

These papers all pointed to a set of public, ultra-high-speed camera recordings obtained from Lund University in Sweden. The recordings were massive, with trillions of frames per second, offering a painstaking–but promising–way to study the repair mechanism.

Another group took these recordings at multiple angles and attempted to create something like a 3D model of several recorded objects and activities, such as the healing of a scrape, a nearly-destroyed human arm being regenerated (David’s current focus), and the complete reconstruction of a human eye.

David frowned in annoyance as he rotated the partially-healed arm. Even zoomed in 3000x, the resolution was decent; however, the available information was limited. The Lund camera had only taken surface-level images, meaning that it was impossible to see a truly accurate volumetric model of the arm at one time frame, and David was forced to use a layered model that stacked the healed surfaces over time. What he really wanted was a cross-sectional model of cell growth over time, but none of that data was public.

Just looking at the current model, however, gave David a clear view of the main mechanism identified in most papers: Intelligent Memory Extracellular Matrix, or IM-ECM. Looking at the time-lapse of the wound site, David watched as a number of newly-discovered (newly-created by the Dragon?) Railroad Cells (RCs) zipped forward and spun a new extracellular matrix where none existed, almost like nano-spiders spinning a highly-complex, extremely-particular web. Flesh soon grew to fill the empty ECM skeleton, with energy provided in part from the user’s metabolism, as well as organic flesh cannibalized and completely restructured on-the-spot through other mechanisms nobody seemed to understand yet.

Common consensus was that the Dragon introduced RCs, cells that somehow held the capacity to “intelligently” remember missing ECM and recreate it from scratch. But David wasn’t even convinced that the RCs were cells at all. He’d recently purchased some pricey medical equipment on the cheap, and had been able to visualize a metal-coated section of flesh using a scanning electron microscope (SEM). It had given him a closer, albeit static, look into the surface of a wound site. He had been able to see a few RCs heading off filaments of nascent ECM, and little bundles of cells blooming in their wake like mosaic flowers.

Realizing the limitations of this method, David had then attempted to isolate an RC cell for study. He lamented the lack of literature providing details on RC cells, including methods of how to actually isolate them. They seemed to go dormant and disappear when not regrowing damaged ECM; and even when David induced in the flesh a wound site, RC cells were so tiny and fast as to be impossible to separate out.

Repeated failures spurred David to return to paper-trawling and looking at public data, like the Lund image series.

Feels like I’m just going in circles, he grumbled while turning his head around. “Zoya,” he called out.

She peaked out from her desk just around the corner, her dirty blond hair pulled into a tight bun. “Yes?”

“Can you help me set up the SEM? There’s something I want to check.”

Zoya stood up and pushed in her chair. “Need me to prepare a specimen from the freezer?” the biochemist asked.

David shook his head. “Just get the microscope ready. I’ll handle the rest”

Zoya cracked a grin. “You’ve learned a lot in a month.”

David smiled back. “It’s a lot easier to absorb information nowadays.”

Zoya sighed as she accessed the dedicated SEM computer monitor. “Some of us learned all of this the hard way, you know,” she quipped wryly. “Let me know when your specimen is ready.”

David nodded as he continued to study the Lund image set. “Will do.”

–––

Dean stood on the Jerboaland Spire balcony, expression inscrutable, eyes squinting into the sun-scorched terrain below. At least the buildings here are made of dull dragonleaf, rather than reflective glass or metal.

I wonder what Fartuun and Aberash are up to right now, he thought to himself, drumming a few fingers on the balcony. They’d left Fartuun on Drift Jag to start establishing the main informational relays between Earth and the other planets. Since Drift Jag was the seventh of thirteen planets in the circuit, not including Earth, it was as good a halfway point as any. Dean hoped that its Earth-like environment would turn it into a major population center.

Dean also liked the idea of Fartuun building up Liberty City on Drift Jag because it was close enough to Earth that she could continue to send a constant stream of updates and monitor technological innovations remotely. He was acutely aware of the heightened role she’d taken on as COTD technological coordinator in the innovation screening process, especially because of the V-Tap. She was doing the work of an entire office on a daily basis, checking and verifying documentation and coordinating with a few others, all off world. Incredible.

There was something more pressing on his mind, though. He felt himself blush, though thankfully his dark skin hid most of the color change.

Aberash.

What am I supposed to do about Abbie?

Dean felt confused and guilty: after hanging and talking with Aberash on Vast Desert, spending practically every moment of free time either listening to her or thinking about her, he’d cut himself off after all the AI Ninety-Seven Arc business and arriving on Equinox. He’d told himself he didn’t have the time for anything other than a casual friendship. He’d told her over a few single-sentence messages that he was too busy to listen to her or talk.

But he still felt a nervous sensation in the pit of his stomach whenever he thought of her. He refused to think of it as butterflies; it was just....indigestion...or something.

He breathed in deeply and sighed out. I really don’t have time for a serious relationship, he thought, repeating himself for the hundredth time. I really don’t have time...and besides, I don’t want to assume anything. I’m also technically her boss: she’s one of my direct human subordinates, along with Fartuun and Barkhad. It would be gross if I tried to make a move.

“Dean,” Virigard piped up from behind, whiskers twitching. “You look like someone’s biting you on the butt.”

Dean wrinkled his nose and turned around. “What now?”

“You look all...contemplative~” Virigard explained, bouncing a bit on her legs. “You’ve been up here just thinking for half an hour straight. Weren’t we gonna clear out some area or check on the tunnel networks?”

“I asked Amalo to coordinate with the snakes and check over the tunnels.”

“It’s Aberash, isn’t it?”

Dean’s head whipped around. “What? It’s, um, just...who told you that?” He closed his eyes and let out a soft moan.

Virigard waggled her tail. “Who do you think? And guess what, it cost me ten of those signed shirtless pictures you gave me.”

Dean’s expression darkened. “Those squirrels never leave me alone.”

The petite jerboa hopped forward, placing two tiny forepaws on Dean’s right calf. “But you know, I kind of already knew what was going on.”

“It’s so dumb,” Dean murmured.

“Nope, not dumb.”

He rolled his eyes. “I shouldn’t be this, um, distracted. I just need to get over it. Keep busy.”

“Well, I think you should say something to her. She’s playing in one of the concert halls tonight. Maybe you could go see her?” Viri’s eyes shined like bright black globes.

Dean blanched. Damn. She didn’t even invite me.

“Uh, when? And, um, where?” This conversation makes me so uncomfortable that I’m reverting back to saying “um” every other second, Dean seethed. Ugh. Just imagine if I try to see her face to face...I can’t go back to just thinking of us as platonic friends. Damn it.

Viri smiled. “Hehe, the concert info was part of the ten-signature information package. I can bring us there later, around 7:30 pm. The squirrels even gave us two tickets, one for each of us!”

Dean smiled, eyes brightening considerably. “Thanks, Viri.” It’ll be nice to see her...and since it’s just a concert, I can always just leave at the end. No need to actually interact if I’m not ready.

“You know, I also heard something else from the squirrels.”

“What?”

“Hmm, something about a young brown-robes named Angelina. Apparently she even went to your school.”

Dean’s curiosity was piqued. “I didn’t know I had a kursi here in Jerboaland who went to Alens. How old is she?”

Virigard paused for a moment. “I think she’s supposed to be a year ahead of you in school, but she’s your age.” She cocked her head. “What do you call her? A sophomore?”

Dean nodded, surprise evident on his face. “Yeah. I have no idea who she is, but that’s interesting. I thought she was going to be much older. To think, we were all there at the same time...”

Both Lisa and Angelina were enrolled at Alens? Dean thought. I wonder if Angelina knows anything more about what happened with the gates and COTD’s beginnings? I honestly don’t know much about how Bath and Lisa discovered the gates and decided to...well, take over the world and...universe. Multiverse? It’s still unclear.

“You know, I think I’m going to try and meet with her.”