Doctor Oak had shown Scarlet a couple more videos and images of the strange monstrous beings on Verdun, before he started to shut down the workstation again.

“Well, those are the monsters out there. Your job, as I mentioned before, will be to dominate a few crystals, permanently, and use them to harvest more. The more you use the consciousness in a particular crystal, the stronger your hold on it, so you can even hold it after it gets stronger by devouring the consciousness of other crystals. In addition, you will have to condition yourself to never drop containment of your crystals, if you do, it can kill you. Start with a single crystal, maybe two if you think you can handle it and go from there. In their dormant form, dominating them is incredibly easy, dominating them while they are manifested is harder.” the doctor continued his explanation of Verdun and what would be expected of Scarlet.

“Doctor Oak, the next two are coming around.” the nurse called from the other room and the Doctor handed me off to her, asking her to tell me a little more about the community they had here.

“Okay, the settlement here. It’s not really nice, very frontier-like and not much in creature comforts. The only real computer is in there and us normals don’t even rate the handheld devices they give you psions. But in turn, we normals get a salary and don’t have to leave the settlement to go hunt or whatever you want to call it.” the nurse started to explain, walking into the main room.

“How many people are there? And how many settlements on the planet? Oh, and what’s your name?” Scarlet asked, trying to gather even more information. What she had heard sounded rather grim.

“You can call me Aida. Here in Albertina, there are around five-hundred normals, most of them working in the food-production, and maybe fifty to seventy-five psions, going out and do the hunting. All in all, on the planet, there are maybe thirty or forty settlements of similar size, so, do the maths and call it fifteen or twentyfive-thousand people. You have all the space you will ever need if you venture outside the settlements, which you will have to.” Nurse Aida explained, making Scarlet wonder just how big a world this was. Just the slum-area where she’d grown up had housed about ten million people and here was a whole planet with just a fraction of that.

“Doesn’t really matter. Moving between settlements is next to impossible, not just the distance, but even that would be a challenge but also the high-power areas in between.” Aida continued.

“What do you mean, high-power areas? And how far is it, really?” Scarlet asked, her curiosity peeking out.

“Follow me, you’ll see.” with those words, Aida showed her back into the reception-area where Doc Oak stood with two guys, dressed in the same black Uniform as Scarlet.

“Ah, and there is another one of your batch. Scarlet, meet Roger and Nedri, both new arrivals, just like you.” Doc Oak introduced and greetings were exchanged while Aida got an old fashioned globe out of a cupboard.

“You are showing her the globe? Roger, Nedri, pay attention, then I don’t have to repeat that part.” Doc Oak chimed in as Aida placed the globe-model on the table.

“To give you some scale. The equatorial radius is about the same as the radius of Earth and maybe you noticed that the gravity is slightly higher than Earth-normal.” Aida started her explanation and Scarlet’s mind started to boggle with scale. It meant that for each human, there were hundreds of square-kilometers out there, maybe even thousands. She was not certain about the exact numbers, but on Earth, there were over fifteen billion people and here, on roughly the same landmass, there were only twenty-five thousand?!

“Albertina is here, on the third continent, between the western mountain range and the ocean. You wanted to know where the next settlement is, Scarlet, the geographically closest is on the central plains, let’s call it two-thousand kilometers, as the eagle flies. If you want to walk that distance, well, knock yourself out.” Aida chuckled and the impossibility was driven sharply home. Without some sort of transportation, it was next to impossible, it would take a hundred days of concentrated walking just to get there. Walking without consideration for terrain, without consideration for supplies.

“Before you ask, there is no advanced transportation. What would you even use without modern technology? A bicycle? Rollerskates?” Doctor Oak tossed in, chuckling to himself. “No, you are pretty much stuck here and that means you work for me. There is a quota that you have to achieve to get food and lodgings, I suggest you make sure that you meet it. If not, well, those who don’t work, don’t get the wonderful comforts of the settlement and can be lazy as much as they want, there is an entire planet out there, just for them.”

Hearing the Doc, Scarlet knew just how boned she was. And not the fun kind of boned, not that she had experience with that. It was the kind of boned that she had been while living in the slums, trying to evade those who thought of her as prey. The realisation that she had survived a similar situation made her calm down quite a bit, it was just a different kind of jungle.

“That’s bullshit, old man. Who died and made you ki...?!” Roger, one of the newcomers, shouted and at the same time, Scarlet felt that he struck out using his mind. He wasn’t weak, there was plenty of power in the attack but she felt that the Doc easily swatted it aside, like a pesky fly. And just like one did with a fly, he didn’t just take it, he struck back with the mental force of a sledgehammer. Roger hadn’t even managed to finish his declaration of defiance before he was just a crumpled heap on the floor, blood seeping from his nose, ears and eyes. Even some of the smaller capillaries under his skin had burst, causing strange blotches to form.

“Aida, show the two where the biological trash is to be disposed.” Doctor Oak ordered, without any agitation, as if he had just asked her to put the globe back into the cupboard. That nonchalance made Scarlet certain that if she ever tried to challenge the Doctor it would not be in any sort of fair fight. While she wasn’t sure how powerful Roger had been, the difference between the two had been one of magnitudes.

Suppressing a shudder, she helped Nedri to pick the corpse up and the two of them followed Aida outside. The town was about what one would expect from a frontier town in some sort of technophobe community. There were a few buildings out of Plascrete forming a perimeter around the building they had just left and further back, a wall out of the darker Duracrete was visible. Scarlet focused on those mundane details to help ignore the fact that she was carrying a corpse. It was not the first she had seen, it was not the first she had to touch but still, there was something deeply disturbing about the whole situation. It did not get better when Aida guided them to a small patch at the wall, calling out as she walked. Another man joined them, by the feeling also a psion and he had a similar feeling of danger as the Doctor had.

“Ah, drat, one of them mouthed off, right? I had placed a bet that all of them would be smart enough to survive until their first trip outside. The odds were just too good to be true and I guess they really were.”

At the wall, Aida gestured for Scarlet and Nedri to place the corpse on a table before starting to undress him, quickly and professionally.

“At least he didn’t soil himself, I hate that.” Aida muttered while she worked. Scarlet quickly looked away once she started, preferring to focus on something else, like the fact that the unknown guy had pulled another of those crystals from a pouch and tossed it, letting the monster inside materialise.

This one looked a little like a badger, only that it had quite impressive claws and golden scales. There was another mental wave, coming from the man, and suddenly, the strange golden badger stabbed both claws on its forelimbs into the ground and the earth parted, forming an easily six feet deep chasm, just the right size to bury someone in.

“Well, toss him.” Aida ordered, causing Scarlet to look back to her. Roger’s remains were now devoid of clothing so after forcing herself to continue to breath, Scarlet joined Nedri in picking the corpse up and together they carried him over to the hole. They shared a look and realised that they would either have to simply toss the corpse into the hole or one of them would have to climb down and hug the corpse to get it down in a semi-dignified manner. Neither of them showed any inclination to crawl into the grave, so they stepped away a little and tossed the corpse into the grave. The unknown man sent out another mental wave and the earth moved together again, making it look like it had never been disturbed at all.

“Come on, maybe the last one in your batch has now woken up. The Doc will want to get on with the introduction.” Aida ordered and somehow, obeying her seemed like a very good idea, so they followed after her, as she carried the carefully folded clothes back to the Doctor’s building.