There’s a colosseum in front of me and I am sitting on the bleachers with my chin resting on my palms as I lean forwards, supporting my elbows on my thigh. Beside me Ria is sitting on a modified seat with a lot of cushions. We are watching a fight between a dog and a boy wearing a gladiatorial costume.

That dog is Ria and the boy is me.

Confused?

It’s pretty simple.

We are in a shared consciousness space which formed after I went and possessed Ria’s body. We are in here as astral projections? Soul bodies? Well… as something or the other. And we can have one main projection and multiple sub projections that are like clones, which are just mindless versions that can only focus on one order at a time. Right now, our clones are duking it out with an order to fight to the death.

Ohh… clone me just managed to pull off a shield bash right into clone Ria’s face.

Hmm… now where did I learn to do that?

Here’s the thing… clones can only know what the original does… so I probably picked up basic shield mastery from somewhere… Skyrim? I knew I liked that game too much.

*crunch*

Ouch. Clone Ria just chomped down on… let’s call him Metwo… I always was a sucker for pokemon.

Annd Metwo uses counter and sticks his little gladiator sword in her brain.

K.O.

The clones dissipate and I shudder and rub my arm from the phantom pain from the feedback from the clone. Beside me Ria scratches her head… probably feeling weird from experiencing one fourth of the pain of being stabbed in her brain.

At least it’s better than the actual thing… trust me we know. Believe it or not we were foolish enough to try this with our original astral projections… if not for the fact that the originals can resurrect infinitely, our dispute would have ended in mutual destruction.

What’s the dispute you ask? Simple… we are fighting to decide who gets dominion over our body for the next hour.

Initially, when I heard her voice, I thought that I had turned schizophrenic. That stopped when she pulled my astral projection into this space and laid into me with her teeth. Apparently, the mutation opened up her wisdom and instead of being a dumb dog… she has the mental capabilities of a human…

So, I have a roomie in my mind.

Joy!

*sigh*

Fuck this.

Anyway… since either one of us can drag the other into this space forcefully, leaving only our instincts in charge of our body, we had to come to an agreement.

Fighting to the death using clones was what the barbaric bitch chose.

Well… at first, we didn’t know about clones and she wanted to use the originals… which scared the shit out of me so much that I ended up discovering clones. Just think ‘take the shit for me’ real hard and poof… mindless drone +1.

I won this round, so the next hour was mine…

I snapped my fingers and a huge screen replaced the colosseum. It was curved to give the 120-degree field of view effect showing a black and white image: That of our body snout-deep in some trashcan in an alley…

Dogs don’t see in colour… back to the nineties anyone?

.

“I knew her training was incomplete…” I muttered and immediately, Ria’s hackles rose beside me.

“Don’t you dare bring up training, human! How dare you debase one with the noble bloodline of the Hounds of Hel?!”

I was riling her up to get her to let slip with just such nuggets of information. She knew things. I don’t know how, but she did.

Hel huh? Wasn’t it some Norse underworld? Did she become chuunibyou?

I turned to her and said, “Okay, you can have this turn… but instead you tell me all about this bloodline and Hel stuff.”

She struggled internally for a bit and then ground out, “Six hours.”

Well… she didn’t say that… it was more like *bark**arf* and somehow it auto translated from Dogese? Doglish? to my mother tongue.

“Deal!”

The information was much more important.

She touched her forehead with a claw and pulled out a silver thread and deposited it in a stone bowl that she conjured up…

It looked suspiciously like a pensieve from Harry Potter…

I raised an eyebrow at her and she huffed, “What? I liked that series… the Cerberus in the first film was really handsome…” she stayed starry eyed for a moment before disappearing to take over our body and get its snout out of the trash.

Oh Gods… what did I just hear? My bitch has a CG waifu.

.

I sat there for a time watching Ria run about through the projection of her point of view on the screen…

Actually, I could turn on the 7d experience with touch, smell etc. But that would be weird because my astral projection is human and the sensations would come from a dog shaped body… so I usually went for sight only.

I remembered my situation and became depressed. We had left my corpse in the park and run away to a nearby alley before bickering about body ownership… I needed to think of a way to get back a human body… maybe my power was body possession? Yeah… I needed to make more informed choices… just winging it had gotten me into this situation. If I had studied more about the mutation, I could have guided it properly.

Instead I was stuck in a dog.

Experimenting with the powers was secondary to information. I turned to the pensieve, held my breath and plunged my head into it… Only to knock my head against the bottom… hard.

Ouch! That bitch! It was intentional… I just know it.

I looked back at the stone bowl and the silver stuff was gone and there was new knowledge in my head.

.

Apparently, earth was a living creature which had to breathe. So, at regular intervals, it expanded like an accordion and drew in some good radiations… cosmic oxygen if you will… these radiations caused mutations and stuff.

But that was secondary. Its main function was making creatures more intelligent. Then when it breathed out, the accordion compressed and out came the CO2/bad radiation and dumbed everyone down.

Apparently, after the last exhalation cycle, everyone was dumb and then due to some luck, humans became intelligent and then you know the story. But this bloodlines thing is from the last inhalation age… some scientist, who was an owl by the way (sheesh, talk about stereotypes), found a way to genetically imprint information into the next generation.

Like humans have an instinctive fear of snakes due to some information locked away within the genetic code, his tech imprinted stuff like language etc. So, you didn’t have to go to school… booster packs of knowledge… boom… done.

Sounds like TM from pokemon…

Anyway… since everyone could start earlier and had superpowers it became really high tech before the end of the fun times… then came the apocalypse.

Mwahahahaha.

Sadly, no animal Nostradamus pulled through for them and they were caught unprepared – only had time to imprint some stuff about their civilization into their descendants. Hel was a nice country… too bad when the space folding happened, it went into the crevice and the earth that you see now came out. It’s like a coin flip; you see our small and homely Blue Planet, or you see the expansive Other Earth.

That’s all that there was in the memories…

I could guess that Ria wanted to go to Hel for a visit, but had no idea of how to do it. Even I was curious about Other Earth… would everything there be intact… or, would the rubbing of the spaces grind it smooth like the patch of ground in the park. If it was intact, could we get some animal tech out of it?

Welcome to the ROOT.

Also, I now knew what that blinking notification that had been distracting the shit out of me was all about.

ROOT, the acronym of Resas Ounis Oum Technicia, which translates roughly to Root of All Knowledge, was an all-encompassing system that spanned Other Earth. It was basically the agglomeration of the knowledge possessed by all the races and it was governed by a highly intelligent AI formed from the agglomeration of every conscious individual linked to it.

It was put in place by an Esper with the skill [Mind Link] in collaboration with his wife who possessed the skill [Perfect Memory]. At first, it was only used as a convenient communication network -- the "Internet of Minds" if you please. But with the advent of bloodline technology and the ability to encode memories directly into the DNA... it became something much, much more.