The Union’s main ambassador to the TGC was in his office when an aide entered a bit hurriedly. “There’s a problem. The Mataal Warbands have decided that ‘the humans are a worthy opponent,’ and have declared their intent to begin raiding the TGC.”

The ambassador was silent for a moment, then laughed for several.

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“So, to clarify, your ship’s warp core had failed and you were stranded in the middle of nowhere. You were rescued by a human in a battleship they called a personal shuttlecraft.”

“That is correct.”

“They had their fabrication bays make one of the ship you had been on before, from scratch, for every person aboard?”

“That is correct.”

“And then they gave your then fleet a ‘skipgate boost’ in the direction of here.”

“Yes.”

“The name on the ship was what exactly?”

“Three Trenchcoats In A Trenchcoat.”

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“We’ve been declared war upon? Again?” Asta Noscerdas, the somewhat nominal leader of the TGC military was rather bemused. She had figured one weapons demonstration probably wouldn’t be enough. Then Taylor Huce happened, alongside the end of the Bineeks Republic, and Asta figured that no further demonstration would be required for quite some time.

“The Mataal Warbands. Heavily isolationist, heavily militarist. Our best guess is that they literally haven’t gotten the news yet of ‘do not fuck with us.’”

“And they’re not part of the Union?”

“Union and Warbands have been at each other’s throats for some time now. Union could destroy them if they actually worked together, but Union is pretty much a slightly less effective version of the UN of ye olden times, so that’s not happening.”

“Huh. Well then, time for another demonstration.”

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The dean of that university shuddered. They paused, staring into space, for a solid few minutes, before starting to type.

No haunted houses.

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“I suppose I don’t see any particular reason that project can’t be duplicated in its current state and deployed.”

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Tyler Harbat was somewhat known for disproportionate revenge. He escalated things a lot, in other words. He had been on a ship, not his ship mind you, just a ship, with some not-very-durable friends.

When it comes to piracy, the general expectation is that the robbed are left a shuttlecraft from their ship so that they can at least get back to civilized space. If they were to just be killed, then the next group would fight like their life depended on it, rather than their cargo. Sometimes, however, stuff goes wrong. Someone doesn’t get enough sleep, something malfunctions, what have you, there’s a lot that can go wrong even on a vessel that’s not being boarded.

“Wakey wakey! It's a beautiful day. Birds are singing, flowers are blooming, and you kids are in a hell of sorts.” Tyler was back on his ship.

Several of the captives tried to cry out but their vocal cord analogs had been paralyzed, leading to their exhalations being only that.

Tyler told his ship to make him a scalpel. He didn’t specify a material so stainless steel was selected. An ingot of such was taken out of storage, a smaller section cut off of it, and a scalpel milled out of that section. The shavings were collected and tossed into storage for scraps of that material, to be recast when enough was collected. The other part of the ingot was tested for microfractures, distortion, et cetera, before being cleared to be used for something else in the future and set aside.

“See, I’m rather displeased with you lot. I don’t know what you actually did, I imagine blowing everything up wasn’t your goal, but my friends were on that ship. I don’t make new friends easily.”

The finished product was sterilized before being picked up by a drone, speed of flight aided by bursts of air from the walls along the way, and flung correctly aligned into his waiting hand in a total of fewer than six seconds.

“Now, I could just kill the lot of you.” He ever so slightly pressed the blade against the neck of mook #1, drawing a thin trickle of blue blood before setting the scalpel to the side. “But that would just be wasteful.”

The captives, still only half-conscious, realized one after another that he was walking and they were moving alongside him, strapped down to some sort of motorized gurney. It didn’t take long for them to see that they were moving to the section labeled MedBay.

“I’m going to assume you’ve heard about how the TGC is trying to adapt some of our augments to be compatible with all the other sapients we’ve suddenly come across,” Tyler swept his hand across the crowd, “beings with very different physiology, and definitely very different genetics. One of the problems is a lot of the more obsolete designs have been lost, and we’ve been working on these sorts of things for humans for some time now, so there’s something of a tech gap.”

The MedBay door opened and they continued forth without pausing.“ Back when the vast majority of humanity was under the aegis,” he sneered, “of the Conglomerate, a lot of the progress in such fields was made via completely unethical experimentation on subjects that were in no way willing.”

He swept his gaze across his captives. “Unfortunately for you, I am rather displeased with you.”

It would be a bit over sixteen days before the last of the captives finally perished to a fatal case of feathers growing in the alveoli.

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“You appear to be flying,” Wooster said with a bemused expression.

Tyrese had a look on his face that could just barely not be categorized as smug. “That I do.”

“The gravity is at standard and I don’t see any cables suspending you.”

“Correct.”

“Magic?”

“Magic.”

Wooster rolled his eyes. “Ok but how though?” Wooster’s implants received a bit of text.

//spell has 11x+9 inputs where x equals num of regions

//look into having positions of enclosed regions update w/i spell rather than through inputs

define m(n){return (10^abs(input[n]))*input[n];}

//the mana saved by ^ isn’t very much, may just remove

define regionSel(n){

centPoint = new Point(m(n+1), m(n+2), m(n+3));

if(input[n]){

return new EllipsoidRegion(centPoint, m(n+4), m(n+5), m(n+6), m(n+7), m(n+8), m(n+9));

//n+4 to n+6 for dim on each axis, n+7 to n+9 for rotating region

}

shape = new RegConvexPolyArea(centPoint, ceil(m(n+4)), m(n+5), m(n+7), m(n+8), m(n+9));

//n+4 for num of vertices, n+5 for dist from cent to vertex, n+7 to n+9 for rotating area

return shape * (shape.normal * m(n+6)); //n+6 for prism height

}

stuff = regionSel(10);

i = 20;

while(i

stuff.(input[i] ? boolAdd : boolSub)(regionSel(i+1));

i += 11;

}

stuff = all within stuff; //dynamically typed variable reuse woooo

i = 0;

while(i

applyForce(stuff[i],

new Vector(m(1), m(2), m(3)) * stuff[i].mass + (

new Vector(m(4), m(5), m(6)) * stuff[i].mass *

new Vector(

m(7) - stuff[i].position.x,

m(8) - stuff[i].position.y,

m(9) - stuff[i].position.z

)

)

);

i += 1;

}

“The station is casting that a bunch of times across my entire body. I think where I want to go and I go there. This is version, uhhhh, several. First couple versions resulted in the levitated object being torn apart by proportionally different amounts of force on different sections.” Tyrese zipped around the room at accelerations that typically would have pulped him. “Translational g-forces don’t matter since everything’s accelerating at the same rate, as is the air a bit away from my skin, so neither does wind. Centrifugal force is still an issue though. Oh, and we figured out how to input negative numbers via slightly different rune shape, so we can just have a small servo change the rune from positive to negative input and vice versa without needing another input to act as a boolean for multiplying the first by negative one.”

“Ah,” said Wooster, once more despairing at the wall of speech metaphorically blasting him back.

Tyrese sighed. “This stuff makes no bloody sense. It’s like someone read the first twenty words of an introduction to particle physics and added a crude modification onto reality based on those first twenty words. Like they got to quarks and decided good enough, but then it actually worked.”

“I’m far from a physicist but it does seem a bit simplified, yeah.”

“As far as we can tell whenever a spell is affecting something it converts physics in that area into some incredibly simplified version and then converts it back when it’s done. Like a complete amateur slapped a bit of code onto the side of regular physics. It makes no GODDAMN SENSE!”

“Well, it’s certainly useful nonsense.”

“There is that.” Tyrese paused for a moment (presumably because hell froze over or something else oft used for pithy statements on improbability) before continuing. “Where was I? Ah, yes.”

With a tremendous bang, projectiles flew at Tyrese, and with nary a sound, they stopped midair. “It’s not only good for flight.

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“And remember, by the start of next class you should have turned in your first draft for a stellar lifter filter complex. Doesn’t have to be perfect, not yet, but it shouldn’t have any glaring issues.

One more thing though, the TGC is holding a competition. You can find the details on the university site, but the general gist is as such: if you had a computer with unlimited hardware including a sensor that could detect both position and velocity of everything within an area, how would you write a program to sort things into protons and neutrons, into atoms, into molecules, and into compounds?

Apparently, there are small monetary prizes for the top ten thousand entries, medium for the top thousand, and fairly large for the top hundred. If you decide to compete, good luck.”

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Ivy Torres, head of the Augmentation Safety Regulatory Commission looked over the report on the latest changes to standard brain configuration sent in for ASRC approval, which had in fact been cleared as safe. Part one allowed for seeing in a spectrum 12.5 nanometers lower and 7.2 higher than existing models, but the really interesting section was part two, a modification that would reduce ideal sleep requirements from 1/6th of the time spent resting to 1/9th.

Considering the best beforehand had been 1/8th, and that came with a list of incompatibilities with various other augments a kilometer long, this was actually rather impressive. The ASRC had a budget for rewarding the creators of particularly imaginative or performant augments submitted for safety testing, and Ivy decided that this definitely counted.

Not that currency was really important in the TGC anyway, what with each person more or less being a civilization unto themselves in regards to the production of goods. It was largely used for gambling or acquiring a paywall-locked template from some site or another without waiting the five picoseconds it would take for it to be pirated.

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Sveta Rhalmstead, a woman with a more or less baseline appearance who was proportionally petite but was in actual terms three meters tall, was sitting on a bench in a park, her eyes closed, simply listening to the sounds of the city. She had no weapons with her, nor any armor. This may sound familiar but be assured that she was on a planet, in the Xon’Ankail system, and surrounded by people. So naturally, she was attacked anyway.

She was briefly aware of how those two engine sounds were getting awfully close before the trucks crunched to a halt and the left half of her body and most of her head was turned into high-velocity meat, bone, metal, plastic, ceramic, and fullerene shards. The other half of the body slumped forward. Four more trucks rolled up, containing mercenaries.

Unfortunately for those mercenaries, the body was already sealing all the wounds, the shoulder already growing eyes, the neck already growing teeth. Enough of the body was intact for the Distributed Personality And Memory Backup Brain, or DPAMBB, to do its job, but until the primary brain was repaired, or in this case pretty much entirely reconstructed, the body was running on instincts. Instincts said to eat to make up for lost mass. What luck for the body’s appetite then, that there was four trucks’ worth of hostiles nearby.

The body waited for one of the attackers to get close before rolling onto the side with limbs intact and leaping at them, neck expanding. Cronch. The materials of neither the helmet nor the head were by any means optimal, but they would do for the moment.

The others would have been quick to react but were disorientated by the carefully designed shriek from the body. The body looked at the construction of the helmet and made some assumptions about the rest. Notably, that the rest would be as insufficiently thermally insulating as the helmet. Sveta had been experimenting with having a dicyanoacetylene and ozone welding torch in her right arm. It was a very quick change to turn that into a flamethrower.

The smell of burning flesh of various sorts filled the air. Of the 108 mercenaries in the area, 63 fell over dead. 18 fell in horrific pain. The 27 that had disembarked from the truck furthest back were more or less fine, aside from a nasty surprise. With only the right limbs existing the movement of the body might make one think of a motorcycle with limbs instead of wheels. Regardless, another burst solved the issue of there being survivors.

The three snipers each independently decided that if missing its head didn’t stop it, they would much rather quietly leave than risk the body tracking the shot.

The body got to work scarfing down a not-insignificant amount of the bodies, armor included. Several minutes later Sveta was repaired enough for her to be functional again. She investigated the scene a bit before leaving a swarm of microbots to do so as well as consume every bit of her body splattered everywhere, before heading off to eat a restaurant out of stock, pondering how to modify her instincts to include leaving survivors to interrogate.

Police finally showed up. The cause of death was informally listed as ‘suicide via attacking a human.’

The only real information found was that they had been hired to retrieve at the very least a large chunk of a human corpse. After a moment of thought, the video from herself and the various cameras around the scene uploaded the ‘battle’ to the net.

Quite some distance away, the video quickly caught the interest of Sam. Xon’Ankail system huh? That’s in the same general area as that bombing against Jack Svar and that killing of Thomas Ruhl. It’s a place to start if nothing else.

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Suux`ataimot was responsible for traffic control for the solar system. He got paid to sit in a fancy office and stare at screens displaying information relayed from sensor platforms seeded throughout the system. The automated systems handled pretty much everything and he was dreadfully bored. To his mild surprise, however, the computer pinged and tossed up on-screen whatever it was that it had encountered and didn’t know how to deal with. When he actually opened his eyes his surprise was greatly amplified.

An organic… something had emerged from warp near the star. It had a central section that read as a bit over seven hundred kilometers across but that couldn’t possibly be right. It had innumerable spindly tendrils extending from the center, covered in eyes darting every which way and mouths full of prehensile teeth, whipping around in calm and tremendous speed. The organism moved towards the star, many of the maws gaping. It appeared to feast upon the star’s corona.

Suux`ataimot would have hit the panic button had they not been still in shock.

The thing spoke for lack of a better word, emitting radio waves enough to disintegrate an asteroid were it to be nearby. “Hiya, I’m Sam Schierling. This is the Xon’Ankail system right?”