“How did you do that?” The Captain asked as I sat down across from him. I was still a bit damp from my run, but now it was more difficult to see through my tee-shirt to the white bra beneath.

“How did I do what?” I asked, stretching a little to work out the stressed kinks from my shoulders. Oddly enough, while humans were amazing at their physical abilities, they paid a toll in soreness when they utilized them. The man following me towards the station had stressed me enough that it reflected in my body, my shoulders tightening as I ran and my fists sore from where they had been clenched.

“That.” he brushed his hand towards the items cluttering his desk. The pen holder, monitor, and a now-missing desk nameplate.

I shook my head, “I have no idea. The nameplate was here when I left, and now it’s gone. I don’t recall doing anything with it.”

He shook his head, “Not the nameplate, I did that. I have only been Captain for a week, and I forgot the last guy’s name was there. Good man, caught in a bad situation. I meant the pen.”

“What about the pen?” I asked curiously. It looked okay, and it was still in the holder I had flicked it into last night.

“It appeared. In its holder. It disappeared from your hand. Last night, when you left my office.”

I thought about it. “Oh, you mean telepresence.”

He nodded, slowly.

I smiled brightly, “That’s just natural. Lots of races have it, even before the game. That’s how civilized races do a lot of things without risking their lives. Humans probably have it too, but I haven’t seen anyone using it. Then again, it’s really hard to notice unless they do something like carrying mass with them.”

“So this telepresence thing, it lets you move stuff around like telekinesis?”

I shook my head, “No, telekinesis is a much more powerful ability. telepresence only lets you drag around a small bit of matter, generally capped at your own mass. Telekinesis lets you carry around much greater weights, but it’s generally limited to a line of detection. If you don’t know it’s there, you cannot move it. I wish I had telekinesis, though. When used through telepresence, it could have helped my job enormously.”

“Helped your job?” He asked a little dully.

I nodded, “Oh yes, I was a drone rider. I was also good with microassembly and compression coding. If the enchantment was still intact, I could shift parts out with me to repair drones nearly a seventh of a light-year away. Even if the drone was almost entirely destroyed, if the enchantment was still there, I could fix it.”

“So you are an enchanter?” he asked, “With like… fireballs and stuff?”

I shook my head and laughed, “By the stars, no. In my old form, even the thought of using something like a fireball would have made me discorporate. Those are horribly destructive, and even more painful. I am a magician.”

He suddenly looked a bit more confident, “A Magician? Like you can do illusions and pull rabbits out of hats and card tricks and make elephants disappear?”

I shook my head. “Illusions are on the special abilities list for Magicians, but I cannot move living materials. A rabbit would be well beyond my abilities, as that is more the domain of spatial or life mages. Card tricks might be possible, depending on what you mean, since, as far as I know, cards are not living, although it would be a lot easier if they were made of artificial or refined materials.”

I shrugged. “Maybe when I get a higher ranking I could make elephants disappear, whatever they are. But I was never high ranked. I can use telepresence, of course, and I like to think my compression coding is very neat and compact, but I am far more interested in that throwing ability I have now. I didn’t get any time to practice, but it looked like fun, and I bet it could be used aggressively if necessary. A man was chasing me this morning, and I could have thrown something near him to get him to stop. He scared me, His friends said I had to sit on their dicks or stop, whatever that means, and he started chasing me and I thought he was going to try and make me sit on one.”

He sighed, “You were out running, from the shelter to here, wearing that? I can practically see through it. You didn’t think that maybe it was a bad idea to tempt them like that?”

I shook my head, “I don’t understand. Tempt them?”

He nodded, “Yeah. Look, sweety, you are like 15 pounds of pure sex in a 5-pound bag. Even knowing your age, I am tempted to try and take you to bed. And you are white, in a black neighborhood. You might as well have been running naked with crack baggies duct-taped to your butt.”

I sat and thought about it. A quick information search revealed that sex was the process of implanting fertilization in a female’s currently-available egg. Being naked apparently, was a signal that you were ready to be implanted? The male’s ovipositor didn’t look that dangerous until you realized that he implanted it through the birth canal. At least it didn’t penetrate directly through your flesh as I had feared.

The Captain was beginning to look impatient when I finally asked him, “Why?”

“Why what?” he replied.

“Why do males so desperately desire to force their ovipositor into a female for breeding purposes? I have seen pictures of it, and it looks like quite a painful and disgusting process. Is the instinct to raise young that overwhelming in human males? And why do you say I have a three-to-one ratio of sex? As far as I can tell, my genitals are of a fairly standard size, or perhaps smaller than many.”

He slapped his forehead with the palm of his hand and slowly sighed. “Great, the birds and the bees talk. I thought I wouldn’t have to have this until I had kids of my own. Alright. You seem to have lived a very sheltered life. I am a very busy man, but I guess I can talk for a few more minutes. When two people love each other very much…”

I interrupted him, “What’s love?”

He started slowly counting backward from 100, so I hastened to add, “I mean, I see lots of definitions on the internet, but most of them conflict. There’s making love, which seems to be the act of breeding, but it’s not lovely at all. Then there’s brotherly love, and comrades at arms, but that doesn’t seem like it. Then there’s love for family, which looks a lot closer, love for food, or your people, which seems fairly abstract, and then there’s I Love Lucy, which seems to be a title for some kind of entertainment. I don’t know what you are talking about.”

He sighed. “Okay, you know people tend to crave physical contact, right?”

I nodded, “Yeah, that’s kind of obvious. People brush against me everywhere I go, even when it’s not very crowded.”

He nodded slowly, “Well when people care very much about each other’s well-being and crave physical contact, males, and females… and sometimes males and males or females and females, try to get even closer. So they engage in the act of love. Or breeding, I guess, although a lot of the time actual breeding is not the intent.”

I spoke slowly since this made no sense. “They breed without breeding? What on earth for? That seems like an enormous waste of time and energy, even for an instinctive response.”

He sighed, “Because it feels good? It excites the pleasure centers in their brains, and sharing that with someone else, especially someone as attractive as you, tends to increase that pleasure.”

I looked through my connection to the shelter’s machine to try and figure out what he meant. “Oh. Do humans have a nerve center of their brain that is devoted to producing nothing more than pleasurable impulses? That is amazing. What excites it? Was that like the bacon this morning that tasted amazing?”

He chuckled, “Yes, on a very small scale. When humans breed, they both, hopefully, get that center excited enormously. Other stuff does it too, but sex is one of the big ones.”

I nodded slowly, “So humans are capable of exciting that center, and gaining a reward, for breeding without breeding?”

He nodded, “Yes, although there’s a lot of psychological stuff involved too. Like some girls want to try for a baby and enjoy it a lot more if they are trying. And of course, the appearance and suitability of whoever you are playing with. There’s also the love aspect, if you care about who you are having sex with, it tends to be a lot more rewarding.”

I nodded, so many things were coming into focus. “So the males and females that want to breed with me, want to love me and get the reward?”

He shook his head, “Not always. There are some guys, and some girls, that get off on doing it with someone that doesn’t want it. They get a greater response from forcing people and hurting them in the process than they do from doing it with someone they like. Often the more attractive the target is, the more they enjoy hurting them and then raping them.”

I was absolutely horrified. He had no reason to be mistaken or to… intentionally present a falsehood, but it made no sense. I could feel the tears starting to form in my eyes again, and he hurriedly held up his hands.

“Don’t cry. It’s not common, and we catch them and lock them away so they never hurt anyone again, but it’s something that can happen, especially to someone like you. I am not saying you are doing anything wrong, but you are kind of a lot of people’s dream girl, both the good and the bad kind. You have to be careful or have some way to protect yourself.”

I nodded slowly, choking back the tears. I needed to work on controlling my emotions a little, at least until my human brain could put them into the past. But maybe, if you could breed without breeding, and if it was something to reward humans with for doing so, it might be worth looking into.

“So let me change the subject. First, My name is Captain James Tiberius Braxton. Don’t laugh, my parents were into Star Trek. And you are Tracy, no middle name, Nutock.”

I nodded, “Yes, but I have one important question.”

He nodded, “What is that?”

“What’s Star Trek?

He looked at me in shock, and I prepared to send another query. The sex search had been a lot of data though, and I was running a little low on energy.

“Holy shit. You really are an alien.”

He told me what Star Trek was, and I realized just how much humans loved entertaining lies, but they called them fiction. I realized that it must be another one of their stress coping mechanisms. If you could convince yourself that a fiction was real, you could also convince yourself that what was happening wasn’t real, or didn’t matter. I could have used that ability when my world was getting destroyed.

“So, what else can you tell me about your job?” he asked a question that I had been dreading.

“Well, I am a magician, but that’s what everyone who is a warrior becomes. It has the highest utility for Drone riders that has been discovered to date and comes with abilities like Aural Strengthening and communications that are hugely useful for protecting your drone and communicating strategy. Some classes have much greater utility, but most riders do not survive long enough to get to a rank where their abilities become useful. Aural Strengthening and communications are useful at rank 1. Plus, if you are a squad leader like me, it improves microassembly and telepresence strength as well, and gives you a bonus to both your essence and your sorcery, both of which are hugely useful in a fight. If you can get to rank 2, it also gives you agility, which is terrifying in a fight.”

He shook his head, “Wait, you are a warrior? You don’t act very warrior-like to me. And what is sorcery? Is it what I think it is?”

I shrugged and answered the last question first since it was less painful. “Sorcery is the act of will overcoming the natural laws of the universe. At its very lowest level, it allows you to use rituals to temporarily disrupt those laws or unusually apply them, and at its highest level it allows you to freely violate those laws through an act of will alone.”

I shrugged, “That’s right out of The Game of War’s documentation. I have a high enough Sorcery to use what I know without requiring expensive ingredients or rituals, which is one of the things that makes me a well-known warrior. I have survived seven battles and triumphed against odds in excess of three-to-one, and before I died I was a second-ranked magician. Another battle and I might have made it to third. I have destroyed thousand of drones, and twice I was instrumental in…” and I muttered a little.

“What was that?” he asked, as I knew he would.

“I have taken out two drone controllers. I have to mention it even if I don’t want to because ships like that usually contain a living being. One of those ships might have been a land invader, and so it might have contained…” I sniffed a bit, “Hundreds, or maybe thousands, of living beings.”

“Land invader? You mean they were invading your homeworld?”

I nodded, letting the horror of the situation show in my eyes. “Yes. And I destroyed it, and possibly ended all those lives.”

He shook his head, “What would they have done if they had succeeded?”

I shuddered, “They would have deployed short-range ground effect drones, and would have gone on a rampage through our nests, murdering and probably eating billions of individuals, if not tens or hundreds of billions. And then they would have stripped all of our databases, all of our technology, and then laid claim to our world and strip-mined any resources left. Lastly, they would have stripped all organic materials, drained our atmosphere, and left behind a barren hunk of rock that would never again support any kind of life. And then the Game would have rewarded them for a successful conquest.”

He nodded, “And based on what you said last night, they may be coming here?”

I nodded, and pulled up a holographic representation of the galaxy, using his screen and projecting it over his desk. “Right here.” I said, pointing at the Earth’s location, “Is Earth. Unfortunately, when they destroyed our world, Our databases were declassified. My former people scouted Earth. We are sort of out in the proverbial boondocks, but now that Our planet’s location is known, well. A faction resource search, which is not expensive for a faction like the Sintar, will put this planet and its system right at the top of the list.”

I zoomed to another part of the galaxy. This visual thing was so great since the holograms just required flexing the LED display’s output a little bit, and the mouse’s laser was already perfect for the job. “Right here are the Sintar. They are in this Galaxy and Dimension. This means they will get here quickly, probably within 15 years of uncovering your system’s wealth. They are like locusts, a plague that likes to strip systems bare of all resources. Every organic molecule, every hint of oxygen or metallic element, and even the iron in your body is valuable. They are a hive mind, and will enslave your brains into their core cluster, using you as sort of an overmind to direct their Synthetic intelligences in battle and production efforts.”

I shook my head fearfully, “Humans have amazing brains. You have a gift called flexible minds, and if they can plug that into their overmind, They could break the universe itself to their will, and probably most other dimensions. The worst part is, that they have access to the Game, and will know that. Earth is just about to become…” I accessed the local net directly through James’ computer. “The king in a game of chess, and right now, the Sintar have the board full with no losses, and Our King is sitting naked, by himself, two squares in front of their line of pawns.”

I was rather proud of the metaphor. It was certainly close to perfect and worked far better than any metaphor that my former people might have pursued. Humans had a history of conflict, and it seemed almost all of their entertainment activities centered around it. My entertainment activities, I corrected.

He was sitting at his desk, head clutched in both hands, staring at the hologram I had created. “I believe you,” he said.

“What? Why?” I asked him, surprised that he had been convinced so quickly. I thought I had him right up until I had mentioned magician and then lost him completely. But now he was just staring at a minor technology upgrade like it was handed down from God herself.

“This. I mean, we have fantasized about three-dimensional holograms for decades if not centuries. And you just pop one up as if it is nothing.”

I shrugged, “It is nothing. I just set up a matrix that reflects the existing technology of your monitor in a slightly convex fashion. All the technology is there, including the magnetic resonance on the screen that keeps the images contained. It’s not really a technology I have any experience with, since my prior race didn’t have eyes, but all it’s doing is enhancing the aural projection from your existing screen. I suspect someone is probably already experimenting with this, considering that all the components already exist and just need minor tweaking. You probably would have had it in a year or two. Although the 3d software absolutely sucks. It’s using huge resources for basically nothing. I can’t believe human software designers even build this stuff without shame.”

He nodded, “Yeah, actually that’s pretty well known. It’s called bloatware. It’s kind of a joke that the bigger and stronger and faster they build the machines, the more existing software gets updated to fill it without any improvements.”

I nodded, “I can believe it. Did you know that over ninety percent of the packets that are sent to your computer from the internet contain nothing more than thousands of viruses, trackers, and data readers designed to do nothing more than peel all the information off your computer and send it to someone else or just eat all of your data? Eggs, the antivirus software is almost worse than the stuff coming in, it peels out a lot of information that nothing but root access could send out, and just throws it out in barely-secured packets that could be read by anyone.”

He nodded slowly, “Yeah. That’s another trope. I am not enough of a computer guy to know much about that, I mostly focus on using it to try and catch bad guys. I am way overdue on my morning briefing but fuck it, the guys know what to do. So what do you intend to do?”

I sighed and curled up sideways in the chair, putting my knee over the arm but leaving my right foot on the floor as I leaned back against the left arm. “I intend to flood your side of the board with queens. I even have a quest to recruit as many of my people as possible to fight against the Sintar. Humans are terrifying, giving them that much power, especially if they can revel in the pain of others is even more terrifying.”

I tucked my hands behind my head, ignoring the Captain’s lingering looks. “But I know what the Sintar will do if they find Earth before we are ready. They will destroy everything, eat everything, and use your minds to take everything. Eventually, they will probably run out of targets and die like a fire that has burned the entire forest, but when they do, everything will be gone for a few million years until new races rise. The worst part is, They have the technology to submerge themselves in stasis. It is already suggested they may have done this once before, and they will come back when there’s enough life to repeat the cycle.”

I smiled a little at him and was confused by a hint of bloodthirsty desire in my tones. “Humans may destroy everything, but the Sintar will destroy everything. I intend to make sure that when they show up, Humans not only send them running with their tails between their legs, if they had tails if they had legs, but that you make sure that they can never respawn and threaten any species ever again.”