Apocalypse Redux

The first thing that hit him when the doors of the elevator slid open was the air.

Cold, yet oddly wet, with some bizarre combination of an acrid taste at the back of his throat, and the whole place was also … maybe spicy was the best term to use here, but it was far from accurate.

Urgh.

Derek gagged, then cast [Air Purifier], anchoring the spell to the front of his face.

It worked. Sort of.

Some of the worst of the issue was cut out by the spell, but in general … not exactly better, and certainly far from good. Also, now that he was a few breaths in, it also started reminding him of the one time he’d been to Peru, the mountaintops’ low air pressure and lack of oxygen not immediately apparent, but harshly limiting nevertheless.

Truly, a terrible atmosphere for humanity, but when he caught sight of several other people wearing either rebreathers or what looked like perfume-soaked shawls, he realized he wasn’t the only one who had a problem with the air, just like they’d been warned up above.

Because of the people he was looking at, half of them were aliens.

Nearby stood an Assai, a head shorter than him, clad in a golden cloak that just covered most of their legs and torso, just barely granting sight upon their white skin, most of their exposed limbs covered in rocky grey armor.

They shared the “two arms, two legs, one head” set of limbs that humanity did, but no one would ever mistake an Assai for being human, the second pair of eyes currently staring at Derek from the back of the alien’s head being the least of the “clues.” And there were probably few things he could do that would be worse than looking like a tourist. Perhaps acting like one, actively gawking, begging random passer’s-by for selfies, shit like that, though Derek had the distinct suspicion that those who lived on this station were either used to that, or being obnoxious had been banned, but if that had been a real concern here, wouldn’t that have been one of the things they’d been warned about up top?

Either way, Derek dragged his eyes away, slowly, trying to avoid giving the impression that he was averting his eyes due to being unable to look at an alien or something like that. He’d probably overcompensated in the other way, but there was no way to change that now.

He also decided to take a few steps forward to clear the elevator’s entrance, the pod having already shot back up for another group of passengers.

“Where to now?” Ye-in asked. “Honestly, I kinda want to see the food …”

Derek threw her a surprised glance, but shrugged and agreed.

Finding the food court was easy, as everything was clearly labeled in thirteen different languages, of which Derek spoke only three, those being English, Spanish, and Mandarin, with a fourth, Hindi, recognizable. The others were alien, four each for the Assai and Koinians, and the final one for the Dromon, whose language, both written and spoken, had been provided and/or codified by the [System], resulting in the basically Stone Age species actually having the greatest degree of linguistic unity of any species present.

The various restaurants/stalls had also been set up in one of two wildly divergent ways. The first was all about offering one’s own cuisine, letting any alien species try the things that would not end with them in a coffin, while others specialized in catering to a specific species while drawing upon recipes from everywhere.

Including one that was simply named “The ‘Start Here’ Restaurant.”

As far as branding went, that one definitely had the best Derek had seen in recent memory. Especially since it was the closest to the door that led into the food court.

Though Derek also noticed that tables had runes visibly set into their center, the ones he recognized as being some manner of containment … had they actually set up enchantments to make sure that only the people sitting at the table could smell the food?

Actually, how the hell had it taken him this long to realize he couldn’t smell any of the food, period?

Clearly, the same kind of “protection” was also in place on the stalls themselves, which was potentially a good idea, but at the same time, also made it hard to figure out where to eat by smell alone, which was how he usually navigated these places. Which made advice like “start here” all the more important.

“I’ll get us a table, but I’m not going to promise I’ll try anyhting,” Mimi announced, before heading off to do just that.

Derek shrugged. “Go to the sign that says ‘start here’ and see where we go from there?”

***

Fifteen minutes later, the four of them sat at a table and Derek was staring down at something that looked like a pile of fish scales, smelled like copper and woodsmoke, and had been sold as a specialty of the Assai people, with a name that was downright unpronounceable, not just from a language that used sounds not contained in one he already knew, but one that had never even had human phyiology in mind, which was why he’d been very glad orders could be made via a tablet.

And he was hesitating.

Okay, come on, Derek, you can do this … remember those sea snails in Japan, or how much you love durian even though it stinks to high heaven … someone must have been the first one who tried those, right?

Or what about sea urchins? Someone once looked at the devil’s pincushion, then cracked it open and ate the insides anyway, and now it’s one of your favorite foods … this could be that, right?

Spoiler alert, it was not, though it was hard to put into words just what was wrong with it, beyond the fact that something was decidedly disagreeing with him.

So while Derek tried to avoid looking like he was about to puke, or actually wind up puking, Ye-in did her best to avoid laughing her ass off … only to promptly wind up with almost the exact same expression on her face when she took a bite of her own food.

And Atticus followed a moment later, cursing softly in a language Derek neither spoke nor recognized before setting his fork down with a firm thunk, before suddenly turning to their engineer, who seemed to be rather happy with her own meal.

“How are you okay?”

“I asked one of the humans for advice,” Mimi said primly, taking another bite of what Derek could best describe as Pablo Picasso’s interpretation of a pizza that someone had gone insane on with the palate-swap feature of an image editing program.

“Boo,” Atticus said, half-heartedly. “Where’s your sense of adventure?”

She shrugged. “I had it replaced with an extra helping of common sense.”

Yeah. That pretty succinctly summed up why she’d been the only one to avoid issues.

“What’s that called?” Derek asked, gesturing to her meal.

“No idea how to pronounce it, but this is what it looks like on the menu,” Mimi said, waving her free hand through the air and making strange letters appear in the air as she used a [Skill] Derek believed was normally used to manifest phantom blueprints or the like, for the purposes of visual demonstration.

For a long moment, Derek was torn on whether or not to get that too, but eventually decided to stick with the fish-scale stuff. It didn’t outright get better now that he was used to it, but at least the urge to spew had mostly subsided.

And once they were done, he wiped off his mouth, downed an entire glass of water to try and wash away the taste.

“So, what do we want to do now?” he asked.

“Look at the technology on sale,” Mimi immediately announced, to absolutely no one’s surprise. That girl had a one-track mind any time tech was even remotely in her future.

“Check out the gear,” Atticus offered.

“Same,” Ye-in agreed. “What about you?”

“I was going to look for Aspects,” Derek said. “But I don’t think we should completely split up. Pairs?”

“I’ll come with you, I think all the personal enhancement stuff is in the same place,” Atticus offered, leaving Mimi and Ye-in to go look at starship parts again … but Ye-in seemed happy with it, and Derek was fully aware of the fact that if she’d had a problem with it, she’d have said something.

So together with the Dragonfly’s pilot, he navigated the rather chaotic surroundings of the food court to the area that offered, well, gear, in a rather chaotic medley of stuff.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

There were high-tech booths that had been ripped straight out of the old tv shows he liked to watch, so thoroughly that he half expected to see copyright lawyers show up, sitting next to blacksmiths that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a medieval castle … assuming the proprietors hadn’t been burned for witchcraft the moment a member of the clergy caught sight of the runes carved into their anvils.

Armor that looked like it would rupture like a balloon attached to a firehose if the wearer was even a single millimeter bigger than intended, and shapeless masses that seemed like they’d wind up being effectively poured over whatever poor sap would wind up having to squeeze into them.

High-tech weapons such as working, portable railguns and what seemed to be edging dangerously close to copyright-infringing plasma blades sitting next to basic swords, axes, spears, some positively medieval, others seeming to have originated even further back, something for which there was no doubt a very good reason, likely [Skill]-related.

And Derek did have to admit, even though he was very happy moving towards a magic build, the childish impulse to buy a big flint axe and play the barbarian was strong.

Also, anything he got here, rather than Earth, would be subject to one hell of a markup.

But once again, they weren’t here to buy from humans, and Atticus made a beeline straight for a doorway that was very much giving “hole in the wall” vibes, something that had to be absolutely intentional, considering the fact that everything in this station had been built from the ground up, with intentional partitions between stores, so there wouldn’t be any random gaps for those looking to hide to slide into.

At least not so blatantly and visibly. There was doubtlessly at least some black market shenanigans present aboard this station, though.

Atticus dove straight into the wares, which turned out to be all sorts of “shady” gear, which immediately explained the vibe of the store.

Potions that erased scent, spellbooks that promised to teach the magics of shadows and mystery, even a handful of [Skill]books, which could only be obtained from the Events which the [System] sometimes held, and the unique summoning tables only available then … oh, and there were knives.

A lot of knives.

Thin stilettos meant to slip through gaps in armor, hollow blades designed to be filled with poison, even cursed weaponry that was to be employed in situations where the opening blow was not going to finish the fight, where it needed to be more decisive than a mere injury alone would allow for.

And while any decently-leveled rogue would have the Strength to wear plate, but there was far more involved in choosing the right gear than “can I carry it without keeling over.”

As such, there were at least a dozen different kinds of armor, as well as versions for each size of each species … though [Cosmos Soul] let him know that that was only possible due to an utterly absurd amount of spatial magic built into the closet.

Oh, and there were also only about a million different kinds of thieves’ tools, plus various toxins, smokebombs, and other (al)chemical enablers of shenanigans.

The only thing that Derek could really use were the [Skill]books; he didn’t use any of the gear, had a spellbook that likely contained most of the spells found here that he hadn’t even gotten to, and any [Skill]book worth getting was too expensive to be worth it.

So he found his eyes drawn to the proprietor instead.

He’d seen others of the species before, after all, Koinians were actually the most common species on the station, ahead of even humanity, but Derek had decided against picking out a random alien and staring them down while moving through the crowds.

They had an interesting history. For starters, they’d managed to entirely sidestep the issue of summoned monsters getting out of hand … by having a devastating civil war instead, one which had quickly led to one side escaping onto the other habitable planet in their star system, expanding the war into a whole new dimension of chaos … until they’d managed to lock themselves out of all manner of FTL, teleporation included, by constantly creating more and more ward anchors and hurling them into space until the whole mess became functionally permanent.

Though they’d eventually managed to dismantle the mess, which was why they were here in the first place.

Appearance-wise … Koinians were hairless, thin, tall, with wide-set eyes and a big mouth that some people claimed made them look like stretched frogs.

Derek couldn’t quite see it, though their blue-green skin did resemble that of an amphibian if you squinted.

All in all, they were the species humanity was closest with, though they were still noticeably alien.

For example, they had a weird thing about social positioning. It wasn’t a caste system, or some kind of formal anything, but rather a web of relationships and varying weight being lent to various people’s words that meant that people who knew what was going without being formally in the chain of command could weigh in, but also a whole lot of other issues, muddying the water in several different ways … oh, and when it came to sending envoys to a different “structure” could get weird, the rules surrounding that as opaque to humanity as the darkest depths of quantum physics, yet made perfect, downright instinctual, sense to Koinians.

And even just the issue of hierarchy, which wasn’t the biggest issue, just the one that cropped up the most often, could fill a book. And not some dinky little paperback, but a massive encyclopedia heavy enough to crush a human skull.

In many ways, the Koinian idea of hierarchy seemed to have been developed by the same mind behind German grammar: purpose-built to confuse the hell out of anyone who hadn’t grown up immersed in it.

Eventually, though, Atticus wound up buying a couple of oddly-shaped daggers, either something from Earth that was so obscure that even Derek hadn’t seen them before, or, more likely, he was looking at an alien design, the wavey shape meant to exploit some weakness of the creator’s physiology, much like how the Maori of New Zeeland had designed a club for whacking other humans in the temple for a swift and decisive blow.

Together, the two of them continued their stroll through the area until they found their next piece of interest, or rather, it found them?

“Hey, you look like someone who appreciates a unique Aspect? How would you like to earn yourself one from an alien summoning list?”

How had … right, [Chimera], that probably made it obvious that Derek liked his Aspects.

“Sure,” he said, turning to face the Koinian standing at a small stall, obviously lacking the space to summon much of anyhting, though a placard to the alien’s left displayed a picture of an arena that had likely started life as one of the warehouses, reinforced to the point where this would be safe, at least for something suitable for him to fight.

“What are you offering?”

“Anything up to Tier 5 we can do on the station; there is an asteroid with gravity runes for anything bigger.”

Part of Derek was tempted to dig deep into his admittedly limited amount of knowledge about alien summoning tables, find something that was both far more powerful than him and especially vulnerable to his particular brand of bullshit, then whoop its ass.

But then again … making himself look like someone to watch to the very definition of a foreign power was hardly the best idea, and Derek had the distinct feeling that learning about the “impressive” members of alien species was a decently large part of what this was all about, considering how heavy the government presence was aboard this station.

Yet … wasn’t there an Aspect that he wanted to get?

“So, I saw something interesting upstairs, but the information was pretty sparse. What exactly is a Ki-lun, mythologically speaking?” Derek asked, assuming it was, in fact, from mythology because it hadn’t been translated.

“The bane of fell mages,” the proprietor explained. “They are inured to magic and bring about the downfall of those who would use it for ill.”

“And what’s the actual creature like? I saw the Aspect in the human part, but I don’t know what the creature can do.”

“A spectral-type monster, Tier 5, the usual flexible ‘body’ that implies, with the ability to absorb spells and cast them itself, typically at a heavily increased power.”

Shoot.

“Did you assign your Stat points yet?” Atticus asked from beside Derek.

“Not yet,” Derek said. Neither the points from the last five Levels, nor the 110 points awarded by [Aspect Hunter] for all the Aspects he’d already slotted. And while that would doubtlessly give him a significant degree of extra power, it wouldn’t necessarily be enough to make fighting a largely unknown monster safe.

[Anima Bolt], on the other hand, would. Like a spell, without actually being one, that was the entire reason he’d gotten it.

… But he probably should assign those Stat points soon. As in, by the end of this conversation.

“Do you have some kind of official guide, maybe?” Atticus asked the proprietor. “Preferably one in a human language, but we can translate if need be.”

Though the ship’s computer did have a scan-and-translate function, Derek was sure that a translation made by the aliens themselves would likely be better.

“We have guides in all thirteen languages,” the Koinian told them, blindly reaching under the desk to pull out a pamphlet with the image of a ghostly creature splashed across the front, alien runes swirling around within its body.

“How much?” Derek asked.

“The pamphlets are free. The price for summoning is listed on the back.”

“Thank you,” Derek said. “I’ll be back once I’ve looked this through.”

The exact timing of his return was left vague, though the first thing he did was spend all his Stat points. There were already the increases from the Aspects themselves, letting him bump both magic stats up to 150, because that was what he’d need the most in the future, especially as it would more than allow him to continuously use [Alcubierre Bubble] without needing to pause to recover or temporarily hand off control of the warp effect.

Then Fortitude and Agility had mostly been enhanced by various Aspects, but by the end, they were at 90 and 80, respectively, and he’d used the rest of his points to bring Strength and Perception to 60.

All told, his actual Stats were high for his Level, though that advantage would rapidly shrink as he kept leveling, simply because he’d gain a lot of easy Stat points from that, while new Aspect slots would remain expensive, even with [Aspect Hunter].

Eventually, Derk wound up trading off with Ye-in to tour the technological side of the shops with Mimi, though, for the most part, he didn’t quite have the knowledge to judge quality beyond raw performance metrics, few of which went beyond what the Dragonfly was already capable of, at least as far as the ones that could theoretically be installed went.

Until eventually, it got late, and they wound up heading back towards the ship.

As fascinating as this had all been, Derek wasn’t entirely sure this had actually been productive.

Big shocker, aliens were alien. Even the most similar aliens to humanity, the Koinians, were still substantially different in ways that defied easy categorization because they didn’t look different, they thought in entirely different ways that made understanding them and their actions a real headscratcher, much of the time.

Sure, humans were different, too, but those were simple differences. To use an old example, used in German schools for God only knew for how long: the German and French ideas of what a first meeting between cooperating parties should be like.

Germans liked to hammer out details, French preferred to actually get to know their new business partners, and if neither party knew what to expect from the other, they would talk right past each other and wind up assuming the others were stick-in-the-muds/not taking things seriously, respectively.

But, at the same time, that could be handled, simply by making sure each party knew what the other was like, and that was information that could be conveyed in a couple of sentences at most.

That was with humans, though, working off of a shared understanding of things, a view of the world shared on some level …

Different species could get along without conflict, even cooperate, yet was that feeling of oddness that had accompanied him throughout the station a reflection of his unfamiliarity with aliens, or a sign of something deeper?

He sighed. It was only the first day ... And he’d be damned if they only spent a single day here.