Early the next morning, when Scranton lumbered into her office and opened her email, she was so tired that she actually thought she was dreaming when the first thing in her inbox was an email from Bath with the subject line, "Report."
She opened it up and began to read the attached Word document. As she read, she became increasingly perplexed.
“Bathiosaurus exorexus was alive during the beginning of the Permian period. It combined the internals of a synapsid, the ancestor of mammals, with the external features of an armored arachnid. The size of exorexus is unfathomable considering that exorexus was a terrestrial: the only species rivaling the size of exorexus have all been aquatic. This suggests that exorexus is a completely unprecedented organism with no discovered direct ancestors or descendants.
“Exorexus was undoubtedly the top predator on Pangea. His size is such that just walking would have cause the ground to shake under his weight. More importantly, because he had internals similar to those of a synapsid, he also would have had the metabolism of a synapsid rather than of an arachnid. Accordingly, to support his enormous size, exorexus would have needed to constantly feed. Unlike nearly every other large animal in existence, exorexus was carnivorous. To support himself, exorexus must have been in constant movement across the continent as he devoured prey.
“Exorexus was not a sustainable animal: any evolutionary ancestors of exorexus would have died out quickly from starvation. This again reintroduces the question of how exorexus came into being.
“Exorexus' crusade across Pangea in pursuit of food eventually led him to the land above the Siberian Traps. At this time, the Siberian Traps were already primed to erupt. When exorexus walked across the Traps in pursuit of prey, moving with in powerful strides, he caused the Earth to crack beneath him. The estimated mass of exorexus leaves no doubt that he would have been able to create great tremors in the earth above the Traps, enough so that as he passed over them, he caused them to prematurely erupt. As they erupted, he was immediately caught in magma. Exorexus' body, for reasons unknown, contained many heavy minerals which were preserved in the magma when the rest of his body was not. If not for this fact, exorexus' existence would never have been discovered.
“Because exorexus was found around the Siberian Traps, had the Traps not already erupted, exorexus would have certainly set off their eruption just by his close proximity. That he was flash-incinerated in magma and turned to obsidian only serves to support the hypothesis that he set off the eruption that simultaneously ended his existence.”
Professor Scranton agreed with Bath that there was absolutely no explanation for how exorexus came into being. Exorexus clearly wasn’t a completely new life form: she had seen from Bath’s sketches of the specimen’s internals that its anatomy did closely resemble that of synapsids, indicating a shared evolutionary history.
However, the organism had eight enormous, jointed legs and a massive carapace. From the outside, the organism looked like a huge, armored tarantula. Except for its head.
Exorexus had two beady black eyes deeply set in a round, fiendish looking skull. It also had an enormous, fanged mouth, like some kind of prehistoric angler fish. Exorexus had truly been a terror.
Professor Scranton stopped herself. These were all the insights of her new undergraduate researcher. All of this was just based on his sketches and his knowledge of the ancient world. She couldn’t take all of this at face value. Besides, she saw multiple holes in his reasoning. This entire theory practically relied on the fact that Exorexus existed at the beginning of the Permian Extinction. They hadn’t used any isotropic dating on the obsidian and had no evidence besides Exorexus' unorthodox anatomy that it was from then.
She went over to her computer and pulled up the 3D scan of the fossil she had taken while in Siberia. She studied the fossil thoroughly, comparing it with the sketches Bath had produced.
The minerals definitely coincided with the sketch. However, the minerals were very disorganized around the face and the internals. While everything matched up, she didn’t see how Bath had been able to produce a sketch of exorexus’ internal organs based off of the minerals in the obsidian alone. She couldn’t, then, fully accept the fact that exorexus' anatomy matched that of a synapsid. Perhaps exorexus was from a later or earlier time period.
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“But really, Bathiosaurus exorexus?" she murmured, chuckling to herself. Naming the monster after himself? Bath-iosaurus?
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After Bath sent off the report, he put the issue of correcting the history of the Permian Extinction on the backburner. Something interesting had come up yesterday: Lisa had finally identified someone else who could manipulate minds.
Lisa had told Bath an endless number of times that she would be able to sense people who could manipulate minds because of their distinctive mental shells. These shells would move about in irregular ways and dip into the shells of others.
A few months after Bath and Lisa had been searching for mind-manipulators, Lisa informed Bath that there was a good chance that if a mind-manipulator was careful, they could stop their shell from moving around, though this would require conscious control. If they knew Lisa was coming and sensed her first, however, this meant that they could mask their shell if they wanted to escape her detection. Moreover, if they were more experienced than her, she pointed out that they would likely have a larger range of detection and sense her before she discovered them.
This was one of the main reasons why Bath and Lisa had called off the mind-manipulator hunt before heading off to Alens. Before, they had assumed that if they searched hard enough, they would certainly find a mind-manipulator. In reality, if this wasn’t the case, then they were just wasting their time while potentially exposing Lisa.
But yesterday, Lisa had finally detected someone before they detected her. She hid her shell immediately, gleeful that she had finally become powerful enough to get the jump on someone else.
“Who’s the best?” she asked Bath, a huge smile on her face.
He scoffed. “Me, obviously.”
“Bath—”
“But, you're a close second,” he added warmly, humor in his eyes. “This is great, Lisa. Why don’t we figure out who this person is?”
Lisa pointed out the mind-manipulator from afar. Bath approached the person as a small gnat.
It was a human woman. She was tall, with dark hair and olive skin. Bath found that her name was Angelina Baker and that she was a junior at Alens.
Nothing seemed out of the ordinary about Angelina as Bath followed her around. However, before Bath left Angelina to return to his room, he deposited tiny ears all over her room to listen in on her activities. He needed to know if she had contact with other mind manipulators.
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A few days later, late at night, Bath was stirred awake by the ears he had stationed in Angelina’s dorm. They always relayed to him any sounds coming from her room, though usually it was insignificant noise. However, now, at three in the morning, Bath listened very carefully to Angelina’s words as she spoke into her phone. Calls made at such a strange hour were rarely without purpose.
“Ritus per astra,” she murmured into the phone. Rites by the stars. Bath frowned. This sounded like some kind of weird passphrase.
He quickly used long-range manipulation to place a pair of extremely sensitive ears near the phone to hear the other side of the conversation.
“Hello, Angie,” a muffled male voice replied. “How’s school?”
“It’s good.”
“Have you found the Regis yet?” The king?
“Yeah. I found her.”
“She still doesn’t know that you're a kursi, correct?”
“Of course! Dad, come on, you know I'm one of the best Dominators in all of Ritus.” Her voice was full of expression and intensity, though very quiet. Bath’s stationed ears could only hear the conversation clearly because of their augmented hearing.
The man on the phone chuckled. “Alright. Honey, there’s going to be a meeting with the Council in twenty days. A new gate’s opened up. We're going to test the waters.”
Angelina seemed startled by her reply. “What!? Dad, it’s only been two years since our last fishing expedition,” she hissed. “Is it really a good idea to fish again so soon?”
“We’re just testing the waters, dear. We still don’t know what we’re dealing with. Before then, I want you to make contact with the Regis and invite her to come with you. This is a good opportunity to recruit her and show her Ritus’ power.”
“Ok; I'll make contact soon.”
The phone call ended. Angie stood up and walked around her room. “Why now?” she asked out loud, her voice barely audible. She sighed, then tucked herself into bed to resume sleep.
Bath mulled over what he had heard. “Ritus?” he whispered to himself. What was this organization?
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Bath told Lisa what he had head heard the next day. She seemed fairly annoyed that she had been discovered as a mind-manipulator, but aside from that was relatively unsurprised.
“Well, if there are other mind-manipulators, it makes sense that they’ve created their own organization,” she said. “At least we now know that there are enough manipulators to actually form an organization.”
“Do you know why they were calling you a Regis?” Bath asked.
Lisa shrugged, her face contorting into an “I have no idea” expression.
“Maybe it’s what they call mind-manipulators. Kings and queens or something stupid and elitist like that.”
Bath shook his head. “They seemed to be calling you something else. Almost like...a classification of manipulator.”
“We won’t be able to figure out everything now, without talking to these people first.”
Bath nodded his assent. “Well, this Angelina figure was instructed to reach out to you. However...why don’t we reach out to her first?”
Lisa cocked her head. “We could,” she said slowly, “but why?”
Bath displayed a predatory grin, showing teeth. “I think that if you want to have the best chance of gaining more information, you need to make yourself desirable to this organization. That way, if you ask questions, they will be more inclined to answer rather than be tight-lipped.”
“That’s oddly political of you.”
Bath smiled. “It’s of paramount importance that you make a good impression. We need to find out more about mind-manipulation: how it works, and how it’s possible.”
Lisa nodded. “Okay, so when do we approach Angelina?”
“How about now?”