“Greetings, meatbag.”
The day, Brock thought glumly, has gotten worse. At least these workout clothes are comfortable.
A familiar cannon and missile-studded arachnid shape was seated next to Cap at the table when he got back, one leg plugged into a cylindrical canister covered in what Brock figured must be warning symbols, judging by the skulls and dead body ideograms everywhere. Before he could sit, KB (Administrative) flicked another leg out and poked him in the chest, sending him sprawling backwards onto his butt.
“Hey! What was that for?”
“I am establishing baseline parameters for your testing, meatbag. Reflexes - pathetic.”
“KB,” Cap said around a mouthful of food, “you know you’re supposed to do that at the actual testing site.” She swallowed and took another bite of what looked like a mushroom omelette over a bed of white rice.
“I am merely making the most efficient use of our time, Captain,” KB (Administrative) replied, “as you are still occupied with your breakfast.” Brock swore there was a hint of smugness in the robot’s voice. Scowling, he got back into his chair, then reached for his orange juice. As his fingers closed around the glass, a thin metal tendril curled around it too, like it was going to play tug of war. Brock tried to pull the glass towards himself, but it was like moving a mountain. The glass didn’t even tremble.
Frustrated, he pulled harder on it, then harder still, face growing red. Right as he thought his arm muscles were going to give out, the robot let go, causing Brock to fling what remained of his orange juice in his own face.
“Strength - abysmal. I have witnessed squalling infants with tiny baby hands more effective than your own, meatbag.”
“KB...” Cap warned, but her voice held muffled laughter. She waved one hand at Brock, charms on her wrists jingling, and a glow of light descended around him, whisking the orange juice out of his hair and clothes and back into the glass. Still sputtering, Brock folded his arms across his chest and sulked.
“Social aptitude - like that of a flattened frog left in the sun for six days. Tell me, meatbag, what is the approximate velocity of a standard railgun round fired from a mk. IV Devastator system in three quarter depth Jovian atmosphere?”
“Is the system African, or European?” Brock countered sourly.
“Intelligence - slightly above that of a slime mold. I am left wondering how you managed to dress yourself properly, meatbag. Do you have any redeeming qualities?”
Brock tried to stare down the hellfire eyes, but quickly realized that a staring contest with someone who never blinked was probably not going to end in his favor. He slouched down in his chair, sulk intensifying. He felt angry, and lost, but that wasn’t new. He was used to failure. While punching the robot held an almost irresistible lure, he knew it wasn’t going to happen. He’d probably end up face-down in Cap’s omelette.
“Emotional maturity - excellent.”
“Whut?”
KB (Administrative) let loose with its sawtooth laugh.
“For a Sekkie, meatbag. For a Sekkie. Normally your kind are flailing ineffectually at me by now, screaming what limited insults their addled brainworms can force out of their frothing mouths.” The canister in front of the robot beeped, and it swiveled its head towards Cap. “My breakfast is complete, and my initial tests are concluded, Captain. I will see you at the Bell.” KB (Administrative) turned back towards Brock. “Try not to run into too many doorways on the way there, meatbag,” and then it was scuttling out the door with that too-smooth motion, one limb extending to deposit its spent canister on a segment of the back counter labeled ‘recycling.’
“That wasn’t half bad, kid,” Cap said conversationally, her hostility from the previous day no longer suffusing her words. “KB wasn’t lying about the usual response Sekkies have to it. You’re the first one I’ve seen refrain from attacking.”
“What good would that do?” Brock snapped, still fuming at the rude treatment. “With this Limiter on, it’s not like I could do anything.”
“Yeah, that’s the point,” Cap replied, finishing the last bit of her omelette. “Every other Sekkie thinks they can do something, even with the Limiter on. They think reality is going to change around them because they’re the hero of their own little story, that what they want is the only thing that matters.”
She stood, gathering up her dishes. Brock did the same, walking behind her to the ‘recycling’ part of the kitchen counter. They placed them down, and Cap nodded at George, who had materialized in front of them with a scrub brush and soap.
“Another excellent meal, George. Thanks.”
“Anytime, Captain!” George replied with that too-wide smile as they walked away. Brock wondered if Cap realized just how fake it was.
“What’s his deal?” Brock asked, following Cap out of the cafeteria. “Why is there a ‘sekkie’ making the food?”
“Because George’s powers make him one of the best chefs on this planet,” Cap said, once again leading him through the twisting hallways. They passed a variety of other people along the way, both singly and in groups, all in the same black suit and white dress shirt Cap was wearing. “One of the more popular sub-genres of anime in your world deals with cooking all sorts of weird things. We get Sekkies like that on a fairly regular basis, so there’s no shortage of fine dining options in the city. They’re actually in fairly high demand by the food critics.” She paused. “In here.”
She motioned Brock through a door and into the small chamber of an elevator ant. As the ant crawled through the tunnels leading to the outside of the massive tree, Brock thought about the malice in George’s eyes when he’d talked about ‘NPCs,’ a term Brock was certain he’d used as a pejorative. It didn’t seem to make sense that someone whose powers dealt with cooking would be harboring that much hate towards others. The elevator emerged into bright morning sunlight and Brock tightened his eyes.
“Why does he have to wear a Limiter, then? How can cooking powers be that bad?”
“When we found George,” Cap said evenly, “he’d enslaved an entire farming community in the Veldt Highlands and was conducting experiments on them with his dishes. His food was, quite literally, to die for, and there were over a hundred graves to prove it. He was also on the verge of wiping out the local ecosystem and turning the place into a desert. We’re pretty sure he caused the extinction of at least five local species that we know of. His journal entries indicated they were quite delicious.”
Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.
Brock swallowed.
“But... why? Why would he do that?”
Cap looked at him steadily.
“Because he could. He wanted to raise his cooking skills, and didn’t care who got hurt in the process. To him, and to all the other Sekkies, we’re nothing more than pieces in a game they can move around as they wish.” She sucks in a breath. “They warp the world around them with their desires, which is why it’s so important we track them down and get a Limiter on them.”
The elevator continued climbing up the tree in silence for a while, industrious feet churning away at its sides. Brock noticed there weren’t many other elevator ants around them, and asked Cap about it.
“We don’t normally come up to the lower branches of the Yggdrasil except for testing,” she responded, hands in her pockets. “There’s a very delicate balance of some extremely strange things up here, and we try not to disturb it.”
“What kind of things-”
Brock yelped in surprise as a tree branch as big as a continent flashed into existence below them, then another, and another. They shimmered strangely, like the surface of a soap bubble, then several winked back out, reappearing higher up.
“Past a certain point, Yggdrasils aren’t quite in phase with everything else,” Cap said calmly. “That’s why the planet still gets sunlight, instead of wilting in perpetual shade from their branches and leaves. I’m not even going to get into the damage a nut would cause if it fell into our reality.”
“...a nut?”
Another mind-bendingly huge branch shifted into existence right beside them, and the elevator ant scuttled from the pale trunk of the Yggdrasil onto the even paler branch. Brock held his breath, fearing it would disappear and send them into an endless freefall, but the highway of wood stayed solid. He let his breath out when a gargantuan brown dome rose from the horizon, stretching the width of the entire branch. As they got closer, he saw that the bottom edge of it was cracked in a zigzag pattern, like an eggshell that had been broken in half.
It looked like a bell from the temple of some nameless god, and as the elevator kept zooming towards it, Brock realized the scale of the thing was impossible to comprehend. It just kept growing bigger and bigger in his vision, until the brown dome had turned into a wall that blotted out the sky. The elevator ant scurried beneath one of the zigzag openings, which from far away had seemed too small to enter, but was now revealed to stretch miles up into the air. Puffy white clouds wreathed the upper edges of the opening, streaming in and out like vast breaths, and as they traveled farther inside, despite the early morning sunlight, the air grew dark and gloomy. Small pinpoints of distant light, like twinkling stars, appeared above them, obscured occasionally by slow-moving blanknesses that Brock assumed were more clouds. The shell of the thing had to be at least a mile thick.
He let out a reverential breath. Every time he thought he’d seen something amazing, this world showed him something more.
“This is...?”
“Yeah. This is a Yggdrasil Nut,” Cap replied. “We think they’re how the Yggdrasils spread to other worlds, but frankly, we don’t understand a tenth of what these trees actually do. We’re just glad the nuts don’t fall on us, and we hope we never meet what broke this one.”
“Why?”
“Because nothing we have can do the trick, and believe me, we’ve tried.”
She drew a sigil in flowing orange light, and a gentle illumination spread out from the elevator. A matching glow appeared in front of them, and several minutes later, the elevator came to a stop outside a brightly-lit encampment of four three-story buildings set in a square. Beyond them was what looked like an abandoned city, full of listing skyscrapers and giant industrial complexes, dark and foreboding in the shadowy atmosphere of the rest of the nut’s interior.
The elevator door slid open, and Cap stepped out. Brock went with her, head swiveling all around like a tourist on vacation.
“It was abandoned like this when we found the place,” she began, leading him towards the nearest three-story building. “We’re not sure if a Sekkie created the city, or something else, but no one’s ever shown up to claim ownership.”
“What would you do if someone did show up?”
She shrugged.
“Probably just leave. There are plenty of other branches. Until that happens, though, it’s a useful testing site. Since we’re out of phase, if something goes wrong, it doesn’t blow back into our reality.”
“If something goes wrong, it means a meatbag got vaporized.”
Brock was proud of himself. He only jumped a little bit this time as KB (Administrative) appeared next to them, whip-like legs flickering across the ground, cannons tracking directly at Brock.
“Relax, meatbag. The testing hasn’t begun. Yet.”
KB (Administrative)’s cannons returned to their neutral forward position, and it escorted them through a pair of sliding glass doors. The large room beyond was filled with machines set around a deeply recessed circular area in its center filled with sand. Rows of comfortable recliners stretched up a set of stepped landings like movie theater seats overlooking the pit. A workstation with multiple screens took up a quarter of the entire top row, and heavy floodlights overhead erased any scrap of shadow from the sandy floor, but left the surrounding areas in dim, muted light.
It looked, Brock decided, like some sort of fighting arena.
His unease deepened when KB (Administrative) jumped into the pit and began fiddling with some instruments along the wall.
“Yoooo, Cap!”
A cheerful voice greeted them from the left, along with another familiar, deeper one.
“Good morning, Captain.”
“Fiona, Mikael, what are you doing here?” Cap asked with some surprise. “I thought you were still on convalescent leave.”
“We convinced KB to let us come up and watch, but only if we promised not to participate,” Fiona whispered conspiratorially, bending forward. She had several band-aids on her cheek and nose, and was wearing the same suit and shirt outfit as Cap, as was Mikael, who tousled her red hair lightly, other hand balancing his katana sheath.
“C’mon, Captain. The kid got an Overlord-class to bail. We want to see what he can do. Besides,” his voice dropped, “if there’s any chance Starak’s alive, we want to know too.” A small doll that looked like it was made out of green vines poked itself out of the inside of his jacket. An opening appeared in its mouth, and faint words came out.
“We owe him, Tara. Mikael told me what happened yesterday after I was out. If Starak’s there, we’ll get him back for you.”
In the background of the doll’s voice, someone could be heard yelling, “You better not be doing any photosynthesizing when you’re supposed to be resting, Operator Haze!” and it scrambled back inside Mikael’s jacket with a guilty expression.
Cap held her hand across her eyes for several seconds, then brought it down, wiping it on the side of her pants.
“Thank you,” she said softly, “all of you.”
A piercing whistle sounded at the top of the raised steppes, next to the workstation. “If you’re all done hugging it out,” the ghost-white figure there snapped, “I have a subject to research. Get him into the pit.”
Cap looked like she was going to fire something back, but froze at the clipped tones from behind them all.
“Doctor Yuriel is correct. Let’s begin the testing. There is much to learn.”
Mikael, Fiona, and Cap turned to the entrance, the glass doors sliding shut behind the Director.
“Yes, sir,” they chorused. Cap took Brock by the arm and led him towards the arena as Fiona and Mikael followed the Director up to the recliners.
“You’ll be fine,” she said quietly, but Brock noticed her other hand trembling slightly. “We don’t test to destruction. Normally. Just make sure you listen to what KB says, okay?”
“Uhhh, sure.”
She let go of his arm and took up a position behind one of the machines surrounding the pit. Brock looked around uncertainly. What was he supposed to do now? A long metal limb looped around his waist and lifted him down to the sand, letting him drop the last two feet. He stumbled and almost fell. When he looked up, it was into a pair of inferno eyes.
“Greetings, meatbag,” the robot said, appendages poised threateningly in all directions, like some twisted starfish. “Let’s see what you’re made of.”
Yuriel’s bored voice drifted down from the workstation.
“Beginning test number one.”