Hi, I’m Penny and I messed up.

“What the fuck Penny!?”

That bullshit happened to be being left on a Star Trek, class “M” planet. To Botanist barbie “Francesca Summers” it’s Habitable Planet 2.7k ly antispinward system after alien contact. For me and the upload to the Andromeda Matrix (which I’m trying to rebrand to Supercluster Community Enrichment Program for humanity) it’s the Astoria system, orbiting around Solastra and Solastrab – a binary star system with a hab zone a little further out than Sol. Which is where we are on Astoria.

“Why did you teleport us halfway across the large ass rocky planet?”

That’s my girlfriend, Melissa, Meli, Mel, babe, hon, and ohshitwhatdidIdo?

“Did you want warp sickness with a side of mutation? I love you Mel, but if you sprouted mandibles, I’d be conflicted on whether to kiss you or spray you in the face.”

She turns to me with more puppy than I was prepared for.

“Pen pen, uh, we haven’t, I don’t know what to say, do you really . . .”

Wow, more focus on the ‘I love you’ than anger? That doesn’t seem right.

“Melissa, I was about to be abandoned on a planet and then I asked you, not just my Girl, but my best friend to join me in abandonment, possibly forever. How do you think I feel about you?”

“That you need me and can’t imagine suffering without my mechanical and electrical prowess for eternity?”

Dear Andromeda, never let her change. You made a perfect thing here. Mutate it at your peril.

“Yes, that, and that I don’t want to live without you? How do you make it so hard to confess to you while making it so easy to be with you. GAH!!!”

Mel giggles and bounds at me in a tackle. “Love you too stupid. Thanks for saving me. Again.”

Her teasing will be the perpetual death and rebirth of my soul.

“If you were to guess how far . . .”

“Bae, I don’t have to guess. I’m a mech-telepath. With my booster on the ship, we’re only 5-600 km from the grow house.” I have some serious eyebrow conflicts when deciding how to process these emotions.

“I, I don’t think I can do that in one shot right now hon. Not after basically frying my brain bringing you down here and the emergency teleport.”

“No worries, Pen, I don’t have those kinds of expectations.”

While I pull the javelin out of my chest, apparently my love is also a ruthless fighter.

“So, does that mean you want to engage in a terrifying but growth inducing lover’s sojourn or teleport to base as soon as possible?”

Melissa wants to fight me, apparently. I get tackled into the loamy sand where we landed on a river shore. She’s tackled me face to face, sand in my butt and her in my chest. “If I tell you what I want, will you promise not to shame me?”

“Honey. As long as it’s not polyamory, you know I’m ready to talk.”

“I want to make a colony with you. Like on Astoria with magic babies and everything.”

“Melissa, is your swarm fucking with you?”

“Pen, yes. She is. But also, like, I knew that boots on moons was one of your goals, and . . .” my girlfriend starts bawling. Oh, shit. She’s for real, but she’s scared about it.

“Honey, just because we’re now on a planet, doesn’t mean we have to pop out a softball team.” She wipes her eyes with a chuckle and punches me. Good. She’s recovering.

“So you’re not scared?”

“Fuck yes I am. Am I ready to be mom? No. Will I figure out how to be the mother of your child. Absolutely yes. As far as I figure, we’re each other’s until we fuck up and die. If you want it bad enough, so do I Mel. We’ll figure it out. Fuck, I’m crying. I hate you, in the best way of course.” I am crying. And if you say anything I will annihilate your face. For real though. Watch it.

“In short, yes, I want to jungle with you and test if I can meld with you enough to use your system connection. Yes, I want to bed you enough that the system gets the hint, and yes, I’m in, Penny. But only if you’re in with me. Fuck, I didn’t want to talk about this for years, but, stranded planet, you’re kind of a queen, and this conquering mentality gets me super hot. Is it magic?”

Tessa, it has to be, right? I’m way less hungry.

While your body of power is still rank two, your conversion is still rank 1 and you are significantly less taxed for Aether, In fact the net positive in the planet’s field is building your reservoir.

She breaks for a few minutes then brings up the warp rune.

Tessa, I need several days to study that bird. I recognize some forms, but I’d still need to spend days on extrapolating shapes from the complicated runeform.

When are you going to have enough time for us Penny?

“Meli-bae, I think you and Tessa are feeling the same way. Advice?”

“Just be with us and live with us dummy. Stop getting tied up in your own head and have a cup a coffee, or a tea with us. We have the perfect views and I stole tea and strudels for us to share.”

“I mean, if you wanted me to tell you I love you, you just had to say so.”

“You twat!” she tackles me into the questionable stream and I laugh while she wrestles with my clothes.

I say yes ma’am and her name a lot after that.

***

“No Meli, you need a knife. Yes, you do. No, fuck that, here’s your knife.”

We keep walking toward the station because Mel insists that we need to. I laugh at the concept until I hear a rustling in the brambles 20 yards away.

>P] Moppet, stay still [<

>M] You’re not my mom [< and she yeets off into the pink damn woods.

You think she knows, or it’s just incidentally driving me crazy?

On an informed estimate, you are engaged in a primitive game to . . . you can extrapolate at your leisure.

I start jogging after her. To think, that three years after joining the Navy that I’d be stranded on an alien world by an Australian Captain that resents that we were “infected” with alien tech as well as him. He’s angry at me specifically because I also chose to host a symbiote that helps me access and refine Aether, aka magic. I named my swarm and symbiote Tessa, and she’s developing some of my personality traits. Not sure how I feel about that.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

“Do you think I can enchant a stick well enough to work as a plasma cutter?”

It should work, but the stick will likely carbonize over time, giving you limited uses. You could also keep training you aether manipulation ability.

Hey, there’s an idea. I see a relatively straight portion of a young pink tree and put a shield around it, cutting it and shaving the bark off. I put a quick stasis rune where I’m going to carve a grip later so that the staff stays supple and a hardening rune to make it less likely to chip. Before I get lost in more engraving, I hear Melissa start cursing and running.

“I found a weird anteater pig that wants to tentacle me!”

Cue hentai joke here.

I start running toward her and in less than a minute she crashes through a bush and jets past me. I wind up for her yet to be seen pursuer and swing for the fences when I see a purple mass of writhing tentacles. Gross.

I hit in the mouth? With a wet slap and some soft crunching. The creature shrieks and starts spitting fluid at me out of it’s octopus-like beak. I say nope and pop up my shield to watch the goup sizzle on contact. Extra nope. I bash it in its wet parts a few more times until it’s stunned, then I use my shield and manipulate it to cut the end of my staff into a spear point. I heat the shield quickly to burn and harden the end and jab it into the boar’s wedge-shaped head.

Huh, they did make it into a video game. That’s cool.

“My hero.” Mel comes over and kisses me on the cheek. “I take it you don’t know how to process game?”

“Strong no on that. Are you sure there aren’t more of them?”

“It seemed alone while chasing me,” she says with a shrug. “Why don’t you play with your stick while I finish this.”

I put some more protections on the staff, shape the grip better to fit my hands, and work on some enchanting. When Melissa has the thing skinned, I use a drying rune and then cut some strips out to wrap around the grip. When I feel like it’s finished I get another prompt.

Nice.

So, I get experience for killing aether tainted things and it seems that I get experience for crafting. Why didn’t I get a prompt when I finished the spear?

Because that number of prompts for a User that primarily crafts would be maddening? And because I read your surface thoughts, you didn’t get a description of the spear because you don’t have an inspect or an analyze-style ability. Though with animals, you can just kill them to find out what they are.

“Can you make a bag out of the rest of it?”

“No, but I can make it into a cooling device to keep the meat fresh and carry it with shield manipulation.”

“That’ll work. Get to it mule.” If she wasn’t smiling, I might feel offended.

I stick my tongue out at her and she giggles.

We come across two or three more aether-warped animals that day. The Swooping Diggle was by far the scariest. Imagine a leathery hawk the size of an albatross. Melissa skinned and butchered everything but the carnivorous plant and when night started to set, we started a fire and set to roasting the various meats.

“Mel, what’re you building over there?”

“Smoking tee pee. When you’re done cooking, I’ll scatter the fire and have you get some wet wood to put on the coals. It won’t dry completely overnight, but it’s a start. With your cooling blanket, it should keep for a week or more.”

I really like how smart and capable she is. I picked a good one.

Full of food, smoking rack set up and a warm Melissa snuggled into my side, I bring up my HUD to get some details on the Astorian System. Four planets orbit the binary stars, two of which are rocky and smaller that Astoria. The gas giants are Neptune-sized. Astoria herself has two small moons, one accretion formed and another oblong one with questionable origin. Astorian day is approximately 20 hours, and with a 12 degree axial tilt, we are in the middle of the northern hemisphere spring. Approximate year length 422 days. Huh, I’ll have to get someone to do the system calculations on all this stuff.

I make a few changes to my HUD to display in Astorian parameters and fade off next to my slightly snoring partner.

***

Week two of lover’s sojourn and we’re still in good spirits. We found a clear river and have been following it more or less toward the farm and mine.

“Penny, why are you fiddling with that device when you have a perfectly good spear.”

“Space magic fantasy, Mel. I’m also strategically wasting time until you realize marching six hundred kilometers is going to take us at least a month.”

“Would that be so bad? I mean, I don’t hear any emergencies from the farm, so why does it matter how long we take?”

“You do realize, that distance is likely farther than your comms system can transmit? And that until Katie and I build an ansible, the rest of you don’t get system updates?”

“Ugh, fine. But I want another week of this, then we go out on excursions often after that, okay?”

I smirk at her, love in my gaze. “Yes dear.”

Speaking of deer, Melissa is still working on that Aether warped Stabby Coose, that looks like a large buck with pinkish fur.

I finished up a Sundering Wand I was working on and now I had metal to work with again. I’m currently engraving a contoured and knurled cylinder that can receive an aether ampule. The cylinder that makes Melissa call me a silly nerd. I think I have the settings dialed in, a shield rune designed to let everything pass but heat, and push-button activation. I plop an ampule in and fire it up. The contained plasma beam is loud as hell and I immediately deactivate it. I engrave some extra conditions on the shield, damping 95% of the sound as well.

This time the beam humms quietly, 1.4m in length, bright as the effing sun. I should tone the light down too, but now is the time for hunting.

I spend the next two hours searching for game when an aether-warped rabbit like thing charges me and I slice the bastard in half. Two meaty sections falling in a smoking ruin. “Heh, I have a plasma saber.” And it’s pink.

Melissa makes fun of me for the rest of the day while I lug the food around.

By this time, I’ve learned crude leatherworking and fashioned a patchwork tent from the pelts of the animals we’ve killed. Some aether warped, some not. We’ve seen a lot more warped creatures recently and the phenomenon bothers me.

It is quite uncommon for a solitary source of aether to be strong enough to warp creatures and to be naturally occurring. I can help lead you to it if you want to investigate.

Maybe later Tessa, if it’s strong enough to warp these animals, it’ll be strong enough to warp my friends. Maybe I’ll consider it if the other people we are stranded with want a symbiote. I need to get to level 16 first.

Name: Penelope Astoria Mercer Race: Human (Primus) Andromeda Code: T-S Class: None Track: Artificing (lvl. 12) Imbalance: None Mind [Intelligence: A, Clever: A, Awareness: B] Social [Beauty: C, Charm: D, Presence: B] Physical [Strength: E, Agility: C, Fitness: D] Aether [Capacity: D, Refinement: B, Power: S] Skills [Aether engraving: Intermediate, step 8; Aether insight: intermediate, step 3; Enchanting: novice, step 8; Knowledge absorption: Intermediate, step 6 (tech assist); Pain Suppression: Intermediate, step 1; Aether manipulation: Novice step 7; Magitech Integration: Novice, step 2]

I’m getting much closer to tier 1, I really need to pick it up.