“Inside those crystals,” Honeydew instructed me in a voice that sounded like she was quoting a lecturer, “is death. It is a death that radiates, and a death contained; it is a death in the smallest of ways and the largest; it is a death in the slowest of measures and a death instantaneous. To grow in life from death is the essence of consumption, is the meaning of the verb consume; it is the most fundamental act of life, equaled only by the death which inevitably claims the living and completes the cycle.”
“None of which,” Nathan pointed out, already starting to get bored, “means the slightest bit to—wait, you said something about nexal something something and negative energy inversion, is that the same thing?”
“No.”
“Yes,” Tanya disagreed with a smirk. “It totally is, because they’re both bullshit.”
Honeydew whirled angrily to glare at her partner. “They are not bullshit! Not being a perfect reflection of the underlying mechanics of reality fails to render them bullshit, one is a useful pedagogical framework which can progress the understanding of a student without leaving over-developed erroneous frameworks that need unlearning later—”
“Right, facile bullshit,” Tanya agreed.
“—and the other is our best understanding of what the FNAECS does!”
“Hopeless shrugging with a vague handwave at a funny-sounding acronym,” she supplied in response.
“It’s not,” Honeydew whined. “Nathan, back me up here. FNAECS is not a funny acronym!”
“It kinda sounds like snakes,” the man in question judged with frank honesty. “Like if you took snakes and changed the ‘s’ to an ‘f’ and then said oh yeah, that’s an acronym. What does it stand for?”
“Forget it,” she muttered, and then she took a breath and visibly rallied, recovering her earlier good cheer. “Anyway! In lay terms: when I killed the avatar just a few minutes ago, it left a miasmal deathwake which aggressively inhabited the entropic cascade of your multifactor primary blast injuries. So I—”
“What.”
“General barotitis in one ear, barotrauma, ruptured membranes in the other ear, some pulmonary contusions and related trauma, and at least four different kinds of brain injury but only a little bit of it was axonal,” Honeydew supplied helpfully.
Nathan glanced over at Tanya, who was snickering helplessly. “Help me out here?”
“Heh. Hehe. Hehehe. Oh shit that’s funny. You said lay terms.”
“Okay,” he said slowly, closing his eyes and schooling his expression to calmness. If you can keep a polite face around a pampered Saudi princeling talking about all the women he rapes, you can keep a polite face around anyone and everyone, he reminded himself. But wait, why did I do that? Oh right, I was lazy and ethically apathetic in the face of extremely large amounts of money being paid to me in return for very little work. But I digress. “Explain it to me,” he asked after a moment, “like I’m five years old?”
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
That got Nathan a blink and a considering look. “Okay,” Honeydew said slowly. “I… that will be an interesting challenge. I’ll… try? I’ll try. So! When I killed the… avatar, yes, I know five-year-olds who know what an avatar is… just a few minutes ago. It left a… bad magic cloud, like a really stinky poop? Tanya, I love you, but please stop laughing or I’ll—actually I should just… there! A silence spell. Where was I? Magic poop cloud,” she said firmly, starting to get more comfortable with the thought exercise. “You had a big owie in your head from when I made a loud noise that was too loud for you, and the magic poop stinky bits got into the owie. Nathan, why are you shaking?”
“I’m… trying… not to die of laughter.” He rocked back and forth, sitting on the ground with his arms wrapped around his knees, face hurting as he completely failed to keep a straight face. “Please carry on. This is the second-best thing that’s ever happened to me.”
“Only second-best?” She pirouetted, pouting. “This is me!” She glanced at Tanya’s hands as the warrior’s fingers flickered, then nodded. “I guess you’re right, becoming Millionborn isn’t something I can compete with. Anyway, where was I? Magic poop cloud, big owie, stinky bits, right! So, I had to make your whole body be the kind of body that could be friends with the magic stinky bits so that I could fix your owie.”
“Truly, you are peerless in the art of explaining things to children.”
“Thank you, Nathan!” Honeydew dimpled. “So, once I fixed your owie, I turned all of the stinkiness inside out with a big magic that was made out of lots of little magic, all of which was mostly just me really wanting the stinky bits inside you to turn into nice-smelling bits! But all the stinkiness wanted to keep being near you, because it thought you smelled nice, so I had to pull it away from you really hard while it grabbed every bit of you it could reach, which was all of you. And then you were back to being a regular nice-smelling no-stinky Nathan and your owie was fixed! So all you need to do is to do that to the rocks full of frozen stinky bits and then you’ll be fine.”
“Oh.” Nathan looked at her for a long moment, then looked at the cryma on the ground. “I think,” he said meditatively, “that was perfectly and completely clear, and I have no more questions. My understanding of the subject is complete and no doubt flawless.”
“Wait, really?” Honeydew squeaked. “That’s wonderful!”
“Yeah, absolutely.” He nodded to himself, then nodded to her. “I have such a perfect level of comprehension that I’m going to feed them to Saucer and let them be its problem. Beautiful solution, right?”
There was a meaningful pause, an unsubtle one which partook of the nature of the audible-yet-inaudible ur-ellipse. “That,” she admitted, “is a good idea. A really good idea. It’s primordial, so nothing short of an actual God in this fallen world’s power rankings is going to do any lasting damage to it. The sympathetic resonance might be an issue, and Medripht’s Third Law applies, obviously, so if it’s aware enough to have a consciousness attached to its logic and sensorium it’ll more than tickle, but… oh.”
Nathan looked up from where he was squatting, having grabbed the smallest crystal with a grabber-shaped Saucer. “I’d apologize in advance if this kills you,” he said, grinning faintly, “but I’m not sorry and it would be really funny. But hey! I’m sure it’ll be fine.”
“Yeah,” Honeydew said with an expression of pure anxious worry. “Yeah.”