Same as last time, the first thing he saw was a panel with 4 rules, talk over a drink, integrate with the mood, no pictures or videos unless explicitly permitted, and respect everyone.
Following closely behind him was Adreana, who took for the first time this place in her eyes and perception, she wasn’t the most receptive of the Undecided, but she seemed to have gotten some hints from the shades of colors and delicate atmosphere surrounding her the moment she entered.
“A jazz night bar? Not really my cup of tea, if it was Arik or Utopia, I’m sure they would be more suitable to judge,” not able to help herself, the first thing she did as she entered was judge what she saw.
“Just keep your mind open, there’s so much more to explore here… Do you want an isolated table or do you want to go to the counter? We’ll be able to order from anywhere as long as you have connected lenses, so just answer with your gut feeling.”
“Table then,” and Adreanan led the way to a table near one of the walls, far from the entrance, and almost stuck to the window bay.
The people present only sent a couple of discreet looks before ignoring them, even Lenya, the bartender, only sent a passing glance before ignoring them.
She was discussing with other people and making different drinks after all.
Comfortably installed, Rune activated his connected lenses and looked at the shelf behind the counter, prompting an authorization access demand to the hub controlling the different orders.
‘Now, that’s something I never had in my home planet…’
Convenience, the IGS had that in droves, but it had a cost, a cost that couldn’t necessarily be met on the hundreds of billions of rural solar systems and planets, and in fact, capital systems were generally the only ones having access to such.
Not because it was hard to make connected lenses, Rune had the occasion to try a pair long ago, before the awakening of the Ether Law, but having a simple holographic strap on X125 was simply more practical than having a pair of connected lenses.
“If you don’t have any idea what to order, pick at random, I’m the same,” advised Rune.
“So it’s a nightly bar that has a jazz ambiance and doesn't have any recommendations on what to order, fantastic,” as sarcastically as possible, Adreana ordered something.
Shortly after, Lenya made their drinks and brought them personally.
“Here’s your order Rune, and here’s yours girl, tonight’s a good night so enjoy it as much as it lasts.”
And then she left.
“A nightly jazz bar with a weirdo bartender, nice Rune, nice.”
“Sigh… No matter what you say, I’m still not going to answer. Tonight, nothing will happen, we’ll drink something we may like or dislike, then that’ll be it.”
“Not like I expected something similar to a date from you… But you really brought me here just to enjoy a night at a suspiciously high-class jazz bar?”
Taking a sip of his random combination drink, energy taste 8 with base hot purple dew, he waited a few seconds before answering.
“It’s just a different upbringing I think. Utopia and Arik, I know, are very receptive to this sort of thing, and there’s a reason. So just ruminate over your drink, think about your energy domain, look over the nightly view, forget things…”
Turning his head towards the 20 or so other people present, the majority completely silent and the rest discussing slowly, he finished.
“Just separate yourself from the world. Experience the feeling of being in a new place. It’s a moment of self-reflection.”
As he said that, the slight jazz background music stopped and switched to a new track, modifying the mood just a bit, only enough to be felt by experienced jazz listeners or mood-maker professionals.
And Rune was an experienced jazz listener, though only generally referred to as a chill listener that recognized when the music he heard was jazz or not.
Resigning herself, Adreana didn’t reply, she just switched off her connected lenses and started to sip her randomly picked drink.
They arrived a few hours after the opening, and they weren’t the only ones to do that. As minutes passed, the huge 50 by 40 purple illuminated table area filled with people that streamed in from the entrance.
Angeni also made an appearance to serve appetizers coming from the kitchen area protected by a perception blocker, shocking Adreana speechless.
Rune had long seen her in the back area with Brand the supplier and Karayan the cook, but she didn’t seem to have changed from last time, still as dazzling and cold in appearance and apparent character.
Surprisingly, her dark purple rose hair accessory didn’t flash, meaning no one tried to take pictures.
After she served, she left once again under the glance of nearly everyone, her job was done and she didn’t seem to have anything else to do here.
“What’s her name?”
“Ask her yourself…” Rune lazily replied to Adreana’s question, he was finally starting to integrate with the surrounding, and he only just started to appreciate how finely everything was expertly crafted.
“Do you have her contact information? Does she have a special build? Is she the reason you brought me here? What’s the background of…”
He stayed silent to all her questions, if she was interested, she only had to go to the bar counter, and she should already know it as everyone interested in the being they just saw went to the counter to ask things.
So after 2 minutes of intense staring, she left the table to migrate to the counter.
“Take your drink with you…”
She used her energy to grab her drink and bring it with her after he said that.
And she didn’t come back for half an hour, she seemed to have found her own niche and was sitting at the counter, listening and adding her piece when she needed to.
As for Rune, he would have continued to be a loner if it wasn’t for a late-comer who arrived and ordered 2 drinks, only to take and bring them to his table and give one to him.
“Hello Mr. Tudor, I’m Star Head, the assistant of Ms. Calico at the composite element research faculty,” not forcing himself, he at least tried to integrate with the relaxed mood.
Taking the offered drink, he didn’t out of politeness, but out of knowledge, “She talked about you, also a bit about your amazing background, what a story it was…”
The entity named Start Head was talking in intent, and if he tried to listen to his language, anyone would recognize it wasn’t IGS common.
The reason behind that, and to his very strange appearance of a long-armed and short-legged monkey with fluffy brown fur everywhere, was that he belonged to a recently integrated primitive civilization.
One with a major supreme problem that would have never been solved even if the IGS had encountered them before.
Sitting on a stool he took from the neighboring table, he waited a bit before confirming Rune awaited him bringing a subject up.
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“We’ll certainly see each other in the future, so when I saw you, I wanted to introduce myself first, to ease our future encounter.”
“Ok.”
Tasting the new glass, he evaluated it at “meh” out of 20, not a drink he would order again in the future.
“Hu… Should I… Leave? Maybe? Am I interrupting something?” Observing no real communication, Star Head tried to subtly ask if Rune didn’t want to be bothered.
“If you want to talk, why not tell me the news coming from your species' side in the Universe? I really want to know how you’re resolving your memory problems.”
Directly asking, he made known his intention of wanting to know a bit more about his background that Aleda only scratched a bit.
“Well, it’s really ugly. We’re too far from the IGS, and the more the ether density increases, the less the technology they have is able to jump far, so we’re at like… 400-ish beacon jumps? And it looks like some other unique species need more help than a simple memory-deficient one like us need.”
Breaching the subject calmly like an experienced politician, if Rune hadn’t known he had been equal to a primitive sapient a few years ago, he wouldn’t have believed it.
“As for the true situation, there’s no artificial solution, unfortunately. The only way to escape our fallible memory is to dedicate a mastery to it. I heard that some officers of the IGS are massively supplying memory helpers, but our brain’s situation is too new to understand why we are even sapient, to begin with.”
“Then, does your planet belong to an independent far-away sector? Or maybe it’s a lost system? Not like just those few years are enough to map your position in the Universe,” interrupting, Rune asked what passed through his mind.
“The few of us that have come with me are leaning towards far-away sectors, the few memories we have of the other side is of a sky full of stars, but we can’t recall it exactly enough to create a star map, sigh…” nostalgically, Star Head talked about his home planet.
One for which he held a really intense feeling, but only had a few memories.
“Everything’s fair, you got your position thanks to your ability to think outside the box, and Aleda told me it’s suspected to be your brain compensation for your memory issues. And that’s a good place to think about home, I don’t have to worry about mine, but with our increased longevity, I just thought that nothing can really happen…” Rune participated a bit before returning to silence.
“It’s true, maybe only a black hole can still kill people, and they have to be really stupid to have fused with their avatar, or a particularly unlucky timing… But the IGS already popularized all the tools necessary to detect them… And now, everyone is only waiting for the ether erosion to start.”
A compassionate and silent toast took place before Rune brought up a more lively subject than the start of the apocalypse on the other side.
“I don’t think you have, but do you watch entertainment? Why did you even come here? Do you have the jazz gene in your DNA or what?”
“I completely agree with your line of reasoning, I can’t understand all the social knowledge I read, don’t have the time to be up to date on entertaining subjects, and only came here due to the massive praise of my superior.”
“Ok, then let me teach you. First, are you sensitive to music? The one that is playing for example?”
“Yes, I go to at least one cultural event every month, and I particularly enjoy listening to ‘heavy metal’ in my office, it sounds just right in my ears, also the ‘experimental’, or the ‘alternative’ rock genres are…” With a goofy smile on his face, the monkey-like Star Head started to enthusiastically list a number of music genres.
With only a few years of active memory and the rest only being fragments, he had a totally different outlook compared to other integrated species.
This species of humanoids covered in fur with long arms had been firstly discovered in their Information Board sector, where they remained a mystery due to their sporadic apparitions and nonsensical answers.
Who would have guessed that, like the Rululus, so many other species would have developed on an infinitesimal path, with evolutions taking directions that only hundreds of coincidences rendered possible?
The “Mo-uz”, as the community of a few hundred called themselves, were one of these.
Online, a lot of arguments took place to discuss if they were lucky or unlucky, but for the majority of the web community, the Mo-uz were immensely lucky.
Their first apparition in the Endless belonged to the first wave of unique species with “Anything Apocalyptic Class 9 Disaster World-Ending” problems to resolve.
Some species were on the limit to being sapient, some were sapient but had major problems, some had physics too different to even accommodate, some had spiritual abilities from birth, some were simply incomprehensible.
And all of that had to account for all the sapient species that were too unique to even develop through the Ether Law without help, those were locked on the other side, requesting help, and they were one of the major preoccupations of the IGS that forced pioneer fleet to rush without a care for the consequences.
Once the current generation ended, avatars wouldn’t exist anymore, and some of those unique species were either too few in numbers, or the Ether Law couldn’t help them as much as it should for whatever reasons…
As for the Mo-uz species, the few hundred individuals who amazingly gathered enough EP to max out their tier 1 stats were helped, and with only a “memory that worked sporadically” problem, it was resolved with emergency helpers in the form of other sapients assisting them, and then a mastery at tier 2.
“Looks like you belong to the music gentlemen club then, good, good,” acknowledging what he heard, Rune made his purposely condescending nods very obvious.
“But did you search for the history and the past of those music genres? Their origin in multiple civilizations? And how there were obvious commonalities in their use through hundreds of different cultures?” Mentioning this part, he wanted to confuse the young and naive entity drinking with him.
“Hum… No, I didn’t have the time to do that yet…”
“So, what you’re hearing is obviously related to ‘relaxation’, and now, I’ll tell you an obvious shortcut to understand what you need to do here, and how to properly relax.”
A mischievous glint appearing in the depth of his eyes, Rune used his perception sphere to confirm that Brand was being bored in the back kitchen.
“You’ll go to the counter, and ask to see Brand Brand, you’ll explain that he’s doing nothing in the kitchen and that because you’re someone that can get a lot of mediatic attention here, if you properly understand what this place is, then you’ll bring lots of unique first-timers from the nascent community of unique species.”
He took a sip to seal the deal.
“Now go, we’ll see each other in the future so don’t be shy. And, last piece of advice.”
Looking seriously straight into his eyes, a pair of eyes belonging to someone naive, someone with only a few years of true memory to him, Rune wanted to make a last trick.
An inventive trick.
Pushing two fluctuating threads of energy from his energy pool, he prepared himself.
The next instant, two threads of pulsating flowing black thread radiating anti-life intent spiraled into his eyes.
“If you want to learn that music has power, go listen to ‘Low of Solipsism’, and if you really want to understand why music has so much power, go watch some proper entertainment in the dark.”
From creepy spiraling black threads, it instantly switched to corrupted purple.
It was the same purple as the one in the bar, but the corrupt intent infused in it was the most horrific intent Rune had ever successfully created, and it was the perfect moment to use it.
Standing up, Star Head blurted while doing a small bow, “I’ll do just that, thank you for your guidance, Mr. Tudor.”
And he was gone without forgetting to take his own glass.
‘Easy, another future converted by myself. Get! It’s just so easy…’
The night view didn’t change, the number of people only sporadically increased, and he felt fine, alone in his corner.
‘Nothing will happen tonight, because nothing “Can” happen, just another punchline to add to my note.’
‘I’ll also try to figure out other patterns, I think a complete red pupil with different black motives over it will render it just right, as long as I combine the intent with it…’
Erasing the spiraling energy threads, he returned to being normal.
A normal tier 4 entity.
The rest of the night passed quickly, Star Head got Brand to stand behind the counter to discuss until the Secluded Corner had a slight change in mood.
The color dimmed, and on the wall, a countdown to the closure of the bar started, half an hour.
Adreana returned after the announcement, slightly tipsy from drinking too much 1st energy taste, the taste of alcohol.
She wasn’t drunk, and her self-control as a tier 4 was too strong to be degraded by ingesting any less than a few hundred thousand energy worths of taste, so she just seemed a bit numb.
After coming back she didn’t talk and enjoyed the bar like Rune, slowly finishing her glass and thinking about everything and nothing.
When the counter displayed 10 minutes, the light started to flicker.
It was time for everyone to leave, and Rune didn’t make himself privileged and stood up after drinking two mouthfuls of his drink to finish it before departing.
That night, nothing happened.
…
‘Intent. There’s no place for it in my composite element creation.’
Sometimes. Somewhere. Somehow. Events marked themselves without him wanting them to.
And the previous night, after realizing this trick with the intented energy threads, Rune couldn’t help but remember that relatively recently, his life had been saved by his ability to create intent.
‘Just like singers and instrumentalists, I stepped onto the path of intent, but mine will only explode when my element is complete and I can use intent to make it go beyond its limit.’
However, intent had no effect on leveling his current 6 elemental specializations, so he just didn’t make the link with anything useful to do now.
‘But if I train to use intent every time and everywhere for whatever reasons…’
Looking at the vast white sky above, he was carefully crafting from the ground a training plan to use intent now and not begin in the future.