There was something strangely unnerving about making eye contact with myself, especially when I was consciously controlling both instances of ‘myself’.

Well, at least I know that I need some further work on my eyes. The glimmering emerald look is nice, but it's a bit chaotic and unrefined, as if I had found a chunk of the gem and amateurishly crushed it into an orb shape before shoving it into my eyes.

Hmmm. Thoughts for later.

“Are you ready to begin?” Trazyn asked, standing a step behind me with his stupidly overpowered staff held just right to smash it into the back of my skull if I tried anything funny.

“Yes,” I said, both in the human drone and in my avatar.

The paranoid old skeleton really didn’t trust me yet. I could sense Tomb Spyders spread around the room, along with a contingent of Lychguards standing to the side and I didn’t doubt for a second that there weren’t any Canoptek Wraiths phased out filling the room.

Alas, his best bet at winning if it came down to a fight was his staff. The thing was called the Empathic Obliterator for a reason. If he smashed it into my drone, arcs of energy would obliterate anything with similar neural and psychological activity.

Which probably included my avatar. I wasn’t going to test whether that thing could latch onto psychic connections like that damned disintegrating spear the Shadowkeeper had, Trazyn had nothing to worry about.

He gave a nod, and a cryptek walked up to my still-suspended and scale-covered avatar, holding out its metallic hand as a tiny little gap opened up in the green energy field binding it.

Trazyn almost imperceptibly stiffened, probably engaging whatever equaled ‘combat readiness’ for a Necron.

A psychic thread slipped through the gap, latched onto the small vial of Hrud blood, and snatched it away, pulling it through the gap. Not a moment later, the energy field returned to its uniform state.

“What now?” Trazyn asked, now standing next to the drone relaxedly.

“Now comes the hard part,” I said.

The vial floated up to my avatar’s mouth, shattered under my mental grasp and the blood inside floated into its mouth. A hopefully imperceptible thread of white eldritch flesh sucked it all up the moment it touched my tongue and then I chucked an unnecessarily large part of my mental power at the problem of decoding their genes.

“Interesting,” I hummed. “I don’t think I ever tasted such a chaotic genecode. It’s a wonder they were ever capable of functioning.”

“How so?”

“Their gene chains are a mess, half connected, frayed, and a mismatch of random things I can’t even place. I think most of it doesn’t even serve a goal … but somewhere under that pile of trash should be the secret to temporal manipulation.”

It was going to be a slog, even with my new legion of mind cores at the ready. I was still not quite done with Selene’s new form either, plus I was aching to have a new form of my own too.

Upgrades. So many upgrades. I’m so making a planet-wide server farm of brains once I’m done with this mess and the blueberry primarch.

“This will take a while,” I hummed. “Do you wish to continue our tour? I don’t think this will be done in a few hours. Might even need some extensive testing before I have any measure of success.”

“I see,” he nodded. “I suppose we could. It would be a shame to bore ourselves here.”

With that, we set off again. Though, now that I’d seen how receptive he was to trading I wasn’t going to let this chance go.

“I promised to answer your questions about ‘ancient’ earth in return for that sample,” I said after a minute. “Ask away, if you wish.”

******

“So a little like a localised datasphere that every human had access to?”

“Yes,” I answered, feeling a bit weary after five hours of continuous conversation about the most mundane things in existence. “Though it was far less sophisticated and held much less data.”

“That much is obvious,” he nodded. “This ‘Internet’ of yours was quite the invention, especially for a civilisation only a few thousand years old.”

Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

“I suppose it was,” I shrugged. “Now, it isn’t that I don’t enjoy learning about new alien civilisations, but I am aware you have some … older exhibits and some that would be much more appealing to my particular taste.”

He gazed at me, it was impossible to tell what was going through his metallic head with a distinct lack of facial expression or even an aura to read.

“That is true,” he said, his eyes narrowed. “But my curiosity is satiated enough that I won’t brutalise another exhibit to sate your hunger.”

“Well, on that note, I see this meeting ending one of three ways,” I said. “One, you annoy me and I melt both this drone and my avatar into sludge, leaving you with nothing aside from the information you already gained.”

“Two, I detach the avatar from my main consciousness, which would leave you with an intact but mindless and murderously explosive bioweapon.”

“And three, you offer something that makes the continued security risk that is a captured avatar worth it.”

“Hmmm,” he tapped his chin thoughtfully. “Which outcome would you go for if we cut our meeting short at this moment?”

“The second,” I said. “An avatar takes effort to maintain, and it's useless just sitting around in stasis to me. But as a gesture of goodwill, I would leave it functional enough that you could throw it at a group of people a bit too alive for your liking.”

“I see,” he mused. “And what would you think of as appropriate compensation for not doing that?”

“I heard you got your hands on a perfect clone of the Primarch Fulgrim.”

“Whole or a sample?”

“Sample,” I shook my head. “Letting him run around would cause more trouble than it's worth. Plus I like the Imperium just on the brink of collapse as it is, no need to give them too much of an edge.”

“Done,” he nodded. “You will get a vial of his blood in return for keeping your ‘avatar’ fully functional.”

“Alright,” I grinned. “I do reserve my right to go back on that should I sense you trying to use it as a conduit to attack me.”

“That is understandable I suppose,” he gave an artificial shrug. “Was that all?”

“We could also negotiate some sort of a deal on you putting my avatar into one of those Tesseract Labyrinths you have, I would be more than willing to offer my assistance when needed, seeing you have more than enough interesting things here to make the energy expenditure worthwhile.”

“Let us put that on hold,” he said. “If I ever have to do such a thing, you would be compensated. But I have no need for such an agreement as of now.”

“If you say so,” I shrugged. “I’m still interested in the Great Crusade era exhibits you have, or any that you have kept from before the slumber.”

“Let us continue then,” he said with much more enthusiasm than he had while negotiating. “This next exhibit is of a group of Dark Eldar raiding a … “

*****

I snapped my eyes open, just in time to make eye contact with a sheepish-looking Selene. The cause of said look possibly stemmed from the fact that she held a tiny arc of electricity between her fingers, which was just a moment away from poking my right boob.

I gave her the most unimpressed look I could manage. Then my eyes flew wide open as I caught a mischievous glint in her silver eyes.

“Oh no yo-“ I jumped up with a yelp as she poked me anyway.

The jolt was just about what I would have expected from touching an electric fence. It was far from dangerous, but it stung.

“Oh you are so going to get it,” I growled. Eyes narrowed at the giggling little minx.

“Ahem,” she cleared her throat. “That squishy thing had been squealing at the top of its lungs for five minutes now.”

I jumped to my feet and reached out to it. Through the squish toy, I saw how Guilliman was squishing the living daylights out of his counterpart of the thing.

“This isn’t over,” I pointed at Selene. “But it seems the good Lord Regent has something to talk about. Wanna come?”

“Not now,” she shook her head with a smirk. “I’ll let you deal with whatever this is. Just teleport me in when you get to the fighting, if there is any?”

“Sure,” I said, feeling a little disappointed. “See you later?”

“I’ll be waiting.”

*****

Latching onto the psychic connection between the two stress-balls quickly gave me a feel of the place on the other side and I decided to go with a flashy portal instead of a Blink.

Opening up a portal which announced its presence with flashy orange light and a burning hiss was just a touch more courteous than appearing out of nowhere.

As I stepped through, I had to suppress a smirk as a nearby group of Librarians scowled at me.

“Nice try,” I told them like a mother consoling a child for an effort well done, even if their interdiction field was pathetically weak. Then turned to Guilliman who had his regular statue-like expression on. “You called?”

“Yes,” he said, finally letting go of the ball of elastic goo, which consequently stopped squealing. “I’d like to take you up on your offer of assistance in assaulting the beasts in the caverns.”

“Sureeee,” I smiled. “In return for what, exactly?”

“The corpses you make in the process.”

I clicked my tongue. Here it was, the downside of being so forward with my wants. He figured out I wanted any powerful thing’s biological matter. Oh well, it just meant I couldn’t get rewarded for something I would have done anyway … not that I couldn’t let Guilliman get injured just so I could sample a bit of his blood like with the shadowkeeper.

“Every corpse being made in the fight,” I countered.

“I won’t have you eating the remains of my men.”

Just a look at the dangerous glint in his eyes told me that wasn’t up for debate. “Then any Tyranid, or other corpse of Xeno origin. With the exception of your pet Farseer, if he does kick the bucket somehow.”

“Done.” he nodded, then spun on his heels. “Come, we are attacking in two hours.”

“We?” I asked as I struggled to keep up with his titanic gait without breaking into a jog. After a few seconds, I opted to float along beside him.

“Yes,” he threw me a side-eye.

“Did you find out what the big thing was?”

He gave me a look that said ‘who the fuck do you think you are to have me report to you?!. But instead, he just gave a wave and one of the men behind him answered my question.

“Records show this bioform has seen battle on at least two previous battlefields. Both times as an elite unit sent after generals and commanders. It has been dubbed the ‘Norn Emissary’.”

“Huh,” I tapped my chin as I flipped onto my back and continued floating. “How strong is it?”

The man who answered gave a look to his Primarch, but seeing him give a minute nod, answered again. “The only one to ever have been killed was slain by Captain-General Trajan Valoris of the Adeptus Custodes after it butchered some of his men. It could be said the creature has immense strength eclipsing even Custodian Guards and a serpentine speed that can hardly be tracked even by Astartes.”

“I see.” That’s really fucking strong … but with Gulliman here and with what I got from that cranky old skeleton as a last resort … “Two hours, you said?”

“Yes,” Guilliman said. “Transports are being readied. This has to be done before it kills more of my men.”

“Sounds good.”

He gave me another look that let me know I wasn’t quite endearing myself to him. Not that it mattered, he was programmed to be xenophobic and the best I could hope for was that he saw me alive and powerful as a boon for the Imperium.

Now I just had to make sure I appeared competent in the coming fight, but not too competent.

This is either going to be a pain or very enjoyable … I should get Selene.