Your Adam Aspect in this Cosmos has Died!
Adam’s consciousness, mentally integrated with his Thor Aspect, looked at the message that had popped up in his personal Interface and thought. What? How? First things first, where and when was he? As he reviewed his location he realized that the part of him that had been masquerading as Trix resided in a couple of nanites that were hovering near the ceiling of the room that had survived whatever had happened.
Merging with the nanites was turning out to be one of the best things that had ever happened to him. Of course, he’d just received a death message. Then again, he hadn’t received a death message, only a message stating that an Aspect of his had died. Not wanting to take any chances while he figured things out, he had the nanites disappear into the roof and make their way away from the bedroom. Once they were in a closet in an adjacent apartment he had the nanites replicate so that the original nanites could be moved into his Soul Storage. Could he use his storage space across a temporal sheer and time travel?
Adam forced himself to refocus. he’d explore that question later. Right now, he had to figure out what had happened. He turned his attention to the prompts that his Adam Aspect had generated in his personal interface.
WARNING, you have been suppressed. Use of Magic, Magical abilities, and Spells is not permitted.
WARNING, Hit Points have been reduced to 3 total.
WARNING, you have been caught in the radius of an explosive Force
WARNING, Damage exceeds the structural capacity of your body by 1,579 points of damage. Your Body has been destroyed.
Your primary aspect in this Cosmos has Died!
There wasn’t a lot of information to review. The initial suppression had wiped out any useful information he might have been able to get. Now though he’d just have to guess. Or…he had an idea. If there was a God of Games, he or she must be having a good laugh at his expense. Why? Because what just happened sounded a lot like a tactic he’d used back in New Mexico when he’d first started playing Role-Playing games.
When he’d first started gaming one of his friends had wanted to have a character fight, which meant that he wanted to pit his highest lever character against one of his.
“But I don’t have any high-level characters,” Adam had said.
“You can make whatever you want,” his friend Russel had said.
“Whatever I want, What level is your character?” Adam had asked.
“He’s a 1,000th-level fighter,” Russel had replied.
Adam had read the rules and had known how unlikely it was to reach level 1,000, barring insanely unlikely circumstances like finding a ring that just gave out 1,000 XP every second, actually, that was kind of ironic. Anyway, for the game they were playing at the time, the ability to make level 1,000 would be very unlikely so he’d asked, “A 1,000th level fighter, what material plane did you destroy?”
“What are you talking about? I didn’t destroy a…oh you were being a smart ass. Okay, smart ass what are you going to make?”
“I can make anything I want?” Adam had asked again.
“Yep.”
“Okay then, I’ll make an 18th-level Magic User.”
“Are you crazy, my character is 982 levels higher than that. I’ll wipe the floor with you.”
“18th Level Magic User. That shouldn’t take me too long to get set up,” Adam had said.
“Okay, it’s your funeral,” he’d said.
Adam had gone to work and had his 18th-level Magic User done in under 30 minutes. He hadn’t needed very much for the magic user to begin with. Why? Because while he didn’t have a very high-level character, his highest-level official character had been level 6, he had read the player’s guide and the game master’s guide and knew all the spells backward and forward.
Adam had finished making the character in just 15 minutes and said, “I’m ready.”
“Okay, because your character’s a caster we’re going to start 300 feet apart to give you time to cast at least two spells before I utterly destroy your character” Russel had said cockily
“Sounds good to me,” Adam had said.
They rolled for initiative, and Russel had won.
“I have initiative so I’ll run towards you 120 feet, that puts me 260 feet from you,” Russel said.
“Okay, on my turn, I cast a Wish on you.”
“What are you wishing for? He’d asked.
“I wish “Harm,” the reverse of “Heal” on your character at range,” Adam said.
“What’s Harm do?”
“Oh, it’s in the book, look up the spell Heal then towards the bottom.”
Russel opened his player’s guide, flipped some pages looked at the spell, read it then said, “You can’t do that?”
“Oh yeah, I can. A wish may be used to mimic any spells that already exist with no chance of going astray and since it’s a wish and two levels higher than the spell it’s mimicking. Adding range to the spell shouldn’t cause the spell to misfire. I am of course wishing this at range, so my character doesn’t have to touch yours,” Adam explained.
“Don’t you have to roll to hit?” he asked.
“I wouldn’t think so, your character is a creature, you are in my character’s line of sight and the spell doesn’t do damage, it just alters your character. Also, it’s a divination spell so you could say a God doesn’t like your character very much and made sure this spell hits,” Adam had said with a grin.
“I never thought of it but you’re right, that’s within the rules so I’ll allow it,” he’d said as he picked up a 1d4 and rolled a 3. “I now have 3 hit points and it’s my turn. For Round 2, my character is going to sprint again 120 feet toward your character. That should put my character 60 feet from your character. His character had also regenerated 3 hit points. Nothing you have can hit him anyway, my Armor Class is too high. Your turn,” Russell said.
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“That would be true if I had to roll to hit,” Adam had said with a slightly evil grin before he’d explained, “For his 2nd round, my character is casting Magic Missile. At 18th level, the spell created nine missiles that each did 1d4+1 damage. Your character takes a minimum of 18 points of damage automatically and as much as 36. 18 points of damage would put your character at -12 hit points which is 2 less than -10. That’s character death, which means I win!” Adam had declared.
“That’s not possible!” Russel had complained.
“That is why you never go against a wizard, once they get the wish spell the shit dooth hit the fan,” Adam had said while he thought about some of his favorite books that involved a cagey old wizard in the world of Forgotten Realms.
After Russel had calmed down for a bit he’d agreed that it was a nasty combo. Adam had explained that there were magic items to protect against such things and showed him where to look in the books for them. He also let Russel know that he wasn’t really interested in player-versus-player fights.
Adam shook his head, why had that memory come to the forefront of his mind? Oh yeah, going from a huge amount of hit points to zero. If his abilities and regeneration rates had been suppressed and a wish had been used to lower his hit points, yeah that could have worked. If there was a God of Games in this Cosmos, he or she might know he’d pulled something like that in a game. Shoot if he was that god he’d be laughing his ass off. Adam was really beginning to miss his access to the Universal Interface so he could see if his guess was true.
Adam considered different ways he could try to figure this out and then had a thought that just might work. Of course, if that’s what had happened the odds that he’d be caught by such an attack would have to be at least one in a million. How would they have known that the combination they used would shut him down? Occam’s Razor posited that the simplest explanation was usually true, which was truly a gross oversimplification but a lot easier to say. If the simplest explanation was true, whoever did this wasn’t going after him, they were going after Trix and they knew she was a God, or very similar to one with a lot of hit points and magic. Which posited the question, who would want to take Trix out? Adam would have to come back to that question later.
Well, if he couldn’t review exactly what happened he could try to pick up what had happened from the nanites that had surrounded his Trix body. Adam focused on his memory storage and put his full mental capacity to work searching through the data. Within two seconds he had the area around Trix’s building mapped out and replayed the events. Trix had made her back from the “event” after the call from Thor and went right to bed where Adam had actually fallen into a deep sleep. There weren’t many things that could shock Adam but the level of depravity he’d witnessed upon just walking through the door had surprised even him. Adam double-checked the time stamps and from Trix’s perspective, she’d been sleeping when she’d been attacked.
While his senses and his prompts hadn’t been able to tell him what had happened, nanites, caught everything. A suppression field had enveloped a one-mile radius around Trix’s apartment. Next, a portal had opened 10 feet directly above his bed and he’d been surrounded by a cone of force that led back to the portal. The bubble of force had been placed directly under and around Trix’s body so that she was inside the cone of force. Finally, something came out of the portal at a very high velocity. He replayed the image and slowed it down and realized it looked like one of the tungsten rods that would have been dropped from orbit at hypersonic speeds. He continued the replay until there was a flash and then the cone of force lay empty with a slight haze inside. The cone of force rose from the bed forcing everything inside the cone through the portal. Then the cone of force disappeared, and the portal closed leaving an empty bed where his Trix Aspect had been with no sign of foul play with the nanites that had been part of Trix still in the room before they’d moved through the ceiling and finally into his soul storage.
Adam started searching for the nanites that had been in the cone of force that had propelled through the portal while he searched for the nanites that had been forced up through the portal to wherever the attack had come from. It had taken a little while to find and reconnect with them because they were busy replicating themselves and infiltrating a new location. From what he could make out, the nanites were in the middle of a dried-out lakebed with mountains off in the distance. His nanites sent out a ping and he was surprised to learn that he had no other nanites anywhere on the planet this lakebed was on. So, they went to work replicating and spreading across the planet they’d ended up on.
While he’d been thinking and investigating the attack on his Adam Aspect he rebuilt his body in his Soul Storage area. One good thing had come from this attack though. The nanites in the past, and by proxy he, could use his Soul Storage in the past. He could put things into his soul storage now, and they would appear to his Thor Aspect as a hazy outline that could not be interacted with. It felt a lot like a placeholder. Adam could interact with the item now, but his future self could not. At least not in this Cosmos.
If he went to Cosmos that hadn’t barred Time Travel he probably could pass things between the future and the past as long as he had a part of himself there. That was the other thing he figured out. His nanites in the past didn’t allow him to create himself in the past if his soul or aspects were in the future. Only having his aspect and his soul space separated allowed that bridge to exist here. He’d been extremely lucky when he’d transferred his Soul Space into the trap and unconsciously willed his Ahrem Aspect to remain in its original time. If he hadn’t done that simultaneously both his soul and his primary aspect of this cosmos would have been flung into the far future together. Sure, he would have been able to leave at any time, but he wouldn’t have been able to affect the change he wanted to. Let’s hear it for an extremely high luck attribute.
Creating his body was a little slower than normal as he had to draw nanites into his Soul Storage from the present and they couldn’t take a lot of material from Vrax itself. Instead, he had the nanites come back through the portals from worlds that were not completely mechanical in nature. Still, in less than two minutes he was looking out of his eyes into his soul space using a daisy chain effect. He allowed his body to remain in his Adam configuration and stepped out of his soul space into Trix’s apartment.
Adam looked around as he willed True Sight and Invisibility on himself and then teleported to the planet his nanites had discovered. As he appeared there, he willed himself off the planet. As the planet receded below him he found himself looking at another version of Earth as he rose out of Death Valley in California. Adam checked his mana usage and sure enough, his teleport had cost a full 15% of his total mana pool. A cost that high indicated that he’d crossed a dimensional or universal barrier.
Adam had the nanites in this location continue to spread as he adjusted his trajectory and accelerated away from the Sun until he was just inside the Oort cloud. Not wanting to infiltrate whatever network systems they had on the planet to gather information about the solar system he set his distance to the sun and started zipping around the inside of the Oort cloud while looking inward.
With his high perception and perfect memory, he started discarding all light sources that were not moving to his point of reference and looked for only those objects that were close to him, namely the planets and the moons of this solar system. Once he’d identified as many planets and moons as he could detect, he traveled to each world and moon and dropped off some nanites to begin the infiltration and conversion process of the entire solar system following his long-established protocols.
Adam reapplied his invisibility and True Sight spells as necessary as he zipped around a solar system that seemed almost identical to his original solar system. While he did that his Thor Aspect had the nanites clean up and reconstruct Ne’lix after Eloise left his apartment. Adam watched as Ne’lix’s body healed and the mess that had been made was cleaned up. When Ne’lix finally took a huge gulp of air, he woke briefly, looked around, and then went back to sleep. Thor had the nanites create a note for him that was attached to his bathroom mirror so he wouldn’t miss it when he woke up in the morning. Before he withdrew his attention from Ne’lix he set the nanites in Ne’lix’s body to full defense mode with counter-attack protocols that should help Ne’lix if he were attacked again.
Adam knew he’d have to return to Vrax and retake his place as Trix, but he had a little time. He hadn’t felt this free in a while and it was kind of fun to push his abilities to their limit just to see what he could do. Besides, the process of infiltration and conversion was exponential but in the beginning, it did start off slow.
His Thor Aspect was handling all the nanites currently and spreading throughout the Vrax Empire. Eventually, they would find the links that lead to this world, but he wasn’t worried about it. He was sure everything he needed to know was in the orbital station he’d detected above North America. He was just taking his time and enjoying himself as he prepared to go say hi.
Also, allowing himself to fly around the solar system at incredible velocities was a lot of fun. How? Well, it was like a roller coaster ride, but he wasn’t just thinking about himself. He was quite sure it was fun for whoever was on the station if their sensors could detect gravity waves. If the equipment was sensitive enough it might be able to determine that the source was moving quickly. If not it would appear as if a ring of gravity was emanating from the border of the solar system which was shifting through all 365 degrees on all three axes. They’d be running around like chickens with their heads cut off if they believed the data. Adam was moving so fast that the gravity waves would seem to come from everywhere simultaneously without pause. Increased heart rates, cold sweats, and a touch of fear of the unknown, how could that not be fun?