Our hovercraft circled several spots of interest around the lake. I jotted down mental notes as my Infoscopes flashed through layers of silt and dirt beneath the clear, blue water.

The presence of Kliss holding onto my hand allowed me to fight the mentally disruptive pull of the Astral Ocean, which was far, far worse here. The membrane between the physical and the magical above this lake was incredibly thin, full of holes akin to a slice of cheese.

"Slava, your plan sounds nice on paper, but what if Giovashi or Hollow Mother fight back?" Kliss murmured.

"Oh they'll definitely fight back," I said. "But that's why we're uplifting, arming and educating the youngest generation of Skyisle. No plan survives contact with the enemy, but I have a multitude of war plans being rolled out across Skyisle at the same time."

"I do like the sound of me setting the world on fire with positively-charged dragon magic that heals instead of killing," the dragon-girl added. "But... are you certain that such magic won't be dangerous to people and livestock in the same way the valley of death is? What if people begin to grow extra organs or something?"

"They won't," I laughed. "Leemy is already healing the nature of the valley with Green-Vitality. The crystals I plan to use you to make will specifically target the Astral Ocean - they will have no effect on the physical plane."

"Okay, I trust you," Kliss nodded.

“Are we going to be doing any diving today or just chatting bout crystals?” Delta asked after a moment of languid silence between us.

“Maybe,” I said. “Mainly, I’m doing analysis of where potentially amazing stuff is buried.”

“Booooring,” my twin commented, which earned her a head boop from Kliss.

“Let Slava work,” the dragon-girl commented.

“Hey, you’re supposed to be on my side!” Delta huffed.

“Am I?” Kliss smirked.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Cus we’re both girls?” Delta said.

“And?” Kliss arched an eyebrow.

“Female unity! Girls stick together! That's how it's supposed to work,” Delta declared. She had clearly not thought this argument very far ahead.

“All genders are Equal under the eyes of Goddess Equality,” Kliss replied with a dry tone.

“I shared my bedroom with you, traitor!”

“I have sworn an oath to be a just knight to serve our Lord Administrator,” Kliss said, glancing at me.

“Fine be boring together,” Delta huffed, crossing her arms. “I’ll just stare dramatically… off into the distance.”

I couldn't suppress a grin. Delta, for all her ancient soul-shard knowledge, was often just an immature teenager.

"You know," Kliss commented, "there are better ways to pass the time than pretending to be a forlorn maiden."

“I’ll be as for-err-lorn as I want to be,” my twin said. “I was promised treasure diving. Where’s my treasure diving adventure with sharks and…”

“There are no sharks in this lake,” I pointed out.

“What about approximately shark-shaped Astral Phantoms?” Delta asked, making a shark face at me by pulling her lips back and showing off her chompers.

“Right, lots of those here,” I acquiesced.

Delta pretended to chomp down on Kliss’s arm. The ex-Overseer aptly dodged my sister’s attack with a smile, which only further encouraged her.

“Stop that,” Kliss threatened. “Or I’ll have to assume that you’ve become a mad ghoul and cast you overboard into the lake.”

“Zero chances of ghoulification here,” Delta huffed. “I’ve been feeding on lovely, clean Alanial battery power for a year!”

I finished my local observations and directed the hovercraft to a small island.

“Do you know how to swim?” I asked Kliss.

“I do,” she nodded and then blushed, looking down at her orange, glittering hands. “Erm… I did, in my original, human body. I’m not sure how well I’ll manage in this one. It’s heavier, denser. I’m somewhat concerned that I’ll sink.”

“We’ll dock on this island,” I said. “It’s a donut shaped one with a sandbar and a small sinkhole in the middle. The Astral here isn’t as torn, so I should have no problem supervising you. You can practice diving in the sinkhole. If you sink straight down, I’ll pull you up with my armacus.” I tapped the wooden bracelet on my wrist and my armacus unfirled into the shape of a gun.

“Gotcha,” Kliss nodded. “Wait.” She looked down at her dress. “I don’t have swimming clothes.”

“The water is still hella cold,” Delta commented. “We have wetsuits, made by a local seamstress. You can borrow one of my extras.”

“Wetsuits?” Kliss squinted at my sister.

“Earth-tech! It’s a tight full body suit that keeps your body warm even in cold water. Took us a while to find the correct material for it!” Delta pulled out a pair of black, leather bodysuits.

“Where are we going to change into these?” Kliss asked.

“Behold! I shall summon a lovely tent into existence without magic,” Delta grinned and pulled a lever. A ring-bound, spring-operated tarp unfurled from the side of the hovercraft, forming a tent.

The ex-Overseer’s eyebrows went up. Delta grinned and pulled her into the tent.

I pulled the lever that disabled the magic circuit that acted as our parking brake. The magitek engine stopped spinning the wooden blades and the hovercraft landed onto the beach. I clipped a hex-lantern to my belt and climbed out.

I walked across the donut island, reaching the sinkhole. It was only a few metres deep and had a variety of magic corals at the bottom for me to investigate.

I sat down on a mossy rock and closed my eyes, peering at the world entirely through my four Infoscopes. One of my all-seeing eyes spiraled around us, watching for incoming danger. The second Infoscope hovered over me. The third was passing through the corals. The fourth was cutting through the lake around the sinkhole island, looking for gold.

“Not gonna go for a swim?” Delta commented as the girls approached me from behind.

“Someone’s gotta make sure that you two are safe,” I said.

“Uh-huh, nerd,” she laughed. “How are we even related? You’re like the most socially awkward potato in the universe.”

“There’s a perfectly scientific reason for this,” I replied, not bothering to open my eyes.

Delta rolled her eyes at me, rushed forward and leapt head-first into the deep water off the edge. Kliss tentatively stopped at the sand beach part of the sinkhole, clearly concerned about going into the water.

Love what you're reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on.

“So, there’s a… scientific reason why some people are outgoing and others aren’t?” She asked, turning to me.

“Oh, absolutely,” I replied. “From what I was taught at Moscow State University, it has to do with brain hemisphere dominance.”

“I understand the word brain,” The ex-Overseer said. “That’s the organ responsible for formation of thought. But what’s this about… hemisphere and dominance?”

“The Soviet research into brain function began with psychiatrist Oskar Vogt, who dissected the brain of Vladimir Lenin, our nation’s founder,” I said. “Vogt went on to establish the Institute for Brain Research in Berlin. Another Institute for Brain Research was built in Moscow.”

“Boooooring,” Delta yelled from the sinkhole.

I ignored her.

“In this facility we kept the brains of our leaders, poets and other notable men,” I explained. “In glass jars. We called it the Pantheon of Brains”

“Sounds creepy,” Kliss said with a small shudder.

“It was what it was,” I shrugged. Without opening my eyes I grabbed a stick and drew a diagram of a brain in the sand. “The people who built the Pantheon of Brains were trying to figure out how the brain of a genius differed from a mundane brain and how to create the perfect communist man.”

“And did they succeed?” Kliss stared at me, eyes wide. “Are you… the perfect man?”

“He’s hardly perfect!” Delta commented, running to the hovercraft. “Darn, this water is very Brrrrrrrrr!”

“I am definitely not perfect,” I shook my head with a smile. “And no, we did not succeed at figuring out how to make the perfect brain. What we did figure out, eventually, is that there is a slight distinction between the right and left brain hemisphere.”

Then I divided it in half with a line.

“When the brain is cut in half, separated, then this distinction becomes very obvious,” I said. “As if two different people exist in your head.”

“That sounds… concerning,” Kliss said.

“The left brain hemisphere is mainly responsible for rationality, language and mathematics,” I explained, pointing the stick at the left side of the brain sketch. “While the right hemisphere is better at creativity, art, intuition and imagination.”

“Soooo… how would someone make a brain like yours, filled with so much knowledge of Earth sciences and mathematics?” Kliss inquired.

“I fell,” I said.

“You… fell?” Kliss blinked.

“When I was nine, I was exploring a building under construction with my friends,” I said. “It was on that day that German planes started to drop bombs from the sky onto our city.”

“Were you hit by one?” the dragon-girl asked.

“Nah,” I shook my head. “The bombs fell far from us, but the blastwave distracted me, made me lose my footing. I fell one and a half storeys and slammed the right side of my head onto a concrete block. There wasn't a lot of blood and eventually my head stopped bleeding. My friends helped me get home. No doctor looked at me for years since I didn’t tell my parents anything, plus the war lasted five years from that day, but I knew… sensed that something was deeply wrong with me.”

“Wrong… how?” Kliss completely stopped going into the water and strolled to me, sitting down on the beach and facing me.

“Before the accident, I was a pretty outgoing kid,” I said. “The life of the party. I could tell jokes, could easily chat with anyone. Basically, I had pretty high charisma stats in a world without soul-stats to track such things.”

“And… after?” Kliss pressed on.

“After,” I rubbed the back of my head. “I became a shut-in. I started to see numbers, fractals in everything. I realized that there were no circles, only straight lines between every point. I started to draw fractals, sketch them out on a piece of paper with charcoal. Eventually, over time, I understood that math was everywhere, studied hard and became different from everyone I knew.”

“Oh,” Delta commented, climbing out of the water. “I don’t remember this.”

“You didn’t get all of my memories–only a third at best.” I shrugged.

“Wait, so,” Kliss looked at the diagram in the sand. “You injured your brain?”

“Essentially,” I nodded. “I injured my right brain hemisphere just enough for the left side to almost completely take over. It led me to see that the world, the universe, everything was made from mathematics. However, because I completely lost my intuition, my charisma dropped to zero. I became a shut-in, never talked to girls, never made friends, never fell in love, never had a family, lived my entire life trying to understand the nature of numbers. What happened to me was a blessing and a curse.”

“Damn it, now I feel bad poking fun at your nerd-ness,” Delta lamented.

“You know, now that I think about it,” I mulled. “You’re the first people with whom I've shared the story of my head injury."

“I’m glad that you trust me enough to share your past with me,” Kliss said with a soft smile.

Delta nodded.

“So, were there others… like you or were you the only person in the world who smacked their head just the right way?” Kliss asked after a few silent moments.

“There were others,” I nodded. “I wanted to know if I was the only person in the world who saw everything as fractals and mathematics. It turned out that I wasn’t. The Americans called what happened to me the Acquired Savant Syndrome. Laurence Kim Peek, a boy born in 1951 was a megasavant, someone similar to me, but even worse. He had an exceptional memory, but he also experienced incredible social difficulties. He was born with a condition in which the bundle of nerves that connects the two hemispheres of the brain was completely missing. He remembered everything he ever read.”

“Oh, the Basq have magi who can do that,” Kliss murmured. “They’re called Sages, if I’m recalling things correctly. They’re useless in battle, but good at memorising stuff. I learned about them at the Cessna Academy as an example of why it’s a bad idea to invest all points into Intelligence.”

“I guess I’m a Sage then,” I laughed.

“Slava, how many points do you have in intelligence, if you don’t mind me asking?” Kliss asked with a tentative look.

“570,” I replied.

“WHAT?” She sputtered. “What in Equality’s name… how is that even humanly possible?!”

“I’ve invested most of what I got from seventeen levels into intelligence,” I replied. “Plus I had 89 in Intelligence as an Astral Phantom before I was born as Dante.”

“I… see,” Kliss glanced at my sister and then turned back to me. “So, um, can you recall everything with perfect clarity too?”

“I can recall some things really well,” I said. “I remember stuff from around when I was 29 the best. Presumably this is due to the Tzar Bomba.”

“Tzar-what?” the ex-Overseer repeated.

“The Hollow Mother presented a theory to me when we talked in my dreams,” I said. “That the great, man-made explosions imprinted portions of my soul into the Astral.

28-year-old Slava was imprinted at 1960 while gathering radiation data from Kazakhstan contaminated villages near Semipalatinsk Polygon.

29-year-old Slava was imprinted in 1961 when he stood in the view of a 16 kiloton nuclear detonation at Semipalatinsk Polygon with KGB Agent Sasha Gradenski.

29-year-old Slava was imprinted on 30 October 1961 during the explosion of Tzar Bomba.

54-year-old Slava was imprinted in 1986 during his trip into Chernobyl to help coordinate liquidation efforts.

60-year-old-Slava, somehow gathered up the imprinted fragments and escaped his magic-less world in 1992 when he destroyed Aralsk-7 by standing at the epicentre of the 1 kiloton explosion.”

Kliss simply stared at me.

“These fragments, around 100 soul shards, were mixed with the ghostly remnants of a teenager, an Alanian Acolyte, Kopusha. That was approximately 80 soul shards – most of which were transferred to Delta. When Giovashi shoved me into the Astral Ocean, I also absorbed a 33 year old man-hunter Klint and his grandfather Keps–88 soul shards, from the golden age of Alania,” I said. “I am basically a soup of soul fragments, but I do see myself as suspended in my late 20s as evidenced by my self-image during the Neurovista lucid dream dives. I suspect this was because the biggest part of my soul was captured during the detonation of Tzar Bomba in 1961, only a year after I left Moscow as a 28 year old Biochemistry and Virology graduate still filled with hopes and dreams of helping humanity.”

“Sounds like you’re a very complicated man,” Kliss finally said. “How big was the explosion this Tzar Bomba made?”

“It was the biggest explosion my people achieved,” I replied. “The blastwave circled the world three times and obliterated windows one hundred kilometres away from the epicenter. I was with the small group of people closest to the detonation, in a steel aeroplane, noting down the results.”

“Damn,” the dragon-girl muttered. “So you’re mostly like your twenty nine year old self then… what about the Alanian soul-fragments you’ve absorbed from the Astral Ocean. Have they not impacted your personality?”

“I was able to keep them separated,” I said. “The Infoscope helped me identify and carve them away from myself before they've fully merged with the rest of me. Yes, there was some carryover of memories, but they didn’t affect me as much as my sister.”

Delta stuck her tongue at me.

“I pushed most of the excess soul bits that didn’t belong to me into various items like that book,” I pointed at the book in a leather pouch on Kliss.

“Oh, sorry,” Kliss looked at the leather pouch as if she noticed that it was still on her. “I… really don’t want to let go of my first hoard item.”

“Don’t worry, it’s been warded against decay,” I said. “You can go into the water with it and it won’t come apart.”

“So is your soul… damaged in the same way your mind was damaged back on Earth?” Kliss muttered. “Does this mean that you’ll never truly care for people here on Novazem too?”

“Nah,” I said. “I greatly care for my sister and my parents and... for my first friend here.”

Kliss blushed under my gaze.

“Here, as Dante, I have two perfectly functional brain hemispheres,” I tapped my head. “I’m not as broken as I used to be back on Earth. This is my second chance to live and not just obsess over mathematics.”

“So… why place so many tokens into Intelligence?” Kliss asked.

“Because it allows me to manipulate the world using the knowledge I obtained on Earth as a savant,” I said. “Thanks to magic, I’m not completely defenseless anymore. I brought Aradria down from the sky and I swear to use it to protect my family, everyone in Skyisle and especially you… Kliss.”