A week had passed since Margot had gone off to go do her own thing. A few days had passed since I’d started to deal with the backlog of unprocessed emotions that I’d be been neglecting for an eon and a half. Now I was feeling a bit better. A bit more regular and even keeled. A bit more me.
This wasn’t the first time something like this had happened. When one comes from a short-lived race and suddenly becomes long-lived, there is an adjustment period that basically never really ends. While all souls were immortal, the souls of mortals were generally most suited towards mortal life.
Going against this rule and not losing yourself meant dealing with a long potentially indefinite period of acclimation. A potentially endless cycle of having to deal with baggage that would have either been left behind when you either checked into a new life, or ascended into an afterlife.
This is the reason why three out of five ‘turned’-vampires (as opposed to those who were born vampires) that managed to survive the past the five hundred year mark tended to lose their shit and self-destruct before their thousandth year. This is also the reason cultivators and mages had to be careful of so-called “heart devils”.
Time was a foe that preyed on all of us regardless of our life spans. Mental health was the one area that you couldn’t just hope for your raw power to fix things. In fact, the stakes just kept getting higher and higher, the more influence your thoughts had on reality. If there was such a thing as immortal therapists it’d probably be best for me to go see one, but since those don’t exist I’d just have to try and cope as best I could.
Enough about that though ...I've got more important news to tell you all. I got a puppy! Her name was Mint. She was an adorable little scamp that happened to run into me while I was testing out my dark-eye network’s space-time transfer abilities. She was small, and green, and intoxicatingly fluffy.
I’d been wandering through the streets of Old Barcelona. The residents of the city had moved to a floating island that appeared after the ENE. Old Barcelona was now just a rotting husk filled with wandering undead and tons of radiation.
The zombies were part of something that has been plaguing all of Spain in general. The radiation was the result of a misfired nuke being fired at a location that was dangerously close to the city. Fortunately, the town’s residents had all already escaped before the missile hit.
Even more lucky for the denizens of New Barcelona, the floating island they lived on was surrounded by a natural barrier that protected them from the fallout.
My new little buddy was probably the descendent of some stray, or housepet, that had been left behind when everyone else fled. Magic plus radiation led to “wacky” comic book hijinks.
In the current age, being bathed in radiation could just as easily turn you into a horrible monster, or give you superpowers, instead of just cooking your body from the inside out and giving you cancer.
Thus in sites like this that had either been hit by nukes, or had been affected by the fallout released by the numerous nuclear plant meltdowns that took place at the beginning of the ENE, there also tended to be loads of mutated creatures and people.
The dog’s ancestor was probably one of those mutated creatures. The passage of time, the addition of even more magic, and a few intimate encounters with beings not of this world allowed the lineage to evolve into a type of monster, or variant-beast.
Our initial meeting involved the dog trying to eat me. Its body expanded to the size of an SUV and its mouth peeled open like a flower, revealing a mouth filled with multiple rows of sharp teeth, and dozens of whip-like, barbed tongues.
I have numerous fetishes but vore wasn’t one of them, so naturally I wasn’t going to just stand there and get eaten. It was a very brief fight. Even if my powers were limited to Margot’s level, I was far from weak. The dog came at me. I smacked it down with a blast of gravity and psionic force.
The little beast surprised me by bouncing back. Rebounding from being a sticky green smear in the crushed concrete. The little beast’s body sent out a storm of green barbs before it ran away.
I continued with my tour of old Barcelona with a bit more vigilance. This time, actually paying attention to what my numerous senses, and my connection to the akashic, were telling me.
Which is how I became aware of the fact that my little attacker was still following me. She was probably stalking me, planning on trying a second attack once the poison within the barbs she’d fired at me finally kicked in.
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The little puppy was unlucky. I was more or less immune to poison. There were only a few, very rare, substances that were capable of effecting me without my say so and that number shrank each time I met one, due to my adaptive physiology.
I went about my business unmolested. Only once having to stop and clear out a group of zombies that been clustered around an old shopping mall I was planning to loo-...*cough*...salvage.
After freezing and shattering the zombies, I collected the corpses and the entire mall itself. Pulling all that matter into my storage space.
The rubble and trash would be used for raw materials. I would have my drones assess the rest of the stuff to check for items of either magical value or decent monetary worth before feeding them to my printers as fodder.
Old Barcelona wasn’t the only ruined city that I planned to visit. Making the FC-Rocket and the Dark-Eye Rocket had exhausted my supply of raw materials. Converting raw energy into matter was always unspeakably expensive, even when I’d been at the height of my powers, so I was loathe to resort to that unless I had to.
My FC-fleet would eventually be able to supply me all the materials I could ever want but the mother rocket hadn’t finished the settling-in process yet. It’d probably be a while before my inventory started getting filled with earth, ice, and various precious metals and minerals.
It had occurred to me that so long as I wasn’t too excessive, or too obvious, I could harvest materials from those parts of the world that were currently unsuitable for human habitation without anyone caring. So that was what I planned to do in the interim.
After collecting the mall, I noticed the hound spying on me. I decided to tease her a little. Pretending to finally succumb to the poison. I staggered around for a bit and listed to the side. Predictably enough she lunged. The furious little thing swelled to a size that was even bigger than her minivan-sized form. Rushing towards me like an out-of-control dump truck.
Instead of dodging, I received her. Tanking her whipping licks and sharp clawed swipes while sending out an attack of my own. Blasting the hound with a precision tickle spell. I resisted her attack, dodging her barbed tongue, and using my telekinesis to hold her in place.
At first, her attack just got more furious. Then as the tickles started to hit home, flaying her nerves with the ticklish sensation, I saw her turn more desperate. She fought as if her life was on the line. Spitting globs of hissing green acid. I continued to tank her attacks, allowing the acid to wash over me as she dealt with my tickle attack.
Eventually she stopped attacking and started to try and run away. I didn’t let her go. I held on tight with my psionic powers. She shrank down to see if that would help and it did help...Well, it helped ‘me’ anyway.’
“Gotcha!”
I grabbed the hound and continued my tickle attack. This time using my actual hands. I played around with the pup for a bit longer and then I let her go. She ran off, briefly pausing to give me a wronged look that said, “I’ll get you back for this!”. Like one of those hammy scrub villains on an old hero show.
I watched her run off. Feeling oddly cleansed. I snapped my fingers to replace my clothes and get rid of all the slobber, dog hair, and a tendril that had been left behind after it tore through my torso. Then I proceeded to continue my search for useful property.
I found this nice industrial plant. It was full of the walking dead but that was no biggy. I didn’t even have to go inside the building to clear them out. If Margot was here I would have let her take them on for the experience but since it was just me. I just stayed outside. I used my psionics to lay down a grand enchantment of Rolling Thunder.
Generally, the undead and most other dark attributed creatures had a fear of light and thunder. Turning the inside of that plant into a giant sea of electrical discharges quickly killed off all the undead.
Using such an indirect mass-attack had the unfortunate side-effect of dissipating most of the aether I would have been able to absorb if I killed them directly. However that was fine with me. It was all chicken feed as far as I was concerned. I just took what I ‘did’ absorb and passed it along the tether for Margot to use.
I’d just finished pulling the plant into my subspace when I realized that something was wrong. I’d been keeping my eye on my little pistachio colored friend. She was being chased by something.
The dog was running for her life. Behind her was a building sized monster. Like a bull but with a frog’s, wart-covered, head. It’s pelt covered in slime. It’s massive horns gouging the walls of the buildings it was passing by. It’s massive hooves tearing apart the asphalts.
Normally, I’d have let nature take its course. The big eat the small, the strong eat the weak. That was how nature worked. That’s the world we all live in. However, the delightful green hound’s antics had done a lot to raise my spirits so I decided to play busybody just this once.
I interfaced with the dark-eye network, teleporting over to where the hound was. She ran past me without paying me any attention. I let her pass and kept my focus on the Taurus-Frog.
The beast saw me roared and lowered its head towards me as it prepared to mow me over.
I extended my palm and fired a bolt of telekinetic force that tore through the top of the beast’s skull and down its spine. Blowing apart a building on the far end of the street we were on.
That would have been the end of the story but little green dog had stopped running when she heard the roar of the bull and the explosions. The eyes that were outside my body could see as her little head peeking around the corner to see what had happened.
Smirking, I walked over to the dead Taurus-Frog and kicked its body over. A thoughtless move that lead to the collapse of yet another building. I used my telekinetics to tear the bull’s chest open and tear out its car-sized heart. I ripped apart a sliver of the cardiovascular muscle and used my pyrokinetics to grill the strip of bull heart flesh. I even pulled some salt, spices, and herbs out of my inventory to aid the taste.
I sent the rest of the bull and its heart into my inventory. The boringly named creature was actually full of some very potent magics and after I’d scrubbed it and everything else I’d found in this city of the radiation I could think of a number of ways I could use them
I stood in the middle of the road. Eating the sliver of roasted bull heart. I had a few bites and then left the rest lying on the side of the road for my new little friend to have. Afterwards, I collected the two buildings my fight with bull had knocked.
At that point, I figured I’d taken as much of barcelona as I dared take without it becoming too noticeable. I was just about to transfer to the next city on my stop when I realized I was being followed again. I looked behind me and saw furry green friend was trailing behind me. Her tail wagging uncertainly.
In the end, I decided to take her with me. I figured there was no reason not to, our building allowed pets, and Margot didn’t have any allergies. Now I was a proud pet owner. One of those doting doggy-daddies who spoiled their puppies rotten.