Mark looked at himself in the mirror, and felt weird. Good! Maybe.
But weird.
He looked like one of those ultra-brawnies that worked out religiously, starved for a month before the show, and then got up on stage and posed under harsh lights while wearing a tiny thong. His muscles were huge, his body was shredded, the thong was absolute black, and Mark even had the sun-tanned skin to go along with the look. 2.5 meters tall! Arms and thighs and ass that were way too much, and a shelf for a chest. He did a few poses in the mirror… and then he started laughing.
“This is ridiculous,” he muttered to himself, grinning happily.
And then he went back into his house and he took out the weight bench and tossed the protein powder and milkshake machine. He had made a mannequin with too much tan and modeled after some bodybuilder guy that Quark had in his databases, but more, and that went away, too, and then Mark opened his eyes to the real world, and he looked at himself in the mirror again.
He looked exactly the same as before.
But Mark started Unioning with Good and Bad, and with every breath and beat of his heart his normal body reasserted itself, the bodybuilder version of himself nothing more than a vision disintegrating under Mark’s normal truth.
Mark made a check mark in the air, on a holographic display of options that he had wanted to try, and which Quark made a list out of. None of them had given Mark the capability to TT, but that was only a passing desire once Mark got to really figure out how this all worked. So far, he had become Glorious Man (He couldn’t do that one for very long; too embarrassing and weirdly delightful), himself as an elf (which was okay), himself as an older version and rather kingly (which made him look like Dad, Mark realized, when he was looking at himself in the mirror, and so he had to stop that one fast), and a few different ‘himself, but sexual’ (which Mark stopped doing right quick, and which he would leave for years down the line to figure out).
“Next option is dragon-person,” Mark said… and then he hummed. He checked the time and changed his direction, smiling. “Time for dinner!”
Everyone had dinner together on the observation deck, and everyone talked about something normal and interesting, like a movie that Isoko had seen in her own downtime and how she was excited to get to watch her normal shows again. She guessed there were at least 6 or 8 new episodes of ‘Battleship Galaxia’ out, and she really wanted to know who the traitor was. Sally had been watching that show with her, and they got to talking about all of that stuff. The actual food was great; Sally had made most of it. But being with the team, with Lola and David and Tartu and Andria and Derek, too, that was the better part of it all.
All the talk of shows got Mark to thinking about HVP and what was going to happen next. He wasn’t sure what his thoughts were, exactly, since he was still organizing them even as he went to bed, but he was having a lot of them.
Under soft covers, and a thick comforter, with the AC on high and the space under the covers warm and soft, everything felt awesome. Mark dreamed a dreamless dream.
He woke up and nothing had happened all ‘night’ long. The 27-hour elven night ended, though, so now it was twilight out there, the stars coming out again, the Dreadnought continuing along toward wherever it was going, following the orbs of light and popping them as it touched them.
Mark checked on the command center, on the ETA for leaving the elven lands. Eliot’s scanners, and everyone who had read them, could not yet see the end of the orbs. Current pathing had them at about 2,500 kilometers before the scanners just couldn’t see any further (and anything beyond 1000 kilometers was already iffy), and Eliot had already been told not to go scanning everything, so the drones were only flying out at 100 kilometers away. They had passed through the edge of the previous private realm, though, when Mark had slept.
The various Elf Lands were a series of hexagonal-shaped biomes of various types, each about 3,500 kilometers across. The previous biome was ‘rural mountains, cities, and plains’.
Mark flew in the sky over the Dreadnought, looking out at this biome, which was scattered islands and mostly ocean. Great pillars of ice rose up here and there, each of them capped with a 20 kilometer tall prismatic mana tower, but the distances between those towers in this land was quite far at about 100 kilometers between towers. The density of prismatic mana in those skylines was less, as well, each of the lines only about 5 meters across and looking more like a thread in the sky instead of a fluorescent tube-bulb.
The sky was mostly dark, save for the lights the Dreadnought followed, and nothing much existed up here.
Everything that mattered out here was below the water’s surface.
Corals grew brightly luminescent and tall as towers down below the clear waters. Whales and other large creatures lived down there, each of them massive and dominant, but all of them were just animals. Fish glowed and swam in massive schools or as singular bright spots in the deeps. Quark picked up a few monsters in the darker, deeper parts. Big sharks, small krakens. Nothing too dangerous.
Elves lived in the corals and in underwater cities underneath giant bubbles of air, walking through arches into the seas, to swim to kelp farms and reefs to gather food and to visit each other and to just be, existing the wild places, swimming with the fishes and doing whatever it was they felt like doing down there. Mark wasn’t sure what water elves did, but they seemed to have an easy life. Or at least it was a life they picked.
The elves saw the Dreadnought pass overhead, above the waters, but they did not rise to the surface. Some of them even hid. Mostly, they just continued doing whatever they were doing—
Mark smiled as he felt the air start to hold him gently, helping him stay aloft instead of what he had been doing, which was constant adjustments and fighting to stay aloft and in the same place. He looked down and behind. Quark picked up Isoko flying toward him before Mark saw her.
Isoko glittered with a reflection of the twilight sky as she hovered up toward him, calling out, “Hey, high flier!”
“It’s a good day for flying!”
Isoko giggled as she flew a lazy circle around Mark, and then settled into a holding pattern next to him, saying, “You’ve been out here for a while.”
“Only a few hours?” Mark said/asked. And then he scoffed, adding, “Flying is fun!”
“Flying is very fun, but doesn’t it tire you out to be here at all?”
“I’m Unioning a little bit, all the time,” Mark said, “I set up my house to naturally keep me powered, too, which is kinda weird but it’s working well. I barely have to Union to keep up with the demands of flight, but I still do have to do it a little. Your natural state is floating on your astral body, yeah?”
Isoko swooped and swirled around Mark once, and then she smiled brightly, and changed the subject, “So you were thinking about something at dinner last night. What’s happening, Mark?”
“Ah… You’re worried,” Mark said, the wind easily letting them talk, keeping their words from being swept away because Isoko was making it happen that way. “You don’t feel very worried.”
“I’m not that worried… Well. I am worried. But it’s an airy sort of worry. Not really about you. Not really about me, or Earth or Daihoon… Honestly, there are too many worries to really worry about anything…” Isoko did a barrel roll, and then came up beside Mark, saying, “So I’m doing a little Union of Anxiety and Peace, and I’m doing fine.”
“… How long has that been going on?”
“A while now. Maybe since Thrashtalon and that whole shitstorm… Or really when you were down in the lava with Sally. Your Union of Good and Bad did a lot for all of us, but when it wasn’t there I took over. Andria is a wreck without someone helping her out and I got to be that person.”
“Oh,” Mark said, suddenly realizing that a lot of problems had been piling up while he had been out of it, in one way or another. “Sorry about… all of that.”
Isoko snorted, then teased, “I’ll blame you forever, so you best get ready to apologize properly! I’m thinking that you can buy me a few movie studios as a nice ‘forgive me’ present.”
Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.
Mark smiled wide… And then he paused. Mark’s thoughts from the last day came together at that moment, and he said, “So… this sort of ties into that, but… There are a lot of ways we can play the return to Earth. As I see it, we’re gonna have a confrontation with the Empires and otherwise. Either we can attack first, in some way, or we can respond to their attacks. I’m more open to we-attack-first scenarios, where we assume that the Empires will be gunning for me, at least, and all of you, secondarily… or primarily, in your own ways, I’m sure. Everyone is going to want to have any one of you on their payrolls out there, fighting the good fight, or even back at Japan and in the major HVP production houses and prepping for gate day there. So I assume that everyone will try to split us up rather heavily.
“But we all sort of have a responsibility to Empire Aluatha, with those contracts for the settlement project we all signed. So we’re all stuck there if we allow ourselves to be stuck there, and it’s better to be together than separate right now. There are clauses for us to get out of those, but the only way I see them letting any of those clauses happen is if they can enforce even better ones for them, like jail or murder. So we’re stuck with Aluatha and their machinations. Me moreso than any of you, I suppose.
“When we get out of here, they’re going to attack in a whole lot of ways. Probably nicely, at first. Parties and whatever. Or maybe they’ll go straight for the actual fight.
“So we need to prepare for that, with an attack of our own.
“I was thinking it was time for some interviews, recaps, and maybe a little reality show propaganda piece.” Mark finished with, “We have to give out big reveals anyway, so it’s probably better if we get all of our stories out there in a broadcast before anyone can shape our narratives themselves. Sure, the AIs will catch it all, but even if they catch it, we can redeploy it, and that’s fine.”
Isoko thought as Mark spoke, her vector tumbling with anxiety. Mark easily saw it, now, as Isoko’s Anxiety flowed away on the breeze, like a silver gleam in the air. She glowed a bit, and her vector became more secure. “Should we tell people about the elves? And about Thrashtalon, Kardi, and Grax? Obviously we should tell some people, maybe just the higher ups. But in the main broadcast? Maybe not, if you want to play this as a show piece. If you want to make it a historical document then we have to include that stuff.”
“Eliot can do a few different versions,” Mark said, “I’m not going to face an interrogation room ever again, though.”
Isoko had a thought. “Lola could interrogate us all for the camera?”
“... Okay well, I’d be fine with Lola doing it. How do you figure it would go? From a narrative perspective.”
“Well… We get in a room, and then we start from the top— No! Wait. How much do you want to accuse the Empires of trying to assassinate you? How much do you want to hide about the Inheritor stuff? Because we can either try to avoid that, or lean into it. You did send out that rain lily message about Doomo while we were out here, so we could lean into that, too, or avoid it. Lots of options. Not sure which one would play best, and honestly, we should consider doing the bare minimum and then handing it off to Noel or maybe a big producer and writing team in Japan or even one of the Californian Cities. But Noel has a lot of good writing behind him, and he did do the Battle for Memphi and everyone loved that one.”
Mark decided, “I want to do a preliminary interrogation, and then send that out. Lola can do some basic interviews, if she wants to… And I need to see how everyone feels about everything that happened, anyway.”
Isoko said, “Let’s go in?”
“Let’s go in,” Mark agreed, shifting his rotors and beginning the descent toward the Dreadnought.
Soon, everyone was inside of the hub, and everyone had ideas of how things should go. Tartu was hesitant, a lot. Andria was nervous about being in the spotlight, while Derek wanted to be in the spotlight, but only a little, and he wasn’t sure about how he wanted that ‘little’ to look. Sally and Isoko were all for the whole idea, at its base, but Sally wanted to put out something in order to make the whole thing terrifying to everyone who saw it, while Isoko wanted to do something more like ‘we make a fake plot and then fill it in with personal interrogations/interviews with everyone on the ship and make a movie’. Lola wasn’t sure she approved of such a tactic, and David didn’t have anything to say about any of it at all. Eliot brought up a very good point, almost right away, talking about B-Roll he had captured throughout the whole trip. Quark had B-Roll too, in his database. How much of that did they want to use?
But then Tartu brought them back to the harsh reality of it all.
“What is the ultimate goal here?” Tartu asked, widening the conversation a whole lot. “Are we selling a narrative to the Empires, or the public? Are we making a… a brochure to sell to other would-be-powers? Because that was one of the things we talked about at the beginning. We got very, very lucky, though, because all of the gods were helping us center our Bindings. When other people see this, when they come out here to… to I don’t know? Talk to that blue dragon Quatrok, and hire out some other dragons from Kabberjaw to get powered up themselves? Are the people who see this going to try and emulate us? Because that’s one of the dangers that they talk about in the HVP all the time. Emulators. What sort of fallout are we expecting there? How are we going to control that? We shouldn’t even talk about 90% of this stuff, Mark? How can we do a broadcast when we shouldn’t talk about any of this?”
Tartu was getting nervous.
Andria had a different concern. She said, “I want to know how we’re going to survive back on the Two Worlds. Not how we’re going to…” Andria was suddenly beyond disgusted. She didn’t want to be here anymore, or talk at all, or do anything. She suddenly, deeply, longed for home. For somewhere else. She spat, “And now we’re going to make a movie out of it?! I ALMOST FUCKING DIED. Multiple times!”
Mark suddenly realized he didn’t truly know Andria at all. Did he know Derek? Did he really know Lola or David, or even Eliot? Isoko and Sally, Mark thought he had a handle on, but now Sally deeply desired to go home and never leave. Everyone was tired.
Everyone had reached a breaking point several times over on this trip, but suddenly it was all fraying.
Mark tried to bring them together, “What happened here and how we handle it will define our entire lives to come, so we either put out a narrative, or we have one put upon us.”
That caused everyone to take a moment.
Andria breathed deeply. She wanted to run and hide, but she remained.
Mark continued, “I know you want to go back to your life before, but it’s not happening, Andria. At the very least you’re gonna be rich beyond your previous dreams, and you’re gonna want to put those resources to work for the Two Worlds. I want to help you do that. But I can’t do that with the Empires trying shit. So, we need to prepare an attack of our own. If nothing else it will be a shield to allow you to deny anyone from touching you. You can tell them ‘I gave an interview. Watch the damned movie’.”
By the time Mark finished, everyone was looking at him with surety in their eyes, or at least something approaching as much.
Andria was still debating with herself about everything, but she managed to pull herself back from the brink. Tight-lipped, pale-faced, she took a breath and quietly said, “Yeah.”
Mark said, “Thank you, Andria. I know you’re not into the HVP stuff, so we can keep your involvement minimal.”
Andria just nodded; she could hold it together for a while more.
Tartu focused. “Right. So… We should make it a documentary, with the interrogation idea, and with lots of B-Roll from Eliot and Quark. The material itself is too important to muddy around with any sort of fictional narrative, so we’re not doing that. Eliot has made some good documentaries, and we should do that for this whole thing. Lola should do interrogations, and make it a serious thing, and we should start with Mark as the impetus for the trip, glossing over the goblin war for the most part, and then pause the interview and go through all of everyone, in the same order that we did the kaiju. We should also consider a map outlining the whole trip, and…”
An hour of discussion followed, with Andria sitting to the side and trying to be present, but when Isoko got excited about fonts Andria got disgusted again. Mark brought it all back around to acceptance, though he knew he was never going to get enthusiasm out of Andria with this.
Sally sat down beside Andria and said, “I don’t get how they care about this stuff, either.” And then she grabbed the biggest metaphorical rock she could grab, and threw it into the pond of the group, saying, “I think we should just go on a massive counter-assassination run and kill Doomo and Godking Dominant and whoever else we want to add to the list.”
Almost everyone had a reaction somewhere between disbelief or ‘hmmm?’, but then Andria burst out laughing. Tension diffused. Derek spoke up about how difficult it would be to chop down a tree of that size, to which Sally made a big muscle with a bicep and grinned, talking about how she had done it once, and how she could do it again.
Tartu took the overarching threat seriously for about half a moment, and then he saw that Sally was smiling, so he said, “Okay. We’ve had our fun. Let’s get back to serious matters, please.”
Time passed.
At about 5 PM human-time, though the sky outside was still bright with the 27 hour elf day, Mark sat down with Lola in a quiet room. The sound of the engine hummed in the walls, but barely.
