Chapter 111: Zietriss

Andi and Quatz both regarded me warily, the same way a soldier would regard a bomb that had yet to explode. The cracks on Quatz's head were flaring violently, as if they had gone into overdrive and Andi's eyes glowed with a harsher light than before. With the way they were glaring at me I felt I had done something wrong, even though all I had done was completed their recruitment challenge. 

"So ah, was that the whole recruitment thing then?" I asked, my strength starting to return to me a little more. Quatz nodded, still neither of them said a word. "Seriously guys, what's wrong? Did you think I would just fall over and die or something? Takes more than a few holograms to take down Craig Lyre!" I joked, even though that was exactly what I had expected to happen. 

"You're not possible," Quatz breathed, finally finding his voice. "Nothing can output that much Essence and then go back to having nothing again. Generating Essence is impossible." 

"And yet here the impossible stands," Andi murmured, the harsh glow of her eyes beginning to subside." 

"Sorry, could someone explain this to me. I completed your test, and now you guys are standing there calling me out like I've done something wrong," I retorted, beginning to grow annoyed with the two of them. "Not only that, you two keep talking about this Essence stuff like I should know what it is. What are you even talking about?" 

"You don't know what Essence is," Quatz said, his head cracks also seeming to calm down. 

"Essence is…" Andi started, running a hand through her hair, "Essence is life. It is the energy of the universe, the thing which grants our souls the ability to manifest in the physical word as these forms. It is our weapon, our constant companion, and the reason you can't be picked up by our scans as a living organism is because you don't have any… or rather you didn't have any."

"Okay… No wait, didn't understand any of that." 

"Oh for the love of the gods," Andi sighed exasperated. "Essence is the underlying power source of all living beings in the universe, except it seems for you. Every creature has at least some level of Essence, and some are able to manipulate it to perform incredible feats. Back in the days before we knew what Essence was many species referred to it as Magic. But it's not, it's just a natural force that keeps all living things going. When we found your ship we read no essence, thus we thought there were no life signs. But then we found you, the first being in the universe with no trace of Essence within them at all. When you said you wanted to be a Protector I was shocked, I thought that a creature without Essence would be incredibly weak. But then you did the impossible… you generated your own Essence." 

She paused for breath and fiddled with a control pad on her wrist, causing three chairs to warp out of the ground like the chair in her office had. We all sat. 

"According to reports from the rest of the ship, every single scanner went wild, and you blew out every reading instrument we have back in the observation room. The amount of Essence you were generating was off the scale, no creature in the history of creation has ever displayed as "much Essence as you did during that recruitment test… it was impossible. How did you do it?" Quatz spat.

Before I could respond, considering I really didn't know what they were talking about, the white plates of the training room became a dark, pulsing red. Loud klaxons sounded out across the space and the robotic voice of the computer AI chanted the words red alert over and over again. I swallowed thickly, so far I had thought that this station was a fairly peaceful place. Of course there had been nothing to convince me of that, I just hadn't thought that the Reaper would have put me in danger straight away. Though even thinking that was ridiculous really, the crew hadn't even blinked about rescuing someone from a damaged ship and then nursing them back to health so it was likely something that happened all the time. I swallowed thickly and started to tap a rhythm of four with my index finger onto my palm to try and get my racing heart under control. I had just defeated a gigantic tentacle hologram thingy, in a single punch no less. Surely anything that was attacking the station wouldn't be that big a deal. 

"Andi, you hearing this?" A voice came over the tannoy system, "get your arse up to the bridge right now, we've got Indak all over the grid. I'm getting down to my cruiser." 

"Stay safe love, remember what happened last time," Andi shot back, bringing her wrist up to her mouth to speak into some sort of watch. 

"Oh you mean the time I knocked all those Buzzers out after you flew straight through a droid-wreck?" The voice laughed, "Yeah I'll be super careful!"

"I really wish she wouldn't do that…" Andi muttered to herself, a faint blush creeping up her cheeks. "Right then, I need to get back to tactical. Quatz, keep an eye on our little mystery down here. Under no circumstances do you let him out of your sights, he may have pledged himself to the Protectors but there's just too much weird stuff going on around him. Can't have that in the middle of an Indak assault."

"I am still standing right here you know," I said indignantly, still tapping my finger to keep calm. 

"And that's exactly where you will continue to stand," Quatz said, resting a heavy hand on my shoulder, his remaining eye narrowed with an underlying menace. 

Andi gave Quatz and I a short wave before fizzling out of the room in a gold coloured ray of light, her body coming apart at the atomic seams to be rebuilt back up in the bridge room. Seeing the teleportation process in action made me feel even queasier then I did when I was on the inside of the beam. 

"So what you said about me standing exactly here," I glanced over at the four armed alien, "You didn't actually mean that did you?" 

Quatz gave me an incredulous look before breaking into a loud laugh. "Do you not have sarcasm where you come from?" He asked, shaking his head and walking toward the weapons he had been working on before Andi and I had arrived. I felt a little offended at that, I was British after all, we practically invented sarcasm. 

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Nevertheless I chose not to answer. Well, chose is probably the wrong word for what happened next, because I would have quite liked to have answered the four armed alien and then have regaled him with some of my own sarcastic wit. Instead the choice was taken away from me. I had become distracted by a feeling similar to how I had felt while fighting against the holograms. An energy, deep within me, but this time not a rushing stream that I could dip my mental hand into and draw strength from. A pulsing, one from deep in the very core of my being reaching outward to something else. Something else was responding. It felt like a tether from across the other side of the ship, desperately trying and failing to become one with the power in my body. 

"Um… Quatz," I said, wringing my hands together in my nervousness, I felt as if I might already know the answer to the question I was about to pose. "If I were to, say, walk directly," I pointed to my right, the direction the pulsing energy seemed to want me to go, "that way. Where would I end up?"

"That would be the auxiliary hanger, where all the ships that aren't in use are kept. Why do you ask?" Quatz replied. 

"Ah, no reason," I lied, "call it curiosity?" 

The red pulsing of the walls seemed to be getting harsher and brighter, as if they were screaming at me from all sides. My tapping had slowed. Both were in tune with the pulsing in my body, and it was getting stronger. The connection between myself and what I assumed was the ship I had been dropped off in by the Reaper was gaining strength. The Zietriss was calling out to me like a beacon. A siren's song drawing me in, irresistible and growing in volume. Without realising it I had begun to walk toward the wall that I had pointed at to Quatz before, an dazed look on my face. Once again Quatz's head cracks were flaring into overdrive, clearly picking up on whatever essence wizardry was going on between me and the ship. 

"Craig, what are you doing?" Quatz called out, and I couldn't help but detect an element of nervousness in his voice. Was Quatz scared of me? That would be silly. He was all big and muscly, I was just a wimpy little human. 

A breeze had kicked up around me, seeming to push itself straight through the wall I was walking toward and whipping around the room. I could feel it, stronger and stronger with every passing moment, with every pulse of the walls and tap of my finger and beat of my heart. I wanted nothing more to be in the cockpit of the Zietriss, as if my destiny was to pilot her through the stars and fight whatever may come my way. 

"Whatever this is, stop it right now!" Quatz called out once more, though his voice was hardly audible over the wind and the pulsing. 

A new sound entered the fray. It sounded as if something was ripping and clawing at the very walls of creation itself, and as if those walls were pushing back against it. Like metal being scraped across a taught line of wire, some kind of interdimensional violin. The world around me began to flicker and quake as something new pushed itself into the fold of reality. The wind got stronger, the pulsing got faster, the sounds got louder. Then it all stopped. I was no longer standing in the red light of the training room, I was standing in the cockpit of the Zietriss, which was now sitting half in the training room and half in the rooms around it. Somehow, all on her own, the ship had forged some sort of bond with me. All on her own she had managed to transport herself between the folds of reality itself and pick me up. The ship thrummed with power, and as I placed a hand on the interior wall to steady myself I knew. She told me what she was, and how this had happened. 

Essence, the substance that Andi had been trying to explain to me earlier, it wasn't a substance at all. It was a byproduct of the maw. In terms of the levels of the multiverse, this universe was incredibly close to the bottom, and thus incredibly close to the interdimensional den of The Maw. As it devoured the souls of the departed to power the rest of creation and keep the universe running an energy was created as a byproduct, and this universe had been bathed in it since the very beginning. As sentient life had evolved and began to travel among the stars, Essence was infused within them. It fused to their very souls and allowed them to tap into the fabric of the universe and break the very laws of physics themselves. Incredible feats of strength, speed and magic could be performed here, if the ship was to be believed. There was a small caveat, however. I had not been born in this universe, and so I had not evolved to be bonded with Essence in the same way as every other being within it. Instead the Reaper had left me with a gift, the ability to tap into the well of this universe and create my own link to the Essence. That was the rushing stream of energy I had felt before, and since my body was still so new and fresh in terms of contact with that form of energy it had changed me. I would be powerful, perhaps one of the most powerful Essence wielders who had ever lived. 

Then there was the Zietriss herself. If the fact she had pushed herself through the walls of creation to get to me wasn't enough of a clue, she wasn't just a ship. She was Essence incarnate, forged into a specific shape and made for a specific function. To be my ship. She explained that it wasn't the Reaper who had designed her, but my subconscious as I had entered this universe. The Reaper had been just as surprised as she had at her creation. Then the connection began to falter. Though she was sentient, a living ship with her own will and mind, she was cursed. Her neural web had never been designed to communicate on such a level. 

I pulled away from the wall with a gasp, a thin trail of smoke wisping off of my hand and dissipating into the gloomy dark of the ship. I felt a bubble of hysteria force its way up my throat and escape through my lips. It was absurd, completely and utterly absurd. This universe had already been crazy, but sentient ships and what basically amounted to a universal pool of mana? It was like I had gone to an all you can eat buffet of madness, and then just wallowed around in the mad pot for a bit. I felt a mental nudge from the ship, half way between concerned and disappointed. I felt like she was saying that I had been coping well so far, and that she didn't want to be the thing that pushed me over the edge. 

I bit down on the inside of my cheek and resumed tapping my hand with my index finger. The ship was right after all, I had been dealing pretty well with all of this when you considered how crazy it was. Less than twelve hours ago I had been living in a London flat with a dull and average life, now I was standing in the cockpit of a living ship, and that's not even beginning to mention the fact that I had technically died to get where I was. The Zietriss was right, I couldn't let this new revelation put me over the edge. I had been put over the edge 12 hours ago, at this point I may as well just enjoy the infinite freefall into absurdity. 

The ship guided me forward, and I let myself be guided through the gloom, until eventually my hand came in contact with a plush leather seat. She wanted me to sit down, and so I did. As my hand came down on the console it was as if the ship were telling me what to do, not with words but with little gentle nudges, allowing me to intuitively know how to boot up the ship. I pushed a series of buttons, and then was blinded by a glowing green light on each of the walls in front and to the side of me. The green receded and was replaced by a series of comically large green ticks, before they too faded and was replaced by a projection of the outside world. 

The walls of the room were still pulsing that sickeningly deep red, but this time Quartz wasn't alone and tending to his weapons like before. Instead he was surrounded by around fifty armed aliens of varying heights and shapes, though they were too far away from my vantage point to make out any truly defining features. All of them had some sort of energy rifle in their hands, and all of them were firing green beams straight at the hull of my beautiful ship. 

"Oi," I said, intuitively activating the intercom system. "Would you mind not firing your little laser blaster thingies at my ship? You might scratch the paintwork." I felt a brief buzz of pleasure from the ship, whether that be at my defense or my joke I didn't know. 

"What are you doing Craig," Quatz yelled out through a megaphone of some sorts, "How did you even get that ship in here?" 

That would be too hard to explain, and considering the station had just rocked hard enough to send several of Quatz's guard to their knees I doubted I had time to get through all the intricacies that the Zietriss had projected into my mind. 

"Bit pressed for time here Quatz, explain it all later though," I said, allowing my hands to fly across the controls of their own accord. "Don't worry though, I passed your Protector test, so that's what I'm doing, Protecting!"

With that I pushed a final button and sent my impossible ship ripping back through the walls of reality once more, only this time I would reemerge in the heat of battle. It was time for the new Protector to start protecting.

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