THIRTY: Moon Thegund, Pt. 2

Moon Thegund, Part Two

The door led straight into a residential section of the perimeter building.

They walked through something like a mudroom, where Alden was pretty sure he made a critical faux pas by neglecting to remove his sneakers, and into a common area full of mismatched furniture. Toys were scattered on the floor, and a couple of the adults hurried to pick them up while Alden was installed partially against his will on a chaise lounge facing a large screen he assumed was for television.

Someone brought him wevvi, and he drank it as fast as he could while trying not to scald his throat.

The two children stared at him from behind a chair like they expected him to do something shocking at any moment. Alden wasn’t sure if they were male or female. One appeared to be around nine and the other might have been a couple years younger.

I wonder if I’m the first human they’ve ever seen? He sat up a little straighter and sipped his unwanted drink at a more polite pace, hoping he looked like a semi-decent species representative even if he had tracked dirt on their carpet.

While the adults fussed around the room, seeming unsure about whether they were supposed to sit down with him or not, Alden tried to locate the woman with the pink eyes. She’d run off with the message orb.

Fortunately, she returned before he tried to stumble his way through more sentences to ask after her whereabouts.

She had what looked like a steel eggcup in her hand, and when she placed the message orb in it, Joe appeared on the screen. His image had that same unusual three-dimensional effect that Alden was used to from lessons at the consulate. Up close like this, it felt like the professor might reach through the screen and grab him.

Several of the people in the room gave relieved sighs at the sight of Joe’s face.

Alden glanced around at them all, surprised. Maybe they were worried I was lying?

Joe started speaking, and Alden followed the translation closely.

<<Hello, my friends! I have some good news for you at last. If you’re seeing this message then it means the Avowed I’m planning to send your way agreed to the arrangement and arrived safely. Please treat him with respect. You loyal few who refused to sign with the usurpers will soon be able to rejoin me thanks to his efforts.>>

There was a lot of excited chatter at this, and the uncomfortable stares Alden had been getting became uncomfortable in a brand new way.

He wished Joe wouldn’t set their expectations quite so high.

Even if everything went perfectly, he could only carry one or two people at a time. And he couldn’t do back-to-back teleports to Moon Thegund because of the limitations placed on Joe’s System usage. Apparently, every wizard had some kind of individual credit limit when it came to using the System for things, and Joe’s had been reduced enough that a single round-trip teleport here was all he could authorize per day.

Alden hadn’t been surprised to learn that there were limits, but it was something he’d never really considered before. For some reason, he’d always imagined summoners doing whatever they liked when it came to zapping Avowed around the universe and doling out magical rewards. But of course even the seemingly all-powerful System couldn’t be an infinite resource.

There were fifteen of the assistants here if he included the kids. He could double up a few times, but to rescue them all, he’d have to come back every single night.

Now, the recording of Joe was giving them instructions. He was telling them more or less the same things he had Alden, though he gave the assistants a sunnier impression of the situation. He did say that the first teleport would be a trial run, but he didn’t mention the fact that Alden could just…choose not to come back again.

As soon as the professor started listing supplies he wanted from the lab, several of the Artonans disappeared.

I guess they’ll fetch everything for me then? Alden thought.

That was convenient, but he found himself a tiny bit disappointed that he wouldn’t get to see the non-residential parts of the facility. It wasn’t every day you got to tour a place that specialized in researching “demonic energy.”

Joe finished off his speech by telling everyone the basics of how Alden’s skill worked, which would save him the trouble of trying to say “Entrust yourself to me!” in broken Artonan.

He could think of about a dozen ways that could be misconstrued.

He wondered if people could be entrusted to him by others. He doubted they could, unless they were unconscious, since he couldn’t steal something a person was holding. Bti-qwol had been able to entrust the frog to him, but that was an animal. Although it was actually the carnivorous flower she’d given him…maybe he could take conscious people if they were bound or trapped in a container?

Super powers put you in some bizarre situations, he thought as he imagined someone handing him a duffel bag full of a struggling third party.

When the professor had finished speaking, there was a discussion among all the assembled assistants about who should go first. Initially, they asked Alden who he wanted to take, but he refused to pick.

He knew so little about the situation really. If he’d wandered up onto this lab with no prior knowledge about it at all, he would have thought nobody here needed saving. It was isolated, but it seemed calm. And comfortable.

Yet they were obviously eager to leave.

And it sounded like maybe some of the people who worked here—the ones who’d chosen to be employed by the ‘usurpers’—were already gone. If it was so dangerous in this place that Joe’s assistants were willing to risk using an untested method to escape, then Alden thought they should maybe give him the kids first.

But, in the end, they selected the elderly man.

Alden hoped it wasn’t because they expected him to fail and the old guy had already had a long life.

With the decision made, the pink-eyed woman led them all through the residential section of the building. It reminded Alden of a long, curved hotel hallway. Assuming the doors all belonged to individual rooms, then Joe’s original staff must have been at least three times its current size.

They exited through another mudroom and stepped out into the main compound. A pair of gray, pentagon-shaped…satellite dishes?…towered overhead. A woman wearing coveralls was sitting in the driver’s seat of an armored vehicle with tires made out of interwoven metal links. Instead of a steering wheel, the thing had a few levers and a bunch of buttons that were identical except for the logograms on each of them.

There were seats for three passengers and the driver, and it had an enclosed trailer that she unhitched with the press of a button. The trailer rolled itself back a few feet, its strange tires leaving only the faintest of impressions in the hard-packed dirt.

The old man who would be Alden’s first passenger went straight to a pair of plastic cases resting on one of the vehicle’s seats. He unlatched them and started looking through them, asking the woman in coveralls questions about the contents.

One case was full of foam padding and tubes full of innocent-looking clear liquid.

The System here wasn’t as stodgy as the one on Artona III. It was happily translating absolutely everything everyone said for Alden. But either it wasn’t great at the job or it just didn’t have English words for alien scientific materials. He doubted the official name of the substance in the tubes sounded as absurd as the System’s preferred translation, which was “bad impact juice.”

And the second case had a piece of equipment in it that everyone was calling a “mixer” even though it appeared to be a solid cube.

They were all treating both cases with a lot of reverence, so Alden assumed the impact juice and the mixer were important.

<<We’ll have the other supplies ready when you come tomorrow, Honorable Alden,>> the woman with the pink eyes said. She pronounced his name with very distinct syllables, so that it sounded like more than one word. <<One of us will meet you at Elepta at the scheduled time for transport. Yes?>>

Alden really wished they had some kind of translator for his half of the conversation. They had so much tech here. Were the tablets with System access, like the one Bti-qwol had used, not available to regular people?

“Yes,” he said in Artonan. “But two? Sometimes two people? I can’t come fifteen?”

I probably sound like a caveman.

The woman didn’t seem to have trouble understanding what he was worried about at least. <<Distinguished Master Ro-den said you would come eleven times. Sometimes you will have to carry two passengers.>>

“That’s right,” said Alden, relieved. Then, just in case they had overly high expectations about his physical strength, he added, “I can’t two big people. Two little people better?”

<<Is the teleportation dangerous with more passengers?>> she asked worriedly. <<Most of us have never teleported anywhere.>>

Right. Because regular people couldn’t even teleport on this planet.

Alden rubbed the back of his neck, trying to think of how to say, I have no idea. I’m just worried about my ability to hold onto two full-grown adults.

Finally, he pointed at himself. “Ryeh-b’t,” he said. “Can’t very big?”

She nodded as if that made sense. Probably it did. He assumed the assistants were knowledgable people. Joe didn’t seem to have the patience to work longterm with anyone who wasn’t. And they must have at least a basic grasp of Avowed classes and other species, so they should know that a human Ryeh-b’t wasn’t a physical powerhouse.

<<All of this is good though?>> she asked, pointing at the old man and the cases. <<Do you want to try it here? Before you travel to the teleport site?>>

“Yes,” Alden said eagerly. He’d been trying to figure out how to suggest it himself without making them worry about his competence. “Yes. I want that!”

He deactivated his trait, since he didn’t want the extra momentum for this experiment.

Come here, old dude. Let’s figure out how this works.

It turned out it worked okay.

The elderly Artonan picked up a case in each hand. Alden targeted him, and after gaining his verbal permission and eyeballing him for a minute, Alden just grabbed him around the waist and lifted.

He’d like to know how to do a proper fireman’s carry, but he didn’t. So for now this would have to do. Alden was taller than most Artonans, and he had a few inches on the old man. The guy wasn’t light, but he could walk with him well enough. The preservation worked.

The skill drain was high. Alden didn’t know if it was because of the man himself or the things in the cases. But it was nowhere near as severe as it had been with the shrieky bowl. And he’d only have to do this for two or three seconds anyway.

The hardest part was the awkwardness of holding onto a whole petrified person. The man’s clothes and limbs felt soft and yielding, but that was a false impression. Once he was lifted, Alden couldn’t seem to reposition him for convenience.

That’s something I’d really like to learn how to do. Maybe if I level the skill…

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

After around half a minute of experimentation, he realized he was getting some very shocked looks from the assembled aliens, so he set the man back down.

The assistant came to life immediately, looking surprised to find that he’d moved from his original position.

“Are you good?” Alden asked anxiously. “Are you happy?”

Good and happy weren’t the words he wanted at all, but he couldn’t figure out how else to ask if he’d accidentally hurt the guy somehow.

Are all your body parts working? Is your brain okay? You’re my first ever preserved person. I’m so relieved you’re in one piece.

<<Very interesting, Honorable Alden!>> said the fellow, patting Alden on the arm. <<I don’t remember what happened to me at all. What an exciting experience!>>

Alden let out a huge sigh. He felt himself grinning for the first time since he’d arrived on Moon Thegund.

“Awesome,” he said in English. “This isn’t going to be a total disaster then.”

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