Chapter 107: Immigrant

The main thing to know about the universe is that it’s not that different from home. Some things are great. Some things are beautiful. Most things, though? Bullshit. Once you get used to all the magic and flashing lights, most things are boring and normal. The other stuff tends to be trouble.

That trouble isn’t just exciting kill-the-monster stuff, either. There’s plenty of that, don’t get me wrong. But the universe is a place where people live. They work jobs. They make deals. They cheat people, and steal. They bribe government officials to do shit for them.

Just keep your head on a swivel and understand that people are the same here as they are anywhere. A few of them are good, and the rest of them will hurt you if it gets them anything. Same as home.

The Glorious Jeff Greco

—

“So I go in, I get the rocks, I dodge the…” Sean paused. “The what, again?”

“Aanoranths. You shouldn’t try to fight them.”

“Why?”

“Protected species, at this point. Costs me more money to kill them than they are worth. Just don’t let them see you and you should be fine.”

“Ah.” Sean didn’t ask what had happened to the Aanoranths. He’d quickly found that most explanations for things in the galaxy came down to, “The system did something weird, some stuff happened, and now stuff is weirder in a way we try not to question much.”

Today, he wasn’t in the mood for the potentially long conversation that might be needed to cover all those points.

The pale, scarred man set his breathing mask down, took a deep breath, then lifted it up to talk again, visibly winded from the effort of communicating in what, for him, was not a productive kind of air.

“Any more questions?” he asked.

“Nope. I think I got it. Ten credits for ten rocks?”

The man nodded, then moved his mask away from his face again. Sean stopped him with a hand motion.

“Don’t kill yourself, dude. I got it. I’ll be back in an hour.”

The job was pretty boring, as day labor jobs went. The scarred man had found a bunch of rocks he needed to make the kind of air he breathed at some decrepit mine, and required someone who actually could breathe oxygen-heavy air to go cart them up for him.

The qualifications for the job had fit Sean just fine, since all the man required was someone who would accept the risk of the monster-infested mine and was otherwise strong enough to move ten good-sized rocks. Sean could do all of those things, and ten credits was three credits more than he needed to sustain himself that day.

Could he get better jobs? Absolutely. Jeff had informed him that his class, stats, and insanely specific build would make him a must-have recruit for dozens and dozens of different sects, empires, and corporate conglomerations if what he had become was generally known.

And he’d become, well, kind of a lot.

Sean Lawrence
Level 40 Human (Prisoner of Time)

EXP: 12,000,000/50,000,000

STR: 30 (40)

DEX: 60 (70)

VIT: 30 (40)

SAV: 80 (90)

MAG: 120 (130)

—

Abilities: Shankmaster LV 13, Adhesives Mastery LV 8, Stitch Up LV 12, Hard Time LV 6, Cellblock Brewmaster LV8

Achievements: E-Raticator, Uncommon De-nominator, Three Spectral Bears, Make-shift Ranger, Forest Dragon-kin, Mini-boss Massacre, High-Proof, Late-Start Long-Shot, Junkyard David, Front-yard Defender, Chaotic Alloy, Tell Me More, A Fighter’s Heart

After racing a group of space-assholes to the center of his world and spending some time intermixed with the stored power there, Sean had found a few things had gone on with his build that the system didn’t immediately confess to doing, or hadn’t done at all. First, either soaking in the power of the orb containing the future potential of Earth or beating a bunch of opponents had done some immediate, beneficial work to his own stat spread.

Given that he was getting a 25% buff to all his stats from his work saving Earth, the fairly major increase to his overall strength was working overtime, giving him even more than the raw numbers implied. Right now, he only felt safe wearing his stat-increasing prism ring and not his full armor in public, so he wasn’t exactly at full combat capabilities. Even so, he was walking around much, much stronger than he ever had before.

And that was before he got to the skills. Jeff was out in the cosmos somewhere, putting together some sort of plan. In the meantime, he had commanded Sean to take a break of sorts, doing relatively safe odd-jobs to get by until the handyman contacted him.

He said Sean had picked up a lot of trauma. He could tell just by looking at Sean. At first, Sean had been skeptical. He felt fine.

Then, he managed to get his first true full night’s sleep a few days after the system had plopped Sean on this backwater planet, and woke up sobbing for reasons he couldn’t adequately explain. After that, he believed. He took it easy.

Even taking it easy left him a lot of time to grow, though. He had experimented with glue. He had grown into several combat levels the system had given him, bringing up his general fighting skill completely. He had even captured a big, horrifying insect monster and kept it in a cage in the Shanktuary, letting it injure him several minutes every day to drive his regen up in a controlled, relatively safe, and annoyingly painful way.

Between whatever insights about time as a force Jeff had been able to share and Sean’s contemplations on why or why not time itself had apparently chosen to represent itself as pink, he had even pushed Hard Time forward, getting some insane benefits in the process. He had passed some sort of bulkhead in his understanding of time and for the first time ever he was seeing differences that went beyond small buffs to his ability to speed or slow-moving objects.

Hard Time

You have not only contemplated and manipulated time, but have actually communed and communicated with a raw elemental derivation of the force itself. As a result, the baseline mechanisms which you use to manipulate time have fundamentally changed, not only for the better but also in diverse ways which enable new uses you couldn’t have dreamed of before.

Your time slowing and speeding capabilities no longer run off an internal reservoir of power, but instead use the force of time in the local environment for power. That means that the skill is now spammable, to some extent, working off a “rate of fire” rather than a cooldown system. You may now use it as often as it will allow you to use it, which should encourage you to use it more.

You have also attained the ability to use time itself as a source of pure force, cladding it onto armor to create diverse protective effects or onto your weapons to create wounds that vibrate with the very force that drives the passage of history. Note that you are still really bad at this, and it’s probably not useful to you yet. Keep practicing!

Sean shouldered his pack and headed down into the mine. He didn’t need the pack, exactly, given that he had a dimensional fanny pack of sorts that was more than up to the job of carting the rocks out. But since going into the mine without a pack at all would reveal that fact to everyone, he had taken to using the backpack anyway. Wherever he could conceal his strength, Jeff had said, he should. For the moment, he was fine being obedient.

The mine was dry, which Sean didn’t expect. Most underground environments he had spent a lot of time in had ended up being mossy or damp places, and as the town he was staying in was a rainy sort of place complete with lakes and rivers, he had expected the mine would be the same. Instead, it was just sandy, rocky uniformity, with very little in the way of plant or animal life within it.

At least no sign until he heard the Aanoranths. His night-sight was good enough that he had decided against carrying his own light, which he was now glad of as he heard them chittering and clanking along around a corner, sounding as terrible as anything Sean had ever heard close up. He crouched by a wall, deciding not to tempt fate by heading in their direction, waiting until the dangerous and apparently expensive-to-kill beasts went on their way.

Twenty minutes into his trek, Sean found the rocks. Sean loaded them into his backpack, pleased that things had been so easy. For once, it looked like a day labor job was going to end with no more difficulty than the client had said there would be. That was rare. Sean was, at least temporarily, a bottom-rung laborer. The clients were absurdly willing to abuse his trust, sometimes to the point of actually admitting that fact.

Dodging Aanoranth sounds and making sure not to take any wrong turns, Sean made his way back to the surface without any further incident, actually stepping into the sunlight without a single employer-deception jumping out to bite him in the ass.

But only just a step.

“Sean Lawrence?” the uniformed, human-looking man said, referencing some sort of tablet. “Of Earth?”

“Yeah. That’s me,” Sean said, staying calm. He reminded himself he wasn’t really important enough to be in real trouble, as far as this world was concerned. Whatever parking-ticket bullshit he did do, he’d be willing to pay, just so long as it let him continue hiding.

“I thought so. Several mine alarms managed to get at least that much from their scans.” The man tapped the tablet a few times, then held it towards Sean’s face. “For the record, do you have any particular justification for breaching a closed Aanoranth Sanctuary, in violation of several local laws?”

“I… what? I did that? I had no idea. I was hired to get these rocks.” Sean shook out his pack, letting the rocks fall to the ground for inspection. “The employer didn’t say anything about any of that.”

“Eggs.”

“What?”

“Those are eggs. Aanoranth eggs,” the officer said, his face growing cold. “I’m not sure why you’d show me those, outright. It’s a much worse thing for you now.”

Shit. Of course they are. Great.

“Listen, man. I’m just a day laborer,” Sean said, leaning on the fact that he really probably didn’t seem like a mastermind type to most. “And I’m new here. I had no idea about any of this. The client set me up.”

“Uh-huh,” the officer said, uninterested. “And this client? What’s he like?”

“Pale. Lots of scars. Breathing mask. Seemed like he wasn’t a local and couldn’t handle the air.”

The officer started at the mention of the breathing mask, stopping to push several buttons on his tablet before repeating an abbreviated version of the story of his and Sean’s conversation and sending it off to some unknown recipient. Sean waited patiently. He’d stay obedient, at least until the officer startedactively attacking him.

A few seconds later, the tablet beeped again.

“Looks like it’s your lucky day.”

“You believe me?”

“Not for a second.” The officer tucked the tablet away and motioned for Sean to follow him. “I have more than enough evidence to put you down right now, in fact. But my boss disagrees. Looks like you get a second chance to explain all this.”

—

The police station was a small modular building, apparently housing just enough cops to keep an eye on the mines and catch people doing the exact thing Sean had been unknowingly hired to do. Once they arrived, the cop sat him down and handed him several pamphlets, all of which ended up being short explainers of the various crimes Sean had supposedly committed.

The short message of all of them was that he was fucked. It was a crime to go into the mines at all, a bigger crime to go anywhere near Aanoranths, and a really, really big no-no to steal their eggs, which apparently could be used to make some kind of weird sex drug that Sean was now forced to know about. It wasn’t exactly life-in-prison stuff, but the punishments for each ranged from “really bad misdemeanor” to “carjacked somebody” in terms of the kinds of punishments they carried.

“Come on,” the officer said, finally, pulling Sean to his feet by his elbow. “She will see you now. You don’t want to keep her waiting.”

“Any tips?” Sean asked.

“Yeah. Screw up, badly. I get paid bonuses for convictions. I’m hoping you walk yourself right into one.”

Sean resisted the urge to flip the officer off, judging that it wouldn’t do him much good and the cop wouldn’t understand it anyway. The officer walked him into the office and deposited him in a chair across a desk from the largest, strongest-looking woman he had ever seen.

“Sean Lawrence?” the woman asked, tapping away at a tablet just like the officer before had used. “Of Earth?”

“That’s me. Recent immigrant after Earth’s apocalypse.”

“I heard about that. Big news. Good job getting enough funds to get off-world in time.” She confirmed a few more things and put the pad away. “Before we move on, do you have anything you’d like to add to the record in your defense? Right now, we are working off your narrative that a scarred man in a mask asked you to do this, with you yourself unknowingly breaking the law in pursuit of that.”

“No, nothing to add. I can give you more information on where I met him if you want. But the story itself is true.”

“I believe you, actually. I think I know your client, and he’s not much of a law-abiding type.”

Sean raised his eyebrows in surprise. He hadn’t expected much luck here. “Oh? That’s great. I was worried nobody would believe me. I’m willing to cooperate in catching him if you want. He sort of screwed me over too.”

“There’s no need for that. He’s long gone by now, I’m sure.” The woman smiled. “He would have seen us pick you up and cut his losses. Probably, anyway.”

“So…” Sean said, not actually wanting to come out and ask to be released. “So where does that leave us?”

“Us?”

“As far as the whole letting me go part. Since I didn’t do it. Knowingly, I mean.”

“Ah,” the woman said, understanding flitting across her giant face. “No change. You are charged and convicted of the crimes.”

“What? You know I didn’t do this on purpose. I helped in every way I could. What else do you want?”

The woman shrugged. “We get paid by the case, kid. I don’t know what you expected. Better luck next time.”

Sean’s hand dropped to his belt, where his bag waited. For whatever reason, neither cop had seen fit to cuff him or restrain him in either way, probably figuring a day-laborer type wouldn’t be able to put up much of a fight. He tensed and began to mentally command his chaotic-damage Mystereamer shank to rise to the top of the pack, getting ready to show them just how wrong they were.

Sorry, Jeff. Looks like I’m going loud earlier than we thought.

And then the door to the room burst open, putting a momentary end to Sean’s plans for violence.

“Let him go, Eshla,” the tiny, tiny man in the door said. “I need to talk to this one.”

“No,” the woman said, banging her gigantic fist down on her desk. “You can’t do this, Itto. We have him dead to rights. Absolutely a fair get, and I want my money.”

Itto towered under her at his full two-foot height, flexing all forty pounds of his apparent weight in an attempt at intimidation that oddly seemed to work just fine on the bigger, burlier woman. She wilted under his fierce lilliputian gaze, glaring at her desktop for a moment before standing up and lumbering towards the door.

“Fine, you bastard. But we will have words about this, later.”

And then she was gone. The little man walked around to the chair, working some kind of lever to let it rise to a height at which he could be seen over the table.

“So. Arrested. Not the best move, for a man in your position.” Itto gestured generally at Sean’s chest, where the amulet concealing all the hopes and dreams for a restoration of Earth rested.

Sean tensed, reaching for his dagger out of sheer reflex before Itto raised a hand, let out some kind of pulse of energy, and knocked Sean skidding across the room.

“Oh, calm down, kid,” Itto said, apparently not having sweated Sean’s attempted at intimidation much. “Jeff sent me. We have some talking to do.”