-Mom!-

-Morning, squirt. What you bugging the ExLite at the top of the stack with today?-

-You are so full of yourself. Duh, I made Ten.- As if /messaging me direct in Markspace wasn’t proof that she at least was past the Resonance stage.

-Cool! Sorry, I am currently up to my armpits in oozes, and the shoggoths don’t like me very much at the moment. Can you Riftcut yet?- Said as colony organisms in assorted colors squirmed, writhed, died, and melted all around me.

Grumblegrumblegrumble. -I just made Rantha/10, you think I had time to spare to put that much time into Meter’s higher powers?- I could /hear her rolling her eyes across the galaxy.

-No, actually, but two uses a day is the requirement for using Gloom. You are going to be needing to be using that all that time, so you need to work on it, pronto tonto, Ronnie.-

She caught my tone, and grumbled some more. -This huge monster quest you have me working towards is a total pain in the ass, Mom. Can’t you tell me more about it?-

-Nope, I wanted you focused first on making Ten and getting to the atomic cockroach stage. Your long-term Talent is all R&D tech-based, so we have to keep you from getting distracted. I know you want to go swimming into all the tech out there, but it’s not time yet.- Pseudopods coming from all directions, flaming into goo and ash and vapor...

Grumblegrumble! -So, okay, I have to get Meter stacked up. He’s perfectly cool with that. What all while that’s going on?-

-Now that you’re a Ten, you need to focus on advancing your Expert Levels up, breaking Ten.-

-Expert?- She mentally /goggled at me. -You still want me to prioritize Expert over Melee?-

-Darling, I’m hoping you can burn Expert all the way to Seventeen, and pass me along the way.-

She paused on hearing that. Expert was an NPC Class, and so took half the Karma to improve that a PC Class did. It was definitely not a combat Class. Doing something like that would make her among the least competent in combat of all the Ranthas, especially those that were getting post-Ten.

-Okay, you want to exploit my Talent, Born Researcher, to open up tech trees as fast as possible.- It was a reasonable deduction, as the +4 to Knowledge Skills for researching technology doubled at Ten to +8, which trumped my broad +5 bonus.

-Half right. Also, you are now authorized to begin your Curseline. They’ll all have the same Talent you do, so they are going to form the new hard core of our R&D division. They have the same Overquest you do... make damn sure they get to Six, and get to Ten Rantha for the Stats, and Ten Expert, driving Expert as hard and fast as they can.-

Her nose was wrinkling. -Okay, you want us to have the Ranks to know the tech and take over all the design work. I get that. Why can’t I do a dive into my prior incarnation?-

-When I tell you, you’re going to swear at me for a couple minutes. Then you’re going to go think about things for a while, come back, swear at me more, and tell me I should not have allowed you to do the souldive at all. To be perfectly frank... perfectly, utterly frank... you shouldn’t do the souldive until you’re a Fifteen.-

We couldn’t lie to one another. When I said I was serious, I was, and since we all had the same foundation, her judgement on the issue would pretty much be the same as mine.

-Mom, that sounds goddamn ominous. Do I really want to know who I was?-

-I think it’s a case of pressure. We have this damn superquest to tear down the Warp Gods, and you’ve got probably the second biggest side quest underneath it, fluttering off in weird directions.-

-Second biggest?- Stratospheric Wisdom and Intellect scores digested that. -Daaaaaamn, Mom.- She hesitated. -So, should I wait for Seventeen?-

-That would be ideal,- I /confirmed. I could hear her take a deep breath.

-That’s gonna take a damn long time, Mom.-

-HAH! For the smartest woman in the galaxy? I don’t think so. You’ll beat me to Fifteen, and once you’re the one cracking the tech instead of just refining what I’ve done, your Karma is going to juice like nitro to the brain. Five years to Seventeen, tops.-

-Mithar.- Blinkblink. -That’ll make me one of the highest Level people in the whole damn Galaxy, won’t it?-

-Yep. And as an NPC, you’ll just keep slipping under the eyes of those who style themselves movers and shakers...-

She /laughed despite herself. There was no way a Rantha could not be noticed, with our insane Charisma. -Okay, I’ll get things set up, and start feeding Meter down that path. When I can Riftcut twice, I’ll meet up with you in person, and you can tell me what this is all about.-

-Confirmed!- I /agreed readily, and our conversation was done.

Jirosmer IV didn’t have a human population anymore, at least that I could discover. They had all been eaten by a mass ooze invasion, devoured, and converted into more oozes.

Coming in from outsystem was a Great Race of Yith colony ship, on its way to settle this largely water-dominated world. The oozes were still vulnerable to ultraviolet light, so they couldn’t wipe all the biological life off the world without some help, and only a couple varieties of them, particularly the shoggoths, were intelligent.

The shoggoths preferred sentient prey, anyways. It spurred their own psionic and intellectual development, and so they instinctively went for the sentient species. Of course, the Great Race could and would reduce them to fertilizer with a mass signal from orbit, and either herd the shoggoths into a carrier for the next world-wipe, or extinguish them.

Me, I was thanklessly preparing some fusion surprises for them when they landed on this planet where they’d wiped out over two billion humans, and would doubtless render down the cities and structures to dust and recycle them into cities of their own.

The Indolence Virus, acquired via the drow, would help accelerate the race’s decline into stupidity and lethargy, and when humanity finally came back to do unto them, they might even have forgotten how their own technology worked...

--------

Time passes...

Spidey Base One was our main operating base in the Glooms. Because it was in the Underweb, see...

It was located off in one of the capillary tunnels, with no fixed Portal to the mortal world for a hundred miles in any direction. This particular location was tied to the shadows of a mountain range of a close-orbit moon of a gas giant, prone to lightning storms and such, and we were buried deep down in a valley, and a cavern we’d cleared out of the stone so even some insane nitwit flying overhead wouldn’t be able to see anything.

That didn’t keep out the natives, of course, shadows being what they are, but since nobody walking around here was less than a Ten, and Bane to Shadows was a thing to acquire, the native incorps, umbrals, shadowborn, gloombloods, and other creatures of Gloom that decided to investigate here ended up being Karma for individuals interested in fine-tuning their sensory skills, keeping up with their Naming Karma, and providing the Gloom hereabouts with extra munchies.

The only way in or out was Riftcutting, and by now, there was a lot of it going on. There were several fields cleared around the place for incoming and outgoing traffic, as people hustled through ninety-second portals with practiced speed and precision, going through both sides of opened Rifts cut through the planes and connecting here to places across the galaxy to double the speed, and then just as often turning back around and waiting in ready lines for a new Rift to be cut open to send them to a new destination just after they got here.

Ranthas and Briggs from multiple Curselines were coming in and departing all the time for new worlds, while G&G personnel were being cleverly shifted between worlds and ships below the eyes of anyone watching. Sometimes they were being evacuated from disasters, which was never fun, but shit happened.

No permanent Portals were allowed to be constructed here, because Gloom would immediately react to it being used, and slowly swell the tunnel here into something larger. The drow paid attention to such changes, and someone would come investigate usage of the Portal. Rifts, flaring up for ninety seconds at a time and not drawing on the power of the Underweb at all, had no such problems.

A chorus of Hi, Mom’s and Sensei Sama’s greeted me as I stepped through a Rift, waving it shut behind me as I stepped through and let my breshkt disguise fade. Drow were probably searching the galaxy for me, getting into a tizzy with how many places I’d been seen. If they knew about Spidey Base One being under their noses, they’d probably die of a stroke in outrage.

“Hey, Mom.” Now with white hair at her temples, the olive-skinned brown-eyed brunette Ronnie Rantha looked remarkably plain among the wild colors of some of the Ranthas... but also older, for all that if you looked at her, you’d swear she was a teenager going on fifty.

“Heya, Mrs. Fantastic.” She promptly blushed, having been tagged with that quite early after her almost continual revisions, refinements, and upgrades of technology and the design and production work on them she kept submitting. Even the Engineering Talents could only roll their eyes at the constant flow of stuff coming out of her. Unlike Reed Richards, she focused first on what was useful, and then got into the esoteric and strange shit. “Ready to get really pissed at reality?”

She stared at me, but I definitely wasn’t joking, and lying to one another was nigh on impossible for us Ranthas, the sisterhood bond was just too strong. She reached up to pinch the bridge of her nose, turned to walk with me, and sighed. “No. Tell me anyways.”

“You’re the reincarnation of the Janus III Tekron.”

She blinked at me. Blinked again. “Wha.” Blinked a few more times. “It... that... is that even possible?” she gawked at me, then looked down at her hands.

I made a sweeping motion and double-pointed at her. “I didn’t call you Reed for a reason. Meet Mrs. Fantastic!”

“I... holy shit.” Muscles on her face were twisting as she tried to go through the implications, and then the curses started spewing out of her mouth without stopping.

Being polyglots, we could curse in a lot of languages. With high Charisma and Intimidate, we were REALLY good at it, too.

It took her a few minutes to work through her denial of the situation. She turned around on her heel, waved over her head with her middle finger up. “I gotta think about this, Mom.”

I waved at her knowingly. “I’ll be talking with the hyn!” Who were delighted to run the place and give orders to all these oddly friendly people who were taller than they were, in the safest place they’d ever lived in. With the Shadowknives coming and going all the time, this place saw more Voids going through it than anywhere but Assassin Mountain.

And oddly enough, the location of the Assassin Mountain was one of the things that I wanted the Shadowknives to help me with. Even the Assassins themselves didn’t know its location... but I imagined a dozen Void Brothers scattered across the galaxy could duodeculate the coordinates very accurately indeed...

At that point, said Assassin’s Mountain was going to get a visit from a certain Hag. They were set up to deal with renegade Voids, but there was no such stuff in place for dealing with Nulls.

And most especially, Ranthas. I smiled to myself.

The Land was gonna owe me so much... but the Land couldn’t even really see me, dammit. So unfair...