Plastics were crucial to life in the twenty-first century, but it was unsustainable, between diminishing oil and burgeoning landfills full of unusable crap that would sit there for an eon. We were at an impasse.

That was until Don Eager invented EagerPlastic, a smart compound able to be adjusted to have any necessary traits through hypersonic instructions. It took on the role of plastic admirably. It could be hard, it could be soft, it make perfect drink holders, car seats, and toothpicks.

We just called it plastic.

All that was required to recycle it was a pulse from a Rosen emitter, turning them back into the slimy, primordial soup that they had begun as. They were non-toxic, one hundred percent reusable, with only a tiny amount of energy required. The plastic we deserved.

In the twenty-fourth century, after the loss of Earth, supplies of this miraculous substance were in short supply, as Don Eager and all his progeny were conservative in the use of warp and teleportation technology despite being tech pioneers themselves, leading all the major suppliers of plastic to be lost with Earth.

So many things were lost in that era, convenient plastic seemed like a drop in the bucket, mixaphorically. However, it was a serious problem, as Don’s plastic was one of the basic materials that allowed humanity’s expansion to other worlds.

Scientists were assigned to reverse engineer Don’s miraculous material. A man named Todd Spendle was exploring the possibility that Don had bioengineered the base material for his plastic by combining hagfish slime with industrious little proteins that could rearrange the long-chain molecules at a moment’s notice.

He was working on Marconen when Elliot Spencer took control of the planet, committing treason against the Federation. In the resulting struggle, Todd Spendle was lost, never to be seen again. Shortly afterward, another scientist cracked a recipe for plastic-like materials using Bent. With a solution to the plastic shortage solved, the matter was dropped.

Don Eager’s recipe, and Todd Spendle’s work to recover it remain lost artifacts, buried in the sands of time.

***

Fires, fires everywhere, Ykuingi thought as she navigated the ‘camp’. The sheer quantity of smoke was starting to tint her mucus an unhealthy yellow, making her look sickly and twice her age, at least. Thankfully there weren’t any other People around to see how bad she looked.

There wasn’t even enough fish to go around. The humans ate things like jerky, bread, salted Guar, and fruits and vegetables that she’d never seen or heard of before. Ykuingi tried them out of curiousity, but bread was a flavorless mush, fruits were bizarrely tangy, tasting of blood or metal, and the salted meat tasted like salt. Way too much salt.

Cooked meat though… that was something else. The flavor of the fish, which had been somewhat muted before, practically leapt off the meat and onto her tongue, and with just the tiniest dash of salt that the humans had carted in from the ‘ocean’ beyond…

Mother Hagfish, the stuff was delicious, and after eating it, she felt a steady rush of energy for the remainder of the day.

There were still a few pieces of Yninquiak left, and Ykuingi took guilty pleasure in having someone burn the flesh of the monster that had caused her people so much strife before eating it.

As Calvin’s guest, she was given a stipend of human money, allowing her to buy this and that, dabble with human customs and currency. Over time, Ykuingi saw how they had reached such levels of power. They used tools for everything.

Ykuingi grew faintly jealous of the legs on legs that these creatures owned that allowed them to grip objects tightly, allowing them to create tools for every purpose.

While a People’s Binding was useful for many different situation, Ykuingi had to admit that it wasn’t perfect foer every different situation.

Humans fished the river with nets, inferior to Bindings in portability and edibility, but more effective at catching fish.

They hunted meat-creatures with bows, supplementing their food supply. Their saws, nails and guar-glue built structures stronger than ones made of dried Binding: The houses didn’t rehydrate and come loose in a long rain, although their Guar glue wasn’t as strong as dried Binding, at least not that she could tell.

So many new thoughts, ideas and epiphanies tumbled through Ykuingi’s thinkmeats that she knew for a fact that she was losing one huge discovery in the shuffle for every four more she revealed.

We need tools, She decided, they needed saws, salt, nails, glass, steel. And the only thing they had to offer in exchange for these things were fish and Binding. And If they could find a way to cook fish without fire, that would be just…the best.

Hmm…

***Tzen Chu, Imperial Prince***

“My thanks for freeing me from captivity,” Tzen said as he and the creature passed the perimeter of the palace, finally breathing free air again. It smelled like unwashed humanity. “I agreed to aid you in exchange for my freedom. I am simply repaying a small debt, that doesn’t mean I work for you.”

The looming figure concealed in black cloth snorted disdainfully.

“So what are you looking for? The quicker I direct you to your quarry, the quicker I can put this farce behind me.”

“I’m looking for a person. An individual who has enjoyed a meteoric rise in power over the last couple years. The first thing we’ll need to do is check local organized crime, see if anyone has risen to the top of the heap in the last few years.”

Tzen blinked, thinking about the upstart who’d secured the princess’s hand in marriage shortly after everything had gone straight to the Hoary Abyss for Tzen himself. He hadn’t seen what happened personally, since he’d been imprisoned minutes after the debacle, but he’d heard the stories.

The boy demonstrated attributes that matched a top-tier Legend with decades to grow into their power, and a summoning ability that put Malkenrovian Demonologists to shame.

“Actually, I think I know someone who meets those criteria,” Tzen said. “One Calvin Gadsint, invented a new type of magic and went from shepherd to national hero and prince-consort in a roughly a year and a half.”

“That sounds like the one I’m looking for. We’re still checking with the local color before we leave this shithole. I need to make sure I’m not missing any lieutenants.” The creature said, strutting out in front of him.

Tzen, not to be lead, hurried to walk ahead of the cloaked creature, ignoring the monster’s chuckling.

“Where are we going?”

“Where crime always congeals. The Docks. Failing that we’ll just follow our noses to the smelliest part of town. Should lead us somewhere eventually. Lead on, prince.”

The cloaked creature waved in front and nodded for Tzen to continue moving.

“What do I call you?” Tzen asked.

“Llortan is my name.” The creature said.

“Like the god?”

“You’re testing my patience.”

Tzen started walking, feeling a bit like a Guar being driven ahead of a harsh master. He could almost feel the overwhelming power of something huge looming over his shoulders as he walked, faintly resting a weight on him and studying his every move.

It was oppressive, walking with his back turned to this creature.

****

After a long night of looking for trouble in all the smelliest places, Tzen was amazed to discover that the creature’s casual attitude towards crime had paid off. In one of the most wretched smelling places in the entire city, a short walk from the docks, there was a criminal empire that ran extortion, drugs and smuggling throughout the city.

It was everything Tzen could do not to throw up as he tailed the smugglers into their abode, seemingly defended by a veritable wall of stench. He slipped into a large stone room filled with rough men and women, all of them missing teeth.

In minutes, Tzen was surrounded by looming bruisers, most likely chosen for their high Strength. The large Gadveran men loomed over him, trying to intimidate him.

Tzen could dispose of them in a matter of seconds.

“What’s a silk-stuffer like you doing here?” A fat man at the far side of the room asked. He was sitting behind a desk, leaning back in his chair, his belly erupting from his jacket, nearly resting on the desk in front of him. The desk itself was laden with scales laden with different currencies, Nem stones and piles of different drugs.

“I am looking for information to pay off a debt.” Tzen said, keeping his eyes wide and ears tuned to any sound.

“Oh?”

“I need to know if someone has risen to the top of your organization or experienced a sudden increase in power over the last year and a half,” Tzen said, mindful of the people who’d positioned behind him.

The man behind the desk barked with laughter, ringing through the silent room.

“Oh, of course! Let me just get my ledger that shows exactly who controls how much of Mujenan, and their respective influence over time in an easy to understand line chart.”

“Clever sarcasm is unbecoming a filthy drug-lord.” Tzen said. “You should stick to what you’re good at.”

The fat man’s eyes flickered over Tzen’s shoulder, and he knew the conversation was over.

From what Tzen understood, The people Llortan was looking for were unlikely to be killed in a fight, and Tzen was half convinced the creature intended to kill them anyway.

Busting a few heads wasn’t going to hurt anything.

Tzen twirled as he took a step backward. The club meant for his skull overshot by a good foot, landing the man’s wrist on Tzen’s bone instead. Tzen’s skull won, shattering the delicate bone even as the prince set his back foot in place, locking it to the ground with Beli Ma and shoving his palms into the man’s chest.

The man’s ribs collapsed into his lungs before he was shot backwards, landing in a tangle of limbs along with several other of the ne’er do wells, A dagger slid off Tzen’s Bent and he broke the man’s jaw before twirling and severing an unfortunate soul’s spine with his foot.

Seeing these three suffer such severe injuries led the others to reconsider their course of action.

Some of the rogue’s gallery vanished behind Stealth abilities, while others dropped out of Tzen’s awareness, slinking through hidden exits, vacating the room in a matter of seconds.

“No, where were we- hold on –“ Tzen heard a scrape of boot against floor and felt the movement of air behind him. He dodged out of the way and elbowed the invisible knave in the spleen, dropping the woman to the ground.

The other people in the room hidden behind Stealth abilities decided to test their luck elsewhere, the air currents in the room following their egress.

When Tzen returned his gaze to the front, the fat man behind the desk was already gone. His chair was slid farther back than it needed to accommodate his girth.

Muttering a Bolesian curse against the man’s ancestors, Tzen leapt over the desk and kicked through the flimsy wood paneling under the man’s chair, revealing a tunnel leading into pitch black.

Do criminals use foul odors as some kind of primary defense mechanism? Tzen thought with a scowl as he plunged down into the hole, giving chase to the splashing sounds he heard further down the tunnel.

Why did it have to be the sewers! The silks Tzen was wearing, worth more than any of these commoners lives, were being splashed with aforementioned commoner’s shit as he sprinted through the underground, following the surprisingly fast fat man.

The chase finally came to an end when Tzen came across a looming figure lit by the crackling energy around it.

It was Llortan, holding a struggling figure up, his massive hands curled underneath her jaw.

Her jaw. In the flickering light he could make out the faint outline of a slender woman. Gone was the illusion of a fat Gadveran man.

“Get the fuck off me,” She snarled, her voice that of a young woman, somewhere between sixteen and twenty. One arm was supporting her weight while the other stabbed the creature’s arm repeatedly with the knife in her hand. It didn’t seem to do much.

“Tzen, you flushed out the prey admirably. You’ve got more of a future as a hunting dog than you’d care to admit.”

Tzen’s skin burned from shame and anger, but there was nothing he could say to that power that washed over him, flickering bolts of lightning in what looked like a storm cloud that hung over the struggling pair.

“Now, let’s see who we have here.” Llortan said. At his words, the young woman went limp in his grasp, whimpering with fright.

The creature extended his other hand toward the limp girl’s chest, and the random sparks of lightning in the turbulent cloud of Bent around him seemed to arrange themselves, joining like tributaries into a dozen finger-thick streams of bright light that entered the back of the creature’s palm.

Llortan pressed this hand into the girl’s chest. This brought the light close to her face, and Tzen was able to make out a young woman with a scarred but lovely face, with soft lips and large eyes, wide with terror.

The lightning went through the back of Llortan’s hand and into the girl’s chest, causing her to jerk wildly in the creature’s hand. A moment later, the light redoubled as the lightning seemed to draw something out of the girl’s chest. A bright ball of light, caged by lightning that seemed dull in comparison.

Llortan tossed the girl aside and studied the orb in his grasp.

Tzen could see by the staring eyes and gaping mouth, the unnatural stillness, that the girl was dead.

“Ah yes, Partheno, Grethna’s acquisitions specialist. What are you doing here in the inner territories, my old ‘friend’? Don’t you have trouble to brew at the edge of the empire?”

The creature held the orb at arm’s length, perched between his fingertips.

“System, Seed a Ravager.”

The orb in the cage of lightning winked out of existence.

The creature glanced up at Tzen, and in this light, the prince could just barely make out bright green eyes and rough, pebbly skin through the sheer fabric hiding his face.

It was definitely not human.

“Finding a misplaced Ravager on the first day. Doesn’t bode well for the rest of the hunt, does it, Tzen? Statistically? If I didn’t know better I might think there was some kind of plot to put them here on Marconen.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Tzen said, shaking his head.

LLortan swept up to Tzen and put his oversized hand behind the prince’s head, making Tzen’s heart nearly jump out of his chest as he tilted Tzen’s head towards his own.

“And that’s a good thing. You won’t have to handle the paperwork.”