Invicta got quiet as she studied both the badly damaged nest and the object that had fallen a great distance and was lucky enough to have been caught in a root crevice of the gold cr.

“Kevin… can I have permission to communicate with Tutor and George back in the habitat?” she asked as she finally came to a conclusion.

“I hadn’t given you those powers yet?” I asked in surprise. I had thought that she would have been automatically upgraded to all the rights and powers that I had given my other two AI. I quickly willed her the same rights and a couple more, trying to give her as many rights as possible without her becoming a danger to me. After experiencing this little outing with her I had decided that I would like to give her the freedom to either stay in the habitat or to come with me as she pleased unless I explicitly chose to leave her behind. I unlocked her movement to and from the habitat without limit and sat back mentally as my brain seemed to be covered in static.

“Invicta?” I asked after a couple of moments of not hearing a reply from her. I was starting to think that I had done something wrong with the settings when the rush of static and sparks seemed to rush through my senses.

“Thank you so much, Kevin!” She practically shouted at me as the feeling of her excitement and wonder washed over me.

“VR simulation access? Rights and power to develop myself? I will be right back! I need to ask Tutor something!” She said before she spoke again just a bare moment later.

“Well, that is interesting.” She said in her windy and cheery voice.

“Gah! Can you at least make it seem like going to the habitat and back took a couple of moments?” I asked as I realized that she had experienced the luxury of VR time while she had been away. She could have been away for hours and I wouldn’t have noticed it.

“Sorry sorry!” She said in barely contained excitement.

“So what did you find out?” I asked as I couldn’t help but chuckle.

“Well, besides the fact that I can now make a house and a bedroom in VR, complete with all my own details and designs? Um… yes, that is a Leva egg.” She said as I mentally smacked myself in the face. I had thought that she would have gone to ask more important questions.

“Yes, yes, I did all that too.” She said as I got the image of her relaxing back in the corner of my mind, pleased about something she had done.

She cleared her throat before seemingly starting a lecture just for me. It was clear that she had spent a while asking Tutor questions. “Ehem! It appears highly likely that this is the nest that Magus the 2nd, the old deposed one, found and managed to steal eggs from while he was on his way to build his Core.” She started before I had to interrupt her.

“For real? That was how he got them?” I asked as I floated around the craters of the nest left by the results of huge tentacle teeth. I had to fly a considerable distance upwards to see the extent of the damage. All around me it looked like the Grand Canyon was carved and bitten out of the material that made up the nest. The extent of power that a Leva could manifest was truly huge. I could just imagine them eating planets as though they were apples next to full-grown eels.

A scary thought occurred to me as I thought about eels.

“Invicta… do Leva ever stop growing?” I asked.

“No, not really.”

“Then how do they die?”

“They can starve if they can’t harvest enough Queiie. Tutor told me that Queiie is like your earth's krill and that they tend to live at the center of galaxies where matter and energy is most dense. This is where Leva will often go to feed. The Leva can’t nest near the center though because of all the parasites and the fact that Queiie tend to try to eat Leva eggs.” She said with a self-satisfied tone in her voice.

So the center of galaxies was like the ocean back on earth? Home to all manner of celestial creatures?

“Do Leva attack planets?” I asked offhand as I zoomed down towards the nest to test something. The substance of the nest seemed to flow like it had been melted or poured as it was cooling. I was curious to see just what it looked like up close.

“No, they really don’t. The Tela who managed to tame them could get them to harvest any celestial body, including asteroids and planets… it just wasn’t in the Leva’s nature to do something so tedious. They tend to be semi-peaceful pack hunters that often get curious about the beings that live on planets.” She said as a few images of Leva hovering close to planets came to my mind.

“That is how the Levasucker is a playable race inside my game. Sometimes the Leva would get too close to planets and accidentally lose a few Levasuckers to the atmosphere and gravity. Earth might have had that happen a long time ago and deemed them to be dragons who could breathe fire.” She said.

Her answer stunned me and reminded me just how deadly I had felt as a Levasucker. I didn’t think that there would be much that a low-tech human could do against one of them.

I drew up close to the nest and created twin small blades to gather material for me to look at later. The material was oddly easy to work with and seemed to have self-healing properties. I had cut through the base of a small dagger-like section and found that when I went to collect my sample it had already rebonded with the material underneath it.

“Huh…” I muttered as I went about collecting samples, making sure to have a hand free to pull the pieces apart as I cut them free.

“This stuff is incredible to be able to survive and maintain its structure like this inside the insane heat of the sun,” I commented as I stuffed parts of the nest inside the center of my cr body.

“Yeah… the Tela had an issue with Citizens who became pirates a while ago. They hunted Leva for their exotic materials and had both Tela and other alien races in an uproar when it was discovered what was happening. The families who had Citizens who became pirates were disgraced until they hunted down and took care of their own bad offspring.”

“What could the Tela possibly need with this when they had access to cr?” I asked as I held up a little chunk of the nest to inspect. It was impossible to tell what color it was inside the blue dwarf and I was interested to find out later.

A little mental ping went off inside my head, letting me know that my Remote Miner had just managed to grab and deliver 3 loads of gold cr to my habitat.

“Man, that thing works fast!” I exclaimed as I got a mental image of my cargo bay capacity having already reached 50%. I recalled the Remote Miner and directed it and all my cr to return to me. If gold cr was so prevalent, then I wasn’t concerned with stuffing my entire hold with it. My alien cr still had to work on replicating the little ants to be able to absorb more raw gold cr for me.

“Yup, I have been messing with its coding in the background and making it copy what you do with your walk-jog-run technique. This makes it so that it can move insanely fast to and from the habitat while not creating more gross leeches. I am also working on upgrading your Blade Barrier and Bullet Shield as well.” She said before she started chuckling to herself.

“What is it now?” I asked as I felt a mass of cr impact against my tiny body at a high speed, increasing my size back up to 15 million in just a moment. I couldn’t even get upset at it, it just demonstrated how slow and inefficient my thinking was. I would have had it slow down and to have given me time to reintegrate with the new mass.

This way, while jarring, was so much faster and might just save my life one day. - I thought as I added, “Learning from my cr” to my list of ways to improve.

“Kevin’s Butt and Body Wash! Haha!” was all I got out of her as I dove down into the depths.

I hadn’t thought about that name ever being public knowledge, it was beginning to seem like even my key AI had it out to embarrass me.

“Whoa!” was all that escaped my lips as I drew near to the lost egg. The egg was about the size of a family van and looked to be intact. The sides of the egg had two hemispheres that seemed to be covered in vein-like tubes that branched out on either side towards the center before intermingling in a dense and tight weave. The amazing part about the veins was the fact that they seemed to pulse slowly as though the egg were breathing in the surrounding heat.

“So, I have some good news and some bad news.” Invicta broke into my study of the egg as I hovered around the outer edge, daring not to touch it lest I accidentally do something wrong or harm it with my cr.

“Go ahead with the good news first I guess,” I said as I wished that I could take a picture of this to share it with my family and friends back home. I started to mess with the settings inside my helm interface as she continued.

“The good news is that it is alive and will remain alive indefinitely here in the sun. The Leva eggs don’t live in the traditional sense until the mother and mate remove the shell. They just harvest and refine energy from the sun until it is time to be born.”

“And the bad news?”

“Well… the bad news is that this egg might be past its due date.” She said with a regretful tone.

“What does that mean? I thought you just said that it is still alive.” I asked as I began to lose hope that we could rescue and possibly reunite this unhatched Leva with its own kind.

“It is… but Leva don’t tend to leave their eggs inside the sun for this long. If Magus really did have the rest of the Leva’s younglings in his possession… he has had them for a very long time. This little egg has been refining the energy from a Blue Dwarf for far too long. If it hatched it would become an outcast with its siblings.”

“How can that be?” I asked, not understanding.

“Think of it this way, normally Leva mothers, depending on their age and strength, will burn their eggs inside younger stars. This way they will be able to control just how much strength their offspring have to start life with. This little guy must have really had a powerful mother for her to even consider burning her eggs inside a Blue Dwarf. That might have been the reason why Magus had such trouble trying to tame the ones he captured this entire time, he didn’t know how to deal with an elder Leva.” She said with a tone of regret as I looked down at the softly pulsing egg.

“Oh, that was another question I had. Remember when I played as a Levasucker? Why was I not able to see the glow from the mouth of the Leva when Regeth and I were escaping the Core?” I asked as I shared a mental image with her of our scary encounter. Wait? Mental image? Could taking photos be that simple? - I thought as I smiled, having figured out my photography problem for myself.

“Kevin, Levasuckers are not Leva. Not even close. Levasuckers ingest plasma from stars to help them burn away parasites from their host. Leva, in contrast, are powered by the energy that they absorbed from a star as an egg. The more refined the energy the more powerful that Leva can become.”

“So like better healing and size?”

“Yes, but mostly it has to do with the power of its vision and pulse strength. A pack of Leva tend to have the same strength of pulses, making it so that they all are accustomed to defending against it and can tell who is from their pack with ease. This little guy or girl, depending on how long it has been here, might be wielding a laser or photon weapon compared to the common light bulb Leva.” She said as I went about molding the raw gold cr unto a little cup to keep the egg from falling further into the heart of the sun.

“Ok, let's leave that on the back burner for now,” I said as I made sure that the little egg would be safe regardless of what I chose. I wasn’t of a mind to leave it, I just knew that I might not be the best candidate to take care of something that grew to be the size of a small planet. Maybe I could have Xa look into someone who had experience taking care of rare Leva like this. - I mused as I finished with the protective cr nest.

“Wise choice. Tutor said that there was a high probability that you would rescue it regardless.” Invicta said as I moved a little distance away to the ripply surface of the raw gold cr I wanted to try to tunnel through.

“Oh, I still might. I just know that I don’t yet fully know enough about keeping one to even begin to consider trying to rescue it.”

“Well, against Tutor’s wishes I will go ahead and tell you my thoughts. If you did rescue it there is no way that it could hurt you. It is really hard to kill and besides needing to feed it Queiie, something that you should be able to source on a Core’s market, you really would have to go out of your way to actually harm it. And another thing! If you choose to become Santa Claus Kevin one day, you could blind everyone in existence while you deliver their presents.” She said happily.

“What? What did that last part even mean?” I asked. She seemed to have read something wrong somewhere along the line.

“Well, when I was away I decided to try to read up on your history and stuff… there was too much and it was mostly boring so I just took stabs at it at random. Somewhere in all that I read about a guy who has a deer that shines light with his nose and thought that it might work if you replaced it with a Leva.” She said. “Least that way no one would ever see you delivering presents, which seemed to be the whole point of doing it every year in secret.”

“Why because they would all be permanently blinded?”

“Exactly!”

“Invicta… remind me to celebrate Christmas with you one day. There is so much wrong with your idea and other things about the holiday that I need to explain to you. Just not now, let us focus on tunneling and seeing if we can find anything better than gold cr.” I said as I formed my cr into a little human form, smiling as Invicta formed the gloves on my outstretched hands for me. They still had the strange map-like patterns adorning them and I had yet to figure out what they meant. How was it that when you had all the time in the world it seemed that you still didn’t have enough time?

I could feel the collected parts of the nest still resting inside my body so I directed a tiny portion of my Remote Miner cr to carry it back up to the nest and to go about gathering all that it could back to my habitat. There was no need to leave such an amazing substance here. Who knows, someone might find it valuable elsewhere if I couldn’t find a use for it.

“Ok, so how do these gloves work?” I asked as I placed my hands on the immense expanse of

raw gold cr and felt the hard slick surface.

“I really don’t know.”

“What?”

“Look, I didn’t have access to all the science libraries while I was a game and the Last Tunneler never talked to me so all I can tell you is what she did and what it would do as a result. I do have a broken transcript of her talking to herself while she was creating the gloves in the game for testing. She said “Requires equal or higher density of matter to penetrate through the same. The resulting matter is rendered useless.”

“Interesting,” I said as I look down at my gold cr hands. They were the same density so it should in theory work. “How did she make it work? Will I have to press my hands against it the entire time?” I asked.

“No, that would be crazy. The gloves are just the tool medium that teaches the rest of your cr what to do. Remember what the Last Engineer said? The housing is insignificant.”

“So any part of my body will do? Whew, that is good to hear. I was worried that I would have to wave my hands around all over the place.” I said as I thought about how I wanted to do this.

I flattened my cr body out and became a 15-foot wide disk. I had become something similar to the tunneling machines that I had seen back on earth, except without all the grinding teeth and depth to process and pull the ground up dirt and stone away.

I had no idea how this was supposed to work as I pressed my entire surface against the side of the raw cr.

“Here goes nothing,” I said as I mentally willed my gloves to turn on.

At first, nothing seemed to happen until my personal cr seemed to find a certain frequency to vibrate at.

-Alert! Current cr density discovered above previously recorded limits! Reminder: Open the Lost Ancient Pods!-

“What was that Invicta?” I asked as I read and reread the notice, unable to make heads or tails out of it.

“Not really sure. It was a push notification from your gloves. Kind of like a reminder set by the gloves creator. I can check with George about the Lost Ancient Pods. For some reason, they seem familiar, like I have heard players talking about them back when my games were just starting.” Invicta said as my cr body began to sink into the raw cr.

“Hey, it is working!” I said as I noticed the speed at which I was tunneling slowly picking up. Behind me, a fine dusting could just be made out of what was leftover from the raw gold cr being vibrated almost into oblivion.

“Ok? What will that achieve?”

“Kevin, I don’t know if that is a good thing.”