Your Adam Aspect in this Cosmos has Died!

I, mentally integrated with my Thor Aspect, looked at the message that had popped up on my personal Interface. What? How? First things first, where and when was I? As I reviewed my location I realized that the part of him that had been in Trix resided in a couple of nanites that were hovering near the ceiling of the room that had survived whatever had happened. Merging with the nanites was turning out to be one of the best things that had ever happened to me. Of course, I’d just received a death message. Then again, I hadn’t received a death message, only a message stating that an Aspect of mine had died. Not wanting to take any chances while I figured things out, I had the nanites move into my Soul Storage. Could I use his storage space to time travel, or send objects through time? I forced myself to refocus. I'd explore that question later. Right now, I had to figure out what had happened. I turned my attention to the prompts that my Adam Aspect had generated in my personal interface.

WARNING, You have been suppressed. Use of Magic, Magical abilities, and Spells is not permited.

WARNING, Hit points have been reduced to 3 total.

WARNING, you have been caught in the radius of an explosive Force

WARNING, Damage exceeds the structural capacity of your body by 1,579 points of damage. Your Body has been destroyed.

Your primary aspect in this Cosmos has Died!

There wasn’t a lot of information to review. The initial suppression had wiped out any useful information I might have been able to get. Now though I’d just have to guess. I did have one idea, if there was a God of Games, he or she must be having a good laugh at my expense. Why? Because what just happened sounded a lot like a tactic I’d used back in New Mexico when I’d first started playing Role-Playing games. When I’d first started gaming one of my friends had wanted to do a character fight. He wanted to pit his highest lever character against one of mine.

“But I don’t have any high-level characters,” I’d said.

“You can make whatever you want,” he’d said.

“Whatever I want? What level is your character?” I’d asked

“He’s a 1,000th level fighter,” he’d said.

Now I knew how achievable that is but then I hadn’t even picked up the ring that changed my life, so I’d responded, “A 1,000th level fighter, what material plane did you destroy?” I’d asked

“What are you talking about? I didn’t destroy a…oh you were being a smart ass. Okay, smart ass what are you going to make?”

“I can make anything I want?” I’d asked.

“Yep.”

“Okay then, I’ll make an 18th-level Magic User.”

“Are you crazy, my character is more than 900 levels than that, I’ll wipe the floor with you.”

“18th Level Magic User. That shouldn’t take me too long to get set up,” I’d said.

“Okay, it’s your funeral,” he’d said.

I’d gone to work and had my 18th-level Magic User done in under 30 minutes. I really didn’t need much for this character fight if I was right. Why, because while I didn’t have a very high-level character, my highest-level official character had been level 6, I had read the player’s guide and the game master’s guide and knew all the spells backward and forward.

“I’m ready,” I said.

“Okay, because your caster we’re going to start 300 feet apart to give you time to cast at least two spells before I utterly destroy your character” he’d said cockily

“Sound’s good to me,” I’d said.

We rolled for initiative, he won.

“I have initiative so I run towards you 120 feet.” He’d said

“Okay, on my turn, I cast a Wish on you”

“What are you wishing for? He’d asked

“I wish Harm on your character,” I’d said.

“What’s Harm do?”

“Oh, it’s in the book, look up the spell Heal then towards the bottom.”

He opened his player’s guide, flipped some pages looked at the spell, read it then said, “You can’t do that?”

“Oh yeah I can, also, a wish may be used to mimic any spells that already exist with no chance of going astray and since it’s a wish and two levels higher I’m making the spell ranged so I don’t have to touch you,” I’d said.

“Don’t you have to roll to hit?” he asked.

“I wouldn’t think so, you’re character is a creature, you are in my line of sight and the spell doesn’t do damage, it just alters you. Also, it’s a divination spell so you could say a God doesn’t like your character very much and made sure this spell hits,” I’d said with a grin.

“I never thought of it but your right, that’s within the rules so I’ll allow it,” he’d said as he’d picked up a 1d4 and rolled a 3. “I now have 3 hit points, my turn. “For Round 2 I’m going to run towards you again. I’m now 60 feet from your character, nothing you have can hit me anyway, my Armor is too good,” he’d said.

“That would be true, if I had to roll to hit, for my 2nd round, I’m casting Magic Missile. At 18th level, it creates nine missiles that each do 1d4+1 damage. Your character takes a minimum of 18 points of damage automatically and as much as 36. 18 points of damage would put your character at -15 hit points which is 5 less than -10. That’s character death, which means I win!” I’d declared.

“That’s Not Possible!” he’d said

“That is why you never go against a wizard, once they get the wish spell the shit dooth hit the fan,” I’d said.

After he’d calmed down for a bit my friend Alex agreed that it was a nasty combo. I told him there were magic items to protect against such things and showed him where to look. I wasn’t really interested in player-versus-player fights. Why had that memory popped into my head? Oh yeah, going from a huge amount of hit points to zero. If my abilities and regeneration rates had been suppressed and a wish had been used to lower my hit points, yeah that could have worked. That God of games might know I’d pulled something like that in a game. Shoot if I was that god I’d be laughing my ass off. I was really beginning to miss my access to the Universal Interface so I could see if my guess was true. Another way to find out would be to try to use that on something else at some point. That might work. Of course, if that’s what had happened the odds that I’d be caught by such an attack would have to be at least one in a million. How would they have known that the combination they used would shut me down? Occam’s Razor posited that the simplest explanation was usually true, which was truly a gross oversimplification but a lot easier to say. If the simplest explanation was true, whoever did this wasn’t going after me, they were going after Trix. Who would want to take Trix out? I’d have to come back to that question later.

Well, if I couldn’t review exactly what happened I could try to pick up what had happened from the nanites that had surrounded my Trix body. I focused on my memory storage and put my full mental capacity to work searching through the data. Within two seconds I had the area around Trix’s building mapped out and replayed the events. Trix had made it back from the “event” and had fallen asleep almost immediately. There weren’t many things that could knock Adam out but the new experiences he’d participated in as a woman and the level of sexual depravity he’d seen and participated in were astonishing. When he’d finished his Thor aspect had a record of the message he’d sent himself saying that he’d be down for a bit to rest. From Trix’s perspective I’d been sleeping when my Adam Aspect disguised as Trix had died.

My Nanites however caught everything. A suppression field had enveloped a one-mile radius around Trix’s apartment. Next, a portal had opened 10 feet directly above my bed and I’d been surrounded by a cone of force that led back to the portal. The bubble of force had been placed directly under and around Trix’s body so that she was inside the cone of force. Finally, something came out of the portal at a very high velocity. I replayed the image and slowed it down and realized it looked like one of the tungsten rods that would be dropped from orbit at hypersonic speeds. I continued the replay until there was a flash and then the cone of force lay empty with a slight haze inside. The cone of force rose from the bed forcing everything inside the cone through the portal. Then the cone of force disappeared, and the portal disappeared next leaving an empty bed where my Trix Aspect had just rested with no sign of foul play with the nanites that had been part of Trix still in the room before they fled into his soul storage.

I started searching for the nanites that had been in the cone of force that had propelled through the portal while I searched the nanites for the individual that had set up the suppression effect and found them and realized immediately why I’d been surprised. There were no nanites in the location the perpetrators had attacked me from, save those that had been pushed through the portal. My nanites were busy replicating themselves and infiltrating this location but it would take time. From what I could make out of the location they were in the middle of a dried-out lakebed with mountains off in the distance. My nanites sent out a ping and I was surprised to learn that I had no other nanites anywhere on the planet this lakebed was on.

While I’d been thinking and investigating the attack on my Adam Aspect I rebuilt my body in my Soul Storage area. I did find out one thing, my soul storage would not allow me to cross time. Oh, I could put things into my soul storage now, and they would appear to my Thor Aspect as a hazy outline that could not be interacted with. It felt a lot like a placeholder. I could interact with the item now, but my future self could not. At least not in this Cosmos. If I went to a Cosmos that hadn’t barred Time Travel I probably could pass things between the future and the past as long as I had an Aspect there. That was the other thing I figured out. My nanites in the past didn’t allow me to create myself in the past if my soul or aspects were in the future. Only having my aspect and my soul space separated allowed that bridge to exist here. I’d been extremely lucky when I’d transferred my soul space into the trap and unconsciously willed my Ahrem Aspect to remain in its original time. If I hadn’t done that simultaneously both my soul and my primary aspect of this cosmos would have been flung into the far future together. Sure, I would have been able to leave at any time, but I wouldn’t have been able to affect the change I wanted to. Let’s hear it for an extremely high luck score.

Creating my body was a little slower than normal as I had to draw nanites into my soul storage from the present and they couldn’t take a lot of material from Vrax itself. Instead, I had the nanites come back through the portals from worlds that were not completely mechanical in nature. Still, in less than two minutes I was looking out of my eyes into my soul space using a daisy chain effect. I allowed my body to remain in my Adam configuration and stepped out of my soul space into Trix’s apartment. I looked around for a second, cast true sight and invisibility on myself then teleported to the planet my nanites had discovered. As I appeared I willed myself off the planet. As the planet receded below me I found myself looking at another version of Earth as I rose out of Death Valley in California. I checked my mana usage and sure enough, my teleport had cost a full 15% of my total mana pool. A cost that high indicated that I’d crossed a dimensional or universal barrier. I had nanites in this location that were spreading so I adjusted my trajectory and accelerated away from the Sun until I was just inside the Oort cloud. Not wanting to infiltrate whatever network systems they had on the planet to gather information about the solar system I set my distance to the sun and started zipping around the inside of the Oort cloud while looking inward. With my high perception and perfect memory, I started discarding all light sources that were not moving to my point of reference and looked for only those objects that were close to me, namely the planets and the moons of this solar system. Once I’d identified as many planets and moons as I could detect, I traveled to each world and moon and dropped off some nanites to begin the infiltration and conversion process of those planets following my long-established protocols.

I reapplied my invisibility and True Sight spells as necessary as I zipped around a solar system that seemed almost identical to my original solar system. While I did that my Thor Aspect had the nanites clean up and reconstruct Ne’lix after Eloise left his apartment. As soon as his body was completely healed he lurched up from the bed gasping for air, looked around then rolled over and went back to sleep. Thor had the nanites create a note for him that was attached to his bathroom mirror so he wouldn’t miss it, then set the nanites in his body to full defense mode with counter-attack protocols that should help Ne’lix if he were attacked again.

I knew I’d have to return to Vrax and retake my place as Trix, but I had a little time. I hadn’t felt this free in a while and it was kind of fun to push his abilities to their limit just to see what he could do. Besides, the process of infiltration and conversion was exponential but in the beginning, it did take some time. My Thor Aspect was handling all the nanites currently and spreading throughout the Vrax Empire. Eventually, they would find the links that lead to this world, but I wasn’t worried about it. I was sure everything I needed to know was in the orbital station I’d detected above North America. I was just taking my time and enjoying myself as I prepared to go say hi. Also allowing myself to fly around the solar system at incredible velocities was a lot of fun. Fun how, well it was like a roller coaster ride, but I wasn’t just thinking about myself. I was quite sure it was fun for whoever was on the station if their sensors could detect gravity waves. If the equipment was sensitive enough it might be able to determine that the source was moving quickly. If not it would appear as if a ring of gravity was emanating from the border of the solar system that orientation went through all 365 degrees. They’d be running around like chickens with their heads cut off if they believed the data. I was moving so fast that the ripples would seem to have almost no pause. Increased heart rates, cold sweats and a touch of fear of the unknown, how could that not be fun for them?