***Tirnanog, Aerie Flagship***

***Magnus***

“You are serious about keeping this as a trophy?” Teresa asked while she watched me play with the skull of what we had named a psyling, combining the terms of psychic and changeling. “And how did you get it this squeaky clean so quickly? You were gone for... like... twenty minutes?”

I grinned. “Teleported to the Old Camp and had a quick run to Zipper Shit Creek. Took the little shits less than a minute to clean the entire thing! Though, if I remember correctly I still have to dry out the bone or it will start stinking. Back on Earth I once talked to a hunter and he mentioned something along those lines.” I squinted my eyes as I tried to remember and ultimately shrugged. Sadly, my mutations didn’t affect the things I learned before I got them. “Could be wrong, though.”

“Why not give it to a taxidermist back at the estate?” Teresa rolled her eyes and returned her attention to the chaotic bridge.

I stopped playing with my trophy. “We have taxidermists at home?”

Why was I asking stupid questions? Of course, a strata which prided itself on hunting had a few taxidermists around.

The ship was still tilted to the left, which was the result of a set of ballast tanks being dropped when the psyling incapacitated the whole crew.

One of the engineers in charge had overreacted in their panic and triggered the release. What had been intended as an emergency measure had backfired massively. It would take at least a week to install the tanks again. Normally, an easy procedure back at the Aerie dockyard, but a time-consuming task in the field.

To reattach the tanks, the ship had to be anchored to the ground and pulled to ground level to keep it steady while the mechanics worked.

Having the flagship grounded was a big problem for the fleet's timetable. The original plan was to slowly begin pressuring Thich's and Vier's aerial forces. The start of the operation was scheduled for the next two days. Now, the whole operation would be delayed, depending on how long it took to restore the flagship.

Additionally, we had lost 38 crewmen who happened to be close enough to exits or had been working on the ship's deck when the psychic attack hit.

As it turned out, there were two types of people. Those who simply froze up, incapable of doing anything. And those who would do anything just to escape the perceived source of danger, including jumping over the ship's railing.

All of the 38 deaths were people who jumped off the ship in their panic. Worse, among them were two juggernaut-classed warriors, of which one barely survived, albeit with heavy injuries. It was fighting power we would be missing in the coming days.

I shook my head upon musing over the circumstances. Normally, a juggernaut-classed individual should have easily survived a fall at terminal velocity, even if they got injured by it. There was a list of abilities someone had to possess before they could be classed as a juggernaut, and having the ability to survive a fall from a great height was one of them.

Unfortunately for said individual, they hadn't just fallen off the ship but also landed right on top of one the damned trees which had almost killed me on my first day. So, being not only injured by the fall, but also turned into shish kebab by Tirnanog's unpleasant wildlife was doubly unlucky, and too much to survive.

“I don't want any excuses!” Juliana Rumen reprimanded one of her people who was listing off further losses in materials. The elder was furious because of the damage and loss of life which happened while she was on the bridge. “I want solutions! How do we prevent a repeat of this happening in the future? I want some mechanism which requires double confirmation to release the ballast in the future!”

“But it is a security measure in case the ship loses too much lift capacity!” The woman she was talking to protested. “It would make no sense to make it too inaccessible to activate before the ship goes down.”

“There is no guarantee that the Thich do not have more people of this sort. I want you to go through the whole ship! Find anything and everything which can cause this level of trouble at the push of a single button. I don’t care how trained or reliable the people operating the equipment are. If it can be activated in a moment of panic, I want to know about it!” Juliana countered vehemently.

“And worse, nobody can tell me what that thing even was!” She pointed an accusing finger at my trophy.

“Not human of human origin,” Vanya commented stoically. “Its mind was too alien for that.”

Teresa turned to the matriarch. “So, if it was human I might be inclined to believe that the Thich have a pair of them. If it was not, then what? Do they breed those things? If the attack had happened during an engagement, taking out our entire command structure, we might have lost the fleet. Who can assure me that there aren't more of them?”

Vanya tilted her head. “We can't tell at this point. Currently, the only option I see is to proceed as planned and assume they have more bio-weapons of this calibre. Split up command to a second and third vessel, then have them take over in case the leading ship is incapacitated. If anything, this proves we should be willing to pay any price to take down Thich and Vier. No matter the source of this creature, human or otherwise, they either bred or tamed an insanely dangerous intelligent monster, or they tried to utilize a deviant human mutation. Both are forbidden acts under the clan treaty. If we weren't already at war, this alone would be enough reason to start one.”

Gunnar raised his hand. “Ahem, how about giving the remains to Gurney? Everyone told me he was some high-profile scientist back in the day and he got all that fancy lab equipment from us, so it must be good for something, right?”

A displeased expression appeared on Vanya's face and she massaged the bridge of her nose. “Right! Damn, right. I am sorry. Why didn't I think of it right away?”

Tianna had no mercy. “Maybe because you encountered something packing more psychic power than you do for the first time in your life and your mental defences are shot? Maybe because you overworked your mental capabilities with all those overnighters even before the attack happened and now your mind is finally refusing to play along? Maybe you should listen to my advice and lay down till you feel better.”

“But-”

“No buts, you are going to sleep till you are back to normal! I swear, I am gonna club you over the head if you don't rest.” Tianna grabbed the weakly protesting Matriarch at the upper elbow and pulled her away from the planning table, then dragged her off like some impudent child.

I fought my hardest not to allow anything to show on my face till they were out of the bridge.

Once they were gone, Teresa asked a question, “So, does anyone have an idea why this thing decided to show up right after we locked up this Brook fellow?”

Gunnar massaged his chin. “I don't want to play the devil's advocate, but it strongly hints that there must have been some sort of connection between Brook and this creature. Maybe they had an appointment and Brook didn't show, hence it decided to accelerate the timetable. With this second attack, there is no doubt that one of its goals was to deprive us of information about our opponents. Prevent intelligence gathering by destroying possible sources. And there is another thing. None of us should forget what would have likely happened if Magnus hadn't been immune to its ability. It would have killed Hochberg's leader, and there's no way to tell how many more would have fallen before it was stopped.”If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

“So far, only a handful of psychics reported to be immune to the fear, or rather, to be able to suppress its effects. It looks like it requires mutations which allow for an altered state of mind,” Juliana mused. “Not even Vanya was able to throw it off completely and she is the strongest psychic we know of – at the cost of her physical abilities.”

“But she was right next to it,” I pointed out. “Maybe it would have been easier for her if she had been further away. And I have to point out that the psyling wasn’t truly strong. The night terrors I encountered so far were way more worrying when it came to strength. I still don’t believe I could best one of them on my own. The psyling was mostly relying on this fear to paralyse the victims. Without this ability, it was a mid-grade threat at best. I think we should identify the people who can throw off the fear effect and station a few of them on the ship at all times.”

“Too bad that we can’t test their resistance without having a living specimen,” elder Juliana complained.

“I can try to catch the next one alive,” I suggested.

“No!”

The unanimous reply coming from everyone was somewhat unsettling. Had it been that bad? I mean, suffering the psyling’s psychic attack was unpleasant, but I thought it was manageable.

“Okay.” I shrugged. “So I will try to kill the next one faster then?”

Everyone nodded.

The meeting went on for a little longer from there, but nobody had any world-shaking announcements to make. In some ways, we had gotten away lightly.

If the wormgate had been affected, it could have been catastrophic, but thanks to Gilbert’s excellent engineering all we had suffered was a temporary shutdown.

Since there were no more instructions for me, I excused myself once the meeting was finished. On my way back to the wormgate, I found myself accompanied by Teresa and Gunnar.

The former I was okay with, the latter not so much, even though we had decided to ignore our differences for as long as we had to work together. I just wasn’t ready to accept Gunnar into the family like some long-lost uncle after he hadn’t shown his stupid mug for over thirty years.

The only memories I had of an uncle were dark and almost non-existent. Nobody could expect me to start cheering upon meeting someone who – just maybe – gave me a present or two when I was a child, then talked to my parents for the rest of the evening before he disappeared again. It wasn’t like he had taken me on camping trips to form an everlasting bond.

So, in other words, Gunnar trying to suddenly make up for the past just weirded me out after he hadn’t deemed it necessary to come clean at the first opportunity when I joined the organisation.

The problem was, I couldn’t reasonably tell Gunnar not to tag along when the head of the house, Teresa, had invited him after the meeting. Presumably, to strengthen the bond between clan Aerie and the members of the organisation.

So we inevitably found ourselves back at the estate, visiting Astra in our quarters where we found her lying on the sofa in the living room with Aurora and Constella next to her. Isaac was playing on the floor, building one of his strangely elaborate castles. No matter how often I witnessed it, it was strange to witness a child as young as him building a Victorian-era castle. And even better, what he was doing could no longer be called playing with wooden building blocks.

Isaac was using a little chisel to give the blocks a brick texture and someone had gotten him dyes, so he was building a model – and a good one at that. It reminded me of the time when I was into modelling at fifteen. I had sunken countless hours into that hobby, allowing my marks at school to suffer. So much so that my parents believed I would make a living of it before I found a love for my chosen fields of study – physics and programming.

The boy dropped everything when he saw me and zipped over, holding up his hands expectantly.

I picked him up and lightly threw him into the air before catching him again. “How is your day off the crib?”

“Splendid!” Isaac replied and pointed at his castle.

I nodded. “I was wondering, where do you get the ideas for them?”

“Aunty showed me when I asked,” Isaac replied with conviction, showing yet again that he was mentally more mature than his body showed.

The others probably thought he was referring to Kiera Tate, the doctor who paid us regular visits because of the kids. Kiera was cutting down on those visits because it became increasingly apparent that the mutations the kids inherited from Astra and me caused no severe side effects – though having a kid like Isaac was admittedly strange.

Only Astra and I knew that when Isaac meant Kiera, he would spell her out as ‘Aunty Kiera’. The one who was just ‘aunty’ in Isaac’s mind was Gaia.

While I was busy with Isaac, Teresa was all over Astra and gushing at the two girls with so much enthusiasm that one would never think Astra was indeed not her daughter by blood.

It took a good five minutes till we got to introduce the stewing Gunnar to the kids and I enjoyed every awkward second of it. He had made the ultimate mistake and asked Isaac about his building project, which resulted in a river of explanations about proper castle construction and how the different design elements had changed throughout history.

Once that was over, it suddenly struck me. “Gunnar, I just realized, you haven’t met Ivona yet, my sister! And her partner too! We have to get them!”

Knowing Ivona’s personality, she would rather use her fists than take any bullshit from Gunnar. Witnessing their first meeting would be pure pleasure.

Somewhat overwhelmed, Gunnar only blinked and nodded while listening to Isaac’s explanation of how to integrate murder holes into the construction without making them obvious to the casual observer. He had no idea what he was in for with my prickly sister.

I used the time to go over to Klein’s cage and check on the little monster. It had grown considerably and was now a miniature version of a grown zipper. Not knowing what else to do with it for the moment, I decided to decorate his cage with my trophy skull. Even though I improved his living conditions, Klein only rewarded me with a few squawks of protest when I didn’t serve him food.

“Magnus!” Astra called for me.

“Yes?” I went over, seeing that Teresa was busy cuddling with the girls. Isaac had Gunnar occupied, so we had time to talk.

I went down on one knee and kissed Astra lovingly to greet her.

“I heard there was another incident?” Astra asked.

“Nothing to worry or do about at the moment,” I replied. “I am sure you will hear all about it once that wound is healed.”

Astra narrowed her eyes at me. “Teresa mentioned that the flagship was damaged and that it would take a week to repair.”

I nodded. “Bad luck, I assure you. Your dear partner is totally fine. I even saved the day!”

She smiled. “Then, that means we have time!”

“Time for what?” I asked.

“To visit a play!” Astra grasped my hands and interlinked her fingers with mine. “They started the first performances last week.”

“A play?” I asked. “Like in a theatre?”

“Not like in a theatre!” Astra puffed out her cheeks. “We really should have gone out more to participate in social life while we had time to spare during winter.”

“I do remember your father beating me half to death in the morning, calling it training. Then elder Gilbert took over in the afternoon. And in the evening, it was Mary’s turn to torture me. And if it wasn’t combat training, it was learning the armour weave. As I remember it, there was hardly any time for anything. So what is this play?”

Teresa turned to us with sparkling eyes. It was clear she had listened in on our conversation. “Every newly minted juggernaut of clan Aerie gets their play, portraying their history and life to make them known to the clan as a whole. Add to that, that you two are not only juggernauts but also earned the title of protector at such a young age. And once it becomes widely known what Magnus did for the clan by unlocking the UI, he will be regarded as a hero by most!”

“What?” I gasped.

She covered her mouth to hide her grin. “Oh, I am quite sure it will be the play of the century since it makes for such a juicy story. A single, unpartnered daughter of house Frost going against her parents’ wishes to find love abroad, ending up bringing home the clan’s saviour.”

“What?!” I repeated.

“Oh, don’t worry!” Teresa waved her hand. “We made sure they use your alias, Tulkas.”

I threw up my hands. “That’s not the problem!”

Astra frowned, obviously displeased with my reaction. “Does that mean you don’t want to watch the play with me?”

“No! I mean, yes!” How could they just drop this on me and expect me not to freak out?

Astra smiled at me and I felt her filaments snake up and around my legs. “Magnus, would you please, please go and watch that play with me? I was very excited when I heard they were doing one for us and interviewed Thalia for it.”

I looked down at my legs, where Astra’s filaments did a damned good job to make it impossible to run away, and sighed. “They interviewed Thalia for it? Seriously, why not interview the people who would know best – us?”

I could have stopped this before it started.

Astra nodded, smiling. “Because it's tradition to tell the story from the point of view of those who witnessed the main characters rise. It is not supposed to be tainted by self-aggrandisement.”

Gunnar stepped next to me from behind, carrying Isaac on his shoulders. “Ohoho! This sounds juicy! I am sure you can reserve an additional seat for one old man?”

Isaac raised a hand. “I want to watch too!”