Chapter 1059: The Political Ramifications of Jellybeans (Patreon)

At diamond-rank, most teleport and portal abilities allowed dimensional travel. It typically required an amount of preparation and infrastructure, like pre-built anchor points, but that did not obviate the point that portal users of the highest rank became true world-walkers. Unfortunately, that currently excluded Earth. Diamond-rankers were currently forbidden entry by dictate of the World-Phoenix, whose remit was the integrity of dimensional boundaries. It was her cult, in most instances, who punished violations of the Laws of Intrusion.

Because of this restriction, any dimension travel was through the bridge controlled by Knowledge, or ferrying via astral ship. The role of ferryman had fallen to Jota, the former pirate. His dimension ship manifested near the humungous space station in the shape of Jason’s head, flying through the smugly grinning mouth to enter a cavernous hangar. One of Jason’s avatars was there to greet them, along with Rufus and Farrah. A door opened in the side and a ramp descended for a long line of people to walk down.

Most the passengers had just left Earth for the first time and were looking around with curiosity as they disembarked. They were an eclectic mix of humans and other species, either former humans changed by a transformation zone or the children of those who were. Mixed in were a few messengers, Rufus’ parents, and Jason’s sister Erika, along with her husband and daughter.

“Uncle Jason!”

Emi launched herself from the top of the ramp with gold-rank strength, sailing over the startled people descending ahead of her. Jason laughed as he caught her in the air with his aura, leaving her frozen in place, limbs flailing.

“HEY!”

He floated her over and pulled her into a big hug.

“Hey, Moppet.”

“You’re alright,” she said into his shoulder and she clenched him tight.

“Of course I am. It’s me.”

She pushed away and slapped him on the arm.

“Don’t you give me that Uncle Jason! Do you have any idea how worried we were?”

“I have no idea why,” Jason said, his expression the picture of innocence.

“How many times have you died?”

“Died? That doesn’t even make sense. If I’d ever died, how I would I even be here right now?”

“Do not play games with me, Uncle Jason. I will give you a proper thumping.”

“Here, where I’m all powerful? I’m curious about how you’d manage that.”

“I’d let her,” Farrah said, prompting Jason to look at her as if having forgotten she was there.

“Yeah, well… please don’t.”

While Emi hugged Farrah, Shade bodies guided people to nearby transport shuttles and Rufus found himself standing in front of his parents.

“I see your friends are diamond-rank,” Gabriel said, earning him a shove from his wife. Arabelle grabbed her son in a hug.

“What your idiot father means is that we’re glad to see you safe.”

“That would be the father who was gold-rank when these diamond-rankers were still iron?” Rufus asked as he returned his mother’s embrace.

“That would be the one, yes,” Arabelle said.

Gabriel finally couldn’t maintain his fake-disapproval and clapped his son on the shoulder.

“Good to see you, boy. They tell us you’re building a school.”

“That’s right. And now we’ve got the staff to make it work.”

Rufus looked over the people who had answered his call for assistance. Many were young, having been taught by Rufus himself as children. Others had once been ordinary education professionals before the transformation zones had altered their lives forever. Others were messengers raised with in the Asano Clan by Jali Corrik Fen, who had arrived on an earlier trip. Rufus stepped over to Emi as she excitedly chatted with Farrah while Jason greeted her parents.

“Emi, I’m surprised that Earth could spare you?” Rufus said.

“Most of what I could do for Earth, I’ve already done,” she told him. “At this point, anytime I get near a battlefield, Knowledge’s forces go all-out to try and capture me. We used that a few times, but it was getting out of hand. General Mills won’t let me out in the field anymore, so I can do more good here.”

“Well, you’re very welcome. And your parents, of course.”

“We’re not fighters,” Ian said. “I thought it would be worth having someone who had trained in two worlds worth of healing techniques, if it is safe here.”

“And I knew that food management would be important,” Erika said. “Left to his own devices, Jason would probably just conjure up all the food these kids need.”

“I take food very seriously,” Jason said.

“Yes, because I taught you to. Now, I need to do the same for all these kids you’ve apparently hatched from eggs.”

“It was more like cocoons, or pods.”

“The point is, I don’t want them raised thinking that some magic cafeteria will just pop all the delicious food they could ever want into existence.”

“The food programs Erika implemented in the clan were excellent,” Rufus said. “I was hoping she would agree to come. And your presence, Mother, will be a boon to these kids who have no idea what the world is.”

“And me,” Gabriel said. “I’m here too.”

“Yes, you are, Father. You can probably make the signage or something.”

“The signage? I have decades of educational experience. My family runs a school!”

Jason held out a shot glass for Rufus, who stared at Jason a long time before taking it and slamming back the contents.

“Feels good, doesn’t it?”

“Shut up, Jason.”

***

It took a lot of missed sleep to make a gold-ranker falter, but Rufus felt drained as he trudged through the halls of the new school campus. It had been a week of developing curricula, organising classes and refining the campus design as Jason’s avatars renovated by casually rewriting reality. Others were making sure that all the newly born students were housed, fed and supervised appropriately. He stumbled towards his office, dreaming of a nap on the comfy couch. Opening the door, he found Farrah with one arm in the big jar of jellybeans on his desk.

Behind Farrah was an open door that definitely hadn’t been there that morning, and should have led to open air outside the tree house administrative building. Instead, it led into a round room made of cloud material with numerous doors set into the walls. Each door was different in design to the others, from the automated sliding glass of a supermarket to heavy, weathered wood with a cast iron knocker.

“Oh, hey,” Farrah said.

“What are you doing here?” Rufus asked. “You should be in a cloud ship halfway across the astral.”

“That’s not really how astral geography works,” Farrah said. “It’s more of an abstract framework of contextual interrelation. There is no physical space, so there’s no halfway for us to be. A dimension ship is basically a pocket universe that…”

She frowned as she rummaged through the jar.

“Why don’t you take out the black jellybeans? No one likes black jellybeans.”

“Some people love the black ones.”

“Jason!” Farrah yelled through the door. “Can you change all the black jellybeans into toasted marshmallow or French vanilla flavours?”

“They’re Rufus’ jellybeans and he can have them how he likes,” Jason’s voice came back. “Also, turning all the black anythings into white versions seems kind of loaded, politically.”

“They’re jellybeans,” Farrah called back. “Nobody cares.”

“I care,” Rufus said.

“You care about the political ramifications of jellybeans?”

“No, I care about people transmogrifying my office snacks. What is going on here? How are you in my office, and what is that door?”

“That’s the door room,” Farrah explained. “I wanted a nibble, the door room was closer than the kitchen and I figured you’d have jellybeans.”

“What is the door room?”

Jason wandered into view and came through to join them.

“Oh, hey. Rufus, you look beat, mate. You should take a nap.”

“That was the plan until I found your dimension ship is apparently now in my office, somehow.”

“Well, the cloud flask is a pretty direct expression of my power at diamond-rank. It’s very much an extension of my astral kingdom, so I built a room with doors that are coterminous to places within the kingdom itself. Not portals, actually shared physical space.”

“How is that even possible?”

“Well, the thing about the astral is that it’s an abstract framework of—”

“I rescind my question. Am I going to have you people just wandering into my office whenever you feel like it?”

“Isn’t it great?”

“No! Jason, if I’m in here giving a student guidance and the creator of the universe walks in, what do you think will happen?”

“They’ll think you’re the coolest headmaster ever?”

“I don’t think he needs help in that regard,” Farrah pointed out. “He’s a sexy swordmaster who can wield the power of an eclipse. Also, he’s literally the only headmaster in the universe, so he wins by default.”

“None of which matters!” Rufus said, scrambling to get a word in. “Jason, even without the fact that you invented the species that half the student body belongs to, you are the single most disruptive person in the cosmos. That is not ideal for an educational environment.”

“The most disruptive? That’s a big call, mate. It’s a whopping great cosmos.”

“You made the afterlife explode!”

“An afterlife, and only a bit of one. A big bit, but still.”

“Jason, get that door out of my office. And no arriving on campus without my express invitation.”

“Yeah, have some consideration,” Farrah said with a mouth full of jellybeans.

“You too,” Rufus told her.

“What did I do?”

“Aside from putting your hands on every jellybean in the jar? Did you at least wash your hands first? And who eats that many at once?”

“It’s not that many,” Farrah mumbled.

“Out, both of you,” Rufus said, pointing at the door.

Jason and Farrah shuffled out, grumbling under their breath, and the door closed behind them.

“Door too!” Rufus called out, and the door melted into the wall, replaced with a window that showed the city outside. He turned his gaze longingly to his couch, only to wince as his assistant knocked on the still-open actual door to his office.

“If your friends are gone, Headmaster, would you be able to approve the next batch of lesson plans?”

Rufus groaned wearily, turning from the couch to head for his desk.

***

The intercom in the office of Anson Cazus buzzed a priority signal and he tapped the touch panel to open a channel.

“Sir, the DDC have put in a high priority request.”

“What does the Dimensional Defence Command want from Imperial intelligence?”

“They’ve sent a scan profile of a ship that just shifted in from the astral. They can’t identify it and want an urgent analysis.”

“Tag it immediate priority and send it through to analytics, then give me a summary of what we have on this thing already.”

“Sending now, sir. Immediate scans mark it as a mutable configuration vessel, but none of our scans have been able to penetrate the exterior shell. It’s emitting an aura, and as far as we can tell, it’s not an artificial one. That ship may be a living entity, sir.”

“More likely a physical expression of some powerful being elsewhere. An avatar ship. Has it shown any signs of hostility?”

“No, sir. It manifested away from any occupied sectors and hasn’t moved since.”

“That’s a good sign. Whoever is in there doesn’t want us to rush to any violent and dramatic reactions. I assume that DDC are rushing to violent and dramatic reactions?”

“They’ve mobilised an interdiction force sir, but there’s currently a non-engage order in effect. They’re going to cordon it in. Sir, I’m getting some initial results back from analytics, and they’re a bit odd and a lot scary.”

“How so?”

“The first thing is that the power level is sitting at half-transcendent. Beyond that, scans have only been able to take an aura reading, but they’re getting inconsistent results they’ve flagged as low confidence.”

“Why?”

“They’re listing an aura profile that resembles, but isn’t quite, that of an astral king, a divine relic and a great astral being’s prime vessel. All at the same time.”

“Oh,” Anson said. He leaned back in his chair and let out the long sigh of a man who saw trouble coming from very far away. “Reach out to the DDC and tell them we’ve provisionally identified it as a friendly, but not to drop the alert until we have confirmation. Then contact Princess Dawn and ask her to deploy to the activity zone.”

“Sir, Princess Dawn?”

“Yes. Tell her that her friend is here.”

***

A winged spider made of fire shot through space. The magic around it formed a bubble that deformed relativity, allowing it to move faster than light on a path to the edge of the solar system and beyond. Even at such an impossible pace, it took hours to finally reach the small fleet of ships in the void of space, surrounding another, much larger vessel. Each of that ship’s twenty triangular sides held a nebulous eye, watching in every direction.

Dawn slowed, transforming from a fire spider to her natural celestine form. The ships didn’t react to her presence, having been expecting the princess. She flew towards the strange vessel, where one of the triangular panels retracted into the ship, creating an entrance. She floated inside and the panel closed behind her, resealing the ship. Inside was a lounge the size of an aeroplane hangar, with a bar, multiple seating and dining areas, gaming tables and a cinema behind smoky glass. Dawn recognised the people partaking in various activities, but her eyes fixed on the man standing in front of her, waiting on her arrival. She walked forward hesitantly while he did a poor job of fighting off the smug grin threatening to overtake his face.

“Jason.”

“Dawn.”

“I’m sorry for everything you had to go through.”

“We each have our own responsibilities. I’m sorry you found yourself caught between loyalties, but we’ve worked our way through all those, now. We have worked our way through them all, right?”

She nodded. He grinned and stepped forward to pull her into a hug.

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