Chapter 42 - Teaser! (Patreon)

The next chapter is coming along nicely, but I'm struggling with where to cut it off as I'm going to go a little wild in the next few chapters, taking things in a different direction.  Expect the next chapter this weekend!  For all my readers in the US, hope you're having a great holiday weekend.  :-)

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Main Bridge. The Flighty Temptress. On the surface of Janus VI. Alternate Reality.

There is nothing quite so satisfying and perhaps ego reaffirming as a long shot, random, shot in the dark plan coming together in glorious victory. That was the reason behind the soft grin on my face as I lay reclined in my captain's chair (aka ‘Captain’s Recliner’), immersed in my ship's sensors, on the bridge of my ultra-advanced luxurious warship I had named the Flighty Temptress in a moment of whimsy.

It was a line from the Harry Potter book series from my home dimension, one that had always stuck in my mind, something that the Gandalf impersonator, Dumbledore, had once said to Harry Potter. He had said, 'Let us step into the night and pursue that flighty temptress, adventure.' That was a line of dialogue that was locked in stone when I added that book to my Harry Potter holonovel series, a program that was coming along rather nicely. For some reason, no one had ever asked why I had given my ship its particular name.

My new life was filled with adventure these days and the latest one had seen my crew and I tossed in yet another dimension, on my new ship's maiden voyage no less, where I was in just the right time and place to stop an alien invasion of my new home's galaxy, an invasion that had a very good chance of succeeding in my opinion. Our victory there had seen us thrown into yet another dimension, ironically enough into the past of an alternate Star Trek dimension, one where the Federation existed, but history had taken some weird freaking twists and turns.

Luckily my ship was advanced even for 24thcentury Star Trek and had two distinct forms of cloaking, neither of which the immediate locals could see through, so thankfully we'd been spared much in the way of conflict while my ship was still undergoing much needed repairs. On the one hand, it was fortunate that their technology was inferior to ours, and thus they weren't as much of a threat even on a couple dozen to one basis. On the other hand, it was unfortunate, because it meant that there was shit all in terms of looting potential.

The incredible temptation to go hog fucking wild and fuck shit up with little thought to any long-term consequences had been there, oh it had been there. What had kept me from going total murder hobo on everyone was the knowledge that this was a Star Trek dimension and thus time cops from the future might show up to kill me, with technology 500 years more advanced than mine and armed with temporal weapons that I had no true defense against, if I registered on their temporal radar by having too big an impact on the future. Call me a pussy if you want, but I didn’t want my Star Trek adventure to end just because I enjoyed causing chaos. Of course, that didn't stop me from taking the entire database of that half-destroyed Federation ship we'd stumbled upon, but a long shot idea to profit from this little joy ride through the multiverse had definitely paid off with Janus VI. Thankfully, even if someone discovered this incredibly rich world in the future, what I was taking from it was highly unlikely to affect the future in such a way that the time cops would show up.