The ripping sound of his jacket’s flip-flap resistance caught one hundred percent of his attention for an instant, but then he returned his focus to the ground. A rolling savannah plain slewed by almost twenty meters below, making him feel like he was riding a disk or skids or an abnormally smooth-paced steed. Slight adjustment of angle, to better court air resistance; he preferred the convenience of not getting his limbs shattered.
It all would have been much easier for him to deal with, had the whole planetary surface not been subject to the same restrictions as most of the rest of the Parsed City-State of Rhaagm. No folding. No dissemination of extrafacetary technological advances without a license. No folding. No ritual resurrections outside of institutes thoroughly approved for the task, unless the gestalt of the victim was otherwise demonstrably endangered. No killing except in defense of self or others. And most important for his own purposes, unless he was in very very special designated areas, NO FOLDING. He wasn’t annoyed in the slightest. Ah, well; practice with the craft wouldn’t do him ill.
He swooped past one particularly tall tree, and threw out another fulcrum. This one lasted about a millisecond, and sliced off perhaps one percent of his momentum by imbuing the tree with just a little of his kinetic energy at a steep angle. The tree didn’t react outwardly, except to rustle a bit near its topmost layer of fluff.
By slow effort, he passed along bits and shards of his breakneck speed to the environment, one incredibly acute magical twitch at a time. It didn’t kill all of his velocity, though.
Instead, as he dropped, he picked out a squat cabin near the far end of his trajectory, and identified one last fortuitously-placed tree beside it. Around the cabin spread an admirable swatch of cropland, or a poor one, depending on who and how many had done the planting. Tools and various things that didn’t belong inside a house lay scattered around the wood dwelling’s outside in ordered pockets of chaos. A tiny horizontal chimney made of clay and some kind of mortar sprouted from one end of the dwelling.
The pioneer clamped another fulcrum onto the adjacent tree, swung himself quite high, carefully spread out his feet, and landed on the minutely slanted plank roof with an almighty thud.
He heard a rapid rattling of feet as the Gegaunli karkshesh below him scurried about. He almost started laughing as he imagined the way they’d be able to keep a rhythm up on a drum rig.
In less than three seconds, a quadruped came charging out of the house, sling in one hand and pickax in the other. Both sets of teeth were on display as she whirled, checking the front of her home.
“I know you are out there!” she said.
“I appreciate your forthrightness,” Eihks said, dangling his feet from her edging. “I also hope that things will go more smoothly for us from here on in.”
She whirled, faster this time, and without even a full revolution in her sling loosed a stone that came within a centimeter of Eihks’s left hand.
“Wow!” he said, watching the rock bounce off the roof and go skittering along the sky behind. “You’ve got… quite the arm! I’d need a lot of practice to get that skilled with a sling.”
“The next one is going to hit you in the head!” Ktsn replied.
Eihks’s response was to fall the three meters from the roof to the ground, and approach the woman as she was winding up another stone. Her near eye widened, and she took one two-feet-only step away, presumably to better her aim. His whole body went slightly slack with bold acquiescence.
“If you don’t think I was telling you everything I’ve already said for a reason, then go ahead,” he said, very softly and stock-still.
Taking him up at his word, Ktsn loosed her stone, and it smacked directly into his skull perfectly between the eyes. There was a second of him rocking back, blinking a bit, then he righted himself, and picked up the stone.
“You see, if I had a normal human skull, that would have killed me,” he told her, as she let the sling’s thong fall loose. He examined the stone, impressed with its smoothness and near perfection, and underhanded it at the cone-shaped “toe” flagella of her long palindromic feet.
“But we have a little bit of a different arrangement, my skull and I,” he said, folding his arms and putting on a wry smile. “I come from a society that makes things which you’d call impossible not just easy, but commonplace. Universal, limitless nutrition. Magic for not just the few studious sorcerors or the like who want to devote their lives to it, but everyone. Infinite knowledge, and almost every branch of scientific discovery followed farther than you could dream. Immortality, in a variety of senses of the word.”
She was peering at him now, a bit more intrigued than disturbed - though only a bit.
“You wish for me to believe all of that?” she asked, storing her weapon away. That was one of two things at work; either sufficient fear to discourage belligerence, or an accepting rationality taking hold once more. Body language might be revealing more, but his reading material wasn’t quite as up to snuff with every conceivable posture or expressing of body-noise.
How those anthropologists got the time to study all of that about the Gegaunli karkshes’ personality, but hadn’t realized that deific disaster was hanging over their own heads, was more than he could be bothered to fully contemplate just now.
“That’s my goal here,” he said, more gentle and normal in his tone and attitude. “I’m here to help you become one of us.”
He moved away from the building, staying on a blank stretch of grassy yard that struck a medium between not being close to her house and not being close to her cropland. Sitting, his hands descended behind his head as he looked up.
“By the way - this is neither here nor there, but should be said - I appreciate you not getting over-excited or panicking when you first saw me. Most species take one look and see the largely-bare skin, the little patch of fuzz on top, the awkward feature structure, and the ways we move and behave, and either get really, really disgusted or really, really attracted. Both are awkward. Humans are awkward, too, but not quite so much.”
A stunned moment of silence.
“Think nothing of it,” Ktsn replied, in a way that seemed to indicate she didn’t want to dwell on the topic.
He could relate. Oh, but he could relate.
A few long seconds, as each someone waited for the other someone to say something further.
“So… perhaps, just perhaps, my service so far is less than perfectly clear in what it is supposed to achieve,” said Eihks, leaning his head on his shoulder. His fingers rapped down his leg, and he stopped when they came close to the metal shape embedded by his groin.
He looked up at where the sunlight made the projected faces glow much brighter, and frowned.
“To wit: I’m here as your undesirable companion until such a time as you are in a place of understanding your rights and restrictions, your abilities, your-”
“I must ask, what do you mean when saying that you were killed?” interjected Ktsn.
The explorer felt a bit of reassurance at the fact that this was the first time she’d butted into his rambling trails of speech. Then, he felt something between sadness and annoyance, sprinkled with a reflexive dash of I-told-you-so-because-you-used-the-word-“undead” (except-he-hadn’t-because-of-lexical-problems-but-never-mind).
“Allow me…” he said, a bit above a whisper, “... to illustrate my meaning,” and rose to his feet.
“If you could please lend me your pickax?” he asked, holding out his hand. When she clearly didn’t make any move to oblige, he huffed, closed his eyes, and said, “If I wanted to hurt you, I don’t actually need to do anything like wait for you to give me a pickax.”
His hand traveled to one side, still watching the near eye of the brown-coated farmer, and he spun up another fulcrum. It tore up a bit of the grass, and also picked up the stone she’d used to smack his skull, putting it in his palm. He brandished the stone, his index finger raised, and her eye looked like it was about to spring out of her head.
“I’m asking, and although I could simply take it, that would be bad manners. It would also be against my instructions. So it won’t be happening,” he assured her. “The last thing this whole messed-up day needs is a potential charge of assault on a native.”
A couple quirky gyrokinetic manipulations later, the rock floated down (gently, gently) to right in front of Ktsn once more, in little up-curved waves. She looked very carefully at the thing for a very long time, then adjusted her grip. His still-extended empty hand filled several seconds later with the heft of well-worn wood, and the crude yet black-iron-quality head of the sharp end glinted as he turned it this way and that.
“This will only take a moment,” he assured her.
With a wide high flourish, he swung the edge of the pickax around in a greasy smooth circle. He did a quick on-the-fly twisting adjustment as he watched his arrogant swing continue. The angle, regrettably, wasn’t quite appropriate for the width of the tool’s wedge.
He had just enough time to regret not using another personal utility to solve for the proper trajectory before the hardened breadth of it went straight through his neck. The blade came out the back directly next to his esophagus, and came to a dead stop as the handle encountered his clavicle.
“Ah, oh, Crippled False,” he swore, very thankful that he couldn’t feel pain. “Sorry,” he assured the now horrified karkshesh, “I can fix this.”
A noise like the splatting of a flat stone on almost-dry mud preceded his withdrawing the pickax. After a two-count, he swung it again.
This time it struck true, and managed to disconnect spine, backbone, flesh, cardiovascular tissues, and a great deal else. Two finger-widths of skin and muscle kept noggin and neckin in close contact, before a final application of the wedge parted the lot.
It took the experience of numerous inconveniences from a considerable stretch of his history, but Eihks managed to reach out, deftly twist his left hand, and catch his falling head by the hair.
Some very short time thereafter, he began carefully forcing air through his stump via a fast-built, fast-moving chain of fulcra. It was a macabre method of speech, but he used what he had.
“So, as you can see,” he rasped, “I know exactly what I meant when I said ‘killed.’ There’s-”
His eyes flickered down, and he saw the karkshesh laid out flat, giving stupendous evidence for excessive shock having the same effect on her kind that it had on his.
“Well, that’s just dandy,” he said, before reattaching his head, and asking himself what he… what the program… how…
He had a lot of problems. This one, at least, he knew how to address.
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