177 –
Announcent
Huge Oopsie on my part, I accidentally posted the wrong chapter. So now you are getting the actual chapter and the previous one will count as Saturday’s chapter. Sorry guys, just woke up.
I looked up into Cain’s eyes, finding him staring back with a mix of concern and determination. His surface thoughts were clear enough and told enough of what he was thinking.
‘She can teleport a damned table twenty miles in a snap, how am I supposed to hit her with a damned laspistol?’
Then there was my armour, which resembled the ones worn by my combat drones, whom he knew never even got injured while purging the cultists. Those worries and a dozen more were running through his mind as he tried to decide whether Jurgen’s Blank aura would be enough to stop from using any of those powers.
Knowing his trusty aide was just outside the tent, ready to fire his heavy lta to douse in a plasma burning at a few thousand degrees celsius was the only reason he was even risking confronting .
That, and having been told to do so by Amberly of course.
“I would have thought your self preservation instincts were better than this,” I muttered, my deanour unconcerned but my voice now had a tightness to it. I stared into his eyes, my face void of expression as I spoke in a calm, asured tone, “you pull that trigger and I’m breaking your arm. If you pull it again, I’ll cut you into bite sized pieces and that goes to all the soldiers standing outside this tent. You get one shot that you’ll survive as a warning because I feel just a tiny bit bad for stealing your toy. One shot, then you can go see how well ‘the Emperor protects’.”
“You have held us at Psychic gunpoint up until now,” Amberly said with so mild reproach in her voice. I glanced over, finding the Inquisitor now behind her two goons, who had a pair of hellguns levelled at . “This is just evening the scales.”
I tilted my head, squinting at her as I all but ignored the three guns aid at , and the other dozens that I couldn’t see, but knew were there.
“Fair enough,” I allowed, the edge of my lips curving upwards into a smile. Not the polite, playful smile I wore before but one a hint more manic, holding an echo of the grins I tended to wear while engrossed in a fight to the death. “If that is what it takes to calm your nerves. I’ll tell you though, your pet Pariah won’t stop from killing you all. I’ll just have to get my hands dirty. With the due threat out of the way, I’m curious, what are you hoping to achieve with this?”
“We can’t allow you to leave with the artifact,” Amberly said with finality, making it known she was willing to risk testing my claims of being able to kill them all to get what she wanted.
“And I won’t allow you to have it either,” I said, smiling wolfishly. My visible lack of concern at having three guns pointed at my face was having so adverse effects on the three n’s courage. Now, the two goons were mirroring Cain’s uncertainty who himself was looking like he was cursing everyone and everything that compounded his eting with . “Quite the conundrum.”
“It doesn’t have to be,” Cain said, speaking up for the first ti since I’d revealed myself. He sounded uncertain and hesitant at the start, but was quickly getting more and more sure of himself with every word. His laspistol left my face, his aim jumping low, landing … right on the artifact. “No one having the artifact seems like the perfect compromise to . Neither of you want the other to have it, but I feel like neither of you are enthused about using the thing yourselves either. It’d just be rotting in so vault anyway, wouldn’t it? We might as well destroy it now and erase the danger it represents here and now.”
I humd thoughtfully, my gaze catching the desperate yet hopeful look in Cain’s eye before I slowly let it move over to the Inquisitor. She looked ready to argue, clearly unwilling to let the fruits of her months-long work be destroyed, but she kept her mouth shut.
“Sounds good to ,” I said with a smile, curtailing her response with an agreent. Now if she disagreed, whatever happened thereafter would be wholly on her. “I like compromises. One addition though, if we are to destroy it, I want it to be destroyed thoroughly.”
“Yes?” Cais asked, a hint of confusion in his voice as he looked back at .
“That peashooter of yours won’t do,” I said, waving vaguely at his laspistol. “Have your pet Blank shoot it with that big fuckoff gun of his until not even the scraps remain.”
Cain looked over at Amberly, who had her lips in a thin frown of clear unwillingness. A mont later though, it drained away and left only resignation.
“Fine,” she said. “But it stays within the Blank’s influence until it’s destroyed.”
She then gave a aningful look to the table I had teleported here. Fair enough, I’d be worried about teleporting away nanoseconds before the lta hit it too had I been in her shoes.
No one would be able to tell if I did, after all. None of their eyes could grasp details happening on that tiscale.
I shrugged easily, as if it didn’t matter, though I felt slightly disappointed inside. Sure, I didn’t really want the toy, but I would have liked to research it, anyway.
Oh well, no loss on my part. I thought to myself. Dangerous as it might have been, a tool to protect my soul could have been useful. Those Shadowkeepers had attacked it after all. If in no other way than to serve as an inspiration on how to improve my own defences.
Almost every use of my psychic might have been just stolen ideas and random superpowers from pop culture I had managed to make work after all. I was barely scratching the surface of what was possible because I was too dumb to co up with viable uses of my powers on my own.
In my defence, it was hard to co up with anything concrete when technically, everything was possible through the use of Psychic powers, but was in practice limited by vague and mysterious rules I was still figuring out.
If I could see how this thing worked, without actually having to endanger my own damned soul to do it, I might just be able to get sothing out of this, anyway. How do I do that though, without backing out of this ‘agreent’ and making myself look like an ass?
“Before all that though,” I spoke up, smiling disarmingly as they turned their suspicious gazes at . Rightly so, because I intended to do sothing that might not really be in line with the spirit of our yet to be concluded agreent. “I’m curious about how this thing works. Aren’t you?”
“No,” Cain said before he could catch himself. A brief expression of disgust flickering across his face as he glanced at the artifact. The man looked like he’d rather be in the sa room as a Plague Marina than with the artifact.
“Understandable,” I said with a smirk, then stood up with slow and asured movents so as to avoid spooking the soldiers and the goon duo behind Amberly, both of whom still had their plasma rifles aid at into firing. “And before you worry, I don’t intend to touch it, nor am I willing to let it touch and do whatever it ans to do to my own soul. I’m rely proposing we let it connect to a … test subject. To see what it does. It’d be informative, and I’d take it as a favour, which I’d be willing to return here and now.”
“I have two questions,” Amberly said, eying suspiciously as I took a few steps away from the table, backing up a little. “What use would we have of this favour? Second, where would you be getting your test subject? I am not letting you use one of my n and nor am I all that willing to let you just grab one of the locals.”
A bit surprised she didn’t tell to go eat a bolt of plasma in case of an answer — like I suspect 99% of Inquisitors would have responded to an alien telling them they’d like to test their dangerous artifact — it took a long second to answer.
“I was not intending to use neither your n, or the locals,” I said dryly. “On the note of favours, I could provide you with rejuvenation treatnts the likes of which you in the Imperium can only dream about. If you don’t want that for so reason, or don’t trust to not sneak in sothing you’d find distasteful, we can talk about what other services or goods you’d be interested in. Alternatively, I could give you a demonstration and you could have your pet Psyker check my work afterwards.”
Cain was looking increasingly weirded out by the direction I was taking our discussions in, but Amberly was now looking a mix of intrigued and wary.
“I think I’d like that demonstration,” she said, settling into her chair and waving the two n behind her to lower their guns. It was just a gesture, since the ones outside still had their much larger guns pointed at , but I took it as the sign of goodwill that it was and gave her a polite smile. “But I’d like to know what exactly you’re intending to do, so we can cross check afterwards.”
“I can do just about anything with organic material,” I said, tapping my chin as if in thought. “But I was thinking along the lines of returning people you chose to their physical pris, removing genetic defects that’d make them more likely to contact incurable diseases and infusing them with so life-force. The last of which would allow them to stay in their pri state I’d returned them to for a long ti, the extent of which would be determined by how much energy I infuse into them, and how much of that energy would be used up prematurely to heal wounds or various illnesses.”
A few seconds of dubious silence followed that, with Amberly being the first to digest my answer and manage a response. A follow-up question, at that: “How long would that life extension be?”
“Depends on how much I’m willing to make it,” I said. “Really, I could make it upwards of four millennia, but afterwards your genetics would start to unravel as your cells’ mories weaken. Not that I’m willing to even extend one of your lives that long for a favour this small. I’m willing to give you a single millennia, spread across as many people as you want and no more. Healing soone up to tiptop shape would reduce that by a century per person.”
Extending their lives beyond four millennia was possible, of course, but that’d involve more in-depth changes. I’d have to make them new organs that’d remake all of their cells every five years and reinforced them every ti they did. I had so templates that could work with so modifications too, but I wasn’t willing to go that far here and for them, and nor did I think they’d be willing to let put so strange new organ into them.
Even if one of those templates I could use ca from the standard Space Marines.
“And you would be willing to demonstrate that capability?” Amberly asked. “And let my Psyker double check it?”
“Only the healing part of course,” I said. “I don’t want to sit here for the next hundred years just so you can make sure the recipient really stopped aging. Nor do I think it would be a good use of your ti, for that matter.”
“Right,” Amberly said with an awkward look, looking slightly sheepish before she recollected herself. “Then let’s do that before anything else.”
“Sure.” I shrugged. “Who do you want to do? I take it you won’t be taking the role of the test subject. Soooo … maybe him?”
I gestured towards Cain with my chin, then turned my gaze on the two n standing at her shoulders.
“Or maybe one of them?” I asked with a lazy tone, having to hold back a giggle at the absolute revulsion and horror washing over the latter two. “I could also do your Blank … Jurgen, was it? Removing all the dozens of skin diseases he has and de-aging him would be doable, and I might as well add in a minor modification for free to make his sweat sll like roses.”
For whatever reason, Amberly didn’t think to entertain my suggestions and instead called out to soone by the na ‘Sebastian’, who lumbered in through the flap of the tent a few tense seconds later.
“Him,” Amberly said, turning her intense blue eyes on . “Should be pretty visible and obvious whether you can truly do what you claim.”
“True enough,” I said, eying the newcor. Then repeated in a murmur as I ran my gaze over him, “True enough.”
Sebastian was an old man with dark gray hair and where his skin lacked wrinkles, it sported scars of cuts and burns. He also had a biochanical eye and a fully chanical right hand from the elbow down.
True enough, even a blind man would be able to tell whether I could really heal and de-age soone with old Sebastian as my patient.
Well, challenge accepted. I thought, a slow grin forming on my lips. Not that this will be much of one. Should be easy enough.
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