Pieces of Me (SI, Mass-X-Over, RFC, Warning: Rated Hard-R)
08-05-2018, 04:43 AM (This post was last modified: 08-05-2018, 07:06 AM by MarshalGraves.)
08-05-2018, 04:43 AM (This post was last modified: 08-05-2018, 07:06 AM by MarshalGraves.)
Hello, all. I'm crossposting this from Sufficient Velocity (and SpaceBattles, and Fimfiction). In part, because I want opinions and whatnot on the whole shebang, because I really, really want to write keep writing this.
On the other, I must shamefully admit that I'm also hoping to get some exposure for my gofundme. The link is in my sig, right now, but if you're feeling lazy, I'll include it at the bottom of this post.
To make a long story short, at the beginning of this year (Feb 13th, to be precise), my ex-fiance decided to put the 'ex' in front of her descriptor and cheated on me before she let me know we weren't together anymore. I got kicked out of our shared home, given four hours to get out, packed my stuff, crashed on a couch for a couple of months, moved back into my old place, and that's where this story picks up. This story was an effort to exorcise those demons in a constructive, or at least non-destructive, way.
Unfortunately, barely a few months passed before I was in a hit-and-run accident. The gofundme updates have all the information, if you want to read a blow-by-blow, but the long and short of it is this. My neck and shoulder were fucked up, my car is jacked up, the other guy's company declined responsibility using a technicality, my own company is giving me the runaround, and I'm due in for some significant pain in the next few days, all while the only income I have available to me due to my injury is the gofundme campaign. I did try to start one on SpaceBattles' forums, but the mods took it down and asked me not to post it again, and if I wanted to advertise for it, I'd have to run through Staff Comm. They have more important crap to do than worry about a down-on-his-luck hack like me, so...here we are.
Besides, the demons are coming back, and I need to pick up writing this, or figure something else out if this is crap. So, for now, let us explore the....
Look in the mirror.
Have you ever wondered if that mirror was more than just paint on glass? Have you ever wondered if it might be a whole world, and you were just looking into a window? Or maybe you are the image, and the mirror is showing you the real person, staring back at you, into your little pocket of unreality?
Have you ever wondered what happens if you break that mirror? Go ahead. Shatter it into a thousand tiny sparkles. Some of them are bloody, maybe, some of them are empty. Some of them cloud up. All of them are still mirrors, though, still reflecting you from a thousand different angles. Broken, jagged, sharp angles reflect you and the destruction around you. A thousand broken, jagged, sharp worlds, all of which you now inhabit.
Have you ever wondered about that?
I was human, once, a long, long time ago. I can barely remember it. Well, I can barely remember most of it. Some of it sticks pretty good in the mind, mostly the bad times. I remember how it ended especially well.
Her name was Callie. I loved her. I loved her with all my heart. I gave her my love, my loyalty, my everything. She asked me to change. I changed. She told me to put away my games, put away my cartoons, put away my fanfiction. I put away the things that made me 'me'. I was hers, mind, body, soul. I was hers for eleven months.
The day before Valentine's Day. Mardi Gras in my hometown. I got home late, early in the morning, from Lundi Gras. I was working as a rideshare driver, making money for her, and I came home a little late. She was asleep. Her phone beeped. A text message summary appeared on her screen, from someone named 'Mark', talking about how they couldn't wait to see her again. My heart started to freeze.
I resolved to talk it out with her. I got into bed, and made myself ready to sleep. She was a cuddler, and clung to me like an octopus. My heart thawed just a bit. I woke up at noon, got up and took a shower. Her mother must have called her, because I was just getting dressed when Callie came home.
It was all my fault. I was disrespectful. I was lazy. I dismissed her children. I didn't listen to her. It was all in one ear, out the other. I was always on my computer. We're through. We're done. I have to leave before eight o'clock, but my stuff can stay.
My mind was whirling. When had I disrespected anyone? How was I lazy, I was never home, always working. I spent what little time I was allowed at home teaching her son and daughter, watching cartoons with them, or being a jungle gym. I always listened to her, even when she was glued to Facebook on her phone and kept starting sentences and expecting me to know what was going on. My computer had been collecting dust for weeks at a time. Why? Why are we through? Oh, hell no, you are not kicking me out but keeping my stuff!
My heart froze again.
I hadn't even been pulled out of the driveway for five seconds when another guy, this one in a big truck, pulled up and took my place. I suddenly realized why I could not stay, but my stuff had been allowed to. She had replaced me.
My heart shattered like that mirror.
I spent almost a month on my best friend's sofa before he got tired of me. My cousin was murdered by her own son. My other best friend withdrew into himself when his dog had to be put down. One by one, the ties of my life unknotted themselves and fell to the ground like so many tears.
It took a little doing, but I eventually got myself a place. My old place, actually. It was a moth-eaten room in a rundown house in a shitty part of town that I paid way too much for. I had left it to be with Callie. She had abandoned me and put me back in that too-small, too-heartbreaking hell. I had no friends. I had no love. I only had a job and too much pain behind me.
I lasted a week. I lasted one week of looking into the mirror and wondering what had happened to me. I lasted one week of wondering what world I had ended up in, what world had stolen me from myself, one week of wondering if I was even the real 'me', or if I had ever been, before I broke my mirror into a thousand tiny, glittering pieces with my car's exhaust pipe, a length of duct, and some weatherproof tape.
I do not know how they found me, or if they even did. I did not have some great vision bestowed upon me at the end. I did not see them find my body and cry over it. I did not see my own funeral. There was no grand epiphany, no light at the end of the tunnel.
I could not see anything. I had broken my mirror.
I could tell you that death is unpleasant. I could tell you that it was the single-most enlightening experience of my life. I could write you chapter and verse about death, how it felt to finally be home, somewhere I belonged.
I could, but I am disinclined to lie, and anything of that nature would be a bald-faced fabrication. I do not know how death feels, apart from the sensation of my esophagus desperately struggling to draw in oxygen in a car filled with tainted ‘air’ as I slowly, but surely, passed out.
There was a brief feeling of falling, of weightlessness, and then of something within me shattering into a thousand jagged shards. After that feeling...there was more weightlessness, and then, curiously enough, gravity had a hold of me again. There was a heartbeat above me, and everything sounded as though I had been submerged in fluid.
It was at that moment that I realized I had absolutely zero control over anything, but I could feel. I could feel everything. From the top of my bald, fluid-soaked cranium to the tip of my skinny, curled-up little tail. From the stubby little fingers to the equally-stubby little toes at the ends of my digitigrade legs. From the tiny, pink nose at the tip of my muzzle to the umbilical stuck in my….
Wait. TAIL?!
As I said, I could not tell you what death feels like, as I was not there to experience it. I had been absconded from my world, from my body, and placed elsewhere.
I can, however, tell you in excruciating detail, and I will not lie, it was actually quite excruciating, how it feels to be born.
Unfortunately, I cannot tell you any detail beyond ‘pain’, ‘more pain’, ‘oh God, something is suffocating me’, ‘why does it hurt so much’ ‘holy crap, my ass is suddenly very, very sore’, and ‘annnnd now my throat is sore, too’. I was deafening myself with my own screaming, which I will admit, sounded quite like that of a baby.
I was disoriented, all but blind as I could not open my Light-bedeviled eyes, freezing cold, and sore in places I had not known one could be sore in. All in all, I am relatively certain that all went according to Nature’s ways and wants, given that I felt like every baby I have ever seen (all two of them) born.
Well, except that I could still feel my tail.
I find that, in this moment, I am quite forced to skip what was, at least to me, a highly-riveting period of time. My infancy, for that is, indeed, what it was, was spent as an adult mind in an infant’s body. I am quite certain that I went insane as a defence mechanism to prevent myself from going insane, if that makes any sense. You see, I was helpless. Utterly and completely unable to do anything at all, I was forced to wait for my musculature, my skeleton, even my own brain to solidify into something usable. I also spent quite a bit of time trying to sharpen my senses, which seemed to have only three modes at that age: abhorrently absent or excruciatingly enhanced at either extreme, with a tiny little smidge on the dial that liked to bounce around randomly anywhere from ‘1’ to ‘11’ that I labelled ‘acceptable’.
My body was weak. My skeleton was soft. I had features that I knew, without a doubt, did not belong on a human being. Was I a mutant? Was I even still human? If not, what was I? If so, where was I? Had I actually succeeded in killing myself? Was this the afterlife? What was that thing in my mouth? Ooh, that tastes almost like mil….
Thaaaaaaat was about the time my mind broke.
So, we catch up to when I was about two years old, at least by my reckoning. I could toddle about fairly well, especially with my tail, by now, and I was dealing with a very sharp pain at the base of that very same tail.
Not like that, you ninnies, my body had apparently gone and earned me a spanking whilst I was dancing with the butterflies for the sake of my sanity.
I was wearing a cloth diaper, and toddling about in a quadruplet of thin, off-woolen ‘socks’. And yes, I was ‘toddling’ about on all fours. I was in a smoky, hazy room, with stone walls, like, actually stone, uneven lumps of roughly-squared chunks of Light-bedamned pumice stone walls, with a fireplace at one side of the roundish walls, a simple cot opposite the door. A pot hung above the fire in the fireplace, and was filled with a slightly-bubbling, off-red thick gunk I could only describe as ‘really, really hot paste’. It smelled like capsaicin and anger, and looked like it would feel half as nice to the touch. The less said about how it looked like it tasted, the better.
There were hides strewn about the walls, two of them hanging from hooks in the wooden-cross-beams-with-thatch-covering ‘ceiling’. There was a form behind those hides...no, wait, there were two forms. Horizontal. On the cot. And one of them was moaning breathily.
It is sad that I can state, with one-hundred percent certainty, that I can tell the difference between a moan of pleasure given for real, and one given in a Light-benighted porno. And Little Miss ‘I-Have-Sex-With-A-Child-In-The-Room’ was doing her throaty, breathy best to try and upstage Jenna Jameson to steal the Oscar for ‘Best Fake Acting Ever’.
I almost lost my sanity again, right then and there.
Instead, though, I decided that I was quite done with that sort of crap, and I high-tailed it out of there. Which, interestingly enough, involved my tail being quite low, more in line with my spine and less perpendicular. Anyway, quite right, I ran out of the room, through another that was quite like it, only larger and with a small basket that was lined with a bare minimum of cushion, and slammed my skull right into a thick oaken door straight across from what I now realized was Little Miss Porn Star’s bedroom.
It was filled with more hides, lots of jars, a great many plants, actual rugs covering what my dainty little pawpads, yes, I had those too, were telling me was a dirt floor through the patchy holes in my ‘socks’, and, of course, that basket.
I will skip a lot of pathos here, because I was repeatedly drawn to that basket and did not know why until that night. That basket was mine. It was my bed.
Back in the relative ‘now’, however, my skull was reeling from its recent abuse, my ears kept twitching to face behind me at the sound of yet another rendition of ‘Girls Gone Wild: Spring Break’, complete with actual fucking yips. My tail was swaying in the rug as my forepaws sprang up to massage my poor abused skull, and then my claws went and made it worse by getting tangled up in my filthy, stringy, and utterly smelly blond hair.
I believe that is the moment I came to a horrid thought, and believed myself to be Porny McActress’ pet. I had a long, skinny tail, I was covered in dark, almost charcoal-coloured fur, and I had paws with claws that even now were extending into my already-abused scalp. Then I remembered the blond hair, and the diaper, and had an even more horrifying realization.
I was a furry. And I was a neglected child.
I was right. My logic was utterly abysmal, based solely on the fact that I absolutely stank of unwashed baby and was left to my own devices in a closed ‘cottage’ (that is being very damned generous for what amounted to a slightly-upgraded hut, if I am honest) with an open bedroom door and a basket that smelled like nothing I could describe as anything other than ‘me’.
On a completely unrelated note, cat senses suck so hard to get used to when you have no frame of reference.
As I said, when I realized I was in a feudal village, in the healer’s cottage, after another couple of hours of nursing my poor, almost-certainly-traumatized skull (what? I am quite attached to it, you know.) and exploring my extremely-limited and horrifyingly-stale-smelling environs, I realized I had rolled quite low on my ‘Logic’ test.
It was, indeed, a couple of hours later. I had decided to curl up in my basket and flop onto my back, legs splayed like I was a lazy cat who had no time for anything but tummy-rubs and pain when Breathy Mcfakemoans walked into what I had mentally labelled ‘the main room’, wearing an off-brown ‘tunic’ that resembled nothing so much as a shapeless sack under an actually-nice and well-attended white robe. I looked up at her, and my heart froze once more.
I recognized her. And no, I do not mean from memories that did not exist, created during a time when memories were extremely unlikely, if not outright impossible, to be created in an infant brain. No, I recognized her from my previous life, and this, I knew, was a dead-certain impossibility.
She was on the tall side of average for her genus, as I call them. Perky, triangular ears atop a lupine skull, covered in snow-white fur over most of her body, but her back and the top of her head were a riot of darker fur capped with actual black hair. Sharp, angry green eyes glancing at me once, in what I instantly knew with my adult reasoning to be pure, unadulterated hatred. She was a wolf. Worse, she was a wolf of the Valmorian mountains, as well as a disgraced citizen of Valmar’s one and only monastic village, Othrace.
Her name was Aislygn Balmung, and she was a character I had created for an original fiction that I had never published, never even written. She was a character from a story in my head.
After a quick glance down at myself, from my burlap diaper to my stringy, filthy blond hair and my feline paws and tail, I also knew, without a doubt that the bitch was my mother.
At least, in that moment, I had one comforting thought, scant though it was. I knew my name.
Oh, right, let me introduce myself. My name is Johnathan James Graves, though, at the time in question, my name was Johnathan James Aehric Alessandro Cayenne Domar Lecarde Balmung.
….Yes. Go ahead and laugh. I hate myself and my new body’s grandmother for that one. There was something about names of honour, and living up to their heroic legacy, and good omens and all that jazz.
At the time, though, I broke again.
What? You try finding out you have literally been reborn into the body of an original character you fucking invented while you are physically just a toddler, then realize you have condemned yourself to eight fucking years of systematic neglect, abuse, and pain, only to then realize you know what is going to happen to you when you are nine years old, and it is all your. Fucking. Fault. and try to keep your sanity from slipping down the self-defence drain!
The interaction between body and soul is a curious thing. The soul is necessary for the body to operate, this is true. At least, in my belief, and, hey, in my experience, too, because I sure as hell was not in what I had spent over thirty years calling ‘my body’ anymore!
I am sorry, I just...this was an extremely stressful time for me, and even now, looking back on it...no, yeah, fuck that noise. Fuck it like it’s a prison bitch sharing a cell with a very large Shire stallion with glandular disorders, and they are all, stallion and disorders alike, named ‘Bubba’.
Anyway, my soul was present, so my body operated fairly normally. Breathing, movement, instinct. My body, however, was that of a fucking toddler, so I had...let’s be polite and call them ‘problems’. My body and soul were disparate, yet unified entities, each affecting the other. I was an adult soul, so my infant body was remarkably easier to get under control than is reasonable for a toddler so young. On the other paw, my body was giving me urges I cannot ever remember having, and my underdeveloped brain, while capable of creating memories at this point, was still an underdeveloped brain constantly being affected by slow-acting growth hormones common in children.
At least, that is what I am going to blame everything that happened to me when I was nine years old on, so there.
Right, let me backup and explain a little bit to you. I told you that Aislygn and Johnathan are original characters of mine, and the revelation that suddenly they were fucking real broke my mind, right? Well, that was a bit off. You see, they were characters I had made, yes, but fictional entities suddenly becoming real? That is not enough to break my brain. I have long been a believer of string theory, mirror universe theory, and quantum dissonance theory. All fiction is fact, somewhere, and all fact is fiction somewhere.
What broke my Light-benoosed mind was that I had written a character whose childhood was so broken and bereft of anything resembling love, at the hands of a character who was so beyond redemption it wasn’t even fit to be gallows-humour, and that I was living as the abused child in the situation.
You see, Johnathan Too-Many-Names-Shut-Up-Already Balmung was born in Othrace to Aislygn Balmung, the village healer and daughter of the monastery’s High Prophetess. Othrace is a village of wolfen, lupine furries who live a simple life that could quite easily be mistaken for a positively medieval society, and they do so by choice. Friends that I had brainstormed with to create the world of Cor, the planet I was situated upon, jokingly called the Valmorian mountain range ‘the Scottish Amish Puppy Mountains’.
There are many nations on Cor, all of which have their own culture, their own flair, their own social mores. The important bit comes in with the nation of Corenna, an extremelyspartan, militaristic nation with a tradition of nonviolence. Wait a moment, it will make sense in a second.
Corenna is the single-largest country on one of the world’s ten continental masses. It became so large by being invaded, repelling the invaders, and defeating them so handily the aggressor nation had to be subsumed just to remain capable of feeding itself. For three thousand years, they bespoke peace, love, and unity, and then beat the ever-loving shit out of anyone who tried to tell them to shut up with more than words.
One such nation, Venezia, was rather sulky about being defeated, so they decided to try and revolt about fifty years after their capitulation. It went about as well as you might expect, but the important thing to note here is one of the families involved in the revolt.
The family in question is that of Armando Lecarde.
Corenna has a rather simple culture, which ends up seeming extremely complex in its simplicity. Okay, I’m fucking with you, Corenna’s a goddamned mire of laws and bullshit I am half-convinced I came up with when I was drunk, but anyway, one of their laws is ‘Selective Service Citizenship’. You sign up to serve your country, you become a citizen. Citizenship grants rights that vassals, the lower class of Corenna, are denied. Vassals are allowedto live, eat, and work. Corenna prides itself on being able to feed every one of its vassals. Citizens, though? They get to own shit. Citizens can own property, can work civil service jobs, they are allowed travel rights outside of Corenna’s Protectorate Treaties. Vassals? Nope. They live and work land that Citizens fucking own. It’s not slavery, but holy shit, it’s Dark Ages. The only saving grace the Vassals have is that Corenna is progressive as fuck.
Another law, which is important in this case, is the Expansion of Citizenship Rights for Meritorious or Devoted Service. Which is a fuckton of legalese way of saying, if you’re a good enough soldier, you’re not the only one who gets citizenship. You can assign citizenship up or down a number of generations equal to your ‘Expansion of Citizenship Rights’, meaning if you were selected for ‘one generation of expansion’, your siblings automatically become citizens, and you can bring in your parents or your children. Two generations, up or down to your grandparents and grandchildren, and so on.
Why is this important? Because the families of Venezia fucked up and rebelled. If merit earns you citizenship, what do you think criminal behavior gets you?
You lose your citizenship. Worse, if the crime is bad enough, you don’t just damn yourself to Vassalage (and prison, you don’t escape an eight-by-eight cell, either). You damn generations of your family.
So, the Lecardes conspired to commit treason. The eldest generation (out of two) had committed the crime, and a five-generation penalty was imposed upon the line. Atrezia Lecarde, the oldest son of Armando Lecarde, immediately challenged his father’s capability as the head of the family, and turned him in. For this, they were allowed to keep their family estate, though they could not stay in it, for the five generations, with the caveat that the sixth generation would fulfill their restored ability to join the military of Corenna.
Oh, right, forgot to mention that. If you lose generational citizenship, and the crime is bad enough, those generations are not allowed to join the military to restore their citizenship. It is a harsh fucking ban.
So, in comes James Montoya Lecarde, son of Loric, son of Arron, son of Louisa, daughter of Ezio, son of Tulio, son of Atrezia Lecarde. After the Second Fall of Venezia, the Lecarde family became very, very big on honour.
James signed up for the Corenna Armed Forces on his fifteenth birthday, the youngest you were allowed to enlist without parental permission. By the time he was twenty-five, he was a Captain, highly-decorated, and he had earned three generations of Citizenship that he immediately forsook for himself and granted from his father all the way up to his great-grandfather.
He also served during the Third Fall of Venezia, yeah, they just could not fucking learn, and was wounded in action, nearly killed, rescuing the kidnapped heir to the throne, then-Prince Reginald Leonidas, from another formerly-noble Venezian House, the Mountebanks.
Prince Reginald, then the Hereditary Marshal of the Nation of Corenna’s Armed Forces, returned home to his sick father, who had presided over the entirety of the war in ill-health, and assumed the throne, appointing his rescuer and now-friend, James Lecarde, as his new Non-Hereditary Marshal.
James is still the second-youngest Non-Hereditary Marshal, the highest non-royal military rank possible, on the books.
So, the Venezian war dies down, Reginald marries, and has a baby girl named Evelyn that James just -dotes- on. He adores her so much that he declares war when he finds a pale, skinny, furless ape in her chambers, making arcane gestures above her crib.
The ‘ape invader’ was an elf. So, James declared war on the elves, and good old Regger backed him up, despite neither knowing of the actual nature of the ‘attack’. Hell, even I don’t know, and I wrote it. Anyway, their millenia-old tradition of not being the aggressor shaky, but presumably intact, they went to war. The Elven nation was, unfortunately, across a mountain range, a desert, and then an ocean, so they had to fly out...yeah.
Long story short, the Marshal’s transport was shot down over the Valmorian Mountain Range. Aislygn found James Lecarde. Did I mention James Lecarde, and the Lecarde family as a whole, are panther furries? James, himself, was a melanistic tiger. A black panther.
Yeah, they boned. Well, more like Aislygn boned James when he was well enough.
Aislygn is….well, she’s a bitch. And a slut. She had ten boyfriends, all of them the ‘wealthier’ nobility of the fairly-large village that I will continue to call a village despite it being more like a city, shut up. Anyway, she was a gold digger. She saw James Lecarde’s rank tabs, and had to get her some wealthy Marine lovin’.
Every single citizen of Othrace is lupine. Aislygn never used protection. Never. So all ten of her noble boyfriends thought the pregnancy was theirs. Johnathan was born feline. Aislygn’s cushy life of sex-and-leisure disappeared when ten boyfriends realized they were not, in fact, her only one. Kinda hard to have a feline baby when the only thing around is lupines. Oh, wait, there was that feline Army guy….yeah, you know where this is going.
Aislygn blamed Johnathan. The boyfriends, all of whom had clout in the city council, blamed Johnathan and Aislygn. Are we caught up with reality? Do you see where this is going?
Right, moving along. Where was I? Oh, right. Soul and body. My soul was adult, and managed to get me moving along at a slightly faster developmental pace, which, by the way, is actually pretty painful. Turns out we grow at our own rates because that is what is healthiest for our tiny, baby bodies! I cannot tell you the number of times I twisted my ankle or pulled a muscle. And no, before you ask, you do not ever want to pull a muscle in your tail.
On the other paw, I was a toddler who lived in a cit-village that actually hated me. I mean, we are talking Jinchuuriki levels of hate. And worse, I had a mother who hated me just as much. My poor little brain needed love.
More than the sparse encouragements my grandmother gave, anyway. She was the High Prophetess, she was busy, and she absolutely did not want to display favoritism or disfavor, because absolute power blah blah blah. Honestly, when I wrote her, the Hiruzen-like moral schtick made sense, but now that I was living her grandson’s life, I could not help but hate the bitch juuuuuusssssst a little bit. Also myself, for fucking writing her that way.
Yes, by this point, I was flat-out tripping balls insane, by the way. I was in a fictional character’s body, living his fictional character abused childhood, after killing my nonfictional body with a nonfictional dose of nonfictional carbon monoxide. And learning fictional furry martial arts from fictional furries I nonfictionally invented when I was nonfictional.
Oh, right, I forgot to mention that. Have you ever seen or heard of an abused partner remaining with their abuser? I am absolutely certain you have. Abused children defending their abusive parents’ actions? Yes. Do you know why?
It’s not love. It’s a need for love. That’s the sick, twisted thing about abuse. An abuser almost always knows this, seemingly instinctively. They can cow their family, their targets, with violence, and make them grateful for it with carefully-doled out words of endearment, or maybe even the occasional hug.
I got no hugs. I wanted love, damnit. I wanted my fucking mommy to love me. So I did what almost every abused child ever does. I went and made myself a better son.
When I was six, I enrolled in my grandmother’s temple to learn how to become a monk. In two years, I was capable of fighting with every single one of my limbs except my tail restricted. By the time I was eight, I had mastered the Apprentice school of the art and was flexible enough to start seriously wishing I was a Light-beshriven adult again.
When Aislygn was told, she beat me black and blue up and down the Temple’s plaza and mezzanine, including the stairs, with the Master school against my Apprentice school. She called me worthless.
I was worthless at the martial arts in her estimation? Well, then, I would do something better. So, I picked up magic.
I knew it was coming. I knew what was going to happen. I hated myself, I cried myself to sleep for a year and change over it. I tried to change it. I tried not to do it.
But damnit...after the life I had lived already, the life I had given up because nobody loved me, I was not going to give up hope that maybe someday, someway, someone here would.
Magic in Cor is unique, as far as I can tell, and as far as I tried to make it. Everyone has a magical center, a series of nodes and valves in their Ethereal Selves that allows them to channel mana. Mana, by nature, is always neutral. Aspected spells, such as those aligned with Elements or Ideals, are released through the Ethereal Nodes into spell matrixes that alter the mana’s alignment, converting it into usable Aether for spells.
Tee-ell-dee-arr, your soul draws in and generates water, which runs through soul-veins, and when you want to make shit different MTG colors, you hook it up to an adapter called a ‘spell matrix’. Which you cast by moving your hands and saying words and sometimes using material components shut up it’s what I came up with.
You do not try to alter your core. That shit stays neutral. Period. Bad Shit Happens if you fuck with magical cores. Have you ever seen Fullmetal Alchemist? This is the ‘Human Transmutation’ of Spell Matrices.
Othrace lacked a dedicated group of mages. They had a narcoleptic old wolf who had last cast a spell about thirty years before, and the Amish Puppies all still looked at him kinda funny for it.
So, like I had made Johnathan do when I wrote him, I stole all his books and studied them alone while I was recovering from getting my tail beat like a drum in the Journeyman school of Preying Wolf. When I was nine, the bitch caught me at my studies.
See, what I had intended to do was take up healing magic, to make her ‘job’ as a healer easier. I showed off a cauterization spell. Barely a tiny fireball, but it took a lot of refinement in a matrix that took a metric fuckton of mana to simultaneously focus the fire into a small, but hot enough form to direct over open wounds, as well as alter the neuter mana into Fire Aether.
She swatted my paws and called me ‘fucking useless’ while I was still weaving mana into Fire Aether. You do not fucking interrupt a spell matrix. That makes shit explode. Like, no, seriously.
So, quick question. How do you mitigate an explosion immediately before it happens? You deny it the catalyst. You take the gunpowder out of the dynamite, pull the nitro out of the glycerin. The catalyst in every single spell, all over Cor, is mana. Mana is gasoline for magic. I was channelling mana into the matrix, which, when disrupted, destabilized. So, I did the only thing I could do.
I channelled all of the pure mana, and with it, the Fire Aether into my Ethereal Self. My ‘magical core’.
Remember how I told you that you do not fuck with the magical core?
I fucked with my magical core.
The thing about mana is, like I said, it’s neutral. Neuter. Colorless. Unaspected, unaligned. It’s a glass of pure spring water.
Which I had proceeded to dump a fuckton of ‘red food coloring’ into. Have you ever tried to ‘uncolor’ dyed water? My Ethereal Self was lit on fire, and my right arm, which I had used to channel the Fire Aether into my core, was burning from the inside out.
It was three days of pain, burning, and fear. Three days in my grandmother’s temple, screaming my throat literally bloody, while watching the fire eat my right arm from the inside out.
I had known it would happen. I had always known it would happen. I had done this to Johnathan years and years and years before, when I first made him. I had seen it coming. And I did all I could to change it without changing it. Because I wanted someone to fucking love me.
I broke again. Another thousand shattering little motes of sparkly light crashed to the floor and ruined my reflection.
I gave up on love. I gave up on everything in Othrace. I gave up on granny and her fucking milquetoast ‘morals’ bullshit, I gave up on Aislygn and her slut-mongering gold-digging child-neglecting abuse. I gave up on James Lecarde, who I knew was not dead, but trapped in a cell in the Temple, still under Aislygn’s ‘care’, while she raped him over and over to produce another child, one she could use to claim generational rights in Corenna when she was old enough. I gave up on the little sister I knew, even then, was growing inside of her, who I knew would be called Jeannette Aslyana Balmung.
I just gave up. Nobody loved me. Nobody loved me in my old life. Nobody loved me in this life. Not even me. So, why bother hoping for love?
All it had ever done was hurt me.
Martial artists are hard-pressed to continue their lives with a limb missing. Mages have it even more rough, and worse, I was kind of super-crippled. See, I hadn’t just burned my arm off in a particularly-nasty way, I had permanently Aspected my magical core. Every single spell I would ever try to cast would be Fire-aligned, whether the matrix said it should be or not. And that is if the matrix managed to remain stable when its gasoline was already burning in the hose, so to speak.
There would also be the matter of the fucking pants-shittingly debilitating pyrophobia I had developed to contend with, as well.
Like I said, body and soul. In this case, my soul had known fire was bad since I was four years old as a human. Fire was bad, but controllable under the right conditions, right? Right.
My body, on the other hand? Fuck that noise. If there was so much as a lit candle within ten feet of me, I was about a mile away within a couple of minutes, if I didn’t freeze up so strongly as to literally lock my digitigrade knees so hard it took days for me to walk without needing to move on all threes afterward.
So, yeah. I was never casting magic again. Let me tell you, living in a world where literal goddamned magic is a thing, and being so terrified of your own, natural ability in magic that even humming a cantrip and snapping your fingers can make you pass out from fear and suffer night terrors for the next week to go along with the phantom sensation of your missing arm serving as the fuel in a magical bonfire? That fucking blows. It blows rancid, vomit-flavored diseased baboon spunk, and then it gargles with AIDS-afflicted skunk-with-a-necrotizing-fasciitis-of-the-anus diarrhea. And then it goes back for seconds.
Grandma could not help but see this about me. All of it. Missing limb, phobia, loss of balance, inability to do martial arts and magic...all of it. So, grandma finally did something decent by me and called on an old ‘friend’ of hers, who was actually her great-by-about-a-hundred-times grandfather, another character I invented.
His name is Agrias Saestas. Yes, I named him after a female Final Fantasy Tactics character, shut up, I made him when I was like, thirteen and thought Agrias Oaks was a dude. Go to Hell.
Agrias is the son of my first original character, a divine elf named Serenol Muirin. Serenol was cursed to turn into a werewolf, blah blah blah necromancer, blah blah blah kingdom, blah blah blah saved the day, blah, married, blah kids, blah died and went on to Godhood.
Nothing really interesting, really. Stop looking at me like that.
Anyway. Agrias and his brother, Seagryn, were born wolves to a pair of elves. Serenol died, their mommy was a bitch and dropped them off at the Valmorian monastery (which was full of elves at that point), and ran off to be a queen. She was later shanked in her sleep in a ladyboy whorehouse.
Agrias and Seagryn grew up humbly, but each learned an aspect of the Preying Wolf. Agrias took to the defensive style, Seagryn the offensive. Agrias, the younger sibling, was calm, quiet, and thoughtful. Seagryn was angry and pissy and a fucking diva. Agrias was named the heir, and would be named King. Seagryn murdered the head of the Temple, and Agrias was forced to put him down. Shit happened, Agrias lost an eye, more shit happened, love, new eye, life, yay, puppies.
Puppies which eventually moved into the Valmorian mountain village when the elves abandoned it because they were racist little sissies who didn’t want one of their holy sites being ‘desecrated’ by werewolf cooties. Fucking pansies. Yes, I know I wrote them that way. Shut up.
Anyway, Agrias is like, three thousand years old. How do you explain that? Well, in simple terms, he’s fucking Maui. He’s a demigod. Closer to ‘god’ than ‘demi’. He became a Cleric, himself, and one day found out he was powering his own prayers. So he studied medicine, and took the portfolio of Healing for himself. He then went on to spend three thousand years living amongst the vast populations around the planet. Except for the elves, he never really fit in with them. Or the dragons, because seriously, those fuckers were bigger than he is, and he is a Dire-blooded wolfen.
Oh, right. Agrias is twelve feet tall, in mortal form, and has not stopped growing since he was born. And he is a demigod Dire Wolf Cleric with 3000 years of XP gain behind him, and he does not fuck with the dragons of Cor.
Fast forward to ‘today’, relatively speaking, anyway.
So, Agrias came by to pick me up, and took me to his first home, the ruins of his father’s house from waaaaaaaay the fuck back when. He said he liked to keep it in shape for nostalgic reasons, and, okay, I’ll be honest, it was miles ahead of the bullshit ‘healer’s hut’ Mommy Dearest kept me in. And I got my own bed, too, no more kitty basket.
But what he called a ‘ruin’....fuck, Buckingham Palace would be a ‘hut’. I’ll put it that way.
So, he took me in, taught me medicine. Under his tutelage, I was a better healer than my own bitch of a puppy-farm in under two months. My arm still bothered me, though. So, he did what I knew he would, and offered to teach me what he called ‘the Wonder of Machines’. I called it ‘I am joining the Enterprise as Montgomery Scott, so suck it, Spock!’.
It took a bit of doing, what with me being a teenaged, one-armed, ground-bound never-be-a-fire-eater, but eventually, Agrias petitioned an old buddy of his, Voltan. Voltan, the God of Iron and Ingenuity, Master of the Forge and Fire. Voltan, whose appearance caused me to ‘spontaneously teleport’ twenty miles away.
Did I mention I was afraid of fire? Also, my legs were fucking sore.
So, yeah, it took a bit, but Voltan saw ‘my spark’, which I knew to mean my Ethereal Self, and proclaimed me ‘the best birthday gift anyone had ever given him’.
Gods have issues, man.
He gave me the most powerful blessing he could without me being his Son (yes, the capital letter is necessary), and that woke up my own body’s Divine blood through Agrias, diluted as it was, and….well….
Okay, fine. I was fucking high as a kite. I was tripping Ethereal God Balls. I was livin’ loose, and layin’ large. I was tripping the light fantastic, and spouting the Magical Technicolour Yawn. I was God-level Stone-face Blitzed. I had lived my life off of water, and gotten drunk off an entire brewery’s worth of the finest Dwarven Stout.
I still have no fucking clue how I did it, but when I woke up, I had an arm again. It was skeletal, absolutely basic as a prosthesis, and it was bolted to my ribcage and shoulder blade.
So, that happened. It was a whole thing. From that point on, I could See machinery. I could plan it. I could build it. I understood it. I knew it. I was its Master.
So I built a better arm. This one, I had to have Agrias help me install, because while I was Divinely Gifted in the realm of Mechanisms, I was...eh….at medicine. At least I was certainly skilled enough to know that you do not do an implant-removal-and-replacement, especially for something bolted to your skeleton (like, no, literally, I mean ‘bolted’) on your own damned self. This one was...okay, the new one was technically accurate to the canon of my own original fiction. Technically. If you squint at it hard enough.
See, the Divine Gift I had been given included a retroactive eidetic memory. I could remember almost everything my brain was capable of remembering. That included large chunks of what I instinctively ‘saved’ to my ‘hard drive’ before I ‘rebooted’.
This included Fullmetal Alchemist, shut up, sit, and rotate on the finger.
Fine. My new arm was an automail arm, complete with direct-nerve-stimulating connection. It was Ed’s arm. Tell me that any nerd given the Keys to Engineering and missing their fucking right arm wouldn’t do the same.
Fuck off, I was a nerd. I’m still a nerd. Just...not nerdy enough for what was going to come, eventually. Or at least, definitely nerdy enough, just not nerdy enough in the right direction.
Right, so, new arm. Installed that sucker, and Agrias and I spent weeks checking to make sure everything was working fine. It kinda sucked, though, do you have any idea how much it hurts to just grow when you have a mechanical monstrosity bolted to your own skeleton? It fucking hurts. It fucking hurts a lot!
Agrias kept training me in Preying Wolf, though he called his sub-style of it ‘Silent Sentinel’, which, admittedly, was all on him. I did not come up with that. I made it through the Journeyman school, and was busy expanding my knowledge of medicine and engineering at a breakneck pace. By the time I was thirteen, I had built my own rudimentary motorcycle. Admittedly, I had a lot of cheats, because Agrias was constantly hauling ore and materials into a foundry and smithy he had literally miracle’d up out of nowhere.
He taught me to make my own molds. He taught me how to break them. He taught me about metals, alloys, and chemical interactions. Most importantly, he taught me how to learn.
I know what you’re thinking. ‘But Johnathan, you died when you were thirty, and now you’re thirteen, so you have had forty-three years of learning experience’, yeah, bullshit.
Learning is more than retaining information. It’s more than critical thinking. It’s even more than practical application. Learning how to learn is learning how to organize, empathize, and theorize about and with new data as you receive it.
It’s like Naruto, who is amazing at instinctive learning and growth, but absolute and utter shit at theory and bookwork, is half of an equation, and Hermione Granger, who takes top marks in theory, but never manages to connect all of the information in her head to practical applications in any sort of reasonable time-frame, is the other half. Put them together, and what do you have?
...No, seriously, I don’t know. Ugh, fuck it, whatever.
So, I learned how to learn.
One thing Agrias never tried to teach me, though, was how to open myself back up. See, I appreciated all that he was doing for me. I liked learning, I loved engineering, I even liked medicine. But...I did not love him. I never asked him if he loved me. He was doting on me, yes, but...I could not love him. I never opened up that part of me to him. It certainly did not help that, in my mind, I kept calling him a fictional character that I had made up.
Looking back...I think that’s why he was always sad when he was around me. He knew he’d gotten to me too late. I had lost more than my arm. I had lost my love, my friends, my life, my species, my family, my hope...and then I had lost my magic, my arm, and my capacity for love.
I think...as broken as I was, I think that was what broke him.
He took me to a tombstone, lower down in the mountains, a few days before my fifteenth birthday. He gave me a single dog-tag on a chain, a thick, blue crystalline thing inscribed with my father’s name, date of birth, blood type, and serial number. There was a thick, sealed metal ‘chamber’ at the top of the tag, which I knew was a Corenna Marine Distress Signal. That detail, by the way? That’s important.
Agrias told me about James Lecarde, and told me that I was old enough to enlist, if I wanted to.
Johnathan would have cried. Johnathan does cry at that empty grave, in my story. But me….I just said that I was Johnathan James Graves, and I walked away.
Johnathan loved his daddy, and wanted to live up to his example.
I just wanted to get away from all the fucking wolves. So I turned and I left one behind, crying in front of an empty grave.
Corenna deals with foreign nationals joining their country in a pretty straightforward manner.
“Hello, Random Foreign National applying for entry into Corenna! Do you wish to become a citizen?”
“Fucking straight, I do!”
“Boot camp for you!”
I had to enlist, just to become more than an entry-level wage slave to some snooty asshat who thought his grain was the greener side of the fence. So, of course, I enlisted. I went from ‘Johnathan James Graves’ to ‘N-1 Serviceman Graves’ and got my tail shipped off to basic combat training.
Do you have any idea how fucking difficult it is to hide a mechanical arm under what amounts to a spandex sleeve made of dyed tree-rubber and your own fur sheddings?
Oh, right. One thing about the Corenna Armed Forces - disabilities are death. You lose a limb, you are immediately discharged from service with the full benefits of whatever rank you achieved counting towards your Citizenship Rights.
I was entering as an N-1, or ‘fucking noob’ for those keeping count, which meant I had fuck-all for rights. If I was discharged now, I would end up a K-1, or ‘Knave’, which was basically their version of a ‘conscientious objector’. Any rank, K, V, P, or N-1, is a non-Citizen.
I was not going to be a fucking wage-slave again. Fuck that noise.
So, boot camp happened. I hid my arm (with great fucking difficulty). And then I met her.
Sasha Norman. She was in charge of my training cadre. A fiery-hot, red-haired lioness who was as wild as a cold winter night is long. She was a party girl who believed that if she had not wrung every bit of fun and tease as she could out of any given day, the whole week was a fucking waste of time.
I knew I would meet her. I tried to stay off of her radar. It didn’t work.
You see, in my last life, I had...let’s call it ‘mustered out’ of the Army after BCT. Basic training was old hat, to me. I’d gone through it before. I knew all the tricks. Keep your head down, but not so low you’re sniffing dirt. Middle of the pack doesn’t end up on the rack. That sort of thing. It’s all about not getting noticed, right?
Well, she fucking noticed. For the second time in as many lives, I was a Cadet Commander of my own barracks. Fuck. My. Life.
She pushed me. I let her push me. I was not about to quit, not when failing could cost me my precious, precious not-a-wage-slave-life. She got close to me. She forced her way in.
By the end of boot camp, my teenaged love-starved hormone-addled brain had me half-convinced I was in love with her, even though I knew what and who she was.
Oh, right, backtrack, backtrack. Um...Sasha. Sasha was a lioness with bright blue eyes and rich dyed-whatever hair that she kept in whatever wild hairdo she felt like it at the time. It was normally what I think is called a side-hawk, where one side of her head is shaved bald and the rest is combed over the other side in a weird, spiky, jagged mess...whatever, I’ll just say, on Earth, in her civvies, she’d fit right on in as a pierced punk princess at a Green Day concert.
Emphasis on the ‘princess’.
The royal family have been lions for generations. Like, a whole bunch of them, I never bothered to chart it out. Anyway, there’s a tradition. Well, more like a law. Yes, another one. Anyway, you can’t legally be an heir to the throne unless you have served in the military. And I mean, no, seriously, you are not in line unless you put your life -on- the line.
So, punk princess Sasha? She kinda-sorta led a night life where she was actual-Princess Evelyn Leonidas, who was particularly famous for her long, lustrous, red hair. And Sasha? She likes to rainbow her hair, like, seriously, every colour ever. I’ve seen a fucking hex chart on her vanity. But before the big reveal that comes at the end of the Second Elfen War, she never, ever uses red.
I had zero chance. Like, ever. She’s Johnathan’s total besty, inseparable-from-the-hip and all that, but that’s the story. For me? Johnathan doesn’t have a crush, he is full-on devoted to her, mind, body, soul in love with her until he hits his early twenties.
Me? Well, she became my best friend. And no, neither Johnathan nor I would have -ever- stood a fucking chance, because we have wedding tackle incompatible with her wedding cake. Or, well, whatever the polite way of saying she prefers kitty carpets to kitty...um….
Lesbian, damnit, she’s a lesbian! Fuck!
So, Sasha Norman, my training cadre’s instructor, picked me up and made me be the best I fucking could be, and along the way, she made my ice-cold heart start beating again. I graduated Best of Class...or would have, if she and the Tee-Cee hadn’t discovered my prosthetic arm. It took a lot of sweet-talking (and the benefit of knowing the script) to keep my ass where I was, but they docked me. I graduated third in class.
Johnathan does, too, by the way. It’s a sore point, but he eventually finds out Sasha wanted him to graduate third, because that way, she’d pick him for her squad, which needed one more soul to qualify for action.
Johnathan? The way I made him, he’s a fucking genius of battle. He could take StarCraft and make all the South Korean Championship teams cry. Martial artist, sharpshooter, mechanical arm...total bastard to fuck with on the battlefield, but where he shines is Combat Monitor. He is the tactical soul of Ermine Squad. Pays for it by being a total social dunderhead. I mean, if D&D stats applied to real life, he made Charisma his dump stat, and then stole from it to give the points to other shit. Like...he’d be negative score, if you could.
Me? I...eh. I could maybe place 1000 out of 1000 if I tried really, really hard at StarCraft? I had martial arts and sharpshooting, I absofuckinglutely refuse to use magic for reasons I have already explained, and I had a metal arm. I had about as many social graces as the boy whose body I occupied, only mine were crippled where his were stillborn, and I had a chip on my shoulder, plus the rest of the bag, with a full selection of dipping sauces to boot.
Fuck, now I’m hungry.
Anyway, so, Ermine Squad. Made up of myself, as the point-mammal, front man, the anchor, whatever you want to call it. Sasha was our sniper, Vodka Friedkin, an adorably-short polar bear that hated vodka and adored giving rib-cracking hugs to me (and let’s not forget the super strength) was our heavy weapons and demo-bear, and William Edward Pryce Balmoral the Third, a stag with his nose so high up in the air he would have managed to bury it in Apollo’s ass at high noon if we were in Ancient Greece. Oh, and the ‘noble’ fuck that wanted, with all of his might, to fucking fly was our skirmisher and spotter.
Why, no, the little shit still has no idea why I would break out into giggle-fits whenever I called him ‘Wesley Wyndham-Pryce’, who, in case you are wondering, is the character that partially inspired him.
We did eventually separate his antlers from his ass, and he mellowed out once I made him a flight harness. You did not fuck with him after that. William was a fucking nightmare with his flight pack and shotgun.
Anyway, so, Ermine Squad. A four-soldier fireteam that was kitted out for long-haul action behind enemy lines, and that was us. The Second Elfen War was kicking into high gear, and we were rolling out as soon as I finished BCT.
….Yeah, I’m gonna skip a bunch of boring war crap and get to the next important bit. Fuck, man, I don’t want to remember all of this shit. I did things I’m not proud of, I watched people I fought side-by-side with do shit that still makes me want to puke. I am not reliving that shit when I have a fucking choice about it.
So, the long and short of it is, I spent three years in the trenches with the rest of Ermine. I earned a hell of a lot of scars in that time, and I remember the story behind each and every one of them. No, you have not, in fact, supplied me with enough alcohol to know about even a single one of them, fuck off, that’s personal.
I did not want to become friends with them. I just wanted to serve my time and get my papers. I did not want to be all that I could be. I did not want to be a role model. I did not want to eventually follow in my father’s footsteps and become the Marshal of the Corenna Armed Forces.
I was already a Marine, damnit, what more did they fucking want of me?
So, anyway, in those trenches, I found a lot of enemy tech. The elves are primarily magic users, and holy shit their magic is fucking phenomenal. Corenna mages mostly think practically with their spells. ‘I want to light shit on fire, so I make a spell that lights shit on fire.’ If it’s useless in a fight, or takes too long to get off in a fight, or...pretty much anything that means you might lose a fight? That shit’s useless.
Elves, on the other hand? They live and breathe magic. It is their bread and butter. Airships, artillery, fucking caster shells from motherfucking Outlaw Star and no I did not write them having that shit holy fuck.
Their magic was amazing. Their tech was...kinda meh, honestly, but they thought differently and had a different design philosophy, so I used what I could and cobbled together myself a little something that made me nerdgasm when it was done.
See, I was the point-man. That meant I was the firefight director, I called shots, and I made the enemy shoot at me instead of Sasha or William. So, I had a four-weapon loadout.
First was my CASA-130 Lex, my standard-issue sidearm, which I modified like hell into a transforming tonfa that fired .45M ACP. The modification was severe enough I eventually rebranded it the TMSA-145 Ebon Echo. Then, I modified my battle rifle, the CABR-131 into a caster-enabled .50HCBR that could also transform into a shield and a one-handed battlehammer I named the TMBR-1000 Sierra Staccato.
After a year in combat, Sasha found my dad’s dog-tag and realized I was the old Marshal’s kid. She gave me my dad’s old CASA-150 G. Lex, which I modified into transforming tonfa TMSA-150 Alpha Lucis, which fired .50HCACP. When I necked that fucker up, I kinda...well, all I’ll say is that I can only fire that loud bastard with my mechanical arm and leave it there, alright?
And last, but not least, was Reginald Leonidas’ own Corenna Royal Cavalry Pistol, a six-shot revolver that I modified to fire .60MCACP from its native .50HCACP. I call it the Kingsguard. ...I respect that gun too much to make it transform, though, even now. King Reginald deserves at least that much from me.
…..No, I am not a gun-nut. Put that flag away, you ass. I am not an alt-right hardcase, I just like my guns. Why? Because I took those weapons and made them badass. I believe I have a right to be justifiably proud of making the smallest caliber weapon out of the four I had need ammo that would make Dirty Harry weep with joy. This was my rifle, and these were my guns. There are not many (make that none) like them, and these ones were mine.
….Yes, I watched RWBY. Apparently, so did you. So shut up.
Anyway, so, yeah. There I am with at least three hand-cannons and the battle rifle from Hell, each capable of firing rounds that would fuck up heavy armor at a minimum, and when I’m not using my battle rifle, I’ve got a nifty little kite shield to let them plink off of. I needed Elfen tech to accomplish this.
I got into the habit of pillaging it. Yes, that’s important, haven’t you ever heard of Johnathan’s Gun? ...Fuck off, I am perfectly capable of pronouncing my vees, Chekov. No, I do not have any nuclear ‘wessels’.
Anyway, by the end of three years, I loved and trusted Sasha, William, and Vodka more than my cold, dead heart would ever want to admit. You kinda don’t really get a choice when someone whips off their shirt to keep a bullet hole in your thigh from bleeding out long enough to get your bullet-magnet ass to a M.A.S.H in relatively good nick. Especially when they didn’t have time to put a bra on before the firefight started.
…Just because I was a cold, selfish, heartless wreck of a former human being does not mean my junk has ever been in anything other than perfectly-working condition, and holy shitdoes Sasha have a great rack, or what? You have no idea how many times I cursed myself fucking stupid for writing a primo lady like that as a woman’s woman. Holy fucking hell, I mean, she’s a twenty-five out of ten on a bad day…
Oh. Sorry, um...where was I?
Right, so, anyway, there I am, at the end of three years, closer to three other beings than I ever was to my own family, in any timeline, and I realize I done fucked up. I woke up one morning, and my dad’s dog-tag was blinking.
I was eighteen, and James Lecarde was still a baby-factory for Bitches Claws and her little elf, my then-nine-year-old-sister, Jeannette, had been due to start sneaking in to find ‘her daddy’ soon. There was a whole storyline I had plotted out that basically ends up with Johnathan charging back to Valmar when that little light goes off.
The Distress Signal. It was quantum-entangled with the other dog-tag and a beacon back in Corenna’s Emergency Rescue Unit. The problem was, I had avoided a couple of missions that would have had me in the ERU due to a bad case of ‘bullets-to-the-vitals-itis’.
Well, at least I was healthy.
So, I told Sasha, and she called the FOB. At this point, she had been appointed Marshal, and assigned us to the ERU for the recovery mission. This was very, very bad, because Sasha being back at the Leonidas Estate while Johnathan was in the ERU was the only thing that saved Reginald’s life from an assassin. I told her to head back to the castle, that I had a ‘bad feeling’ (what I had been passing off my foreknowledge as), stole a mechachopper, and high-tailed it to Valmar. Which, again, oddly enough, was done with my ridiculously overlong tail being quite low to the ground.
….Relatively speaking, anyway.
Anyway, long story short, I made it back to Valmar, met my little sister, freed my very, very ill-health father, confronted my mother, and shit went so pear-shaped I understand why Ten (or is it Eleven, now, actually?) told Martha Jones not to do something stupid like eat one because he didn’t want to wake up in three months and taste that.
Aislygn had gone fucking nuts.
Remember how I said I had been gathering and hoarding Elfen tech? Well, I hadn’t exactly had time to offload my latest batch at the FOB before I woke up to a blinking QEC Distress Signal, so I’d fobbed it into the back of the mechachopper I stole.
I did not know it, but there was a grenade in the batch with a fucked up space-time enchantment on it. Aislygn had stolen it, pulled the pin, and grabbed her daughter, my little sister, and held it to her throat.
If I shoot her, Jeannie dies. If I don’t, Aislygn wins.
While I did not want Aislygn to win, by any stretch, fuck that noise. The bitch deserved season tickets to Hell for the next dozen eternities, if I had any say in the matter. On the other hand, though, I did not want Jeannie to die.
Jeannie was my favorite character in my own little world. I had written her as an awesome little sister for Johnathan. Yeah, I kind of wrote her to be that way to spite my own, bitchy-ass cunt of a little sister in my old life, but that did not change that Jeannie was genuinely an awesome little kitten.
Snow-white fur, absolutely pure snow-white fur, with a tuft of blonde hair she wore like Johnathan’s, pulled behind her head in a long, single braid. She was a curious, sweet, adorable little klutz whose ultimate dream was to be her beloved big brother’s assistant, and help him change the world with his mecha.
She would eventually become what I called his ‘pit boss’, acting simultaneously as an eye in the sky for his missions as well as his chief of staff and second-best mechanic in the company he would eventually create, Tombstone Mechanisms. She was amazing, and would eventually serve as the cornerstone of Johnathan’s sanity. She never felt anything but love for her big brother. She never felt anything but love, period. Well...love and pain. Her catchphrase was ‘Ouchie! Wait, I’m okay!’ for a reason.
She was a total sweetie, who would one day go on to develop a romance with, and marry, Evelyn Leonidas’ younger brother, James Leonidas, who would, in fact, go on to be King. She deserved all the best. She was, without a doubt, my favorite character.
I did not want her to die, even if I had utterly, completely, and totally fucked her destiny without the benefit of lube. I wasn’t that heartless.
So I did the intelligent thing, and I holstered my weapons and tried to negotiate with the crazy bitch that held her hostage.
I made it within ten feet before the rest of Ermine popped up from behind the mechachopper, guns aimed right at her head. She went crazy. I grabbed Jeannie with my tail and flung her sideways, towards Vodka, and did something so monumentally stupid I will never, ever be able to forget it.
The grenade fell, and Jeannie, Sasha, William, and Vodka were in range. The locking guard popped out, and I leapt onto the fucker, Fire Aether swirling around my flesh-and-blood arm as I grabbed it and hugged it to my chest.
At least I managed to draw Alpha Lucis and put a bullet in the crazy bitch’s head before the fucker went off.
The last thing I heard, as I stared forlornly at Ermine and my estranged family, was tinkling, like a thousand tiny shards of glass striking the mountain side.
And that would be the second time I died.
I expected the darkness. I expected death. I expected to hear a heartbeat, and to feel a loss of control as I floated in yet another fucking sack of amniotic fluid. I did not expect to feel pain, at least not that early. I did not expect to feel the weight of Alpha Lucis as I raised my still-mechanical right paw to my head. I did not expect to feel my other weapons situated where they belonged, in their holsters.
And no, I did not expect to wake up, face to face, with a fucking pastel-rainbow-haired, horned, and winged Night-bedamned pony right in my fucking face. I think I can be forgiven for what happened after that.
On the other, I must shamefully admit that I'm also hoping to get some exposure for my gofundme. The link is in my sig, right now, but if you're feeling lazy, I'll include it at the bottom of this post.
To make a long story short, at the beginning of this year (Feb 13th, to be precise), my ex-fiance decided to put the 'ex' in front of her descriptor and cheated on me before she let me know we weren't together anymore. I got kicked out of our shared home, given four hours to get out, packed my stuff, crashed on a couch for a couple of months, moved back into my old place, and that's where this story picks up. This story was an effort to exorcise those demons in a constructive, or at least non-destructive, way.
Unfortunately, barely a few months passed before I was in a hit-and-run accident. The gofundme updates have all the information, if you want to read a blow-by-blow, but the long and short of it is this. My neck and shoulder were fucked up, my car is jacked up, the other guy's company declined responsibility using a technicality, my own company is giving me the runaround, and I'm due in for some significant pain in the next few days, all while the only income I have available to me due to my injury is the gofundme campaign. I did try to start one on SpaceBattles' forums, but the mods took it down and asked me not to post it again, and if I wanted to advertise for it, I'd have to run through Staff Comm. They have more important crap to do than worry about a down-on-his-luck hack like me, so...here we are.
Besides, the demons are coming back, and I need to pick up writing this, or figure something else out if this is crap. So, for now, let us explore the....
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Tombstone Machinists Corporation
In Association With SpaceBattles Forums
Shamefully Presents
Pieces of Me
A MarshalGraves Production
Prologue: Breaking Apart, Coming Together
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Look in the mirror.
Have you ever wondered if that mirror was more than just paint on glass? Have you ever wondered if it might be a whole world, and you were just looking into a window? Or maybe you are the image, and the mirror is showing you the real person, staring back at you, into your little pocket of unreality?
Have you ever wondered what happens if you break that mirror? Go ahead. Shatter it into a thousand tiny sparkles. Some of them are bloody, maybe, some of them are empty. Some of them cloud up. All of them are still mirrors, though, still reflecting you from a thousand different angles. Broken, jagged, sharp angles reflect you and the destruction around you. A thousand broken, jagged, sharp worlds, all of which you now inhabit.
Have you ever wondered about that?
I was human, once, a long, long time ago. I can barely remember it. Well, I can barely remember most of it. Some of it sticks pretty good in the mind, mostly the bad times. I remember how it ended especially well.
Her name was Callie. I loved her. I loved her with all my heart. I gave her my love, my loyalty, my everything. She asked me to change. I changed. She told me to put away my games, put away my cartoons, put away my fanfiction. I put away the things that made me 'me'. I was hers, mind, body, soul. I was hers for eleven months.
The day before Valentine's Day. Mardi Gras in my hometown. I got home late, early in the morning, from Lundi Gras. I was working as a rideshare driver, making money for her, and I came home a little late. She was asleep. Her phone beeped. A text message summary appeared on her screen, from someone named 'Mark', talking about how they couldn't wait to see her again. My heart started to freeze.
I resolved to talk it out with her. I got into bed, and made myself ready to sleep. She was a cuddler, and clung to me like an octopus. My heart thawed just a bit. I woke up at noon, got up and took a shower. Her mother must have called her, because I was just getting dressed when Callie came home.
It was all my fault. I was disrespectful. I was lazy. I dismissed her children. I didn't listen to her. It was all in one ear, out the other. I was always on my computer. We're through. We're done. I have to leave before eight o'clock, but my stuff can stay.
My mind was whirling. When had I disrespected anyone? How was I lazy, I was never home, always working. I spent what little time I was allowed at home teaching her son and daughter, watching cartoons with them, or being a jungle gym. I always listened to her, even when she was glued to Facebook on her phone and kept starting sentences and expecting me to know what was going on. My computer had been collecting dust for weeks at a time. Why? Why are we through? Oh, hell no, you are not kicking me out but keeping my stuff!
My heart froze again.
I hadn't even been pulled out of the driveway for five seconds when another guy, this one in a big truck, pulled up and took my place. I suddenly realized why I could not stay, but my stuff had been allowed to. She had replaced me.
My heart shattered like that mirror.
I spent almost a month on my best friend's sofa before he got tired of me. My cousin was murdered by her own son. My other best friend withdrew into himself when his dog had to be put down. One by one, the ties of my life unknotted themselves and fell to the ground like so many tears.
It took a little doing, but I eventually got myself a place. My old place, actually. It was a moth-eaten room in a rundown house in a shitty part of town that I paid way too much for. I had left it to be with Callie. She had abandoned me and put me back in that too-small, too-heartbreaking hell. I had no friends. I had no love. I only had a job and too much pain behind me.
I lasted a week. I lasted one week of looking into the mirror and wondering what had happened to me. I lasted one week of wondering what world I had ended up in, what world had stolen me from myself, one week of wondering if I was even the real 'me', or if I had ever been, before I broke my mirror into a thousand tiny, glittering pieces with my car's exhaust pipe, a length of duct, and some weatherproof tape.
I do not know how they found me, or if they even did. I did not have some great vision bestowed upon me at the end. I did not see them find my body and cry over it. I did not see my own funeral. There was no grand epiphany, no light at the end of the tunnel.
I could not see anything. I had broken my mirror.
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I could tell you that death is unpleasant. I could tell you that it was the single-most enlightening experience of my life. I could write you chapter and verse about death, how it felt to finally be home, somewhere I belonged.
I could, but I am disinclined to lie, and anything of that nature would be a bald-faced fabrication. I do not know how death feels, apart from the sensation of my esophagus desperately struggling to draw in oxygen in a car filled with tainted ‘air’ as I slowly, but surely, passed out.
There was a brief feeling of falling, of weightlessness, and then of something within me shattering into a thousand jagged shards. After that feeling...there was more weightlessness, and then, curiously enough, gravity had a hold of me again. There was a heartbeat above me, and everything sounded as though I had been submerged in fluid.
It was at that moment that I realized I had absolutely zero control over anything, but I could feel. I could feel everything. From the top of my bald, fluid-soaked cranium to the tip of my skinny, curled-up little tail. From the stubby little fingers to the equally-stubby little toes at the ends of my digitigrade legs. From the tiny, pink nose at the tip of my muzzle to the umbilical stuck in my….
Wait. TAIL?!
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As I said, I could not tell you what death feels like, as I was not there to experience it. I had been absconded from my world, from my body, and placed elsewhere.
I can, however, tell you in excruciating detail, and I will not lie, it was actually quite excruciating, how it feels to be born.
Unfortunately, I cannot tell you any detail beyond ‘pain’, ‘more pain’, ‘oh God, something is suffocating me’, ‘why does it hurt so much’ ‘holy crap, my ass is suddenly very, very sore’, and ‘annnnd now my throat is sore, too’. I was deafening myself with my own screaming, which I will admit, sounded quite like that of a baby.
I was disoriented, all but blind as I could not open my Light-bedeviled eyes, freezing cold, and sore in places I had not known one could be sore in. All in all, I am relatively certain that all went according to Nature’s ways and wants, given that I felt like every baby I have ever seen (all two of them) born.
Well, except that I could still feel my tail.
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I find that, in this moment, I am quite forced to skip what was, at least to me, a highly-riveting period of time. My infancy, for that is, indeed, what it was, was spent as an adult mind in an infant’s body. I am quite certain that I went insane as a defence mechanism to prevent myself from going insane, if that makes any sense. You see, I was helpless. Utterly and completely unable to do anything at all, I was forced to wait for my musculature, my skeleton, even my own brain to solidify into something usable. I also spent quite a bit of time trying to sharpen my senses, which seemed to have only three modes at that age: abhorrently absent or excruciatingly enhanced at either extreme, with a tiny little smidge on the dial that liked to bounce around randomly anywhere from ‘1’ to ‘11’ that I labelled ‘acceptable’.
My body was weak. My skeleton was soft. I had features that I knew, without a doubt, did not belong on a human being. Was I a mutant? Was I even still human? If not, what was I? If so, where was I? Had I actually succeeded in killing myself? Was this the afterlife? What was that thing in my mouth? Ooh, that tastes almost like mil….
Thaaaaaaat was about the time my mind broke.
So, we catch up to when I was about two years old, at least by my reckoning. I could toddle about fairly well, especially with my tail, by now, and I was dealing with a very sharp pain at the base of that very same tail.
Not like that, you ninnies, my body had apparently gone and earned me a spanking whilst I was dancing with the butterflies for the sake of my sanity.
I was wearing a cloth diaper, and toddling about in a quadruplet of thin, off-woolen ‘socks’. And yes, I was ‘toddling’ about on all fours. I was in a smoky, hazy room, with stone walls, like, actually stone, uneven lumps of roughly-squared chunks of Light-bedamned pumice stone walls, with a fireplace at one side of the roundish walls, a simple cot opposite the door. A pot hung above the fire in the fireplace, and was filled with a slightly-bubbling, off-red thick gunk I could only describe as ‘really, really hot paste’. It smelled like capsaicin and anger, and looked like it would feel half as nice to the touch. The less said about how it looked like it tasted, the better.
There were hides strewn about the walls, two of them hanging from hooks in the wooden-cross-beams-with-thatch-covering ‘ceiling’. There was a form behind those hides...no, wait, there were two forms. Horizontal. On the cot. And one of them was moaning breathily.
It is sad that I can state, with one-hundred percent certainty, that I can tell the difference between a moan of pleasure given for real, and one given in a Light-benighted porno. And Little Miss ‘I-Have-Sex-With-A-Child-In-The-Room’ was doing her throaty, breathy best to try and upstage Jenna Jameson to steal the Oscar for ‘Best Fake Acting Ever’.
I almost lost my sanity again, right then and there.
Instead, though, I decided that I was quite done with that sort of crap, and I high-tailed it out of there. Which, interestingly enough, involved my tail being quite low, more in line with my spine and less perpendicular. Anyway, quite right, I ran out of the room, through another that was quite like it, only larger and with a small basket that was lined with a bare minimum of cushion, and slammed my skull right into a thick oaken door straight across from what I now realized was Little Miss Porn Star’s bedroom.
It was filled with more hides, lots of jars, a great many plants, actual rugs covering what my dainty little pawpads, yes, I had those too, were telling me was a dirt floor through the patchy holes in my ‘socks’, and, of course, that basket.
I will skip a lot of pathos here, because I was repeatedly drawn to that basket and did not know why until that night. That basket was mine. It was my bed.
Back in the relative ‘now’, however, my skull was reeling from its recent abuse, my ears kept twitching to face behind me at the sound of yet another rendition of ‘Girls Gone Wild: Spring Break’, complete with actual fucking yips. My tail was swaying in the rug as my forepaws sprang up to massage my poor abused skull, and then my claws went and made it worse by getting tangled up in my filthy, stringy, and utterly smelly blond hair.
I believe that is the moment I came to a horrid thought, and believed myself to be Porny McActress’ pet. I had a long, skinny tail, I was covered in dark, almost charcoal-coloured fur, and I had paws with claws that even now were extending into my already-abused scalp. Then I remembered the blond hair, and the diaper, and had an even more horrifying realization.
I was a furry. And I was a neglected child.
I was right. My logic was utterly abysmal, based solely on the fact that I absolutely stank of unwashed baby and was left to my own devices in a closed ‘cottage’ (that is being very damned generous for what amounted to a slightly-upgraded hut, if I am honest) with an open bedroom door and a basket that smelled like nothing I could describe as anything other than ‘me’.
On a completely unrelated note, cat senses suck so hard to get used to when you have no frame of reference.
As I said, when I realized I was in a feudal village, in the healer’s cottage, after another couple of hours of nursing my poor, almost-certainly-traumatized skull (what? I am quite attached to it, you know.) and exploring my extremely-limited and horrifyingly-stale-smelling environs, I realized I had rolled quite low on my ‘Logic’ test.
It was, indeed, a couple of hours later. I had decided to curl up in my basket and flop onto my back, legs splayed like I was a lazy cat who had no time for anything but tummy-rubs and pain when Breathy Mcfakemoans walked into what I had mentally labelled ‘the main room’, wearing an off-brown ‘tunic’ that resembled nothing so much as a shapeless sack under an actually-nice and well-attended white robe. I looked up at her, and my heart froze once more.
I recognized her. And no, I do not mean from memories that did not exist, created during a time when memories were extremely unlikely, if not outright impossible, to be created in an infant brain. No, I recognized her from my previous life, and this, I knew, was a dead-certain impossibility.
She was on the tall side of average for her genus, as I call them. Perky, triangular ears atop a lupine skull, covered in snow-white fur over most of her body, but her back and the top of her head were a riot of darker fur capped with actual black hair. Sharp, angry green eyes glancing at me once, in what I instantly knew with my adult reasoning to be pure, unadulterated hatred. She was a wolf. Worse, she was a wolf of the Valmorian mountains, as well as a disgraced citizen of Valmar’s one and only monastic village, Othrace.
Her name was Aislygn Balmung, and she was a character I had created for an original fiction that I had never published, never even written. She was a character from a story in my head.
After a quick glance down at myself, from my burlap diaper to my stringy, filthy blond hair and my feline paws and tail, I also knew, without a doubt that the bitch was my mother.
At least, in that moment, I had one comforting thought, scant though it was. I knew my name.
Oh, right, let me introduce myself. My name is Johnathan James Graves, though, at the time in question, my name was Johnathan James Aehric Alessandro Cayenne Domar Lecarde Balmung.
….Yes. Go ahead and laugh. I hate myself and my new body’s grandmother for that one. There was something about names of honour, and living up to their heroic legacy, and good omens and all that jazz.
At the time, though, I broke again.
What? You try finding out you have literally been reborn into the body of an original character you fucking invented while you are physically just a toddler, then realize you have condemned yourself to eight fucking years of systematic neglect, abuse, and pain, only to then realize you know what is going to happen to you when you are nine years old, and it is all your. Fucking. Fault. and try to keep your sanity from slipping down the self-defence drain!
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The interaction between body and soul is a curious thing. The soul is necessary for the body to operate, this is true. At least, in my belief, and, hey, in my experience, too, because I sure as hell was not in what I had spent over thirty years calling ‘my body’ anymore!
I am sorry, I just...this was an extremely stressful time for me, and even now, looking back on it...no, yeah, fuck that noise. Fuck it like it’s a prison bitch sharing a cell with a very large Shire stallion with glandular disorders, and they are all, stallion and disorders alike, named ‘Bubba’.
Anyway, my soul was present, so my body operated fairly normally. Breathing, movement, instinct. My body, however, was that of a fucking toddler, so I had...let’s be polite and call them ‘problems’. My body and soul were disparate, yet unified entities, each affecting the other. I was an adult soul, so my infant body was remarkably easier to get under control than is reasonable for a toddler so young. On the other paw, my body was giving me urges I cannot ever remember having, and my underdeveloped brain, while capable of creating memories at this point, was still an underdeveloped brain constantly being affected by slow-acting growth hormones common in children.
At least, that is what I am going to blame everything that happened to me when I was nine years old on, so there.
Right, let me backup and explain a little bit to you. I told you that Aislygn and Johnathan are original characters of mine, and the revelation that suddenly they were fucking real broke my mind, right? Well, that was a bit off. You see, they were characters I had made, yes, but fictional entities suddenly becoming real? That is not enough to break my brain. I have long been a believer of string theory, mirror universe theory, and quantum dissonance theory. All fiction is fact, somewhere, and all fact is fiction somewhere.
What broke my Light-benoosed mind was that I had written a character whose childhood was so broken and bereft of anything resembling love, at the hands of a character who was so beyond redemption it wasn’t even fit to be gallows-humour, and that I was living as the abused child in the situation.
You see, Johnathan Too-Many-Names-Shut-Up-Already Balmung was born in Othrace to Aislygn Balmung, the village healer and daughter of the monastery’s High Prophetess. Othrace is a village of wolfen, lupine furries who live a simple life that could quite easily be mistaken for a positively medieval society, and they do so by choice. Friends that I had brainstormed with to create the world of Cor, the planet I was situated upon, jokingly called the Valmorian mountain range ‘the Scottish Amish Puppy Mountains’.
There are many nations on Cor, all of which have their own culture, their own flair, their own social mores. The important bit comes in with the nation of Corenna, an extremelyspartan, militaristic nation with a tradition of nonviolence. Wait a moment, it will make sense in a second.
Corenna is the single-largest country on one of the world’s ten continental masses. It became so large by being invaded, repelling the invaders, and defeating them so handily the aggressor nation had to be subsumed just to remain capable of feeding itself. For three thousand years, they bespoke peace, love, and unity, and then beat the ever-loving shit out of anyone who tried to tell them to shut up with more than words.
One such nation, Venezia, was rather sulky about being defeated, so they decided to try and revolt about fifty years after their capitulation. It went about as well as you might expect, but the important thing to note here is one of the families involved in the revolt.
The family in question is that of Armando Lecarde.
Corenna has a rather simple culture, which ends up seeming extremely complex in its simplicity. Okay, I’m fucking with you, Corenna’s a goddamned mire of laws and bullshit I am half-convinced I came up with when I was drunk, but anyway, one of their laws is ‘Selective Service Citizenship’. You sign up to serve your country, you become a citizen. Citizenship grants rights that vassals, the lower class of Corenna, are denied. Vassals are allowedto live, eat, and work. Corenna prides itself on being able to feed every one of its vassals. Citizens, though? They get to own shit. Citizens can own property, can work civil service jobs, they are allowed travel rights outside of Corenna’s Protectorate Treaties. Vassals? Nope. They live and work land that Citizens fucking own. It’s not slavery, but holy shit, it’s Dark Ages. The only saving grace the Vassals have is that Corenna is progressive as fuck.
Another law, which is important in this case, is the Expansion of Citizenship Rights for Meritorious or Devoted Service. Which is a fuckton of legalese way of saying, if you’re a good enough soldier, you’re not the only one who gets citizenship. You can assign citizenship up or down a number of generations equal to your ‘Expansion of Citizenship Rights’, meaning if you were selected for ‘one generation of expansion’, your siblings automatically become citizens, and you can bring in your parents or your children. Two generations, up or down to your grandparents and grandchildren, and so on.
Why is this important? Because the families of Venezia fucked up and rebelled. If merit earns you citizenship, what do you think criminal behavior gets you?
You lose your citizenship. Worse, if the crime is bad enough, you don’t just damn yourself to Vassalage (and prison, you don’t escape an eight-by-eight cell, either). You damn generations of your family.
So, the Lecardes conspired to commit treason. The eldest generation (out of two) had committed the crime, and a five-generation penalty was imposed upon the line. Atrezia Lecarde, the oldest son of Armando Lecarde, immediately challenged his father’s capability as the head of the family, and turned him in. For this, they were allowed to keep their family estate, though they could not stay in it, for the five generations, with the caveat that the sixth generation would fulfill their restored ability to join the military of Corenna.
Oh, right, forgot to mention that. If you lose generational citizenship, and the crime is bad enough, those generations are not allowed to join the military to restore their citizenship. It is a harsh fucking ban.
So, in comes James Montoya Lecarde, son of Loric, son of Arron, son of Louisa, daughter of Ezio, son of Tulio, son of Atrezia Lecarde. After the Second Fall of Venezia, the Lecarde family became very, very big on honour.
James signed up for the Corenna Armed Forces on his fifteenth birthday, the youngest you were allowed to enlist without parental permission. By the time he was twenty-five, he was a Captain, highly-decorated, and he had earned three generations of Citizenship that he immediately forsook for himself and granted from his father all the way up to his great-grandfather.
He also served during the Third Fall of Venezia, yeah, they just could not fucking learn, and was wounded in action, nearly killed, rescuing the kidnapped heir to the throne, then-Prince Reginald Leonidas, from another formerly-noble Venezian House, the Mountebanks.
Prince Reginald, then the Hereditary Marshal of the Nation of Corenna’s Armed Forces, returned home to his sick father, who had presided over the entirety of the war in ill-health, and assumed the throne, appointing his rescuer and now-friend, James Lecarde, as his new Non-Hereditary Marshal.
James is still the second-youngest Non-Hereditary Marshal, the highest non-royal military rank possible, on the books.
So, the Venezian war dies down, Reginald marries, and has a baby girl named Evelyn that James just -dotes- on. He adores her so much that he declares war when he finds a pale, skinny, furless ape in her chambers, making arcane gestures above her crib.
The ‘ape invader’ was an elf. So, James declared war on the elves, and good old Regger backed him up, despite neither knowing of the actual nature of the ‘attack’. Hell, even I don’t know, and I wrote it. Anyway, their millenia-old tradition of not being the aggressor shaky, but presumably intact, they went to war. The Elven nation was, unfortunately, across a mountain range, a desert, and then an ocean, so they had to fly out...yeah.
Long story short, the Marshal’s transport was shot down over the Valmorian Mountain Range. Aislygn found James Lecarde. Did I mention James Lecarde, and the Lecarde family as a whole, are panther furries? James, himself, was a melanistic tiger. A black panther.
Yeah, they boned. Well, more like Aislygn boned James when he was well enough.
Aislygn is….well, she’s a bitch. And a slut. She had ten boyfriends, all of them the ‘wealthier’ nobility of the fairly-large village that I will continue to call a village despite it being more like a city, shut up. Anyway, she was a gold digger. She saw James Lecarde’s rank tabs, and had to get her some wealthy Marine lovin’.
Every single citizen of Othrace is lupine. Aislygn never used protection. Never. So all ten of her noble boyfriends thought the pregnancy was theirs. Johnathan was born feline. Aislygn’s cushy life of sex-and-leisure disappeared when ten boyfriends realized they were not, in fact, her only one. Kinda hard to have a feline baby when the only thing around is lupines. Oh, wait, there was that feline Army guy….yeah, you know where this is going.
Aislygn blamed Johnathan. The boyfriends, all of whom had clout in the city council, blamed Johnathan and Aislygn. Are we caught up with reality? Do you see where this is going?
Right, moving along. Where was I? Oh, right. Soul and body. My soul was adult, and managed to get me moving along at a slightly faster developmental pace, which, by the way, is actually pretty painful. Turns out we grow at our own rates because that is what is healthiest for our tiny, baby bodies! I cannot tell you the number of times I twisted my ankle or pulled a muscle. And no, before you ask, you do not ever want to pull a muscle in your tail.
On the other paw, I was a toddler who lived in a cit-village that actually hated me. I mean, we are talking Jinchuuriki levels of hate. And worse, I had a mother who hated me just as much. My poor little brain needed love.
More than the sparse encouragements my grandmother gave, anyway. She was the High Prophetess, she was busy, and she absolutely did not want to display favoritism or disfavor, because absolute power blah blah blah. Honestly, when I wrote her, the Hiruzen-like moral schtick made sense, but now that I was living her grandson’s life, I could not help but hate the bitch juuuuuusssssst a little bit. Also myself, for fucking writing her that way.
Yes, by this point, I was flat-out tripping balls insane, by the way. I was in a fictional character’s body, living his fictional character abused childhood, after killing my nonfictional body with a nonfictional dose of nonfictional carbon monoxide. And learning fictional furry martial arts from fictional furries I nonfictionally invented when I was nonfictional.
Oh, right, I forgot to mention that. Have you ever seen or heard of an abused partner remaining with their abuser? I am absolutely certain you have. Abused children defending their abusive parents’ actions? Yes. Do you know why?
It’s not love. It’s a need for love. That’s the sick, twisted thing about abuse. An abuser almost always knows this, seemingly instinctively. They can cow their family, their targets, with violence, and make them grateful for it with carefully-doled out words of endearment, or maybe even the occasional hug.
I got no hugs. I wanted love, damnit. I wanted my fucking mommy to love me. So I did what almost every abused child ever does. I went and made myself a better son.
When I was six, I enrolled in my grandmother’s temple to learn how to become a monk. In two years, I was capable of fighting with every single one of my limbs except my tail restricted. By the time I was eight, I had mastered the Apprentice school of the art and was flexible enough to start seriously wishing I was a Light-beshriven adult again.
When Aislygn was told, she beat me black and blue up and down the Temple’s plaza and mezzanine, including the stairs, with the Master school against my Apprentice school. She called me worthless.
I was worthless at the martial arts in her estimation? Well, then, I would do something better. So, I picked up magic.
I knew it was coming. I knew what was going to happen. I hated myself, I cried myself to sleep for a year and change over it. I tried to change it. I tried not to do it.
But damnit...after the life I had lived already, the life I had given up because nobody loved me, I was not going to give up hope that maybe someday, someway, someone here would.
Magic in Cor is unique, as far as I can tell, and as far as I tried to make it. Everyone has a magical center, a series of nodes and valves in their Ethereal Selves that allows them to channel mana. Mana, by nature, is always neutral. Aspected spells, such as those aligned with Elements or Ideals, are released through the Ethereal Nodes into spell matrixes that alter the mana’s alignment, converting it into usable Aether for spells.
Tee-ell-dee-arr, your soul draws in and generates water, which runs through soul-veins, and when you want to make shit different MTG colors, you hook it up to an adapter called a ‘spell matrix’. Which you cast by moving your hands and saying words and sometimes using material components shut up it’s what I came up with.
You do not try to alter your core. That shit stays neutral. Period. Bad Shit Happens if you fuck with magical cores. Have you ever seen Fullmetal Alchemist? This is the ‘Human Transmutation’ of Spell Matrices.
Othrace lacked a dedicated group of mages. They had a narcoleptic old wolf who had last cast a spell about thirty years before, and the Amish Puppies all still looked at him kinda funny for it.
So, like I had made Johnathan do when I wrote him, I stole all his books and studied them alone while I was recovering from getting my tail beat like a drum in the Journeyman school of Preying Wolf. When I was nine, the bitch caught me at my studies.
See, what I had intended to do was take up healing magic, to make her ‘job’ as a healer easier. I showed off a cauterization spell. Barely a tiny fireball, but it took a lot of refinement in a matrix that took a metric fuckton of mana to simultaneously focus the fire into a small, but hot enough form to direct over open wounds, as well as alter the neuter mana into Fire Aether.
She swatted my paws and called me ‘fucking useless’ while I was still weaving mana into Fire Aether. You do not fucking interrupt a spell matrix. That makes shit explode. Like, no, seriously.
So, quick question. How do you mitigate an explosion immediately before it happens? You deny it the catalyst. You take the gunpowder out of the dynamite, pull the nitro out of the glycerin. The catalyst in every single spell, all over Cor, is mana. Mana is gasoline for magic. I was channelling mana into the matrix, which, when disrupted, destabilized. So, I did the only thing I could do.
I channelled all of the pure mana, and with it, the Fire Aether into my Ethereal Self. My ‘magical core’.
Remember how I told you that you do not fuck with the magical core?
I fucked with my magical core.
The thing about mana is, like I said, it’s neutral. Neuter. Colorless. Unaspected, unaligned. It’s a glass of pure spring water.
Which I had proceeded to dump a fuckton of ‘red food coloring’ into. Have you ever tried to ‘uncolor’ dyed water? My Ethereal Self was lit on fire, and my right arm, which I had used to channel the Fire Aether into my core, was burning from the inside out.
It was three days of pain, burning, and fear. Three days in my grandmother’s temple, screaming my throat literally bloody, while watching the fire eat my right arm from the inside out.
I had known it would happen. I had always known it would happen. I had done this to Johnathan years and years and years before, when I first made him. I had seen it coming. And I did all I could to change it without changing it. Because I wanted someone to fucking love me.
I broke again. Another thousand shattering little motes of sparkly light crashed to the floor and ruined my reflection.
I gave up on love. I gave up on everything in Othrace. I gave up on granny and her fucking milquetoast ‘morals’ bullshit, I gave up on Aislygn and her slut-mongering gold-digging child-neglecting abuse. I gave up on James Lecarde, who I knew was not dead, but trapped in a cell in the Temple, still under Aislygn’s ‘care’, while she raped him over and over to produce another child, one she could use to claim generational rights in Corenna when she was old enough. I gave up on the little sister I knew, even then, was growing inside of her, who I knew would be called Jeannette Aslyana Balmung.
I just gave up. Nobody loved me. Nobody loved me in my old life. Nobody loved me in this life. Not even me. So, why bother hoping for love?
All it had ever done was hurt me.
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Martial artists are hard-pressed to continue their lives with a limb missing. Mages have it even more rough, and worse, I was kind of super-crippled. See, I hadn’t just burned my arm off in a particularly-nasty way, I had permanently Aspected my magical core. Every single spell I would ever try to cast would be Fire-aligned, whether the matrix said it should be or not. And that is if the matrix managed to remain stable when its gasoline was already burning in the hose, so to speak.
There would also be the matter of the fucking pants-shittingly debilitating pyrophobia I had developed to contend with, as well.
Like I said, body and soul. In this case, my soul had known fire was bad since I was four years old as a human. Fire was bad, but controllable under the right conditions, right? Right.
My body, on the other hand? Fuck that noise. If there was so much as a lit candle within ten feet of me, I was about a mile away within a couple of minutes, if I didn’t freeze up so strongly as to literally lock my digitigrade knees so hard it took days for me to walk without needing to move on all threes afterward.
So, yeah. I was never casting magic again. Let me tell you, living in a world where literal goddamned magic is a thing, and being so terrified of your own, natural ability in magic that even humming a cantrip and snapping your fingers can make you pass out from fear and suffer night terrors for the next week to go along with the phantom sensation of your missing arm serving as the fuel in a magical bonfire? That fucking blows. It blows rancid, vomit-flavored diseased baboon spunk, and then it gargles with AIDS-afflicted skunk-with-a-necrotizing-fasciitis-of-the-anus diarrhea. And then it goes back for seconds.
Grandma could not help but see this about me. All of it. Missing limb, phobia, loss of balance, inability to do martial arts and magic...all of it. So, grandma finally did something decent by me and called on an old ‘friend’ of hers, who was actually her great-by-about-a-hundred-times grandfather, another character I invented.
His name is Agrias Saestas. Yes, I named him after a female Final Fantasy Tactics character, shut up, I made him when I was like, thirteen and thought Agrias Oaks was a dude. Go to Hell.
Agrias is the son of my first original character, a divine elf named Serenol Muirin. Serenol was cursed to turn into a werewolf, blah blah blah necromancer, blah blah blah kingdom, blah blah blah saved the day, blah, married, blah kids, blah died and went on to Godhood.
Nothing really interesting, really. Stop looking at me like that.
Anyway. Agrias and his brother, Seagryn, were born wolves to a pair of elves. Serenol died, their mommy was a bitch and dropped them off at the Valmorian monastery (which was full of elves at that point), and ran off to be a queen. She was later shanked in her sleep in a ladyboy whorehouse.
Agrias and Seagryn grew up humbly, but each learned an aspect of the Preying Wolf. Agrias took to the defensive style, Seagryn the offensive. Agrias, the younger sibling, was calm, quiet, and thoughtful. Seagryn was angry and pissy and a fucking diva. Agrias was named the heir, and would be named King. Seagryn murdered the head of the Temple, and Agrias was forced to put him down. Shit happened, Agrias lost an eye, more shit happened, love, new eye, life, yay, puppies.
Puppies which eventually moved into the Valmorian mountain village when the elves abandoned it because they were racist little sissies who didn’t want one of their holy sites being ‘desecrated’ by werewolf cooties. Fucking pansies. Yes, I know I wrote them that way. Shut up.
Anyway, Agrias is like, three thousand years old. How do you explain that? Well, in simple terms, he’s fucking Maui. He’s a demigod. Closer to ‘god’ than ‘demi’. He became a Cleric, himself, and one day found out he was powering his own prayers. So he studied medicine, and took the portfolio of Healing for himself. He then went on to spend three thousand years living amongst the vast populations around the planet. Except for the elves, he never really fit in with them. Or the dragons, because seriously, those fuckers were bigger than he is, and he is a Dire-blooded wolfen.
Oh, right. Agrias is twelve feet tall, in mortal form, and has not stopped growing since he was born. And he is a demigod Dire Wolf Cleric with 3000 years of XP gain behind him, and he does not fuck with the dragons of Cor.
Fast forward to ‘today’, relatively speaking, anyway.
So, Agrias came by to pick me up, and took me to his first home, the ruins of his father’s house from waaaaaaaay the fuck back when. He said he liked to keep it in shape for nostalgic reasons, and, okay, I’ll be honest, it was miles ahead of the bullshit ‘healer’s hut’ Mommy Dearest kept me in. And I got my own bed, too, no more kitty basket.
But what he called a ‘ruin’....fuck, Buckingham Palace would be a ‘hut’. I’ll put it that way.
So, he took me in, taught me medicine. Under his tutelage, I was a better healer than my own bitch of a puppy-farm in under two months. My arm still bothered me, though. So, he did what I knew he would, and offered to teach me what he called ‘the Wonder of Machines’. I called it ‘I am joining the Enterprise as Montgomery Scott, so suck it, Spock!’.
It took a bit of doing, what with me being a teenaged, one-armed, ground-bound never-be-a-fire-eater, but eventually, Agrias petitioned an old buddy of his, Voltan. Voltan, the God of Iron and Ingenuity, Master of the Forge and Fire. Voltan, whose appearance caused me to ‘spontaneously teleport’ twenty miles away.
Did I mention I was afraid of fire? Also, my legs were fucking sore.
So, yeah, it took a bit, but Voltan saw ‘my spark’, which I knew to mean my Ethereal Self, and proclaimed me ‘the best birthday gift anyone had ever given him’.
Gods have issues, man.
He gave me the most powerful blessing he could without me being his Son (yes, the capital letter is necessary), and that woke up my own body’s Divine blood through Agrias, diluted as it was, and….well….
Okay, fine. I was fucking high as a kite. I was tripping Ethereal God Balls. I was livin’ loose, and layin’ large. I was tripping the light fantastic, and spouting the Magical Technicolour Yawn. I was God-level Stone-face Blitzed. I had lived my life off of water, and gotten drunk off an entire brewery’s worth of the finest Dwarven Stout.
I still have no fucking clue how I did it, but when I woke up, I had an arm again. It was skeletal, absolutely basic as a prosthesis, and it was bolted to my ribcage and shoulder blade.
So, that happened. It was a whole thing. From that point on, I could See machinery. I could plan it. I could build it. I understood it. I knew it. I was its Master.
So I built a better arm. This one, I had to have Agrias help me install, because while I was Divinely Gifted in the realm of Mechanisms, I was...eh….at medicine. At least I was certainly skilled enough to know that you do not do an implant-removal-and-replacement, especially for something bolted to your skeleton (like, no, literally, I mean ‘bolted’) on your own damned self. This one was...okay, the new one was technically accurate to the canon of my own original fiction. Technically. If you squint at it hard enough.
See, the Divine Gift I had been given included a retroactive eidetic memory. I could remember almost everything my brain was capable of remembering. That included large chunks of what I instinctively ‘saved’ to my ‘hard drive’ before I ‘rebooted’.
This included Fullmetal Alchemist, shut up, sit, and rotate on the finger.
Fine. My new arm was an automail arm, complete with direct-nerve-stimulating connection. It was Ed’s arm. Tell me that any nerd given the Keys to Engineering and missing their fucking right arm wouldn’t do the same.
Fuck off, I was a nerd. I’m still a nerd. Just...not nerdy enough for what was going to come, eventually. Or at least, definitely nerdy enough, just not nerdy enough in the right direction.
Right, so, new arm. Installed that sucker, and Agrias and I spent weeks checking to make sure everything was working fine. It kinda sucked, though, do you have any idea how much it hurts to just grow when you have a mechanical monstrosity bolted to your own skeleton? It fucking hurts. It fucking hurts a lot!
Agrias kept training me in Preying Wolf, though he called his sub-style of it ‘Silent Sentinel’, which, admittedly, was all on him. I did not come up with that. I made it through the Journeyman school, and was busy expanding my knowledge of medicine and engineering at a breakneck pace. By the time I was thirteen, I had built my own rudimentary motorcycle. Admittedly, I had a lot of cheats, because Agrias was constantly hauling ore and materials into a foundry and smithy he had literally miracle’d up out of nowhere.
He taught me to make my own molds. He taught me how to break them. He taught me about metals, alloys, and chemical interactions. Most importantly, he taught me how to learn.
I know what you’re thinking. ‘But Johnathan, you died when you were thirty, and now you’re thirteen, so you have had forty-three years of learning experience’, yeah, bullshit.
Learning is more than retaining information. It’s more than critical thinking. It’s even more than practical application. Learning how to learn is learning how to organize, empathize, and theorize about and with new data as you receive it.
It’s like Naruto, who is amazing at instinctive learning and growth, but absolute and utter shit at theory and bookwork, is half of an equation, and Hermione Granger, who takes top marks in theory, but never manages to connect all of the information in her head to practical applications in any sort of reasonable time-frame, is the other half. Put them together, and what do you have?
...No, seriously, I don’t know. Ugh, fuck it, whatever.
So, I learned how to learn.
One thing Agrias never tried to teach me, though, was how to open myself back up. See, I appreciated all that he was doing for me. I liked learning, I loved engineering, I even liked medicine. But...I did not love him. I never asked him if he loved me. He was doting on me, yes, but...I could not love him. I never opened up that part of me to him. It certainly did not help that, in my mind, I kept calling him a fictional character that I had made up.
Looking back...I think that’s why he was always sad when he was around me. He knew he’d gotten to me too late. I had lost more than my arm. I had lost my love, my friends, my life, my species, my family, my hope...and then I had lost my magic, my arm, and my capacity for love.
I think...as broken as I was, I think that was what broke him.
He took me to a tombstone, lower down in the mountains, a few days before my fifteenth birthday. He gave me a single dog-tag on a chain, a thick, blue crystalline thing inscribed with my father’s name, date of birth, blood type, and serial number. There was a thick, sealed metal ‘chamber’ at the top of the tag, which I knew was a Corenna Marine Distress Signal. That detail, by the way? That’s important.
Agrias told me about James Lecarde, and told me that I was old enough to enlist, if I wanted to.
Johnathan would have cried. Johnathan does cry at that empty grave, in my story. But me….I just said that I was Johnathan James Graves, and I walked away.
Johnathan loved his daddy, and wanted to live up to his example.
I just wanted to get away from all the fucking wolves. So I turned and I left one behind, crying in front of an empty grave.
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Corenna deals with foreign nationals joining their country in a pretty straightforward manner.
“Hello, Random Foreign National applying for entry into Corenna! Do you wish to become a citizen?”
“Fucking straight, I do!”
“Boot camp for you!”
I had to enlist, just to become more than an entry-level wage slave to some snooty asshat who thought his grain was the greener side of the fence. So, of course, I enlisted. I went from ‘Johnathan James Graves’ to ‘N-1 Serviceman Graves’ and got my tail shipped off to basic combat training.
Do you have any idea how fucking difficult it is to hide a mechanical arm under what amounts to a spandex sleeve made of dyed tree-rubber and your own fur sheddings?
Oh, right. One thing about the Corenna Armed Forces - disabilities are death. You lose a limb, you are immediately discharged from service with the full benefits of whatever rank you achieved counting towards your Citizenship Rights.
I was entering as an N-1, or ‘fucking noob’ for those keeping count, which meant I had fuck-all for rights. If I was discharged now, I would end up a K-1, or ‘Knave’, which was basically their version of a ‘conscientious objector’. Any rank, K, V, P, or N-1, is a non-Citizen.
I was not going to be a fucking wage-slave again. Fuck that noise.
So, boot camp happened. I hid my arm (with great fucking difficulty). And then I met her.
Sasha Norman. She was in charge of my training cadre. A fiery-hot, red-haired lioness who was as wild as a cold winter night is long. She was a party girl who believed that if she had not wrung every bit of fun and tease as she could out of any given day, the whole week was a fucking waste of time.
I knew I would meet her. I tried to stay off of her radar. It didn’t work.
You see, in my last life, I had...let’s call it ‘mustered out’ of the Army after BCT. Basic training was old hat, to me. I’d gone through it before. I knew all the tricks. Keep your head down, but not so low you’re sniffing dirt. Middle of the pack doesn’t end up on the rack. That sort of thing. It’s all about not getting noticed, right?
Well, she fucking noticed. For the second time in as many lives, I was a Cadet Commander of my own barracks. Fuck. My. Life.
She pushed me. I let her push me. I was not about to quit, not when failing could cost me my precious, precious not-a-wage-slave-life. She got close to me. She forced her way in.
By the end of boot camp, my teenaged love-starved hormone-addled brain had me half-convinced I was in love with her, even though I knew what and who she was.
Oh, right, backtrack, backtrack. Um...Sasha. Sasha was a lioness with bright blue eyes and rich dyed-whatever hair that she kept in whatever wild hairdo she felt like it at the time. It was normally what I think is called a side-hawk, where one side of her head is shaved bald and the rest is combed over the other side in a weird, spiky, jagged mess...whatever, I’ll just say, on Earth, in her civvies, she’d fit right on in as a pierced punk princess at a Green Day concert.
Emphasis on the ‘princess’.
The royal family have been lions for generations. Like, a whole bunch of them, I never bothered to chart it out. Anyway, there’s a tradition. Well, more like a law. Yes, another one. Anyway, you can’t legally be an heir to the throne unless you have served in the military. And I mean, no, seriously, you are not in line unless you put your life -on- the line.
So, punk princess Sasha? She kinda-sorta led a night life where she was actual-Princess Evelyn Leonidas, who was particularly famous for her long, lustrous, red hair. And Sasha? She likes to rainbow her hair, like, seriously, every colour ever. I’ve seen a fucking hex chart on her vanity. But before the big reveal that comes at the end of the Second Elfen War, she never, ever uses red.
I had zero chance. Like, ever. She’s Johnathan’s total besty, inseparable-from-the-hip and all that, but that’s the story. For me? Johnathan doesn’t have a crush, he is full-on devoted to her, mind, body, soul in love with her until he hits his early twenties.
Me? Well, she became my best friend. And no, neither Johnathan nor I would have -ever- stood a fucking chance, because we have wedding tackle incompatible with her wedding cake. Or, well, whatever the polite way of saying she prefers kitty carpets to kitty...um….
Lesbian, damnit, she’s a lesbian! Fuck!
So, Sasha Norman, my training cadre’s instructor, picked me up and made me be the best I fucking could be, and along the way, she made my ice-cold heart start beating again. I graduated Best of Class...or would have, if she and the Tee-Cee hadn’t discovered my prosthetic arm. It took a lot of sweet-talking (and the benefit of knowing the script) to keep my ass where I was, but they docked me. I graduated third in class.
Johnathan does, too, by the way. It’s a sore point, but he eventually finds out Sasha wanted him to graduate third, because that way, she’d pick him for her squad, which needed one more soul to qualify for action.
Johnathan? The way I made him, he’s a fucking genius of battle. He could take StarCraft and make all the South Korean Championship teams cry. Martial artist, sharpshooter, mechanical arm...total bastard to fuck with on the battlefield, but where he shines is Combat Monitor. He is the tactical soul of Ermine Squad. Pays for it by being a total social dunderhead. I mean, if D&D stats applied to real life, he made Charisma his dump stat, and then stole from it to give the points to other shit. Like...he’d be negative score, if you could.
Me? I...eh. I could maybe place 1000 out of 1000 if I tried really, really hard at StarCraft? I had martial arts and sharpshooting, I absofuckinglutely refuse to use magic for reasons I have already explained, and I had a metal arm. I had about as many social graces as the boy whose body I occupied, only mine were crippled where his were stillborn, and I had a chip on my shoulder, plus the rest of the bag, with a full selection of dipping sauces to boot.
Fuck, now I’m hungry.
Anyway, so, Ermine Squad. Made up of myself, as the point-mammal, front man, the anchor, whatever you want to call it. Sasha was our sniper, Vodka Friedkin, an adorably-short polar bear that hated vodka and adored giving rib-cracking hugs to me (and let’s not forget the super strength) was our heavy weapons and demo-bear, and William Edward Pryce Balmoral the Third, a stag with his nose so high up in the air he would have managed to bury it in Apollo’s ass at high noon if we were in Ancient Greece. Oh, and the ‘noble’ fuck that wanted, with all of his might, to fucking fly was our skirmisher and spotter.
Why, no, the little shit still has no idea why I would break out into giggle-fits whenever I called him ‘Wesley Wyndham-Pryce’, who, in case you are wondering, is the character that partially inspired him.
We did eventually separate his antlers from his ass, and he mellowed out once I made him a flight harness. You did not fuck with him after that. William was a fucking nightmare with his flight pack and shotgun.
Anyway, so, Ermine Squad. A four-soldier fireteam that was kitted out for long-haul action behind enemy lines, and that was us. The Second Elfen War was kicking into high gear, and we were rolling out as soon as I finished BCT.
….Yeah, I’m gonna skip a bunch of boring war crap and get to the next important bit. Fuck, man, I don’t want to remember all of this shit. I did things I’m not proud of, I watched people I fought side-by-side with do shit that still makes me want to puke. I am not reliving that shit when I have a fucking choice about it.
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So, the long and short of it is, I spent three years in the trenches with the rest of Ermine. I earned a hell of a lot of scars in that time, and I remember the story behind each and every one of them. No, you have not, in fact, supplied me with enough alcohol to know about even a single one of them, fuck off, that’s personal.
I did not want to become friends with them. I just wanted to serve my time and get my papers. I did not want to be all that I could be. I did not want to be a role model. I did not want to eventually follow in my father’s footsteps and become the Marshal of the Corenna Armed Forces.
I was already a Marine, damnit, what more did they fucking want of me?
So, anyway, in those trenches, I found a lot of enemy tech. The elves are primarily magic users, and holy shit their magic is fucking phenomenal. Corenna mages mostly think practically with their spells. ‘I want to light shit on fire, so I make a spell that lights shit on fire.’ If it’s useless in a fight, or takes too long to get off in a fight, or...pretty much anything that means you might lose a fight? That shit’s useless.
Elves, on the other hand? They live and breathe magic. It is their bread and butter. Airships, artillery, fucking caster shells from motherfucking Outlaw Star and no I did not write them having that shit holy fuck.
Their magic was amazing. Their tech was...kinda meh, honestly, but they thought differently and had a different design philosophy, so I used what I could and cobbled together myself a little something that made me nerdgasm when it was done.
See, I was the point-man. That meant I was the firefight director, I called shots, and I made the enemy shoot at me instead of Sasha or William. So, I had a four-weapon loadout.
First was my CASA-130 Lex, my standard-issue sidearm, which I modified like hell into a transforming tonfa that fired .45M ACP. The modification was severe enough I eventually rebranded it the TMSA-145 Ebon Echo. Then, I modified my battle rifle, the CABR-131 into a caster-enabled .50HCBR that could also transform into a shield and a one-handed battlehammer I named the TMBR-1000 Sierra Staccato.
After a year in combat, Sasha found my dad’s dog-tag and realized I was the old Marshal’s kid. She gave me my dad’s old CASA-150 G. Lex, which I modified into transforming tonfa TMSA-150 Alpha Lucis, which fired .50HCACP. When I necked that fucker up, I kinda...well, all I’ll say is that I can only fire that loud bastard with my mechanical arm and leave it there, alright?
And last, but not least, was Reginald Leonidas’ own Corenna Royal Cavalry Pistol, a six-shot revolver that I modified to fire .60MCACP from its native .50HCACP. I call it the Kingsguard. ...I respect that gun too much to make it transform, though, even now. King Reginald deserves at least that much from me.
…..No, I am not a gun-nut. Put that flag away, you ass. I am not an alt-right hardcase, I just like my guns. Why? Because I took those weapons and made them badass. I believe I have a right to be justifiably proud of making the smallest caliber weapon out of the four I had need ammo that would make Dirty Harry weep with joy. This was my rifle, and these were my guns. There are not many (make that none) like them, and these ones were mine.
….Yes, I watched RWBY. Apparently, so did you. So shut up.
Anyway, so, yeah. There I am with at least three hand-cannons and the battle rifle from Hell, each capable of firing rounds that would fuck up heavy armor at a minimum, and when I’m not using my battle rifle, I’ve got a nifty little kite shield to let them plink off of. I needed Elfen tech to accomplish this.
I got into the habit of pillaging it. Yes, that’s important, haven’t you ever heard of Johnathan’s Gun? ...Fuck off, I am perfectly capable of pronouncing my vees, Chekov. No, I do not have any nuclear ‘wessels’.
Anyway, by the end of three years, I loved and trusted Sasha, William, and Vodka more than my cold, dead heart would ever want to admit. You kinda don’t really get a choice when someone whips off their shirt to keep a bullet hole in your thigh from bleeding out long enough to get your bullet-magnet ass to a M.A.S.H in relatively good nick. Especially when they didn’t have time to put a bra on before the firefight started.
…Just because I was a cold, selfish, heartless wreck of a former human being does not mean my junk has ever been in anything other than perfectly-working condition, and holy shitdoes Sasha have a great rack, or what? You have no idea how many times I cursed myself fucking stupid for writing a primo lady like that as a woman’s woman. Holy fucking hell, I mean, she’s a twenty-five out of ten on a bad day…
Oh. Sorry, um...where was I?
Right, so, anyway, there I am, at the end of three years, closer to three other beings than I ever was to my own family, in any timeline, and I realize I done fucked up. I woke up one morning, and my dad’s dog-tag was blinking.
I was eighteen, and James Lecarde was still a baby-factory for Bitches Claws and her little elf, my then-nine-year-old-sister, Jeannette, had been due to start sneaking in to find ‘her daddy’ soon. There was a whole storyline I had plotted out that basically ends up with Johnathan charging back to Valmar when that little light goes off.
The Distress Signal. It was quantum-entangled with the other dog-tag and a beacon back in Corenna’s Emergency Rescue Unit. The problem was, I had avoided a couple of missions that would have had me in the ERU due to a bad case of ‘bullets-to-the-vitals-itis’.
Well, at least I was healthy.
So, I told Sasha, and she called the FOB. At this point, she had been appointed Marshal, and assigned us to the ERU for the recovery mission. This was very, very bad, because Sasha being back at the Leonidas Estate while Johnathan was in the ERU was the only thing that saved Reginald’s life from an assassin. I told her to head back to the castle, that I had a ‘bad feeling’ (what I had been passing off my foreknowledge as), stole a mechachopper, and high-tailed it to Valmar. Which, again, oddly enough, was done with my ridiculously overlong tail being quite low to the ground.
….Relatively speaking, anyway.
Anyway, long story short, I made it back to Valmar, met my little sister, freed my very, very ill-health father, confronted my mother, and shit went so pear-shaped I understand why Ten (or is it Eleven, now, actually?) told Martha Jones not to do something stupid like eat one because he didn’t want to wake up in three months and taste that.
Aislygn had gone fucking nuts.
Remember how I said I had been gathering and hoarding Elfen tech? Well, I hadn’t exactly had time to offload my latest batch at the FOB before I woke up to a blinking QEC Distress Signal, so I’d fobbed it into the back of the mechachopper I stole.
I did not know it, but there was a grenade in the batch with a fucked up space-time enchantment on it. Aislygn had stolen it, pulled the pin, and grabbed her daughter, my little sister, and held it to her throat.
If I shoot her, Jeannie dies. If I don’t, Aislygn wins.
While I did not want Aislygn to win, by any stretch, fuck that noise. The bitch deserved season tickets to Hell for the next dozen eternities, if I had any say in the matter. On the other hand, though, I did not want Jeannie to die.
Jeannie was my favorite character in my own little world. I had written her as an awesome little sister for Johnathan. Yeah, I kind of wrote her to be that way to spite my own, bitchy-ass cunt of a little sister in my old life, but that did not change that Jeannie was genuinely an awesome little kitten.
Snow-white fur, absolutely pure snow-white fur, with a tuft of blonde hair she wore like Johnathan’s, pulled behind her head in a long, single braid. She was a curious, sweet, adorable little klutz whose ultimate dream was to be her beloved big brother’s assistant, and help him change the world with his mecha.
She would eventually become what I called his ‘pit boss’, acting simultaneously as an eye in the sky for his missions as well as his chief of staff and second-best mechanic in the company he would eventually create, Tombstone Mechanisms. She was amazing, and would eventually serve as the cornerstone of Johnathan’s sanity. She never felt anything but love for her big brother. She never felt anything but love, period. Well...love and pain. Her catchphrase was ‘Ouchie! Wait, I’m okay!’ for a reason.
She was a total sweetie, who would one day go on to develop a romance with, and marry, Evelyn Leonidas’ younger brother, James Leonidas, who would, in fact, go on to be King. She deserved all the best. She was, without a doubt, my favorite character.
I did not want her to die, even if I had utterly, completely, and totally fucked her destiny without the benefit of lube. I wasn’t that heartless.
So I did the intelligent thing, and I holstered my weapons and tried to negotiate with the crazy bitch that held her hostage.
I made it within ten feet before the rest of Ermine popped up from behind the mechachopper, guns aimed right at her head. She went crazy. I grabbed Jeannie with my tail and flung her sideways, towards Vodka, and did something so monumentally stupid I will never, ever be able to forget it.
The grenade fell, and Jeannie, Sasha, William, and Vodka were in range. The locking guard popped out, and I leapt onto the fucker, Fire Aether swirling around my flesh-and-blood arm as I grabbed it and hugged it to my chest.
At least I managed to draw Alpha Lucis and put a bullet in the crazy bitch’s head before the fucker went off.
The last thing I heard, as I stared forlornly at Ermine and my estranged family, was tinkling, like a thousand tiny shards of glass striking the mountain side.
And that would be the second time I died.
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I expected the darkness. I expected death. I expected to hear a heartbeat, and to feel a loss of control as I floated in yet another fucking sack of amniotic fluid. I did not expect to feel pain, at least not that early. I did not expect to feel the weight of Alpha Lucis as I raised my still-mechanical right paw to my head. I did not expect to feel my other weapons situated where they belonged, in their holsters.
And no, I did not expect to wake up, face to face, with a fucking pastel-rainbow-haired, horned, and winged Night-bedamned pony right in my fucking face. I think I can be forgiven for what happened after that.
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A/N: As promised, here's the link to the campaign. Every bit of help, every dollar, every share, every little bit truly goes a long, long way. Thank you, in advance, for your help.
EDIT: Here, have an image of Johnathan James Graves!
![[+]](/images/collapse_collapsed.png "[+]")
Spoiler![[Image: JGravesFullBody.jpg]](http://i74.photobucket.com/albums/i275/AgriasNesme/JGravesFullBody.jpg)
I need your help. I was in a hit-and-run accident. Click on the link to see the gofundme campaign with the details.