[A/N: This is going to be a huge thing to take into account for this set of lore. Most of this isn’t canon! For awhile now, I’ve been wanting to restructure Loka’s history into more of a novel, and less of a History textbook, but in doing so, I’ve taken a ton of creative liberties with it. Each chapter will be followed by my list of sources from other writers and lore keepers, so if you want to figure out what actually happened, you’re more than free to check it out there! Anyways, hope you enjoy, and what should I do next?]
Chapter 1: Brothers in Arms
The sun was slowly dipping below the horizon in Aladra, and the early autumnal winds began to chill the air. Lydia looked over the library, empty of occupants save for herself, Askil her personal aide, and Tee Alduin, one of the official, Lokan Librarians. Askil was decorating the library for the upcoming holiday, Nether’s Eve. Children would run around Aladra and some of the ports of the three continents, asking for sweet treats. Even Skuhoo dropped his blade to indulge the young ones, and it was quite the sight to see Cryptite, the fallen Vanir, partake in the festivities.
The door opened suddenly, allowing a gust of cool air to brush through the library, nearly blowing out the already weak candlelit flames. The candles did little to light the library, adding to the ambience of the upcoming holiday, but the dimness accentuated the blue flames rolling off of Tee’s cloak. At first, Lydia had been extremely wary of the young wizard handling the books, fearing that any moment he could burn the whole place to the ground. He had proven over the past few months, as a Librarian of Aladra and a Historian of Auru, that he handled such precious history with extremely delicate hands. Lydia returned her gaze to the door, noticing that a hooded figure had stopped in it’s entryway.
“Welcome to the Library!” Lydia stated, pondering who was beneath the hood.
“Thanks,” a feminine voice returned. “May I ask, where’s my mentor?”
Lydia looked up towards the young wizard, who was currently searching through the Lokan History section of the library. “He’s up there. Take the stairs on my right to take you to the second floor.”
The hooded figure gave Lydia nod of thanks, and made her way up the rickety old steps. Lydia shook her head. An odd person indeed, but who was she to judge those that wanted to learn?
The hooded figure continued on her way towards her mentor, then finally pulled off her hood. Her dark, nearly black hair flicked up into the air with the sudden movement of it’s holder, and she let out a long breath she realized she hadn’t been holding in. “Tee.”
The young wizard turned towards the sound of his voice. “Ah, Popcorn! What brings you to the library?”
“I want to learn our history. Everything about the Lokans I can know, I’d like to know.”
Tee scanned his apprentice’s eyes for a moment, wondering what brought this upon her. When satisfied, he turned to the bookshelf once more and picked out three different pieces of literature. “Alright, follow me.”
Popcorn followed her mentor back down the flight of steps, past the librarian. “You can head home if you want, Lydia. I’ll make sure to lock up tonight.’ Lydia gave a small nod of approval, grabbed some of her stuff, and her and Askil headed out the door. Tee continued past more rows of books, until he made a sharp turn onto a stalwart porch. This porch was open to the evening air, overlooking Aladra’s main square. The two of them watched as the Lokans busied themselves about, either finishing off their daily errands, settling in for the night, or grabbing their power shards and heading for Nate the Great’s local brewery.
Tee plopped the three books onto a table that was situated on the middle of the porch, and with the wave of a hand, and a little magic, lit a nearby oil lamp. He sat down on one of the chairs, made of a rich mahogany and cushioned with fine, Eldritchian leather, padded with Hiloan wool. “Sit. You have much to learn.”
Popcorn followed suit, pulling out one of the chairs, and flinching a bit when the chair screeched, sliding across the floor. “So where do you want to begin?” Tee asked, flipping through one of the books.
“From the very beginning. As far back as you can possibly go.”
Tee stopped flipping, looking up at his apprentice. “Are you sure?” Pop took in a deep breath, and hesitantly nodded. Tee slowly cracked a grin, before finally flipping to a page. “Good, then we’ll begin with Asymptonic.”
***
You’ll need to understand something about Asymptonic. He was a scientist, typically known as a slicer.
“Are you ready, Asy?”
Asymptonic looked up at his companion. They’d been through this song and dance nearly a hundred times, and yet every time he knew there was a large margin of error. They used their “Knives”, rudimentary machines for large jumps across space, and came back with their recall devices. Sure, they made sure to have back ups and checks on all of their systems, but if something ever went wrong, Asymptonic and his crew would find themselves stranded on a new world, halfway across the galaxy, possibly without a source of oxygen or any social contacts. With those happy thoughts in his mind, Asymptonic grabbed his lab coat from the hook that was bolted into the wall of his personal quarters. As he shrugged an arm through, he let out a deep sigh and a silent prayer. “As ready as I’ll ever be.”
Asymptonic slipped into the hall with his companion, fighting to get his other arm into his lab coat. “Will you be accompanying me on this journey, Zunder?”
“Yep, it’s the last one before my vacation.”
“Vacation? Where are you headed?”
“EH-372. The beaches are lovely this time of year.”
“That they are, my friend. Well, I’ll try to make this slice quick, that way you can thoroughly enjoy your reprieve.” Asymptonic mentally noted Zunder’s excitement to take a break. It was amazing to go see what was out there in the unexplored galaxy, but it was also extremely stressful. Regardless, Asymptonic had to make sure this jump was perfect, and that’s when he noticed the clipboard in Zunder’s hands. “Right, the checklist.”
Zunder continued walking. “Come on, I’ll tell you on the way.” Asymptonic nodded, and followed his fellow slicer down the long, narrow corridor. “It seems like everything is fine, we checked the energy levels of the ship, the knife appears to be intact, and everyone has at least three recall devices attached to them. Food sources are sustainable, oxygen levels stable, and communications to the main hub are online.”
Asymptonic nodded. “Good, good. And our warp point?”
“Well, there’s a bit of concern with that, if I’m honest. We haven’t been able to get any accurate reads on TWo-3s all morning.”
“As in…?”
“Well, the temperature has been fluctuating by plus or minus ten Kelvin, the sea level looks like it’s twenty meters taller than it was yesterday, and the entire solar system seems to have shifted five degrees to the West.”
Asymptonic pondered the new information. After a moment of hesitation, he turned to Zunder. “Ehh, we’ve sliced on less. Gather up the crew: we leave in ten minutes.”
Zunder nodded, and scurried off to find the other scientists, making up the twelve slicers designated for this mission. Asymptonic readjusted his jacket before stepping into the Knife Control Room. With a wipe of his brow, he double and triple checked all of the knobs and dials on a large control board. Something kept nagging at Asymptonic, but he couldn’t figure out what.
Why even slice in the first place? What were they looking for?
Who knows? Some accounts say the slicers were looking to harvest minerals off of foreign planets, where others say they were trying to test out the Knives. As common as they seem today, Knives are still Ancient technology, something that the slicers wanted to reproduce.
After feeling like everything was ready to go, Asymptonic stepped onto the Knife. It didn’t seem like much, just a golden platform with iron walls, and a control panel for coordinates set into one side. With a deep breath, he punched in the coordinates, and heard the Knife begin to charge up. With the amount of energy it took to slice across Space (and possibly time), it usually took about fifteen minutes to fully charge up.
He leaned against one of the iron walls, letting his head roll across the cold metal.
“Hey Asymptonic! Good luck on your travels, today!”
Asymptonic turned to see who wished him the best and found his scientific rival.
Preksak?
Good guess, Pop. Doctor Preksak Heflan was Asymptonic’s scientific rival for many of reasons, but mainly because of the work with Knives. Preksak was jealous that Asymptonic had so much success with the Knives as he did, and was banking off of his discovery.
“Thanks, Preksak. Are you coming with us?”
“Nah, any smart person would know that TWo-3s is too unstable to slice to.”
“Right...If something goes wrong, we’ll be back in a flash.”
“That’s a lie. We both know it takes a total of ninety minutes for the recall devices to properly charge. It won’t matter if you have one or fifty, if you can’t stay alive for those ninety minutes, you’re basically dead and stranded.”
“Thanks for the cheery thoughts as always, Prek.”
“Anytime, Asy,” Preksak wickedly grinned as he stepped away from the Knife. “Oh yeah, and the readings just changed again. Are you sure you double checked your coordinates?” Preksak promptly disappeared behind a set of automatically closing, sliding doors.
Before Asymptonic could check on Preksak’s claims, the other slicers walked in, stepping onto the teleporting pad of the Knife. Asymptonic heard the whirring of the Knife’s powerful engine. Had it already been fifteen minutes, he questioned, but recomposed himself for the sake of his companions. He’d get them out, just in time to be home for dinner. He heard someone calling roll, but wasn’t really paying attention to it.
“Deckard Pollack?”
It was the third time he heard his fellow slicer call out the name. “Here,” Asymptonic had called in return. It was his real name, back from his home planet, a name and place he had long forgotten. However, it was a name still used for check-ins before every slice.
His name was Deckard Pollack?
Yeah, I doubt many Lokans even knew that.
“Right, well that makes all twelve of us. Hold onto your pants, people, we’re about to slice!”
Asymptonic came back into focus, feeling space and time warp around his body. He had sliced many of times, yet he never got over the feeling of splitting through the fabric of the universe, and having his matter particles split apart and realigned. As soon as the feeling had come, however, it vanished as they Slicers made their way to TWo-3s.
Asymptonic took in a deep breath. “Seems like the air quality is just fine. Can we get some quick readings?”
“We have a problem, Asy.” Asymptonic turned towards the sound of bad news and found his long time compatriot, Markus Attrialus, staring back at him, envirometer in hand. “Seems like everything is shot, either it’s uncharged, or the readings are all over the place.”
“Well, do we have some manual tests?”
“Already working on it!” called a Slicer from the back. Sure enough, he had some old-fashioned paper strips, and a color key pointing out the purity of the soil, air, and surrounding water. When everything turned up good, the Slicer turned back to Asymptonic with a thumbs up.
“Good, at least this place isn’t lethal.” Asymptonic stopped in thought, stroking his chin on what to do next. He wondered if Preksak had anything to do with it, but he couldn’t make any conclusions until he got back to the lunar base him and his crew were stationed on.
“Communications to hub are down, Sir!”
“Damn it.” It was the hub that would probably know the best course of action, but with no communication to the outside world, and no energy nor a knife to slice back to which they came…”Zunder.”
“Yes, Asy?”
“Set your watch for ninety minutes. Hopefully our recall devices can get us out of here.”
“Yes sir!”
So...they’re stranded?
If they weren’t, would we be here today?
Ah, fair point.
Asymptonic started ruffling through the very small amount of supplies that they had brought. Although they had landed in the middle of a large prairie, he still equipped himself with a machete, both for self defense, and for exploration. “Alright, you guys stay here and set up base camp. Zunder, Markus, and I will try to go through the standard field exploration procedures and see if we can’t find any civilization or anything of use to us and our survival.”
Asymptonic heard a resounding grunt of approval from the surrounding slicers.
“If we’re not back by the time the recall devices are charged, assume we’re dead, and just get back as soon as possible.” The slicers gave him a concerned look, but just knew it was standard procedure. As much as all of them wanted to believe in “no man left behind”, they ran much more by the code of “survival of the fittest” in the name of scientific advancement.
He strode off, Markus and Zunder not far behind him. There was a few mountains farther North of where they had sliced to, and Asymptonic wanted to check it out. Although it was a moderate temperature at the moment, he could see the ice caps on the top of the mountains, and with ice and warm weather always meant runoff: a good sign for a chance of civilization.
As they got closer, Asymptonic realized there was only three mountains, all nearly exactly identical. Markus and Zunder seemed to pick up on the similarities as well.
“They’re like twins,” Markus remarked.
“More like sisters,” Zunder commented.
“The World of Three Sisters… TWo-3s. It’s like whoever named this planet had that name in mind,” Asymptonic finally announced.
“Yeah, that’s quite the coincidence.”
“Indeed. How odd…”
Really Tee? TWo-3s is The World of Three Sisters? Seems like pretty cheesy storytelling to me.
Hey, Asymptonic’s logs, not mine.
As Asymptonic and crew got closer to the mountains, they noticed a small cave entrance into one of the central mountains. Zunder searched through a small messenger bag he had brought with him and pulled out a flare. “Shall we?” he asked, lighting the fuse.
Asymptonic allowed Zunder to take point, while Markus brought up the rear. The flames were cast across the rock walls, shadows dancing in their peripherals. Asymptonic felt his heartbeat accelerate, the pulsing reverberating in his throat. The cave entrance opened up into a large cavern, a round, tall obelisk floating in the center of the room, and little offshoots running along the edges of the room.
“What is that?” Zunder queried, pointing at the obelisk.
“I’m not sure...It looks like it’s glowing.”
“Good observation, Markus. Who wants to go poke it?”
“I’m not sure, why don’t you try your luck, Zunder?”
“Alright, settle down you two,” Asymptonic intervened. “Follow me.”
Asymptonic strode over to the obelisk, feeling stranges waves of energy rolling off of it. He thought he could hear faint whispering, but it disappeared with just a shake of his head. Perhaps it was just the wind, rolling through the cave?
With a determined glance towards his allies, and an unsteady intake of breath, Asymptonic reach out his hand, and touched the glowing, and floating obelisk. At first, nothing happened: the stone was glossy in some parts, and rigid elsewhere. He went to turn towards his compatriots to ask them to run some tests, but all of the sudden the obelisk began to react. It was no longer glowing faintly, but was a beacon of light, searing Asymptonic’s hand, and forcing him to flinch. The whispers he thought he heard exploded into a symphony of sound. Asymptonic cupped his ears as he fell to the ground in agony, trying to make some form of sense of the words. After a minute of inconsistent screams, all the voices seemed to settle into one word: Artifact.
***
Tee slammed the book shut, causing Pop to jump.
“Wait, that’s it!” she exclaimed. “I have so many more questions though!”
Tee grinned, pulling out a timepiece. “It’s past midnight, Pop. We can continue this in the morning.”
“B-but,” she stammered.
“Ah-ah-ah,” Tee replied. “We’re going to take this one step at a time. Now get some rest: you’ll need it for tomorrow’s lesson.”
[A/N: So? What’d you guys think? Is this a good idea to do or should I just stop here? What do you want me to cover in the future? Questions, comments, and concerns are always appreciated! Hope you enjoyed!]
Sources:
http://lokamc.com/forums/index.php?threads/the-basics-of-lokan-lore.3062/
http://loka.wikia.com/wiki/Asymptonic
http://lokamc.com/forums/index.php?threads/asymptonic.1084/
Chapter 1: Brothers in Arms
The sun was slowly dipping below the horizon in Aladra, and the early autumnal winds began to chill the air. Lydia looked over the library, empty of occupants save for herself, Askil her personal aide, and Tee Alduin, one of the official, Lokan Librarians. Askil was decorating the library for the upcoming holiday, Nether’s Eve. Children would run around Aladra and some of the ports of the three continents, asking for sweet treats. Even Skuhoo dropped his blade to indulge the young ones, and it was quite the sight to see Cryptite, the fallen Vanir, partake in the festivities.
The door opened suddenly, allowing a gust of cool air to brush through the library, nearly blowing out the already weak candlelit flames. The candles did little to light the library, adding to the ambience of the upcoming holiday, but the dimness accentuated the blue flames rolling off of Tee’s cloak. At first, Lydia had been extremely wary of the young wizard handling the books, fearing that any moment he could burn the whole place to the ground. He had proven over the past few months, as a Librarian of Aladra and a Historian of Auru, that he handled such precious history with extremely delicate hands. Lydia returned her gaze to the door, noticing that a hooded figure had stopped in it’s entryway.
“Welcome to the Library!” Lydia stated, pondering who was beneath the hood.
“Thanks,” a feminine voice returned. “May I ask, where’s my mentor?”
Lydia looked up towards the young wizard, who was currently searching through the Lokan History section of the library. “He’s up there. Take the stairs on my right to take you to the second floor.”
The hooded figure gave Lydia nod of thanks, and made her way up the rickety old steps. Lydia shook her head. An odd person indeed, but who was she to judge those that wanted to learn?
The hooded figure continued on her way towards her mentor, then finally pulled off her hood. Her dark, nearly black hair flicked up into the air with the sudden movement of it’s holder, and she let out a long breath she realized she hadn’t been holding in. “Tee.”
The young wizard turned towards the sound of his voice. “Ah, Popcorn! What brings you to the library?”
“I want to learn our history. Everything about the Lokans I can know, I’d like to know.”
Tee scanned his apprentice’s eyes for a moment, wondering what brought this upon her. When satisfied, he turned to the bookshelf once more and picked out three different pieces of literature. “Alright, follow me.”
Popcorn followed her mentor back down the flight of steps, past the librarian. “You can head home if you want, Lydia. I’ll make sure to lock up tonight.’ Lydia gave a small nod of approval, grabbed some of her stuff, and her and Askil headed out the door. Tee continued past more rows of books, until he made a sharp turn onto a stalwart porch. This porch was open to the evening air, overlooking Aladra’s main square. The two of them watched as the Lokans busied themselves about, either finishing off their daily errands, settling in for the night, or grabbing their power shards and heading for Nate the Great’s local brewery.
Tee plopped the three books onto a table that was situated on the middle of the porch, and with the wave of a hand, and a little magic, lit a nearby oil lamp. He sat down on one of the chairs, made of a rich mahogany and cushioned with fine, Eldritchian leather, padded with Hiloan wool. “Sit. You have much to learn.”
Popcorn followed suit, pulling out one of the chairs, and flinching a bit when the chair screeched, sliding across the floor. “So where do you want to begin?” Tee asked, flipping through one of the books.
“From the very beginning. As far back as you can possibly go.”
Tee stopped flipping, looking up at his apprentice. “Are you sure?” Pop took in a deep breath, and hesitantly nodded. Tee slowly cracked a grin, before finally flipping to a page. “Good, then we’ll begin with Asymptonic.”
***
You’ll need to understand something about Asymptonic. He was a scientist, typically known as a slicer.
“Are you ready, Asy?”
Asymptonic looked up at his companion. They’d been through this song and dance nearly a hundred times, and yet every time he knew there was a large margin of error. They used their “Knives”, rudimentary machines for large jumps across space, and came back with their recall devices. Sure, they made sure to have back ups and checks on all of their systems, but if something ever went wrong, Asymptonic and his crew would find themselves stranded on a new world, halfway across the galaxy, possibly without a source of oxygen or any social contacts. With those happy thoughts in his mind, Asymptonic grabbed his lab coat from the hook that was bolted into the wall of his personal quarters. As he shrugged an arm through, he let out a deep sigh and a silent prayer. “As ready as I’ll ever be.”
Asymptonic slipped into the hall with his companion, fighting to get his other arm into his lab coat. “Will you be accompanying me on this journey, Zunder?”
“Yep, it’s the last one before my vacation.”
“Vacation? Where are you headed?”
“EH-372. The beaches are lovely this time of year.”
“That they are, my friend. Well, I’ll try to make this slice quick, that way you can thoroughly enjoy your reprieve.” Asymptonic mentally noted Zunder’s excitement to take a break. It was amazing to go see what was out there in the unexplored galaxy, but it was also extremely stressful. Regardless, Asymptonic had to make sure this jump was perfect, and that’s when he noticed the clipboard in Zunder’s hands. “Right, the checklist.”
Zunder continued walking. “Come on, I’ll tell you on the way.” Asymptonic nodded, and followed his fellow slicer down the long, narrow corridor. “It seems like everything is fine, we checked the energy levels of the ship, the knife appears to be intact, and everyone has at least three recall devices attached to them. Food sources are sustainable, oxygen levels stable, and communications to the main hub are online.”
Asymptonic nodded. “Good, good. And our warp point?”
“Well, there’s a bit of concern with that, if I’m honest. We haven’t been able to get any accurate reads on TWo-3s all morning.”
“As in…?”
“Well, the temperature has been fluctuating by plus or minus ten Kelvin, the sea level looks like it’s twenty meters taller than it was yesterday, and the entire solar system seems to have shifted five degrees to the West.”
Asymptonic pondered the new information. After a moment of hesitation, he turned to Zunder. “Ehh, we’ve sliced on less. Gather up the crew: we leave in ten minutes.”
Zunder nodded, and scurried off to find the other scientists, making up the twelve slicers designated for this mission. Asymptonic readjusted his jacket before stepping into the Knife Control Room. With a wipe of his brow, he double and triple checked all of the knobs and dials on a large control board. Something kept nagging at Asymptonic, but he couldn’t figure out what.
Why even slice in the first place? What were they looking for?
Who knows? Some accounts say the slicers were looking to harvest minerals off of foreign planets, where others say they were trying to test out the Knives. As common as they seem today, Knives are still Ancient technology, something that the slicers wanted to reproduce.
After feeling like everything was ready to go, Asymptonic stepped onto the Knife. It didn’t seem like much, just a golden platform with iron walls, and a control panel for coordinates set into one side. With a deep breath, he punched in the coordinates, and heard the Knife begin to charge up. With the amount of energy it took to slice across Space (and possibly time), it usually took about fifteen minutes to fully charge up.
He leaned against one of the iron walls, letting his head roll across the cold metal.
“Hey Asymptonic! Good luck on your travels, today!”
Asymptonic turned to see who wished him the best and found his scientific rival.
Preksak?
Good guess, Pop. Doctor Preksak Heflan was Asymptonic’s scientific rival for many of reasons, but mainly because of the work with Knives. Preksak was jealous that Asymptonic had so much success with the Knives as he did, and was banking off of his discovery.
“Thanks, Preksak. Are you coming with us?”
“Nah, any smart person would know that TWo-3s is too unstable to slice to.”
“Right...If something goes wrong, we’ll be back in a flash.”
“That’s a lie. We both know it takes a total of ninety minutes for the recall devices to properly charge. It won’t matter if you have one or fifty, if you can’t stay alive for those ninety minutes, you’re basically dead and stranded.”
“Thanks for the cheery thoughts as always, Prek.”
“Anytime, Asy,” Preksak wickedly grinned as he stepped away from the Knife. “Oh yeah, and the readings just changed again. Are you sure you double checked your coordinates?” Preksak promptly disappeared behind a set of automatically closing, sliding doors.
Before Asymptonic could check on Preksak’s claims, the other slicers walked in, stepping onto the teleporting pad of the Knife. Asymptonic heard the whirring of the Knife’s powerful engine. Had it already been fifteen minutes, he questioned, but recomposed himself for the sake of his companions. He’d get them out, just in time to be home for dinner. He heard someone calling roll, but wasn’t really paying attention to it.
“Deckard Pollack?”
It was the third time he heard his fellow slicer call out the name. “Here,” Asymptonic had called in return. It was his real name, back from his home planet, a name and place he had long forgotten. However, it was a name still used for check-ins before every slice.
His name was Deckard Pollack?
Yeah, I doubt many Lokans even knew that.
“Right, well that makes all twelve of us. Hold onto your pants, people, we’re about to slice!”
Asymptonic came back into focus, feeling space and time warp around his body. He had sliced many of times, yet he never got over the feeling of splitting through the fabric of the universe, and having his matter particles split apart and realigned. As soon as the feeling had come, however, it vanished as they Slicers made their way to TWo-3s.
Asymptonic took in a deep breath. “Seems like the air quality is just fine. Can we get some quick readings?”
“We have a problem, Asy.” Asymptonic turned towards the sound of bad news and found his long time compatriot, Markus Attrialus, staring back at him, envirometer in hand. “Seems like everything is shot, either it’s uncharged, or the readings are all over the place.”
“Well, do we have some manual tests?”
“Already working on it!” called a Slicer from the back. Sure enough, he had some old-fashioned paper strips, and a color key pointing out the purity of the soil, air, and surrounding water. When everything turned up good, the Slicer turned back to Asymptonic with a thumbs up.
“Good, at least this place isn’t lethal.” Asymptonic stopped in thought, stroking his chin on what to do next. He wondered if Preksak had anything to do with it, but he couldn’t make any conclusions until he got back to the lunar base him and his crew were stationed on.
“Communications to hub are down, Sir!”
“Damn it.” It was the hub that would probably know the best course of action, but with no communication to the outside world, and no energy nor a knife to slice back to which they came…”Zunder.”
“Yes, Asy?”
“Set your watch for ninety minutes. Hopefully our recall devices can get us out of here.”
“Yes sir!”
So...they’re stranded?
If they weren’t, would we be here today?
Ah, fair point.
Asymptonic started ruffling through the very small amount of supplies that they had brought. Although they had landed in the middle of a large prairie, he still equipped himself with a machete, both for self defense, and for exploration. “Alright, you guys stay here and set up base camp. Zunder, Markus, and I will try to go through the standard field exploration procedures and see if we can’t find any civilization or anything of use to us and our survival.”
Asymptonic heard a resounding grunt of approval from the surrounding slicers.
“If we’re not back by the time the recall devices are charged, assume we’re dead, and just get back as soon as possible.” The slicers gave him a concerned look, but just knew it was standard procedure. As much as all of them wanted to believe in “no man left behind”, they ran much more by the code of “survival of the fittest” in the name of scientific advancement.
He strode off, Markus and Zunder not far behind him. There was a few mountains farther North of where they had sliced to, and Asymptonic wanted to check it out. Although it was a moderate temperature at the moment, he could see the ice caps on the top of the mountains, and with ice and warm weather always meant runoff: a good sign for a chance of civilization.
As they got closer, Asymptonic realized there was only three mountains, all nearly exactly identical. Markus and Zunder seemed to pick up on the similarities as well.
“They’re like twins,” Markus remarked.
“More like sisters,” Zunder commented.
“The World of Three Sisters… TWo-3s. It’s like whoever named this planet had that name in mind,” Asymptonic finally announced.
“Yeah, that’s quite the coincidence.”
“Indeed. How odd…”
Really Tee? TWo-3s is The World of Three Sisters? Seems like pretty cheesy storytelling to me.
Hey, Asymptonic’s logs, not mine.
As Asymptonic and crew got closer to the mountains, they noticed a small cave entrance into one of the central mountains. Zunder searched through a small messenger bag he had brought with him and pulled out a flare. “Shall we?” he asked, lighting the fuse.
Asymptonic allowed Zunder to take point, while Markus brought up the rear. The flames were cast across the rock walls, shadows dancing in their peripherals. Asymptonic felt his heartbeat accelerate, the pulsing reverberating in his throat. The cave entrance opened up into a large cavern, a round, tall obelisk floating in the center of the room, and little offshoots running along the edges of the room.
“What is that?” Zunder queried, pointing at the obelisk.
“I’m not sure...It looks like it’s glowing.”
“Good observation, Markus. Who wants to go poke it?”
“I’m not sure, why don’t you try your luck, Zunder?”
“Alright, settle down you two,” Asymptonic intervened. “Follow me.”
Asymptonic strode over to the obelisk, feeling stranges waves of energy rolling off of it. He thought he could hear faint whispering, but it disappeared with just a shake of his head. Perhaps it was just the wind, rolling through the cave?
With a determined glance towards his allies, and an unsteady intake of breath, Asymptonic reach out his hand, and touched the glowing, and floating obelisk. At first, nothing happened: the stone was glossy in some parts, and rigid elsewhere. He went to turn towards his compatriots to ask them to run some tests, but all of the sudden the obelisk began to react. It was no longer glowing faintly, but was a beacon of light, searing Asymptonic’s hand, and forcing him to flinch. The whispers he thought he heard exploded into a symphony of sound. Asymptonic cupped his ears as he fell to the ground in agony, trying to make some form of sense of the words. After a minute of inconsistent screams, all the voices seemed to settle into one word: Artifact.
***
Tee slammed the book shut, causing Pop to jump.
“Wait, that’s it!” she exclaimed. “I have so many more questions though!”
Tee grinned, pulling out a timepiece. “It’s past midnight, Pop. We can continue this in the morning.”
“B-but,” she stammered.
“Ah-ah-ah,” Tee replied. “We’re going to take this one step at a time. Now get some rest: you’ll need it for tomorrow’s lesson.”
[A/N: So? What’d you guys think? Is this a good idea to do or should I just stop here? What do you want me to cover in the future? Questions, comments, and concerns are always appreciated! Hope you enjoyed!]
Sources:
http://lokamc.com/forums/index.php?threads/the-basics-of-lokan-lore.3062/
http://loka.wikia.com/wiki/Asymptonic
http://lokamc.com/forums/index.php?threads/asymptonic.1084/
