Psycher Chronicles

Chapter 68

Business Arrangements

(Misha Tulley)

It was odd watching a professional work.

Misha watched as her new mentor showed her the slow and methodical method for taking down a group of Bakshee. Particularly when this group had gone and made things personal.

Rather than wanting violent bloody revenge as her body all but demanded from an oddly sympathetic biological level. Misha was taught to wait.

The attack, nothing more than a one-time interaction of operative Clayton meeting with and infecting Alishia and Rodger was by all means benign.

Yes, there had been a daring escape, a quick entry and exit showing their teamwork.

But since that point, the effects have been fairly benign.

Or benign by Misha’s overdramatized standards.

The attack used was weak, a simple virus that only affected Bakshee warriors.

Having just witnessed and fought off the effects of the faster acting, and delirium inducing attack from another Psycher, Misha was not impressed.

This variant was slow, but it did do something that Misha thought was the purpose of the whole operation.

Once the poison had been applied by Operative Clayton, the immune system or functionality for Rodger and Alishia had been fully breached. Meaning that Misha was now able to bypass all personal defenses of the two.

This was a process that Misha herself was now trying to deal with on a fundamental level.

To put it in simple terms, she now had access to the entire boot system that comprised Alishia and Rodger’s Bakshee framework. From here she could decode, mutate, and alter not just their base abilities and functionalities.

There was just one problem.

Well multiple problems, but they could all be boiled down to one clear issue. Namely, how do you kill a system that has no inherent function to kill or permanently turn itself off?

From a computer terminology perspective, this would be the same thing as saying you can destroy the operating system, delete all the files, eliminate all the work, but at the end of the day, the base computer is still there.

This attack vector by Ms. Clayton was the same.

Misha had the targets she wanted compromised. From now on, she could make it so that each and every future version of computers from Alishia and Rodger all had the same genetic defects or worse.

Again, though the problem was the lack of a personal touch.

There was no way to exact retribution.

This was when Misha realized that she had in fact changed. The old Misha, the one of the fleet would have thought in the form of millennium. Destroying all future branches of these two was a far worse fate than one could imagine. It would also make it so that future progeny would be weaker and therefore more easily able to be subdued by Misha and any future Psychers.

By all means and measures, Misha should be satisfied with this compromise.

However she wasn’t.

What good was ensuring that all future branches from these two would be withered and corrosive to the entire terraforming process of the planet, when she could just burn the trees down to the root right now?

Still, Misha realized that she was new to this. That Operative Clayton was a trained professional in this, and likely knew best.

This was why, Misha began working in private.

Practicing methods like the BlackEnergy 3 attacks and beyond, Misha found herself working on her own unique attack vectors that could possibly help her gain the sense of satisfaction that she so craved.

Her craving for vengeance was not overwhelming, not all consuming. At least it wasn’t all consuming for the moment. That said, the need for full revenge was drawing near.

For some reason, Misha felt that there was a time limit to the method currently being displayed by Operative Clayton.

That or her ideas for working were much faster.

Given her role within the fleet, the maintainer, this made sense and likely skewed most of her understandings of how quickly Psychers should operate.

In the fleet, her task was to maintain the complete functional integrity of the ship from start to finish.

This meant she could relax so long as the ship was fully functioning. The only problem was, that the moment something went wrong not only was she to fix said problem, but she was to do so immediately. Not only that, but part of her problems for the future came from being told to do the impossible.

Or at least these were tasks that Misha and her fellow repair workers thought to be impossible, namely they were told to identify future problem areas and begin fixing them before they had a problem.

The only problem with such logic was it bordered on near precognition phenomena.

This was the point where the war became the hardest, and many of the resources for maintainers to be reincarnated were denied. That or were kept off ship.

When reincarnation events happened, it meant that over time more and more of Misha’s fellow crew members were forced of the ship, while Misha was one of the few left onboard.

This was a blessing and a curse.

It was a blessing in that Misha soon found herself promoted to the top after a mere millennium of working directly for the queen’s flagship.

The curse came in the fact that soon all the major maintenance options were her responsibility. Even those other crew members who survived the purges eventually were denied resources and forced to reincarnate off the flagship, leaving just Misha and one or two others.

Misha found herself thinking about not just these odd occurrences now that she had more access to different people. But she oddly found herself wondering why her mind kept traveling back to her time on the fleet.

More importantly, she found her mind wondering to what exactly the Matriarch actually looked like.

***

(Ursala Jarnic AKA Ms. Clayton)

Exhaustion.

“I am too old for this,” Ursala said to herself as she looked in the mirror and took in her glamorous look. This was the look of Ursala Jarnic, CEO of a Fortune 50 company.

Even now she could feel the slow and methodical draining of her new body’s slowly draining energy being sucked away to keep two Bakshee infections active.

All Ursala had to do was focus for long enough and the diseases, these pustules that she had inflicted on her two targets would be permanent.

“A month at max,” Ursala said to herself as she applied her eye liner in the mirror while giving herself a pep talk about using her powers once more and increasing her proficiency.

This was of course the blessing and the curse of the Psycher.

Yes, using her powers would ultimately increase her skill and proficiencies with her more obscure abilities. The only problem was, like always Ursala now found herself drained. She had bitten off too much too fast, trying to impress the simple mechanic.

As least, the person she originally thought of as the simple mechanic.

But after seeing her in person, and realizing that this was likely the famed mechanic of the fleet. Ursala found herself needing to keep up the ruse of power.

Which at this point was too far down the line. Meaning she wouldn’t just need to pretend to be as powerful as she claimed, but she would need to be as powerful.

The only problem, was that killing Bakshee agents to level was tough. Doing so and not getting caught was doubly tough. Back in the day all she would need to do is go to the old west, find a bar and mow down the inhabitants. That or take her powers to the local well and infect an entire city of werewolves and vampires.

Now though, now times were tough.

She had just gotten this new body. Better still, she had just managed to forge her own birth records to prove she was the illegitimate child of her previous body. A body who was taken down by other werewolves trying to enact vengeance.

That’s the problem with Bakshee and their odd organo-tech, they could literally hunt her down for miles and for years on end.

Not only that, but the vampires could track her blood, which she would often shed of some of the more daring tasks.

That was why Ursala felt so confident going after the two tier zero kids. How they were Tier 0, despite the one being an Alpha was beyond Ursala. But seeing those two in such a weakened state, and knowing their importance to her target, the mechanic, she knew she had to go all out.

That of course was a few nights ago.

By now she should have moved on to the other targets.

The only problem was that she was exhausted. Despite being Tier 0s, the energy required to keep both individuals infected with her plague spores.

Of particular concern was how many times she had to seemingly reapply the base compound to the female, the one who was a Tier 0 Alpha.

At one point, Ursala felt that she had to be going toe to toe with a venerable shaman, but soon dismissed that idea as there were no signs of a powerful enough shaman being present. At most Ursala estimated there to be a Tier III shaman, while the powers and patterns needed to break her plague spores would be at least a Tier IV if not higher.

For those reasons, in addition to her trying to run and maintain her everyday persona as the CEO and entrepreneur face of a fortune 50 company, Ursala felt tired.

Still, despite feeling tired, more tired than she had been in multiple lifetimes, she also felt truly alive. For now she had hope, with time and effort she was fairly certain she could pull the Mechanic to her side. All she needed to do was prime the hook and reel her in.

This was why Ursala kept reapplying her lock on the two Tier 0 werewolves, creatures that would normally be below her scrutiny, especially with how minimal the return for effort was.

Logically, she should cut her losses, but this was too important of a chance.

Knock, knock.

Then just as she was going over her plans, she heard a knocking on her door.

“Yes?” Ursala called out, finishing up her makeup as she expected her assistant to come in and tell her what her first meeting of the day was.

“Ms. Jarnic, your eleven o’clock is here to see you.” Ms. Martin stated.

Hearing that her schedule had already started, Ursala could only nod in agreement.

“Send him in,” Ursala replied, trying to remember the name of the particular person who she would be meeting with, and why.

“Right away.”

Of course, Ursala couldn’t ask her secretary about whether the gentleman was a supernatural or not, as no one was allowed to utilize the Surreal app while working. It was odd, but rather important for legal reasons.

This was why Ursala was completely surprised when she entered the parlor to see a well-dressed dark-skinned man in an exceptional suit with a blue blazer and dazzling ivory tie.

“Why hello,” Ursala said, reaching out a gloved hand to grab the hand of the local businessman who Ursala was here to do business with.

“Hello, I’m Jacobs, Bruce Jacobs, and I would like to thank you for your time today.” The well dressed man said, as he gently wrapped his two large paws for hands around the much more delicate hand of Ursala’s and gave a gentle clasp and shake.

“Yes, what can I do for you Mr. Jacobs?” Ursala found herself asking.

Little did Ursala know that at the moment of the connection, a metal ring worn by Mr. Jacobs set off a faint tingle of electricity. Electricity that let Mr. Jacobs know that after searching for so long, he finally found the source of so much trouble.

Hearing the question and realizing that this was his moment Mr. Jacobs merely smiled and replied.

“Oh, but I believe it is I who should be able to offer something of interest for you.”