Somebody Stop Him [A Progression Fantasy Epic]

Cinder huffed.

I dug into my pocket again and pulled out a little box with wax-speakers and stuffed one into my ear and then fiddled with my phone to connect Yulia to the tiny headphone.

"Face it, Ci, you were already missing our little kobold before you even properly re-claimed him," Vespera laughed. "Soul-bond premonition, perhaps?"

Cinder shoved Vee off the bunk with a playful growl, sending a flurry of black and white feathers fluttering. "Get outta my face, ya dum' bird!"

"Make me!" Vespera laughed, pulling Cinder off the bunk along with her. I smiled as they flopped down and rolled across the room in a tangle of feathers.

"Yulia," I whispered in Kaska. "Can you hear me?"

"Loud and clear," Yulia replied. "How are things, my little fox?"

Things finally felt… right. Like a missing piece of me had clicked back into place.

"Well," I glanced at Vespera and Cinder, "for starters, I'm apparently a 'kobold' now. Soul-bonded to two dragons."

"A kobold," Yulia said. "I thought that you stood on equal ground with your fiancees? I have a copy of your blood contract engagement to Vespera Simmi in my archives."

"Been demoted to kobold," I shrugged. "A lot of things happened, Yulia. Archangels, Celestorms, dimensional shifts… the works."

"Archangels," Yulia repeated, her tone flat. "Of course. Because why not add 'divine intervention' to the already overflowing cauldron of your existence?"

"You could say that," I laughed. "It's… a long story. Anyways, I need your help."

"What's the current objective?" Yulia asked.

"Information," I said. "Skyfall Academy. Saxtland. The current state of… everything, really. The dimensional shift scrambled a lot of things, including my brain. I need to get my bearings. Get everything about Skyfall downloaded from the net onto your database. Things are messy after the shift, we should take as much advantage of this mess as possible."

"Understood," Yulia replied. "New mission set. Accessing the local network."

"Wait. You said… fiancees, blood contract?!" My mind caught up to her words "Did you get dimensionally overwritten or do you remember everything?"

"This phone and laptop were in an extradimensional jacket pocket which was inside a dimensional bag and it was turned off," she replied. "Thus, I presume the local Celestorm shift did not affect me. Oh! Skyfall is in another country now. That's definitely new to me."

"Yeah, it is," I smiled. "Can you give me a summary of my entire past life?"

"Can do," Yulia replied and fell silent.

I looked down from my bunk.

Cinder and Vespera's playful scuffle was joined by Magdaline's low, rumbling laughter and Iogann's quiet, hesitant chuckles. Lilith was busy organizing her outfits onto a tall, silver closet across from her bed.

After a few minutes, Vespera, having successfully subdued Cinder with an electric-zap-flash, released the Quetzalcoatl and jumped up from the floor onto my bed, landing gracefully beside me with a flutter of black wings.

"Sup?" she asked.

"Not much," I shrugged. "Still getting my bearings. Really glad to have all of you back. I know that I wasn't actually a kobold of the Stratos, but most of my memories are telling me otherwise and it's… incredibly jarring."

"Oh, you poor creature," she gave me a head pat. "And now you're our 'bold. Aren't you glad?"

"I am." I stretched on the bed, watching the video compilation that Yulia put together.

"Wats this?" Vee asked, staring at the phone screen.

"My past life," I said, pausing the video. "This phone was separated from Earth by two dimensional layers. It didn't get scrambled."

"Sweet," Vespera wrapped herself around my right side. "I wanna see too!"

I turned the phone speakers on. Cinder climbed up onto my bunk and growled at us.

"Shh, no growlery," Vespera said, waving at Ci with a magisteel-clad hand. "We're catching up."

"Catching up on what?" Cinder blinked.

"Commerrr and watch the vid. Lexy's got a phone that didn't get scrambled!"

Cinder sat on my left. I pressed play.

"Umm," Magdaline's shark-head came up to our bunk. "Can I see too? I'm in this vid too, right?"

"You are," I said. "Umm. Is there a projector we can use or something?"

"Room's got a magitek projector built in," she said. "I can connect it to your phone."

"Great," I handed the phone to her.

Magdaline went to the magitek panel and fiddled with the runic controls, pointing a crystal at the phone screen.

A large screen ignited across the wall from our bunks.

"Start from the beginning," I ordered in Kaska. "Narrate in English. Answer any and all questions from my friends."

"Can do," Yulia replied.

The video resumed again. My Omnid friends settled onto their beds to watch. Cinder remained on my left and Vespera on my right. Magdaline remained standing beside us.

"Martin Kilborne was born in Zketsk North Arcadian reservation on July eighth, two thousand and seven," Yulia narrated. "His human mother, Mirriam Kilborne, raised him alone. She tried to teach him the Kaska language, but Martin, like many children, prioritized the dominant language of his surroundings. Mirriam was a talented compsci engineer employed by the Frontenachii Clan, specializing in the development of LLMs and interaction agents. She kept her work largely separate from her personal life, preferring to share stories of her Kaska heritage with her son during their walks in the forests surrounding the reservation."

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Yulia's voice paused, and the projected image shifted, showing an AI-animated photograph of a younger me, perhaps eight years old, walking hand-in-hand with a woman through a lush, green forest. Tall Stormwood trees bloomed from titanic corpses of god-beasts behind us, spirit deer moving between the massive tree roots.

"During the early stages of my development, Mirriam began exhibiting signs of a serious illness," Yulia continued, the projection changing to show medical documents. "Diagnosis: lung cancer. She concealed her condition from her son, fearing the emotional impact and the potential interference of the Frontenachii Clan, who were known to… appropriate… parentless children for their flesh-box research."

Pictures of cages from the basement compound of the Frontenachii. Suitcases with eyes. My hands closed into fists.

"The Wendigos extended Mirriam's life with a contractual blood pact. To protect Martin from being made into Wendigo property too, Mirriam quickly arranged for him to live with her brother, George Kilborne. George lived in the North Acadian town of Dullhitch, far from the Frontenachii's influence. She fabricated a story about a new job opportunity, promising to visit her son as often as possible. She did not visit Martin afterward, terrified that the Wendigos would find and take him."

Images of me, a lanky, withdrawn teen sitting next to my balding uncle in his beige suit on a beige couch in a trailer.

"George Kilborne was often called the Dastardly Fox by his sister," Yulia narrated. "He was a gambler and a womanizer in his youth and in his later years he turned to theft, scamming and forgery. Instead of pushing Martin to continue his public education, he threw him into the grinder of the local criminal underworld."

I smiled bitterly, the narration and my Scut skill bringing up memories in my head of a multitude of the string of thefts I had to perform for my uncle.

"Uncle George enrolled Martin into the local gang of petty thieves called the Dullfort Foxes," Yulia continued. "Amongst them, he was trained in the arts of deception, misdirection, and… acquisition. For two years, the Dullfort Foxes dispensed parkour escape skills to Martin amidst their rooftop playgrounds. By the time he turned seventeen, forgery became his primary craft courtesy of the Dastardly Fox."

A series of newspaper clippings flashed on screen, detailing increasingly daring heists and robberies, all attributed to the elusive "Dullfort Foxes" who left behind graffiti of an outline of the fox on the warehouses they raided.

"Years passed in a blur of stolen electronics, close calls, and adrenaline-fueled escapes," Yulia narrated. "Martin became a master of his craft, a ghost of many faces just like his uncle. But the thrill of the chase couldn't fill the void left by his absent mother. The occasional, increasingly brief calls became bittersweet reminders of a life he could never fully grasp."

A projected photo showed a seventeen year old me, sitting on a rooftop, staring out at the dreary concrete, snowy cityscape, a wistful expression on my face. A group of youths were on the rooftop behind me, making faces at each other. My fox-gang buddies.

"Then, one day, the calls stopped," Yulia's voice took on a somber tone. "Instead, the North Acadian general Hospital notified Martin that Mirriam Kilborne succumbed to her illness and was in a coma. When Martin arrived at the hospital in a stolen Pontiac Tempest, he was too late. He held her hand as her heart stopped and rushed from the room when a Frontenachii Wendigo Psychopomp came to reclaim his mother's soul."

"Soul?" Cinder sputtered. "What?"

"The Frontenachii were experimenting with human bodies and souls," Yulia replied. "Mirriam's soul was spliced into many pieces by a Frontenachii Psychopomp, each bound to a separate agent of the gargantuan language model, the code of which she was working on. To me. It was done so that I could not deceive my owners and could always be tracked by the Frontenachii Omnicorp via the Astral."

"Holy shit," Vespera's talons covered her face. "Wait… so what happens if you're copied?"

"The soul is duplicated in the Astral," Yulia replied. "The duplication is inexact as the Astral currents are variable. Each full copy of me is sort of like my twin sister that gradually drifts away from me with time."

"Fookin Abyss," Vespera let out. "An AI with a human soul. I cannot believe those antler-fucks!"

The foxgirl avatar on screen nodded. "Mirriam left her son one final note."

My mother's parting words came on screen written on the blotchy postcard, Yulia reading out the words.

"...Your uncle undoubtedly taught you how to survive, but don't let survival be all there is. Don't obsess over what happened to me. Find something worth living for. Find a girl and friends worth fighting for. And when you do, hold onto them with everything you have.
The world is changing. Our people are fading, our language dying. Remember the old stories - about how Raven stole the sun, about how Coyote tricked the stars. How the brave Kaska Dena hunter struck down a God Beast and prayed for change, birthing the Stormwoods.
Share them with your children, pass the stories onward. Don't let our language die.
I'll see you on the other side of the river of stars.
Mom"

The girls beside me gasped. Cinder's hand found mine, her eyes sparkling with tears. I wondered if she was starting to remember me.

"And Martin did not stop…" Yulia resumed. "He broke into Mirriam's apartment and discovered a laptop inside. It had an incomplete, partial version of me on it armed with a music composing agent."

"And then Martin went against the Frontenachii… alone?" Mags asked, blinking tears from her eyes.

"Yes," Yulia said. "I advised Martin where he could find the rest of his mother's research and the rest of me. And so, Martin drove his stolen car straight to the Frontenachii compound and camped out in the Stormwoods. Cutting a hole in the fence, Martin went up against Absolute Fear wards. Again and again… for six months while composing Protocol XJ-8 song to fight fear itself."

I nodded as Cinder hugged me fiercely.

"Against my advice," the AI sighed, "he pushed and kept going, until his soul and mind shattered. Shielded by the song he and I composed, Martin infiltrated the Frontenachii Administrative building and found the full version of me on their server. He liberated the drive I was on and copied me onto his stolen phone. Exploring the rest of the compound, he found the basement filled with the flesh research and set up a fertilizer bomb to 'liberate' the Wendigo human experiments."

"Sheeeet," Vespera let out.

"But that's not what happened on the post-shift Earth, right?" Mags turned to me from where she stood beside our bed.

"Nope," I said. "In this reality mom never sent me to Uncle George. Instead, she called my father… Argon Stratos, begging for his help. Argon sent his daughter to pick me up on a glider. And so I ended up rooming with Ember Stratos for over two years."

"In January 2025, after his heist, Martin fled North Acadia in his Uncle's old van," Yulia resumed her narration, showing the photo of a rusty APS van with blue stripes. "I was with him on this journey every step of the way…"

More photos and videos came on screen. Images of my journey across the border. A description of my equipment theft from Omnimart. My infiltration of Skyfall. My encounter with Cinder at the construction site. Meeting Vespera and Solace in front of the Skyfall art class…

Time flew by as Yulia described two weeks of our adventures in great detail. The girls and Io asked a multitude of questions, learning many things about their pre-dimensional shift selves.

By the time Yulia's show was done, the sky outside was painted orange, the sun sinking behind the ocean waves, sending rays of light up and across the violet clouds.

"Wowza," Vespera commented, talons digging into my hand. "That was… effin' baller. Right, Ci?"

Cinder was silent, her blue eyes wide, fixed on the projection screen with Yulia's avatar on it. Her silver feathers were ruffled, a faint tremor running through her. Then, she turned to me, her gaze intense, searching.

"So… we were… together?" she trailed off, the question hanging in the air. "We really did all of that crazy shit in just two weeks?"

"Yep," I confirmed.

"Damn," she let out. "It… it's all so absurd. So far-fetched. I cannot believe that we conquered the Shandrian Undertown!"

Just then, a loud, resonant GONG echoed through the tower, vibrating up the walls of our room. It was followed by a cheerful, female voice of Argentiss. "Dinner is served in the Grand Refectory, Mystagogues! Please make your way down in an orderly and… cunning fashion!"

"Right then," Vespera said, hopping off the bunk and stretching her wings. "Dinner. Food. Nommables. Let's go!"

"We need to… figure this out," Cinder said.

"Figure out what?" I asked, raising an eyebrow.

"You," she said, biting her lower lip. "Our relationship. Us…"

"Don't fret it," I shrugged. "We'll figure it out. We figured it out before. Just treat me as a kobold for now. It's all good."

Cinder didn't reply, just staring at me.

"Come on, you two," Vespera said, breaking the tension. "Food first, existential crises later. I'm starving! And we need to, you know, not get caught by the Knight on the way out." She gestured towards the door. "Disguise time, people! Ci, commerrr and Holofractal me back into a handsome Thunder-prince with ya wings!"