Cerule

For those of you who have read Edgings and its sequels, you know some of my chapters won’t have a lot of sex, some tease and some have quite a bit. One just has to exercise some patience. These first chapters are coming slowly as I piece Pareldon’s new life together, but hopefully this is the beginning of a new wonderful wild ride. Hope you all enjoy!

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Cerule

Chapter Two

I woke to overwhelming pain, and screamed my fool head off, only to gasp as the pain cut off abruptly.

“Monitoring physical damage, protective applier mode off to allow recovery mode. Recovery mode nominal.”

Okayyyyy, took me a minute to recover enough to begin to understand what was going on, but I got it, I got it. My internal AIA, short for Artificial Intelligence Addendum was reporting on my physical well being. It took me a moment to realize I HAD such a thing in this new brain of mine. Then I had to take in my condition, which from the graph which came up over the blackness I was seeing, looked pretty bad.

Still, according to what I was looking at, I had all my limbs, and I made sure to check that my manhood was still there. Oh shit, my limbs were there but they were the limbs of a kid and no dick yet at all.

“Allright, Ala, how is it I am still alive. The last I remember was shrieking as I was burning to a crisp inside this oven of a pod and I can’t see. Are my eyes damaged?”

“The onset of second degree burning triggered an AIA generated bubble during entry into this world’s atmosphere,” was the auto regen response. “You are currently regenerating.”

Ok I could only listen to that slightly nasal female voice for so long and I had already reached my limit. “Al, drop down voice parameters two octaves, add a ten percent husk quotient to it and respond.”

It took me a few minutes of tweaking to get the kind of comforting sexy purr of a bass voice I was looking for, and only after I had it, did I reflect again, just how much my sexual orientation seemed to have shifted. I should have been grieving for Angie, but all I felt was a sort of wistful hurt. After all, the Admiral was right. She was a cheating slut and had been our whole marriage. Here I was with all ties to that life zipping away at just under light speed until The Admiral could clear the interdiction zone that got in the way of FTL until one was clear of all gravitic influences in a star system.

I focused back on my physical condition which was terrifyingly awful. I wasn’t currently much more then a skull with skin attached to a four limbed pre adolescent with no penis and the limbs had no strength, feeling like noodles.

“Where are we?”

“Free fall took this pod eighty two point four kilometers off target, we are this world’s south west of a horse shoe shaped Island.”

A world map appeared in my mind showing, in minute detail a vast ocean world. The world of Cerule. “We are 28 meters down in a sea channel.”

Well, I thought. I do know how to swim, but that was going to be difficult to deal with, particularly with limbs like noodles. Was I going to have to fart my way to the surface?

“Any sign of life? On the Surface.”

“Detatching drone submersible to surface scan.”

“How do I get light in here?”

My right arm, which I could not see, but could feel, moved, I grasped a lever and a dim glow appeared.

“I thought this thing had no power.”

“Emergency lighting is battery powered.”

I wanted to spank myself for stupid questions but I was too weak.

The AIA answered that. “Instruments that were off during descent are still operational for a short period of time under battery power.”

“How short?”
“Sixteen hours and forty two minutes, twenty seconds and counting until Ellumian radiation kills all machine hard digital equipment.”

“When will my body be fully recovered and regenerated.”

“All surphase physical signs and assets will be full regenerated within the next seven hours. Over all functional strength will not be returned without exercise and and several weeks of internal regeneration and food.”

Well, that gave me plenty of time to go over my new memories and try to prepare myself.

“Submersible is scanning.”

Less than a minute later, it reported, “Within a fuve hundred kilometer radius, there are several sea going vessels, most of them near the land mass to the North East of this position.

Wow, that many. “Narrow the scan down to within ten kilometers.”

“Zero. We are apparently well outside the usual sea shipping routes.’

Ok, I was going to have to compromise. “Within fifty kilometers.”

“Seventeen vessels are visible.”

“Within twenty kilometers.”

“Within twenty Kilometers there are two vessels. One appears to be following and gaining on the other. They are seven kilometers apart.

“Will they pass close to us?”

“Yes.”

“How soon?”

“between twenty two and twenty four hours.”

“That long?”

“There is almost no wind circulation”

“Counter the world conquering power of an empire led by the , Xolted Ral hybrid entity, The God Emperor Zorath.

“What is my time frame for this mission?”

“As you are 98.4126 percent immortal, with a variable of .1percent depending on challenges, until success is reached or failure.”

“What is the definition of success?”

“The entity Zorath must be defeated, banished or destroyed.”

Well that was clear enough. After a bit more thought in the darkness, I said out loud, my voice a burnt frail sounding wispy rasp, reminding me I was a mess.

“Report on Pod functions.”

“Hull integrity intact, all auto functions disabled.”

“Great, just great. I suppose the manual release valves still work?”

“I have not tried them.”

“Why not?”

“This AI is not permitted to move your body or exert it’s muscles without your express permission, or in case of greatest emergency.”

“Oh yeah.” I don’t know why I asked. AI Addendums were strictly limited to reduce the chance of foreign entities taking control of one’s AIA. I knew that.

“How long for the eyes?” I said letting my mental thinking clarify that question for the AIA. Despite the dim glow from battery powered emergency lights, everything was a blur.

“Another 32 minutes.”

“I can feel those nanites a workin.” I quipped, sitting back a bit more in the pod seat which felt as if it was nothing but plas-steel frame work. And that’s when I realized that while my body survived the heat or reentry, my clothes, the Cerule carefully stressed outfit that was supposed to show I had been lost at sea for days… had been burnt clean off me. The only thing left was that signate ring which had slipped off my burning body. But I felt it under my arm and with an effort fumbled it into my weak right hand.

I had another thought of alarm and reached up. My hair! It was gone!

“Uh, can we grow my hair?” I felt above my eyes. “And my brows and eye lashes?”

“How long?”

“Now.”

“How long do you wish the hair and lashes?” the AI asked with infinite patience. Thank the stars it was just a machine in my brain and was eternally patient.

Oh well, that was negotiable. But to my surprise my AIA gave me a view in my mind’s eye of my head without hair, from the top of the head to the facial whiskers and eye lashes and took the initiative to inform me.. “Over all Cerule body hairiness is 83 percent the average human. Terran Asian is typical pattern.”

After a moment’s thought I remembered I should be mission oriented. “Show me the appearance of the body this this body duplicated. I did not know much about it, but I did know this body was the image of a young navy officer who had been plucked dead from the seas, a drowning victim after his ship went down. He had family and was apparently a minor aristocrat of his world. I had flickers of dim memory, vague suggestions but no more. I was going to need any back up memory storage supplied to the AIA.

After a moment the image of the young man morphed over a present burnt out partially regenerated  image. He had had long black hair tied back in a pony tail, black upswept brows, grey eyes rimmed by lush black lashes most women would envy. There was something otherworldly about him to my definition, but considering he was supposed to be a hybrid of ral and human, those slightly pointed ears and slightly slanted eyes, were probably not unusual on this world.

“And how long since his body was picked up by the Ral for copying?” I asked.

“Two weeks, three days and eleven hours.”

A cerule week was approximately fifty hours long divided into five days of ten hours. Each hour was fifty minutes long and a minute on Cerule was just slightly longer then a Terran minute, which meant this identity I was assuming had been dead closer to three Cerule weeks or “hands” as they called them.

I remembered reading about a an old science fiction fantasy series where weeks were called hands. It wasn’t an unusual thing but rather common for five finger five toed cultures to have that kind of time keeping.

In Cerule, a minute was a Tick, an hour was a Span, a Day was a Turn, and a week a Hand. On a larger scale, a  season was a Season, a Year a Revel, and decades, centuries and millennium were called just that, though in Cerulean of course. But I wasn’t about to write these chronicles in Cerulean, even though the actual language has some strong hints of old earth British English to it.

I reflected briefly about that. According to the Ral, it was a British colony ship in the early days of FTL drive that had accidentally limped into orbit around Cerule a few hundred years ago. That ship had had aboard a mix of Asian, British, British Commonwealth, in its crew of passengers and crew of six thousand.

Did this Par Alden have a family?”

The person I was replacing on this world had been young, with a family. I was getting vague flashes and hints, of something, but I would need the AIA to pull them out. Clearly those memories were not quite imprinted enough.

“Par Alden, is known as Paralden.” The AIA corrected me, and the realization came to me that first and last names, were elided on Cerule. For the sake of these logs I have decided to elide what I can and still make titles and roles recognizable.

“Right, and his… my family?”

“You are a ViCount, Lord of a Countcy, and your gramother is GreDuchess of Nor, your mother is her vassal, an Eadassa. Your father died at sea fighting the Empire as did your Grafather. You have two younger male siblings and a female sibling. You are the eldest.

I saw more flashes, faces and voices, but dimly as if through a dim glass or in the next room.

“Map of Nor?”

In my mind’s eye the world appeared, again. Cerulean blue, white clouds swirling, with here and there land masses breaking up the vast oceanic expanses. I remembered that Cerule was nine tenths water, with it’s largest continents no bigger then Australia on old Earth, most of the larger continents comparable to the British Isles, or New Zealand.

The map loomed to fill the picture in my mind, and we zoomed down until a crescent shaped land mass that started as a very small land mass filled the view. A blip just off shore of this land mass signified our position to the south west. That land mass was labeled Great Duchy of Nor. Into my mind the thought came that Great Duchies were Great because they were independent Monarchies, rather than vassal Duchies that were not.

“How are the sea vessels powered?” I thought o ask.

“Sail.”

I had several hours to wait. The AIA nagged me into doing isometric exercises, first against myself, and then against the inner hull of the pod. There was no food aboard that survived the blazing inferno we had been, so we were in a race against the lack of nutrition and water. Still internal nanites worked on energy from the atmosphere I breathed in, and the Ellumiun component in the world around me. Though shut off from it, at the subatomic level it permeated everything, and my body continued to build strength over those hours.

As I exercised the air grew stale, and became unbreathable, but my new body continued to work rebuilding itself, though conditions slowed the rebuild.

I told the AIA to let the skin retain a first degree burn, peeling. I figured if I had been missing tor two weeks I had to look it, at least to those who rescued me from the sea.

“Where are those two ships you mentioned earlier?” I asked several hours later.

“The first is one point four kilometers and the other is four kilometers and gaining on the first. There is very little surface wind so the two ships are not closing quickly.”

I was naked with a body like a skeleton with skin, but at least it had some strength. It was time to exit this mummy trap. “Will they pass directly overhead?”

“Negative.  The first will pass .4 Kilometers to the North. The second will pass. 5 kilometers to the north.”

“Well why didn’t you tell me that before? Now I will have to swim to intercept them.”

The AIA said calmly. “You didn’t ask, before.”

Well it is time to get going. With dim still blurred vision, I looked around the deep gloom of the Pod interior. “How do I get out of here?”

The AIA guided my hand to an iron wheel for a manual hatch release. “When you are strong enough to turn that wheel, you can…”

I turned the wheel, not waiting. There was a grating sound as the AIA said, “Caution, strong pressure can damage…”

The weight of all that water overhead resulted in some loud bangs a sound of roaring and then the compartment filled in a hiss of jetted water quickly to the brim, pushing me up to bang against the roof of the Pod interior.

“Ow.” I gurgled, blowing bubbles, as the pressure of the depths felt as if it would crush me. But then, very quickly, the body equalized.

“That… was not advisable.” The AIA informed me.

“How do I…” I began again, but the AI was already guiding my hands to another hatch wheel. I turned it, and this hatch opened.

Well ok, an ignominious start, but I was on my way to meet my new life. It was time to take myself firmly in hand and be about this new life the Ral, Admiral Fentin, the League Navy, had given me.

I swam toward the surface remembering to follow the rise of the bubbles, I knew that one from somewhere, to do that. Of course I did!

I was ON it!! Yes, I was on this mission! I felt good. Ready, and the water flowing past my naked body felt wonderful. It was good, that freedom, being naked, in the water. Yeah. My imagination filled with the idea of swimming naked like this with another handsome man, exchanging smiles, sexy smiles, kisses, our bodies twining together, our cocks rising like stiff rudders. I could fee the nanites working to strengthen me with every stroke of my arms to reach the surface, with every mental stroke of his hand on my stiff throbbing… Oh my fucking stars what the fuck was I thinking? !!!