Factory Reset: Divine Corruption

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Seventeen: Possibly Illegal Cotton balls

"This... This is nice..." Ja'Kle commented as the four entered the room, casually glancing around the alien architecture.

They had just been given their rooms, right up there at the top floor. An apartment, Marissa told them. It was incredibly large, though it made up close to nothing of the hotel's true size.

The room itself was quite lavish. The walls were a nice shade of maroon red, and the ceiling was much the same color, but a lighter shade. The carpeted floor was soft as silk, and it was a deep fresh blood red color as well.

The apartment was a complex of different shapes. Right as they entered, to their right was a doorway leading into a hallway, where there were five different rooms. To their left was the kitchen, bathroom, and living quarters.

Mason and Marissa were the ones to venture towards the kitchen first, both fighting to grab whatever was in the fridge first. Hannah happily skipped her way to the farthest room down the right hand hallway, supposedly, her room.

"Goodness, it's been a while since I've been here. It almost feels like... like home." Mason muttered, gripping a tender plate of what appeared to be chicken legs. Except, they were about as big as a grown man's head.

Marissa smiled at his observation, placing a tired hand against her own neck, "Yeah... Me and Hannah, along with Cotton, had been here for some time. We've been trying to convince the council that more experimentation on Boson Energy should be done... but they just won't listen."

Mason sighed, frowning. He took his plate towards the living room, where a rather large table was set up by the edge where the kitchen's tiles met the carpet. He settled down there, placing his plate of food atop it.

The council was currently made up of thirteen different and individual protogen. Each came from a different 'cut' of the universe. A cut meaning about a thousand sectors. With how vast and numerous the universe was, Mason was actually surprised that there weren't more.

While each councilmen was tasked with problems plaguing their cuts, the decisions that affected the entire Federation were voted on. And, while it may seem easy, one must have more than half of the votes to get anything done.

And they had a lot of opinions that still came from the time that B-01 ruled. Opinions on what denoted a protogen, and the proper etiquette of a protogen. There were so many rules that Mason still barely remembered a tenth of them.

Some of them weren't exactly bad, like the one that forbade any mention of Boson Energy to non-informed persons. That made sense, it was a heavily guarded secret, and if it were to get out to other races on how they managed to get literal superpowers, a lot of bad could be done.

But, on the other, there was also the rule that forbade any relations between protogen of the same make and model.

Now, it wasn't exactly the same rule of forbidding same-sex relationships that Mason's friends had overruled during his time out of the picture, but it made for quite the spectacle on protogen homeworlds.

Seeing as how the current make and model had been pumped out the last thirty years.

And then, there was the gray area stuff. Where Render resided in. Technically speaking, the protogen was committing multiple acts of treason for just being who he was, but also for the fact that he was in the entertainment industry.

That entertainment industry.

Mason glanced up at Marissa, who took a seat next to him, "I've been out of the loop for some time. Has the council been switched up? Or, replaced?" He tacked on at the end, hopeful.