Ortai Legacy: Arrival

5.2 - Mimics (L)

"You don't-" My voice caught. I fought to maintain a steady tone. "Let's be absolutely clear. You expect me to live alone, in a ship full of monsters that could kill me in my sleep, for years with no guarantee that I'll ever see my family again? A proper Ortai might be able to grin and bear it, but I'm not like that. I need human interaction. I need to read and paint and- and rest without being scared out of my mind. I'll go crazy. I'm serious, there's no way I can live like this."

He frowned at me like one might frown at a toddler attempting to describe nuclear fission. "You can carry enough arka to leave the ship for several days at a time. I wouldn't recommend entrusting it to your graxi—as they would most certainly eat or expel it—but your weapon's inventory could nearly hold a kilocuol-sized bucket of liquid arkegy." What looked like a three- or four-gallon bucket appeared floating in front of me. "Assuming you didn't use any active enchantments or Skills, that much could easily last you fifty days."

The urge to hurl him across the room returned. "You acted like I'd starve the moment I walked off the ship!"

The bucket disappeared. "I most certainly did not."

"You little- Don't be pedantic. You said I'd die in a day."

"A day after your last meal, yes. Are meals not portable on your home planet?"

It took every scrap of self control I had not to scream about the impossibility of a world where all food was immobile. I really really didn't care one way or the other, but my shot nerves were making it difficult to take a joke.

"Even if I can go out, it's not like I can talk to people. I'll kill them."

He looked uneasy. "Do you have murderous tendencies?"

"I'm a walking hunk of nuclear waste!"

"I'm unfamiliar with your use of the word 'nuclear,' but I gather that you believe you'll damage other people with your mere presence?"

"Won't I sweat out that arkegy stuff?"

"Ortai don't sweat or produce skin oils. Your saliva and urine would cause mild skin irritation to non-Arkane organisms, though."

Not that I was planning to spit or pee on someone any time soon, but it ticked me off that I had to worry about my bodily fluids hurting people. "That doesn't make sense. I can't destroy all the energy I eat. Unless the laws of physics are different here?"

"The energy is expelled, not destroyed. A series of spells in every Ortai's brain allow them to survive as a non-living organism, and when arkegy is used to power a spell, it travels into a parallel dimension known as the Otherspace."

He kept shooting down my arguments like they never bore any consequence in the first place. Even if things weren't quite as bad as I'd thought, an exclusive diet of nuclear waste—combined with mildly toxic bodily fluids—wasn't good news. And they weren't even my biggest concerns.

"I'll still be separated from my family in a house of horrors."

"If you know the full name of the other Ortai on this planet, I can contact them."

A spark of hope flickered to life in my chest. "Olivia Taroth."

"And their middle name?"

I froze. What was her middle name? Had she ever told me? "Can't you just call all the Olivia Taroths one by one? There can't be many."

"Security protocols prevent me from doing so."

"Then override them."

"I cannot."

"Why not?"

"My database contains a wealth of knowledge on the developmental process of the original Interface programmers, which may answer your question. Would you like to start with a video or an article?"