Ragnarok

Chapter 3 - Valhalla

Micah's eyes were getting droopy again.

The basic robo-forms did most of the work in the hydroponics bay, as they did everywhere on the Amrita colony. The precision work was still almost entirely machine work, as metal tended to have longer periods between "bent", "swap out a part" and "broken, needs fixing." The humans were there to help out with the simpler stuff and then stand back and supervise. While the robots were probably involved in their own private communications between themselves, every member of the human crew was accompanied by a variety of robots in a variety of general-purpose forms, each of them capable of multiple functions within their set parameters.

At the moment, Micah's robot minions were busy studying and pruning the low-gravity hybrids that floated in their water tanks, and Rei was acting as a sub-supervisor. Anything worrisome that Rei noticed in the plant life, she brought to his attention. While Micah took more of an active role in developing hybrids and cures for the strange diseases that sometimes popped up on an environment like the Moon, at the moment all his loaves were baking, so to speak, and he had little to do at the moment. He sat his physical body on a stool, rested his shoulder against a steel wall, and told Rei to alert him in-setting if anything important came up. He blinked twice, and again his surroundings shifted.

He was still in the starfield around Pluto, which made as good a spot as any to serve as a starting point. Then with a few more blinks and twitches of the fingers, he pulled up a list of his favorite programs, and went to Valhalla. The starfield around him blurred into scintillating rainbows, and he seemed to suddenly leap "upwards" at near-lightspeed.

When the flashes of color, which Micah knew were meant to disguise loading screens and auto-logins, finished dazzling his eyes, he was sitting in his favorite chair in Valhalla, detailed in gold and hardwood, now wearing an entirely different flesh. He clenched virtual fists that were hard as steel, smiled beneath a blazing golden beard, and hefted a hammer that was forged in the heart of a neutron star.

While the logical parts of his brain insisted this was merely illusion, there was something about hefting Mjolnir itself that really brought out his inner geek. He spent at least half of his life here. When so much of his job depended on his actual brain, he got used to exploring these different worlds that were available. He loved almost all of them, but Valhalla was thus far his favorite. It was the dangerous ones that kept him mentally in shape.

He'd played through the main story half a dozen times, in various guises, almost all of them champions or avatars of Thor, a god he always felt particular kinship to. Sometimes that took the form of wizened wizards of arcane lore, cloaked in secrets and shadows illuminated by the briefest flashes of lightning. Other times he was a brave and mighty warrior, when his brain was tired and he wanted to get back to the simple things in life ... alright, you guys are still talking, but the writing's on the wall and I'm impatient. If we do this, let's do this now, and then settle it. Fight me fairly and we can move on. Kill me with dishonor at your peril, because the next guy will be ready for this.

But what he loved most were the ones who blended the two. The one who kept the squabbling sides united while the horror that they awoke to settle it decides he's had enough of you pulling his strings, and then things get even more complex. They weren't always the most popular ones on either side-too sneaky for the straightforward, too blunt for the wily-but without them, the story ends as both sides destroy each other. And he'd played through enough tales that had reached 'bad ends' and gotten scattered because they held their grudges from the game too long to remember what was important. He felt he'd found around the right balance of the two, but at the same time, a lot of failed attempts had thought that, too.