Heroes of Dreamland Rewritten, Book 2: Stars in Far Places

Chapter 3

Captain | 大尉

Bored nearly to tears, I find myself once again marching aimlessly around the blank, vacant, steel halls of NightMare Enterprise's headquarters. The windowless, practically entrance-free space station floats listlessly around an empty planet that has never, to my knowledge, held any sort of life. What is does have, however, is one of the Galaxy's largest natural deposits of the dark ore, tenebrisium, which the Lord of Nightmares finds quite useful in his various experiments and creations. It can easily be manipulated into all sorts of other purposes and hidden inside of all sorts of containers, which makes it the perfect tool for creating salable products that don't always do what they're advertised to do, but do always do what their creator wants them to do.

The Lord of Nightmares is one of the most genius businessmen who has ever existed, I'll give him that much. He finds a way to fool people into thinking they have a need that only he can fulfill, sells them a product they really don't need in the first place, has the product do something entirely different from what the buyer wanted it to do, and yet still somehow always ends up having customers come back to him begging for more products. He helped the Halcandrans to industrialize just a few centuries ago, and look where that got them. Last I heard, even though they've been trying for over a hundred years to nurse their planet back to health, aside from out in the country, plants are still rare treasures.

Tools of industrialization are not the only thing the Lord of Nightmares sells, not by a long shot. He markets made-to-order monsters, cartoons, food products, pretty much everything you can think of. But every item he sells has a dark side to it, which always ends up working against the customer... And yet, as I said, they always come back for more.

I suppose I ended up in the same boat, in a way. I traded something of nigh-infinite value for my own benefit. At least I was smart enough not to sell my soul or my life; I still belong to myself, thank you very much. But even as it is, I'm stuck paying fealty to the Lord of Nightmares until such time comes as I can safely get away from him. He helped me, and I owe him my allegiance. At least I'm better off than that infant I brought here a few weeks ago; her life does belong to him now, and probably will until the day she dies, unless by some miracle, he dies first. He owns the legal copyright to her existence, to her DNA, to everything she is. If she has a soul, he probably legally owns it too, though whether he actually has the ability to do anything with it is another story entirely.

Speaking of that infant, I wonder how her adjustment to the cold, antiseptic space station is going. After stopping my march for a moment and fading into thought, I finally shrug and head toward the cell block where I dropped her off a few weeks ago. It's not as if I have anything better to do at the moment, and I'm genuinely curious as to how the one other truly-living being on this Nova-forsaken ball of metal is getting along.

It takes several minutes to make it to the nearest cell block. There is a digitizing teleporter system that runs throughout the space station, allowing anybody and anything to be converted into code and back again and transported anywhere there is another teleporter pad in the place in the matter of an instant, but I don't trust it. There's just something about it that makes me feel antsy, so I've never used it. Walking may take quite a bit longer, but it's hardly as if I have anywhere I need to be most of the time anyway.

In the cell block, several prototype monsters wander about in various cells, some of which are basically cages. Others are quarantined glass-like boxes or observation rooms, based on the relative danger of the monster within. In one cell, a large group of empty-eyed Batamons (basically the end result of the Lord of Nightmare's attempts to make Star Warriors from scratch, puffballs that all come in a shade of sickly pink) stare at the wall, hardly blinking, never stirring. They're essentially vegetables, zombies, even. The only real reason the Lord of Nightmares makes them anymore is the fact they can be used to synthesize Star Warrior blood. Other than that, all they really do is stand and stare in their cells for the five years or so they live before silently dying the same way they silently live. Of course, that's assuming they don't get used as practice dummies for the other monsters before their natural length of life is over. Shuddering, I hurry past that cell, checking each cell for any sign of an actual living Star Warrior.