Phase Q/Revenge

As you float through dream cities, images filling your mind, the time passes. Yet, nonlinearly. Sometimes time flows in giant, sweeping curves. Sometimes, time moves back on itself, only to leap forward again in a surge of excitement. Sometimes time forms multidimensional loops, connecting you with otherwise unreachable points in lifeworld.

As the time flows unevenly, you transmorph through many different forms. With time, you gain in ability to control the morphings. You explore the possibilities from animals through robotic forms through speculative rearrangements of matter and energy.

Your mind guides you without your full understanding. Yet, you can tell that another force nearby has a greater understanding.

You streak through spacetime, spinning gracefully with the ambiential swellings and diminishings. As you go, you try to communicate with the other being.

You pick up hints, traces, vague feelings. It’s almost like you know something is there but have no way of telling what it is. You are aware of its contour.

You try to bend a portion of time into a knot. It’s the kind of knot that doesn’t arise with any regularity in most of your journeys. So, it must signify some kind of being, essence, showing who you are. Maybe the other being can pick up on it?

You somersault twistingly across radiation lines in the energyzones, curving time ever more. You continue to feel the other being. Yet, it doesn’t seem to notice you.

You keep flying on the null trajectory of spacetime. As the other being goes, you watch its patterns.

Hm.

It seems to know the way, far better than you. And it seems to guide you away from certain regions and pitfalls. Yet, it doesn’t reply to your messages. Maybe it just doesn’t care?

You push all your mentalforce into reverse. Straining, you manage to hold back the entropic pull of the worldstream.

The other body takes notices. Its frame begins grating against yours, seemingly involuntarily.

You float, face to face with the invisible being. Can it see you?

You wave.

No response.

You flip.

No response.

You stay still and control spacetime to crisscross through your core.

As the contents of space reverse themselves, the entity becomes visible.

“Natalya!”

“What are you doing here?”

“What am I doing here? What are you doing now?!”

“Look,” says Natalya. “I’ve got to get to Q sector soon! We’re running low on time. It looks like you can do something interesting with time?”

“Well, um, yeah,” you say. Should you tell her more?

“I can’t tell you everything,” she says. “We’ve got to arrive before the Zonnyxes know what we’re doing. This is going to make a big difference. Trust me.”

You look her up and down. She flies nakedly through the vast colorful realms of new spacetime. She seems to have a youthful vitality that she lacked when you knew her on the planet. Yet stress creases her face. In the glowing hot radiation, she looks beautiful, if carcinogenic.

“Well, Natalya. Can you tell me about what happened with the Fyucheez and the Triads and all that?”

“Not right now,” she whispers.

• [[Phase Q/Phase Q|Follow Natalya.]
• [[Phase Q/The Island|Transport to the Island.]

Phase Q: An interactive adventure.