Chương 443: BECMI Chapter 442 – Immortal Recruitment Drive

Jorg's face hardened at the implications in Lady Edge's voice as she continued her explanation of the past.

"The core of the Barhund is now the Core of All Magic, tied to the magical energy field of this planet, and about it more and different magicks become possible than anyplace else on the planet." The holographic Illusion faded away, and she faced him with demurely clasped hands, the perfect red rose in her hair with black stamens only seeming to precisely accent her almost luminous eyes.

"This is the situation you are in right now, Master Turmalez. Like your superior, you have been thrown into an Immortal status through a very unconventional method, relying not on promotion or sponsorship, but pure luck and magitomic reality alteration. You are an Immortal of this world, not Ascended, bound to it by fire and atom, not by obligation to an Immortal Patron or mentor.

"With your status comes a great deal of power, and frighteningly small amounts of responsibility. What restrictions exist upon the Immortals are enforced upon them by the powerful of their kind. As you might imagine, that is quite loose of an oversight, and they do not even know you exist at this time.

Immortal Projects regularly include great Curses, purges, wars, falls of empires and kingdoms, conquests, and magical catastrophes, one of which you participated in, and one which you slept through, but which killed ninety percent of your fellow crewmembers in cryosleep.

"What we know of you is what we have seen of your counterpart, a no-nonsense, hardworking man with great discipline who prefers to work with his hands and not with airy theory and micromanaging efficiency." He had to smile at that accurate description of Senior Engineer Encheliff.

"What we would like to know is what you are planning to do next." Jorg could only sit there for a moment, rather tongue-tied, and not just by her cold, alien beauty, a perfect rose with thorns that should not be plucked.

"I… don't know?" he had to admit.

"My main priority was finding out what happened to the rest of the ship and its crew. But… three, four thousand years since then…" He could only shake his head in dismay.

"Okay, except for that arse Encheliff, I'm the only survivor? What about those in cryosleep?"

"I am taking them to the Other Shore, so as to break the temporal trail. If I hid them and let them sleep until this age, Immortals could look back along their timeline, find my interference, and start tracking the ways I have been getting around. By moving them across the Shores, their timeline is snipped, and they basically become survivors coming out of nowhere.

"Captain Emeril and Master Lalo, the other Immortals made by the Doom of Darkmoor there, will also work to erase their origins and keep them and us safe.

"If I bring them forward to this time, there will be consequences, and they will likely not be well. Most of the Immortals behind the Doom back then are gone, but not all, and they will be very, very happy to clean up these little fleas that were somehow missed back then, just for starters." Jorg could only sigh helplessly, imagining experienced entities with access to the powers he now had, and knowing how to use them!

"And I couldn't use this.. time-travel device of yours to go join them, or something?" he had to ask.

"You are now a major fifth-dimensional existence, and the Portal is not strong enough to take you either back in time or across the Shore," Lady Edge informed him calmly, shaking her head.

"Given sufficient skill, you could throw your awareness back there and see events of the past, using Immortal Power, but that would be in the future.

"For now, you are a newborn and completely unattached Immortal of the Sphere of Energy, tied to this world, and that is all." He detected a note of expectation from her.

"It sounds like you might have plans for me." It was a strange feeling, to be called an Immortal, and to have a Mortal planning for him. No, that didn't sound right.

"We are in need of a true Immortal ally," the blonde woman, Sama, spoke up crisply.

"The reason the three of us are speaking to you is because we also are not mortals." Jorg's eyes widened slightly as he glanced between them.

"We are Eternals, on a separate road of post-mortal advancement, one that very well may have been culled by the Immortals in the past. We are attempting to bring about, if not a world, then a society that is not beholden to Immortals, one that can raise mortals up to the heights you knew as a member of your Federation, and, with magic, possibly even something higher.

"It is not a thing the Immortals of this world can tolerate. They come from primitive peoples and primitive times, with no knowledge or respect for what the power of science can truly accomplish. They crushed Darkmoor and wiped knowledge of the Barhund from history, turnings its Core into a massive tool of magic just to prove their dominance." Briggs leaned forward on his massive arms, a gentle giant with a dangerous strength to him.

"We are very, very tired of living and fearing Immortal whims and Projects injecting excitement at yet another experiment into our lives, Master Turmalez." He glanced between them, nodding slowly.

"I wouldn't care to be the germs in the Petri dish, either," he agreed slowly.

"But… I'm also new to this status and my capabilities, so I don't know what I can truly do to help you." ============== This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere. I know what you can do to help. Novel Bind and other sites are scraping my stories (and others!) without permission again. If you're not reading (or hearing) this on Royal Road, you're helping pay a thief! Please read it in its original home, it's still free!

You get the foreword and afterword, author comments, and answers to people with questions! I have not given permission for this story to be copied by a bot and posted ANYWHERE ELSE. ============= Hard smiles broke out on the faces of all three of them.

"Well, for starters you can play a god for us." He stared at them, blinking a few times as he processed that.

"Seriously?" he had to ask.

"You have the same spell-granting ability as, say, a demigod in Exudar IV would possess." It took him a second to remember that Lady Edge had said she had lived in this Darkmoor for fifty years, and the others were familiar with Federation technology, so of course they knew about Exudar IV!

"All those churches you've seen, and the priests who could actually use granted miracles? They are empowered by Immortals returning the Faith of mortals serving them to their priests, allowing them to act as their representatives in this world."

"You aren't the first Green Immortal in this world, but you are the first one with some common sense," Briggs went on with a sniff.

"We could instantly give you a church, a powerful and numerous following, and the tools with which to start slowly changing the world, with some caveats in that we know you as a person, not just some distant Immortal."

"I take it there are rules against Immortals directly manipulating and associating with mortals," he said dryly. Wasn't that the case with all gods in any fiction? All three of them nodded back at him.

"The better to stir the Petri dish without any empathic connections or things like friendship or paternalism getting in the way," sneered Sama.

"Supposedly it's to protect mortals from Immortals strong-arming them and directly ruling them, but all that does is make the rule-breakers a bit more clever about how they do so."

"Captain Emeril and Master Lalo have some experience with Immortal society and training on the Other Shore. I will forward their notes to you," Lady Edge said.

"I think you will find them quite instructive." He didn't hide his eagerness to learn more about his own status.

"I presume you have goals beyond finding a Patron Immortal?" he asked sharply, aware of political maneuverings even if he despised them. Again, all three of them nodded in approval.

"We are going to attempt to bring in true gods," Lady Edge stated evenly.

"Non-finite Divine entities whose power is an order of magnitude or four above the Immortals. Beings tied to profound concepts and drives that transcend mortal limitations, and actually have motivations far beyond the pettiness that seems to be amplified by being Immortal."

"The Alignments," Sama stated, Briggs nodding firmly. Jorg found himself leaning forward in interest.

"Alignments?" he repeated slowly.

"I… have no frame of reference…"

"Cast a Know Alignment spell," Sama smirked.

"Like this," Lady Edge said quietly, and wove the simple spell in front of him. He imitated it quickly, spending very little power to do so. It was a simple Divination effect into a separate spectra, enabling one to see the spiritual Auras of living things. For a moment, there was nothing revealed about any of them. Then magical and quasi-magical interference went down, and suddenly he could see them all very clearly. They were very Gold.

He understood instinctively that they followed some very benevolent moral codes with both understanding and grim devotion. Briggs' viewpoints were wound up with hints of Silver and more group support, leadership, and discipline, involved with raising the floor for all those around him.

Sama's Gold sparkled with Rainbow edges, revealing a somewhat wilder and more emotional personal side, willing to buck authority and pursue her own path, with full willingness to face the consequences head on with delight and enthusiasm. And Lady Edge's was a hard, tempered, and very grim Gold of such depth and solidity that Jorg swallowed to see it. It had to be based on endless self-introspection, confidence in one's actions, and understanding her own motivations and deeds in relation to what needed to be done.

And killing on the level of genocide things that needed to be killed. Jorg looked down at his own hands. White. His Aura was White. Next to all three of them, it looked rather pitiful and hollow.

"Even Immortals have Alignments," Lady Edge informed him coolly.

"They try to ignore the implications of such things, thinking they are above mortal considerations and philosophies, that they cling to motivations that transcend such feeble notions of behavior and morality, that they are unimportant and irrelevant to such beings as they.

"They are, of course, fools." Jorg nodded slowly, staring at the disparity in Colors. With enough introspection he was fairly sure he could work out just what values, mores, and virtues each of them possessed, by their Colors.

"Such Auras can be concealed," he said slowly, the means to do so popping into his head, not even that difficult, "or even altered to appear as something else, but they are still there…"

"The local powers believe the only real Alignments are Law and Chaos, with evil and good being things that are relative to the perspective of the individual. They are naturally quite mistaken in this belief," Lady Edge said coolly.

"It is the interaction between Law and Chaos that creates the laws and rules by which realities run. It is the interaction between Good and Evil that requires Free Will, and is the engine by which Creation advances.

"Good and Evil are quite absolute things, diluted only by interaction with the other Alignments. But Immortals do not wish to be held to standards, and care little about wills other than their own."

"Our intention is to bring in the Gods of Good from another multiverse and provide an offset for the ambitions and schemes of the Immortals, particularly those of Entropy, but there are precious few Good souls among any of the Immortals," Briggs stated calmly.

"And… we'd like your help with that ultimate goal," he said candidly.

"That's sort of like bringing in my own replacement?" Jorg had to chuckle at the thought.

"You are an Immortal," Sama cut that line of thinking off sharply, staring at him hard.

"Your power is your power. If you cut yourself free of mortal existence and go exploring the multiverse, your power remains your own. You replace nothing," she stated flatly, and he winced.

"Even if you choose to play god and empower Clerics to aid us, this costs NOTHING of your own power. You are merely returning Faith to empower those who follow you, nothing more!"