A short barbarian, a leg focused cyborg, a feline alien, and an orc all grabbed onto each other as they felt wind rushing by. The orc was me, by the way. We were falling to our deaths.

  I wasn’t super fond of that idea, but I was also fairly certain I’d kill myself if I tried to multicast Fly at the moment. So I just regularly cast it on Midnight. I was kind of hoping to reestablish our bond, but even this close it was fuzzy. Fuzzy was far better than before.

  Maybe I should have tried to triple the cost for a Multicasting, but nobody could accuse me of thinking clearly in my most recent hours of consciousness. Midnight was captured and I broke magic.

  We had to fly. I could split it… or I could just get my arms under the other two and cast it on myself. No offense to anyone else, but I had priorities on who should live- and it would be quite difficult to get them back from this planet if I died and Midnight was incapacitated.

  Also I doubted they would hear me shouting over the rushing wind.

  All good reasons, but ultimately Midnight and I were the most important. As I cast fly, I wondered if the rushing wind counted as a focus component. Whether it did or not, Midnight and I suddenly stopped and the other two nearly tore my arms off.

  Next time I’d transition to flying more gradually. Relatedly, we were now dropping… but slowly. I angled for an alley in the city below, finding something that looked like a full dumpster. It was that or some sort of concrete.

  We landed with a thud.

  Kick sighed. “I was led to believe this would be an observational mission which might eventually lead to retribution against what remains of the Mod Squad. And now I’m in a pile of trash.”

  “That just means things are going well,” Honey Badger said helpfully.

  A dog barked at us. No, wait. That didn’t make any sense. A basset hound… or probably not that but certainly vaguely shaped like one. What was I supposed to do here? Translation. That had lapsed because Midnight wasn’t around to need it.

  “Bark, growl, long live the resistance! Come hide with me!”

  I floated myself out of the dumpster like object, making sure Midnight was with me. I reached over to help the others out. “That guy wants us to come with us.”

  “Sure. Whatever,” Kick said. “I really wasn’t planning to go to another planet today,” he sighed.

  “If you get new high tech upgrades on an emergency mission, can Extra take those away?” I asked.

  Kick blinked. “What?”

  “Just saying. This is a high tech world.” I turned towards the basset hound. “I hear you buddy. Lucky we have you here.”

  “Members of the resistance must be ready to act at all moments!” he declared.

  “Are there a lot of you?” I asked. “Or is one of us just cosmically lucky?”

  It could be Midnight. Getting into a teleporter accident and ending up on a different planet sounded bad, but it was way better than getting in a teleporter accident and not ending up anywhere at all. The supernatural pull of certain parts of Earth was pretty strong, but that mostly biased the events towards a region rather than causing them more frequently. Probably. There was some debate about that.

  “We stand around every corner, behind every swinging door, dug into every garden!”

  I didn’t know if that was literal, but there might be a large resistance. In that case, why had they not been more successful resisting?

  Perhaps I shouldn’t judge someone just trying to help. Especially not when I was about to topple over. The good news was, being in negative mana didn’t hurt anymore. The bad news was that I couldn’t tell if that was because I was numb to it or if it wasn’t dangerous anymore.

  Midnight was vaguely half-holding onto my shoulder where I’d placed him, held aloft less by his grip and more by the Fly spell.

  The sounds of the city around us turned more chaotic as flying saucers began to appear overhead and alarms blared. I didn’t have to guess that they were looking for us. Our new buddy kept low, and we just did our best to follow him through alleys covered with hanging tarps of some kind. I wondered if they were high tech sensor dampening tarps… or maybe they were just tarp tarps.

  “Through here. You’ll have to crawl,” he said, walking straight through a wall. Or at least, an image of a wall since I was pretty sure he wasn’t a ghost.

  I got down on hands and knees, moving carefully. I felt a brief firmness, but it wasn’t quite right for the apparent surface of brick. I pushed forward, feeling a yielding cloth slide over me as I moved, temporarily blocking my vision. Then I was in a garden of some sort. The sky was fake, though, and the ceiling was low. I couldn’t quite stand up. The other two came through behind me.

  If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

  There was a lot of Bunvorixian talking. I managed to pick out some of the louder voices. “A Celmothian! …. Is it okay? … strange apes?” The last word might not have quite been apes. Translation told me it was close. Not with words, but with vibes. Bunvorix probably didn’t have exactly the same creatures… except maybe squirrels. Rather than cross dimensional inspiration, this phenomenon should be… galactic cross-pollination? In short, there had always been a few instances of movement back and forth, bringing random plants and animals and vaguely mixing ecosystems. That was how such things were explained, but observed instances were admittedly rare. As they should be.

  “This one was kept captive by the dictators!” our guide declared loudly. “Recall the victorious declarations. Midnight Deathstalker, captured and shamed. We will spread the word of their failures through our networks. Now then, I am sure these people want some explanations.” The basset hound turned towards me. “I am glad you speak our language somehow, despite that Celmothian battle suit appearing damaged. I am Flopan. Might I have your names?”

  Right. We’d skipped that part. “For the sake of things on my homeworld,” I said. “I should go by the name Mage. A pseudonym, unfortunately. You already know Midnight, but he would be called Familiar. Then we have Kick and Honey Badger.”

  “... Can you clue us in?” Kick asked.

  “Sorry, I’m very low on mana. Just making introductions.”

  The mana regen here was… atrocious. Like, actually below ‘standard’. That concerned me, given various things I knew. Maybe I’d screwed up my intake and the ambient mana wasn’t that bad? But again, it didn’t hurt.

  Oh, I should absorb some mana crystals at this rate. I could get more than a few out with one use of Storage. Small ones, mostly, since those were efficient if I had time. I poured them into my pockets, then crushed one. That felt right. Actually, a bit better than normal?

  Then again, all my magical tuning was off at the moment. Nothing could be certain. When I actually focused on it, it was significantly more effective but… it might have been more sluggish when I was just letting it happen?

  I might have to manually absorb them now. Great.

  “How much do you know about Bunvorixian politics?” Flopan asked as he led us over towards a nice patch of grass where we sat down.

  “Umm, let’s see…” Most of what I knew had come from Zeb. “Tiny dogs are dictators that feed propaganda to mid sized dogs that perform necessary tasks. Big dogs are soldiers that may or may not be zealots.” I noticed we had a few of everything around here- though small dogs were rarest.

  Flopan nodded, his ears and loose skin flapping about. “That is generally accurate. This is quite a surprise. Perhaps you learned from the Celmothians?”

  “Nah, I met one of you. Zeb. She was an engineer on a ship that ended up attacking Earth.”

  “Oho, you are from The Earth! Word has reached our ears that General Sporticus led an assault on that world. The official word is one of great success… but we saw no spoils and counted few ships returning.”

  “Sporticus? Never heard of him,” I said.

  “Truly?” Flopan commented. “I had thought he would be known there. He gained special powers. Some say from the divine, but the resistance knows it more likely he made deals with dark powers.”

  Was he talking about Spot? Technically, you could say his powers were divine- but that did not mean a deity gave them to him.

  “Oh yeah, that’s magic. From my old world. Everyone has that.” I poked Midnight, who dazedly rubbed my hand. “Including this guy. And him,” I indicated Honey Badger, “Though his magic involved more hitting things with weapons.”

  “Magic…” the Bunvorixian showed a look of concern that I couldn’t have been able to interpret without Translation active. “I suppose that is as good a word as any.”

  “If you don’t believe in magic, I can show you. Though… not much. Actually, Midnight should be in a better shape but he’s… like this. Can you help?”

  “Yes. We have doctors on the way, but we do not have so many that they can be at every safehouse,” Flopan explained. “Nor do we have many familiar with Celmothian biology. Most of the studies are from warlike perspectives.”

  “I think those guys put some bad drugs in him,” I explained. “He was locked into a bunch of machines too. His suit was deactivated and his powers were suppressed.”

  “Well, I don’t know about these ‘powers’,” Flopan commented. “But I can say that I have heard of Celmothian bond suppression. I was not aware it could even happen with humans, though.”

  Would it be unhelpful to tell him I wasn’t a human? Probably, since it would have worked just as well if I was human. It was a good thing Midnight was showing signs of… something. Or I would have probably been flinging magic around trying to help but hurting myself more. Magic I didn’t have the mana for, twice over.

  -----

  A german shepherd like individual with a name that came out to ‘Starla’ poked and prodded Midnight for a bit before actually jabbing him with a syringe of some sort. Obviously they were arranged differently than human made ones, though I noticed a helpful collar with extensible grabbers. Most of the other Bunvorixians had them too, and I wondered if Zeb was supposed to have more things like that.

  They folded up into nearly unnoticeable states when not in use, serving a similar effect to the Celmothian suits. I wondered if these were an alternative, developed by different people, or merely what people had access to. I felt like Spot had some sort of suit at some point, but that might have been an Earth thing.

  “This should help counteract the drugs in his system,” she explained. “It will take a few hours for his body to process things still.”

  It wasn’t magic- I would have been able to tell- but it seemed like magic, because I could feel the bond becoming more real with every moment. I wasn’t sure how it suppressed both a Celmothian bond and a magic familiar bond, but then again there had been some magical garbage mixed in with all the tech stuff holding him.

  Kick had brought up his concerns that they might have placed trackers on Midnight. I relayed that, but Starla thoroughly checked. It didn’t seem they expected Midnight to get out. It wasn’t a trap to get to me. Most likely, they wanted to study magic in one of the enemies of Bunvorix.

  I still didn’t know how this related to Flasher and orcs, though. Were they all working together? I supposed there could be evil orcs not working with Doctor Doomsday, but if they were aligned with the main body of the Bunvorixians they were still bad. After all, anyone who wiped out squirrels and lied about it couldn’t be trusted.

  We were provided something like big doggy beds mixed with large beanbags. None of them were big enough for me to fully lay out on, but I could sink into one with my legs dangling towards the ground and be supported enough. They provided a tent-like covering to block the artificial sky. It was weird, but we couldn’t complain. And even if it wasn’t that late in our day, Midnight and I at least needed rest. The other two could figure out their own schedules.

  Midnight lay next to my head, our thoughts returning to a tangled unity of recursive stress… but it was still better than being alone.