Part Two: The P.O. is the guy who later helps him meet the Olders, and eventually joins in on the Ship.

S.1. Awake to a terrifyingly handsome man lifting him up to put him on a bench.  He gets angry, and tries to fight back as he wakes, but the man disposes of his attacks, although he does get blooded.

The man is tall, almost an elflord, and has multiple glowing balls floating around him.

"Angels don't bleed." Blurts out our hero.
"One assumes so, they being creatures of spirit unlike Our Lord, but that raises an interesting question as to if an angel were damaged, say be a demon's blade, what form would that damage take?"
His rescuer is perfectly willing to sit down and speculate about angelic weaponry for the next hour, but our hero is not interested as he wants to know What's Going On, right now!!
"You took too much intoxicant, maybe with an amnesiac as a social challenge or because you were embarrassed at a faux pas at last night's party."
Yes, its party pretty much all the time.
"No, no, I...I was shot...in the chest....by a bullet."
"A bullet, how quaint."
"Thats a rather extreme challenge there, my friend."
"Hunh? No, it was...a drug dealer."
"Why would a seller of intoxicants want to shoot someone? Even if you ripped him off, he could just go to the police..."
"No, he can't, he's a criminal."
"But why?  And no, I'm pretty sure selling brain and body mods is legal."
Hero's head goes into his hands.
"Look ordinarily I would not do this, but you seem really bent.  So I'm going to access the localnet, and find your recent past."
"You can do that?"
"Well, yes, I'm a peace officer, or in the jargon 'a cop' or 'snoopy parker'"
"Track down murders, and shoot bad guys...a cop?"  Incredulous look at very nicely dressed guy.
"Well, not like that.  Besides most murderers turn themselves in.  It helps convince the autons it was a crime of passion.  Hunh, this is strange. You're not here ten minutes ago....hmmmm.....ah there you are, seven minutes, and twelve seconds ago, and you appear in the LocalNet Panopticon..."

"You mean you have cameras everywhere!!"
"Yes, but only with due cause can they be accessed....hello, this is...'yes, I'm Reynolds, P.O., yes, deputize me for 413..." Long, leary look at our hero. "OK.
And...."
"What's that?"
"It seems my friend, I've been totally wrong about you.  You're not a druggie on a challenge who borrowed a very good chameleon cloak, no, you're a gravitational anomaly, a Genuine Threat to the Planet, and all that."  Reynold's eyebrows went up, and for the first time he had a big grin on his face.
"Now I can show them what I can do."

I died the first time, over Tikrit, in a helicopter....Earth.

His next world is one of medieval darkness where orcs think they are humans, and can do human things....You have White Coats who are not Scientists, Correctors who are not Preachers but Commissars, Moral Ones instead of Writers for they are very didactic.

He is enslaved before he fully wakes up, and he is given the job of turning a water wheel for the Orc Town above him.  Its called Yall (for one day long ago it was Yale).  But in his chains, he prays.

He also tries to protect another wheelman.  He prays for him when the orcs beat the guy, and he sees some recovery, and he feels an urge to lay on hands, and the man fully recovers before his eyes, or mostly so since he has mnot the faith that the man would be f ully recovered.

Pray for Angel and an Earthquake.

Ready to clamber the wall, and a horde of orc guards descends.  Shoves the guy over the wall, and turns to fight.  Eventually verses out.

Arrives in new world, with less magic, and prays, but God is afar off, and he wonders what he did.  He prays for guidance....please.  This leads to him becoming aware of a scriff vector which leads him to another verser who is not knowledgeable and trying to pretend he's in his home world.  Our hero uses this to piece together some of a verser theory.

He decides that if he's going to be travelling to other worlds, then preparing for that would be good.  So he spends the next twenty years as a woods guide, until people start noticing he's not getting gray hairs.  There is one final daring rescue on the outside of a mountain, and he gets his picture in a blog.

Then he deliberately vanishes, but checks out the Verser in Denial.  The man is the same age he's always been after fake mustaches are taken off.  The facts are clear.  He's immortal, or very long lived.

He moves to a city, dyes his hair, cuts his beard, and becomes a cnvenience store clerk, and takes martial arts, and then moves over to professional underground fighting.  He has to leave in eight years as 'he's too good to be so young' and 'I want what drug he's using' which leads into a major fight with a boxing promoter and his thugs and an attached gang.

He verses out.

His last world is a lead up, and then a big title fight against Evil. And The End.

This is based on the world Shikamaru played in.

1. Somewhat experienced, and magically trained computech verser arrives on a cobblestoned street.  He gets in a fight by accident, and it spills over into the nearest Temple of the Five Gods.  Mage uses magic on him, and he tries to reply.  Mage's magic works, his doesn't.
2. He's in a dungeon, in a wooden cage with others in like situation. There is a possessed man, a priest of the Silent One (not one of the Five), and the duke enters with his son, Caprician.

More Later??

By the time I was five, I was an old, skilled pro at ground hog spotting; by twelve, I was bored with the 'not really bacon', by twenty, I found the whole ceremony sweet, and quaint, and a thing to be preserved against the tides of change for I could see the smiles on the faces of the little children.  By twenty-five, I said goodbye to all that.

It did not take much.

There was a girl, and some alcohol involved.  You can already guess this story is going to end badly, and it does, but this is the type of story that always can restart, even always will restart, whether the protagonist, I hesitate to call myself a hero, wishes it or not.

I'd entered Seven's Luck, which was not my kind of place, being full of loud music, and no chance to talk.  If all you wanted in a romantic encounter was a nice bod, then why not get to the point, and have a pair of opposing, parallel slutwalks down the street, and throw a lariat around the girl or guy you liked, and hope they didn't slip it off, and spit on the ground in your sort of direction.  And for alcoholic sustenance, one could borrow the Mad Dog from the mentally ill who lived on the street, which was doubtless superior to the slop I held in my right hand.

My sociology professor, in a fit of hatred inspired by my showing him up in his analysis of the effects of gun control laws (really, if you can't manage multiplication with decimals,  you shouldn't bother with math), gave me the 'opportunity to expand my mind' by going to a bunch of bars, spending money I'd prefer to spend on steak on cheap wine with colored dye, and asking a bunch of girls a ten point questionairre on how they'd been mistreated by the System aka the Patriarchy.

I walked up to a PYT, with a  hard gleam in her eyes, who was dancing at quarter volume, clearly hoping some guy would come up to examine her green lame' dress with its spaghetti straps, holding a drink in one hand, and the corner of the bar in the other to stabilize herself.

She gave me what she imagined was a coquettish glance, and I felt like groaning inside.  Perhaps, I am shooting too high, for what I can see in the bar mirror does not look that prepossessing.  Six five in my stocking feet, big boned (I am, really), and a bit fat with a face more closely resembled a light peach with curly, pale ginger hair, gone to receding foreline, and eyes of watery blue.  Most people assumed I had played center or linebacker in high school.  No one would believe I was state for ping pong, but I have very fast hands, and I'm quick on my feet.  I could have gone for football, indeed the coach begged me too, but getting busted knees like my uncle, and running around in a hundred degree heat compared to playing a game in an air conditioned hall was no challenge for me to decide what to do.

She said something about how big a fellow I was, and I grated out a smile, and said my spiel.  She must have caught on to my distaste because she made a smart aleck comment to a guy near her.  He took up the opportunity dropped in his lap, and made some comment to me.

He was a short guy, even for a guy, and well-dressed, not like my khaki colored suit, but instead he looked sharp.

"Look guy, I have just a few questions, and then you can make time with the girl."
Mistake. Oh yeah.  I aaw the girl's eyes flare, as she realized I genuinely did not like her (her petulant pouts added four  years to her age), and so she invited the other guy to 'defend her honor' at which I choked back a laugh.  I don't think she understood what honor was.

He said something, and I just stared bored at him.  Look, when you're six five, and two hundred sixty pounds, of which all but twenty are muscle or bone, you rarely get in a fight.  But on the gripping hand (yes, I read SF.) you get to endure more insults than are really needed.  Its a karmic balance, I guess, except its more of a social balance since karma has nothing to do with it.

He faded back a step, and took out his camera phone for some reason, probably to threaten to upload a pic of me with a caption.  Ooh, scary.  So I turned back to the girl, and began to quiz her.  And she screamed in outrage, grabbed the phone, threw it at me, and then followed that pitch at my head with her colored dye water plus cheap booze.

And something odd happened.  I did not feel the minor impact of a phone, nor hear the shouting of the little punkazoid, or the crazy girl, or the stinging of drink in my eyes.  Instead, I felt a thrumming all over, almost painful, and saw yellow dots in the air.

And then I woke, but somewhere else entirely.  For a moment I was glad, after all, I was out of that bar.

PS remember the Doppleganter King story.
This message was last edited by the player at 08:30, Mon 28 July 2014.

Due to the backup at the crematorium, and the steamwagon's full of protestors, I had cracked open a book of history, complete with pictures, and handy diagrams, and given my husband a Viking burial in the rowboat in the pond behind what used to be our house, and was now just my house.  He would have laughed so hard that he fell down to the patio stones, with tears in his eyes, unable to speak even as guests at one of our backyard parties laughed, but more discreetly.

It was how he loved me too, with a  fervor that scorched the soul.  Even as he lay dying, pinned by a falling pine axed with more enthusiasm than expertise in the stand across the pond, his body broken, he had been instructing me.

"Remember the yellow folder, babe, doll, dream of my..." And that was his last words.  And that was two months gone.

In the yellow folder entitled 'Emergency' was a cardboard sheet with seven intricate keys of pewter, of iron, of silver, and e'en one of plated gold.  Then came the instructions to burn him, along with a quote from the Good Book assuring me that he was with Our Father, and no necromancer could undo that bond.

 And lastly was a sketch in pencil of a man.  At the bottom of th epage was a jagged note, written in heartsore letters.  "Wear your red dress when you meet this man."  My husband as much told me from beyond the grave to set my cap for this man.

Over the next month, I had studied his face.  Lean, tired even, with a blade like nose, and a large chin, and black hair hanging in a lock over his eyes, concealing them, that I wondered if my husband had lost his mind before the end.  He has a Gift, a Seeing of future events, but many who had such powers, also gained madness with it.

So I waited in hope.

Our hero is a math major with a liking for traditional ways, and not inclined to the rushing tide of change, especially stupid change.  He also wants to find a girl, a good girl.  He's also a huge guy.

World: The Mountainous Islands of the Yareth Peninsula.  The Yarethian Empire is on the land, but the Isles of War, joined by toll bridges, and ferries, are to their north where the great warriors live.  In the Peninsula live the peasantry and the aristos.  The aristos are elvish and foppish, and the peasantry are half-elven, but have the worst traits of both races (lazy, and short lived, inclined to status mongering, and to temper...elven and human respectively).

The War Isles are largely human, although some other races mix in, here and there.  And the WI are violent, clannish, warriors.  And the WI have  Royal Hunting Grounds stamped all over them, which lets  wyverns and chimera prey on the human's herds of cattle, and on wounded humans.

The WI are told, repeatedly, how much the YE spends on them, and how much the YE helps them, and how the WI should be grateful instead of being sullen and bitter.  But, as mathmatics guy will show, the YE is skinning the WI which has a much rougher life in their mountainous islands than the peasantry with their well settled lands.  Part of the reason is that the WI have war vets who take home money and that gets counted as a gift to the WI by the YE.  Our mathematics guy is going to be able to be a leader showing what people sense to be true is in plain fact true, and the YE leaders know it.  Which is going to lead toward war, or a readjust ment of power and money in the empire.

Also the WI provide most of the warriors in the YE.

S.1. The Bar/Versing Out

S.2.

The early morning air freshened my face. Fog drifted on the river to my left, and slightly slimy to my toes was the earth path rippling up and down underfoot for the sub-tropical sun had not yet baked it dry.  The burp of frogs, the rustle of wild game in the bamboo stand to my right, and the plunk of  stone sinker on fishing line from Malitak ahead of me greeted.

The quiet whoop of Yordnak, the other boy, was a taunt and a rejoice from the smaller lad.  I came over the last pop-up to see Malitak, in his kilt of plain white linen, raise an arm to mock threaten the other. Yordnak shied away, but kept on grinning as he lay a six inch panfish on a banana leaf on t he muddy peninsula both boys stood on.

"Erri!" They both cried, but then shushed themselves for sake of the fish.
"We don't want to scare away the fish."  Yordnak explained with great, if cute, solemnity.
"Yes." I agreed gravely, and then the two boys dropped their fishing poles,and ran to me for hugs.

[[[[stampede and then tres thru village from his side.

"Next time let me hunt with  you, 'Erri?" Malitak begged.  Yordnak was not far behind in joining in.
"The Great Beasts are too much for you, young ones." I said, with a smile, thinking back to the huge creature I had seen wandering through a ravine, slowly, munching on the trees tops of those middling ones that grew along the ravine's edge. And that was that.
"True."
"Not." Replied Malitak.
"Let me finish, Mallie." Yordnak whined until Malitak signed acquiescence.
"Wannai desires furs for her leggings so when you go, we will go to the Lower Valley, where it is safe, and no Great Beasts come."
I blinked.  The two boys had a point, not that I wanted to admit it, but Wannai had the way of getting her desire, either by asking, or smiling, or by bending others to do the asking for her.  In the end you  tended to do what Wannai wanted, which is why despite her looks, I had not cast a flower at her in last month's dance.
I wanted no part of a puppeteer, most of the time, but in the midst of a dance with such a lithe young women, it was hard to remember good reasoning.  Meren was more to my taste, a shy, little thing with a cute smile that got startled out of her.
"So we can go?" Malinak asked eagerly.
"Ah..."
And then there was a thrumming underfoot.

I spun about, shoving the two young lads behind me to see a palm tree just south of the village waver, and then bend, and finally snap off.  One of the Great Beasts, a stegosaurus, stepped through the space it had made, and then began to run.  Behind it came others of its  herd, the smaller ones, not quite up to the thirty foot at the crest of its back, not counting the fleshy heat-radiating fins.

The fins were red with blood as the huge beast had need of losing heat with that titanic body mass wrapped in tight around itself, and serving as excellent insulation and heat producing muscles the size of a large pig.  The scaly skin was tightly knit together, and sealed so that it was water and air and spear proof.  On it, great spirals, such as adorn the clay pots of the People of the River, whose village was being invaded even now, stood proud.  And all about its vastness, was a fringe of fungus and moss, and even as it ran, thundered on, two birds sat calmly on its back.

"Into the river, boys, swim."  I ran, not looking back.  "To the opposite side, quickly." I yelled as I heard the splash of their entries.

Running parallel to the stampeding herd, I saw ahead of me the thatched roofs of the village.  I screamed, sparing what oxygen I could, a warning, even if it was not likely neccessary as anyone could know that the herd was coming by the sound, and the rising dust going over the treetops, and the shaking of the earth.

The herd came into the village, and all the villagers had retreated to their homes.  And the herd went under the houses, all of them on stilts, which was good for flood, and for herds.

One hut had a bamboo pole support snapped like a toothick, no, easier than a toothpick, like an uncooked spaghetti strand, but the people overbuilt their supports.  And then another, and another, and the house canted sideways, barely held up by the four remaining poles on the left side.

Ge and Dpona, and their young child....my heart threatened to burst inside me for grief and for rage. But there was nought I could do.  So I went up the ladder to my house, which the people of this kind village had helped me build when I came unlooked for into their world, and their lives.

And inside, as the remainder of the herd streamed on, I ripped open the 'lock' a pitiful thing of twisted corn husks, and took out my Dragunov.  My father bought it cheap after the Fall of the Soviet Empire.  And he gave it to me at my eighteenth birthday.  Hurriedly, I slammed in the bullets, just four, was all.

And then against my better judgement, I looked out to Ge's place.  To my surprise it was still standing, and the herd came on.  So little time had passed.  It felt as if it had been an hour, but it was mere seconds, tens of seconds.

And I was moving before thought kicked in, and screeched not to do this.  My rifle went on my shoulder with its strap over my back.  And I leapt with one foot to the top of the railing of my 'side porch', and without thinking, for how could I think at a time like this, I leapt out onto the back of the first stegasaurus under me.

He stumbled as I hit hard, and I fell forward, about to fall between two of the giant things, so I pumped my legs, and slammed face first into the stinking hide of the next.  Slipping on the fungus, so out came my knife, and in it went.

Yes, the stegasaurus is proof against the spear, but that is a bronze spear.  My knife was another gift of my father.  It was cold forged steel, four inches, and a straight handle, double edged.  It went in, and the beast yowled in outraged pain.  Roughly how you would feel if some prankster stabbed you with a hair pin in the thigh.

He bucked, and I flew up, surprised, but bycycling in the air, I went with it, and came down on his back.  To my dismay, I saw that the beast under me had flinched to the side, thus driving the monster to his right, and the one to his right further right, and right into Ge's last remaining supports.

I was running forward without thinking, and when the house crashed on the backs of the beasts, I leapt inside, and grabbed Dpona, who was hugging the baby that Ge held.  Then I spun and leapt up, and the house went on, and we left the house by the great hole in its side, just formed.  Ge followed me, and I landed on my rump with the delightful Dpona on my lap, but with no time to enjoy the moment, I set her to  her feet, and ...

The moldy living room stank of the washed dead, but that is a smell that never comes completely off, despite Dial. A grandfather clock to my left struck twelve, sending shivers th rough the air, and I reached for the door behind me to close it, fearful of waking the inhabitants.

Alas, too late.

A rushing wind, and I pivoted around and back to catch a granite hard fist in my lips.  Flung backwards, I skidded across an old chestnut table, seating for ten, and got fetched up on a high back chair of similar design.  Which then held me for a half second, before totterng over, and smashing under my abundant weight.

I reached twice.  Once for one of the leg poles with a shaved point to fit into the chair bottom, and the other to shield myself from the flow of time.  The stake was in my hand, but still I hadn't caught the flow of time in my mind.

"Its the Witching Hour, mate." Said the man in the bowler derby hat, said the thing in the hat, with the golden cravat above his white silken shirt. "All things are possible now.  And that means, not allowing you to use your freezing time powers.

Dismayed, and yet I reached.  But there was nothing, I was being stifled.  And then I saw a wave of current, and began to pull on it.  And on and on, Until suddenly that changed, and I was no longer pulling, but trying to manage a roaring watefall.

And as the power spirals up and around, back and frothe, and twice around us, and then it freezes, and we all stop.
=============================

The room was dark, lit only by the light of the moon through tall windows.  Echoes in the air seemed strange, as if a continual reverb ran through a much larger space than before.  I am an immortal verser, so I recognize when I have come to a different place for I have been cast out of many worlds, and born alive in many new.

Still the floor looked the same, and the vampire across from me, the one smelling of dead things, of carrion....and I could smell the breath mints in his pocket, and the different types of blood under his fingernails, and the slime in his throat, dried blood and gunk, and a dead fly that had flown into his throat attracted by the scent of blood that all vampires have, but got  stuck in the 'gunk' that enables the movement of these undead beasts.

And so, I came over, stake in hand, to kill, to render non compose physicallii in the Roman of the 23rd Century, a star-spanning Rome, and he looked up at me in fear and in great agony.  His eyes were over wide, and blood lines stood out in the white viscera about the eyeballs, and he croaked.

"You've killed me, thief."  And right before my eyes, he fell into chunks, and then smaller bits, and then earth, and finally dust.

And then a robot rolled up from the wall, and vacuumed him up, which was strange because we had been in a warehouse, and I was pretty sure the place did not have a robot vacuum cleaner, especially one so powerful as to clean up near two hundred pounds of ash in a few tens of seconds.

What was going on?  I accessed my time sense, the most basic of my temporal powers, granted me on another world as one of the Temporal Knights of the Cross, but found nothing.  Nothing that is but a scarred and blasted wasteland in my soul, and doubling over, I wept for the anguish of it even as the robot came back out to clean up my tears splattering on the smooth concrete floor.

Sinking, falling, dropping into a putrid sea of panic and pain, weeping bitter tears on the floor of the room, while a bothered bot tried to cleanse the floor without getting in my way, even as I kept on dirtying the floor with my tears.  I might have stayed there forever, as I am a quasi-immortal, or until I died of thirst, and then lain on another floor, in another universe, repeating my agony, world without end, but it hurt too much.

"God, help me."  The imprisoned sensation of being locked in time stepped back a half step, waiting for something.  I felt the inrushing collapse of the walls upon my face and my soul, and begged again for help.  Again, that pause came.

"I know you can, I know you will." I spoke to the Other.  Desiring to say that you would lift me up when I was fallen, but I did not so speak.  Instead, I merely repeated myself, and the walls of the crushing room of the heart slid back a bit further.  There was no sunlight, but I could take a small breath.

Sitting up, and the pain came back, both the blasting of my mind and soul caused by overuse of my temporal powers, and the grief, and panic of being trapped.  So, I prayed, and said what I knew to be the truth of the Other's care, and believed it, however faintly, and over the course of ten minutes, I gained my feet, even as emotional undercurrents would suddenly sweep in, and threaten to take me off my feet again.

Hobbling, bent over, unable to take a clean and clear breath, I made my way to the doortway, to lean on it for strength.  Now, I was clearly in a strange place.  For the past ten years, I had lived in Mayington, a sizable city on the northern Tennessee River.  While the technology in this universe was respectable, they did not have robots in warehouses that could casually dispose of a man's body.

Which suggested that I had been 'killed', and transported to another one of the almost infinitude (none of us versers know for sure) of material worlds that make up the Multiverse.  Now, this is a lively possibility as I had gone from Earth to Naga World to Mecktronix where the Christian order of knights had given me my ring, to this vampire infested city of Mayington, and will presumably if the strange entity known as Whisp is correct 'will have many other worlds to catch hawt babes in.'

But the similarity of design, the same concrete floor, the same general layout of room, even if the last had been a parlor, and this an empty warehouse.  But there had been no odd dreams, I suddenly remembered with a snap of my fingers.  And no sensation like that of being torn apart which had accompanied my trip from Mecktronix to here, and which Whisp said was standard, followed by some crack about how aswesome he is.

The only thing to do was to go outside, and look for confirmation.  Somehow I.....

"Is that man okay?" Admiral Hooper's voice rose half an octave as he pointed at segment three of the forty seg overwatch screen.  The bubbling laughter of Liason One, Elise Connor was not in the approved selection of replies to a space admiral's concern when he was on an inspection tour.  Less than that had caused a captain and a crew to be downchecked.  His frown made that obvious.  She straightened up her back, clad in the dark black of the Terra Nova Navy, and put her face into a professionally solicitous mode.
"That's...Immortal, sir. He's kinda odd."
"Immortal?" The admiral's dark blue questioning eyes bored in on the liase, who was responsible for running the semi-informal link between orbitting starship, and the Tearshell Personal Dropships.

The Launch Carrier Horatio, could carry up to eighty Tearshells, and a full rack of support orbitals.  In this case, the Captain had opted for a full global set of support orbitals, what amounted to three missile/laser space stations set up to cover the whole of a planet, and the minimal rack of forty Tearshells.  He treated the individual Tears as independent action groups, without local ground support, and used the additional orbital firepower to make sure pirates did not escape by dodging to the offside of the planet, and going exoatmospheric.  In the TNSN, this was considered an aggressive hang forward load out.  When it worked, it was awesome, when it failed, it got men and machines slammed, and even slaughtered.

"That's his call sign, sir." First Liason Elise Connor explained, pretending to check the forward screen that curved across the front wall of the Link Station along with her other 'Voices'.  That same voice might be having an effect on the admiral so he turned about, and asked the Captain a seemingly calm question as there was no heat in his voice.

"Do I look dumb, Captain?"  Captain Alex Mayfair winced, his overtly bushy eyebrows, jutting up.  He spared a baleful look at the back of young Connor.
"No, sir."
"Then why, Captain is your prima lecturing me on what any third grader knows back in teh asteroid mines?"
"I would say, nerves, Admiral." The Captain replied, stiffly.  He waited until the Admiral nodded.
"Probably." He turned to the prima.  "Now you understand why we don't let women in combat.  I know its your job to explicate the obvious so that we don't get half baked status on the away teams.  Just as I know what a call sign is."
"Um, thank you, sir."

"Now..."
"He's been that way from the state.

"....err, from when we picked him up on Copernicus is Wrong."
"CW was blased by the Radauts, right?" The admiral's eyes grew distant which meant he was accessing data from his contact lens interface with his personal net, or pernet, a wearable computer holding millions of petabytes of data.  Such a device was limited to High Command since when the Singularity did not happen, and computer power tapered off as did every other tech advance in history, without yielding a manyfold increase in human reasoning, which would then yield another such increase, and on and on until trillion point IQ's were commonplace, and all men were, as the ancient temptation had it, as gods.

Reminded of the admiral's personal power, let alone his rank and authority, Elise Connor swallowed hard.
"Yes sir, but he was the only survivor."
"Which is unusual."
"Not totally so, but his not having radiation damage is..."
"What do these signs mean, this lack of rising and falling yellow..." The admiral's voice faded away.  He wondered who would talk next.
"It is remarkable, Admiral." The Captain stepped into the converstation with ease. He had just time to see a raised eyebrow, before he plunged ahead.
"Consider the Asatru warriors, their yellow is almost as calm, but their red is spiking like crazy over a very high baseline as they work their way up to the berserkergang.  Even a Christer Battle Saint, has more yellow, by a thin margin, along with the spikes of blue of unalloyed joy, and the deep black of determination.  Here, yellow and red are almost flat."
"What's it mean, Captain?"
"Immortal is bored, Admiral, sir. This is his one hundred ninety-fourth missiondrop."
"Those who survive can get out at twenty missions, and are forced out at forty.  How is he...??"
"He had a court martial after he refused to leave.  At the end, he asks the judge what would be the punishment for killing the judge in the majesty of his chambers."
The judge told him him that assignment to the notoriously deadly Tearshells would be the punishment for that, and Immortal just smiled right at the judge who retired to his chambers, and left the starship thirty minutes later, never to return."
"He...threatened a sitting officer...?" The Admiral stared in shock. "Ok, get me this man, and I'll talk to him."

First Liason Elise Connor paged call sign 'Immortal'.
"Hey dude, I got an admiral on an inspection tour, he'd like to talk to you." The request was plain, and there was a long moment when nothing but breathing was heard and then a Southern drawl came back.
"Sure, put the admiral on, Elise. It will give me something to do other than play solitaire." The sheer casualness of the male voice echoed around the Overwatch Link room where the others sat.
"How did you get so many missions?"
"Friends in low places, Admiral.  A clerk here, a logistics master there, after a while, you start collecting friends, and everyone does each other favors, and they have my back."
"Corruption."
"Oil. Grease. Admiral, you're an admirable, ....heh, people.  Really you guys are, but you're also kind of aspie."
"You're one of us too, y'know." Admiral Hooper said leaning back, getting into the swing of things with this unusually cool customer who even now was hanging over a twenty-three thousand mile drop into enemy fire with a one in four chance of survival that he could be launched into with ten seconds notice, or in an emergency with no notice at all.
"No sir. I'm not." There was a long pause. "I mean I'm human like you guys, not some cyborg freak on a god trip like the Radauts, but still I'm not one of you."
The admiral pulled a puzzled face, and make a throat-cutting gesture than had been recognized for centuries as 'zero the sound'.
First Liason Elise Connors shrugged.
"Sir, its what we found when we picked him up.  He claimed to be a dimension traveller who died, and went to other universes, and that this was his ninth universe."
"PTSD from CW getting blased over?" The admiral wondered.
"Thats what we thought, but our shippschy found little signs of PTSD except for an unusual aversion to fur.  He's angry as he'd tell you, but only because the Radauts killed everyone on that planet."
"So not being able to bear the pain, he constructed a fictional background that he believes in obsessively."
"Yes, sir." Said Elise.  The Admiral frowned, and studied his fingernails until the Captain spoke up.
"It also makes him my best soldier.  He approaches the state of No Mind attained by our best Japanese soldiers, but he has a flexibility of mind that they lack."
"Hunh. Any other thoughts?"
"Well..." Elise blushed, and closed her mouth.
"Speak." The Admiral commanded.
"Well....the Asatru soldiers and sailors think he's Thor, or the avatar of Thor, come to once again be Protector of Humanity."  She paused, and took a deep breath.  "The Christer's think he's a Battle Saint or an Angel.  The Catholics are more for Saint, and the Baptists are more for Angel."
"I see." The Admiral said darkly even as the female voice of the ship sounded.  "Maximum success proabability launch window now open. Closing in forty-nine seconds. Forty-eight, Forty......

The problem with modern war was that each soldier needed to be a tank, or a colonel.  In Harry Watkin's case he was a colonel, but no one called him sir, instead he was Ol'Harry.

Out at the end of Poacher's Lane, under the twin moons of Tabasco, known for its volcanoes, and Velvet, known for its smotheringly soft high clouds that hid all, a man sat up. All across the planet of Erevon, gravity sensors went hysterical.  But no one paid any attention to them.

People were busy planting crops, and planting trees.  The older the farm, the more it was an orchard as orchards were easier than farms, and while the residents of Erevon would have admired much about the Victorians and the Neo-Vicks, and the New Traditionalists Resurgents, they did not see that working oneself to death brought one any closer to God.  Thus Landing City was surrounded by a belt of orchard's fifty miles  which ran right over the top of Dismay Mountain, and kept on going.  Eventually it grew splotchy

"Chars Michman." Charles Alexander Michelin.  The deep, sonorous voice bore down on me, entered my mind, invaded my soul, and I found myself wanting to obey. Whispers ran in on me from the shadows in the dark places beyond the gaslight lantern hung on a bronze pole. I could not flee from them for I was bound wrist and ankle to a table flipped on its side. They spoke of whatever I desired, both unending peace, paradise and oblivion all at once, which makes no sense, but then this was not logic they practised, nor argument, but brute persuasion.  I was weak, and they would win, and I should give up now.

"Yes." I agreed.  And the voices exulted even as they promised me all I had wished.  And the owner of the voice leaned forward when I made as if to speak, but could not.
"Tell me of the woman, the one that carries the godling in her belly.  Already the life in him reaches out into the outer world. Give the fetus to me, and I shall give you the world." And thus spoke the priest of Moloch Childburner to me, and his name was Aranokis.

Crunch.I spat into his piggish mouth, open, gaping desirous of the sweets of my hidden secret, of breaking open my skull, to eat my brain. The greater part of the poison in the broken tooth flooded into his throat, and instantly the knowing fled to his brain.

I had killed him.  And so without another word, just bulging eyes, he drew and lashed at me with his dagger, and cut my belly open, and then stabbed and stabbed, and then stricken, he fell.  And I slumped, undone, but victorious for the godling fetus, only two months old now, would be born into this world, and the Powers of the Dark would flee before him.

The world grew dark around me, and I let it for I had taken in less poison, but enough, and such poison that death by stabbing was an easier way to go.  And so I died, but as I passed near the River Styx, I heard a voice calling, and turned back without suprise.
The Boatman gave me a rueful smile under his hooded cloak for he had seen me before.

And then I awoke to hear a voice, not of a god, but of a man.

This is third person, unlike the first bit which was first.

"Leave him girls. He's just a man, not a soldier." Charles Michelin opened his eyes to the voice of not-a-man, but a mannish women, clad in tan khaki uniform, with a smart overcoat, and some braid and ribbons on her vest pocket and shoulder epaulets of dark velour.  Her face was turned from him, and was not wholly unattractive, but the short bob haircut accentuated all the worst features of her face.

She was crouched in the shade of a large concrete block that had been pitted by small holes and then sliced firmly through, leaving black glass, and obsidian pebbled on the smooth cut side, and drooled down on the edges of the cut.  At her feet were two pretty young things, both blonde, and cute, one green-eyed, and the other blue-eyed, and they looked at him with hope from under their golden ringlets.

"Hold up, there, missy." He reached out a left arm, sitting up, and the soldier woman reached out, grabbed his arm in a professionally taught capture and twist designed to immopilize him with leverage and pain.  His arm barely twitched under the assault, and he used her weight as a countermass to yank himself to his crouched feet for if these other three wanted to hide behind the concrete block, that was good reason for him to do so as well.

Here in this new universe, Charles had no idea of what was going on.  For all he knew, the uniformed woman might be a spy for Aliens, or a vampiress not allergic to the sun, or...
"Sergeant Jessamine-Wilmington of the Jubilee Resistance. Let go of my arm."  Charles blinked, look down, and let go of the woman's arm in surprise.

"How'd you get here? You're a deserter, and I should shoot you..." She reached for her sidearm, and Charles grabbed a rock off the ground next to him, and shoved it right up into her face, and almost touching her left eye.

"Hold up, there, soldier." He improvised rapidly. "I'm on a secret mission. Advanced tech. Stealth." He did not see disbelief in any of their eyes which suggested that this building in the Multiverse, this row home along the Road of Forever, had technology, and more advanced than the gaslit tech of the last universe.  Seeing the sergeant back down, he retracted his jagged stone from her face.  She twitched for her pistol, and his rock twitched in reply, so she gave up.  So he added. "Stealth suit. But it burnt out."

This won him adoration from the two cuties, whose eyes shone, and a grudging respect from the sergeant.
"So you're an officer. What are your orders, sir?"  Charles stifled a curse.  Now he was responsible for three lives as well as his own quasi immortal one.  How did he keep getting in these situations?

Read an interesting article on The Imaginative Conservative website about how Tolkien and others dealt with creating interesting good in their stories.  Tolkien put it in specific details in communities....like the taste of strawberries in the Shire springtime....was the idea.

I'd also considered the idea of being more 'meet neat characters' in MV novels.  In some stories, one of the primary elements is the meeting of friends which is not something I do so well in my writing.

Also, have been considering that if I know my world better, like Holly Lisle  says, that I can write my story better.  Similarly, I need better villains as story drivers??.

==================================================================================

"Brief me on the tactical situation, Sergeant." He spoke, his voice sounding controlled and professional even to him.  The two blondies gave him grateful smiles, and even the  sarge unbent a little.

"Captain Montgomery sent me and a pair of boppers with four valets to go pick up a half-dozen Unlocked. There were only five, and we lost three on the way, and if I hadn't spent the valets and the boppers to shield our retreat, it would have been all ofus."

Charles recognized self-justifying statements, and fear of failure, and second guessing for he had done his share.  He considered reassuring her, but decided a cold face was more appropos to his goals.

"Any retrievable?"  It had not escaped his attention that the sergeant spoke of boppers and valets as things, and that five minus three was two, and there were two girls of dating age right here, so that probably meant they were Unlocked, whatever that meant.  He shifted his knees, and spatters of light out of the corner of his right eye over the concrete block had him diving down even as the block and the ground near it grew new pencil thick holes that steamed and smelt of hot summer days and overheated concrete.

"Keep low, sir. The Bill Collectors, they do love to, ah, collect an officer."
"Thanks, sarge, I'llkeep that in mind." Charles replied dryly to the taunting humor and well meant advice of the sergeant.

"I...maybe. But right now, we've got a spike of Bill Collector's that punched a hole in  Jubille lines, and I can't get across it, and I can't go behind it because the Colonel in charge of this sector, he will be massing forces to repel the robots."

Robots! A clue, a veritable clue. Charles exulted inside while struggling to keep his face plain and solemn.

"Can we go under? I mean in the sewers." Charles knew he was taking a risk.  What if everyone in this universe used composting toilets, and tossed the biomass on their gardens back of th ehouse?

The sarge blinked and then grinned.

"We could, and with your permission, sir, let's head out.  Keep low."

I hadn't heard of that website before.  I'll have to check it out.

I definitely give my vote for more "meet neat characters", especially ones that can be befriended.  You have run so many wonderful worlds for me over the years, but the best ones by far included neat characters rather than just settings.  For example, in the Star Wars/Lovecraft world, would you believe that my thoughts return most often to five young cubs?  And in my awesome current world, would you believe how much more the setting sparkles from folks such as the ancient Widow Hennsta?  "Welladay", indeed...  :D

Charles ran behind the trio, helping to bring the two cuties back to their feet when they stumbled.  Sergeant Jessamine hisses at them, and then fell herself three seconds later as they slipped from the open street into a narrow alley.  Without a word, and biting his tongue against the laughter, Charles helped the Sergeant back to her feet.  She jerked her arm back out of his grasp, growling, and stomped on forward with battle broken concrete chunks underneath her flat soled light boots.

He bit his lip again, this time in controlled irritation.  Her demeanor was unprofessional at the least. And if they were not in danger of being immediately killed by something of a robot army named 'Bill Collectors' he would have had it out with her right then and there.  They moved on, down the alley, took a left turn, and came to a sewer drain barely visible under an overlayment of rock and dust.

The sergeant clicked off a net hologram on the sleeve of her coat, and pointed at the circular metal cover.  Grumbling to himself that as an officer he shouldn't have to dirty his hands, but he realized the facts as he lifted the metal disc up from the hole.  None of the other three, no normal woman, that is, could have lifted the mass.  That much weight was beyond them just as lifting a jeep was beyond him.

The sergeant led the way, climbing down a ladder into the dark.  A splash and a call at the bottom sent Greeneyes down, followed by Blueeyes, and lastly himself.  The tunnel was not the concrete he expected but white pvc pipe in a huge bore.  He wondered how much oil they had, and considrered that this might not have happened.  If they had an oil shock like his Prime Earth, or some other inflation, then it probably   would not have happened.

Running down the drain, head bent, he reflected that money gets used for something.  The same monies that in his timeline fled to the Mideast to pay for overpriced gasoline could have been used in this world to build robots.  Whether a robot army was worse than terrorists was a question he was not prepared to answer.

The Sergeant jabbed up with a finger, but waited for him to agree, fearing to take responsibility for her choices.  He chose, and went up, pushed aside the metal disc, and breathing in once, hard, shoved his head out and above.  Quickly he swivelled his head taking in a pile of cardboard boxes, filled with pink sheets, a garbage can, a rat sitting atop the can, and two long brick walls alongside an alley.  He popped up, looked about again, and then pointed at Blue Eyes who  he helped up.  He waved off the Sergeant, and helped Green Eyes next. Each smiled very prettily at him, and he felt his heart stutter.  Then he helped up the Sergeant who sneered at him.

By this time he was a bit breathy, indeed, they all were, so he ordered a rest break.  The whine of richocheting hypervelocity weapons, the thunder of lasers shouted from beyond their small haven, on each side of them.

"Are we in the clear, Sergeant?"

"Not sure, sir."

A mass, ten feet tall, cylindrical, with eight tiny spider legs about the base of the rod shape held it one foot from the ground.  Other weapons were being pulled out, and fitted to its arm as its weapons were pulled out of protected storage.

"You are in possession of two Free Breeding Females.  The Human Genome is patented, and patent fraud will not be tolerated."

Charles motioned for them to get back into the tunnel even as he squatted down to face the robot. A quick reach, and out of his jacket came a slim rectangular box of soft, black metal.  This he tossed, not at the robot for it might well have defenses, but at the boxes of pink slips.  The eruption of flame set off the slips into a towering rage of flame and smoke that blocked the robots way forward.

Charles dropped into the sewer crying 'Run!'

The quartet ran on past the next ladder, and the next,  and was fixing to do so for the third, when Charles called a stop.  The three females wanted to run on, until Charles asked the Sergeant just how wide was the human controlled corridor?

Charles went up first, again, to spot a half ten of soldiers crouching looking at him over the sights of their battle rifles.  Then they smiled and eased up, but Charles looked past them.  A devouring wall of flame was rushing their way.

"Sorry." Charles said and dropped, without using the ladder back down into the sewer.
"Run!!" He screamed with full panic in his voice, and a wildly waved arm to encourage them.  As they went, he scrambled up, lunged forward, and the ground bucked under his feet.  And then the roof came in, and a piece of that roof shattered his skull.  And suddenly he was no longer there, but elsewhen.

I was out of the bar, with its stink of sweat, and overlain layers of perfume, and cheap booze, and for a moment all I could do was express my gratitude to Heaven, until I saw the gaping chasm, formed of blocks of black rock, decorated by cedar sprung from the cliff below me that stretched all the way down to the white spray of wave tops disintegrating upon wet rocks.  Panicked, I flipped back, away from the death staring me in the face.

And I rolled over something flexible but firm, and for a long moment, I wondered what it could be, until it wriggled all up and down its whole length, and I knew.

Snake.

I was laying on a snake, and it undoubtedly was angry at me.  Which meant as soon as I got up, it would bite me.  Then I would die from poison.

I looked about for distraction, for something to aid me, and saw a mountain covered in bushes and interspersed with trees, dotted by cows on the steep face of the dark rocks, all going up into the puffy, white clouds.  It distracted me because it boggled the mind.  I knew of no place on Earth that I had been like this, and I certainly don't have the type of friends with the inclination or the wealth to drug me, toss me on their Lear Jet, and drop me off somewhere.  My friends, if they were playing a practical joke put a cup of water on the doorframe above a door, or pushed the car around the corner of the store so I spent half an hour looking for it in the parking lot of Malley's Grocers (a local chain to which I had done some accounting  work as a consultant when they were looking for an embezzler and needed an outside man. The fact that I was a student weighed against me, but my being bigger than most men helped as they were afraid of some violence.  As it turned out, the embezzler went as quiet as a lamb.)

And then there was some more wriggling, and the large, green snake, the great grandpappy of all garter snakes pulled itself out from underneath me, gave me a very snakish glare, and slithered away.  I collapsed laughing uncontrollably for almost a minute, and then spent, I just lay there, realizing that yes, indeed, I was going to live.

Carefully, I got to my feet, and I began to decide my direction by process of elimination.  I did not want to go down to the choppy sea, nor did I want to go wandering mountaintops in fog.  The presence of cows suggested a cowherd, and that suggested a path, and a herdsman or cowboy or vaquero.  Someone.

Besides, I felt as if I had lost something off that way which truly was the oddest feeling on an already odd nigh....err, day.  So I began picking my way through the stiff brush with the little thorns, and quickly decided to avoid them as much as I could because they had a decided tendency to push you back, outward, away from the slope, and into a back flip and dive which I doubt any judges would reward with a perfect ten as I'd be screaming the whole way down.  Ok, probably not.  I'd be concentrating on how to survive the probably unsurvivable, but still, no ten.

In between the bushes, bending over to cling to the boxy rocks, or to catch at a nag of rock with a hooked finger, and I began to go up.  A little way later, and I looked down, but not all the way down.  I had found another space for rest, a little bobble out from the face with a flat bit of grass, and fifty feet below me was the other.  There was no way my friends would have brought me here, and I'm just not important enough for the CIA or the FSB to do something insane like this, unless, well, it could be identity theft.  Maybe the CIA thought I was some super tough spy because said spy had stolen my identity.

It was plausible, if you were drunk and low on sleep which I wasn't.  I gave up in disgust, and got back to climbing after my short break.  Another break, at a less congenial spot, had me just clinging to a wall, and waiting.  And then I came to my first cow, and wonder of wonders, it moved its head, and a bell chimed forth.

My unspoken worry had been that these cows were wild.

"Bessie. You wouldn't know where to go home would you?"
And at the word 'home' it began to slowly amble along the steep slop, carefully plodding on, choosing each step, never fast, but never stopping either like a steamroller in high gear.  And so I found myself at the tail end of a northbound (who knew?) cow like in the old joke.

Half an hour later, a grizzled old man emerged from a hut on the side of the mountain, and began shaking his staff, and yelling at me.  I just grinned to see him, and I think my happiness eventually penetrated his ire, and he realized I was not some vandal or troublemaker, but a man in need of help.  So he came over to me, spoke in some foreign language, and fingered my battered suit with wonder, and then took me into his one room hut on the side of the slope.

I was so glad to sit on his tiny chair that I almost did not notice the hot tea he pressed into my hand.  It was half tea, half milk, and a couple teaspoons of honey, and it revived me greatly so that I raised my weary head, and gave him a grateful smile.

"Thank you, friend."
"Tiya, jotunn." He replied, nodding.  He pointed up, and then made a symbol for walking down, and pointed at me.  I shook my head no, which confused him, but then he shrugged.

His room was simple and plain.  Tree trunks tied together formed the walls, and dried and pressed brush the low ceiling.  A hammock of leather, probably from one of Bessie's kin, hung in one corner, and at the most outside edge leaning the furthest over the gulf was a small hole.  Considering there was no other sign of a toilet I was willing to be that that was garbage disposal and toilet all in one.

"Jotunn, vatak." He said, and went to the doorway which he left open for light, although he had a panel that could be tied up to serve as a gate.  I went to follow him, and he held up a forbidding hand.

"Vatak."  Okay, that sounds like it meant 'stay'. i resisted the urge to woof like a dog, and settled back into the tiny chair.  He looked satisifed, and then led his cows back out on the cliff.  I waited there, drank, and after a bit tested out the hole.  It worked admirably, and there was a pile of large leaves nearby that got some use as well.  When he came back, he wrinkled his nose, and then showed me some leaves hanging on the wall.

He crumpled up one and smeared it on his hands, and it left a fresh, piney scent in the air, and so I did as he did, and felt my skin prickle, and the small cuts on my hands sting.  It must have some cleaning property, some thing that protected one from bacteria I thought, noting the oval shape, and plump structure of the near hand-sized 'cleaning leaves' as I called them.  The larger other leaves I called 'washtowel leaves' at least in my mind.

He frowned at me, and for a second I thought I had displeased him, but as he looked up at me, and I bent my head under his low ceiling, I saw he was trying to figure me out.  He took off his fez like hat, made of leather, once dyed yellow, but now faded, and rubbed the bald spot in the midst of his frizzy, white hair.

His clear, blue eyes, and Roman nose (once broken) were all set on a spare frame barely five feet tall, if that.  His hands were well calloused and marked with scars in  herdfulls.  His face was leathered and tanned from living in the outdoors, and he carried not a spare bit of fat on his body.

He had on a tunic, and a short cape, short pants and shoes with a pointed end to them which rose high enough to be really low boots.  And before, when he left, I had see a roll of line, attached to a weight, on his back belt, along with a long knife.

He pointed at me.
"Jotunn."
At himself.
"Timvaik."  Now Timvaik could be his name, his clan name, the mountain's name, a job like cowdoy or herdsman, or simply human.  So I pointed out at the cows.
"Yana."
And the mountain.
"Doranei."
Well, that eliminated some things.  I kept on with the items of his house, and found the language simple, at least compared to English, and sweetly pretty.  It was a melodious tongue for which I was glad.

And after a time, he took himself out of the hut, and guestured me to follow, and so we came around the hut, and above it, and back down on the far side of the hut where there was a stone oven.  Next to it was a pile of dried wood.