An evil necromancer destroys a town while trying to take over the world. Two teenagers who lived there thwart his plan and defeat him.

(Release Early, Release Often)

Two teenagers save the world from an evil necromancer.

The bartender first began to suspect she was irregular when she took her fifth shot in twenty minutes without showing any signs of drunkeness at all. The alcohol might be old fashioned, but by old fashioned standards it would be some of the purest, hardest, punch-you-in-the-stomach-and-steal-your-lunch-money-ist alcohol you could find. Modern day, of course, nobody drank themselves to death unless they wanted to. If someone passed out at the bar, a pair of orderly robots did them the common curtesy of picking them up and dumping them in the station’s do-everything vacuum tube system. The tubes would first administer a sedative to keep them asleep, then teleport all the alcohol right out of their blood. The alcohol was stored in a reservoir behind the bar and promptly sold to the next customer. (Hey, you gotta be careful with your resources on a space station in the middle of nowhere.) The drunkard was dumped into their own warm bed in their cabin and had their sheets tucked over them all nice and gentle like. Living in the future was pretty dang sweet in some respects. So, that considered, it wasn’t unusual that this lady was drinking quite a bit of alcohol. It was unusual however, that she showed no signs of slowing down.

The bartender’s suspicion was amplified when there were twelve more shots in the next twenty minutes. This was most definitely unusual. The bartender’s suspicion, however, meant nothing at all because he was payed commission. It didn’t really matter to him that she ought to be dead so long as her money kept clearing.

She spent the next twenty minutes eating stale chips. Then she walked out of the bar. Through the wall.

They had arrived at earth.

They had arrived in the year CE2010.

—

The Space Station Aquarius had been a space station since the Exodus. It had not existed in anywhere near its current form, but it had existed. It started as a small research base orbiting the moon of an M class planet. Back in those days it only had the infrastructure to support four or five people. Since then it had ballooned to accommodate more than a million. The moon and planet and star it was bound too were all destroyed in the Exodus, but by some coincidence the station itself remained quite functional. Intially it’s location was very close to the center of the New Worlds. Without FTL the slow boats that travelled among the planets of the New Worlds set up bases on every rock, pebble, or (in this case) space station that was on a path between populous planets. Aguarius just so happened to wind up on the line between the two most populous planets in the New Worlds, so scarcely a month went by without another slow boat passing in one direction or the other. Sometimes the boats contained building materials. Sometimes they chose to invest those building materials in expanding Aquarius. There was quite a lot of money to be made selling things to slow boat captains and passengers who were usually either paid very well or already very welthy respectively. By the time they got to Aquarius it had been a long time since they’d gotten to spend that money. FTL communication was invented shortly after the Exodus, using precisely the quantum entanglement electron spin method you’d expect. (Causality remained intact. Somehow. Look, don’t bother me, kid.) Indeed, FTL communication was developed shortly after the Exodus both in the Milky Way and in the New Worlds. Unfortunately, despite many sustained efforts from both sides to get a matching pair of communicators split between the New Worlds and the Milky Way, no one had ever been successful.

Bad luck, I guess.

Anyways, back on Aquarius there is a man in an old fashion human meat body getting drunk on old fashioned grain alcohol in an old fashioned bar where things were a little too expensive, and the chips weren’t very good, but the bartender would listen to your stories and pretend to give a crap. The bartender didn’t give a crap, of course, but he pretended to. That was good enough to keep the customers coming back, and paying just a little bit too much for the alcohol. Or maybe it was just the alcohol. Whatever. In any case, one person getting drunk at this bar will be interesting to us.

She was a tall, brawny lady you probably didn’t want to get into a fight with. Unless you wanted your face smashed in. Which, ya know, if you did, that’s fine. I don’t judge you. She’s your lady. She’s not a regular at this bar, though. She’s not even a regular at this station. Nor was she a regular in this universe. Suffice to say, she was irregular.

—

They were in a galaxy. The Milky Way galaxy, to be precise. To be even more precise, they were in the Local Cluster. Ah, fuck it, let’s cut to the chase: they were about two light minutes out from the third planet in the Sol system.

But that was many generations ago.

—

“Hey Jenna. You might wanna take a look at this” buzzed Michael. There was an enormous amount of radiation coming from a point in space that contained, as far as the rest of his sensors were concerned, nothing at all.

Jenna flew by the point he had indicated. “You’re right. This is pretty odd. It doesn’t seem to have any gravity, but it is spewing out a metric buttload of energy. Actually… nevermind what I said about gravity, sensors don’t report anything unusual at the point where the radiation is coming from, but nothing is at all what it’s supposed to be anywhere else.

She was right. In the intergalactic void there wasn’t much gravity to be concerned with at all except what their own microcluster generated, and they had departed from the tip heading out, so all the gravitic force should have been coming from one direction.

It wasn’t.

Instead, it was coming from all directions. For that matter, there was LIGHT coming from all directions too, and it was bright light. Brighter light than they were used to in the Void.

“Michael?”

“Yeah, Jenna?”

“I think we’re in a galaxy.”

Jenna woke up blearily, rubbing her eyes.

“Where am I? Ugh…” Her initial sense of alarm was unnecessary, as she was in her own bed on the space station Aquarias, the same place she’d woken up every morning (Or, as close as there is to “morning” on a space station light years away from the nearest star. Which is to say, nothing like morning at all) for the past hundred days.

“Ughhhh…” she said aloud before ploping back down onto the bed and covering her head with a pillow. Her respite only lasted a few minutes however, before she heard the smooth pneumatic “hiss” of her cabin door opening.

“Rise and shine, beautiful!” the intruder said.

“Go away! I’m sleeping.”

“I made ~waffles~!”

With that, Jenna sat bolt upright, eyes wide open.

“Ahh, bright eyed and bushy stomach-ed, I see.” said Michael.

Jenna simply stuck her tongue out at him, before retracting it to make room for the waffle her hand was rapidly delivering. “Being a hyper-advanced, billion credit space ship is nice and all, but you know what sucks about it?” asked Jenna.

“No eating?” replied Michael.

“No eating.”

“Indeed. Well, you better stuff your face now, ’cause we’re gonna be spending quite a while as space ships, starting in about… three hours.”

Jenna would have made noises of disapproval if her combination noise-making/food-eating apparatus wasn’t already occupied with its other function.

Michael laughed briefly at Jenna’s enthusiasm before, himself, having at the remaining waffles with enthusiasm to rival her own.

When the waffles were done, Jenna plopped right back down into bed as soundly as before, and covered her head with a pillow. She was no longer really tired, but she was hardly going to let the facts get in the way of a good moping about having been dragged away from sleepyland. For his part, Michael contented himself with putting the dishes from their breakfast into the ship’s practically magical vaccum-tube system. By the powers of computers and robots you could put whatever you wanted in those tubes and the ship would figure out what you wanted and take care of it.

“Hm… we’re a bit ahead of schedule.” Michael thought, and so went about changing into his storage suit.

“Well? Aren’t you gonna wake me up?” muttered Jenna from under her pillow.

“Nope.” said Michael, timed perfectly to coincide with another smooth “hiss” of an opening door.

“Jenna! Wake up!” barked the station’s flight commander.

Jenna threw aside the pillow and shot a bemused look at Michael. He shrugged innocently.

“Yeah, sure, you just play innocent you sneaky little…” grumbled Jenna, climbing out of bed and putting on her own storage suit.

—

The mining ships had been loaded with their pilots’ minds and crammed into the launching tubes like billion credit T-shirts being launched into the stands at a baseball game. Technical preflight chatter buzzed on the general comlines. Jenna didn’t pay attention to any of it. She didn’t need to, the technicians and computers would take care of everything until her ship was far out into space. She attended to the private comline between her and Michael, although it was empty. She left it that way and made mental intimations at sleep. This, however, was purely intellectual pigheadedness as she was no longer even made of meat and these ships were not designed to get tired. After finally deciding that trying to sleep was a futile endeavor she brought up the specs for her mission and began to read. Unfortunately, her reading was cut short as she had scarcely gotten two words into the brief when she noticed her primary thrusters were burning and she was rocketing down the launch tube at accellerations that would kill a human in a conventional craft thirty times over. She noticed there was activity on her comline with Michael and flipped back to it. It had only one message, posted about 45 seconds ago. “Pay attention ” it said.

Smartass.

Michael too had had his mind transfered into a similar ship to this one and would soon be launching out of a parallel tube. They were on a long-haul exploration mission and they had no idea where to start. But that was fine by Jenna. Despite all her appearence of lack of discipline she was the sharpest pilot there was, and everybody knew it. Michael was one of the better pilots in the galaxy himself, but it wasn’t much secret that command only sent him along to keep Jenna on task. The two of them were comfortable with that arrangement.

She would be breaching station shields in a few moments, so she decided to stop goofing off. She switched her attention to her cameras and radars. Cameras sensitive to only the human visible light spectrum were of only minor utility from a piloting perspective, but they were so cheap MilDev didn’t even hesitate to put them on their low-end grunt ships. And this was no low end grunt ship. Regardless of the reasons, Jenna was glad the cameras were there. The view from between galaxies was spectacular.

—

Perhaps I should take a moment to explain the circumstances of our heros. In the course of an interstellar war in the Milky Way galaxy one of the factions developed a bomb that operated by locally changing the fundamental constants of the universe. Near the blast site of one of these bombs a perfectly round wheel could travel 40 of 50 times the length of its radius with a single rotation. Or half the length. e, alpha, h-bar, you name it. The effects of the bomb were so new and so novel that even the scientists who invented the thing couldn’t predict very accurately what the overall result of detonating one would be. Well, long story short, one of the effects was that a very tiny chunk of the galaxy (only about fourty thousand star systems or so) was spontaneously launched out of the galaxy at very close to the speed of light. The Aquarias space station was part of this involuntary exodus.

Afterward

Kill the emperor

“You seek to challenge ME?” yelled the Emperor. “I’ve been doing magic since before you were born!”

“I’ve had a little help.” I wispered in his ear with magical voice. He looked around briefly and then scowled back down the hill to where we were approaching.

Use the spell of bonding to break the siege on the city.

Michael looked down at the sword. Then he looked back up at the soldier. He cocked his head to the side. One particularly canny archer ran off to call for reenforcements.

The sword vanished. More than vanished, the sword simply ceased to exist. This caused quite a bit of blood to come gushing out of the both of us, but that was fine. In this state, blood was easily conjured. After we felt the imperial soldiers were sufficently awed by the demonstration our wounds healed. The eyes of the soldier who had stabbed us got very wide before she turned to run. She got a small ways away before an enormous fireball blasted her off the path and, indeed, blasted away most of the path she had been standing on. She would be fine, I made sure of that, but the effect was well worth it. The other soldiers that had been watching took off towards their camp (and in some cases, the forest) at a full run.

We continued walking.