The Fire and the Storm - Metric Pro Edition: Fiction, Dragons, Elves, Unicorns, Magic (82 page)

After those three had met on the stage and conferred for perhaps fifteen seconds, the rest of the assembly began starting conversations among themselves and ordering drinks and snacks from the attendants.

Mark and his family were psionicly following what was being said on the stage when Yzell appeared on the floor before Mark, laying flat on her belly with her palms flat on the floor beside her head.  Since her face was hidden, they had to check psionicly to see who it was.

“Yzell?” Mark asked in a puzzled tone.

“This position is one of supreme shame among the elves.” Alilia stated in irritation.  She nudged the prone midwife with her toe and demanded;  “What have you done?!”

“I…  I have solved the fertility problem!” Yzell cried in anguish.  “I have discovered how to ensure that any elven woman can be pregnant from a single mating if she so chooses, and any humanoid female can become pregnant by almost any male of any humanoid race.”

“So, ah, why are you laying on the floor?” Mark asked as people all around them began to pay attention to the scene to and relate to others what Yzell had revealed.

“I have offended against you My Prince!” Yzell sobbed.  “I have offended against you greatly!”

Mark’s brow knitted, and he considered Reading her before deciding on patience.  “All right, just start from the beginning.” he told her.

“My Prince, my first breakthrough in the problem came from my study of Talia’s pregnancy by you, my study of the fine-scale recording I made of Alilia’s conception by you, and her subsequent pregnancy.  But it was not enough, I needed to study more examples of the process, preferably involving other women than Talia or Alilia to further isolate what parts of the process were caused by their bodies and what parts by yours.  I tried so many times to bring myself to beg you to impregnate another elven woman, but I could not ask you that merely for the sake of my research, even as important as it is.  And after Hilsith solved the longevity problem, and I was still not making any more significant progress on the fertility problem, I…  I became jealous of her success, and envious of the adulation she received for it.  I
knew
that if I only had a few more examples of the process, I could solve the problem.

“So, when Balen came to me on behalf of the forty-three females of The Hilian Volunteers, asking if I could give them the spells that made it practical for you to have sex with them, including the Contraception…”

“Great blazing Source above!”  Mark breathed in shocked realization.  “Don’t tell me you…”

“I did My Prince!” Yzell sobbed, crying fully now, her voice hard to discern with her forehead pressed to the floor.  “I purposefully ignored what an offence against you it would be, and concentrated on the hugely greater good that would come from it…  The very survival of the elven race may depend on this in the days ahead, and you have not truly been harmed!  It was for the greater good!  But once it was done, my conscience and my vow of justice upon Mountainfire began to torture me, until I was driven to confess.”

There was a long pause before Mark asked in a quietly angry tone; “And the girls didn’t know about it?”

“They did not, My Lord, I swear, and they still don’t know!  I have blocked the knowledge of their pregnancies from them.”

“I see.” Mark growled, and there was another pause.  His knuckles cracked as he steadily tightened his clenched fists, and he struggled to control his rising anger.

“Out with it, Yzell.” he finally gritted through clenched teeth.  “How many of the forty-three females of The Hilian Volunteers are pregnant with my child without my permission?”

“All of them, My Lord!” Yzell wailed in anguish.  “And Kalem is bearing twins!”

There was a long shocked silence at that.

“I’ll bet that you didn’t solve the fertility problem until a moment before you came here to confess!” Talia angrily accused.  “You say your conscience tortured you, but you still weren’t going to confess until you had that achievement to balance your crime!”

Yzell kept crying whole-heartedly, but didn’t speak.

Mark’s anger grew until he could no longer control it.  What began as a growl of angry frustration grew into a full-bodied scream of rage as he crouched a bit and held his fists shaking in front of him, he stamped his foot as he struck himself on his thighs, then he was gone in mid-scream.

He did nothing to prevent himself from being followed, and his family did so a fraction of a second later.  They found themselves in the valley north of Focus Mountain.

“
EVACUATE THE FIRING RANGE!!!
  NOW!!!”
Mark screamed, augmenting his voice with ear-splitting magical volume and powerful psionics, and before any of those in the valley could do so, he began blasting the volcano north of Focus Mountain with an incredible inferno of destruction while screaming his rage at the top of his lungs, his voice still as amplified as his barked command.

The few weapons and spell researchers who had been in the firing range when he arrived fled in a panic.

“Fall back!”
Alilia psionicly commanded, as she and the rest of the family moved back and up in a series of quick Translocation jumps until they were far enough away from Mark to comfortably observe what he was doing.  They found themselves kilometers behind and above him, almost over the center of the Focus Mountain reflector, and still had to block most of the volume of Mark’s cacophony of magic and his audible and psionic screaming, which itself sounded quite strange due to his extremely low and deep voice.

Mark could no longer be seen in the maelstrom he was creating.  Within seconds, even the blazing light of his spells was blocked in the storm of flying shattered rock and clouds of dust he was blasting out of the mountain he faced.

Talia hurriedly cast to protect the reflector and the research facility on it’s north rim from damage from flying rocks and boulders.  The facility’s blast protections had automatically activated, but would soon have been overwhelmed.  It was more than Talia could deal with alone, and a second later those with her joined her efforts, then Val cast an automated, self-powered spell that relieved them of the task.  Any unprotected living thing within twenty kilometers would certainly have been killed, but nothing visible lived there.

“Have you noticed that we’re almost in the focus of the reflector, and we’re not getting any extra power from it?” Val absentmindedly asked as she watched the destruction-storm with captive fascination.  “Father’s got his collection field over this entire area, fifty kilometers wide, and no warlock power is getting through it at all.  I had to cast that automated spell with pure wizard’s power, or it would’ve drained my warlock power pretty fast.”

“He needs to vent his anger, and I can’t blame him.” Alilia angrily stated.  “I don’t know what the hell the poor boy is going to do about this.  Damn it, we’re supposed to be getting married in four hours!”

“We
are
getting married in four hours!” Talia stated with fierce determination as she gave Alilia a sudden firm hug.  “
Nothing
is going to change that, and nothing could diminish our love for you!”

“Damn, are my insecurities so very transparent?” Alilia bitterly asked as she returned Talia’s embrace.

“Only to me, dear love.” Talia assured her.

“Is he going to be all right in there?” Kragorram worriedly asked.

“He has all his Shields and Pure Breath running.” Fire observed.  “He should be okay.”

“I know, but that mountain is a dormant volcano after all, and barely dormant at that.  It’s most recent eruption was only two centuries ago.  If he keeps going like that, he’ll break through into the lava at the core of the mountain.  It may be under incredible pressure, and he may break through suddenly, which would cause a cataclysmic explosive eruption aimed directly at him, and at us.”

A second later Talia reported; “I warned him of the possibility, but he’s still too angry to care.”

“We should prepare to act to contain the eruption enough to protect him, us, the reflector, and the facility.” Povon decisively stated, then Linked with Somonik and demanded;
“Give me the Command Link and our available power now!”

“Done!”
Somonik responded almost instantly.

The eight over Focus Mountain were already Linked with Povon when she felt control of the Command Link come to her, and they were aware of the minds and power of the two and a half million military spell-casters who were on stand-by duty at the moment.  Hundreds of thousands more were joining every second, then millions.

“That’s enough, thank you.”
Kragorram reported as he and Six analyzed the volcano and what Mark was doing to it.

But Mark was also aware of what they were finding, and he forced control upon himself before he reached the lava.  Relative silence fell, broken only by the reports of still falling rocks and boulders, as he floated there in his sphere of Shielding, still shaking with anger.  Then he expanded his awareness for kilometers all around and identified all the material he’d blasted out of the mountain, seized it all with Movement, and began crushing it back into the crater he’d made with astounding force while heating it enough with Fire to fuse it into place.  He did this repair with a manic violence equal to his destruction, and he resumed his great roaring scream of rage while he did so.  Again sight of him was lost amidst an inferno of his creation.

His anger was finally spent just before his repair was done, but he still heated and forced the last of the rock into place with grim determination.

Then he joined them above the reflector.  There was silence for a long moment as they considered his grim countenance and realized that he was keeping his thoughts to himself, while he considered their concerned expressions.

“I’ve gotta think this out for a minute.” he told them as gently as he could, obviously still struggling for self-control.  He made a seat of Force and sat down in mid-air, rested his elbows on his knees, and put his head in his hands.

Talia and Alilia moved to sit and embrace him from either side, but they remained silent, letting him think.

“Somonik, Battle Wizards of The Just Alliance, thank you for you almost instant response.”
Povon said over the Command Link. 
“Your readiness does you proud.  However, it seems this was a false alarm.  It seems we will not need your assistance to deal with the consequences of our Key’s temper tantrum.  As alarming as it was, it appears he was quite in control of himself, and he has repaired all damage to his firing range.  Again, thank you.”

“I am relinquishing control of the command Link.”

“On all of our behalf, you are all most welcome.”
Somonik chuckled over the Link.
“We might have trusted Mark’s self control, but we did not begrudge you the precaution.  As you said, it was an alarming demonstration of destruction, and almost as alarming a demonstration of repair.  We will study our Reading of the event in order to more fully understand and quantify his abilities and those of warlocks in general.  This study may be of greater importance now, since it seems there may soon be many more warlocks.

“We have not had a genuine emergency call to duty since the war ended, so this was a valuable exercise, and we thank you.  Our response time has not diminished much, and that is good to know.”

Povon shared his mental chuckle, then closed the Link.

After almost six minutes Mark sat up straight and looked around at all of them.  “It seems I’ve got two choices.  We could move us all with all forty-three of the girls and their kids into our biggest place and just all live together like one big happy family.  But I sure wouldn’t be able to give each of my children the time and attention they deserve.

“The other choice is to raise each child one at a time in a series of time-bubbles.  We’d go into a little time-bubble with the first girl and be a family with her and her child until the child is grown, then come out of the time-bubble and cast another for the next girl, and so on.  There’s no way I’ll ever be able to give all my adult children the time they deserve, but at least this way I can give it to them when they’re kids, when they really need it.

“We want to find a way to get enough time compression so that we can do it all over the span of one pregnancy, so we finish raising the second-last child just before the last one is born.”

There was silence for a bit as the rest considered that.

Talia made her decision, and gave her opinion.  “Then that’s what we have to do, because it seems to me that it would be neglect to try to raise that many at once.  I know you couldn’t consider just adopting them out and washing your hands of them, you need to raise and love every one of your own children.

“The girls of The Volunteers are all fine people, and they’ll be easy to love, especially since they already love you, and you love us so you can’t just give us up while you raise children with them, so we’ll be helping them raise their children as co-mothers.”

“I agree.” Alilia nodded.  “And for an area only large enough to contain a healthy environment for a single family, we can use reverse-stasis fields rather than time-bubbles.  We can cast those ourselves, without needing the help of the gods, so we’ll have complete control over ending them or communicating with the outside world if we have to.  And they’ll give us a much greater time compression than the time-bubbles.  We could be done raising all the children long before the Hiliani time-bubble is scheduled to end.”

“That would mean that we’d either have to join you in some or all of these long-lasting and tiny reverse-stasis fields,” Six mused, “Or miss many decades of your lives.  Even if it was only six weeks to us, it would bother me to miss that much of your lives.  Maybe you’d still seem the same after many decades of raising other children without us.  But maybe you’d be different, and it would always be obvious to us how many years you’d lived without us.  And that would hurt, a little.

“However, there is another alternative.  We have the spell for Multiple Simultaneous Manifestations.  We figured it out in the brainstorming session because it’s one of The Prerequisites of Divinity.  You could each become two people first, one to stay out here in the world with us, and one to go back in the Hiliani time-bubble until it ends, which will be another sixteen years inside.  That should be more than long enough to raise our brothers and sisters, since it only took seven years for us.  Once inside the bubble, Father would make forty-three more simultaneous manifestations of himself.  One of him would live with Mother and Alilia, and the other forty-three would live with each of the girls and their children.  I suggest you disperse their homes all over Hiliani as much as possible to minimize having to meet yourself too often, which may be too confusing for young children if they don’t turn out like us.  And every time you sleep all your selves will exchange your memories of the previous day, so that you’ll truly remain one person and not diverge into forty-four distinct people.  Then when the time-bubble ends you’ll re-integrate yourself, and you’d all re-integrate with the copy of yourselves you left here to be with us.”