486 Overdrive

I see a lot of you Pathbearers. You keep trying to go bombastic, go big.

You're not big. You're not bombastic. If you were, you wouldn't be trying so hard. It'd simply be who you are.

Us rats, we’re small. At baseline, most of us will die beneath the foot of practically every other race in Integration, but with just a few skills, we can start cutting down giants. But even as we do, we don't start pretending that we're titans ourselves. No, we're rats. Our experiences are based around being a rat. When we evolve and get stronger, we get stronger in the way a rat does. We scurry away fast, so fast, in fact, that most people can't follow where we're going. We blend in with the shadows. We make no noise. We use our cunning to avoid the traps they've left for us. Most of the time, our Physicality is based around evasion and subterfuge. We find our way to victory through poison, through magic, through anything that isn't force-on-force.

Before all of that, there's speed. If you can’t be the smartest, if you can't play at omniscience, then be the fastest. Always. Never draw second. Never stop moving.

Doesn’t matter if you’re just one rat if you're moving at the speed of light—because at that rate, you’ll chew through the leg of a man before his foot ever strikes the ground.

—The Rat Queen, High God of Rebels, Guerrillas, and Artificial Apocalypses

VIII-46 Overdrive

Skill Enhancement Requirements Reached:

> Absorb kinetic energy until you outpace an adversary who is dramatically superior to your initial speed.

> Tear the kinetic energy out of an approaching hurricane and preserve a town from destruction.

> Tear the heat and kinetic energy out of a falling meteor and take its speed for your own while saving a close friend.

> Convert external kinetic energy to hypersonic speed.

> Convert heat to hypersonic speed.

Shiv kept pace with the veil of fading night, while the sun loomed behind like a blade cleaving the horizon. Light spilled in after him, slowly eating away at the shadows which guarded him. He burned ever hotter, stole speed from fire, drank momentum from the winds lashing against him, from the inertial membrane thundering with every surge of his Shapeless Tides.

The race went on, but his blood was cool, and his mind was calm. With every rushing vector, the air around him exploded, displacing ripples in his wake. His movements sounded like echoes of distant thunder—an oddity on what was to be a sunny day. The sun drew close, but even as dawn threatened to invalidate all of Shiv’s efforts over the past twelve hours, he remained a blissful void.

A series of Pyromancy and Dynamancy spells blazed bright upon his flesh. They helped him drink speed from the highest temperatures and external sources of kinesis. All he had to do now was go forward, after the night and away from the impending day.

Simplicity was a therapy all its own.

He couldn’t remember the last time he got to simply tear through the air—just him, the sky, the wind, and the world passing by. This was the first time he was flying just for the sake of flying. No duty, no battle, no burdens.

Not right now.

In the depths of his subconsciousness, his objective burned. But the fire it emitted was one of passion and not burden. He never knew the dark sky to be so pleasant, even after all the nights he spent looking at the vast, scintillating firmament that curved across this little globe he knew to be his home. The sky meant something else to him before; it filled him with agitation and ambition. Pathbearers could dance upon clouds and mount the gales. Shiv was Pathless, and so the sky remained another taunt toward him.

Not so much anymore. Now, he was above the winds and the clouds and beyond the looming light. Now, he moved of his own accord, lived life to his own will—as much as he could, anyway.

A bitter darkness within threatened to creep into his mind and match the pleasant darkness without. Shiv didn’t let it. He kept himself empty and dull of thought as he rejuvenated his tension. There would be time enough for struggle and misery again soon.

For now, it was just him, the sky, the sea of clouds, and the night.

And Shiv raced. And Shiv existed. And Shiv knew life to be more than worthwhile in the contentment it offered despite moments of promised pain.

“Sometimes, existing is its own reward.”

The Harbinger’s declaration came with a notification and a resonant crackle from his Inertial Overdrive skill. His soul felt like it was on the verge of combusting, and his vitality was sapped once more to facilitate an impending metamorphosis.

Shiv cared little—he let reality take its course without judgment. For now, he tried to embody emptiness and let the rest of existence pass through him as if wind through an open window.

Skill Enhancement Requirement Reached: Race the sunrise across the horizon and stay within the receding shadow of night for an hour.

Skill Enhancement: Inertial Overdrive (Heroic) > Lord-Maelstrom of Hungering Kinesis (Unique)

The initial transformation took shape inside Shiv. It felt like he was being turned inside out in the most pleasant of ways—akin to stretching out tendons and muscles that had been tight for a lifetime. Yet, there was a background tension to the struggle; his Vitae continued to trickle away to facilitate and bind his newly achieved legend to his soul. He had replicated the required feats, and now his soul was burning through what little facets of alienation remained between that which was native to his previous struggles, and what had been done to avoid a skill transplant rejection.

His inertial membrane thundered twice more before it went silent, spreading wider and wider until it was like a thin, flat disc overlapping the world around him. The disc stretched further until it developed mycelia. Shiv saw the edges of his skull brush the distant clouds as he savored the heat in the air and drank in the passing winds to fuel his burgeoning speed. But he was more than just speed now; he felt like a hurricane waiting to happen, a storm that kept itself in check.

The world was in motion. The planet. The stars. Everything was moving relative to something. The chase was eternal, and the dance played on. Before, Shiv would liken himself to a stone he could throw time and time again—a stone that accrued a debt of inertial energy and stacked velocity upon velocity. Being an exponential missile was an awesome thing indeed, but it was also a narrow ability, possessing far too much focus on building up power only to cast it out in a devastating blast or escalating impacts.

Shiv lived life as a hammer, and so a hammer he became. But the hollowed Inquisitor had experienced the world differently in their times; they knew speed to be salvation and freedom. They knew heat and energy to be things they had to harness in defense of another as a priority focus rather than a means to deliver an apocalyptic blow.

And now Shiv knew the same thing.

The inertial disc stretching out from his person burst apart into thousands of tattered limbs. Each kinesis tendril left faint distortions in the air, but possessed no speed of their own. Rather, they affected existing objects in motion; they could sap heat from the atmosphere and turn it to a distillation of momentum. Shiv’s inertial membrane flowered into a forest, and his vines played and preyed upon the world as a predator of momentum.

His speed briefly flattened. The darkness nearly slipped past his person, and starlight came within a centimeter of his heels.

I choose to stay beneath night just a while longer, Shiv decided.

His furthest tendrils tore movement from all they brushed. He stilled passing winds, halted clouds, formed patches of impossible stillness, and seeded storms as he stole heat from the atmosphere itself. At the same time, his closest kinetic limbs fastened themselves around his person as his Shapeless Tides speared forward in row after row.

A muted clap of force popped against Shiv. He shed bombs of pure force along the kinetic sinews as he absorbed speed, as he magnified speed, as he coaxed himself to a brand new level of kinetic overdrive. Shiv tore across the air with a lurch of explosive speed; the counterforce exerted against his sudden acceleration glided out along his kinetic tendrils and thickened them. His membrane returned once more, not as a dense knot but a web of veins that could all be unleashed as one or systematically ejected back into the environment to maintain a facade of subtlety.

At the same time, Shiv noted another detail: he was still bleeding vitality. Using his skill ate up far less existential structure than before, but the cost was still there—and didn’t seem to fade. He let the moment extend for a minute, then five, and finally ten. During that time, he scythed toward the horizon and left hailstorms and silence in his wake. The sun descended back over the Rocky Mountains, going from a rising inferno to a narrowing crescent. But the coldness within Shiv was building once more as well; so long as he exerted this new skill, his vitality was spent as a buffer between his legend and the legend he adopted.

If the cost would eventually go away or always be there, he didn’t know. Such would require time and greater expertise than his to uncover. For now, though, Shiv felt his spirit lift. The enhancement was a success, but what would happen if he focused on quelling the drain of his vitality?

The answer arrived with a simple decision.

Skill Reverted: Inertial Overdrive (Heroic) < Lord-Maelstrom of Hungering Kinesis (Unique)

“Huh,” Shiv hummed to himself. “First time that’s ever happened to me. Interesting. Some kind of semi-evolution on demand through vitality, then? Alright. Let’s see what else you have going.”

***

Back in Veronica’s extra-dimensional office, his stationary true clone announced his success. “Evolution success. Mostly.”

Both Valor and Veronica cocked their heads.

“Mostly,” Valor replied with apprehension.

“Elaborate,” Veronica said.

“It may be akin to immunosuppressants,” Helix suggested, circling around Shiv as he examined him in body and soul. “Consider that these skills might have settled, but the assimilation is not complete—and cannot be completed.”

Over a dozen eyes followed the work, each one filled with suspicion bordering on hostility. It had taken great effort to convince the Republic to allow his presence—something that wouldn't have worked with Shiv alone. Thankfully, Valor was willing to vouch for the orc, despite his questionable allegiance in Veronica's eyes. After his Excaliburization, that questionability was doubled, but so was his use. Helix was no longer a meager Heroic-Tier Biomancer, as meager as a High Hero with a hundred thousand years of experience could be. Now he was a Legend of Animancy and Biomancy in one, and there were few others who were as versed in handling Shiv's biology and also coming at this problem from a novel and perhaps accurate angle.

“For most, skills are silos, containers of experience and triumphs, but for Shiv, it seems that aspects of his capability have been internalized on a more fundamental level. A level that we have not witnessed thus far in any other Pathbearer. This might make him capable of absorbing and enhancing his skills to a Unique Tier by siphoning symmetrical evolutions—but that doesn’t completely resolve the incongruence between the major moments.”

Veronica frowned. “Incongruence?”

“Incongruence,” Helix insisted. “Because some of this lore still doesn’t make that much sense at a deeper level of examination. After all, why would Shiv need to rip momentum out of a meteorite? He would simply slam himself into it over and over again until he stops dying and it is dust.”

“Hey, I’m smarter than that,” Shiv said, folding his arms.

Everyone ignored him.

Nihilist:Bunch of pricks.

“It’s all in the details. Same with biology. Even more than biology. You are what you do, but a single skill rarely encapsulates all of a Pathbearer's legend. These hollowed Pathbearers managed to drain momentum and heat in part because they had the necessary attuned skills. Pyromancy, Dynamancy, the works. Shiv lacks this, and so Shiv would have never approached the problem the same way. He can accomplish the necessary feats, but just like having an acceptable donor alone doesn’t mean you’ll be able to keep a donated lung, the same likely goes for a skill. Even more so. Hence, Shiv burning through vitality to keep the Unique skill functional.” Helix suddenly smiled at that. “Which might be something good and unique unto itself. I have a theory: would you like to hear it? Would you—”

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“Legend Helix,” Valor said, barely suppressing a sigh, “it’s the entire reason why I asked you to be here. Please, enlighten us.”

So great was Helix’s ego that he waited for more people to beg for his wisdom. When Veronica and Kathereine only glared at him in response, his mood soured slightly.

“Please tell us, Legend Helix,” Shiv murmured, casting a half-hearted appeal to tilt him away from one of his ever-looming tantrums.

Helix’ demoralization came to a halt; he filled with just enough bluster to continue without complaint. “My theory is that Shiv is burning through his vitality to overwrite the System’s rules to a minor extent. Consider how he can ‘escape’ from reality. I suspect he is banishing select aspects of these skills from reality to make the assimilation process possible.”

“Then why can’t he just transplant any skill he wants?” Harlock inquired, his voice echoing from the darkness ebbing out from Anthony.

“Any number of reasons: Too many asynchronous aspects to the legend; his Severed Shadow is not powerful or advanced enough; the mana fluctuations in a skill are too disruptive. Only time and experimentation will be able to reveal this, really. What I am almost certain of, however, is the fact that Shiv is likely more than capable of replicating the same effects in another’s soul, provided he can gift them with a certain amount of his vitae. Now, what happens once his Vitae runs out? Well, I suspect we will see a particularly vile death unfold as their soul shreds itself from within since their foundational essence isn’t nearly as malleable as the nonsensical ooze that comprises Shiv.”

“Hey, you know what else is a nonsensical ooze?” Shiv asked sweetly. “You. If I cram you real hard into a barrel and batter you like a gray egg.”

“Very mature, Insul.”

“Eat my ass, Helix. You’re the one that made me sound like a bag of splooge.”

“Please refrain from using that word,” Kathereine cut in. “You may use any other word. Just not splooge. It’s such a gauche-sounding word.”

“Bah, enough of this theory,” Helix declared, waving everyone off at once by sprouting additional limbs for just a second. “What we need is more tests. You. Chandler.”

“Councilwoman.” Veronica’s voice came as less than a murmur, but her intent lashed across the room to strike the very bedrock of the orc’s existence.

Helix clamped his jaws shut and glared at her, failing to hide the fact that he was swallowing a mouthful of blood. He'd healed the damage caused by her Rhetoric already, but it was a near thing. A half-second of hesitation would have seen him twitching on the ground.

“Councilwoman,” Helix rasped, rolling his eyes in a meek display of disrespect. “We need… more tests. For his new skill… enhancement.”

“An apt suggestion,” Veronica said. “What do you think, Shiv?”

“Sure. Why not? But only if it’s not any trouble for the Republic.”

***

It wasn’t trouble for the Republic at all. Not when it came to manpower, resources, or force protection. Shiv measured his new Reflexes against other Pathbearers of a similar Tier; he used his skill upon incoming projectiles and his environment. Switching between his baseline Heroic Skill and his Unique Enhancement took little more than a thought. It was like flicking a switch inside himself. Drain, no drain. Enhanced, baseline.

Even so, the vitality cost wasn’t as bad as he expected. It sapped life force faster than he absorbed when the Severed Shadow was barely materialized, but he remained far in the positive.

There were some additional downsides to his enhanced Reflexes Skill as well. He couldn’t directly affect another Pathbearer who altered their own momentum; every time he tried to press his kinetic tendrils against them, he felt his skill ricochet off an angle like whips bouncing off armor. He possessed a meager influence over Pyromancy and Dynamancy, but nothing capable of overcoming an attuned skill on its own.

He found his greatest success not in amplifying his own momentum, but in altering the Reflexes of a Martial enemy—throwing them off their rhythm and twisting their relationship with friction and movement. It worked especially well when he focused his strands on a specific part of the environment or individual, such as pouring all the momentum he stole into the head of a mace, while the rest of its haft swept through the air at its standard pace. The usual outcome that followed was a weapon flying free from its wielder's hand—a temporary disruption to the tempo of combat, considering how most people have their weapons equipped, but in the heat of battle, a temporary distraction had a tendency to develop into fatal ends.

The greater discovery went beyond just the enhanced skill. Shiv tried carving a specific skill out from a cave troll—and failed. He endeavored to do better on an ironhide boar attacking a village—and ended up butchering the poor beast with not much to show for it. He tried again and again with as many beasts as he could, cutting slowly and with focus—it didn't make much of a difference; he still ended up cracking the skills he wanted instead of preserving them. It didn't make a difference if time was flowing or frozen. The issue was Shiv's alone. He simply didn't have the dexterity or experience necessary to carve out a skill without splitting its foundations down to the root.

Soul surgery was obscenely delicate work. Work Shiv wasn’t going to get good at in a day. He'd managed to extract the skills from the hollowed Pathbearers with ease, mainly because of how hardened their skills were. The extraction process there was closer to an excavation than a disembowelment. It made his roughness necessary and stabilized the skills with an unnatural integrity.

Unless that weird Animancer woman comes back around to hollow out more people, I think my easy skill extraction days are done. Need to start practicing more soul surgery on random assholes and monsters. Maybe more assholes—I feel bad for the poor animals, Shiv thought.

Severed Shadow 393 > 401

But just as he assumed he was on the road to another bottleneck, a notification appeared before his eyes, bringing encouraging tidings and an affirmation of the worth of his efforts.

Feat Gained: Soulshaper (Heroic) - Some are born to greatness, some have greatness thrust upon them, and some choose to pursue greatness of their own will and volition. You have taken your first step into defining your own story, beyond what the System has inflicted and bestowed upon you. There is your own will, your own knowledge, and the shape of your own existence. As you have successfully created or altered your being using the heart of soul manipulation, all future creations and manipulations demand magical strain and accommodate your struggles. Triumph begets triumph, Pathbearer. You have reengineered your soul once. Do it again. Choose your own perfection.

Skill Gained: Crafting (Common) 1

An absurd note of laughter bubbled out from Shiv. It was ridiculous. All that effort in exchange for both a Heroic Feat and a Common-Tier Skill. The juxtaposition would have been borderline mockery if Shiv hadn't earned so many other levels along the way. It felt like the System was pushing him, but also throttling him at the same time, reminding him that his effort would see rewards if he continued along, but that he needed to apply focus above stubborn struggle. There was no slamming his head through a brick wall to achieve easy gains anymore for his higher-Tier Skills. Every single one was laden with legend, made complex by all that he'd survived and all he hadn't.

No skill empathized more than his Severed Shadow. It was then that he suddenly felt a question creep into him, a question relating to another long-bottlenecked skill. He turned his cutting aura inward, slicing carefully, thinking and feeling every detail. The pain was information, but sometimes it was chaotic information, messy data that he didn't need. The hurt of the body was a signal that something was broken, that he needed to take care and mend himself in a certain way. A hurt to the soul, then, was damage on an exponential scale, an existential scale, hence the severity of the pain, the all-consuming nature of the pain.

As he drew close to his Multitasking skill, he read something from that melange of agony. There were patches of Vitae around his Multitasking that were borderline insensitive. The pain became pinpricks, mere needles to the searing, ripping torment that defined every other region. Shiv knew enough by now, even in his amateurish experience, to know that incongruity was also a form of data.

He brought this information to Valor and the others, and they fell upon him as if a ravenous flock of vultures drawn to a whale's carcass.

“Insensitive…” Helix adjusted his enamel glasses. “The pain is muted, or reduced?”

"There's a difference?" Shiv asked.

"There's a world of difference, Insul!" Helix chided, practically offended by Shiv's rank display of ignorance. "If something is muted, that usually means that the skill is dying inside of you. You are not the first to attempt a skill transplantation. There are similar bits of literature and experimentation, though they've all ended in failure, for they run into a more severe version of your problem. The lore eventually gets rejected. Even if you can use someone else's skill once or twice, it will detonate inside of you and kill you in the most catastrophic and ontological implosion. A muted skill is usually a skill that is on the verge of bursting apart inside of you. If the pain is merely reduced, say, then that means the skill has suffered some form of strain-ceiling erosion.”

“Strain-ceiling erosion?” Shiv asked.

"A less common but no less colloquial way of describing the reality behind a bottleneck," Valor elaborated. He cast another spell, and this time he zeroed in on the place where Shiv performed his self-surgery. The Vitae spilling out of Shiv was painting the air with blossoming patterns of faded red. He carved with precision and kept the trickling life force bleeding at the lowest possible level. Even still, it cost him to remain in this state. The longer he lingered, the more his focus began to wane, the more the cold set in, and his mind and body began to succumb to weakness.

“So what does that mean exactly? That I've been pushing the skill too hard?” Shiv didn’t think that was the case; he pushed all of his skills to the extreme. He barely remembered all his strain-related deaths. It was like eating bread for him by this point. He didn't keep track.

“You have been pushing your skill to the limit in the worst way possible. I should have noticed and stopped you, but with all that has been happening…” Valor trailed off. “No, that is not a good excuse either, and you are a particularly special case. I assumed you could avoid that, but it seems certain skills also need to be approached with more calculation even for you. The simple fact is: you never stop using your Multitasking. You are always running parallel instances of yourself, drawing upon your synaptic echoes to manifest your many true clones while performing high-stress operations that would ignite the nervous system of most Pathbearers. But that is not all, is it? Every time you come close to succumbing to a period of stupor from overuse, you draw upon your Harbinger and accelerate yourself into the future. You skip across time to avoid that period of vulnerability and malaise.”

Shiv nodded slowly. The fault of his supposed wisdom was slowly dawning on him. “So I was supposed to suffer for my struggle rather than trying to be clever and skip over it?”

Valor shook his head. "It's not even that. It is the fact that you are constantly at what your skill, body, and soul recognize to be the peak of your limitations. You are, in effect, burned out spiritually on using the skill as well. You have never allowed it to fully recover, and you have never strained it again. You need to enter a period where you focus on a single body—rejuvenation after immense activity.”

His suggestion inspired a visceral, borderline nauseating swell of disgust inside Shiv. I stop working the skill? Stop struggling? Stop suffering? Really? I have to do that?

"I don't know, Valor. I don't think we have that kind of option right now. I need to use all my true clones. I need—”

“You need to learn how to cycle yourself out. You need to cooperate. You, Adam, and Uva must all support each other and allow for one another's deficiencies to be covered and one another's periods of exhaustion to pass without risk. You have been assuming too many external missions. You are the Gate's primary workhorse when it comes to offensive action. That needs to change, at least for a period of time. We must build you up. We must keep you in reserve as a surprise against our enemies rather than a constant catastrophe. From now on, you are to select no more than four bodies. The bodies you use, the bodies that you operate toward only the benefit of expanding your knowledge, building your skills, and responding in emergency situations. You are to let the skill recover, and then you are to strain it once more.”

“And when's that gonna be?” Shiv asked.

“When I judge the time to be right,” Valor replied, cryptic and final. “In the meantime, Uva will assume more offensive responsibilities. You can take over for her day-to-day operations.”

Shiv felt like he was being punished. “Valor, did I do something wrong?”

“No, but it likely feels that way because you have been living a high-octane life with high-octane consequences and never that much of a moment to rest. There is more to life than cooking and fighting and a few other hobbies you care to indulge in, but a big part of life is banality. It is the slowing of its pace, drudgery. In boredom, however, there comes inspiration, for in boredom, as all is silent, your mind speaks, and it might give you instruction that would never arise under times of constant stress. You need that boredom to some extent, however much you can gain."

Valor paused, and a hint of barely withheld sorrow came over him. It lasted just a second, but Shiv saw it in the full rawness of its form. "We all do."

Shiv saw it, and so did Veronica. From behind Valor, Shiv caught her stare, and she gauged the measure of the ancient Undying the same way her grandson did. They shared a fleeting glance, Shiv warning Veronica not to use this information as a weapon against his mentor. Veronica craned her neck just enough to acknowledge his tacit threat and regard his warning as wise.

But he knew better, and so did she. When the time came, and if it was to her advantage, she would exploit the fact of Valor's origin. She would use the Thief of Lost Acheron against Valor Thann if it meant preserving the Republic. That never lingered far from Shiv's awareness. Veronica Chandler was here alongside them because it meant the preservation of her kingdom. That didn't mean the status quo would last forever. If Gaia, Avalon, or the Great One offered a deal promising Yellowstone's preservation, there wouldn't be much Shiv could do in counter to that, but the same applied the other way around as well.

Sometimes, the truest form of politics was noticing something and pretending that you didn't, just to avoid a premature battle.

Valor reached out and clasped Shiv's shoulder, squeezing him with reassurance. The moment of contact was a stabilizing force for both of them. Shiv knew he could rely on Valor, and Valor had no doubt about Shiv's loyalty. If Veronica was the shadow of a cold and predatory moon, then Valor, in all strangeness, was the dawn-sun, the promise of morning after a bitter night, despite his adherence to stealth and subterfuge.

“Being in reserve is not a condemnation of your abilities,” Valor said. “It is not a punishment. Do not treat it as such. The boredom might agitate you, but the boredom is necessary. You have gone far, far, far too long without dedicating yourself to intellectual pursuits and refinement and restitution with your fullest focus. You have always been scattered. Now I am going to make sure you are not. Now we will carry your burdens, as you have done much to carry ours.”

A reluctant blush came over Shiv as Valor made his promise. “I wouldn't call what I did 'carrying your burdens.'”

"But you should," Valor insisted. "You should. I know that you think you are simply helping, being a cudgel against our enemies and cooking to feed people. I know that you doubt your worth when it comes to tertiary matters, auxiliary matters, matters of community and Gate. I am here to tell you that you are wrong. I am here to tell you that you matter much more for the hearts and minds and culture of those around you with the person you have become. Spend some time away from the promise of carnage. Spend some time and capture the same peace you attained while fleeing from the light of day a few hours ago. Spend time with the people in the Gate. Get to know them as a person and not an icon.”

“A good suggestion,” Veronica noted, slipping smoothly into the conversation. “I would ask that you do the same for Yellowstone. You are wanted here as well. You are respected and valorized here as well. It would be to the benefit of both your Gate and the Republic to know that the Deathless is more than a weapon.”

The shadows of uncertainty grew over Shiv. Choosing not to fight was like choosing to gnaw off his own limb, but even so, who was he to reject Valor's wisdom? Even with all he learned, even now, Valor saw clearly. He saw through Shiv.

“And to be more selfish, if you do not do this, how will you ever drive your Multitasking to the next level?” Valor asked.

Shiv blew out a long, puffing breath as he placed his hands on his hips in a sign of semi-surrender. “Alright then, let's go see just how much of a people person I can be. But, uh, the Forbidden Empire and the Great One… What are we going to do there in the meantime?”

“Ah, that,” Valor hummed, stroking his chin. “I think it’s time for us to turn to Legends Mettabon and Hymn to address strangeness with something… stranger.”