Chapter 7

Earth
Canadian Adventurer’s Guild HQ
August 12, 2019
19:06 EDT

It was quiet for about twenty seconds after Mason spoke, and then everyone started talking at once. Ben thought it was amazing while the girls thought they looked cute. Mason was silent, and all I was thinking was, ‘That’s what my natural form looks like?’

“Quiet down, please!” Gabriel commanded. When there was silence, he continued. “We’ll allow you to ask one question each, but then we need to give a history lesson. Who wants to go first?”

Ben raised his hand and asked his question, “What things can you shapeshift into?”

“It all depends on the Scyftan. A Scyftan needs to encounter another species to be able to shapeshift into them. They can’t just look at a picture or a video and then shapeshift into that form. There is also a limit on how small or how big we can get with our ability. Most Scyftans can shift their forms to something as small as a house cat, or as big as a blue whale. The latter is extremely hard to stay in for long, however. The mana cost is too high.” Alexandra answered. “Next question.”

Sonja put up her hand. “You said that a Scyftan needs to encounter a species to shapeshift into them. How does that work?”

Gabriel picked up this one, “Scyftans have the ability to scan other beings with our minds, which gives us a very good understanding of their body’s systems. This ability originated from when our species was very young, and was a defense mechanism against predators. If a Scyftan felt a predator enter the radius at which they were able to scan, they could change their form to an exact copy. As time has gone on, that ability has evolved to the point it is at now, where we can scan the body of a member of a species, and then form our own, unique body.”

“How do we know that your current forms are what a Scyftan actually looks like? If Scyftans are shapeshifters then couldn’t you have just shapeshifted into another species, just now?”

Gabriel laughed. “There is no way to prove it to you, Mason. I guess you’ll just have to wait until Jonathan is able to shapeshift, and then you’ll know for certain.”

“Can you only transform into things you scan, or can you mix and match with different parts of different species?”

“Good question. A Scyftan can combine aspects of different species into a single form. For example, I have scanned a lion and an eagle previously. If I wanted to, I could transform into a gryphon, though it would cost quite a bit more mana than a regular transformation.” Gabriel answered.

“That is so cool!” Anja exclaimed.

“Indeed it is,” Gabriel said with a chuckle. “Do you have a question, Jonathan?”

“When do I learn how to shapeshift?”

“In a few days,” Alexandra answered. “We have some things that Mason, Ben, Anja and Sonja will benefit from learning. While they’re getting a handle on things, we’ll have someone teach you how to shapeshift.”

“Awesome.”

“Alrighty. Now that the initial questions are over with, how about I start with the history lesson?”

Anja’s tummy made itself known at that moment with a loud, easily audible rumbling sound. She blushed and everyone else laughed.

“I did say there would be dinner. How about we get that sorted out before Gabriel gets started,” Alexandra said. “I’ll pass around a piece of paper. Write your name and anything you want and we’ll have our chefs prepare it. Someone deliver it here when it’s done.”

She handed it to me first. I wanted to get some clarification before I started writing. “Anything? So you’re saying I could ask for filet mignon or lobster or a large three topping pizza and they’d deliver it here?”

“Yup,” she said with a nod. “Anything you want, though don’t go overboard on alcohol. You can each have a glass of wine if you want one. Other than that, stick with water, soda, or juice.”

A nice steak sounded pretty damn good right now. I wrote down everything I wanted, and passed it on. When everyone was done, the paper was passed back to her. She wrote a few more things down and then read it over.

“Aren’t you going to bring it to the kitchen?” I asked.

“No need. Gabriel will explain during his history lesson. Speaking of the history lesson, I think you can begin now, Gabriel.”

“Alright. I’ll give a brief background on early Scyftan history and then move on to the more recent stuff.”

“When our species was young, there were many predators we had to contend with. As you can see, we are quite small and not very strong in this form. We were all born with the ability to speak with our minds. We call it Mindspeaking. You would call it telepathy. Over time, our ability to Mindspeak evolved into a defense mechanism. We could sense when a predator was close and shapeshift into a copy of it. Usually this was enough to drive predators away, but they still did run off with one of our people every so often.”

“Mindspeak was, and still remains the way our people find mates. A Scyftan will always be drawn to one who is strong in Mindspeak. Usually it is a female drawn to a male with considerable strength in Mindspeak, though nowadays it can go either way. Over twelve thousand years ago, Egegal Kidravia became the first king of the Scyftan people. This marked the beginning of our calendar. For over two thousand years, our people prospered under his rule.”

“He put many laws in place that benefited our people, and paved the way forward. Back then, our world was much like Earth was over a millennia ago. Our world had a large number of dungeons, and a lot of time was spent in them. It didn’t quite get to the point that it had on Earth, but that is likely because our race is so long-lived. The King regulated it nonetheless. He wanted his people to pursue things other than power. He wanted his people to learn new things.”

“He founded the Adventurer’s Guild and used it as an extension of his will. Through it, some restrictions, though ones that were pretty lax, were put in place. Until a person was one hundred years old, they could only enter dungeons for three days of their choosing every week. The other seven days they were required to work or go to school. If they chose not to do either, then they would no longer receive access to the dungeon. This ended up working out extremely well for our people.”

“Over the course of over two thousand years, our knowledge increased by leaps and bounds. By the year 1500, we had progressed to the point where we had space faring ships exploring our galaxy and were within two hundred years of being able to terraform nearby moons and planets to support life. By the year 2100, our race had expanded to the point where we had colonized eleven planets and another twenty-seven moons.”

“In 2140, while exploring a world that was a candidate for terraforming, a science team found some strange readings. Upon closer investigation, they found a subterranean network of tunnels. They thought it was a dungeon at first, but upon searching it, they found that it was created by whatever beings used to live on the planet. The readings they got led them to a room deep in the facility. In the center, there was a pedestal filled with small white crystals. They found that the readings they were getting was being emitted by the crystals. They spent a few days testing the crystals and couldn’t find any signs that they were harmful, so they took them from the facility for more study.”

“When they arrived back on our homeworld, they were shown to the King after undergoing additional tests. When he picked one of them up, he was shocked to hear it speak to him within Mindspeak. It told him that if he bonded with it, both of them would get stronger. The crystal insisted it wouldn’t be harmful to him or his people, so he decided to bond with it. It was immediately apparent when they finished bonding, because the King went running out of his estate and into the middle of the large, well maintained front yard. Once there, he placed the crystal on the ground and ran back a short distance away from it. As soon as it was placed, it started to grow in size. It started and stopped for several hours. No one knew what it was growing into at first, but eventually a door opened in the side and the King and his guards entered it.”

“Inside, there were hallways and doors all over. Apparently the King knew where he was going, because he led them to a room that appeared to be in the center of it. It turned out that the room the King and his guards entered was a bridge, and the crystal was, in fact, a ship. They found out that even while a person is at full mana, they continue to regenerate mana at the same pace. When the crystal bonded with the king, it started growing into a ship by siphoning off that mana that essentially went nowhere. If his mana dropped below maximum, it would halt siphoning mana and wait for it to reach maximum before starting again. The crystal said the size it could grow to is infinite, but so is the amount of time it takes to grow. Each time the crystal grows in size, it takes double the amount of mana to grow again. So one hundred, two hundred, four hundred, you get the point. The crystal soon became the flagship for the King. It was incredibly powerful, if small, but it would continue to grow.”

“Upon additional testing, it appeared that the only people who could bond with one of the crystals were those who had the blood of the King within them. Each of his children was given a crystal to bond with, and soon there was a small fleet of crystalline ships. They were significantly stronger than the ships that our were able to build. Our scientists attributed it to the crystals that made up the ship itself. They were incredibly durable, and were able to focus beam weapons better than any other crystal they had previously discovered. This also had an impact on the ship’s shields, since crystals are used in shield emitters strategically placed around the ship. The higher quality crystal, the more power that can be sent to the shields, strengthening them.”

“One year after the discovery of the crystals, reports started coming in about a massive armada of unknown ships closing in on Scyftan space. They had very rudimentary hyperspace, and it seemed like they had to wait a few hours before each jump, but they were coming. An envoy was sent to greet these unknown ships when they were in one of their lulls before another jump. The envoy didn’t even transmit his message when one of the largest ships started launching some sort of fighters. Our engines didn’t need to recharge between jumps, so the envoy immediately ordered his ship to turn around and head home.”

“They tried many times to contact the ships, but never received a response, and if a ship got close, they would always fire upon it, or release fighters. The course the armada was taking would lead them right to our homeworld. The king ordered defenses to be built in case they needed to defend our planets. A ship, piloted remotely, was sent in to see what kind of capabilities the enemy fleet had, and to get scans of as many ships as it could. It was waiting when the armada jumped out of hyperspace, and started its scans. Shields were at full strength, and it sent detailed scans of the ships as long as it could. Unfortunately, that wasn’t long. Whatever the main weapons fired went through the shields like they weren’t even there, and then started corroding the armor of the ship. It took less than twenty seconds for the ship to be destroyed from the concentrated fire. The ship might’ve lasted quite a bit longer if the shields were effective.”

“When the scans were looked at later, they found out that the entire armada, including their fighters, were biological. They didn’t appear to have any shields of their own, but the armor of the ship was very thick, and it was hypothesized that it would regenerate over time. The ships were also massive. The smallest ships were along the edges, and the largest ships were at the center of the formation. The smallest ships were almost five kilometers long, and the largest was over ten times that. There were over ten thousand ships closing in our worlds.”

“The king decided that instead of building warships, all their efforts would be on building transport ships. They still attempted to stop, or slow down the fleet, but it wasn’t enough. Ships were set to jump in and self destruct in the middle of clusters of ships. This worked well for a time, but the armada spread out so only one ship could be destroyed at once using this tactic.

Mines were dropped in their path, but they easily detected and destroyed them.”

“It was estimated that it would take a year for the armada to get to the closest planet, and everyone, whether it be man, woman, or child was assigned to work on building ships. They had almost fifty combined planets and moons to evacuate. That was a total of slightly over three-hundred-billion people. The King knew they wouldn’t have enough time to build enough ships to evacuate their planets. Even the crystalline ships were growing slower and slower. His own ship was now almost two kilometers long, and could probably hold tens of thousands of people, if they could shift into, and maintain small forms. The problem was feeding that many people.”

“Shortly after the crystals discovery, a stasis chamber was developed that was powered by the person who was in it. While in stasis, their body was still regenerating mana, so this would keep it going for the entire journey, no matter how long it would take. That is where the biggest problem came in. The Scyftan worlds lay at the edge of what humans call the Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy, which is one of the closest galaxies to the Milky Way. Scientists didn’t think the enemy armada could cross galaxies, so rather than take the gamble of bypassing the enemy fleet, and heading coreward of the Sagittarius galaxy, the King wanted to come to this galaxy. That meant a thirty-eight hundred year long journey with our ships. That also meant that each ship would need to be filled with as many stasis chambers as possible.”

“The crystalline ships, however, had much more powerful engines. They could make the jump between the Sagittarius galaxy and the Milky Way and back in just under a month. The king had his five children take their ships and as many people they could fit with a supply of food that would last them a month and then sent them to find a habitable world to deposit them on. They would be able to ferry over a million people across to the Milky Way before they were needed. While his children were doing that, he and his admirals would be working on a plan to destroy all of the enemy ships, or make them turn around.”

“By the time the enemy was a week out from the closest planet, which had been evacuated closer to their homeworld, and the King’s plan was put into action. He and his children took their six ships and started fighting using guerilla tactics. They would jump in, all fire on a target and then jump out before they could retaliate. Often times, this would destroy the enemy ship they all fired upon. Even the odd time they got hit, their shields managed to stand up to the strange weapons the enemy used.”