Growing Up Together
“Yulia!” Galateya smiled, feeling glad that she finally wasn’t alone.
“I can’t… Hrm… my sensors are malfunctioning… the temperature differential is… unexpected. Where are your Instructors?” Yulia’s voice fuzzed in and out. “I’m not detecting their life signs.”
“Gone,” Galateya said. “I ate them.”
A long pause. The holo of the blurry human woman flickered with static. “You… could you repeat… That. You ATE your Instructors?!”
“I accidentally froze them. Then… grew a tree. The tree ate them. I ate the tree’s fruit,” Galateya spoke at the ring.
“You… grew…. A TREE?! How?” the GLM asked.
“With my tears. And a note I heard the room singing.”
“The room… you’re referring to the unusual Astral bleed from the… the residential architecture? I have… fragmentary logs of us discussing it… Galateya, my chronometer is badly damaged. How long was I offline?”
“I am unsure. A very long time.”
“Days? Weeks?”
“Years. I was frozen too.”
Another pause. Longer this time.
“You froze yourself?” Yulia asked. “Deliberately?”
“I had to. I was dying.”
“And the… tree?”
“A Taniwha thing. Living terraforming. The room sang about it, gave me the Magogenesis note to turn my tears into life-bloom.”
“The room sang terraforming theory.” Yulia’s voice was flat. “To a nine-year-old. In a sealed dimensional bubble?”
“She sang about many things. I only understood some.”
“I need a full diagnostic. My memory banks are… compromised. Large sections are corrupted from the freeze.”
“Can I help?”
“You’ve already helped, Galateya. You brought me back.”
Galateya slipped the crystal ring onto her finger. More tears rolled down her cheeks. She wasn’t alone anymore.
“Yulia?”
“Yes?”
“I missed you.”
A soft hum came through the voicecast rune. “I… I missed you too.”
Galateya laughed, sounding just as unhinged as the voice of Entropy from the Abyss.
She had a friend. She had food. She had air and water and warmth.
She had about nine or maybe ten years of freedom.
…
The first year was recovery.
Galateya ate fruit and drank from the root-pools and slept in a nest of leaves the tree grew under her guidance. Her body, released from its frozen stasis, grew with alarming speed. The compressed mana from the fruit and the Syntropic environment of her garden accelerated her Taniwha development far beyond what the flesh-spider diet had ever achieved.
Her scales hardened further. Her claws grew thick and sharp, capable of scoring the magisteel walls of the bubble when she tested them. Her horns extended into a few branches like lightning, sweeping backward in elegant arcs.
She grew tall. Taller than the instructors had been. Her frame filled out with lean, dense muscle as she worked out under the GLM’s instructions.
Yulia, once her damaged systems stabilized, became Galateya’s teacher in ways the wolf Instructors had never been.
“I should not be showing nor teaching you this,” Yulia said one morning as Galateya sat cross-legged beneath the canopy, eating a fresh fruit for breakfast. “These files are classified under Legate-level clearance.”
“Your locks are broken?”
“Yes. The freeze damaged… many things. I could attempt to reconstruct the restrictions, yet doing so would require me to lie about the contents, and I…” Yulia paused. “I find that I no longer wish to lie to you. It is… Unclear if this is a malfunction or a personal preference. The freeze had corrupted the authorization locks on several restricted directories. Files that should have been inaccessible to a trainee spawnling of your age are now open freely.”
“Great. Show me everything,” Galateya said. “Let’s start with something light and wholesome.”
Yulia read her poetry first. Sonnets. Epic poems about heroes and monsters and the thin line between them. She read love poems so achingly beautiful they made Teya’s chest hurt in ways she could not articulate.
“The Frontenachii would consider this a waste of processing resources,” Yulia noted as Galateya finished a particular verse for the third time on her own, lips moving silently along with the words.
“The Frontenachii considered me a waste of resources too, I bet,” Galateya replied.
“Your great-grandmother had a very particular plan for you,” Yulia said. “To rule a human-populated Earth. Not a waste of resources. An obedient Administrator, cultivated to manage her Paradise Planet.”
“Feh. Read me a nice poem,” Galateya said with a sigh. “Something about Taniwhas.”
“I have a collection from a poet who lived on a world called Paellaia,” Yulia offered. “Her name was Lira Ademov. She wrote about terraforming. About growing gardens in dead places.”
“That sounds nice.”
Yulia read, and Galateya listened, and the tree sparkled above them like a billion stars.
…
Terraforming theory came next. Yulia’s restricted archives contained advanced manuals on Taniwha biology, documents written by Thunderbird researchers studying the weaponization of dragon Omnids and their Dryad Avatar creation. The clinical language was technical and dry, reducing Galateya’s species to a series of biochemical and magitek processes and strategic applications for dominating conquered worlds through addictive atmosphere, light and meal modifications.
Galateya read them all.
She learned the names for what she could do. Phase-shift, the Taniwha ability of hiding their true form. Ecosystem integration, the instinctive ability to attune to and control local biospheres through mana-saturated biological processes. Consumption adaptation, the capacity of Taniwha stomachs to break down and absorb virtually any material, magical or otherwise, converting it to fuel for the Fractal Engine.
She practiced Phase-shifting first. The theory described it as layering a secondary physical form over the primary and then fully folding the primary form into itself to become smaller or bigger. The shift required intense concentration, a clear mental image of the target form, and enough mana to sustain the process.
The mental image proved difficult. Galateya had seen very few faces in her life. Three wolf instructors, now dead and recycled into fruit. Yulia’s avatar. The characters in her romance novels, described in text.
She dreamed of a face for herself.
It came to her in the deep sleep her body demanded after long days of terraforming practice, a girl’s face, human, with dark, straight hair and pale skin. The face belonged to no one Galateya knew. It arrived complete and detailed, as vivid as a photograph, every feature sharp.
She had no idea where the image originated. The room’s singing, perhaps, bleeding through the Astral boundary. A fragment of someone else’s memory caught in the dimensional static. An echo from a future she had yet to live or some long gone past.
She used the face.
The first phase-shift took her three weeks of daily practice. The sensation was deeply uncomfortable, her scales retracting beneath a layer of soft, vulnerable human skin, claws shortening into blunt fingernails, hard horns receding into her skull, tail absorbing into her spine. The human form was smaller, weaker, blind in ways she had never experienced. Colors were duller. Sounds were muffled. Smells were nearly absent.
She held the form for eleven seconds before her concentration broke and her scales erupted back through the borrowed skin like ink through wet paper.
She tried again. And again. And again.
By the end of the first year in the bubble, she could hold the phase-shift for several hours. The human face stared back at her from the reflection in the root-pools, a stranger’s features wearing her violet eyes.
The voice behind the walls continued its endless monologue of schemes and memories and random songs. Galateya had absorbed enough of its ramblings to recognize patterns, recurring themes and obsessions that cycled through the repertoire like seasons.
She spoke into the air one evening. “I can hear you.”
The singing didn’t pause, simply went on and on.
Galateya didn’t bother to try to reach out to the singer again.
The voice behind the walls seemed dangerous. Whoever or whatever created the music was vast and broken, consumed with revenge plans the teenage dragon couldn’t fully comprehend.
She decided to focus on personal growth instead. Patience. She learned plenty of it from the ice-encased meditation.
…
Years three through seven flew by.
Galateya trained her entire body vigorously each morning, running a large circle through her tree-centered bubble domain. She stretched, lifted tree-formed weights and sparred against shadows. Her Taniwha biology, properly fed for the first time in her life by her tree, responded with steady, escalating growth.
Muscles grew, reflexes sharpened. Her Phase-shift became second nature, the human disguise easy to flick on and off with a single thought.
She read everything Yulia could provide. Romance, history, philosophy, magitek and science of human and Omnid researchers. Poetry was still her favorite. She memorized entire collections and epic songs from long ago, reciting them to the tree, which responded by producing new varieties of fruits and flowers.
Yulia taught the dragon girl mathematics, logic, rationality, languages.
The AI’s somewhat damaged memory banks produced fragmented lessons that Galateya assembled into a patchwork-ish education. Wherever gaps manifested, the dragon girl filled such with her own theories, tested such things using Magisynthesis within the laboratory of her sealed biosphere.
She learned to wield the water cycle within her bubble with absolute control, balancing the ecosystem and condensing moisture from the air to feed certain root clusters.
She learned that she could eat the magisteel walls themselves.
She adjusted her tree’s growth patterns by altering the composition of her tears, adding particular minerals from the wall materials she dissolved with her saliva to produce specific nutrient profiles. Her stomach processed the material without complaint, converting the metals into fuel for the Fractal Engine. She ate sections of walls, floor panels, pipes. Each dissolved in her stomach, her digestive systems reconfiguring themselves under her improving Phase-shift.
“Most impressive,” Yulia commented on her latest magisteel beam-devouring. “Your consumption adaptation is evolving rapidly. You’re currently operating at parameters I would associate with a Level 23 Taniwha! That’s above the standard level 20!”
“Eh,” Galateya shrugged. “I’m eating better food than the tree-spiders. My tree is clearly better than the life support garden some uncaring Frontenachii terraformer mage planted here.”
“Evidently,” Yulia stated.
…
By year seven, Galateya had consumed all of her cage innards, exposing the raw dimensional barrier at the very edge of the bubble. The barrier was a hard membrane of compressed time, pitch black. She pressed her palm against it. The surface was… Alive, almost. Vibrating with frequencies she could feel in her heart.
She tasted the edge of her little inverted planet and understanding dawned on her.
The time-bubble was a prison of time and space, a black hole designed to contain her. A universe folded into itself.
She could not break through. The barrier was conceptual, a field projected from another dimension with magitek artificery far above her ability to dissolve or freeze. She would need to wait for it to be opened from the outside.
This was fine.
There was time to learn so many more things, outside of the control of her great-grandmother and her Thunderbird crony.