Chapter 18 Once Upon a Pause
Once Upon a Pause
Key:
O = Orpheus, Fenrir Prime
^ = Notes to self taken during the interview
+ = Observational notes from me added after receiving additional information
WTPE = What the Poop Emoji
O: Once upon a pause...
Me: Wait, that’s how you’re beginning the story?
O: As you will see, I must begin upon a pause as the timing of this event cannot be considered accurate.
Me: No, it’s just, fairy tales start like that…. You know what, never mind. Continue…
O: Our progenitor, Fenrir Zero, caught Dorie, a she-wolf from the future, who fell into a lake directly over the Irish Wolves’ Kingdom Portal while on a tour with her parents.
After reciting an Optimum DNA request match code her non-blood-related oversire Hamish had taught her, she fell through the portal and into the sky, straight into Fenrir Zero’s arms.
Me: Optimum DNA match request code? Oversire?
O: You referred to them as fating spells, and you called your oversire ‘senair.’
Me: So in this first timeline, both my parents were alive?
^Long hesitation.
+Later I find out how hard, verging on impossible, it is for any of them to straight-up lie to me.
O: Yes. The telling of this story will be easier with fewer interruptions.
+Suspected he was obfuscating, but decided to let him go on.
O: Fenrir Zero, who had been developing the hunting hybrids for nearly 10,000 rotations and had long forgotten about the fertility portal in his ship until its klaxon sounded, had no idea what to make of a she-wolf with an advanced form of communication and knowledge of math falling into his arms.
^Ask him about 10,000 rotations! Ask him about ship! Why fertility portal?
+Yes, Drakkon live an average of 20k-25k Earth years. Not a lot of them. Their population numbers were less than 5 figures. But there didn’t have to be with that kind of life span.
+Yes, Fen 0 was truly here that long, developing the species in what the Drakkon call Zone 2.
It became a whole thing. See Dorie 1000 Journal for a further breakdown of the history of his 10,000 years of work developing the shifter species before he returned to his home planet to advocate on our behalf.
+See Dorie 999 journal for a full breakdown of what happened to Fenrir Zero.
O: If he had not happened to be standing directly underneath the ship, she would have died of her injuries. Perhaps it would have been best if she had.
^WTPE. Ask about why he hates me!
O: Her language was unknown to Fenrir Zero, and for some reason, he could not godspeak her. He would find out later this was because she was his best fertility match. His, not one of the hybrid wolves he assumed she’d been matched with by the fertility portal.
Me: Not to interrupt…
O: Yet you are interrupting.
Me→shameless: Yeah, that was more of a courtesy heads-up than a request for permission. How did he find out that she was his match?
^Awkward silence.
O: She went into heat with the rise of the two full moons.
And it became evident when his male works dropped for the first time.
Over the gestation period, he came to develop deep feelings for her that, combined with Reverence, became a form of obsession, which metastasized into a full descent into Widower’s Madness after she died in the early moon cycles of her gestation.
+Translation: Later find out that the original Dorie died when the baby attempted to come early, around the same time as a female dragon would lay an egg.
+Widower’s Madness = Male Drakkon go mental to the 1000-percent emoji when their mate dies: hallucinations, mania, the fuckery that unfolds in the rest of this interview.
O: For this reason, he spent a few more generations breeding the she-wolves to be hardier before traveling back to our home planet to campaign against the hunting of humans for food, and to formally request they become a protected species.
Me: And how did that go?
O: It is ongoing as we speak. Fenrir Zero did not share about the hybrid he had mated.
He had little proof of her existence, as he ashed her body in a fit of grief after her death, and he was so infatuated with her that he did not log her DNA.
He failed to be a good scientist in this regard.
He also could not provide a sensible explanation for how she came to be in his time period.
Or why his fertility portal remained in hers.
^Ask about definition of ashed.
+Translation: Ashed = He fireballed her. Drakkon death ritual (see Dorie 999’s notes on Fenrir Zero) and then had nothing left to prove she was ever real.
^Ask about O’s definition of “good scientist.”
^Ask why F0 had fertility portal in his interplanetary flyer.
Me: So Fenrir Zero and—I guess we’ll call the original version of me Dorie Zero—were able to communicate?
+In Orpheus’s numbering system, the original version of me is also called Dorie Zero for reasons that will become evident as the interview goes on.
O: Yes, they established a mind bond after her heat that allowed them to communicate without the aid of translation.
Still, finding out she was from a time period several thousand rotations beyond his own raised more questions than answers.
After her death, Fenrir Zero had enough sanity remaining to know that people might accuse him of having made Dorie up.
As it was, the court who heard his case could tell that he suffered from some form of madness.
As a result, I, Fenrir Prime, the copy of the Royal Geneticist, was decanted, and together we engineered my variants especially for this 1,000-year mission to substantiate his claims about the potential for human civilization.
+Cloning was F0’s original field of science. From what I can tell, he was at the far end of the Drakkon’s nascent steps into cyborg design for interstellar travel and developed several versions of “seed populations” to travel to and inhabit other planets.
+The last 10,000 years he spent creating my race? Considered a light retirement project. Insert mind blown emoji here.
O: I did not think the mission would yield favorable results.
Me: Wait, so you’re his copy, but you didn’t believe him?
O: I did not. Having no concept of the bonding affliction your kind refers to as love, and having worked closely with Fenrir Zero, I assumed he had gone insane and started hallucinating true interpersonal connection where there could be none.
Me: Like a shepherd left alone too long with his sheep.
O: I do not understand this reference as I do not know what a sheep is. But if you are alluding to the inherent unethical nature of engaging in sex with your lab subjects, you are correct in your assessment.
For several moon cycles, there was no evidence the primitive beings Drakkon wished to hunt were anything more than upright animals with crude tools and a method of communication that mostly consisted of grunts and hand signals.
+This only sort of checks out. Hominids, as the Drakkon call us, have a very small inventory of speech in comparison to modern humans, with a lot more hand signals. Can see why it appeared to the Drakkon like we could only grunt and sign.
O: I believed my work would be a straightforward few years of filing reports that matched Fenrir Zero’s before this supposed advanced she-wolf was issued through his fertility matching portal.
However, just a few moon cycles after our mission arrival, another she-wolf named Dorie Scotswolf fell from the sky. With the exact same story.
^Not hyphenated?
+No, in all the timelines where my father survived, I took his name completely.
O: The newly arrived she-wolf went into heat at the very next moon cycle, and to my great shock, my male works dropped.
+Hindsight being 20/20, really should have clocked that moon cycle detail, but…
Me: Your male works?
O: Our Drakkon genitalia.
+HUGE UNDERSTATEMENT. Not enough room in the margins to explain male works. See Dorie 1000 journal for a multi-page explanation with rough sketches.
O: Our male works do not present until a viable candidate for mating appears. Therefore, a drakkon may go his entire life without having sex if a viable female candidate does not present for mating.
+Translation: Fenrir Zero, Orpheus, Diarmuid, and Aengus were big ol’ virgins until Dories started dropping from the sky.
Me: What did you do when your, ah… male works presented?
+Buckle up.
O: The results were chaos. For all three of our male works presented, and the variants had no prior knowledge of Dorie Zero. Upsilon killed Omicron in a fit of primal jealousy. I was forced to put Upsilon down before my own primal instinct released, and I mated you.
^WTPE!!
^Check on definition of “killed” b/c A & D are still here.
+Note: Even though Orpheus kept careful count of the Dories, he often refers to all of us as “you.”
+Note: This is basic knowledge in most wolf communities.
A she-wolf’s heat will cause deadly fights to break out among eligible males, which is why, before the heat control shot, it was incredibly important for a she-wolf to designate who she wished to mate prior to going into heat.
See Dorie 1000 Journal for the tale of how a Zone 2 Viking Wolf ended up with a twenty-first century she-wolf who was designated for President Nightwolf’s father, Rafe Nightwolf.
O: The implantation was successful, but Dorie 1 also died toward the beginning of her gestation period.
I immediately succumbed to Widower’s Madness, and I once again worked to make the she-wolves more resilient. By the time I was done, the sea level had risen, and I had created the underground land where the three kingdoms from your epoch now reside.
Me: Wait, so you fell in love with Dorie 1 like your predecessor fell in love with Dorie Zero?
+Another super-long pause.
O: Yes.
+Suspicion Noted: Longer the pause/shorter the answer.
O: In a fit of Widower’s Madness, I sank into the lake above the Irish kingdom, closed my eyes, and willed myself to never wake.