Mortal Protection Services Chapter 26: VII.A: Abstainer

Read chapter 26 of Mortal Protection Services by B.T.Skull on NovelPedia.

VII.A: Abstainer I decided to let time slip by at a millisecond of real time per hour of my experience while I continued to study this gods forsaken handbook. Fully pausing time, I think, was causing me to go absolutely nutty. I know about the subspace crazies, but I suspect there's a hyperspace equivalent if you leave it paused too long, or maybe it's just trying to study hyperspace legalese that'll drive a person mad. Felt like ages passed. An hour outside was more than four hundred years for me. I relied on that unseemly hunger from the scourge, fermented to be satisfied with knowledge, even boring knowledge. Between that and petting the napping Mafdet, I kept sane (ish). Mostly what she did during that four hundred year hour was nap. After I fully understood several hundred thousand pages further along in the manual I decided to let time start flowing a little faster. Now it was one whole second per hour of my experience. This adjustment in the flow of time roused Mafdet, and she bounded off through the wall. Great. Suppose I didn't really need to keep a window open for her after all, did I? While I wondered what she was up to I kept an eye on my three child minds and kept on with the reading. Time slowly trickled by in my windows. A few days of realtime later and I found Mafdet had decided go visit the gaian to help her survive blowing up a star. Mafdet got a little more than half a brushing before she bailed out and came home. The gaian then used her brushed off fluff to crunch time. Neat. "You let the gaian treat you like a baby." I told her when she'd abandoned the gaian and hopped back into my office. "I saw that Mafdet, I know you're a precious baby now, and there's no unknowing it." I should not have told her that because when I tried to finish her brushing she wasn't having it. I got the distinct feeling that it was because I admitted to witnessing something I shouldn't have admitted to witnessing. Any attempt I made to manifest a brush and get her brushed, she'd respond by either swatting me, which hurt - which was odd - or by demanifesting my brush. The damned hyperspace cat was better at hyperspace manipulation than me. I guess I need to reread that section of the manual. Or maybe there was advanced tools I could read about later that'll stop her demanifesting my shit, but it'd take me a week just to study the index enough to find out. Whatever, she can stay half brushed then. "You look ridiculous. One side is obviously fluffier than the other," I told her. Maybe shame would work? I should have known better though, cats have no shame. I kept the window up with Jim in it, and I tried many times to coax her half-brushed ass into taking that smelly black ball with her back down to him, but she apparently didn't care how urgently he wanted it, she wasn't going back to see Jim. He was in the doghouse. I kept studying. Sometimes when Mafdet wasn't around I'd work on trying to use the remote to set up a tracking algorithm to keep a window on her. I'd get it eventually, but she was a slippery one to track, that's for sure. I knew she never went to realspace anywhere other than the milky way. My not-perfect search algorithm caught her when she was visiting planets that didn't even have life(or atmosphere), planets that did, a subspace crab colony, and visiting some space whales in warp on the other side of the galaxy. She went other places too, I'm sure, but my algorithm could only find her about thirty percent of the time she was gone, the rest she was only she knows where. Ahh well... back to this horrid book. Almost a month had passed outside in realspace since the Audit and intervention. Mafdet came and went through the walls as she pleased. Sometimes even deigning to jump down through my view. I'd started watching the gaian's subminds. Most fascinating to watch, all adjusting to existing as non-human species. Mafdet sometimes visited them from my observation post. Well... she'd visit the more mammalian(ish) ones. Wa