The Four Mirrors
A Sequel to Legacies
By MMM/AJ

A/N: The next few chunks, including this one, will be split into two chapters each, and each chapter will be separated by five years of time advancement. I will be putting dates with each chapter from now on to help prevent chronological confusion. This will let me advance the societal development of K'telle at a brisk pace without losing out on any of the most important events!

Chapter XXVI – Nolus 7

December 12, 2236

"So how many people do you think are going to attend this little meeting Opulous? A fair few people are going to be at the party Jeselle is throwing to celebrate her release from that inhibitor collar, Amara and Emael are going to be at their five year anniversary and plenty more are caring for the children they volunteered to raise. That rules out practically everyone." Nolus griped.

"Well, I'm here." Lucas interjected with a shy smile, wanting to inject a little optimism into the conversation.

"Don't worry Nolus, even if nobody comes tonight, I can call for volunteers again tomorrow, or another day. I've been working on this network for five years now, another day or two won't kill me." Opulous replied.

The three of them were standing together in Opulous's basement laboratory near the main entrance, leaning on the only empty experiment bench side by side. Nolus shook his head, wondering if anyone was going to want to volunteer to be a living computer for Opulous at all, even if it was in short shifts. He certainly knew that he, Cygnus, and Venius were far too busy for it, and he was sure that Melicia, Satoria, and Tamista were as well. He looked over at the holographic clock at the next nearest bench, two minutes until the scheduled meeting time and nobody had shown up.

"Good point, I just find it ironic that you picked this time randomly Opulous, and it turns out to be the exact same time as all these events! You're such a space case sometimes!" Nolus said with a chuckle.

"I'm a space case all the time." Opulous said with a self-deprecating chuckle. "It's the main reason I have all my work spread out across this room. When my mind shifts randomly, I can just walk over to the appropriate bench and put down my thoughts or work. For example, I just cleared this table off for note taking recently for one of my new theoretical ideas about atomic physics and manipulation. Do you remember how Ares used the psychic powers of his Acolytes to compress the fuel for a fusion reactor later in his reign? Well, I had the idea that our powers might be able to manipulate atoms in other, more drastic ways! Specifically, if we were to manipulate subatomic particles in superheated plasma-"

Nolus chuckled as a small group of Mewtwos entered the lab, interrupting Opulous's ramblings. Among them were Talas Aurah, Elemir Skygem, Eloniel Nevica, and a couple others from Venius's line. They were all together as a group and were silent as they entered the lab, giving Opulous nervous yet expectant glances.

"Wow, I didn't expect so many people to come tonight! What a fortunate surprise!" Opulous said, quickly shifting gears from his ramble into an introduction. "I'm sure you're all familiar with my ongoing project to build a massive free psychic communications network, correct? What isn't so widely known is my difficulty running it through any kind of standard computer system. The short of it is that normal computers can't process sentient thought and emotion with any kind of proper efficiency, so the network needs a volunteer to take shifts letting the network use his or her brain as a processor core."

"So what necessarily would we need to do and what would it be like?" Lucas asked curiously.

"You don't actually really need to do anything per se." Opulous replied. "Each volunteer will choose the amount of time they spend hooked into the network, and when their shift will take place. I will hook him or her up, and he or she will simply let the thoughts, emotions, communications, and everything else flow freely through their mind. The volunteer will likely experience a fairly high amount of mental strain at first to handle all of these thoughts, but I have performed enough experiments in the network to prove that it will actually expand his or her mind considerably over the course of the first week."

A thoughtful look came over Lucas's face, as well as the faces of most of the gathered potential volunteers. One however, immediately stepped forward with a look of determination: Talas Aurah.

"I want to volunteer. Most of my life I've never really been that scholarly or intelligent when compared to most of my peers and most of my contributions to our society have been through unskilled labor like construction and metallurgy for Montalbo. This would give me a chance to improve myself considerably while providing a greater service to our species as a whole."

"Excellent Mr. Aurah! When can you begin?" Asked Opulous.

"As soon as you need me. Since I'm one of the few from my generation that hasn't settled down with a spouse or taken in a child, I have a lot of free time outside of work. If need be, I can even ask Cygnus to shorten my hours a bit so I can maximize my time here."

"Your enthusiasm is infectious, Mr. Aurah! Very well! I am planning on officially unveiling my network next week, pending my ability to finally think up a name for it! I can begin acclimating your mind to it as soon as tomorrow. Will there be any further volunteers?"

After a few moments of silence, Elemir and Eloniel nodded and stepped forward. The rest remained silent. "Very good! If you can all meet me tomorrow afternoon at 1PM, that would be excellent. For now, you may all go." Opulous said happily, and the small gathering turned and exited.

"You know Op, I think I might have cooked up a name for your network." Nolus interjected suddenly after being silent for so long.

"Oh? Spit it out! I'm eager to hear!"

"Well, I was talking history with Cygnus last week, and he was mentioning in human history about how some old extinct ancient civilizations called themselves 'Sodalities.' I can't exactly remember which one, but I think it was Greeks or Romans, or something like that. It meant an alliance of one or more states, I believe. Why don't we name your network after that?"

"Well, it's good, but I don't like the idea of directly ripping off a word like that. Even if it is sufficiently interesting sounding, I want at least a touch of originality in the name as well."

"Well, why not just modify the word in a way that retains the meaning but adds a little spice? Something like…'Sodalis'?" Lucas suggested.

"Perfect!" Opulous chimed, smiling again. "Sodalis it is! Lucas, you're a genius! You too Nolus!"

"Heh well, not as much as you, Opulous." Lucas said humbly.

December 19, 2236

Nolus fidgeted nervously with a little sprig from a Lum Berry bush as he walked through the bustling town toward the tower. Today was Opulous's big day: the public launch of the Sodalis that he had worked so hard to perfect. The people of K'telle were all going to be there, but Nolus and the other brothers naturally were gathering ahead of time. They were going to use the meeting hall where all the marriages had last taken place, since by now it was well furnished with decorations and cushions for seating.

Nolus looked up at the tower as he turned around a corner and walked through the little park that he had seeded in a donut shape around it. The new park was short but beautifully green and the tower itself hadn't grown much over the last five years, but that was to be expected since most of the effort of the K'tellians was being directed toward expanding the rest of the town and its industry. The K'tellian town was still nameless, they had yet to elect a mayor, and the economy was only starting to seriously change from frontier communism into a form of capitalism.

"It's about time you got here!" Venius said in his usual grumpy tone as Nolus emerged out of the park and started walking up the steps toward the meeting hall doors.

Venius was leaning against the open doorframe and Cygnus was standing in the doorway looking inside.

"He was probably spending a little time talking to the trees on his way through the park." Cygnus joked, and Venius snickered softly.

Nolus rolled his eyes and didn't verbally acknowledge their teasing. "So where's Op?"

"Where else? In his lab doing last second adjustments of course. He says Talas has been acclimating extremely well to spending long periods as the Sodalis's computer, but there are always more little tweaks." Cygnus replied.

"We'll he's got four minutes, he'd better tweak quickly!" Nolus replied.

It didn't take long before a crowd began to form, gathering around the marble staircase at the entrance to the tower's meeting hall, murmuring softly and staring up at Nolus and his brothers. Many of them were carrying children in their arms now, and a few of the babies were crying in the cold morning air in their bundles. Nolus glanced inside at a clock inside the meeting hall and frowned.

"He's leaving us hanging again!" Nolus said telepathically to Venius and Cygnus.

There was a flash of light signaling someone arriving via teleport and Nolus rolled his eyes, expecting Opulous to have appeared at that precise moment to ironically prove him wrong, but instead saw Emael Redclaw appear there with a very grave expression on his face.

"I hate to rain magma on this little parade, but there's really bad news from the refinery on the edge of town." Emael said quietly, gesturing to the three brothers present to come closer. "Montalbo Senior dropped dead 15 minutes ago. Heart attack. His son found him slumped over his desk in his office. By the time one of our people got in there to try and use recover on him, it was too late."

Nolus shook his head sadly and closed his eyes. "It's a shame, he was a good man, but he did live a pretty long life for a human."

"I'll admit, even if I hated him for awhile, he's done a lot for me and the rest of K'telle. He was one of the better humans I've known." Venius said begrudgingly.

"At least he got to see his dream of building that metallurgy business into a global enterprise. K'tellian steel and tritanium mined and refined by Montalbo is pretty popular around the world now. I take it his son is going to take over the business?" Cygnus asked.

"Probably, after he gets over the loss of his Dad. He's pretty torn up right now." Emael said with a nod. "The plant's shut down now; it's why I'm off of work. I had to deliver the news, and I figured I'd attend the unveiling of Op's network thingy."

"Thingy? It's called the Sodalis." Opulous said with a little huff, walking out of the meeting all and looking at Emael.

"Oh jeez Op, it's about time you got here. Look at how many people have been waiting for you!" Cygnus said, gesturing to the fairly large crowd of K'tellians now, which even included a few humans.

"I'm sorry, there was one last bug in the system that needed to be rooted out, and I barely managed to nip it now. There was a very subtle error in the neural sync buffers that could turn into a fatal cascade overflow if left unchecked for a week or more, and Talas has volunteered to stay in the system for about a week with breaks." Opulous replied in a neutral tone, glancing at the crowd without even being fazed.

"Heh, well, take us away then Op; don't make the people wait any longer!" Nolus said, gesturing toward the crowds. Seeing the gesture, the people quickly all fell quiet.

Opulous quickly stepped forward and broke into greetings and then started explaining his work. Nolus didn't really want to say it to Op's face, but even if Op was eloquent, his manner of speaking was slow, droning, and essentially boring. He took an exciting new concept and still made it easy to start feeling drowsy while explaining it. Nolus gave him a telekinetic elbow to the ribs when his rambling got too technical and somnolescent and he jumped a little and broke into the final portion of the ceremonies.

"Alright ladies and gentlemen, I'm going to bring the central computer system, nicknamed 'Machinae Prime', online now. As soon as it is online, feel free to connect your minds to Sodalis and test things out!" Opulous said and then tapped a few buttons on a little interface on the back of his arm.

For a moment the air was still and the silence thrummed against the eardrums of everyone in the crowd. A few tiny rows of blue lighting began to light up along the sides of the incomplete central tower. A pleasant energetic sensation flowed across Nolus's mind and he decided to join in to see how things went. He smiled as he felt his mind linking to the new network without draining any of his energy, and the telepathic thoughts and feelings of the crowd began filtering into his mind. More and more joined him, whispering words of amazement at how streamlined and easy it was to access the system. Emael even threw in the fact that it was still easy for him to access even though he was nearly tapped of all his psychic energy after work.

It was at that point that Emael's continued inexperience with hiding his own thoughts struck again. Much like how he had accidentally revealed his feelings for Amara over a mental link with her for the first time, now he accidentally leaked onto the Sodalis the fact that he was not only sexually active with Amara now, but was into so rather bizarre and kinky practices with her. Practically all the communications over the network ground to a halt as Emael quite suddenly became the center of attention. He blushed furiously, politely excused himself from the link, and dashed away. There were several moments of awkward universal silence over the link and then Op spoke over it.

"Heh, this is a good lesson for everyone, be careful to control just what you think about while connected to Sodalis lest it leak into the link! Let's all do Mr. Redclaw a favor and keep him out of the doghouse tonight by not spreading this knowledge around!"

Laughter broke out, both out loud and over the link, and the ice shattered as people resumed chattering happily. Nolus grinned and spoke to Op over it as well.

"I get the feeling that no matter how politely you ask, Op, your little invention is still inevitably going to be used for idle gossip."

"At least this way people won't be able to talk about someone behind their backs, since anyone can link up at any time!" Opulous replied.

"Just as long as participation always remains optional, I don't want any of us turning into big brother!"

Chapter XXVII – Venius 9

July 9th, 2241

"Equations equations equations. Damn it Cygnus, why the hell are you making me do all this!" Venius groaned aloud in his study to nobody in particular. "I'm 48 years old, I have grandchildren, and I'm stuck in here every damn night doing accounting work."

The huge pile of windows with forms in them on his desk's holo-screen was intimidating even to the most seasoned bureaucrat. Bills, taxes, income, exports and imports to K'telle, population growth projection charts, defense spending, construction projects, Sodalis usage tracking, food production, research projects, and so much more that it made Venius's head spin. He set down his stylus and lifted another steaming mug of coffee to his lips to take a drink. His console beeped to indicate an incoming video call and he quirked an eyebrow. Who could be calling him at 2AM? He hit the button to accept the call and a holographic image of Cygnus appeared over his desk with a forlorn expression.

"Venius, sorry to bother you. I'm afraid I've got some more paperwork to add to your pile. A K'tellian couple just got back from another one of those 'romantic atmosphere dives', emulating Emael and Amara's wild stunt from several years ago. They created a huge crater with their energy shield out in the grasslands that Nolus is not happy about, and the humans are pissed again about improper usage of international space."

"Ugh, and let me guess, you want me to calculate the damages and send letters of apology to the human governments?" Venius asked in a strained tone, closing his eyes and rubbing his temples.

"Yeah, if you're not too busy anyway." Cygnus said, wincing a little at Venius's tone of voice.

"Well sorry Cygnus, but I AM too busy! You know all the damn finance reports you dumped on me to fill out? I've been working on them for nine hours straight. I pretty much went from the end of teaching my last class of the day to working on this red tape and I'm still only about half done! So unless you'd like to crunch the rest of these numbers for me, then I think you can take a little time out of your busy blue collar construction schedule to talk to a few damned humans!" Venius snarled.

"Cripes Venius! Calm do-" Cygnus tried to say, but Venius slammed his fist on the 'end call' button, cutting him off.

"Selfish asshat thinks he's the only one who's bad at math." Venius muttered.

Venius looked back down at the mess of windows on his desk display and frowned. "You know what? Hell with it all."

He growled and then hit the 'power down' button and the machine prompted him to save his work. Not about to ruin nine hours of work in the name of spontaneity, he hit the accept button before standing up and simply walking out of his study. He passed through the living room of his new condo; it was almost completely dark except for the lights of the city outside the large far window wall. The few couches and chairs he had assembled were strewn about the room in no discernable pattern, a product of his usual clutter-prone personality, and framed in a case on the opposite wall was the old Time Medallion.

Venius sighed as he walked over to the Medallion where it was stored and laid its hand on the case. Ever since that night so long ago, he had been repressing the spirit-sight ability it had given him. The ability flashed back to him once in awhile, but he still managed to suppress it most of the time. Now he had snapped though, as K'telle had continued growing, his life had drifted in a direction that he found unbearable. Even with Ayla as his own little secretary and household helper, he was losing his soul in bureaucracy and becoming K'telle's foremost economist. This was not the future he wanted for himself, and in his rebellious epiphany, he unlocked the display case and picked up the Medallion in his bare hands.

"Alright you little trinket, hit me with what you have. Show me something." Venius said and then closed his eyes.

The reaction was just as instant as last time, a jolt of unnerving energy washed over Venius that made him feel like his world was turning off kilter by a few degrees. Over a handful of seconds several dozen visions ploughed through his mind, gnashed and garbled like they had been put through a blender full or rocks and broken forks. He stumbled forward, grabbing the display case and putting his weight on it, and the glass shattered, sending him down onto the floor in a flurry of profanity that would have made Darkest himself blush.

Venius sat up, picking shards of broken glass out of his arm and side, and slowly used his recover power to seal the wounds. The blood stains in the carpet would need a good shampooing to get out, and the Medallion had escaped his hands in the fall and rolled off somewhere.

"Damn it, lights on!" He called out, attempting to use the apartment's voice recognition software to get some light.

The lights failed to turn on though, and Venius stood and tried to walk toward the holo-panel on the wall that held the manual controls. He stepped on a glass shard on his very first step and it sliced deeply into his foot, eliciting another long, ear-searing string of cursing. He fell forward onto his knee and pulled the shard out, using his recover ability yet again to seal the wound.

"Damn it this has to be the worst night I've had in years. Lights on, you damn computer!" He yelled, not caring that there might be others in neighboring apartments that he could disturb.

The room still remained dark and Venius cursed a few more times. That was when his first new vision from the Medallion came to him, his vision fuzzed out a bit and he saw a glowing form appearing out of the hazy darkness of his living room. At first it was completely indistinct and unrecognizable, but as the features came back into view, Venius immediately recognized the form of his father!

"Dad?" Venius asked, his anger immediately evanescing into nothingness.

Tanis's transparent, ethereal form wavered even in the still air and he smiled. "I can't talk long, but I'm glad this unique ability of yours lets you see and hear me.

"Do you have any of those dire warnings or predictions from beyond the grave? Or the meaning of life?" Venius asked softly.

"Hah, no. Generally pure spirits only get to carry those kinds of messages back if they've been to Celestia or the Underworld. I've been sticking around with you guys here on Earth. I just wanted to tell you how proud I am of all four of you. Each of you has been doing something important for our race. Even you, Venius; you may not want to hear it now, but you are doing something vital for K'telle. You need to find passion in it."

"But Dad, my passion is defending our people! I want to make sure K'telle is safe from attacks like the one that took you from us." Venius replied sadly.

"Then pursue that passion, Venius! Use your financial influence to include a defense budget. Do weapons research with Opulous again. Train the youth to defend themselves with their powers and how to recognize psionic disruptor fields. Take the good with the bad."

Venius smiled and slowly stood up. "That's…a good idea Dad. Thank you."

"No problem. I'm running out of energy to stay visible for now, but remember, I'll be around."

"I'll remember. I love you, Dad." Venius said, walking over to hug the apparition, which wavered and faded away.

July 10th, 2241

"Hey, Cygnus!" Venius called out, flying up to the construction zone 30 stories up the central tower.

Cygnus was no longer playing the role of the core of his own little psychic directive network, but rather using the Sodalis. He was in the thick of things with his crew, stringing long cables of super-tensile tritanium-carbon nano-fiber through the tower to add stability. He glanced up at Venius as he landed in the construction zone.

"Hey, I'm sorry about last night." Cygnus said. "I didn't know you were under so much stress, I wouldn't have added to your pile if I had known."

"You're the one who created that pile." Venius said matter-of-factly. "But that's not why I'm here to talk to you. I spent the morning with Opulous and he and I agreed that it's time to start preparing K'telle against potential attacks like the one that nearly killed us all and took father from us. Here, take a look at the additions he and I made to the tower's blueprints."

Venius handed a digital pad to Cygnus, which he activated. A 3D diagram of the tower appeared with the changes highlighted in red. Every 20 floors there was a set of four huge charged particle cannons attached to the tower pointing in each of the four compass directions, mounted on swivel base turrets for maximum range of fire.

"Venius! These are full-sized anti-capital ship weapons! Do you know how difficult these are going to be to mount on the tower? Or how much power they'll consume? Hell, this many cannons will use more power than all the rest of the tower combined!" Cygnus said, disconnecting himself from Sodalis entirely to speak to Venius.

"So? The Blue River provides effectively infinite energy, just take more energy." Venius retorted, huffing a little and pointing at the energy receiving stations on the planned top of the tower.

"So, if we draw too much then Paladin Station's transmission stations will get overloaded and burn out. The humans running the station wouldn't like that, and the whole city will go without power!" Cygnus returned, crossing his arms.

"What's stopping us from sending a crew up to the station to upgrade the transmission station? I doubt the humans would complain about that!" Venius said, crossing his arms too and raising an eyebrow, a slight smile on the corner of his mouth.

"Alright, but this is still going to take easily a whole extra year to build! The tower has taken over ten years to build as it is; this is going to stretch it out further! Hell, running new power conduits into the existing portions of the tower will take months." Cygnus complained.

"So? Better safe than sorry, Cygnus. We've spent so many years building this town up and we're already starting to get threats from the humans because of what our cheap psychic labor has been doing to the global economy! The United States has been in a terrible economic slump recently and they're afraid that if more corporations like Montalbo come here for cheap and fast psychic labor then their job market is going to shrivel even further. All it would take is another group like the psi-slayers getting into their military again and-"

"Yeah yeah yeah, and then one sufficiently large bombing run could kill us all. I've heard your story plenty of times Venius. Fine, we'll do it. But if weaponizing the tower makes all the humans even more paranoid about us, then you'll be the one to deal with it." Cygnus said, uncrossing his arms and rubbing his temples with both hands.

"Only if you take some of this economic paperwork off of my hands! I know that you spend your nights after work grading papers and then relaxing! You have the time to help me!" Venius said, scowling. "Don't make me send my Luxray pack after you!"

Cygnus chuckled and raised his hand as a gesture of surrender. "Heh, alright Venius, you win. I'd much rather calculate annual earnings and expenditure than handle human politicians. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to run these blueprints by my workers and start writing up more requisition orders for weapon parts."

"Of course, I'll send the blueprints to one of your own pads." Venius said, taking his pad back from Cygnus and closing the 3D display. As soon as he grabbed the pad, the call buzzer sounded. "Ugh, duty calls."

Venius waved to Cygnus before taking flight and hovering down to the ground at the base of the tower. He hit the button on the touch screen to answer the call and Ayla's holographic head popped up. "Mr. Venius! You've got a message from the Prime Minister of Russia!"

"Oh jeez, just patch him through for me. I'm out, but I don't want to make him wait." He replied.

Ayla nodded and the screen switched over to the craggy and fairly angry looking face of the Russian leader. Venius sighed and listened as he started ranting angrily about how the Russian steel and Tritanium industries were a wreck thanks to Montalbo now and that he wanted to impose massive Tariffs on imported K'tellian metals. Venius sighed and listened to the angry tirade all the way home and was only greeted by the pile of unfinished paperwork on his desk's screen leftover from last night. But this time when he looked over it, a grin came over his face. He was going to sort out a fairly large chunk of it to send right back to Cygnus where it belonged, and he was going to enjoy every damn minute of it.

A/N: We're moving pretty fast with the societal development here, and while writer's block hit me fairly hard in a few spots on this chunk, I really enjoyed writing most of it. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it, and sorry for my usual delays!