***Trakken Prime***

***Magnus***

I was so… bored.

Had it truly been three days since Vanya began her negotiations with the Trakken official?

It felt like I had been sitting here for more than a week.

Ituun, was that the official’s name? And why did all of us have to listen to the inane back and forth of two parties trying to plumb the depths of how far the other side was willing to go? As if explaining all our societal troubles to Ittar and Ittoit wasn’t bad enough, now we had to repeat the whole shindig with this Ituun fellow. Hadn’t his subordinates already briefed him?

My bored gaze wandered to my right, down the rows of comrades who were seated in extra sturdy chairs, then to the thick security glass that separated us from Ituun and his bodyguards. Ittoit and Ittar were still part of the negotiations, but they had taken over the role of advisors.

As if that puny layer of glass could stop us from getting to the Trakken official if we truly wanted to. I knew we probably looked like barbarians to them, but those people were vastly underestimating the capabilities our mutations gave us. One good punch and the whole thing would shatter.

I returned my attention to the Trakken security guard who was eyeing me warily from the other side. It was telling that Ituun got this added layer of protection while Ittar and Ittoit had to face us in person.

Ah, the good old days, when politicians were the untouchable Samaritans protected by law and state. Their reputation only to be smeared in court when another of their ilk deemed it necessary to gain more votes in the upcoming elections. I hadn’t truly appreciated the elders’ way of doing their dirty business with their own two hands until I was being confronted once more with the coward’s way of handling things.

If a leader didn’t have their own skin on the line, they approached things differently. It didn’t mean that the elders were better people because of that, but their ways were certainly more respectable.

I frowned. Maybe I should go and pay my respects to the fallen elders once I return home.

The guard across from me finally began to fidget as I kept staring at him. It always took an hour or two for him to soften up a bit.

We had been working on our silent relationship over the past three days. Truly, either we were about to become great pals soon, or he would finally give away how this Trakken precognition ability worked. I was giving it my all to make him twitch, but so far, he had been the perfect military statue… like one of those English guards who guarded the palace to this day.

The first day, he hadn’t even moved an eyelid, but I was cooking him slowly. It was just a question of who was the more tenacious one between the two of us.

Soon, I would be done with going through all the fictional jump scares I could come up with. And there were only so many possibilities on how to kill a guy in a room with nothing more than furniture. Right now, a tenth of my sub-personalities was considering the best way to jump through that glass barrier and bite off the guy’s nose.

Thinking about it, I slowly raised my hand and took off the glove.

The guard’s hands tightened on his rifle.

Taking my time, I placed my white fingernail on the glass and… scratched. The glass was hardened, but between a mindflayer’s claw mutation and the security glass, the glass drew the short stick on Mohs hardness scale.

I finished the large circle and added two smaller ones as eyes. A few more curved lines finished the hungry smiley face.

Stopping, I regarded my artwork before I realised that the room was totally silent. Very slowly, I looked to my right only to find that everyone was staring at me. Trakken, as well as Tirnanogians.

Vanya forced herself to smile.

“Are you bored, Magnus?” she asked in Trakken.

I found, I just didn’t care any more about whether they knew about my language skills. “Very, this circling the core point gets on my nerves. It is annoying and, quite honestly, it hurts having to listen to it. Plus, I am very hungry!”

I returned my attention to the guard I had been playing ‘stare’ with, and he finally broke. Outright dropping his weapon, he ran, fleeing his side of the separated negotiation room and slamming the door shut behind him.

The other Trakken stared in shock at the door where he had disappeared.

Huh… seemed like knowing your vis-à-vis’s intentions ahead of time came with significant downsides when mental warfare was involved. And other Trakken apparently didn't sense what I was planning as long as they weren't the direct target of my intentions. Good to know.

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As if this was proof, I pointedly tapped at the glass, gesturing towards where the guard ran off to. “See? That is what I am talking about. The way we are doing this is ~waaay tooo~ tension building. It is just a question of time until someone snaps and does something we all regret. Let’s get this business done and take a break.”

Vanya looked back at Ituun. “I suppose you don’t want to keep him?”

Ituun’s eyes widened slightly as he returned his attention to Vanya and vehemently shook his head. “I hope that was sarcasm, but I will still say no just to be sure.”

“Are you two ignoring me?” I asked and threw up my hands.

Ituun did indeed ignore me. “Even if your offer seems more than fair on paper, I still find myself unable to trust a people who show up unannounced on our world and refuse to grant us access to theirs.”

Vanya crossed her arms. “I already explained that the reasons are manifold, cultural, environmental, as well as physical.”

“Nothing I have heard so far is a true deterrent,” Ituun argued. “Solutions can be found.”

Vanya narrowed her eyes just a little. “That may be so, but there is one very significant reason why your people can’t interact with ours, and it boils down to why I am sitting here and you are sitting there: with a thick layer of security glass between us.”

Ituun’s eyes wandered over the security glass as he searched for the meaning in Vanya’s words.

The girl leaned forward, raising both hands to right below her chin and placing her fingertips together. “The answer is fear! Your people are afraid that my people might be able to hurt them. And the more I speak with you, the more I realise that ongoing interactions between us might spell the end of your people.”

Ituun’s attention snapped back to Vanya.

“Oh, it is nothing we might do to you, and more about what your people might learn from us.” She tilted her head. “Immortality. How would your people deal with it? While fighting overpopulation at the same time?”

The Trakken grimaced. “Is that the reason for the disparity between your age and your appearance?”

“Oh, no. I am fourteen, but you should ask the others in my group.” Vanya looked at her right hand, Tianna.

Tianna rolled her eyes. “I am 163.”

“118,” Etan provided when the attention fell on him.

“And before you ask, there are way older individuals among my people,” Vanya pointedly looked down at her tablet. “And our years might be slightly shorter than ours if the information on here is correct.”

Ituun shifted in his seat and looked over our group, allowing several seconds to pass before he came to a decision. “How long would it take for your people to get us the knowledge about these ‘wormholes’? I don't believe the concept is known to our scientists.”

Vanya waved a hand at me. “Tianna will go back and get you the necessary documents, together with some suitable translation. Meanwhile, Magnus can start teaching some of your scientists to prove that the science behind it is solid.”

“I can do what now?” I exclaimed. “I am no teacher!”

The smiling, devilish girl looked at me. “But you are our local expert on wormhole physics.”

An hour later, I was sitting in a room with several Trakken physicists while listening to their approach to trying to explain how the universe functioned. In lots of ways, essentially the basic ones, their ideas of physics were identical to ours. It was the more esoteric discipline of quantum physics where ideas began to diverge drastically.

It was like they had gone down the wrong route of development without ever realising that there was a much simpler way to approach the problem. Their math worked out, but it ran circles around the issue. Math was a good tool to explain the world, but some concepts that math allowed simply didn’t exist in the real world. Like negative numbers. There was no such thing as less than nothing in the universe. And these people had fallen into such a trap.

I held my head while I tried to follow the lead scientist’s explanations: I hadn’t bothered to remember his name. Just to give them the benefit of the doubt, I had decided to listen to their approach, but this had gon on for long enough.

“No, no, no!” I growled and jumped out of my seat. I ran over to the whiteboard and took the pencil away from him before he could note down even more of this nonsense! “You can’t do that! Time and mass do not exist on that scale! If you want to manipulate the spacetime continuum, you have to get rid of that notion! If your math worked on that scale, you would need the mass of a black hole to influence anything!”

“That is what I have been telling you!” The Trakken complained. “And how can you claim that time does not exist when you call it the spacetime continuum?”

“You are hereby demoted to apprentice! Calling it spacetime is simply the most approachable way of describing a concept which goes over most people’s heads!”

“What!?”

I turned to the whiteboard and began replacing all his mass and time variables with the appropriate energy statements. “Time as you experience it is a consequence of mass, and mass is nothing else than another state of energy. Broken down to the most basic level, you could say that time is only an illusion conjured forth by the feeble mortal mind. A way to explain how we experience the world because we are missing the means to sense all forms of energy. But on the quantum level, everything can be broken down to energy states. If there is no energy available to change the state, there is no time! So, if you understand how to use energy, like magnetic fields, to influence the space-continuum, you can stretch it, bend it, or punch a hole in it. All without the need to rely on these stupid amounts of power your antiquated equations suggest.”

I finished moving equations around and drew a few arrows to connect the dots for them. “Instead of manipulating space with a single, powerful force, you can move it little by little, holding it in place until it relaxes, then move it further. You will have to build the proper machinery to manipulate the electromagnetic field, but it is perfectly doable.”

The Trakken stared at the whiteboard with his mouth open. “That’s impossible!”

“Impossible, my ass!” I quickly used the pencil to draw a few black circles around his eyes and added a few tears to make it look like he was crying, which he might as well be doing, the way he was behaving. They should have brought me some younger people who weren’t so set in their ways.

He jerked away thanks to his sixth sense, but only after I was done. “How did you do that!?”

“I created a controlled distortion of subspace around me, which allows me to move faster than the rest of the world around me.” I took his hand and placed the pencil in his numb fingers. “And now you'd better start learning fast. I want you to understand the basics by tomorrow, so I can be off this world. There are lots of things to do back home.”