Borderlands: Unnatural selection

I chose to leave it alone since she had only swapped guns without just stealing one of mine outright.

"And this not so little beauty is my dragon egg!" I said excitedly showing off the egg once we got to that part of the tour.

"Really or are you just fucking with me?" she asked suspicious.

"No tricks here, one hundred percent a dragon or well at least as close as I can get to one in here." I said with a grin while resting my hand on the egg.

"The hells that mean?" she asked confused.

"Ah well it wasn't originally a dragon but I've been stuffing all sorts of good traits into this thing in order to turn it into one. To be honest I'm not sure how close to the real thing this will turn out to be but at the very least it will LOOK the part, fire breathing and all." I said proudly.

"Wait you can GIVE traits to people!?" she exclaimed in shock.

"Well I'm not entirely clear on that point actually. See if it's still developing like this egg then yes I can totally load it up like a bowl of nachos, all the fixins. For grown things like people though I haven't had the oppurtunity to test that theory yet so I may or may not be able to do so. Though I can give out lifeforce if I want." I said honestly.

"And what happens if you do give out lifeforce?" she asked very interested in the answer.

"They get better I guess? Like I know it makes them stronger but for exact details? Who the fuck knows." I say with a shrug.

"Free upgrade, sign me the hell up!" she said eagerly grabbing my hand as if that would automatically give her my lifeforce.

"As nice as it is to hold hands, no. First off it's NOT free since I have to spend the lifeforce and second you don't need an upgrade, siren remember?" I said firmly.

"Ah come on please! You can't just tease me with something like that and not give it to me!" she said with her best puppy dog eyes.

 "Adorable but my answer is the same." I said shaking my head.

She pouted cutely but didn't push the issue. I showed her my crafting room after that and she admitted that she couldn't care less about it since she wasn't mechanically inclined. The teleporter room though, THAT got her going. 

"So you can go literally anywhere in the universe in an instant so long as you've been there before?" she asked with wide eyes.

"That is roughly what I just said yes." I said with grin.

"You are like the best smuggler ever with this!" she said excitably reaching for the control panel which I had to stop her from messing with.

"I haven't marked Athenas yet so don't go messing with the teleporter, I still have stuff to do here." I chided her.

She shrugged "Can't blame a girl for being tempted." She said unapologetically.

The tour was over at that point and other than play a few rounds of air hockey that I won the majority of she left. I myself just grabbed the next tome from a bookshelf and brought it back inside my house to be read. Well to be more specifically I digitized it to my inventory and copied it's contents before returning it to the shelf and moving to the next tome. Much as I enjoy a good book about a topic I am interested in there was no way in hell I was going to be able to read all these books in four months.-

With this in mind I briefly scanned the contents of the books and if it was something random I copied it and put the physical copy back on the shelf. If it was something interesting I set it aside to be read physically like the book written by Dido. I spent the next two weeks doing this before I got through every piece of the archives. Maya came to visit everyday but I had a sneaking suspicion she was just using me for my food maker thing.-

Not to say she didn't hang out for a bit or anything like that but she had this timing where she'd suggest food at the same time everyday even if she had been hanging about for hours at that point. She also made things very uncomfortable for my hormonal teen self by using my sim training room and coming out all sweaty and flustered. Fun fact about humans was that we like many animals could pick up the scent of a female in heat though we are unaware of it most of the time.-

Thanks to my very sensitive senses I was VERY fucking aware of Maya when she hit that time of the month. I was going through puberty again and let me tell you that shit sucked when you had someone like Maya around. I hit a growth spurt during one of these days that left her and myself speechless as one second I was just chilling and the next my tattoos started glowing and I gained four inches of height in a short period of time while losing five hundred units of lifeforce.-

Not having to deal with weeks of growing pains was nice and all but it was really fucking disorienting to gain a random four inches of height out of seemingly nowhere. Still the fact my powers worked like this had me curious if the original holder "Darwin" was a young child when he got his powers or if this was just something that was there without intentionally being there? Anyways out of the entire archive there was only fifteen books that I ended up reading the physical copy of. The first was naturally the book written by Dido and the second was as well though it was more a diary or research journal about her powers.-

(Book narration)

I acquired my powers from the previous user, my adoptive mother, after nearly five years of apprenticeship under her. She was an older woman who ruled over Athenas before I myself would inherit that position along with her powers. She had fallen ill and had only a scant few years left upon my adoption that she used to teach me all I would need to know upon her passing. She never told me how but she said she adopted me because she knew I would succeed her. -

My power known as Phaselock worked by principle of "targeting" and "control". I designated a target and my powers subjected it to my control via an orb of energy. Through this control I could manipulate space, time, gravity and other fundamental forces of the universe on a miniscule scale centered around the target. There was a caveat however to my power that offered a serious limitation to my use of it. Any living thing subjected to my power could either resist it's effects or outright shrug them off it it was powerful enough.-

The more resistance I faced and the larger the target the more energy it cost me to use my power on it for more than a few moments. With practice and my mothers teachings to guide me I eventually learned how to target and control multiple things simultaneously. On the matter of the alien substance known as "Eridium" I learnt from my mother that our powers disallowed us to absorb the material without a special method that her predecessor generations back had developed. The reason for this inability to simply absorb it like most sirens was I believe due to the projection nature of our powers.-

Our powers sent energy outward and had no intake feature to it in it's base usage thus leaving us unable to enhance our powers using the material. The technique to use the material was in fact merely a creative usage of our power to encapsulate the Eridium as a target and use our control to break it down into pure energy that was then released into our bodies. It took a great deal of control and focus but the pay off was that it gave us a massive , borderline qualitative boost to our powers.-

The rest of the book spoke of the ways she used her powers and even spoke of the special vault that could only be opened by a siren wielding the Phaselock power and using Eridium. Fascinating as that was the real kicker was that apparently a previous user of Maya's powers actually somehow tied the powers to the planet which meant that every user would at some point come to live there. How they accomplished this wasn't explained beyond that it killed them to accomplish which was a steep price to pay but I suppose worth it with how long the rule over the planet they had lasted.-

It was only during Dido's reign that the next inheritor of the power arrived AFTER she passed away which meant she never got the chance to teach them herself and keep the ruling line going. Ironically Maya was still in a fashion ruling the planet since she was what the monks used to keep the population under their thumb or used to before I showed up. Now days Maya spent most of her days either dying her hair bright colors(she was partial to blue apparently) or setting things right with the local population.-

Unfortunately few chose to stay once they learned that she was not in fact going to kill them with her powers if they tried to leave. Some did of course but the monks had done a damn fine job making Maya out to be the Krampus, the boogieman and god all wrapped up in a nice neat package that traumatized the citizens, belief was a funny thing like that, contagious. The Bluenette was a little disheartened by this mass exodus but it only made her more determined to fix this situation. The monks REALLY didn't like me right now if it wasn't obvious but since they swore oaths of nonviolence their hands were metaphorically tied.-

"You know you could just tell them to fuck off right?" I said when Maya came to complain about the monks complaints against me.

"You could stop antagonizing them at least and leave the archives so that others could have a turn." she said and I scoffed.

"You act like I'm stopping them or something. They are as free to enter this place as they ever have been, they are just too big of a pussy to do so." I said disdainfully.

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https://www.pa treon.com/user?u=81578854#:~:text=pa treon.com/pa treon_loskro

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Alexander Drake

Lifeforce: 573,578

Integrated Traits: [Gun expertise-Uncommon grade], [Clever mind-Uncommon grade]X3,[Enhanced senses-Rare grade], [Omega body-Rare grade]x4,[Superior bones-Rare grade],[Armored hide-Rare grade], [Fire resistance-Uncommon grade], [Bone regeneration-Uncommon grade], [Corrosion resistance-Uncommon grade], [Energy projection-Epic grade], [Superior vitality-Epic grade],[Flame breath-Uncommon grade],[Minor regeneration-Rare grade][Iron stomach-Uncommon grade], [Disease resistance-Epic grade],[Amphibious lungs-Uncommon grade], [Thermal sensing-Uncommon grade], [Water resistance-Common grade]

Stored traits: [Amphibious lungs], [Water resistance]