It's not much of an announcement, given that the news is already quite old, but I promised an extra chapter for it, so here goes: A (Not So) Simple Fetch Quest, A Lonely Dungeon and An Unbound Soul are all getting audiobook editions, produced by podium audio. The first due to release is part one of fetch quest, out in two and a half weeks time on the 24th of Jan.
The three volumes of fetch quest are narrated by Jessica Almasy, who also did the excellent Vigor Mortis. They contain the extra patreon what-if chapters, but there's no bonus content beyond that.
So, with fetch quest being what it is, what better way could there be to celebrate fetch quest and unbound soul getting audiobooks than a not-particularly-canonical crossover story in which the circus of Katies get acquainted with not-Blobby? It might also (eventually) go some way towards finding this specific multiverse's answer to a question that has plagued fiction writers in some form or other since forever.
This is part 1 of 2. Be warned that there will be a gap before part 2 is posted.
Katie pondered as she listened to Katie regaling her adventures, as Katie squirmed on the floor, twitching and moaning occasionally for reasons Katie wasn't planning to inquire about. Instead, she asked something else that had been bothering her.
"I was wondering, given your description of the human kingdom; how is there a human kingdom?"
"Huh? One guy gets delusions of grandeur, sticks something shiny on his head, tells everyone he's in charge, then kills anyone who disagrees," answered Katie.
"Mmmpf!" agreed Katie, who had her mouth full.
"No, I didn't mean the 'kingdom' part of 'human kingdom'. I meant the 'human' part."
Katie blinked. "Uh... I've never thought about that before. I don't actually know."
"Aren't you omniscient?"
"I'm... supposed to be. At least with regards to the worlds I'm in charge of."
All three Katies shared a moment of confusion.
"Mmmpf?" questioned Katie.
"An interesting theory, but you'd think evolution wouldn't make mistakes like external testicles twice."
"Why do you always automatically gravitate towards sex organs?! At least go for something like the dangerous way our trachea is connected to our throat. And how did you get all that from an mmmpf, anyway?"
"Omniscient," answered Katie, as if that was a perfectly reasonable explanation. "Or at least, I should be. I can't see the history of this planet past a few thousand years ago. It was just... there, humans and demons already fighting each other. And I've somehow never noticed, until you mentioned it."
"Mmmpf?" suggested Katie.
"Could be. She set things up so that I would be created to clean up the mess she left behind, after all."
"Look, if zombie-Katie wants to be a part of this conversation, please can you take her gag out? You might be able to understand her, but I can't!"
"She suggested that the previous goddess might have just built this place for her own entertainment, and so didn't want to wait a few billion years for evolution to kick in and make something interesting. Seems plausible enough, given the state of the planet."
"So, what, 'human' is just a standard thing? They get them from a catalogue, perhaps? Ready-made components for your new world; buy ten humans, get one free?"
Katie shrugged.
"Mmmpf," said Katie.
"Great idea; we can just ask," replied Katie, looking around in more dimensions than the usual three. "Sheesh, there are humans all over the place. Maybe they really do come as standard."
Katie sighed and stooped down to pull about a foot of phallic rubber out of Katie's mouth, eyebrows raising as the material kept coming.
"How the heck do you breathe with that in?" she asked.
"I don't. Zombie, remember?" replied Katie from the floor, still unable to stand up on account of all the rope.
"Then how were you making any noise at all?! I swear, this place needs a sign up warning visitors to leave their common sense at the front door."
"There is, but you missed it because you were teleported in."
Katie squinted suspiciously, then left the room. A few seconds later came the sound of the front door opening, followed by a scream.
"Well, this is certainly an interesting mystery," opined Katie, still peering out across the multiverse. "Humans are worse than cockroaches. They're everywhere. No way can we blame this on convergent evolution."
The front door sounded again, and Katie returned, looking slightly pale.
"Oops," giggled Katie insincerely. "I should probably have warned you about the Void."
"Right," said Katie, clapping her hands. "We're going to get to the bottom of this. I can see at least eight nearby worlds that have both humans and active gods, so let's go ask them."
"Uh..." said Katie, who was the only one of the three still a hundred percent mortal and was clinging tightly to her last vestiges of her common sense, whatever the sign might request. "Do you think you can do that on your own and get back to me? Meeting one goddess was enough, and I'd rather not meet more."
"Yeah... Fair. Anya was saying some of them can be complete jerks, so I don't really want to meet them either. Tell you what, I can see a tiny world, less than a hundred thousand people on it, and it's got... half a goddess? A visit should be completely safe, even if she acts up. She won't be able to do anything to me. Or you, if you're near me."
"How can it have half a goddess?" asked Katie, not putting voice to her thoughts that it wasn't her physical safety she'd been concerned about.
"Okay, it would be more accurate to say it has no gods or goddesses at all. But it does have... well... the entire planet. The whole surface is alive somehow. That's pretty close, right? The planet should remember how she got populated."
"Okay, first question; how can a planet be a she? Second question; if you take us there, are we going to find ourselves up to our necks in blood and meat? I don't like the sound of a living planet."
Katie paused her wriggling on the floor to consider that thought. "Ooo, that sounds fun!" she decided.
"No, it's not a flesh planet. It's normal rock and stuff. It's just alive," Katie answered, neglecting to answer the question of the planet's gender.
"Aww."
"Fine. Because rock can be alive now. I can see I'm not going to win this, so let's just get it over with."
Katie nodded and the trio of girls were suddenly elsewhere.
"Shouldn't you have untied your pet zombie before we went out?" asked Katie.
"Nah."
Katie considered that, but decided to ignore it for sanity's sake. "So, how do we get in contact with this planet? Rock isn't known for its communication skills."
Katie tilted her head, as if listening to some silent voice.
"... Or are you already talking?"
"No, it's just that something tried to parasitise our souls the moment we arrived. Well, mine and yours. The degenerate down there doesn't have one."
"Hey! I'm no more of a degenerate than you are! Either of you!"
"And that's the bit you're going to complain about? Not the bit about having no soul?"
"I already knew about that," shrugged the hog-tied zombie. "Hasn't caused me any problems so far."
The human Katie once again filed that under things to ignore, then turned back to her fluffy-goddess version. "Well, thanks for protecting me, I suppose."
"Actually, I didn't."
Katie raised a quizzical eyebrow.
"Don't give me the eyebrow! I didn't need to; there wasn't anything to protect you from. Whatever it was failed miserably. I think it was built to infect a slightly different soul structure. It's trying to adapt, but at this rate, it'll take a hundred years."
"Okay, fine. Planet?"
Katie closed her eyes, perceiving the world through inhuman senses.
"There's... two entities, I think? The soul thing came from one, but the one I picked up from home is different. I think the soul one is artificial?"
"I suggest we try to talk to the one that isn't mucking around with souls," suggested Katie. "Worse than mind control."
Katie nodded, looking around again. "She's that way," she said, pointing.
"I thought she was the entire planet. How can she be 'that way'?"
"Well, where are you?"
"Uh... Here?"
"Yes, but where exactly? If you needed to point to a single place, where would it be?"
Katie frowned, failing to understand the question.
"I mean, are you there?" asked Katie, pointing at Katie's feet. "Or there?" she added, pointing at her face.
"Oh, so we're going to find the planet's brain?"
"Yeah, sure. Let's go with that," answered Katie, picking up Katie by a rope and adjusting space slightly so they didn't have to walk so far. As small as the planet was, it was still a bit large for a casual stroll from one side to the other, but she wanted to see at least some scenery while they were visiting, so she refrained from teleporting.
"They have a really weird vandalism problem here," commented Katie as a herd of horses galloped past a couple of minutes later.
"I don't think that can be explained by vandalism," disagreed Katie as she spotted a flock of hexauyo grazing in the distance.
"I'm not sure that can be explained by anything."
"Maybe a page of that catalogue they order humans from got creased, and they ended up with two things glued together?"
"Makes as much sense as anything else."
The trio continued walking in silence for a while, the landscape blurring away behind them. Or rather, two of them continued walking while the third dangled.
"That's an oak tree," commented Katie.
"Yes? So?"
"Well, since this world has... whatever the heck those green, feathered things were, why does it have normal oak trees? Just like the way it supposedly has normal humans, even if we haven't seen one yet. I'm really starting to like that catalogue theory."
"Point taken."
The walk continued for a few more uneventful minutes, and then Synklisi came into view.
"That's a city," observed Katie.
"More of a town," disagreed Katie.
"Either way, it's a settlement. Did we find the humans?"
"I did say the population was under a hundred thousand. It's not a surprise we didn't bump into any on our way. Interestingly, the one we want to speak to is apparently right in the middle of the place. I somehow doubt that's a coincidence. Keep your eyes out for a big temple, or... I dunno. A giant gold statue that the natives are all bowing to? Something suitably ostentatious."
They continued walking for a few seconds more.
"Okay, now you need to untie her. You can't walk around like that in public."
"Why not?"
"Because... Well... You just can't."
"It's not as if anyone's being immodest. Besides, maybe they don't care about that sort of thing here."
They turned out not to care about that sort of thing there. The trio of Katies attracted some strange looks, but no-one said anything.
"This is weird..." said Katie.
"Yeah. I actually agree with you," said Katie as she swung, greatly surprising Katie. "I'd expect the kids to point and laugh, if nothing else."
"Or clamp themselves to my tails," added the final Katie, before frowning. "Dammit. We picked the wrong entity to talk to," she muttered.
"Huh? How so?"
"Looks like both the world-spanning presences are mucking around with souls. This one is just not so proactive about it; she's not trying to adapt to you or respond in any way to her failure, so I didn't notice it at first, but now that I can see some natives, it turns out she's got her hooks in everyone. They aren't pointing and laughing because she's mucking around with their behaviour via soul manipulation. It's the bloody demons all over again."
"Should we pick a different world?"
"Maybe, but now that we're here, I do kinda want to find out what's going on. And maybe kick her butt. I know this isn't my world, but still... If she's anything like the demon lord's brother, I'm gonna get cross."
"Where's the butt of a planet?" asked Katie, somehow radiating bogus innocent curiosity despite still swinging around in a hog-tie.
Katie and Katie ignored her, continuing their walk while the local brainwashed population completely failed to see any problem with Katie's situation.
"Their behaviour aside, either people are very into cosplay around here, or there are some variations on the theme of human going on," observed Katie as they passed a gossiping group of beastkin.
"Our world has the fox-kin. But yeah, there's blatantly dwarfs and elves around too. And I'd swear the dude that just walked into that house had four arms."
"Beastkin certainly aren't something that should evolve naturally."
"They certainly didn't on my world. Harder to tell here, but I don't think they're natural. Their biology is slightly different from the regular humans, but they're all the same internally, despite the massive differences in their animal characteristics. I don't see how that could happen via regular evolution."
"Didn't Anya mention she made a tribe of beastkin once?" chimed in the zombie.
"Yeah, she did. I guess sticking animal bits on humans is a common thing?"
"Well, yes; it's cute," agreed Katie. "Besides, you're not allowed to express surprise. Have you looked in a mirror recently?"
Katie swished her collection of self-inflicted tails, fox ears twitching atop her head.
"Point," admitted Katie. "Or heck, maybe these are the ones Anya was talking about."
Before getting the chance to follow that train of thought any further, she paused her stride down the street. "Well, that's not a temple," she commented.
Katie followed her gaze to the tall wall and wide gate that crossed the end of the street. "Could be hiding behind those walls?" she suggested.
"No way. Look at the people going in and out. All heavily armed."
"Oh no," opined the zombie. "Please don't tell me it's a dungeon. I never want to set foot in another one of them again."
The tails of the goddess froze up, along with her ears. One eye twitched. Then she handed the zombie Katie to the human Katie—who immediately dropped her on account of being human and not having quite the upper body strength of the goddess Katie—and started marching off towards the gate, elbows and knees hardly bending.
"Wow, she's angry," said Katie from the floor. "Also; ouch."
"Sorry."
"No problem."
"Look, I know you're heavily into this whole bondage thing, but I'm not carrying you. It's not practical. Get up and walk," said Katie, reaching for a silk rope and unknotting it.
"Aww. But fine. We should probably go after her."
The pair of Katies chased after the third, who was having an argument with a guard at the gate.
"Oh? You're all going in together?" asked the guard, clicking his tongue in annoyance. "Why didn't you just say you were here for the slime instead of all that... that..."
His face blanked briefly as the fact that he couldn't remember any of the conversation—which had involved a lot about Katie shouting about souls and mind control—was papered over by Erryn's Law.
"Anyway, just head on in. And next time, be honest. Some days I swear half the foot traffic through here is for her, so there's no call to be ashamed about it."
Katie blinked, trying to imagine either of the other two Katies displaying any shame whatsoever. The picture simply didn't fit into her head. It was like trying to picture an ice cube floating in lava, or a cloud on fire.
"Why did he think we were here to see a slime?" she asked instead.
"No idea."
"Okay. Next question, then; where's the way in?" she tried, looking around and seeing nothing but a ring of crystals floating in the air.
"Don't know, don't care," she answered, looking through the floor with more than eyes, scanning for souls that weren't parasitised by any external entity, and finding one on the sixth floor of the dungeon. Alas that she stopped on the first one she saw, rather than continuing to look, or the human Katie may have escaped the world with a greater proportion of her sanity intact. "I wasn't intending to waste more time," she added, teleporting the trio into a room of sultry pink.
"What the hell?!" exclaimed the slime who was most emphatically not called Blobby, looking up from where she'd been carefully painting the nails of an equally surprised delver.
Part 2 will be posted under A Lonely Dungeon once I have a release date for that audiobook. I wanted to hold out on posting this one until I had that, to avoid leaving a big gap between chapters, but with the fetch quest release date drawing near I've run out of time. Hopefully it won't be too much longer.
For those who haven't memorised two-year-old unbound soul chapters, and hence didn't get the vandalism reference, horses on Erryn's world are polkadot. Hexauyos are medium dog sized, six-legged, egg-laying creatures with no head and a full body covering of grass-green feathers. They have eyes at both ends, and a mouth on their underbelly. They're grazing animals, and the residents of Erryn's world farm them instead of chickens, on account of there not being any chickens.
Hi there, a passing Katie here to provide some evolutionary commentary for Katie and Katie.
For reasons of me being kind, I'm gonna spoiler the technical paper worth of rambling, so it isn't hell to scroll through.
"An interesting theory, but you'd think evolution wouldn't make mistakes like external testicles twice."
"Why do you always automatically gravitate towards s*x organs?! At least go for something like the dangerous way our trachea is connected to our throat. And how did you get all that from an mmmpf, anyway?"
Ah, you see, external testicles actually have an evolutionary advantage.
So, we're warm blooded mammals, and that has the lovely benefit of a stable core temperature. And most of our biological processes quite like that temperature. Not all mammals have the same core temp though... most are normally hotter than we are by a few degrees, birds even more so, it's apparently a metabolic thing. The point is that their body temperatures are fixed at a certain, usually quite warm, temperature. Why am I explaining this? Testicles! And that "most"...
You see, it turns out that for a whole bunch of land mammals, humans included, testicles operate better when they're cooler than core body temperatures, which is a problem when core temps don't really vary much, so when a useful mutation moves them closer to the surface, and thus cooler, it's giving a very literal reproductive advantage to that variant. Rinse and repeat for long enough and you get the scrotum that allows the testicles to be in much cooler environment, can raise or lower to provide a basic temperature feedback loop, and can even change the skin configuration to maximise or minimise heat loss. The "really well performing testicles" fitness won out over the "easily ripped off by predators" fitness. Not that some animals haven't ended up with the best of both worlds, as they can retract and somewhat compact their testicles when they're not ready to breed... humans can do it too under appropriate conditions.
There are other arguments that could explain the common ancestor's evolutionary change, but I at least favour this as a solid reason they persisted so well.
Now if you want a really good example of terrible evolutionary processes, look higher... the eyes, specifically. There are some good adaptions there but the basic design is atrocious. Even if we ignore the lack of iris response to UV light, the retina is completely backwards. If you look at the design, light has to make it past the circulatory system, the nerve network, some structural cells, and then finally hit the photosensitives. Yes, in that order, human eyes have all that junk in the way because we have "inverted" retina structure.
Maybe it has some advantages in terms of longevity but it's terrible in regards of actually seeing well.
And don't even get me started on the complete disaster that is the uterus, evolution really doesn't want us to reproduce anymore.
"Beastkin certainly aren't something that should evolve naturally."
I don't see how that could happen via regular evolution.
Weeeeeeellllllllllll.... ok, to be completely fair, they're reasonably impossible in our species but only because of where certain branching points occurred. As a species, we already have a physical dimorphism that's on a comparable scale, we've just been talking about it.
The male/female primary sexual characteristics involve some really substantial rearranging of the common structures and it's not like the XY karyotype some how loses the genetic instructions for developing the female structures. In much the same way as humans still retain code related to tails and snakes have coding related to legs, there's processes in the development that deactivate the unneeded instructions before they can do much and processes that release counteracting instructions to override the development direction.
The fact we still have code related to tails is a good example. At some point our genome had everything needed to make one, we can imagine that instead of an atrophy process there was a mutation in a key early sequence of instructions that caused the tail not to form while retaining full reproductive capacity with those who had the tail. There are a number of genetic disorders that cause portions of the body to simply not develop, even to the point of just deleting all 4 limbs. A little unrelated and slightly heart wrenching tangent in spoiler...
Ok, so first I want to take a moment to acknowledge and wtf over how we have the Germanic name Amelia in common use. The Greek derived word of the same spelling, amelia, means "lack of limb(s)" and is the name given to birth defects involving the absence of one or more limbs at birth. I can't help but think the name would fall out of use if people were more aware of the condition's name.
And... I would be remis if I were to talk about this field of genetic defect without a mention of Thalidomide. If not familiar, it is a drug that was briefly made available to counter the symptoms of pregnancy back in the late 50s. What wasn't known was that the "safe" version gets converted by the body into a version that is teratogenic, meaning that it damages embryos during early development. The outcome for those who were affected is heart breaking, the summary list being which part of the body it would damage if taken on a certain day. Of those affected, 40% of those born died at or shortly after birth, I don't think their numbers properly account for miscarriages and terminations of no longer viable pregnancies. Of those who survived the tragedy, the most obvious symptom is limb defects similar to those caused by genetic defects like amelia.
One is a rare genetic defect, the other is a painful lesson we shouldn't forget about why scientists and doctors must be so incredibly cautious about drugs are safe to give to a person.
Ok, back to trying to be more light hearted about this...
We have real world examples of the chromosome changes needed for the fantasy races of giant and dwarf, though both have additional issues. A lot of the conditions that lead to exceptionally tall bodies don't proportionally improve the other needed structures, often impacting quality of life. Conditions producing dwarfism tend to be better in terms of quality and length of life, and are pretty self-evident in regards to the persistence of the genetic change needed, but introduce other problems that can affect maternal and infant mortality. With sufficient time and generations, evolution should select out a set of secondary mutations that cancel out any quality of life considerations.
Fur is obviously solvable, it's just a modification of the body hair coding we already have... throw some extra development into that process and you can make any degree of additional fur. Scales would likely be a more involved mutation surrounding skin genes. Ok, fine, ears....
Ears relate to the core of how the various sub-species of human could form naturally. Assuming for a moment they have the same basic karyotype layout we do, we can borrow from conditions like Haemophilia that are coded on the X chromosome. There's already known coding on there for ear development, so it's reasonable, let's imagine that it has a gene sequence that modifies or overrides the ear development to produce something feline instead. Maybe there's another version of that gene where it make canine ears instead. By being on the X like that they make for good inheritance variations. If we code the oddities into that chromosome, we can have pretty much any of the species with a reasonable common ancestor in Boreoeutheria.
Oh, you want to know how those weird coding genes got in... right. So, uh, genetics is weird. Hybrid species aren't exactly simple, but they are possible. Normally they're fairy closely related, but... weirdness. Take the mule, a donkey and horse are pretty closely related, both in the equus genus, but... the horse has 2 more chromosomes, 64 vs 62, so the mule has 63. We've been breeding them for thousands of years. Zebras? 32 to 46 depending on species. Over in Carnivora, you can hybrid any ursid other than giant pandas, so many cats and dogs, but not cat-dogs...
Ok, my point is that you can make a hybrid if the species is close. So imagine about 66 million years ago, the common ancestor species of the placenta-type mammals didn't diverge quite the same. Like cat and dog species have, they started to diverge in morphology but remained genetically compatible for a while, conveniently the morphology is on the X chromosome. So when they started to diverge into the ancestor of the rabbits and primates there was still some of those traits from the branch that becomes Carnivora. The branch heading for Primates should be diverse enough in groups to retain the traits until specialisation kicks in and we get the early Homo species. At that point they start to diverge on appearance as proto-social structures start to spark off and groups shrink to smaller "family" structures. From there it's nice and clean, we can take a model of co-evolution from Neanderthal except rather than go extinct the various sub-species would have split up to their own territories when civilisation started to spin up. The few tens of thousands of years since then isn't enough for genetic drift to massively but more than enough for trait concentration to ensure that pretty much all children have a similar dominant trait set.
See? Totally works. I'm sure I haven't messed up something massively because I've been away for way more than 30 hours now. Yup, I'm sure it's good and scientific, ask my pet zedonk.