- April 19, 2026
The Royal Bastards of Galagan (Chapter 12)
The Royal Initiative
“The best way to kill someone without punching them is to make them feel alone.”
Lady Renho Takeda
Lemon Limelight
In many ways, cakra is an extension of the self. I learned a bit more about how that works when I finally learned to teleport by becoming one with my cakra. I learned that my cakra won’t revert me back to something I never wanted to be, that I… that I could trust it.
My cakra had become the friend I had never had. Having sisters is something else, it’s a different kind of loyalty. It’s great, wouldn’t trade it for anything, but it’s not the same. The way my cakra supported me, helped me to change what I wanted to change is something only a friend does, but not family.
As my training to learn duplication continued, I learned more about my cakra than I thought I would ever learn. Even in that first week, or maybe it was two weeks? Time blurred in the beginning as I learned something about cakra no one would tell me.
Cakra could be clingy.
“Don’t push,” Howl told me, as I tried to let extend my soul and place it somewhere else. The idea was that I could release my cakra somewhere else, take my form, copy me and assure that I would not be…
Let’s say that it was not working, and Howl saying ‘don’t push’ wasn’t doing anything remotely helpful. Seriously, ‘don’t push?’ What was I supposed to do when my cakra was fighting me to keep stay within my center? I knew how basic conflicts work, Cal made sure of that.
When something is standing in the way, you push.
So you better believe I tried to push my fucking soul out of my body. I was sure as all hell that I was letting go of my inner self, so my inner self could grow in a way monks on Galagan wish they could.
But guess what happened?
My cakra pushed back. Turned out, it could push harder.
After struggling to learn the basics, I had finally put the method into practice. Hours later I was drenched in sweat and on my knees. It was a common sight at this point, and I needed another break before I could start again.
I could feel Howl’s hand on my shoulder before I ever heard him touch the ground. He was actually floating and patting me with his small hand as he assured me I was fine. “Don’t get so broken up kid, we all struggle on the first day, but if you need to, it’s better to let it out than hold it in.”
“Wha… what?” I questioned him. You’d think after a week I’d have known when he was screwing with me. Also, this wasn’t the first day?
“It’s okay to cry it out, doesn’t make you any less of a man.”
“No, no, I… I agree, I just don’t feel like crying, I just can’t catch my breath.”
Howl nodded his head and said, “Of course, of course, bud, I’m just saying, holding it in isn’t healthy.”
“Holding what in?! Oxygen?! My sweat?!”
“Whatever it is you’re holding in let it out,” he said, gesturing to his chest as if it were expanding.
“Oh my god,” I groaned.
That groan must have come off harder than I meant because Howl’s mocking face of sympathy had some harrowed eyes. For someone who would describe himself as an outcast, I was quite experienced with people giving me worried looks. In my experience, it was as easy for some people to worry about me as it was for people to hate me. Sometimes it’s condescending…
Sometimes it’s nice.
To rid himself of his little leak of consciousness, the little Pyrie leaped onto one of the wooden dummies they kept around the room. We were in the green room or the gym that had a dirt floor. The same place where Howl and the other masters showed us the techniques we could learn.
“I think it’s time for a short whittle break,” he said, squeezing his fingers really close together in front of his eye.
“So we’re done for the day, you’re saying? Already?”
Then Howl hopped from one dummy to another one. Without even meaning to, he was training my eyes and ability to follow things. He liked to stand on them, to hop from thing to thing. It reminded me a lot of a kid with ADHD if they also had flying and superspeed.
“No,” he said, his voice cracking as he did, “we’re just done testing this technique, I didn’t say we’re done training.”
He would talk and hop between his sentences. I’m sure Poppy would have found that annoying, and Cal would have perceived it as a threat.
I found visually… stimulating.
“So what are we going to do?” I asked as I was turning my neck all around the room to follow him.
“Oh no, I’m done, you’re doing something else.”
The thought of training alone made my shoulders immediately slump. “Alright, what solo forms do you need me to practice?”
“Nothing like that, and who said you’d be alone?”
I turned my head and found him where he was standing immediately. He was standing on the ground right next to where I sat. “Is Cal or Poppy joining us?”
“No, I think I speak for all the masters when is say you three should get some friends you aren’t related to.”
That was easy for him to say.
“Okay, so I’m getting a training partner, when is he going to get here?” I asked.
“Oh, they’re already here, but the question is,” Howl said, pretending to twiddle his thumbs like a crazed villain, “can you find them, mwhahahaha!”
“Why, just… why?” I asked him.
“Some of us like to have fun, kid, now look around find where they’re hiding, and you can get to playing.”
“Playing?” I immediately jumped on.
“Playing, training, it’s all the same shit, let’s be honest,” Howl said with a shrug of his shoulders.
His words weren’t comforting, which was actually unusual. It was something to think about later because at that moment I was trying to find someone playing games on me with Howl. I couldn’t say that I didn’t appreciate it, but at the same time, I appreciated the opportunity to win.
As I looked around the room, I took notice of everything in there. It was easy to account for every training dummy, every dumbbell, and every weight on the ground when it only took a little bit of cakra to speed up how fast my brain thinks.
It’s dangerous to do that in battle, even though I’m good at it, but in the room where nothing was moving? Easy-peasy.
I’ve gone on a few stealth missions before, but not too many. Believe it or not, Calcutta was better at it than me despite being taller than nearly every other Galagan I’d ever met. But the few times I did go, it was to find someone that was stuck on a planet that we wanted them off.
From doing that, I had gotten to see the different ways people used cakra when they couldn’t use it to blast planets to pieces. They could use it for all sorts of tricks that were really good in specific situations but fell apart once I held up my hand and the landscape was gone. When there was a hostage, I couldn’t do that.
I had to look.
The most common way I’ve seen people use cakra, that even a lowly trooper can do, is flying, and after that was changing the way light bent around you. You’d have to be so incredibly still, and focus your cakra over your skin. Then the light would flow over your cakra all-around before following the path it would have if you weren’t there. Then any light that would be reflected back to another person’s eye, tells you that they’re not sitting where they are sitting.
Some people just couldn’t do it. Some people’s cakra didn’t mend well with nature or only mended well with familiar environments, but it only took one skilled person to hide five people in a room. A really skilled person can make their spot look like something else entirely.
When they did that, there were a couple of things you may not realize disappear. If light hit your cakra, it would become brighter, no matter how dull your cakra was. That’s why our cakra cloaks glow and shimmer with colors like they do.
So first I looked for any spot that looked brighter than it was supposed to. The brighter a room already is though, the harder this is to do, and this room was pretty well lit. After searching for what must have been five minutes of in-my-head time, which was more like a few seconds, I tried the next best thing.
That’s when it occurred to me how this might help my training. Camouflage is considered a basic technique, Poppy could do it and she learned how to blend her hand in about a few hours. The way she explained it, it’s about’ connecting to other things.
Maybe instead of trying to just push my cakra soul out into nowhere, I should have been pushing towards something else. I could learn to push a cakra soul towards air later, but maybe it wass time to try going about it a different way.
“I figured out what you’re trying to teach me,” I told Howl, who met me with a befuddled shake of his head.
“You did? I am?” he asked me.
“Well yeah, someone’s clearly using camouflage to stay hidden, but cakra camouflage is all about extending your cakra to meet the light. I’ve been trying to push my cakra soul out into nowhere, but if I try pushing towards someone, or something, then it can stay out of me easier.”
“Oh, well, that’s a clever solution, Lemon,” Howl praised me as he scratched his head.
He was clearly surprised I figured it out so—
“But that’s not at all why I want you to find this person,” he said, interrupting my train of thought.
“Wha… so my solution was an accident?” I questioned.
“Not an only accident, but it’s also not even a solution to your problem,” he said with a shake of his head and his finger. “You came up with an idea that, for someone struggling with the mechanics of the technique, could use as a step to learning. You’re doing the technique correctly, you’re problem is internal. Try your solution, and you’ll find that there’s no difference at all in what result you get.”
I got all fuzzy in the head hearing that. Sure, it was nice to know that I had the technique down on a mechanical level, I wasn’t doing anything wrong, but… how the hell do I do it right now?
Being wrong was not something I wasn’t used to, but I was so sure with how I figured it out. How could it…
No, I had to try it, Howl might have been wrong. Being old, experienced, and knowledgeable didn’t mean you were always right. People are only right after they’ve proven someone else wrong, and he hadn’t done that.
So I did as he recommended, and first focused on a dummy in front of me. Like with teleportation, it became a target, and just similarly, I let my cakra flow through me, becoming one with me. I focused on my center, my cakra soul, and I tried to push it out.
For a moment, it looked like it was going to leave, and I was going to be able to rub it in Howl’s face for a hot minute. It left my body, I could see it and the limp strange of cakra connecting us.
Then it snapped back.
Boing!
The sound that followed my cakra knocking me back on my ass wasn’t what I expected, but it was embarrassing nonetheless.
“I would say I told you so if I were a jerk,” Howl said as I was rubbing my head. It was when I looked at him, grinning, barely containing a laugh that it dawned on me what he said.
Regardless, he was right.
“Alright, what is my problem?”
“If I just told you, then you would probably either deny or spent every waking moment trying to convince yourself you recognize your flaw and accept it.” Howl then let out a heavy groan that told me enough. “You have no idea how mentally debilitating that process is. Openly and clearly telling you your problem has about a fifty/fifty shot of doubling how long it takes you to learn to accept it.”
“Is that long-winded way of saying I have to figure it out on my own?”
Boing!
“Ow!” I yelled after Howl hit me on the head.
It left this staggering sting, definitely leaving a bump. The Pyrie clearly had some physical strength that I wasn’t considering, but in that moment I just complained, “What the hell was that for?!”
He ignored my question out of spite. “No, not on your own, like I said, like I keep saying, find the person in the room.”
“Why?” I asked. “What are the odds that they’ve been through the same thing that I have?!”
“Less than 1%, no two people have the same two experiences, no one is the same. Even if you cloned someone and gave them all of the original’s memories, they wouldn’t immediately become different people as they experienced life differently. But life, my stupid silly student, has a way of causing traumas that leave marks so similar, that we find ourselves in the same place and call it coincidence.
“They’ve been where you’ve been, suffering the same obstacle to learning duplication, but no. They most certainly, positively, 100%, did not go through the same thing as you.”
Howl spoke in a serious tone I had yet to hear from him. It left me feeling naked and cold. It reminded me of whenever I would get dressed down by my father or brother for doing something wrong.
But just as quickly, Howl sang his next few words to annoy me, taunt me even. “Maybe that’s also why you can’t find them!”
“You say them, are we talking about multiple people, one person?” I asked, feeling stupid that I didn’t ask that before.
“One,” he answered, which made it easier on me. That way I used the right pronoun as I was punching this person in the face, assuming I would need to.
After staying hidden all this time, there was this feeling that this person had to be looking down on me, thinking I’m pathetic or something to laugh at. That’s what people—
“Fuck me,” I cursed to myself as I realized, and then pointed my hand at the ceiling. “They’re above me, aren’t they!”
“Close,” I heard a voice say behind my head.
Then the pressure and fuzziness that I thought was my bruised ego, actually physically left my head. All around me this white goo moved around my face, flowing like a river that was missing its physical boundaries.
It moved faster than I could react, as fast as me or one of my sisters, to make this window blind in front of my face. It was tying itself to me, but it could easily slap me if it wanted to. Instead, two eyes and smirk appeared.
“You really had no idea what you were looking for,” this white goo told me before I screamed and tried to blast it.
My scream may have been a little high-pitched, but anyone else’s would be too.
The white goo leaped off my face, and the rest of it came off me, revealing itself to be an extra layer over the surface of my clothes. I watched as it collected together on the floor, and began to take shape, spinning like a slushie in a blender before creating two legs in cargo pants, their own jacket, stringy arms, and a pale face without a nose. The form of their head made it seem like they had hair that curled around the side of their cheek, but in reality, it was the same color as their pale skin and connected directly to their forehead. It simulated the silhouette of hair but wasn’t actually.
And their eyes, they were red pupils and white rises on a flat black surface. Their eyebrows weren’t actually hair but looked more like lines drawn in marker.
I’d have said that this person looked handdrawn if their form hadn’t perfectly replicated clothes. This was how they wanted to look, to a ‘T.’
And as they opened their mouth, showing me the outline of teeth and a black wall behind them, I missed how loud and condescending their laugh was. When they started pointing and laughing at me, I was free and able to find him annoying.
“Lemon,” Howl said, “meet someone who I think will help you in the coming weeks. The last of the Primes, Lumen Ro.”
Primes? I couldn’t remember where I had heard that before, but it sounded familiar.
There was something else on my mind. “You’re a shapeshifter, you weren’t using cakra at all!” I yelled it.
The Prime laughed at me with his hands behind his head. “Nah, I turned into your clothes while you were trying and failing to multiply. You were so sure I was using cakra that you sounded like a total tool.”
I glared at him for a few solid seconds before I turned to Howl. “Why do you want me to train with him again?”
“Because if we practice multiplying for hours at a time, you’ll destroy your body, but you Galagans must have ADHD or something because you’ll just keep training if you don’t have something else to do.” Then he gestured to Lumen. “Lumen has the opposite problem, they’re a lazy little fuck who needs to get back into shape, and you could stand to train what you already know.”
“That… that had a lot more thought than I was expecting,” I admitted, it made sense from Howl’s standpoint.
“Do you think they’d give any idiot the title of ‘master?’”
I tried not to nod my head. “Well, where I’m from it’s… relatively common to find idiots in charge.”
“Oh yeah,” Howl mumbled as his eyes narrowed on me, “you people believe in nepotism.” He proceeded to mock spitting as he said the word.
“I don’t… I don’t know if nepotism is something you believe in…. it’s just like…”
Lumen finished my sentence for me, “Like something people do, no one is like,” using an old man’s voice, “‘well, I believe we should practice nepotism.’”
“Yeah, that’s what I mean!”
Howl just looked between the two of us and shook his head. “That’s what they all say.”
Lumen and I both said something like, “You’ve had this conversation before?” Wasn’t the exact same thing but it had the same point.
“Yeah, yeah, so can I leave you two kids alone, right? Are you gonna be okay?” he asked us.
“Umm, I don’t know what a Prime is, but as long as it doesn’t eat people, I don’t see why now,” I said. I was trying to be funny, I realized later that it was a poor joke.
“No, Terrans taste terrible,” Lumen said without missing a beat, which was something he should not have done, but it kind of cemented how we would get along.
“Good, then I’ll be off to annoy Atolli, it’s a lunch pastime of mine, I’ll tell your sister you said hi if I see her,” he said as his cakra charged up like he was going to teleport.
From what I could tell, the more experienced teleporters could do it before their cakra cloak even showed up. I had never even seen Howl’s sky-blue glow before now, and I wondered what he was waiting for.
He looked over his shoulder and said, “Lemon, before I go, know that you’re doing great, kid.” I almost took a step back when he said that. “I know it may be hard to grasp, but if you didn’t hit some kind of roadblock, I’d worry that you were a psychopath.”
Then he teleported away.
He left me with this warm fuzzy feeling all around my head. I was afraid to move because it might go away, but it did on its own. Those few seconds were some of the best because they felt longer than they were. Even when they were gone I was still clutching my fists, trying not to pump them into the air.
I wasn’t used to roadblocks, not yet anyway, but his words made it easier. After taking so long to learn to teleport I had an inkling that multiplying would be longer, but it’s hard to take bad news well, it doesn’t matter if it’s inevitable.
Lumen let me have my moment, but not unjudged. He felt young, maybe older than me by many thousands of years, but he had to be young by his own species’ standards. It was always hard to tell with shapeshifter species. Even the weaker shapeshifters lived three times as often as everyone else, but if all the Primes were like Lumen, they appeared to have complete control over their molecules, enough that they could imitate non-organic material.
It was so goddamn cool.
I got into my fighting stance and asked him, “So, do you want to train here?”
“Pfft,” he only scoffed, and arched that painted-on brow of his, “you want to practice?” From him, practice seemed like something meant for people who needed it.
“That is why Howl brought us together,” I noted, growing uncomfortable in my fighting stance.
“So? He said it himself, training was just a way to get you to take a break, but if we do something like, I don’t know… hit a food joint.” He shrugged their arms around, and stopped with his fingers pointed out the door, like he was doing some kind of pose. His body rippled, as if stopping in place meant he had to remind everyone around him that he wasn’t flesh and bone.
“Oh,” was all I said, since I was actually looking to train with someone, but he clearly had different plans. It was frustrating, wanting to both hang out with Lumen but do as Howl said.
That made it all stranger to so easily say, “What kind of food were you thinking? I got no cash so you’re buying.”
Lumen just smiled.