Chapter 9, New Home

They had heard Kristy talk about her space but seeing it for themselves was different.

"This is beautiful." Brenda commented

"Space, bring me baby girl." Kristy gave the command.

"I thought it was instant?" Matty asked

"Look." Kristy pointed at the heavy jet in her space the door had opened and a blanket was floating out of it. "The space is following the command do not scare living things. So, she needs to travel here. The space is my power so I can move anything in here in a second but it could startle someone to move suddenly when they're not expecting it."

Kristy disappeared from where she was and was now by the baby on the other side of the lawn. The baby floated to her arms and she popped back to them. "She is still sleeping so she won't be scared." She showed the cute baby to her family. And sat on the grass.

"Are we going to eat? Who wants to hold a baby?" Kristy asked.

"I want to hold her." Brenda said then looked at the pot in her hands

"The pot can touch the ground without hurting it." Kristy commented, Matty laughed.

"I'm going to take a look around." Uncle Richard said.

"Want to take the truck? I don't think you can pop up anywhere like I can and this is five acres." Kristy said.

"Truck would be good." Richard agreed and the Toyoda Tacoma popped up next to him. The keys floating in front of him. "Nice ride." Richard responded.

Matty jumped into the passenger seat to go exploring. not that the land wasn't flat and you could see most everything easily.

They just wanted to drive around.

Brenda took the sleeping baby from Kristy and started thinking of names. She had been thinking of names since she learned of the baby, but hadn't decided yet.

Kristy opened the lid to the pot and summoned a fork to dig into her macaroni, corn and barbecue ribs.

"I thought you said you had dishes?" Brenda commented.

"I do, but I don't want to wash more dishes." Kristy replied holding the pot of food.

"I only put it in the macaroni pot because I wanted it to stay warm and not spill when we were running to you, not for you to eat out of the pot." Brenda made fun of Kristy.

"I can feel the magic of the river flowing through your space." Brenda told Kristy

"The space absorbed a lot of crystals to develop this way. Those crystals are what us power users absorb to get stronger. I will give you some later to absorb but we need to leave some here too. They work kind of like a battery that keeps this place running. These batteries are going to get expensive to keep the space like this." Kristy tried to explain.

"I'll explain better when the boys come back. Not sure how good I am at explaining." Kristy said. "So, I don't have to go over it again, it's important."

Brenda looked at the Truck, we could still see in the distance. They had stopped near the animals.

Then the truck was speeding towards them again.

Uncle Richard got out of the truck. "Something is wrong with Matty." he sounded worried as he helped to pull Matty from the truck. He looked very pale.

"I'm ok dad, I was just suddenly exhausted." Matty said.

"What happened?" Kristy asked.

"Well, I was feeling a connection with the grass so I thought I was going to awaken my powers so I deepened the connection I felt. if that makes sense then I felt like the grass absorbed all my energy." Matty Explained.

"Oh my god." Kristy brought up her tabs and requested one for the manna levels for the space. It showed the fire at full since the usage was being pulled from Kristy that was normal but the others had been around 75 percent full since the space was using them but now the wood energy went up without using a crystal. It was still below full though.

Kristy was jumping again. "This is amazing! This is wonderful."

"How is me getting sucked dry of energy, a good thing." Matty asked, punching Kristy in the arm.

The baby started crying. "You scared her." Brenda accused Matty. bouncing the baby a little, and holding her close.

"Ok Brenda asked a question earlier about the river too and I think uncle Richard can feel the breeze too if I'm not wrong." Kristy looked at her uncle who just nodded.

"Ok let me explain, I'll start with our manna and crystal cores. All of you are level one power users. Yes, Matty you too or you couldn't connect with the grass. Maybe you didn't know because you live on the fifth floor and don't have a plant."

"It's a good thing you didn't stupidly get bit to awaken a power you already had right?" Kristy looked at Matty and he rolled his eyes at her.

"Ok, humans do not get strong without work like zombies do, but the zombies only get one power where humans can awaken more powers. If you find a zombie with more than one power they were once a power user who was killed."

"Yes, I said killed not bitten, he might have been bitten but every dead thing with an intact brain comes back as a zombie. Except for insects, their brains are too small."

"Some people eat insects but I never could." Kristy explained making a bottle for the baby that is now wide awake.

"What we have now are level zero zombies; they are as strong as one and a half humans; they double in strength, speed and power with every level."

"Right now, they could be considered half awakened once they hit level one, they will have our level zero powers, and also be twice as strong, and now they will have speed of one and a half of their human self so an athlete runner would be amazing and someone overweight might still be slower than us."

"Each upgrade makes them twice as strong as they were before." Kristy looked at her family and noticed they were patiently waiting to see how this connects together."

"So, to upgrade our powers to the next level we need to absorb one hundred crystal cores per level. for each power we awaken, unless it is a unique power like my space. The space is level Seven, but I only absorbed fourteen crystal cores for space. but space type cores are one in six hundred zombies to find so it is actually harder even though it takes less cores."

"Special power cores are different; they are the equivalent of fifty of the same level cores in power."

"To upgrade from level one power to level two power you need one hundred of the right type of Zombie magic core, to go to level three you would need one hundred level two cores or two hundred level one cores. Do you see the pattern?"

"Sounds like a lot of killing to get stronger." Matty said.

"Yes, but there is a plus side to that too. I'll explain later so I don't get sidetracked, remind me if I forget." Kristy told them.

"This..." Kristy handed each of them a crystal core. "Is a level four crystal core absorbing them will get you to level two and part of level three. It is the equivalent of killing four hundred level one zombies. Or eight hundred of the level zero zombies if we pretend, they even have a core so you can understand the difficulty we're supposed to have."

Brenda sucked in a breath holding her crystal. "You brought these from the future?"

Kristy nodded "now to explain what happened. Jessica threw me in the warehouse storage. Like the bank for the apocalypse. These cores are the money we trade if you don't have that power to trade with someone. The value of the core is based on the level of the core for how much strength it could give you."

"Being an inner space type power, we were discriminated against as thieves because no one can see what is in our space, not even mental powers can read it. I was not authorized to be there. The base was under attack but the moment the door was closed I was left for dead."

"If the humans failed and the base was over run, I was too weak to escape and if the humans survived, there was an extremely high chance I would have been executed on sight for theft. Even if I didn't take anything."

"The extremely small chance I had was that Jacob was in charge of the supplies and the base was under attack. If I said Jacob sent me to secure supplies there was a small chance, he would back me up but there is also a chance that he agreed to what Jessica did to me. I might have been an embarrassment to him, I don't know." Kristy paused to breath she was crying now.

 "That was assuming they let me talk or even say that Jacob asked me to do it. But my story needed to be believable. Why would Jacob send a space user who could carry less than a quarter of the supplies to fetch supplies?" Kristy continued with her story to explain how the space came to be this way.

"But I was in the bank where the cores and food were kept so I broke into the boxes of cores and looked for space type cores. There were eight U-Haul sized boxes of cores in the warehouse and I found twelve cores. one of them was time but I didn't know this then,"

"I put each box of cores that I had searched into my space. If they killed me, they would damn well lose something!"

"I absorbed the cores hoping to make my space bigger to hold more and make my lie believable. When my space stopped growing. I didn't stop absorbing cores if it wouldn't grow out. I was hoping for the space to upgrade so I could hop inside to hide as my space would previously not hold living things."

"I could feel changes to my space with each upgrade. I just didn't know what was changing. Then the zombies broke in and the humans were evacuating. I had the last core left. I threw a few boxes of food in my space quickly and tried to jump in but it didn't work.

"So, I madly absorbed the last level six core that was time. I thought it was space. It looked almost identical to space, just slightly darker. I thought it was contaminated or because the level was so high but I finished absorbing it as the zombies were bending the vault door of the warehouse like puddy. Once again, I tried to jump in my space but it didn't work."

"Remember how I told you I acquired the habit of talking to myself, as I was an outcast?" Kristy looked at her family and they were crying, hands bawled in fists. Richard looked like he wanted to kill someone.

"I wished out loud that I could go back to the beginning and fight zombies and dump that cheating bastard. The time started to reverse."

"At first, I thought it was a strange way to have your life flash before your eyes. Then I felt something strange in my space when I looked. I found that one of the boxes of crystal cores had gotten knocked over in the space by the food I shoved in there. And the floor of my space was absorbing them."

"I thought why the hell not let's see what happens. I'm already dying, so I dumped all the crystal cores out. For the space to be absorbed just to see what it would do."

"I opened my eyes and watched my life rewind like an old VCR tape till I was standing in the grocery store."

"It wasn't until someone needed to get past me that I realized I went back in time and was not dead."

"I could feel my space still there so I looked and found this. Half of the boxes of crystal cores were absorbed by the space to create this and do remember those were all level four and higher."

"This is the bad news I had for you. My space eats magic cores to run." Kristy took a breath, the time, space and fire manna is pulled from me, everything else comes from crystal cores so the upkeep to have a farm is expensive." Kristy dropped the bomb of how much work they would need to do just to keep the lights on so to speak.

"Now for the good news Matty just gave us. The space can be charged by you guys too!" Kristy was ecstatic. Worrying about running out of specific types of Manna cores was a problem she thought she would face but living people can meditate to refill their manna. Like a core that never disappears.

"We only need a little of each of your types of cores to keep for emergency backup. And you have control over when to charge the space. just open up like Matty did. However, I suggest you level up first so you don't get sucked dry."

"Oh, also don't give your manna unless you have the time to meditate to get more. because we cannot meditate in the space. there is nothing here that should be pulled from the space. Though the ground and air are made by manna it is already designated to type so not able to be drawn in to refill your manna core's and does not register as manna to the animals living here it's not floating densely in the air like outside. Even the wind is a passing manna so sleeping in the space won't give you manna ether."

"This is a source of real food. We don't want to downgrade it. I think we can draw from the space if we link to it. Like the opposite of what Matty did but I don't think that is smart to do." Kristy said to them.

Brenda handed the baby to Matty who was still looking at Kristy and gave Kristy a hug.

"Thank you, thank you for living through hell and coming back to save us, thank you for thinking of all the things we could desire in the zombie apocalypse. We love you. And you will never be that powerless again. We will get stronger together." Brenda told her.

Matty and his dad also came in for a big group hug then the baby started crying from being squished.

We separated and Richard took the baby from Matty. He was rocking her. "She needs a diaper change."

"Space change the diaper." Kristy said and everyone looked at her. "What, I tried to change the diaper myself before it was hard and gross. She screamed and wiggled a lot. The space is very efficient. Do you think she cares who wipes her but?"

"Where did the diaper go?" Matty asked

"It was not reusable so it went to the waste pile with all the animal shit. Convenient right you never have to worry about stepping in cow dung." Kristy said with a smile.

"Speaking of cows, why is there only one? weren't you at a dairy farm? There are so many pigs." Richard asked.

"Oh, I can freeze them like in a video game." Kristy said "I store the animals and time stops for them."

"One cow gives three gallons of milk a day. I have thirty-eight of them. I'm worried that we will run out of space just storing the milk. So, I put them away for now."

"The pigs still need three weeks before they can be weaned from the momma pig, then we can store them and raise three at a time. Right now, only the momma pig needs to eat food to feed the piglets so the cost of raising them to that point is not bad but we need to acquire or grow more food for them because I only have enough for three months." Kristy explained the situation.

"The chickens and bunnies are still growing. I was thinking of putting away the bunnies to lessen the wood and water power usage but that's not necessary anymore. We just need you guys to get stronger."

Kristy walked over to a patch of grass and left three piles of one hundred and two crystal cores of each of their power types. "With the one I handed you earlier this will get you to level five." Kristy took the Baby from Uncle Richard and the bottle from Brenda who was still holding it half drunk. Poor baby she didn't get to finish before she was squished.

Kristy smiled "have fun we're five years ahead of the apocalypse."

"Oh, yah what was the upside to killing a lot of zombies all the time? Other than getting rid of them so they don't get stronger and eat us?" Matty asked while absorbing the cores in front of him.

"Well, the combat power users in the future get strong like the zombies the more exercise you get the more the manna in the atmosphere gets absorbed in your muscles there is a plus side to feeling the burn of exercise and it's the speed and strength boost just like the zombies get with each upgrade."

"I have a theory that it is because the zombies never stop that they get so strong so fast. But we have plenty of time here as long as we go out and fight with our boost and good food. I wonder if we can get stronger than the zombies." Kristy informed them.

"I don't want to look like a muscular woman." Brenda complained.

"It's the manna that condenses. your figure would look super healthy not like you're taking steroids. How do you think Jessica dragged me to the warehouse? She was stronger than me. We need to be strong to be safe."

"In my last time frame, it was believed to have been caused by the combat powers. That gave superhuman strength and speed because all of them had different varying degrees of strength and speed once they reached fourth level powers."

"But I moved my combat fire to level four and did not get stronger or faster so this is where my theory comes in. because I didn't have to adjust to new strength. I finished reaching level five fire magic."

"If you're out there actively fighting zombies you will awaken a power at some point or you will die because the zombies are that strong. Your wishes at the time of awakening help with what power awakens. So, when a normal person is desperate their body will absorb more manna."

"So, everyone awakening new powers by fighting were also priming their bodies with manna to survive. We did not get stronger physically because we cheated."

"Right now, you are absorbing one thousand dead zombies' worth of magic cores, if we were to kill real zombies there is a one in nine chance of finding these combat cores so if we were to fight the zombies and level up naturally, we would have killed over 9000 level one zombies to get where we are."

"We're doing it backwards, get a power upgrade before fighting the zombies. but we can eat and sleep in here. So just like the zombies when we are not in the space we could always be moving. Except for meditating but it's not like the zombies are moving fast all the time."

"This is why I wonder if we can get stronger than the zombies. Sometimes they move really slowly if they are not chasing after someone where we will be moving normally or running, kiting and attacking zombies. Does that not mean our muscles will advance better than the zombies?" Kristy shared her theory.

"Granted they do start one level ahead of us in strength but they are one level below us in speed for now." Kristy was rambling her thoughts now as she burped the baby.