A second installment of Ragnarok Conspiracy today.

In this new draft chapter from my upcoming first novel Ragnarok Conspiracy, Bjarne finds himself being called out of retirement and being sent on a Ragnarok-Society mission after having reported on his experience with Robert during his guest lecture.

Note that this is still a work in progress and an unedited draft. All feedback is highly welcomed. If you didn't read my previous chapters, please look at the index at the bottom of this post.

While I do attempt to write each chapter for part one, two and three of this novel in such a way that it works as an independent part of flash fiction, reading the chapters from start to end does, I hope, add an extra dimension.

Have fun reading and I hope you are enjoying the story so far.

I am looking for beta reading input. Please comment your feedback below regarding this (or any of my other) chapter(s). I'll upvote any constructive feedback and will run a @croupierbot mediated lottery with whatever the SBD part of the payout will end up as for this post.

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Caverns

Amazon rainforest, August 23 2047

Bjarne might have been through this many times before, he hadn't done so recently. Neither his mind nor his body was in anywhere close to the shape they had been in before. But even if they had, encounters with the Hylobo-Sapiens weren't a thing that could ever have become a pleasant experience.

This assignment had not been what Bjarne had anticipated when he had reported about the shocking questions that this young Dutch student had asked at one of his guest lectures. How could this youngster know how to even ask such a question about the unbreakable cord? Questions that society members had been attempting to unravel for decades?

Had a society member violated his oath of silence? They had to get to the bottom of this, and as at many events in the past, they needed the special abilities of the Hylobo-Sapiens to pull that off. Hylobo's didn't particularly like working with humans, or "Homo-pseudo-sapiens" as they often jokingly referred to humans.

For one, history with humans hadn't exactly given them much reason to be comfortable about. Homo-Sapiens. Dangerous and primitive beasts that they knew to be a violent and vicious creature.

Many Hylobo's had been killed by humans throughout history. All out of fear. Out of religiously-fed false projections. These creatures, Humans, were oh so quick to turn into violent mobs.

And then the awful names that had been used for them.

Hylobo's had been referred to as 'evil trolls', 'daemons, and more recently, as grey 'aliens' by the Homo-Sapien's.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Hylobo's were very much terestian and compared to humans and their tendency for violence, the meek and skittish Hylobo's was about as evil as a two-week old human baby. They could be quite dangerous though. Very dangerous indeed if approached with the wrong mindset.

Bjarne disliked descending into the cave systems to seek an audience with the Hylobo's? He had retired from the society two years before. But this was big. Big enough to drag him out of retirement.

The alliance between the Society and the Hylobo's had been an uneasy one at the best of times, and this wasn't the best of times.

With the most of the transport sector and more than half of the food industry having been made obsolete by replication printers, global warming was on its way out, and the idea of the Holocene ending made the Hylo's even more nervous than they naturally were already.

The idea that a new ice age could bring the Jötnar back to earth was the Hylobo's biggest and oldest fear and their sole reason for accepting any kind of alliance with Homo-Sapiens.

An alliance that felt uncomfortable to Hylobo-sapiens and Homo-sapiens alike.

Given their special abilities and cultural sensitivity, approaching a Hylo took a special type of person, the type of person Bjarne had proven himself to be.
Hylobo's were telepathic. Not the type of sideshow trick telepathic or the friendly twin mind telepathic that a rare human could be. No, they were a badass type of telepathic. The type that would let a visitor like himself get lost in the labyrinth of their cave systems for weeks by the power of their mind if that visitor happened to startle them with his conscious thought.

And Hylo's were startled oh so easily by humans and their rude thoughts.
And oh were they ever sensitive with regards to rudeness or secretiveness.

Obviously, it took amazing skills from a human, Bjarne in this case, to control his own mind in such a way as to not even think a single mildly rude word while descending the dark moist and slippery labyrinth cave systems. Yet Bjarne needed to control them, at least until a guide would feel safe enough to make an overt mind link and guide him to the underground Hylobo city.

As Bjarne approached the entrance of the cave system that he had used so many times before, Bjarne cleared his mind from all concerns about the Hylobo's, all concerns about the Holocene and most importantly all concerns about the moon situation that had resurfaced. Resurfaced before the society had prepared the world for the coming battle.

As he filled his mind with happy thoughts about his granddaughter playing with their dog, Bjarne began his descent.

In the dim light of his led-suit, Bjarne noticed this entrance to the cave system had grown in disuse amongst the Hylobo. The walls were now covered with a layer of dark green moss, and the stones that made up most of the cave floor were covered in a thin moist layer of what appeared to be slimy algae that made them extremely slippery.

When Bjarne noticed a giant centipede of almost half a meter in length that instantly hid away between two large boulders. Seeing the monstrous centipede, Bjarne almost slipped in the wrong mindset. It had been such a long time. 'Replace fear with wonder', as Bjarne recalled the mantra from his youth, a mantra that he had no longer need to use on any of his more recent visits, Bjarne realized just how old and rusty he had become.

These centipedes, while being quite dangerous due to their poisonous bite, were indeed marvelous wonders of evolution.

Replace fear with wonder indeed. A mind filled with wonder to the Hylo was what a kind smile would be to a human. While a fearful mind to the Hylo was like the foaming mouth of a crazed animal suffering from rabies. As his led-suit illuminated his surroundings, Bjarne kept his mind on the rock formations looking out for whatever allowed him to prolong his state of wonder.

When, once in awhile, his feet slipped on a slimy wet rock, the image of his granddaughter kept him from thinking negative thoughts.

About 20 minutes had passed before Bjarne sensed a probing presence in his mind. Now was the crucial moment. The reason why he was set to the task of arranging this abduction. This moment required a type of diplomacy so different from human intercultural diplomacy. A type of diplomacy that it would probably be seen as the inverse of diplomacy by many a diplomat. In normal diplomacy, one needed to 'think' carefully what to say. No such luxury with the Hylobo.

The Machiavellian thought patterns of average diplomats had proven to be a prime source of diplomatic incidents in the distant past. Bjarne cleared his mind of thoughts and decided showing would be more appropriate than thinking. As he felt the Hylobo exchanging the quite formal stream of thoughts of customary introduction ending in a request for the intent of the visit, Bjarne guided the visitor in his brain to his memory of Robert Gottschalk and his question.

Then a set of events took place in Bjarne's mind that even with all of his Hylobo encounters Bjarne had not in any way been prepared for this. His previous encounter with the Hylobo's had all been rather emotionless from the part of the Hylobo. Then this was his first time with a female Hylobo as guide. As Bjarne and the female, that had identified herself as Azzraela to Bjarne, replayed Bjarne's memories of Robert Gottchalk's question, for a short moment Bjarne felt the barrier between his guide and the Hylobo collective thin significantly.

Azzraela was startled quite intensely by the memory and then had relayed the memory into the collective. By doing so however, she had exposed Bjarne to part of the collective, and more shockingly to part of the collective memory that went back many millenniums.

First Images of a giant raging wolf monster were projected in his mind together with a deep emotion of fear and despair. Then other images from the collective were projected into Bjarne's mind. Images of a past much deeper both beautifull and frightening.

An Image of a large and prosperous city that seemed to be made of glass and ice. It's inhabitants having Hylobo traits, but different in a some really major way.
Their eyes were not the huge black eyes needed to live in the daylight-deprived underground cities the Hylobo resided in today, and these Hylobo in this vision actually wore clothes, They even had bodily hair! In fact, they looked almost human as far as their clothing, hair, and eyes were concerned, yet with bodily traits, that made their kinship with their distant yet closest cousins, the Gibbon, all that more obvious. Their slender figures, their arms that in relation to their body size were quite a bit longer than those of humans.

Then, above the city, there appeared a pitch black round circle. A huge black sphere, maybe. What Bjarne concluded must have been the Hylobo's distant ancestors all collectively looked up at the sky. The black sphere disappeared for a short moment. Less than a second. Then with a flash of light, a large section of the blue sky turned a bright yellow. A look of puzzlement in the almost human eyes of the proto-Hylobo's, and again the same deep feeling of fear flashed through Bjarne's very essence of being.

Then darkness. The link with the collective was severed leaving Bjarne to struggle with his pose. What did he just witness? "No, no distractions!", Bjarne rolled back and focused again on his memory of his guest lecture. Replaying his memory again in his mind for Azzraela to witness.

A feeling of compassion washed over Bjarne that he realized came from Azzraela as a form of Hylobo apology.

I'm so sorry for that, my friend, I did not mean to expose you to that. The friendly voice of Azzraella spoke in his head,

Thank you so much for bringing this urgent matter to our attention. How can we assist?

Still startled by his experience, one word formed in Bjarne's head:

"Abduction!"

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Index

If you enjoyed reading this chapter, please have a look at the other chapters I've posted on steemit so far and follow me for more installments from this series:

Part One: Beginnings

1. Dakila
2. John
3. Gwen
4. Bjarne
5. Rachella
6. Pete
7. Wietse
8. Xavier

Part Two: Concequences

1. Gwen
2. Dakila
3. John
4. Pete
5. Bjarne
6. Wietse

Part Three: Robert

1. Carnage
2. Soviets
3. Debrisphere
4. Roughnecks
5. Fiat 500
6. Lecture
7. Caverns
8. Cipher
9. Confrontation

Part Four: Midgard

1. Tables Turning
2. Trolls
3. Captured
4. Mindless
5. Reset
6. Air
7. Coordinates
8. Forgotten
9. Foreign Dreams

Part Five: Nilfheim

1. Perseus-Pisces
2. Holocene Past
3. Jötnar
4. New Allies
5. Old Enemies
6. Whack-a-mole
7. Antifragile
8. Cold start