Chapter 27: No More Before
During the Hamartian invasion, we have this touching exchange between Barar and his true love, the A.I. Ali:
"I will go and bring them [your family] back to you." A tear fell from her eye...
"See you soon," I said.
"Bye," she said softly.
That's it. We never hear from Ali or Barar's family again.
Now suddenly, Barar's (you-know-what)-doll/namikil Jaren has just mentioned that Ali is on Secondaris of all places. But instead of bringing him directly to reunite with Ali, Jaren takes Barar and his rebound girlfriend A.I. Deborah (and Wesley as a third wheel) on a walk to casually explain hundreds of thousands of years of Secondaris history.
Since time passes much quicker on Secondaris, it has had time for a lot of shenanigans, which we don't care about at all. Basically, Jaren made more namakils because, I don't know, boredom? And they got into fights and some of them wanted to become human, and they got into more fights. This happened several times over. Like I said, we don't care about this.
If you're curious about the mystery ship that attacked Plenarius a few chapters ago, that was a break off group of Namikils (who maybe thought they were human Plenarians?). And the second ship that blew up the first ship, and then blew itself up was another group of namakils that disagreed with the first group. How they found Plenarius, I don't know, because Secondaris is in another galaxy.
Finally, they find Ali, and she can get back to attending to her Daddy issues. She blows up all the namakils, they all transport back to Plenarius, and oh look - here's Barar's family!
It's almost touching, if I weren't such a hardened
SKEPTIC
The most exciting thing about this chapter is that we finally get all three of the AI girlfriends together, and they are all fighting over Barar (or as Ali calls him, "Daddy"). For example:
ReplyDelete"Deborah took Ali's wrist. "Hands off my daughter," I said, looking sternly at Deborah." It's a classic Harem Anime set up. We've got the crying, babyish girlfriend (Ali), the bad-tempered, bossy girlfriend (Deborah), and the smart, serious girlfriend (Jaren).