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User:Taln Fan/Summary:Cytonic

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{/{spoilers|sky3}} {/{update|Sky3}} This page contains a chapter by chapter summary of Cytonic. We hope this summary will make it easier to find specific areas of the book, as well as providing a quick plot refresher for anyone who doesn't want to take the time to reread the entire book.

Prologue

Characters
Plot Summary

Spensa and M-Bot stand in front of the nowhere portal on Starsight, contemplating it as Superiority soldiers come closer. Spensa grabs M-Bot and Doomslug, and enter the nowhere. Spensa senses the delver she changed and turned away from Starsight, and she can feel its fear. She communicates with it, and it tells her that she can learn more about her powers in the nowhere. The delver puts a location in Spensa’s mind, a location important to cytonics. It tells her to walk the Path of Elders. Spensa sends Doomslug a message to go home, then activates her powers and hyperjumps to the location.

Part One

Chapter 1

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Plot Summary

Spensa emerges out of the nowhere portal, M-Bot with her but Doomslug missing. She finds herself in a jungle, an unfamiliar sight for her. She tries to sense Doomslug but can’t feel her. She tries to reach for Detritus, but can’t sense it or any other familiar location. M-Bot expressed his anger at Spensa for abandoning him on Starsight, and flew off angrily into the jungle, crying. Feeling alone, Spensa goes over her supplies, which include an energy rifle, her jumpsuit, and her translator pin. She also finds a small pile of silver glowing sand, and her father’s pilot pin. She finds it strange, since she didn’t have it on her when she entered the nowhere. Another cytonic speaks into her mind, and Spensa asks for help. It warns her to be quiet, and to describe her position. Before she can describe it well, something attacks Spensa.

Chapter 2

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Plot Summary

Three aliens attack Spensa, two Heklo and one dione. Two more join the fray, and they defeat Spensa and take her gun. They assume Spensa is a Superioirty soldier. They take her father’s pin, saying that its valuable. The pirates decide to ransom her back to the Superioirty. As the pirates start to head back to the ship, the face of one, a burl, begins to melt.

Chapter 3

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Plot Summary

The pirates tie Spensa to a tree root, and rush over to help the burl, whose eyes are glowing white like a delver’s. M-Bot appears, and talks to Spensa. He apologizes for over-reacting. Spensa apologizes as well, and forgives M-Bot. M-Bot only then realizes that Spensa is tied up, and tries to figure out how to free her. The pirates abandon their melting comrade, and they retreat to their ships. Vlep levels the rifle at Spensa, but at that moment a dinosaur rides into camp, a mustachioed man on its back.

Chapter 4

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Plot Summary

The man riding the dinosaur wears a flight jacket, and is in his fifties. He dismounts, and M-Bot helps free Spensa using his light-line. The man introduces himself as Chet Starfinder, the cytonic who talked to her earlier. They want to steal a starfighter, but they are taking off. They go for Vlep instead, who has her father’s pin. A ship aims its destructors at them, but the grig attacks it, distracting it. Spensa and Chet attack Vlep, Spensa snatching her father’s pin. The white-eyed burl’s eyes have been grown over completely with skin, but still glow with two white dots. It screams at them, and Spensa and Chet run off into the jungle with M-Bot.

Chapter 5

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Plot Summary

They crash through the jungle, and M-Bot follows, expressing fear. The pirates notice that the grig feeds on energy, and the beast grows sluggish. Spensa introduces herself and M-Bot, and Chet is disturbed by the fact that Spensa brought an AI into the nowhere. Chet calls M-Bot an abomination, and M-Bot practices insults by calling Chet a noodle-brain. He then asks Spensa to rate his insult from one to ten. Chet offers to be Spensa’s guide in the nowhere for the price of one reality ash per day, the silver dust that is produced by reality icons. Chet tells her about the Path of Elders, a series of the first nowhere portals, left by ancient cytonics, and Spensa tells him that she must follow it. The grig, though it should’ve fallen asleep, crashes through the frost towards them. It chases them, its eyes glowing white. Spensa and Chet break out of the jungle, and before them is the edge of the floating island, only empty air out in front of them.

Chapter 6

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Plot Summary

Spensa follows Chet along the edge of the fragment as the grig continues to chase them. M-Bot talks about his emotions to Spensa, who doesn’t reply. Chet leads them towards a close fragment near by, and Spensa has M-Bot go connect his light-line to it. He returns, but the light-line isn’t long enough to reach across. With no other choice and the grig right behind them, Spensa and Chet jump towards the other fragment. Spensa grabs on to M-Bot, Chet missing and hanging onto her waist. M-Bot’s acclivity rings weren’t strong enough to keep them in the air, and they plummeted briefly, then were stopped, held in place by M-Bot’s light-line. M-Bot retracts the light-line, bringing them up and onto the next fragment. Spensa inspects Chet warily, finding it strange and convienet that he happened to find her.

Chapter 7

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Spensa asks Chet about the nowhere, saying it looks different from when she hyprjimps, and Chet tells her that she normally passed through the lightburst at the center of the nowhere, whereas they are in the belt. He tells her that things from their world, like jungles and oceans leak into the nowhere and form fragments, the floating isalnds in the belt. He tells her that the Path of Elders contains memories from ancient cytonics, and tha the’ s never walked the path. He tells her that eventually she’ll have to travel all the way to the lightburst, which is roughly fifty thousand klicks away. He also tells her that she could hypothetically hyperjump home from the lightburst. She asks him about his past, and he says he doesn’t remember his life before the nowhere, just some caverns and old ruins. He says he’s been in the nowhere for around a hundred and seventy years, and that he can make himself not age using his cytonics. Chet jogs off to secure a cave for sleeping, and Spensa has M-Bot do some math to figure out that he crashed on Detritus right around when Chet entered the nowhere. Spensa realizes that Chet is M-Bot’s pilot, and they take off towards the cave.

Chapter 8

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Plot Summary

Spensa enters the cave, and asks Chet if he knows the name Spears. He frowns, and pulls out a uniform patch with the name SPEARS on it. He vaguely remembers crashing on a planet, and Spensa tells him that he was once M-Bot’s old pilot. Spensa is shocked, and Chet finds it slightly ridiculous. Spensa is slightly suspicious at the near-impossible coincidence. Spensa tells M-Bot that they have yet to come across an “evil wizard” yet, and that heroes always do in stories. Spensa tells M-Bot to wake her if Chet wakes up.

Interlude I-1

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Plot Summary

Spensa’s mind drifts, and her mind finds Jorgen, fighting in a Poco in a battle. His face is covered in a dozen tiny cuts. He looks up and apparently sees Spensa in the reflection of his canopy glass. He talks to Spensa, able to feel the meaning of her words. Spensa tells him that she’s in the nowhere. She asks what is happening there, and Jorgen says it’s been a few days since the delver came to Detritus. Jorgen tells her that they got a communication from Cuna, and that they found a huge colony of taynix, which they’re trying to use as hyperdrives. Spensa realizes that Jorgen is a cytonic, and Jorgen says he’s been training with Gran-Gran. Spensa says she has to stay in the nowhere for a bit to learn, and says she thinks Winzik will try and use the delvers as weapons again.

Spensa leaves Jorgen, and hears Brade communicating with the delvers, speaking for Winzik. He offers to silence the annoying buzzing if the delvers destroy enemy cytonics for him. The delvers agree to consider the trade. Spensa drifts off into true sleep.

Part 2

Chapter 9

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Plot Summary

M-Bot wakes Spensa up, telling her that Chet woke up and left the cave. Spensa walks over to him, and they discuss their cytonic abilities. Chet says he also has the ability to visualize the entire belt in his head. As they cross several fragments, Spensa noticed the great variety to the different fragments, and the journey is physically challenging. Chet tells her that there’s a pirate base near their destination where they could steal a starfighter. On one fragment, Chet stopped Spensa just before she stepped into a sinkhole. They approach a desert fragment, and several starships fly overhead.

Chapter 10

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Spensa and Chet hide under a tree as the ships pass, and Chet tells her that the different pirate factions, like Cannonade and Broadsider often fight each other aggressively. Spensa tries to make a club out of a branch and stone as they waited underneath the tree, but fails to tie the stone properly. Chet shows her how to do it with a spare shoelace, and shows her how to make different types of knots. She names the club Skullbreaker. Spensa hopes to see sand worms on the desert fragments, but M-Bot tells her that there aren’t any. Spensa is pleased however, to find that there are a type of poisonous arthropod that can kill people. They approach the target fragment, and Chet tells Spensa what he knows about the delvers. He also asks about living on Detritus, and tells her that the fragments float on acclivity stone. M-Bot tells them that they won’t be able to jump across to the fragment for ten hours, and Spensa is surprised at Chet’s poor sense of time. Chet and Spensa talk about stories, including Paradise Lost. Spensa argues with Chet, thinking that Satan is the protagonist of the story, not Adam and Eve.

Chapter 11

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M-Bot wakes Spensa and Chet hours later, and they cross to the next fragment. There are mysterious markings, and Spensa insists that they mean something, but aren’t a language. M-Bot grows frustrated, and whacks Spensa on the head with his grabber arm. They find the portal, which is locked, preventing them from getting back to the real world that way. Spensa opens her mind and senses the portals, and accesses the memories within. She sees a fragment being formed over hundreds of years, time being sped up rapidly. Spensa notices that there aren’t any delvers during this time. A dione stepped through the illusory portal, then aged and died, with no way off the fragment. Spensa discovers that cytonics are made when the nowhere leaks into the somewhere. At Spensa’s questioning, M-Bot tells them that the first delvers were documented during the First Human War. Their discussion is interrupted by a impact shaking their fragment.

Chapter 12

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A small, dense, rock fragment has crashed into their fragment, which is mostly made of soil. The fragment Spensa and Chet are on begins to collapse, and M-Bot helps them jump over an opening rift in the ground. They manage to escape to a nearby fragment as the small compact fragment completely destroys the larger soil one that they had been on. Chet tells Spensa that he’s never seen two fragments collide so violently. They decide that they need to steal a starfighter from the Broadsider base before they can continue on the Path of Elders.

Chapter 13

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Chet works on plotting a course to the Broadsider base, and Spensa and M-Bot watch three star fighters survey the destroyed fragment. Spensa sees that the pirate pilots are passable pilots, but not very skilled. She also realizes that she misplaced Skullbreaker during the chaos, which saddens her. Spensa contemplates their journey so far, and finds the adventure exhilarating. M-Bot tells Spensa that he’s sad that though Chet is his pilot, he calls him an abomination. Spensa comforts him by saying that Chet will adjust, and that Spensa is M-Bot’s pilot anyway. M-Bot also tells Spensa that he’s still mad about her abandoning him on Starsight, and Spensa apologizes again. Spensa feels the delvers communicating to her, and sees that they are very angry at her for corrupting one of their members, the one who had attacked Starsight. She realizes that they sent the rock fragment to destroy her. Chet finishes planning the route, and asks her how she feels about sailing.

Chapter 14

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Plot Summary

Chet and Spensa find a wooden building, and take the doors of their hinges. They make a rough raft out of the doors and large nuts, and set sail across a large ocean fragment. A garqua, a sea creature, comes up to their raft, and Spensa names it Gnash the Slaughterer. Using fruit to motivate it, Chet used Gnash to let them traverse the ocean fragment faster, having the creature tow them along. They reach land, and Chet tells Spensa that the Broadsider base will pass by the next day. Chet tells her that when he had a ship, he tried to fly towards the lightburst, but lost all of his memories in the attempt, slowly losing himself the closer he got. Spensa thinks about the frightful passing of time in the nowhere, and drifts off to sleep.

Interlude I-2

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Part 3

Chapter 15

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Chapter 16

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Chapter 17

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Chapter 18

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Chapter 19

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Chapter 20

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Chapter 21

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Chapter 22

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Chapter 23

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Chapter 24

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Chapter 25

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Chapter 26

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Interlude I-3

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Part 4

Chapter 27

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Chapter 28

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Chapter 29

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Chapter 30

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Chapter 31

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Chapter 32

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Chapter 33

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Chapter 34

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Chapter 35

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Chapter 36

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Interlude I-4

Part 5

Chapter 37

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Chapter 38

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Chapter 39

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Chapter 40

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Chapter 41

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Chapter 42

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Chapter 43

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Epilogue

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Notes

{/{summaries|stub}} {/{Skyward}} [/[Category:Skyward|+3]]

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