[Archive] The Way of the Blue [Lantern OC][Story Only]

The voice seems to come from all around us and I have no time to process it before something strikes me, sending me flying sideways past the crowd and directly into the treeline, annihilating several trees before my momentum is lowered enough for the next one to just smash me instead. For a moment I can't breath, the wind knocked out of me.

Restore.

Firing myself off the ground I come tearing out of the trees, the cheetahs scattering in all directions as Elise is circling upwards, dodging what appears to be several Skal charging her. Dodging, weaving, smashing them away with giant green fists until one of them lands a solid punch on her and she's sent flying into the ground the way I was.

Great. Super strength shortstacks, that's just what we needed.

The ones in question attacking her are slightly different from the ones in the crowd. They look faded, drained of color, eyes almost glowing yellow. I'm not sure what the hell is going on but I don't really have time to think about it. Elise needs the support.

Blue ring, synchronize.

In progress. Symmetry established.

I come in from their left as another one of the super-cheetahs attacks her in a frothing rage, smashing it - no, her - flying into another one of the attackers.

"HERETICS! INFIDELS! YOU WILL NOT TAKE MY PEOPLE FROM ME!"

Oh, great. A soft fizzing sound and a slump behind me as a would-be sneak attacker is cut down by Emil at a distance. The super cheetahs suddenly collectively slump, falling to the ground as the blood spilled from the few we couldn't avoid hurting begins to... waggle? No, it's moving of its own accord, pooling together.

The form that it shapes itself into is roughly humanoid but with no defining features. That would be impressive, considering I can still see it flowing and moving around. It lashes out at me, extending an arm into a tentacle to strike at me. Raising a shield the tentacle slaps off of it, smearing the shield for a moment before the excess blood is dropped as I lower the guard again.

"We're not trying to take anything from you, we're trying to stop them from killing and destroying everything without massacring them!"

"LIES! DEATH TO THE OUTSIDERS!"

Some of the cheetah crowd are beginning to charge us again, but they don't seem to be enhanced. Just the ones who seem to be taking their 'god' or whatever the hell this is seriously. The rest hang back, clearly terrified.

I look over at Elise. "You know what? We have bigger problems to deal with today." A MASER forms next to me and I take a moment to aim carefully at the blood elemental thing.

"Knock knock, Avon calling." Fire.

There's no real noise. A sort of buzzing hum from the construct, that's about it. It's the kind of weapon you expect for there to be a big, bright flash or something. A loud noise. Some kick back. Something. But nope, it's none of that. Firing it feels like a whisper and a gentle breeze, right up to the point where the blood elemental basically explodes. Flash-boiled, there's a kind of gargling scream before boiling blood is splattered in every direction and the charge of the cheetahs stumbles.

The ones rushing us slow down and look confused. The ones on the edges, farther out near the trees, they scream.

"TEKELE! TEKELE, NOOOO!"

When I drop the construct I move over to where the elemental was, poking it with a foot. Nothing. Hm. The fighters scattered around us who seemed so confused before look shattered now. Shit, did we just kill their god?

Is that even a thing?

I draw one of the closer ones over. He's clearly alive but doesn't resist, almost limp in how he's given up. When I put him down he just kind of slumps back to his knees.

"Get up. Tell me your name."

A few seconds pass before he can muster himself enough to stand, staring at my stomach almost blankly. "Khur."

"Khur, you mind explaining to me what the fuck just happened?"

"You killed Tekele. Our homes, our families, our culture and now our god." He hangs his head. "Just kill us and be done with it."

"We only fought because it attacked us. In case you haven't been paying attention, we've been trying to help you."

"You only bring a slow death. If you're merciful, you'll finish it now."

"No." I can see his face twisting up. "I'm not going to kill you all because this isn't the end. Haven't you been listening? You don't have to carve out another place in Skal. We'll help you rebuild elsewhere."

"If we leave Skal, what would we be then? Who would we be? Roaming, hunting, fighting is all we do, all we know."

"You'd be something new." Elise floats over to me, one hand on her side. Landing next to me she doesn't look like she's leaning her weight on her legs, she's sort of hovering.

"Elise?"

"I'll be fine. Just a cracked rib."

"That isn't fine."

"Not now."

I turn my attention back to Khur. "So, what will it be? A slow death, or a new life?"

"Remove them from Skal and they will be lost."

I tilt my head up. "Oh good, you're still here! Are you ready to actually talk now that you're done your little tantrum?"

"They will be lost. They are children still in the creche. You have already tempted enough of our people to travel other lands. You will kill them if they leave!"

"How do you figure that?"

"The magic which strengthens their minds to make them intelligent lives with deep roots here. Without it, successive generations will lose the process of integration already at play. The process will not be complete for another century at least with this clan."

"You're not a god, are you?"

"What is a god to a believer?"

I heh softly. "Why didn't you start with this instead of attacking us?"

"Swift death is the price for such trespass in Skal. You're simply annoyingly difficult to kill."

"Thank you. Look, we have bigger fish to fry, here. These distortions -"

"They are a threat to everyone, not just Skal. Go. Tekele will keep the Yellow Sun clan in check. My people will endure this."

"Please don't make us come back here. All we're trying to do is keep the peace."

"Peace is a lie. In Skal, only nature rules."

I sigh. "Fine. Fine. Whatever." I reach over and put a hand on Elise's shoulder, restoring her. "We'll talk more when we come back, Tekele."

"Perhaps."

 

"This isn't working."

I turn to look at Emil when he speaks. We're back at Saxali's camp while Tiala packs up the last of her things. Kuri is taking the time to do a little hustling, trading for some herbs while we're on downtime and behind us, Elise is half asleep. She's sprawled out on a pile of cloth, mostly wall-hangings and cushions. Taking the time to rest while she has the time to rest.

"What do you mean?"

"When I sent you off to go find those things, I didn't mean for like, five minutes, man." He sighs. "It ain't your fault. Soon as you get back, things start falling apart. But from what you told me, it might be because you're not prioritizing. We're not prioritizing. We're running around trying to put out fires when we should be looking for the thing throwing sparks around."

I take a moment to consider that, then nod slowly. "You think I should leave you guys for now and go looking for the last lightsmith?"

"Not before picking up the indigo battery, which you still haven't done, you damn slacker." Elise throws a small rag at the back of my head. "Dad's probably right. Nothing we've done today really required both of us."

"But -"

"Nah." She waves me off. "Look, if I get into trouble I can still call in that ship you found. The AI on it - Lucca? Weird name - won't shut up about having a crew again. Pretty sure asking for help wouldn't be a problem. I'll call her in if we need air support. Since we're dropping Tiala and Kuri back home anyways, taking a moment to go talk to her about it should be fine."

I sigh a little. "Feels weird going alone."

Elise grins. "Miss me already? You haven't even left yet."

I throw the rag that hit me back at her and she gigglefits, making me smile a little. "Alright. Do me a favor and check in on Holly and Jay too?"

"Sure. They're sweet cats, I like them."

Standing up, I pull the indigo staff out of subspace and lean on it a little as a walking stick. "Alright. Get in touch with me if you find out anything."

Slipping out of the yurt they're lounging in I rise up into the air. Ring, can you tell me where your central battery is?

It's currently hidden in a subspace pocket half a kilometer below the surface of a minor satellite orbiting a dwarf planet in the oort cloud of this solar system.

Okay. Guess I'm going for a flight, then. Usually I use the blue ring for FTL, but since I'm dealing with indigo exclusively today, lets give this a try.

Ring, plot course to that location and transition.

I have a better idea.

There's a sound like paper sliding against paper and next to me, a circle opens in the air, tinged with indigo at the edges. On the other side of it is a dirty ice plain stretching out forever - or so it seems - the patterns broken up by dirt and mineral contamination, making the ice range in color from dirty brown to mud brown to ice-white to gray. The sky on the other side is black, no stars visible.

Frowning a little I move through the aperture, which closes behind me with another paper-sliding noise, nearly silent. Where am I?

In my head my location lights up relative to the rest of the solar system, bright in my minds eye. I just know where I am compared to where I was, like I'd walked four feet and still had a mental sense of how far I'd gone. Kneeling down I push a little at the ice with one hand, swiping at it. Dust clouds around my fingertips like silt in water but without atmosphere there's nothing to suspend it and it slowly drops back to the ice. Low gravity.

When I look behind me I find the sun looking back, though at this distance it's little more than a particularly enthusiastic star. Why can't I see more stars? The light backwash from the surface? It doesn't seem that bright.

Whatever.

Give me a HUD and find the battery. Track it in realtime.

Unable to comply.

What? Why?

I bring my right hand up to look at the blue ring, which sputters weakly. The hell? Ring, state charge.

86% charge remaining.

Okay, so it's not that. Too close to the indigo battery, or something? Frowning, I look at my left hand.

How about you?

I'm good to go.

Hm. I need to find this thing so I can get back to helping people. Locate it for me.

Overlaid on my vision, an indigo HUD with atmospheric pressure (almost nothing), gravity and relative distance to target appears along with a crosshair to show me which direction it's in. Almost right below me, as it turns out. How to get to...? Ring, I know you can fabricate and annihilate matter, but can you change energy to matter and transmute materials?

Yes. It's a little energy intensive, depending on how dense the material you need is and how big it is.

So burrowing through the rock by transmuting it to something else is doable?

Yes. Alternatively, we can simply burn through it.

Oh. That sounds like a better option. An indigo bubble shield forms around me and the staff begins to glow brightly as I drop down towards the surface, plunging into it. The sound is a bit like grinding gravel across broken glass, the shield below me shimmering brighter than the part above me. Then we break through what has to be the largest lava bubble I've ever seen.

The light from the shield isn't even bright enough to reach the far edges of the cavern. Dropping it, I raise the staff above my head and intensify the glow to reach the light further but... no. Below me, I can feel a resonance as I increase my focus on the staff.

For them.

Yes, this feels like the right place. As I lower down to where the bottom of the cavern should be, a structure comes into view, rising out of the darkness almost ominously. Black stone with indigo embellishments. I think it's some kind of temple, like the one I found the blue battery in.

Time to go see if anybody is home.

 

The 'temple', for lack of a better description, is black volcanic glass. I thought it was polished stone at first but the texture is all wrong. The indigo highlights and tron lines running through it glow in much the same way my staff does. It looks like it would be right at home in here.

Instead of open pathways of blank even stone every surface is made of centimeter deep engraving of linear, hard edges and lines, square or rectangular surfaces, like a map of some idealized city broken down to the most minimalistic way possible. Parts of the lines have smaller writing in them but neither ring is translating it. 'Decorative' would be my thought but the writing is glowing indigo as well. The carvings cover every surface, every wall, everything. In some places they stretch out, clearly forming part of the buildings aesthetic. Probably.

The entrance is circular, a barrier of indigo light covering which seems to be permeable to me. There's a little resistance from the blue ring until part of the indigo field around the blue part of my environmental shield at my hand begins to turn blue as well and suddenly lets my hand through. It didn't stop me, but having one limb suddenly feel like it's encased in wet cement feels weird.

The inside of the entrance leads to an antechamber much like the blue version of this place. As before, I reach up and touch the lines in the wall -

O to see this suffering! They cry out in pain, how can I not answer?

- and only wince slightly at it this time. It's not as intense to experience in a burst like that when I've felt a low strength version of that ever since I put the ring on. With the blue ring, its light is there but it's only at the forefront of my mind when I used it. With the indigo staff, it's something I feel like a low-level buzz. Part of why I prefer to keep the staff hidden away.

But it's too useful as a means to augment my power output so I don't get that option in situations like this, where I might need to defend myself at any moment. Instead I turn away from the markings in the wall, heading into the heart of the temple.

The indigo central 'battery' reminds me of newly cooled lava, the way the surface twists and folds around on itself. It's in the rough shape of an hourglass, if the hourglass were a sphere in the middle suspended by two V-shaped prongs holding it. Indigo light flickers around it in smokey wisps which move like slow-burning fire. The sphere itself is solid, made of the same strange, organic looking stone but with the same tron-lines that are present in my staff and the temple surfaces.

Now I just need to get it out of here.

Thankfully, the teleport circle that the indigo ring seems to be able to do should make that relatively easy. Walking up to the central battery, I lay my hand against it, then tap the head of the staff to it and close my eyes.

The sheer level of the emotion is overwhelming. Flashes of suffering without any discernible context, an overwhelming sense of powerlessness and the need to do something to stop it. Anything.

Opening the portal is easy. Finding the focus to move the battery through despite the intense sensory overload isn't.

When we get to the other side, the slip-paper sound of the portal closing makes me breath a sigh of relief while I move the staff away from the battery. The relief doesn't last.

Touching the staff to it again, I pick the battery up and move it to its place among the other five. The seal has changed since the last time I was here. It feels... wilder, now. Rings, tell me everything about this anomaly.

Analyzing. / Analyzing.

Unable to determine. Scans inconclusive.

It appears to be a fracture in space-time to a pinprick of an unknown anomaly. Physics breaks down within. It appears to supersede three dimensions and the visible fracture here is very unlikely to be the true extend of the fracture.

I look down at the blue ring. Hey, how come you can't scan that and indigo can?

Error.

What the hell? Define error?

It would not be an error if that were possible.

I frown. Ring, self-diagnostic. Are you feeling well?

Diagnostic complete. Ring functions unimpeded.

Then why the error?

Unknown.

You are being very unhelpful.

We all have our off days.

I sigh a little, then my eyes drift to the blue central battery I placed here awhile ago. Rising up from the floor I move over to it, then begin circling it.

Blue ring, run a diagnostic on this instead.

Diagnostic complete. External device detected.

Son of a bitch. Rising up to the top of it, I run my hand along the rim of the flat surface between the two 'handles'. Then tear the device away, staring at it.

It's small, black and had yellow tron lines. Even as I look at it, it flickers and dies out, then falls apart in my fingers like broken pastry flakes made of ash.

Turning I quickly run a scan on the other central batteries. It doesn't take long to find them.

As I move from each to each, I pull the devices off. Always the same. Like the one on mine. The moment I tore the one off the blue battery I could feel the chamber open up to me, my scans pulling proper returns and the blue rings sheer alarm at the thing in the middle of the room.

Four devices in total on every central battery but one.

Fucking Nemesis.

 

"Ring, contact Mina."

I'm pacing the massive chamber housing the anomaly and the central batteries, headed towards the exit.

"Hmm? Well hellooooo Ai-"

"No time." The fact her head is showing up above the indigo ring in orange instead of indigo is throwing me off a little, but I can't be fucking around right now. "Nemesis did something to the central batteries. Attached something to them. I just removed it. I don't know what it was he did but the moment I pulled it off the blue one I was able to get a proper scan of the anomaly and it's far larger than we thought, Mina."

"Oh? How large?"

"How does 'beyond three dimensions' sound to you?"

"I've scanned it myself. The anomaly just confused the ring. Are you telling me he somehow did this?"

"Yes? Yes, I am."

"..." Her portrait has frozen up for a second.

"Mina?"

"Go back to Durjak. I will meet you there. Tell them not to panic when we arrive."

"Wait, we?"

"Yes." And then her signal cuts out, the Mina-head above my ring vanishing.

Uhhhhhh that doesn't bode ominously at all. Ring, Elise me. Actually, wait one second.

As I rise into the air out the front of the temple the burrow-guards have surfaced, facing me. Instead of ignoring them I approach them.

"Do you understand me? This is very important."

We.͠ H̕ęa͟r.͡

I point behind me, at the temple. "This place is dangerous. Threaten the continent dangerous. If you live nearby, it may destroy you if or when it runs wild."

We.͠ H̕ęa͟r.͡

And then they burrow back into the sand and vanish. Well. Okay.

Hopefully they got the message. Okay, now, Ring.

As I rise up into the sky and begin plotting course to Durjak, Elise's face pops up above the blue ring.

"What's going on? I just got a sudden... I don't even know how to describe it. Like I was half asleep before I just woke up."

"Nemesis interfered with the central batteries somehow. Mina is incoming, possibly with other orange lightsmiths. She said 'we' but didn't say how many 'we' was."

"She coming to fight? Oh, I'll give her a fight."

"I don't think so. Hers was rigged too. I think she's coming to join us in going to kick the shit out of Nemesis."

"Oh. I have really mixed feelings about that."

"I imagine so. Don't kill each other before I get there."

Wait, I'm being stupid. Halting mid-air I pull the staff out of subspace and draw a circle in the air with it, then step through behind Elise as she stands in the middle of the tavern-slash-command-center we tend to hang out in. Bradley's been making a fair bit of money off us and even more when we're not around simply for the fact he has our business. Emil is sitting next to her and Ren is sitting next to them, but on the floor because no seat in the house is strong enough for her. Bradley took one look at her and forbade her from even trying.

"Haha, the man of the hour! C'mon Ainsley, what kinda fight you got for us this time?" Ren's in good spirits, a stein of beer in one hand. She's leaning back against the side of the booth Emil is in.

"Offworld. We're going to go have a little talk with Nemesis about what he's been up to lately. Has there been any word at all about the violet lightsmith?"

Elise shakes her head. "No. Nothing. Ring, scan for the violet light of love."

"Not found."

I nod. "We might still have time then. I can't be sure of what will happen when they show up. I'd remove the batteries we've placed around the anomaly but I have no way to tell if that would make the problem worse or not. I think our best bet is to stop him doing whatever he's trying to do before that happens."

Ren rumbles. "You know what his place is like?"

"Nope."

"His forces?"

"No idea."

"Do you know where he even is?"

"Only in approximate terms."

Ren stares at me for a full five seconds, then looks at Elise, then looks at me. "... ...So, when do we go?"

I can't help but chuckle. "It's not that easy. I'm not sure if Vera's gonna side with him or not."

"If she does?"

I sigh and hang my head. "Then we'll have to fight her too. But whatever's going on can't be allowed to continue unmonitored. How's the situation with the distortions?"

"Kinda insane." Emil sighs. "We're losing control. In Skal, the local gods seem to be empowering the locals themselves somehow to beat back anything hostile that shows up but things like the cheetah's home are still happening, just in smaller pockets. The distortions themselves seem to be shrinking in size - smaller patches of places being replaced - but there's way more of them now."

"This is the worst possible time for us to have to go focus on this. Gods damn him."

"You know, I oh shit." I feel it too.

Alert! Orange light detected! / Alert! Orange light detected! / Warning! Orange light detected!

Yeah, no shit. I walk out of Bradley's as they come in to land in the town square.

Mina is lowering down from the sky surrounded by dozens of glowing figures, people made of orange light. As she lands on the pavement they take up formation along the tops of the buildings, hovering just above the surfaces rather than land. When her feet touch the pavement they all collectively scream together.

"HAIL MINA, MISTRESS OF THE ORANGE LIGHT!"

Yeah, this doesn't feel like her patting herself on the back at all. Yikes.

"Hi handsome. Miss me?"

 

When we pass through the indigo portal, I let the rest of them through first. Mina, Elise, Emil and Ren in full armor and gear, along with a few toys we cooked up based on stuff Elise and I have scanned or nicked the designs for. Mina drew her construct-slaves into her ring, because apparently just having an army up her sleeve is just an orange light thing. My threat assessment of her has gone way up and Elise is refusing to let her out of her sight.

Stepping through, I let the portal collapse behind us and pass through the group, the others having stopped to just stare a moment.

Psyche, by all rights, looks like it ought to be dead. It isn't. We've come out at the top of a massive canyon halfway up the cliff face of jagged spires reaching into the sky like daggers. The sky itself is a disturbing orange-red, causing everything to look bloody. Everything is cast in shades of red. Like just being here covers you in gore.

The canyon drops down away from us, not formed out of erosion but looking like the land split apart. As though some massive set of hands had broken the face of Psyche like a loaf of bread being split, almost. The canyon's bottom is difficult to estimate. Ring?

The bottom of the canyon extends nearly 20 kilometers below the lithosphere.

Phew. That's really deep. Damn.

On the other side of the canyon the land is flatter but still broken in massive shelves of rock tilted against each other, forming tilted daggers pointing at the sky. Along the flat ends, scraggly looking grass clings in patches to the rock face and at the tips of the spires grows some kind of fungal colony, darkening the tips against the rest of the rock and making them look bloody. I gesture to Emil and Ren and they kick off the ledge, the skids in their boots kicking in. Form a HUD laid over my vision and give me data on the others position when they're out of line of sight. If you can, keep track of their ammunition and alert me when they're running low.

We won't let them down.

Good. As we pass down towards the broken plains, Elise and Mina fan out behind me on either side.

"So, what do you plan to do when we get there, mmm? Confront him aggressively and pick a fight immediately? Have a little chat?"

Mina's tail is lashing side to side behind her. She's flying sideways almost lazily, arms folded under her breasts, her entire body at a 45° angle as she faces me only slightly while flying in formation. It's interesting - I favor armor that's made of high-grade materials I can fabricate, integrated with systems I've scanned from the genkits and a bunch of other sources. Even without the ring I'm still really mobile, able to skid along the air the way Emil and Ren are doing right now. All three of us have the short-duration energy bulwarks we can pull up in front of us. Only lasts a few seconds but they're surprisingly resilient, even if they do nothing against energy-based weapons.

Mina seems to favor something closer to leather armor augmented with magic somehow. I can see runes and spellbindings made directly into it. They're not glowing orange either, so the ring isn't powering them. The only parts the ring is altering are the gold embellishments she's wearing, mostly jewelry. The scelera of her eyes is still black but the iris has changed to match the color of her ring, which is glowing brightly. An orange sigil is hovering next to the armlet she's wearing on her right bicep.

"I think that depends greatly on what Vera is doing, whether or not she's there. We also have to find him first."

"Usually I'd be more inclined to take our time, recon a little, find out what this place is all about. I'd like to know why the hell there's so much smoke particulate in the air here. I don't think we have that option this time."

I glance over at Elise. "You think we should just scan openly? He might detect it."

"So? It's better than running around in circles trying to find some trace of him just to lay an ambush. Besides, we don't even know what he's up to. If he's just sitting around in some fancy castle drinking all day, kicking his door in might be easy."

Mina snorts derisively. "You really think it'll be that easy? Hilarious. Trust me, it won't be."

"Mina, I wouldn't trust you with a wooden spoon."

Mina nods. "Probably sound advice, since I'd shove it up your -"

"Ladies, please. Can we focus? We're here for a reason. You can sort your... differences out later."

Mina and Elise glance at each other, then look away. No, that's probably not over. Something I'm going to have to look out for.

"Emil, Ren. Double back, we're going to try doing a direct scan."

The two of them loop around, landing on the construct platform Elise generates as we stop. Ring, scan for the yellow light of fear. Ignore traces, I want to find the most active source on the planet.

Oh dear. The most concentrated source is a structure about 550 kilometers north-east of this position. A great many people are there and all of them are very, very afraid.

I tilt my head and wince slightly. Mina narrows her eyes a little when I do that, so I wave her off. Ring, explain what that was, please?

Enough ambient fear is being generated that a sympathetic resonance is building through the indigo light.

Shit. This is like when you turned orange to talk to Mina, isn't it?

Correct. The indigo light, as you demonstrated with Elise earlier, is capable of 'borrowing' other emotional resonances. You simply struggle with it because you have damage to your ability to feel.

I felt that feedback though.

It's probably going to get stronger as we get closer.

Oh. Great. "Indigo ring thinks that he's that way." I point in the direction the ring specified. "He's terrorizing a huge number of people over there for some reason. Probably something yellow light related."

"Ah, fuck." Mina sighs, rubbing the bridge of her nose. "I was hoping he wouldn't do something like that. He gets stronger the more people are afraid of him."

"Oh cool!" Ren laughs. "We're not just going to kick his ass, but he's superpowered too? Man, I gotta find a souvenir to hang up in my bunk when this is over."

 

Approaching the centerpoint of fear the indigo ring described, we're sticking to conventional flight rather than trying to transition there. Mina was very graphic about the level of destruction that can be done to a lightsmith being too careless about it. Apparently magic provides a way to counteract the re-insertion into the physical universe as a defense against summoning, typically resulting in a splatter of gore as whatever is trying to manifest is ripped apart by reality refusing to allow the planar fracture to effect the space around the ward.

No thank you.

As we approach the spot, I'm getting returns on scans. It's some kind of massive fortress-city, putting me in mind of something that flickers in and out of my memories sometimes. Three circles of walls with the outer walls at ground level, the next set slightly raised, the third above them. The third set of ringed walls acts as the base of a citadel hanging over the city like a skyscraper from hell, all jagged edges and hard lines.

Yellow circuit board lines run through the exterior of the building, flickering around a massive yellow light sigil embedded into its face on each side, so that nobody in the city can ever forget who's above them.

Very subtle. I can make it out with the unaided eye from several kilometers away.

The inside of the city seems to house a lot of buildings but they're built in the same jagged, linear designs as the citadel, writ micro. The walls themselves must be at least ten feet thick, clearly built to withstand a ground invasion, which makes me wonder how they plan to stop us considering we're fl-

As we approach the cities walls, our flight auras cut out and the genkits skids suddenly deactivate.

-ying. Oh. That would explain it.

I reach out and construct armor envelops Emil and Ren as the five of us meteor dive towards the cities outer walls. We're only about 60 meters off the ground and in freefall, the armor fully enveloping them at the same time I'm manifesting my own armor around myself and Elise is making a massive... sheet?

When we hit the surface of the construct it bends inwards like an elastic, then vanishes just before we hit the point of arresting our momentum. Instead of splattering against the ground, we drop about six feet with a collective number of 'oof's to go around.

Mina is the first to her feet, coiling her knees against her chest and springing up to a crouch, then standing and brushing herself off. "Hm. Nine out of ten, ferret."

"Thank you so much for your approval, cat."

"You're welcome." Mina even manages to sound chipper about it as she trots past the rest of us, who are just getting to our feet.

"Thank you, Elise." I bring my right hand up. "Rings, synchronize."

Established. / Established.

"Hmmm?" Mina glances back at us over her shoulder. "You're coming, aren't you?"

Ren snorts at her. "You wish." Mina actually recoils slightly as Ren takes a moment to wink obviously at her, overacting. "You wouldn't be able to bear it." Then she pulls her weapon off her back and checks it over, leaving Mina staring at her with a mixture of annoyance and very obvious lack of attraction.

"Huh, so that's what that's like."

I pat Mina on the shoulder as the rest of us pass by her. "Yep. We're all learning new things, today." Elise can't help but snicker while Mina takes a moment to shrug, then visibly brush it off and follow along with us, wearing an air of nonchalance.

"Not being able to fly is going to be a problem for mobility."

"Don't worry dad, we still have constructs. Should we go knock on the door?"

To be fair, it's a pretty fucking impressive door. The gate to the city is a massive portcullis. Naturally, it's closed. The entire structure must extend at least thirty meters into the air, the slab clearly meant to rise and allow people in under it.

Ren strolls right up to it and taps 'shave and a haircut' against the stone with the tip of her weapon. "Huh, kinda reminds me of concre-"

She recoils back from the gate as a vibration begins running through the ground, moving back to the rest of the group. Her and Emil train their weapons on the gate as the slab begins to rise, the vibrations from it making the ground itself tremble as it moves. It stops about three meters up, leaving the gate open.

What floods through from the other side can only be described as a ghost canine. It's far gone enough I can't tell what kind. The skin is black but stretched like a ragged cloth across something too large for it but instead of muscle or bone underneath it's some kind of pale green... something. The skin is held together by a frame made of what might be bone, or maybe metal made to look like it. The whole thing only has a dog-shape because it was made to look like a dog. The shit shifting around under their skin puts me in mind for half a second of parasites swimming around inside an insects body and -

Don't fight it. Use it.

- the indigo staff changes color right about the same moment the dozens of abominations reach us.

Emil and Ren open fire, the light pulses shredding the things apart. Where they do damage, where the frames or skin are broken, the green shit inside spills out like caustic acid. Elise forms a wall in front of us right as the pulses rip the first ones apart, her barrier visibly abrading where its getting hit with the things guts. Then suddenly we're surrounded by orange fighters streaming around Elise's wall, kamikaze'ing against the acid dogs and simply respawning from Mina's ring while she stands behind us.

I raise my left hand and -

Destruction.

- a wave arcs outward in front of us, hitting Elise's barrier from behind and shattering it, then continuing forward and shredding the remaining acid dogs and orange slaves apart. Beside me, Elise shakes her hand out from the feedback, then turns to look at me and realizes I've changed color, taking a step back from me.

I don't move for a moment, sort of... not basking exactly, but trying to hold onto the feeling, the emotion of fear. To remember it before it slips away again.

Then it's gone. The staff flickers back to indigo, the sigil within correcting itself.

For half a second I feel a sense of loss before it slips away too. The entire group is now looking at me save for Mina, who's walking around them in a wide circle to approach the gate.

"Are... you okay, dude?" Ren pokes the side of my head lightly, looking a bit concerned.

I nod slowly, then sigh. "Yeah. C'mon, let's get going."

As I walk past them, the others exchange looks for a second, then turn to follow.

 

"Why did the gate open?" We're carefully making our way towards the center of the city, having passed the first wall. Once the initial wave of demon-dogs was fought off, we haven't seen anything. "I can't think of a good reason for it."

"Trap, you think?" Ren's gotten quieter, moving from bar-brawler mentality to professional soldier. "All these nice, narrow streets. Good for ambushes."

"Just keep your eyes open."

I'm following behind Elise and Mina, keeping both of them in my sights for now. Elise seems relatively calm but Mina's tail won't stop twitching and her ring is glowing furiously. Not sure what's going on there.

"Have you not been here before, Mina?"

"No. Just because you saw us together doesn't make me, Nemesis and Vera friends or anything. I'm here together with you two, after all."

"Us four. We count too, cupcake." Ren rumbles it at her without taking her eyes off the road in front of us.

"I suppose." Mina shrugs it off, sounding uninterested. "I don't like Nemesis much. Aside from the fact his chosen name is really fucking lame, he's a jackass and likes to mess with people. I have better things to do with my day than entertain a clown."

"So why'd you show up with them before?"

"Where do you think I got all my construct slaves from? Didn't you look at them? They're not Tovari."

I frown, thinking back. "I wasn't paying them much attention, I just assumed you were creating them with the ring."

"No. He paid me in people. The concubines are fun, but I didn't have much use for a bunch of slave-laborers who only needed to be fed so I turned them into orange light instead. Now I don't have to feed them and they don't even mind their role."

Elise is looking at her completely blank-faced but everything I know about her says she is probably seething right now.

"Mina?"

"Mmmm?"

"We don't like slaves. We don't like slavers. The more you talk like that, the more you make us hate you. Since we need to work together here, stop talking about slaves." Elise narrows her eyes at her. "But when we're done here..."

Mina makes a dismissive gesture at her. "Yes, yes. I'm so very threatened." She sounds bored. "Anyways, no, I'm not Nemesis's drinking buddy. My stake in this isn't anything more than the fact he's apparently been messing with my central battery. Nobody gets to fuck with what's mine." She growls the last sentence out.

As we come out from the narrow street we pass into what might be generously called a town square, though it's neither at the center of anything, nor particularly square. An open courtyard of paved stone. Arrayed out in the courtyard are what might be called troops. At the vanguard are some more of the demon-dogs and it looks like their handlers are some kind of onyx-colored elves. Their skin reminds me volcanic glass. Shiny, dark enough to make them look like moving shadows. Only the ring enhancing my vision is allowing me to pick up on details.

They don't have hair. Only ritual scarring, the design different for each of them. They're dressed in what might actually be considered half decent armor, leather with plating over it.

Alert! Runic etchings match known examples of sygaldry.

A few flashes of some of Mina's armor comes to mind. Interesting, it looks like they're using the same style of bound spells. Was she lying about not having much to do with Nemesis? Not a happy thought.

The armor plating itself is black with yellow highlights and even bears the sigil of fear on them, but no glowing. No use of the yellow light at all, it seems they just adopted it as his standard. Behind them tower three... things. Built like a silverback, they don't stand up so much as they partially lean on their knuckles. But they're no ape. They don't have skin, only chitin plating. The 'arms' and 'legs' look sort of humanoid but they're plated like armor, only the armor is uneven and clearly organic. The faces are a horror. A distended jaw that splits sideways with several tentacles dangling from a mouth with far too many teeth, the insides bearing preying mantis style mandibles that shift and move along with the tentacles. I don't see any eyes on the face but there's plenty of eyes all over the body. They have hair but it's shaggy, dirty looking and matted.

What the fuck has this guy been doing here?

The moment they spot us the demon-dogs charge, bearing down on us hard in an attempt to swamp us with whatever pus-acid they're supposed to be filled with. No, I don't feel hopeful about a peaceful resolution, here.

But destroying these things means nobody else will ever have to deal with them ever again and I won't lose sleep over that.

Ren and Emil are opening fire already, spreading out left and right of us to give us clear line of sight. Which us good because when I manifest the construct sniper rifle I can see Emil take one look at it, recognize it and then start gesturing frantically at Ren to get behind me.

Then I manifest five more around me and even Elise begins to look a little concerned.

When I open fire the air begins to hiss and pop violently, like tar that's been heated up too hot. Ren and Emil both cover their eyes and look away but Elise and Mina merely blink as their rings compensate for the glare. The air around me burns blue as the ring provides a real-time charge count meter overlaid on my vision that I can visibly see going down as I fire these guns. Each shot is knocking out nearly 8% of the rings charge, but the bombardment shreds the demon dogs, everything behind the demon dogs - about 1/3 of their handlers - and two of the giant abominations. The dog-things explode, hitting the ones next to them which makes them explode, a few of the handlers getting hit with it and screaming in a wet, gurgling kind of way for a few seconds as they're melted. The shots tear out the legs and lower body of one of the giant abominations, the other one getting its entire face disappeared (along with everything behind it) as it crouched down to begin charging us.

Alert! Ten percent charge threshold reached.

The construct guns disappear while Emil and Ren whip around to open fire with their much less powerful infantry weapons. Mina begins manifesting her construct soldiers again and Elise forms a bubble shield around us while the others take point.

"Recharge quickly. And Ainsley?"

I pull the blue battery out of my rings pocket. "Yes?"

"At the end of this, one way or another, I am going to kill Mina."

 

"I feel that would be a bad idea at the moment."

"Less talking, more ring charging."

I wince internally, pointing my ring at the battery and glaring at her as I recite the oath. A few seconds later, the battery vanishes back into it's pocket and I start speaking at the same time it disappears. "Elise, if you-"

"No time!" The bubble she's generating drops, revealing Mina's construct fighters either shredding apart the demon-dogs or fighting with their handlers. Some kind of dark elf? I'm going to go with 'dark elf' until I have a name for these things. Elise blasts off from the spot she's standing on hard enough to shatter the pavement under her and make me flinch, construct armoring herself just before she hits the remaining giant abomination with what feels like ballistic force. Hard enough to generate a mild pressure wave I can actually feel.

The abomination goes staggering backwards as Elise pings back from the recoil, flipping midair and firing destructive pulses at it. The thing is surprisingly fast, not trying to strafe so much as rolling sideways to try and dodge the bolts. Surprising agility and intelligence, actually. The thing actually grips part of the pavement it's on, tearing a chunk out of the ground and hurling it at Elise, forcing her to dodge. I think she's got that handled for now.

Mina's constructs are grappling and either outright killing the demon-dogs handlers or doing... something to them, orange spreading across the dark elves who fight madly to get away but can't. The ones who succumb to it shudder and... ah. That's how she makes them. Shit, she doesn't even have to do it herself? Her minions can make minions?

That's really fucking bad if Elise makes an enemy of her.

Emil and Ren are tearing up the demon dogs themselves, though there isn't many left. At the same time Elise launches her attack they're just cleaning the last few up, kiting backwards to try and keep as much distance between them and their targets as they can. While Elise fights I move backwards, opposite her and generate armor for Emil and Ren. Restore.

For a couple seconds Ren looks startled as her fatigue and the minor injuries she's accumulated so far vanish, her suit repaired. Then she grins viciously, noticing the construct augmentations to her armor. One look at Emil and a nod is all she needs to charge down the remaining dark elves. Even Mina's minions pull back, the woman herself raising her eyebrows as Ren rhino-charges past her into the crowd, grabbing one of the elves by the head and using him as a club to send another two flying. Then she starts actually attacking them.

Gotta hand it to her, it's kind of impressive. Though I can't help but wince when she starts tearing things off them.

Elise is handling the giant abomination pretty well. I don't think she's trying to actually beat it outright so much as get a feel for how the things fight, what works against it. The abomination itself seems to have realized it's being toyed with and turns away from her, trying to charge us instead. Mina gestures lazily at it and the construct minions start to charge it down only for Elise to bisect the thing with a butcher's cleaver large enough to shatter the ground under the thing. For half a second it continues on its own momentum before the halves topple away from each other and it twitches a few times before going still.

Mina looks a bit put out by that, pursing her lips before turning to her new additions, which are kneeling before her. Heads touching the ground, hands out in supplication. Some ritual of hers for new additions? Something she needs to do? Whatever, she's distracted.

I move over to Elise at a jog, slowing as I come close to her and then reaching out to touch her shoulder.

She's not hostile right now! If you pick a fight with her, she might try to do to us what she just did to them.

Elise glances at me, then flicks her eyes back to Mina.

She captures sentients and keeps them against her will, Ainsley. You're not going to dissuade me. You're also REALLY not impressing me by trying to stand up for her.

I narrow my eyes at her a little.

Don't even. My only concern is that we already have enough concerns. Do not put us in danger for your vendetta, Elise.

She lazily knocks my hand away from her shoulder, then heads over to Ren at a lazy stroll without looking at me.

Taking a deep breath, I exhale slowly, catching Emil looking at me in puzzlement. Ugh, I wish I could explain to them, but with Mina here...

The new construct-minions flicker and I turn to look at them just in time to see them vanish into her ring. She unfolds her fingers slowly, staring at the ring for a moment afterwards, contemplative.

"It seems our friend Nemmy has been busy. This place? This city? It's his engine, his factory." She glances at us. "This whole place is just to bolster himself. It's his core." She points at the citadel hanging above us. "He's up there someplace. These guys, they're just the greeting party. Something to slow us down a little and keep us distracted."

"How do you know this, exactly?" Emil sounds genuinely curious.

"I ate them. I know what they know, now." She makes a face. "Everything they know. This place is disgusting, even by my standards. Tearing it down will be satisfying."

"Emil, Ren." Both of them look at me. "I'm not sure it's responsible of us to bring you further. I'm not saying you can't hold your own, but you're very very valuable to both us and Durjak and things are going to get... messy."

Emil looks over at Ren, who is currently doing her best impression of a successful Ninja Scroll character. Half of her is red. "That doesn't bother us very much, no."

 

"This looks like a good spot to rest a little." Emil even sounds tired. The rings keep us fresh and ready to go as long as we need and I've been restoring Emil and Ren but we've been fighting on and off since we got to this place and the stress of constantly being in combat is beginning to take its toll. I can see it happening despite the physical resets.

The part of the city we've reached is a vast ruin, a section undeveloped by whatever force Nemesis calls his people. The whole, vast walled sections enclose large tracts of land but the insides aren't uniformly developed. The whole thing seems to have been built on the corpse of a destroyed city - because of course he would do that - and the sections we entered to the south were more populated than where we are now.

Nemesis seems to build things with a style that reminds me of bismuth in the hard, angular lines and edges his buildings make. None of the buildings are especially tall, save for the citadel in the middle of the city. I guess he didn't want anybody getting a look in his corner of the 'looming over people' market. Even the roads, when they curve, do so in hard corners and lines. Haven't seen anything like vehicles yet so I guess they don't have to worry about making turns. These ruins though...

The group is resting in the half-standing ruins of a larger building, in one of the more stable parts of it. The room in question only has a single opening but it's not a window, just a hole in the wall where something small but hard smashed through it. Destroyed furniture is all over the place but it was a simple matter to shove it all over to one side of the room so we'd have space to relax a little. Ren is leaning back against a wall, sitting on the floor with Emil next to her. Neither seem bothered by the lack of seats. Mina is off to one side of the room watching us from a construct chair while Elise is on the other side of the room watching us from the other side of Ren and Emil.

I'm watching the outside as much as I can through that hole in the wall. Whoever built these ruins had an architectural style that makes me think of old european countries mixed with some of the building styles I saw in Allasfere before it was destroyed. Some kind of link there?

Not that I'll ever get to find out, I suppose.

"You going to sit down, Ainsley?" Elise says it quietly but doesn't look at me.

"Just keeping an eye on things outside."

"You'll be doing that for hours and honestly? It's weird having you standing there being so still."

I turn to look at Elise. "Huh?"

"You kind of... just stop moving. When you start thinking heavily, go inside your own head. Kinda freaks me out. You're not telling your ring to do that?"

"No. Rings?"

"Not me."

"When introspective, the user tends to hope more for detachment from physical distraction than situational awareness and this ring acts accordingly."

"Oh." I frown. "I suppose I could just watch from outside the room. I won't go far."

"Stay within yelling distance."

I nod to her and slip out of the room, using the staff as a walking stick for balance in the spots where the floor has been chunked out or debris is in the way. This place reminds me a little bit of an old office building, or perhaps a school. Ring, anything or anybody nearby?

Yes and no, in order.

Oh? Give me the bad news.

A marker appears in my mind, one floor up and a little bit behind where the group is. Looking up there's no holes in the ceiling but the buildings an open ruin so moving down a little, I can just climb out of the open end and up to the second floor. Just have to be careful not to get spotted. Just because they're not nearby doesn't mean they aren't looking.

A quick look and I dart upwards, the staff disappearing into my subspace pocket to free my hands up. Pulling myself up is a breeze compared to how I was when I first got to this place. Getting up to the second floor by the ruined wall only takes a moment.

The hallway up here is a different color. The floor downstairs is gray but the one up here is some kind of blue tile. Some more debris but it's tapering off as I make my way back into the building. The rooms up here are pretty much the same but the furniture is a bit more intact than downstairs, since whatever blew the side of the building out seems to have hit the corner of it and just took whatever was between the walls when it happened. Some desks, a cot. A shelf of unlit candles.

Papyrus. Hmmm.

Using the ring to unfurl it intact, the sheets seem to be dried out, brittle. Ring, can we scan these without physically damaging them?

Yes.

Do it, then load it all into my head.

Done.

Then it feels like the fist of a demigod just punched me in the temples from both sides. I make a quiet hurk noise and drop to my knees, holding my head as the ring loads everything at once and it turns out the translation is actually pretty fucking dense.

While resisting the urge to puke my guts up all over the floor, the information starts to take a sort of hazy focus as the ring helps my brain process it. The building was a school but it was a specialty one. I think this whole place... whoever these people were, they ran everything on magic. This school is for runecraft. I just loaded the magic inscription version of Websters Dictionary into my head and my brain isn't liking it.

After a couple minutes I shake myself out and stand up, leaning against the wall.

Which is how I end up getting blown out of the side of the building when Nemesis smashes through the wall into me.

 

Alert! / Alert!

Everything is kind of a blur as I go careening out the side of the building, impacting something - the ground I think -

Fear Detected! / Fear Detected!

- and smashing through the partially standing wall of another building, coming to a stop as it collapses on top of me.

Yeah. Thanks. I got that.

Pushing outwards with a construct barrier, the debris explodes off me while I establish construct armor at the same time. The first thing that registers is the fact Nemesis is hovering about four meters above me. The second is that the area is being flooded with troops from every direction. Both are a bit concerning but I focus on Nemesis as I can see Elise and the others already beginning to fight back behind him.

"Ainsley my boy! You don't call. You don't write. I was starting to think you'd forgotten me, honestly." He places his hand over his heart as he floats down to hover just above the ground. "I'm hurt. Coming to the neighborhood to party and you don't even call ahead? Dude, I would've brought snacks."

"We found the devices."

"Oh? What devices would those be?"

"The ones you planted on the central batteries."

"Ooooh those. Yes, I figured that would eventually happen."

I manifest a pair of twenty meter plasma cannons next to me, both aimed at him. "Stop fucking around and explain yourself!"

"Declined."

He flickers and the ring spins the guns to correct the firing solution while I kick the skids of my suit on. I might not be able to glide on the air here but the friction systems still work. Dismissing the guns I replace them with a jetpack and use it to maneuver sideways in a hard strafe to avoid whatever he's about to do, which pays off as the ground where I was standing is torn apart by some kind of deep purple beam, leaving a plume of dust behind it. The shot gives me a firing solution and even as I slide in a circle around him the guns are coming back, but he's moving as I move, matching my attempts to maneuver.

Problem is, the fucking bastard can still fly. Whatever is effecting us apparently doesn't apply to him.

Fire, construct barrier, strafe, hard stop, jump. While mid-air I use the recoil of the guns to propel myself, bouncing upwards with each shot while he fires himself sideways and flies 'round in a half circle above me, his construct armor barely cracked. I know I'm getting direct hits in and he's just tanking it like it's nothing. While moving in his arc he's firing destruction pulses back at me, forcing me to focus on on my defense, moving and creating layered barriers in front of myself. Sliding just out of reach of one of the pulses I let it fly past me and come to a hard stop, turning and slipping backwards through the hole it just blew in the wall of the building behind me.

Catch me if you can, motherfucker.

Smashing through the walls indiscriminately I aim behind myself, letting the construct barriers flow away and reform behind me. Stop, hard strafe to the left through the door. Gravity generator.

Thank you Noah, and your fancy floating platform.

When Nemesis follows the corridor down and tries to stop in front of the door to turn towards me, I activate it and create a three meter wide space in front of it with a gravity shear of more than 300 G's. Nemesis stops, looks at me and then promptly pancakes into the floor just in time for me to manifest my plasma cannon and unload on him as hard as I can.

For a second, as it happens, everything goes silent. The ring cuts the noise out completely as the construct's muzzle flashes a pure white, nearly blinding light. Only the ring itself keeps me from blinking away at the sheer intensity of it. I can feel the vibration throughout my body, the floor and probably the walls right up until they and Nemesis disappear, the beam cutting a furrow with him at the bottom straight out of the building and through the next building and... I think the next one, but at that point I don't care anymore and I'm already turning away.

Tearing through the building I race towards where Elise and the others are, hitting the ground and using a construct to accelerate myself while using the skids to cut the friction between me and the ground. It's like skating on wet ice and the ring is working doubletime to keep me balanced. I'm letting it handle most of my legwork. Jumping I cut the friction back in and run up a broken wall with my forward momentum continuing upwards and the construct giving me a nudge over the top of it.

The building we were in is kind of gone. More of the giant abomination things that met us as the gate have rolled in and are smashing the shit out of it. I can't see the others. Ring, find them.

Not found.

I glare at the ring. Fuck you mean, not found?

Something is interfering.

Ugh. Kicking off the wall I hit the ground and turn away just in time for Nemesis to come blasting out of wherever the hell I buried him.

Oh. Right. I could do that.

If I can't locate the others right away, it makes sense to bug out and try to regroup. I'm not really interested in fighting him where he's strongest, here. Transmuting the ground below me, I knock out the wall I was just on, burrowing down even as debris covers the mouth of the tunnel I'm creating, then collapsing back down on myself. It feels a bit like going down a bumpy children's slide, sort of. Just as I start to figure it's safe to stop, I break through into some kind of chamber and come barreling out the side of the ceiling, spinning wildly and hitting the cave floor hard.

Nnnngh.

That could have gone better.

 

I'm sitting cross legged on a rock at the bottom of the cavern I broke through, leaning my elbows on my knees and working my way through an MRE that I stuck into one of the rings at some point. It's pitch dark in here, save for the light coming from me, but I have the ring compensating for it in much the same way it did when I was deep below Allasfere. The 'sonar' the ring is producing is happening in my brain instead of my eyes, I'm pretty sure. I mean, it worked in The Matrix, right? They'd plug your brain in and you'd just see or hear or feel whatever. I suppose when the ring is augmenting my senses it does something like that.

Finishing the sandwich I destroy the wrapper, making it not-exist rather than just leaving it here. Stretching, I get up off the rock and begin looking around. The cavern itself is irregular, not so much a big room or anything as much as an even slice of open space underneath Nemesis's city. Hmmm, interesting. The ruins extend down here as well. There's a partially collapsed bridge a couple hundred meters to my right, where the rock narrows and then opens up again. Not much of an issue for me.

Rings, state charge.

73% charge remaining. / About 97% left.

Hmm. My habit of falling back on the blue ring is showing. I don't bother climbing along the walls or anything, opting instead to simply make a construct walkway to where the rock narrows. Burrowing through it isn't much of a challenge, considering how I got here.

Hmm, yep. Looks a bit like the buildings above. The parts of the broken bridge are actually still laying below at the bottom of the ravine. Interesting that the stone blocks are all intact, it looks like it had wooden supports that simply rotted away or something. But the tunnel probably leads somewhere and I don't want to come back to the surface anywhere near where I am, so wandering in the underground it is. It's a lot less spooky when you can actually see.

The superpowers are also a bit of a confidence booster, there's that too.

In retrospect, I think we were kind of being stupid here. More specifically, I was being stupid - again - and the others just kind of went with it. Not sure why Mina did, but I'm not sure why Mina does anything. Trying to guess her motives is an exercise in futility. But charging into this stronghold with such a small group was really stupid. We should've retreated the moment the flight cut out. That, right there, should have hinted that he had preparations for something like us to show up and make trouble but I was more focused on... I dunno. Getting Nemesis, I guess.

I sigh at myself. Now the group is split up and without me there, I have no idea what Mina and Elise will do to each other. I need to find them but I'm not sure how to do that, exactly. I'm not even sure how the hell Nemesis set all this up.

As I follow the tunnel it begins to wind downwards, curving in a spiral. At the bottom it comes out into an open cavern but not like the natural one I smashed my way into. This one appears built in much the same style as the city above. The air smells fresher here and there's light along the edges from some kind of bioluminescent fungus or lichen that seems to have been intentionally planted there. The light is pale and ghostly but enough that somebody used to the surface might be able to kind of see, which is helpful because the whole place is open bridges and ledges leading down to a body of moving water at the bottom of the chamber. In some places water is actively falling from the ceiling but it seems to have been piped into the room, so none of the streams water down anyplace one might wish to tread.

Interesting. Do any of these tunnels maintain that light source?

Affirmative.

Mark them out for me.

A faint blue crosshair appears in three spots of the room, one ledge above me, one below me and one on the other side of the room near the bottom. Hm, no. I don't want to go down anymore, I think.

A construct hookshot forms in my hand and I aim it carefully, firing it at the ceiling above the ledge with the door I want. The ring binding it to my hand is pretty much all that keeps it from launching me off the ledge as it pulls me with more force than I expected, sailing across the room at a swing and then cutting out to leave me dropping to the ledge, sliding a little halfway into the door. That was pretty fun, actually. I can see why Link liked this thing.

Making my way up the tunnel I come to a crosshairs. A quick test of the air leads me to the left one, following it upwards and coming out into another large cavern, this one open but with a solid floor. Which is probably why all the shacks are built here.

There's dozens of them, not built but sort of grown out of some kind of fungus. The lighting is better here but I'm in the door of a tunnel on a ledge higher up in the chamber and I'm not feeling super threatened by them anyways, judging from the state of them. Looks like some more of those dark elves - maybe I'll get a name for them, finally - but they don't look quite as deranged as the ones we fought above. None of the self-mutilation, to start with. The other part of the population is some kind of large, sort-of-humanoid insectoid. They remind me of ants, the shape of their faces. Thick legs with backwards knees, kind of like a birds legs and a set of four arms, one halfway down their 'ribs'.

I'm not in much of a hurry to jump in here when I know nothing. Getting ambushed wouldn't leave me in a position to help the others. Instead, I watch for a short time. They seem to be working together rather than one dominating the other. One of them eventually spots me, pointing and raising an alarm, but I'm not rushing in to attack them so the initial panic-and-scatter dies down after the first dozen or so flee into the tunnels.

The ones who stay to watch me seem wary, but since I'm not threatening them, there's a bit of debate among the closest to me. Then one of the insectoids breaks off, approaching the walkway leading up to the ledge where I'm sitting.

**Who are you?**

 

Victory.

Neil sat in the throne lazily, slouched a little, like the Jarl in Whiterun. The throne itself was something he fabricated based on a mod he used to have in the game, times he dove deep into it to escape from a shitty reality. It was gaudy, over the top and a little tacky in his opinion but having a massive stone dragon looming over you while you hold court is something people around here take more seriously than he would have in their place.

The room itself, sitting at the top of his citadel, was partially open. 'Partially' in the sense that he had force screens keeping the shit in the air here out but could still get the sense of the room being open and gaining the benefit of the bloody natural light that permeated everything on Psyche. The only way in was a vertical lift from the middle of the citadel, giving him a bottleneck. The lift wasn't very large so no particularly large force could invade the room at any given time. Large and shaped like an elongated diamond, he lit the room during the night with fires tinged with copper. Gives the slaves something to work at and having green fire in your throne room really unnerves folks who are used to demons and other, worse things.

While he sat ruminating, he watched the display in front of him. It was simple, really. He had Ainsley's little group stripped, strapped and put on display. Not even being tortured or anything, he just put them up like trophies while he waited for things to get into place. The bear he'd sedated simply to make her shut up, but the others he'd left conscious. Every half an hour or so, an attendant would check them to give water if they needed it, make sure they're still kicking. He wanted them to see the whole thing go down.

He knew it broke the evil overlord rules but frankly, he deserved something.

Victory.

Ainsley disappearing did bother him, though. It was the most cliche story set up he could think of, their enemy having his friends prisoner so the hero could barge in to save them at the last moment with... whatever half baked shit he came up with. Frankly, Neil was having some difficulty thinking up what that might be.

The demi-humans, things like were beasts, vampires and djinn, he'd either recruited or slaughtered. Anything not with him was swept aside. The demon lords he'd culled as much as he could, slaughtering their cults and armies and tearing down their alters. They'd come back - really pissed, too - but it would take time, more time than he needed to finish this. His goal was too important. It transcended himself, them, all three worlds. He'd briefly considered taking their little group to the dead world and trying to explain things but ultimately decided that there was too much chance they'd try to exploit it for their own ends.

It's what he would've done.

He felt a little bad for Vera. Not warning her. Not very much, though. Her little continent was the only part of Psyche he didn't have some direct control over and if she wanted to bottle up there being all goth about everything she was welcome to it as far as he was concerned. Just so long as she didn't get in the way, at least.

Glancing at Elise he caught her glaring at him and gave a slight smile. "I'm doing you lot a favor, you know."

Whatever she intended as a response was pretty muffled but the unmistakable tone of 'fuck you' was there. He nodded a little. "Yes, I thought you'd say that. What would you say if I told you that even if I did nothing, we were all going to cease to exist in about two centuries anyways?"

Emil turns his head to look at him now and Elise is just staring.

"What did you think, that I just brainwashed her? Pfft, no." He shook his head. "All I did was explain things. But, you know, since you're here and I'm here and we've got nothing better to do while I wait, why don't I explain exactly what makes you morons so funny?" Back to the glaring again.

"You see, while ago - right about the time I caught Engel, the green guy - I started wondering what was outside this solar system. The rings have FTL, right? Stands to reason we could leave." He points at Elise. "Did you ever give it a try?" She doesn't respond. "I thought not. It turns out, this entire solar system and everything in it is in a tiny pocket universe."

A look of confusion.

"Not computing? Okay. Think of this place, this little universe, as being like a soap bubble in the space between universes. It used to be part of a larger universe but got split off intentionally. Some super demi-god scientist asshole decides he wants to study a universe decaying and makes us." He shrugs. "Then? He vanishes. Little blue man goes to all the trouble of making a pocket universe specifically to access other parallel universes and then fucks off and just leaves us all to vacuum decay. Pretty shitty, huh?"

Neil shrugged. "But hey, good news. I'm here to save the day." He swung his arm across the middle of his body, striking a goofy pose. It doesn't look like it's amusing them very much. "No, really. See, I plan to stabilize this little pocket universe. I just didn't think any of you would co-operate if I told you my plan." He leaned in a little, squinting at Elise, looking her in the eye. "Did you ever wonder what happens to the universe that places originate from here? You know, the one Tovalon or Skal were from. Does the region go missing? The chunk of universe? Is it copied perfectly from one place to another? Turns out, no, it's not. It erases the planet the region came from as their universe struggles to correct the distortion. All the energy in the momentum of the planets, all the energy in their spin, all the energy of the sun, all of it goes into correcting the flaw. The universe folds up a little, a solar system disappears and poof, no more problem. Say what you will about the guy, that Krona fellow kept good notes. Little incomprehensible but thorough."

Turning away he idled his way back over to the throne. "So, how much energy do you think it will take to stabilize this pocket universe, then stick it to an established universe? They don't have fucking USB ports, after all. A lot of energy. It takes a fuckmothering lot is the answer. So let me simplify this for you."

"I'm going to sacrifice the places this pocket universe connects to. The regions that are here will be here so don't worry your little heads about that. But their home universes - just like yours - are going down the drain. Sorry about that. Sort of. Probably feels shitty to you but this place has remnants of universes that just don't exist anymore and that needs to be preserved more than a couple hundred solar systems, no more than a handful of which are actually populated. It's just triage."

The chute for the lift opened as he finished speaking and Mina flew up over the lip. Removing the mobility restriction wasn't too difficult for her. All he needed was something of her and a few hairs sufficed. He didn't bother to tell her the other things he could do with a few hairs of hers, though. Always best to save ones tricks.

"It's in place."

 

Elise is waiting.

Bound by a construct next to Ren and her father, she couldn't even move. From her vantage point it was difficult to even really make out what was doing on. They were inside a construct, bound to the passenger seats of the ship Nemesis was creating around them. Next to them sat Mina, holding her ring and watching her, slouched in her own seat a little, legs crossed at the knees with her tail over her lap. She wasn't wearing the ring, just casually turning it between her fingers, thoughtful.

If she could, Elise would tear her limb from limb. In her minds eye she was visualizing it, imagining the violence. Graphicly. She kept running the moment through her own mind between the fantasies of revenge when Mina did... something to the three of them without warning. She still didn't understand it exactly. At the time she thought it was a perfectly normal idea and she could remember wanting to just go along with everything a lot, like it was all fine. Afterwards, in retrospect, it clearly wasn't fucking fine.

She couldn't move, couldn't speak. Could only glare. Ren still wasn't conscious and in the back of her mind she was beginning to worry. She ought to be up by now.

Suddenly the construct fell apart and instead of the generalized yellow glare from every direction it just coalesced into a laser point above her. The sun wasn't that bright on Psyche. Looking around and blinking hard she found herself unbound for half a second before being yanked hard into the sand with a yelp, hitting the ground.

"I swear to everything I am and the entirety of House Tychorus, the entirety of my species, every weapon, every BOMB, EVERY CANNON, EVERY MAN WOMAN AND CHILD, WE'RE GOING TO FUCKING KILL Y-"

She suddenly found herself unable to speak, gagged again by one of Mina's constructs and screamed incoherently while muffled.

"She really is a lively one, isn't she? These genkits really seem to take their vendettas seriously."

"Honestly? I think she's just especially talented at being a bitch. We doing this or what?" Mina was following him, making Emil and Ren hover but dragging Elise through the sand like a heavy pack she didn't want to carry.

The temple. They're brought them to the temple. She recognized the doorway as she was being dragged in on her back, taking the chance to look around. She could barely think from how angry she was but years of training didn't just disappear. She'd been military for almost fifteen years already.

As they entered the antechamber she could feel the change in the air. Like being too close to a massive charge, something in the air. She couldn't see the thing from this angle but the change made her nervous. When she turned her head to the left she hitched her breath in her throat.

The last battery was in place. All seven were here. They'd already found the final lightsmith and beaten them to it.

But then, where were they?

Putting the others down, Mina let go of her, manifesting construct servants. A pair of humans she'd taken during the red sword fight, apparently. Just a little extra salt in the wound, not just her slaves but purist slaves. Elise stared at her for a moment, then forced herself to look around the room.

Yes, there. A boy she didn't know, a large human. North American, perhaps. Long hair in a braid over his shoulder. His eyes were vacant and although he held a violet ring, Mina's sigil was overlaid at his chest and forehead. Which meant either this was very very recent or she'd agreed to work with Nemesis before ever coming here with the group. Not that it mattered. Not to her. It was going to end the same either way.

As Nemesis turned to approach the anomaly, something shook the ground and a loud THUD was heard outside. Stopping mid-stride, Nemesis hung his head, sighing and turning around. "Okay, I've had it. Whoever the hell this is, I'm just going to torture them to death out of spite." Rising from the ground he passed above her to approach the doorway, forcing her to choose between keeping an eye on Mina and waiting for her chance to rip her throat out or watching Nemesis.

She chose Mina.

"Oh you picked a bad fuuUCK!" She could hear the sounds of fighting, constructs being made and destroyed. As she watched Mina, the woman didn't look too concerned. Looking away she tried to turn to look at Nemesis, only for the construct slave to punch her in the face and send her sprawling to the ground. One more thing to remember.

Flying backwards, Nemesis passed next to her and nearly hit Ren on his way by, smashing into the ground and casually bouncing off it to hover in the air, shaking himself out. "Are you fucking kidding me. Seriously? I went out of my way to leave you alone."

There wasn't a reply but a moment later, Vera passed by next to her, holding... holding the rage axe. She wasn't looking at Elise. She was watching Nemesis and Mina. Standing in front of Elise Vera glances at her but seems to pay her little mind. With a casual swipe the weapon passes just above her, passing through the construct slave close enough for it to whiff her hair, stopping in the other construct holding her father and Ren. Seeing Mina shake her hand out from the feedback gave her a little satisfaction, but the important thing is that she was free now.

The moment she was unbound Elise sprang to her feet and screamed, rushing Mina only to be sent flying backwards as Vera hurls the weapon at her.

"You didn't bring me here."

Hitting Elise in the chest, she jerks in midair, the impact stopping all of her momentum cold as the blade buries itself in her chest -

"She did."

- And flows into her somehow, making everything so clear. She drops to her knees as somebody begins to scream -

It's Emil.

- while the rage at her powerlessness and the betrayal suddenly crystallizes with a laser focus. When she stands up she finds the pattern of her fur has changed, going from a cream-white to dark red. It wasn't like the ring at all. She could feel it flowing throughout her entire body, like every moment she'd ever been in combat, every moment she'd ever fought a purist. The tips of her fur glowed, making her glimmer as she moved her arm to look at herself. Every humiliation suffered from people she knew she was better than. Every time she saw somebody die because of callousness or convenience. Every atrocity. Every tragedy. Every friend she'd lost and the inability to find the people responsible. Every casual racist remark from a human, every business who wouldn't take her money, that thunderfuck in Somalia who tried to butcher her for fucking meat. Oh yes, she remembered this feeling. The drive to kill.

Then her eyes turned to Vera.

Vera nodded at her. Yes, she could see it now. Feel it. The need for revenge. It was something her people were familiar with, the concept of giving as good as you got, with a little bit of interest besides.

Then she looked at Mina and the attack began.

 

Mina had been waiting for this. She knew since she'd taken the green ring off her that if given half the chance, it would come to this. It wasn't helping her very much.

Elise was on her, not content to hit her and send her flying but to grab her and claw at, grab, even bite at her. All the pretense of civility was gone, burned out from her and Mina wasn't sure how to fight this new, far more dangerous version of Elise. Bringing her arm up to jam it into the ferrets mouth to stop her from biting Mina's face off, it occurs to her that she'd sort of been relying on Elise being sane when this happened and that wasn't the case any more. She was prepared to handle a fight against an Elise she could rile up into making mistakes or subvert.

This was far worse.

Not content to let go of the arm Elise thrashes her head to the side and then suddenly Mina's arm is on fire, red... blood?... Disintegrating her arm. Not her ring arm, thankfully, but Mina isn't thinking about that. It's the hand that was holding the green ring and she no longer has it. She's screaming madly and wanting the ring to turn off her ability to feel pain as hard as she can, wanting to escape, wanting out -

The world is spinning end over end as Mina is sent flying through a pillar, then another. By the third she realizes Elise has her by the ankle and is swinging her around like she's seen Ren do, spawning slaves just in time to hit the third pillar and have the world burst into white, the thinking knocked out of her for a moment.

Antagonizing this bitch might have been a mistake.

The construct slaves she's spawning are quickly snuffed out by burning red around Elise's hands. She's simply grabbing them and letting it burn through. Wanting to be whole again Mina restores herself, standing up in the short time the destruction of her minions buys her, then forming a tower shield of the type she'd seen Ainsley make, as tall as she is and spiked. Halfway through forming a polearm to use with it Elise's claws pierce the shield in front of her, inches from her eye, the construct torn apart and the feedback in her arm sending her reeling along with the panic and then she's tripping backwards and her environmental shield cuts out -

For a second she feels a sense of loss before realizing there's a hole in her abdomen the size of Elise's fist, mostly becuase Elise has just jammed her fist through her. Mina tries to speak but all that comes out is blood, then Elise is grabbing her by the throat and pulling her off, throwing her to the side.

A quick restoration and Mina spawns a slave, then pulls -

Folding inward and manifesting the inner self externally

- one of her slaves into the shape of a ring, calling it to her hand so she can burn power and end this quickly. All of her attention is on Elise, which is why she doesn't see it when Vera smashes her from behind before she can get the ring and gain the advantage. She'd totally forgotten the woman was even there, turning on her in surprise and indignation, taking her eyes off Elise for just a second. The undead ring, her call disrupted, flicks against the broken pillar and falls to the floor but she has no time to turn her attention to it because Elise is on her again and where the fuck is Nemesis -

Then Mina has her arm torn off.

A sound like wet construction paper tearing and a sense of loss and she's ragdolled into the pillar, the orange glow around her cutting out as the ring is separated from her body. She can't think and all she wants is to get away, the desire and desperation strong enough to begin calling the rings. The undead one reaches her first and the moment she has it she transitions out of the temple, restoring herself and turning to face the entrance as Elise comes tearing out after her.

Yeah, enough of that. Nothing has shown Elise flying so she fires herself into the air, leaving them.

For a moment Elise stands in the sand, hyperventilating. Then she remembers Nemesis and turns back in towards the temple, running back in as hard as she can.

When she tries to stop she does it at a slide, taking in Vera and Nemesis in a hard fight. The violet man, freed from control during the fight with Elise, has apparently picked up the orange and green rings and walked around the edges of the fight towards her.

"Who are you people?"

She doesn't hear the words. He's close, close enough to engage and that's exactly what she does, the need to fight outweighing her ability to think rationally. Violet flies backwards, then tries to dodge around her by keeping the pillar between them, going for the entrance and forcing her to chase him towards it. She's bearing down on him, the prey drive taking over when the last thing either of them expected happens.

With a slip-paper noise a hole opens up behind Violet, confusing him when he flies through it backwards and tries to skid to a stop. On the other side of it, Ainley steps out. Then Kuri. Then Aetius, Fela, even Saxali. She has just enough time to realize she recognizes these people when the ground shudders violently and everyone on her side of the portal is thrown from their feet, the temple caving in behind her. It's almost enough to snap her out of it.

The ship Ainsley rescued. It must be shooting at them.

Wheeling around she sees the destruction just in time for the debris to begin flying upwards, spinning and forming a vortex in the air of flying stone. She takes a deep breath, prepares to move -

And then Kuri's hand is on her shoulder.

"Peace."

What?!

"Peace."

But...

"Peace."

Oh.

Oh no.

Even as the red runs out of her, reforming in her hand as a weapon again, she can barely stand up. Ainsley actually has to grab her, which is a little awkward, being naked.

"Ainsley... Ren and my father... They're still in there! What have you done?"

 

Helping Aetius take hold of Elise, he carries her back through the portal while the rest of us hold guard around it. I can't help but keep clenching and unclenching my hand. I want to dive in but I know I need to be patient, should be patient. Team effort.

When Aetius comes back through it's with the pink guy. I spare a moment to glance at the newbie.

"No memories?"

"No."

"You have no idea who we are or where this is?"

"...No."

I nod. "We're gonna have an interesting conversation later, I think. The ring you have, you spoken to it?"

"A little. Not much."

"Kuri?" I turn towards the newly minted indigo. The look suits her. Where the ring synergized with the blue for me I still tended to rely on the blue ring more and having another lightsmith made for better use of resources than me alone working with both rings. Body paint like the kind she wore back in Skal glows in indigo lines on her body, the staff reshaped to something almost organic looking for her, like shaped wood.

My time with the indigo ring was valuable and I've learned a lot from it, but it was always meant for her, I think.

She nods slowly. "I can sort of feel the violet light in him." She looks at Violet. "Who did you love?"

He looks pained. Grieved. "I had a fiancee. Her I remember. Pieces. Moments."

She puts a hand on the mans arm. "That feeling you have right now, remember it. Hold onto it. Use those memories to use your ring. Stay moving, listen to its advice. We'll try to stay with you. Try to stay with us." She thumps the staff on the ground next to us. "Together."

He nods, turning his head to look at the disaster unfolding in front of us. "Together." Saxali pats the man on the shoulder and I can see it lift him, standing a little taller, a little more confident.

Ahead of us the anomaly seems to have broken loose or something. The debris from the broken temple is being whipped through the air. We can feel the vibrations in the ground just standing here. Vera and Nemesis are still fighting but I don't think it's an even match, he seems to be taking it seriously and she can't gain the upper hand. When I move to take a step forward, Aetius grabs my hand, then shakes his head.

"Not yet. It's not... the right time."

"What?"

"Look, I can't explain it. I've been in a lot of fights and I'm telling you, not yet. Wait. Trust in me."

"Would these be helpful?" Violet opens his hand, revealing... the green and orange rings.

"Oh." Kuri sounds surprised. "That was good thinking, Violet."

Aetius reaches, stops, then looks at me. When I nod, he picks the green ring up with a grave seriousness. Gripping it in his fist he looks at the fight still in progress, then slips it on. The glow kicks in around him immediately as his focus and willpower are channeled through the ring...

...And his armor vanishes.

He stops, stunned, then slaps himself in the chest and laughs, laughs madly. "It... it's gone! It's gone! HAHAHAHAHAHA!" ... "Oh I don't care, it can stay in subspace forever. Thank you, ring."

Huh, so that's what it looks like when I do that. Violet is giving me the most confused look and I just gesture lazily at him. "Long story, no time right now. Who's taking the orange one, then?"

"I will." Saxali picks it up with a look of distaste. "For now." Slipping it on she winces, then looks very confused for a moment, her environmental shield sputtering in and out. "Wh...?" She frowns at the ring as it turns itself off. "What's wrong with this thing?"

"You're not thinking orange enough." Kuri shakes her head. "Give it to Ainsley, he won't be able to use it well either but he can hold onto it for now."

Slipping the ring off Saxali hands it to me and I'm left holding Mina's ring. You know, sometimes things just sort of work out. I slip it onto my left hand.

Alert. Users connection to the orange light is damaged. Stand by.

It's not quite the ice pick in my brain it was the first time with the indigo ring. I can... feel...

Hrrnnng. No wonder Elise is so frustrated with me... and I think I very much want to take those yellow and red rings now.

I can't help but glance at Violet, who is busy watching the fight and waiting, as Aetius said.

No. By force is only acceptable because Vera and Nemesis are dangerous. This guy seems okay. Reason first.

"Get ready for it."

Fela flicks her wings, looking nervous. "I'm not sure how much help I can be here."

I grin at her and flare my environmental shield, her own wings flaring in sympathetic response to my use of the blue light. "It'll be a learning experience for us both. Try to stay low and grab anyone who looks like they can't fight anymore."

"Okay."

"Now!"

Ahead of us, Vera and Nemesis split apart as he gets the upper hand on her and sends her flying wildly. Without missing a beat he turns on us, narrowly dodging some kind of blue blast from Saxali and what looks like some kind of frost elemental which is winding around her body seemingly out of nowhere. As he spins in midair he creates a shield to tank the impact of the massive battering ram Aetius has created, but he's underestimated just how focused that boy is. Instead of taking the shot it sends Nemesis spinning madly, allowing Kuri to open a portal behind him. When he comes flying out behind us I arm-bar him in the face, sending Nemesis spinning before I create a small construct building and drop it on his head.

Might still be a little salty about Psyche, yeah.

I don't have time to be smug though, he's managed a short-range FTL transition next to me and I'm suddenly surrounded by massive jaws! A car jack stops them from closing on me and a destruction pulse down its throat tears the construct apart.

Connection repaired.

I WANT YOUR RING.

 

The need to get the yellow ring is so strong I can taste it, following up the destruction pulse and closing the gap between Nemesis and I. A large bat'leth construct in my hands meets the jaws of a dragon Nemesis has begun making around himself like his version of construct armor. The dragon bites down on the sword, my need corrupting the dragon constructs head, forcing Nemesis to shear the dragon apart and focus on knocking me away with a piston construct. The ring corrects my balance mid-air and I hit the ground on my feet in a crouch at the same time Aetius and Violet attack Nemesis from both sides. Aetius is opting for his usual spear, stabbing at Nemesis from the back while Violet is creating a machine gun construct, firing at Nemesis from the opposite but not quite exact angle from Aetius. Nemesis doesn't seem to have an issue with it through, forming a half-dome shield around one side of his body while pushing aside the spear construct with a hand, turning into the strike to smash Aetius in the face with his elbow. Throwing Aetius at Violet he drops out of the air to avoid an attack from Vera, who's hydro cannoning red blood at him.

The attack forces me to duck to the side, grabbing Fela at the same time instead of just trusting that she can get out of the way. She makes a kind of choked squeak, then flaps the wings hard and suddenly we're sixteen meters away and the red blood is hitting the ground where we were, hissing violently and bubbling. She lands beside me, grinning a little.

My head clears a little too, the need... not lessening, but becoming more focused.

"Quicker than I look."

"Good show." I frown a little. "Actually, stick close to me when you can? It's... it got easier to think clearly when you used your wings."

She blinks in surprise, then nods and flares them, spreading the wings out, the intensify of them brightening. The effect becomes even more pronounced. Blue against orange?

Above us, Nemesis is trying to split Vera, Violet and Aetius apart as they present a united front against him. Surprisingly, somehow, he's holding his own. It's not just his construct strength, either. Even as I watch I can see the way he positions himself to make them get in each others way, the way he tries to use their own attacks against them or forces them to fight him one by one instead of all at once. When that does happen he splits, gaining distance and tries to slow them down, forcing them to split up or be pinned down by obstructions. It's only sort of working with Kuri acting as support, working to shield them or back them up or stop attacks from being as bad as they should be.

"Elise said your ring makes hers stronger. If my wings make that orange ring weaker, does that mean your ring can do the same to other rings?"

"I have no idea." Firing myself off the ground again, I come up behind Nemesis, cutting my flight aura suddenly as he slashes at where I should have been with a yellow blade and grabbing his leg instead. Hope crushes fear, doesn't it? I've known for awhile that I could effect the hopes of those around me, but never really saw the use of trying to manipulate them. Now I do.

Inspire.

I can feel the others as they stand a little taller, get a little more focused. Except for Vera. She actually stumbles in her attack, stopping and shaking herself out, looking confused. Nemesis actually stumbles a little, taking precious seconds before trying to shake me off, starting a destruction pulse and forcing me to break away down and around him, in a wide arc, flying backwards. The pulse just barely misses me and then I can feel him trying the same thing, the gnawing uncertainty -

"No. You won't drown us out." Kuri thumps her staff, the color changing to blue as she backs me up, drowning his fear out in a wash of hope as we both focus entirely on lifting the other.

Behind Kuri, Vera drops to her knees, shakes her head and then withdraws, taking off in the opposite direction.

Nemesis has the same idea, trying to break away across the surface of the desert in a streak as we follow him. Aetius and Violet are really putting it to him, forcing him to jerk and weave to avoid the two of them smashing into or attacking him. A wide circle around the growing anomaly and he suddenly comes to a halt, laughing.

"This has been a fun little chase, hasn't it?" Aetius isn't stopping for him to talk but he doesn't seem concerned, forming a railgun as Aetius charges him and simply shooting the man in the face, sending Aetius flying backwards and Kuri flying after him. "You've already wasted too much time, though. The only way to close that tear now is to dump enough energy into it and you don't have a source powerful enough! You're all going t-"

The sands split apart as a massive, burrowing, worm-like thing - not a sandworm in the Dune sense, it reminds me a bit of predatory sea life, actually - snaps Nemesis down towards the surface almost faster than we can process, the entire area around is visibly shuddering as the thing burrows back down, sand filling the tunnel it leaves behind.

Violet looks at me and Fela awhile Aetius and Kuri rise up to join me. "What the fuck was that?"

I can't help but chuckle. "I met some new friends deep in Psyche. Before I came back to get the rest of you, I brought some here to try and talk to the guards of the temple... took awhile, but I guess they finally got through."

"How are we going to stop it?" Kuri gestures down at the writhing thing encircled by the batteries. "And where are Ren and Emil?"

That stops me. I don't know how to stop it.

I don't know how to stop it.

 

For a moment I'm paralyzed. I know they expect me to have a solution and I don't. I can feel the weight of their gaze as they look to me for an answer almost as a physical thing, a sinking feeling at the top of my stomach, like a hook behind my ribs tugging me down. Outwardly, I'm not showing any signs of agitation save for clenching and unclenching my hand as my mind runs hard enough to shake itself apart, flash-inspecting everything I know about the rings and this world and magic and energy and coming up with nothing.

Fela is the first to look away, back to the anomaly below. It's begun to spin like a whirlpool, the center a black nothingness that somehow seems to oscillate the same time despite not changing. The edges of the effect are tinged a weird blue. I think it's the light being distorted.

There's a hand on my shoulder and I turn my head to look at Kuri, floating next to me holding her staff limpy, hanging below her. "What?"

"How attached are you to your power?"

Something inside me suddenly realizes what she means and the sinking feeling sharpens to a laser intensity. "But... we don't know what'll happen if we do that."

Violet frowns. "Do what?"

"Whole universes, Ainsley. Not just worlds, but all the span of time and space you told me about beyond that. How many lives? Are we really worth that?"

I hang my head while Violet starts to look irritated. "What are you guys talking about?"

Aetius drifts a little closer to him. "Those." Pointing down, he gestures at the central batteries surrounding the anomaly. "They're talking about those."

"But, what are they though?"

I take a deep breath, exhaling slowly. "They're the source of our power. Without them, the lanterns we power from will die and our rings will run out of power eventually. We'll lose the ability to ever recharge them."

"This ring is capable of recharging from ambient hope."

I blink, looking down. It's been awhile since the blue ring took any initiative like that. Violet looks over as the ring speaks up. "So, you'd be the last of us, then." He takes a deep breath, then exhales slowly. "My... she's not here, is she? What's the point of wallowing in love I've lost? I don't think..." He shakes his head. "I don't think I could do that for a long time."

"It's the only way."

I know they're right. I just don't like it. "One of us needs to throw them into the anomaly somehow, then. To get close enough t-"

Violet straightens. "I'll do it."

"No, you're not okay right now. You're hurting, Nameless."

"Thank you, but I think I'll decide that for myself." Holding his fist up, he glances at us. "Ring, if we survive this and you have any charge left, return to her." He points at Kuri. "I trust you'll find some use out of whatever's left of the ring if I don't survive."

Kuri turns her face away. I don't think she can cry, not in the way we do, but everything I've learned about her body language is telling me she's very much not okay with this. I do the first thing that comes to mind and pull her into a hug, only to find her clinging to me far harder than I thought.

"Good luck." Violet turns and fires himself downwards as Fela makes a little sound behind us.

"We should get back, move away from here. Now." Aetius isn't waiting for us to decide, scooping Fela up and taking off with her as she squawks indignantly at him in surprise.

Letting go of me, Kuri nods, but I don't let go of her. Instead I pull her away, grimacing.

Emil. Ren.

Elise. I don't know what I'm going to tell her.

Collectively we pull back just as I see Violet tip the first one towards the event horizon, the contact of the red battery with it causing a violently bright flash of red light, followed by orange, yellow, green.

Blue.

I don't feel anything. Not physically.

Alert. Connection with the central power battery lost.

But the ring doesn't let it pass by without remark, either. Which means the others know, now.

As the last battery tips in, the wild oscillations the anomaly is undergoing sort of wobble in a way that reminds me of a car beginning to fishtail. Below us the ground shatters violently, sands being thrown up in clouds as the bedrock underneath cracks in a wave passing outwards from the centerpoint and surpassing even us, going as fast as we are. The pressure wave behind us isn't going as quickly.

"Move it people!"

Speeding up, I know I'm burning power I shouldn't burn, the wave catching up to us but there's a strange tint to it, something that's difficult to put into words, like the explosion is deeper than it ought to be somehow. A sense given by magic or intuition or whatever I might call it.

Letting it touch us won't result in anything good, I know that.

Behind us, Kuri is creating a shield using my fear as a source, yellow light surrounding us at the same time the blast wave catches up with us somehow and then



things



get




strange









When I open my eyes I take a deep breath, sitting up and shaking myself out of a sense of déjà vu as my first day here pops into my head for a second. Kuri and I are... not quite buried but it's apparent we impacted the northern mountain ridge instead of passing over it like we meant to.

The first thing I do is check on her. She's breathing and small enough for me to carry so I pick Kuri up, holding her against my chest like a little kid and holding her staff with the other hand. It looks... dead. Turned off.

As I make my way up out of the crater and look out I can't help but gasp softly.

The desert is still there... sort of. But everywhere I look, every direction, parts of it are broken up, different. Some have different sand. A few are glass. One is a chunk of jungle, standing out violently among the desolation. Another is a tower of ice sheet and even as I watch it cracks down the middle, sliding apart and hitting the ground hard enough I can feel the vibrations in my feet despite the fact it's at least a few miles away.

"Ainsley?"

Kuri is coming around and I kneel down to put her back on her feet. She keeps a hand on my shoulder for a moment to steady herself, then looks out at the shattered desert.

"Oh." She breathes the word, her tail curling around her feet as she becomes unsure of herself and the hand on my shoulder tightens a little. "It's..."

"Like every possible piece of every place that could have been drawn here was pulled in all at once. Yeah."

She looks at me. "How far does the effect extend?"

"I don't know. Not far, I hope."

"Then we need to get back to Durjak. Do you have any power left?" She frowns down at her own hand. "Do I?"

"54% charge remaining." / "62% charge remaining."

Taking the staff from me uncertainly, Kuri nods. "Let's go find the others. If there are any others."

"Don't give up hope, Kuri."

 

When Elise woke up, she found herself in a room of blue stone.

I'm back at Ainsley's keep. The thought didn't bring her much comfort. Dragging herself up off the bier she'd been placed on, she found the Weapon was still...

Even as she looked at it, became aware of it, the spike of anger that awareness brought with it both enraged and confused her, a frustration that welled up and hit her with the force of a thousand lessons she couldn't understand, a hundred jokes she didn't get the punchline of, whole crowds of people laughing at her for not getting it. She lashed out, smashing the bier with her fists and snarling, the Weapon reshaping from the clawed gauntlet it had become to iron fists, then back to the gauntlets again. She flicked her ears hard, turning her head down and to the side as though pained by a sound despite the silence in the room, trying to shake off the feeling instinctually without thinking about it too much.

As the feeling receded just as quickly as it had hit her, her mind began to clear and she started to understand why she was in a large stone room on a stone table by herself rather than, say, the middle of the hospital they'd begun in Durjak. She'd lay odds the door was locked too and if there wasn't guards outside she'd be very, very surprised.

The Weapon had somehow bonded to her, much like Aetius and his armor. She tried pulling at the gauntlets, taking them off. As soon as she did she was rewarded with the most intense pain she'd ever felt in her life, her knees dropping out from under her as it felt like her very skin was being torn off while being set on fire while being plunged into acid. The second she stopped pulling the pain stopped and she curled up into herself on the floor in the fetal position, hugging her own tail to her chest.

She stayed that way for awhile. Her sense of time was unclear. It might have been five minutes. It might have been an hour.

Eventually she mustered the courage to try using her hands again, gently pushing herself up off the floor and finding that it didn't hurt. So long as she wasn't trying to rid herself of the Weapon, at least. Every time she thought about it that spike of frustration, rooted in her own inability to rid herself of it and amplified like an echo reaching back from a powerful sound in a large room, but intensified somehow in the process. It was her own anger writ large.

A knock on the door startled her, making her jump and take a sharp breath. She took a moment to compose herself, then spoke up. "Come in."

A series of clicking and clanking noises gave her an idea of how many locks were on the door. When it opened she found Kuri walking into the room, minus the staff. Once she was in she closed the door up again, running her fingertips down the side of it and using the ring to relock it from the inside. Then she turned to Elise, trotting across the room.

"I'd ask how you felt, but I think I can guess." She looked sad, sitting down on a chunk of broken table rather than making a construct chair or something. Elise looked at her puzzled, edging back a bit to keep some space between them. She didn't trust herself like this.

"I'm... frustrated." A wince. "I can't get them off and it just... every little annoyance is amplified and I don't feel very okay right now."

Kuri nodded to her. "I can wait to fill you in until you feel a little better?"

"No." Taking a deep breath, Elise exhaled slowly and sat herself down on the floor, sitting on her own hands and then curling her tail over her lap. "Tell me what's happened."

Kuri watched her for a moment, then nodded. "We tried to fight Nemesis but he's... good. Really, really good. He held us off until one of Ainsley's long shots paid off and he got distracted fighting something worse than us. But... by then, the... whatever that thing was, was out of control. We couldn't get near it, didn't know what to do..."

Elise watched her closely. Kuri looked agitated, almost guilty. Her ears were pressed back close to her head and she wasn't looking at Elise directly, sort of staring at the floor. Kuri took a deep breath, fortifying herself before continuing. "We threw the central power batteries into it. Actually, Violet did. We're... not sure what happened to him, actually. He told us all to split as soon as he made the decision, but he also told his ring to come find me if he died and it hasn't so... we don't know. We went looking but the area is weird, the rings started freaking out when we approached it. Something about 'extreme spatial distortion'." She shook her head. "We can't recharge so using the power..."

Elise nodded to her slowly. "You're all running your charges out. You can't recharge, can you?"

Kuri looked at her, then shook her head slowly. "Only Ainsley can, by making enough people hopeful or someone feeling hopeful really intensely. It's not fast enough though. Percent of a percent here and there."

Elise closed her eyes, hanging her head. "And Ren? My dad?"

Kuri sounded like she wanted to cry saying it. "I'm so sorry, Elise. We just don't know."

Elise didn't say anything, do anything. Her voice got flat and she nodded. "Okay. Thank you." ... "It might be best if you left for a bit."

Kuri nodded and got up, moving back towards the door while keeping half an eye on Elise, but Elise wasn't moving. "Anything you need, let us know. We'll arrange some place nicer for you to stay within an hour or two, I promise." Then she knocked on the door, waiting for the guards to unlock it again before slipping back out.

For a little while, Elise stared out into space, not doing or saying anything. Just going over things in her mind.

After an hour or two, she only had one line going through her head, over and over.

Who ordered that orbital strike?

 

Fela walked down the hallway into what had been named Ainsley's throne room. Ainsley himself didn't really like the thing. It had supposedly been built at the insistence of the town instead, wanting some place they could hold big official business. It was mostly Zack that used it for public petitions, settling disputes or greeting important travelers.

Today though, there weren't any petitioners. No townspeople, no Zack. Just Ainsley, sitting on that silly looking, incredibly plain dining room chair not-throne. Like he'd tried to skimp out on the idea by making it look lame. He was slouched a little, hands on his stomach, fingers interlocked.

"Thought I might find you here."

He sat up, looking at her, taking notice. It struck him just how much the blue of her eyes contrasted against the dark complexion of her skin, almost glowing in the way his eyes have done in the past. He'd looked at Fela before, of course, but never really noticed her. Looking at her now - even after having taken the orange ring off - he realized just how pretty she was, sitting up a little without thinking about it.

"Why is that? I don't usually come here."

"I know. I couldn't find you in the places where you usually are and figured you were probably still here in the castle someplace, so I went to the one place you would go to be totally alone. Oh, that and Zack isn't holding court today."

Ainsley heh'd softly at her. "How'd you end up with us? Everything happened so fast, I never really got to talk to you or know you."

"I traveled here looking for other light users. Found 'em." Fela spreads her arms, laughing wanly. "You guys sure know how to throw a party. I'm sorry I couldn't be more helpful than I was."

He tilted his head at her slightly. "Fela, you were the one who gave us the idea to try and drown Nemesis out. It was a really good idea and it worked. You contributed."

She waved it off, stopping in front of the 'throne'. "Well, I still felt pretty lame. I came to tell you that Elise is awake."

She could see that get to him, the concern. "I should go see-" He stopped when she put her hand on his shoulder, sitting him back down in the chair, giving her a puzzled look.

"She's not doing so well. Kuri said it might be safer if they... handle with care, is how she put it. Also you, um..."

"She might attack me." He covered his eyes with one hand, hiding them. "Fuck."

She nodded. "Yeah." Tapping him on the top of the head to get his attention, she held her hand out to him when he looked up at her. "Come with me?"

"Whyyyy?"

She rolled her eyes. "'cuz I asked, of course. C'mon, a pretty girl is trying to cheer you up. Just go with it, you'll get the hang of these things eventually."

Getting up out of the chair with much the same sort of energy an old man might, he took Fela's hand and was immediately pulled off his feet, a wooshing sensation all he has time to process before they find themselves outside in the sunlight, making him blink for a second instinctually. Not that he needed to, the ring kept the glare from blinding him, of course.

"What do you see?"

Ainsley looked at her, a little confused. A part of the back of his mind noted she wasn't letting go of his hand, but he was thinking about her question instead of that. "I dunno, Durjak?"

"Annnnd?"

"And... the town wall, I guess? The mechs?"

"What else?"

He furrowed his brow, thinking about it. "The people, I guess?"

She nodded to him. "The people. You know, I've been around a bit before I came here. Traveled the world before the Fragmentation. I've been to lots of places, you know? There aren't many hubs of real civilization out here, Ainsley. It's just too difficult to establish a real foothold. It'll be even harder, now. But look at this place! You've built a real city here. You've established something that looks like a government here. That's rare. You have guards, courts, laws, trade, food security, even luxury goods. You're not even a port town!"

Ainsley was blinking as she spoke, as though coming out of a fog. "I never... I was just trying to do what I thought was right."

She spoke quietly. "I know you feel bad right now. You feel like you let Elise down. Elise might feel that way too. But Ainsley, my wings, that weapon of hers, Aetius's armor... they're like your rings. They're not entirely unique, either. There's not like... one artifact of each color. I saw a lense once which was like my wings, but only ever showed you the way to safety. So there's others out there, lesser artifacts. Maybe you can use them somehow."

"That's... a quest for another day."

"Yes. But there's hope, is what I'm saying. Despite everything that's happened you may have saved whole universes. Whatever the cost..."

"Don't say it was worth it."

"No. But we could make it worth it, couldn't we?" She took his hands and stepped up into him, hugging Ainsley suddenly. "Touch my wings and try?"

The hug took him by surprise, the sudden close body contact with even more surprise. Suddenly he was really glad the ring could control certain things consciously because her being this close was new and strangely pleasant for him. Hugging her back, he touched her wings, the solid light feathers turning out to not be soft at all but rigid, as though cut by crystal.

"In darkest day, with dauntless might.
Face down despair, continue the fight.
Stand tall against the blackest night,
you will not fall while hope burns bright."

A familiar rushing sensation in his arms as Fela's wings visibly dimmed, becoming faint and transparent. His hand passes through them suddenly, finding the wings mere ghosts of themselves and drawing his hand back as Fela steps back away from him and reaches up, touching the side of his face.

"Your eyes have changed. They're little symbols, now."

"Are you okay?"

"They'll return. They've become like this before, when I flew for a long, long time. How much power did you gain?"

"Ring, state charge."

"67% charge remaining."

"That got me about 25% of a full charge. How long do you think they'll take to restore?"

"A day, perhaps. I don't think it'd be a good idea to just leave you alone for awhile, Ainsley. Why don't I keep you company for a bit?"

"I... think I'd like that."

 

When they brought Khumu to the shamans abode, he expected something reminiscent of Skal. There, one might make their home out of natural materials. Wood, stone, earth, clay, bone, leather, fiber. A yurt perhaps, like the plains traveling Tovari use. Or maybe a wooden longhouse, like the other skunk tribes sometimes use. At the very least he expected some ceremony and pomp, a ritual... something.

Instead, the genkit guard assigned to him brought him to a simple little house made much the same way as the rest of the town, but to Skal dimensions. The guard had become his friend after several months together (Remi wasn't so bad once you got over the fact that touching his fur was a little oily, apparently otters just have that as a problem) and he didn't think he was being pranked.

Kuri's little house was a wide open affair, much like the longhouses her people use, which almost never have partitions. He'd grown curious about their resident shaman, who'd taken not to being mysterious but completely open and almost maternal towards the Skal in town. Those who had come to Durjak had become their own tribe and she'd taken the role of shaman for them all, yet behaved like no shaman he'd ever heard of. So he asked around about her people, her clan, wanting to understand her a little, yet never speaking to her directly.

Instead of a wooden or stone floor, hers was made of seamless wood, fitted together closely enough he couldn't see any cracks between the boards. The walls, instead of being covered in cloths and curtains for insulation, were naked looking by comparison across half the space. The other half was furnished with a half-finished mural apparently of her own making, painting supplies scattered around on a cloth to cover the floor where she last stopped. The furniture was simple and wooden in the main area by the door but lush and upholstered further into the room. Her kitchen didn't even have a fire pit, housing one of the big iron devices they called 'stoves'.

It was all so very foreign and strange and the realization slowly came to him that Kuri didn't act like a shaman because she'd gone native. She was different because she was something new, something... blended between these people and Skal. He suddenly felt out of his depth, unsure of exactly how he should behave around this one who was clearly his social superior, yet also disdained formality, yet also had the authority to make his life very miserable if her gave offense. Nor did he know what she might take offense to.

When the guard closed the door behind him Kuri gestured to him while putting away her painting stuff. "Grab a seat someplace and relax. I can feel your nervousness from here, I'm not going to punish you or anything. Take a minute to calm down. Did you eat today?"

Moving through the room with care, he approached one of the upholstered couches, poking at it. He and the others Ainsley had captured that first day mostly had furniture like this, but after finding that sleeping inside tended to kind of mess with him they'd let him set up a little camp of his own in a corner of the town after swearing an oath that he would stay for his time of punishment for what he'd done. It was only a year or so of his life and seemed a fair bargain, at least to him. It meant not having nice furniture like this though. When he sat on it he sank into it a little, then sort of melted against it, surprised. "Um... Yes. They give us all food at the same time."

Looking at him, she hmm'd and crossed the room to the kitchen. "Thought you might say that. Here." Taking a tiny cauldron with a handle off her stove she poured a thick broth into a large cup, bringing it over to him. When she handed it to him he found it wasn't very hot at all, despite the steaming liquid inside. He could see it had little bits of meat and a few vegetables in it.

"I thank you, shaman." He sipped politely, burning his lips a little bit finding it very good.

"I hate formality. I'm Kuri. Kurishalia."

"I thank you, Kurishalia."

She smiled a little. "Not many around here use my full name. Thank you. Did Remi tell you why I wanted to talk to you?"

"He did not, Kurishalia." Ssssip. "Am I to assist you in some way?"

"Yes and no. Do you know how shamans are elevated, Khumu?"

That stopped the cup halfway to his lips. "N-no. I do not." He slowly lowered the cup again, looking at her. "Shamans are mysterious and powerful. We do not question them."

She nodded. "You know, I never really questioned the way things are back home until I met Ainsley and came here. Looking back now, I can see... ways things can be improved. But I think you and I both know that the other shamans would not listen to me as I am now. I'm too different."

He nodded slowly and sipped the broth as an excuse not to answer for a moment, mildly shocked that she would come out and simply say it. He decided to take a risk. "You have... become like them. You are no longer entirely Skal?"

She shook her head. "No. But I think, after your time here, you've come to appreciate more than the others the benefits of this place. Jufad said you actually haggled at a market a few days ago. That's pretty remarkable for your people, before you I'd never heard of one of the Folk ever being sociable."

"I... do not understand, Kurishalia."

She smiled at him. "That's okay. Come." Standing up, she crossed the room to a large wooden chest by her bed, leaning over to open it. Khumu took about three seconds to totally check her butt out before looking away casually before she turned around. When she did she was holding a small crystalline matrix set in metal. He tilted his head at it. The crystals reminded him of quartz, a sort of milky-white.

Walking over to him, she took his hands, cupping them under the device so he would hold it and cupping his hands in hers. "Take a deep breath and clear your mind for me, Khumu."

Inhaling slowly, he stilled his thoughts and as he exhaled The world expanded for him, his awareness spreading out as he began to hear Kurishalia's thoughts. He felt the awareness going inward, changing him. Parts of his mind were awakening that had been dormant, asleep. He became aware of every living thing around them at varying degrees of strength. Kuri shone like a beacon to him and most of the sentient minds were bright. A few of the genkits were brighter than the others, almost like Kuri. But not quite.

**What is going on?** His confusion translated through the shared thought.

**Expansion.** What followed was a series of non-verbal ideas, knowledge of things she had learned about the mind, things from both shamans and the genkits. The shamans knew the inner voice and mind well and the genkits knew the physical structures of the brain. The combined knowledge flowered in his mind like a tree and he suddenly realized the device was actually making him more intelligent, teaching him, renewing him.

As the heightened sense of everything began to recede, it didn't fade away completely. He could feel the minds around him, the life around him. His self-awareness was changed and he began to realize he was conscious of things he was unaware of before about his own body. He had finer motor control and fewer involuntary responses. He felt calmer, too, more at peace than he'd ever been in his entire life.

"What is this?"

Stepping away, Kuri gently lifted it out of his hands, taking it to the chest and placing it back inside, covering it with padding. "It's the Minds Eye. It's how we elevate new shamans to our level and is only one of a set of three. Today, Khumu, you have become a shaman. You'll hear everything now. You'll always be aware of the others. You'll always be sensitive to how they feel. You're the first of the Folk to ever achieve this."

He felt stunned but it didn't freeze him the way it would have when he first walked into the door. "Why have you done this thing?"

"I want you to return it to Skal and be the herald of change Skal needs. I want you to teach our people that valuable things can be learned from outsiders. I want you to talk to the gods themselves and tell them of the wonders achieved here by us, this new clan. I want you to herald the greatest change Skal will ever know and benefit from."

Suddenly the reason he was here, the reason he had been cast out from Skal, was laid bare before him.

And he knew he was fulfilling his destiny.

 

His race across the landscape was as fast as he could go within an atmosphere without igniting the backwash of thunder that Ainsley called a 'sonic boom'. Completely unaware of it, far below him, a few noted his passing and assigned to it ominous portent, a green fireball racing across the sky unlike anything they'd ever seen, so fast they'd barely caught it. A week after his passing they were telling travelers stories about it when they finally reached civilization again.

He tore out across the ocean, the land falling back behind him and vanishing in a flat expanse of blue stretching in every direction. He wore the hated armor, controlling the spike of distaste for it and focusing on the task at hand. Besides, he needed it, now that he didn't have the battery anymore. As long as he wore it he could slowly, passively charge. Which meant he was paying for his power use right now, a debt of time having to voluntarily wear the very thing he'd desperately wanted for years to take off. The irony was a bitter necessity to him.

My thoughts are wandering. Focus.

"Ring, show me the cities entry points. Scan and compare to the descriptions given by the genkits and the recordings from Elise's memory."

Working.

The mental picture unfolded in his minds eye and he knew City Zero the way Elise had known it. Elise had known it very, very well.

She still does. She isn't dead, just set back. Just a set back. She'll return and stand with us again.

He hoped, truly hoped that that was true. Every moment he wore the green ring he felt like an imposter, despite the synergy with his armor. If he could give it back to Elise he would, but when he offered she kicked him out of the room. Well, no, she'd asked him in a very controlled way to leave her alone but he was pretty sure that there was a lot of kicking going on in her head.

As he approached the city he opened every possible channel he could to it with the ring, instructing it to grab any comms it could.

"City Zero, please respond."

"Wha-? Who is this?"

"Name's Aetius, nice to meet you but you don't have much time, do you?"

"How do you-?" A pause as whoever it is thinks past themselves and realizes they're asking the wrong questions. Good lad. "What are you going to do and how are you going to do it?"

"I need you to get everybody off the lower levels of each district. I can't guarantee there won't be seismic damage, sorry about that. We can have a chat afterwards but for the moment, strap yourselves in and get ready for a show. Also, turn on EVERY SENSOR YOU HAVE."

"You don't have to ask us twice, we started recording the second you squawked. We're sending the information to the city administrator AI, that'll get people moving. Good luck, Aetius."

"Thanks, Zero."

Then he dove into the mountain.

The way Ainsley had described the technique, it was just a matter of storing the crap ahead of you in your subspace pocket and dropping it behind you or simply transmuting the matter around you. Since he wanted to make a volcanic vent and channel it very precisely, he opted for a combination of both, creating a bubble around himself. In his mind, he split himself like a musician playing a tune, holding the image in his mind of the transmutation to what the genkits called tantalum carbide, holding the atomic structure of it in his mind and unloading the actual work of the transmutation off onto the ring while at the same time subspacing all the material in front of him. The result was a sort of crackling noise, the same noise as when one stepped in fresh, heavy snow. A crunch that one might hear in each step, but never-ending and following just behind him like a ghost.

Alert. External temperature and pressure are beginning to reach levels which require a higher power expenditure than designated.

Guess it'll be a deep debt this time.

He really hated that fucking armor.

As he continued in he could see a glow forming in the rock around him, brightening slowly...

Yeah, that's enough. The ring seemed to concur, his flight reversing as the rock face in front of him cracked inward and magma began to seep through, then suddenly explode as the pressure deep inside the volcano suddenly found a valve. He fired himself out of the tunnel, the pun in his head making him laugh as he escaped the mouth of it just ahead of the lava. He found it surprisingly runny, expecting it to sort of glob down the mountainside. Nope.

Life's full of surprises, it seems.

Firing himself back down out of the sky he slammed into the ground in front of the hanger bay doors which led to the surface vehicle bays for the city. He could see how thick the blast doors were but since he didn't intend to force himself through, it didn't matter too much to him.

"Hey, Zero. How's things looking in there?"

"Got some shaking but it's nothing the city wasn't made to handle. We're gonna lose power as the magma pressure drops but that's okay, we've... been running the torch, heh."

"Cool. Mind opening the door so I can say hi? Authentication, carbon fish animalia thirteen twenty-five I-am-not-a-crook."

"Uh..." He could hear the confusion as the code checked out. "Who are you, exactly?"

"I've been sent here as a representative of a city-state called Durjak. We have a number of genkits living there who would like to say hello. Something about having gone through a gateway?"

He could hear whooping on the other side of the channel, their entire comms room bursting into cheers at the news their people were alive. Oh and the not horribly dying because of a volcanic eruption, that too.

"Copy that, Aetius." One of the hanger doors began to open in front of him. "Looking forward to meeting you."

"Yeah... it's gonna be a long story."

 

In the same moment that Aetius was learning about molten rock fluid dynamics, Mina was taking a stroll along the coastline of another world.

She had never been to Val. None of them had really had much to do with the place, since it didn't seem very interesting. Oh it was pretty to be sure, but there weren't a lot of sentient species here. It wasn't like Mi'gra, the world Ainsley called Terra. Mi'gra was fecund beyond reason, a mandela of different species. The wanderers who found themselves there often came from such a diverse variety of cultures that it was taken for granted anyone who didn't look regional would be an outworlder. Since the shattering, that simply got unacceptably out of control. Even in Tovar they had incursions. Their cousins to the west might embrace the spread of cultures, but outworlders in Tovar either proved themselves or died. Only strength mattered.

Not many had it.

Her mind wandered as she walked through the surf, disturbing bioluminescent algae and creating a soft cyan glow around her ankles. She could see it in the head of the waves crawling up the beach. Even though it was day it still felt almost like twilight, the sun scattered across the sky in a way that it... ought not to be. Instead of the pale bright blue of Mi'gra it was a deep purple where the glare of the sun seemed to get eaten in much the same way it might on a cloudy day. The trees were dark too, the leaves all either a deep burgandy or the same bright blue as the grass. She couldn't see much in the dim light, even for a cat, but she could see fliers overhead. Not birds exactly. She might call them air jellyfish, if she'd ever seen a jellyfish. As it stood they were so alien to her she didn't even really try.

She'd been shaken after she escaped. She'd lost before, sure. Of course. You couldn't get to the top without losing something, sacrificing things, being defeated in ways large and small. You learned to choose your battles, to strategize, compromise, learn to work around other personalities you couldn't bend. You learned to manipulate, the sharpness of a cunning mind has always been a warriors first weapon. Some were better at wielding that blade than others, despite everyone believing themselves a master. But she'd never been defeated like that. She'd gambled on Nemesis, gambled he could do what he said and pay the price she set. She'd lost so completely she nearly died and had actually had to regrow a limb. She'd never lost a limb before. She didn't like it.

As she came around the bend of a stretch of beach she could see what she'd come here for. A small settlement along the coast, nestled into a bay with a natural seawall formed by a massive cliff the ocean had been working at eroding for... ever, it seemed. The water would win in the end but not while it mattered to any of the humans there.

She pulled up her hood, covering the felid ears. Her cloak and robes would cover up her tail easily enough. She couldn't hide the black scelera of her eyes or the bright yellow of the irises, but there was a little magic known here, thanks to incursions to Mi'gra and contact with her people. It wasn't friendly contact, but it was contact and the Tovar didn't leave their dead. No sense in wasting resources.

As she passed into the port nobody questioned her or tried to stop her. Just another traveler. A shapely one too. She didn't pass unnoticed, merely unmolested. A lot of heads turned as she passed by. Not all of them were male. If she could show her tail she'd be lashing it side to side, irritated at the presumption that they were worthy of fantasizing about her. Most of them, anyways. There were a few she'd take home and keep in her play pens, if she took a mind to do so. Maybe, as a souvenir of her visit here. She hadn't taken a girl in awhile. It was a shame Elise had proved so willful, seducing her might have made things a lot easier for her. Especially if she could bag Ainsley through her. Alas, missed opportunities.

When she finally chose a tavern it was one of the better looking ones. Slipping inside she paid in gold - local coins - then sat down at a table and slouched in her seat appropriately for the setting, crossing her legs at the knees and doing her best to look nonchalant as she drank a beer that tasted not quite like horse piss, but it was such a reasonably passing facsimile she might inquire about buying some to use as an insult when serving it to guests she didn't like.

She drank and listened.

Not so easy with her ears covered, she couldn't turn them this way or that to catch the sound. She wouldn't catch full conversations, just shift her concentration this way or that, catching different ones to find somebody talking about something interesting. The personal woes of people, the grumbling about jobs and bosses. She wanted the talk of local events, she wanted information. As time passed and the hours waned she started putting together a picture in her mind.

First of all, her guess had been right. The Red Swords began here. Not on Mi'gra, where they would have been found long ago. She hadn't worked out how they got to Mi'gra yet but it wasn't so important, now that she knew they'd begun here, it was a good guess that some of the glow artifacts might be found here as well. None of the others had expressed any interest in Val at all in their search for those, either from shortsightedness or ignorance, she didn't care. They weren't looking here and Val didn't present the same problems as Psyche, where everything wanted to kill and/or eat you. Nor were those two things mutually exclusive there. Psyche was a nightmare.

Finishing off her fourth beer, she put the stein down and got up to walk back out into the night. She didn't have any friends here, not in a whole planet of humans who were convinced they were masters of everything.

But she didn't have any enemies looking for her either.

It was a start.

 

For Abeba, life was still a wonder, but a much more interesting one than it was a year before.

Following the odd little skunk-man, she found herself studying him. His sister was visiting and she was a big deal. She couldn't figure out why they called themselves Skal and the not-knowing was itching at her brain. His whole appearance was close to what a genkit should be, but his legs were all wrong, more feral than human. Too short as well. He was as tall as her and she wasn't finished growing yet.

While Kuri tended to things in the administration district with the cities bigwigs, she was tasked with showing 'Sammy' around the city. Which is how they found themselves strolling through one of the simulated parks, a large open space with holowalls to fool one into forgetting that they're underground. Carefully maintained environmental settings helped ensure that they could cycle seasons between parks, making it possible to go from summer to winter with about a half hours walk through the entertainment district.

"This is incredible. It even smells green." Trotting across the grass he lightly stepped up onto a bench, springing off it and catching a tree branch with one hand to swing himself up. Balancing there with his tail he stood up, one hand on the trunk, leaning into it a little. The casual display of agility impressed her a little.

"We need places like this, where you can go to feel unconfined. To get some sunlight."

"But this is underground, how can you get sunlight?" He jumped down to the ground and rolled with it, springing back to his feet.

"Simulated sunlight, then." Abeba shrugged. "People go stir crazy if they feel like they're inside all the time. The parks help with that."

"Never seeing the sky would be tragic." He shook his head in mild dismay.

"Why is your name Sammy?"

"What a strange question." He gave her a sideways look. "Why is your name Abeba?"

"I was named that because the species my model of clone was based on is a wild dog from Africa, so it seemed fitting to have an African name. It means 'flower'." She grinned, showing teeth a little. "The actual wild dogs are pretty successful and ruthless hunters in the wild, but they made some tweaks to my genetics when my batch was begun so I think one of the Liara's was being ironic. I'm pretty successful and so far, I've gotten exactly what I want and I'm where I want to be."

Sammy nodded as they walked, a felid genkit couple passing by them going in the opposite direction and giving them curious looks, but leaving them alone. "My name is actually Samazurasha. But lots of people find that to be a big long mouthful everytime they say my name so it just gets shortened to Sammy. Ainsley told me it meant people like me."

"Shortening somebodies name is a sign of familiarity." She tilted her head when he sat down in the grass randomly, picked a dandelion and began eating it. "You're a little odd, you know?"

"Only to you. You have good soil here, that was tasty." He shook some grass from his hand as he spoke. "When I left home I didn't really know much about much. Now I know lots of things about lots of things. Never been to a place like this before, it's like Durjak but... more. Way more."

"Do you like it?" She sat down next to him in the grass.

"I don't know. It's different. Reminds me of Allasfere, but better." She shook her head in incomprehension at him. "It was a city back in Skal run by Skal and some dwarves but it got destroyed a short time ago. We're not sure what happened but the big crystal there consumes anyone it touches and grows a little more so everyone avoids it now."

She blinked slowly at him. "I can't tell if you're screwing with me or not."

He grinned at her as widely as he could. "Oh that's not even the worst of it."

A shout turned their heads, Kuri approaching them from the way they came. Waving them down, she called out as they approached. "You two behaving?"

"I always behave!" Sammy's tail was wagging behind him as he said it.

"No you don't." Completely deadpan. "Last week you stole a whole loaf of garlic bread right out of the oven."

"Well, it was food, so it was gonna get eaten anyways, right?"

"...That's not the..." She rubbed her temple. "Nevermind. I've blown your governments minds and now I'm taking a break while they get the panic and debating out of their system. I have better things to do than sit around with talking heads." Dropping next to Sammy, Kuri picked a dandelion as well. Popping it her mouth whole, she chewed thoughtfully.

"Not bad, right?"

"Do you both just eat flowers randomly?" A pair of nods and Abeba couldn't help but smile. "Skal must be a very interesting place."

"Yeah, in the 'oh crap, oh shit, oh fuck, it's gonna eat me' kinda way." Somehow Sammy managed to sound like he was joking. Almost.

"So, what now for the city?"

"Now... we rebuild your magma control systems, first of all. After that...? Your government wants to send out settlers."

"I'm not surprised. We always wanted a homeworld and... now we have it. We don't really need City Zero now, I guess."

"Yes, you do." Kuri shook her head. "That's the other part of it. Opening the city to settlement, expansion and trade. Somehow. We'll figure out how to link you to the main continent, but one thing at a time."

Abeba leaned back on her hands, phewing softly. "Outsiders living in Zero. That's... wow."

"Times are a-changin'." Sammy said it singsong, sprawling out in the grass.

"Why don't you come back with us?" Abeba found Kuri was looking at her. "I bet they'd let you if I asked."

"I'm already kind of set for life here if I stay. With an apprenticeship in the administration district I could be... anything. Even a tribune, someday." She went quiet for a moment, mulling it over. A whole preset path, versus... what?

What's out there?

The intensity of how much she wanted to know took her by surprise and suddenly, the prospect of a nice, safe life in City Zero seemed less appealing than it had that morning.

"On second thought... I think I'd like that."

 

The crystal shattered and Emil snapped into awareness, the dream-like state he'd been in shattered. He felt disconnected, hitting the ground face first and barely noticing it as his mind tried to readjust back to reality.

"Alignment incomplete."

Blinking twice in his helmet he started to snap out of it, slowly pushing himself to his feet. The systems in his suit didn't seem to be working. Pushing himself up to one knee he brought his arm up and tried to activate the holopanel, but nothing. Dead suit. Then a hand closed around his shoulder and lifted him up to his feet, startling him.

His helmet came off and he turned to see Ren holding it one handed, towering over him. "You good, boss?"

"I think so. Where'd the suits come from?"

"Beats me." A quick look around the room showed them in a mid-sized room cut out of what looked like volcanic glass, smooth and shiny. The door wasn't a door at all but rather a hallway with a sharp corner. No barrier at all.

"Sitrep?"

"Dude, I just woke up too. You know as much as I do."

Emil started checking himself over. "Whoever armored us didn't bother giving us our equipment or weapons. Nothing stopping us from looking around, so lets look around." Ren nod-shrugged at him and the two of them set towards the door, slipping into the hallway and finding it to be Z-shaped. At the end of the tunnel, they came out into a vast, cavernous space.

They found themselves at a high point in the wall looking out into a glittering mass of strings of light of many colors. The cavern wall was the same smooth, polished material they'd seen so far, broken by patterns and intricate designs inlaid on the walls of the cavern. Abstract and detailed with an obscene level of intricacy, they themselves were dwarfed by the webs of colored light connecting various points in the cavern. The whole cave glittered as the strings appeared, glowed and disengaged, flickering back and forth between balconies and ledges and buildings. The buildings were set into both the ground and ceiling, hanging and standing and in some places forming vast columns with pathways wound around them.

At various spaces in the cavern they could see platforms hung by the strings of light, the suspensions resembling organic looking webs.

"Whoa." Ren almost breathed it, approaching the ledge and then stepping back as the floor opened and a pedestal rose, formed out of milky white crystal. When Ren touched it there was a chime and a flash, then she vanished.

Emil was only starting to react when she reappeared, turning to face him. "Teleportation network, sir. Freaky one too." She frowned, looking away from him, which was a bit unlike Ren. "It's like when I tried Elise's ring. Only instead of having to focus willpower, I got a surge of love and all the memories around it and it's..." She shook her head.

"I think I understand. You good?"

"Pfft, never. But I'm alright to keep going. C'mon, there's more on the other side." Flicker.

Taking a deep breath, Emil strode forward and touched the pedestal. In the half-second that followed he was struck with a machine gun barrage of memories centering around his mate and daughter and when he reappeared to the other side he gasped, almost falling over but for Ren keeping him upright.

"Thought that might happen, boss."

"Thank you." He steadied himself and stood up, taking a deep breath. They'd found themselves on one of the free hanging platforms, a large one.

At the other end of it was a nightmare in black, gold and silver. It should have been a nightmare, but somehow the 'clothes' it wore - more decoration than modesty or function, whatever those concepts were to this species - gave it an air of civility. It was sitting on a large throne-that-was-not-a-throne, the seat looking nothing like what a humanoid would use. Lines of colored light glinted when he moved his head side to side and somehow, intuitively, he understood that this thing had woven the web of rainbow light holding this platform in place. Perhaps all of it.

Striding towards it, he called out. "I am Emil of House Tychorus, military of the city-state of Zero One."

"Does the one behind you have no name?"

Emil glanced back at Ren. "She's under my command."

"Acceptable. Her behavior will be considered the same as your own."

"Agreed. Do you have a name?"

"We are Ancient."

"Okay. Ancient it is. Don't suppose you know what happened, do you? We're a little confused."

"The Bringer of Love trapped the two of you in elemental crystal as he died. When I recovered the Bringer of Fear I brought you as well, sensing the powerful emotion encasing you. Even now he waits for my judgement. I have decided to speak with you first."

"May I ask why? And... what are you?"

"I am the final Master of Light of a universe long forgotten and dead. Like your kind, mine used the power of the Glow. After long eons it became a part of us, intrinsic to our being. Emotions made physical, my webs are made of my being. They connect me in ways that I cannot explain to your kind. I have tried before. It was my kind who forged the Glow Interfaces your kind call artifacts. Tools for our servants and children."

"I chose to speak with you because you attempted to defend the Cut of the Bleed. It is a weak point, the part of this pocket universe which once connected it to the reality we were split from. This is why the Bringer of Fear needed that location. Attempting to reconnect this pocket universe to an existing universe in the Bleed could only be done at the anchor point, but he is far too late to do this and would have failed in his attempt had I not intervened to allow your allies to stabilize it."

"So... you're talking to us first because he's an asshole?"

"Yes."

"Good to know. Are we prisoners?"

"No."

"Is he your prisoner?"

"Yes."

Emil nodded and Ren walked up behind him to stand at his side as he relaxed a little. "Excellent. Do you know what happened to the violet ring?"

The Ancient lifted one of its limbs, reaching out. Tugging a string of light, it pulled down, drawing out the ring it was tied to so it hung down rather than high above the platform where it had been hidden.

Emil reached out, hesitant for a moment before closing his hand around it, fingers touching the string of light. The warm familiarity of home filled his heart for a second, then the ring was in his hand. He didn't put it on.

"Thank you for returning it to us. Let's have a chat."

 

I have learned much from you. Thank you, my teachers... and now, for your education.

Before there was Time... before there was anything... there was Nothing.

And before there was Nothing...

There were monsters.

The cycle never ends. A universe is born, playing itself out until energy is equalized and it reaches heat death, priming conditions for a breach in the fabric of reality where the pressure of an emerging universe uses the equalized energy distribution to manifest itself, like a plant taking root in soil. From the Bleed universes are born. From the universe, a Mind is born. From the first mind, the Dream is manifested and then the universe has conceptualization, allowing for quantum physics and enough stability to begin the cycle anew.

The Ancient didn't have a name. Not anymore. It didn't really believe it needed one. It felt itself a survivor, or perhaps an archivist, preservation of what once was. Not in the sense of linear time, because linear time meant little to it. Its own physical manifestation in the material universe was more like an avatar, a material thing that The Ancient might sometimes wear to interact with linear beings.

It did not do this often. To experience linear time was to be partially constrained by it and there was always a sense of disconnection as the part of it that existed outside the known universe diverged from the part of it experiencing linear time, mostly due to only one of those being aware of the whole of the string of time it was walking upon. To the Ancient, time seemed more like a woven fabric of probability where an entire domain of multiverses centered on its initial creation existed all at once, always both occuring and having occurred at the same time.

It did not remember the last universe because it had not been a resident of it. It was a creation, an epitaph to the last Creation before the strange Maltusian scientist had interfered. Once discovered it had been a sort of battle of wits, with Krona trying to study the Ancient and the Ancient finding ways to make it more difficult for him to do so using both material agents and indirect action at the same time.

It had been so long. So long since anything was even capable of truly understanding it. The entire existence of the universe had seemed so overbearing, a weight of knowledge that it couldn't rid itself of. It was self-aware and there was nothing quite like it. Krona was nothing like it, not really, but the strange little Maltusian had been intelligent enough to be able to hold an interesting conversation when the Ancient took to manifesting in the material universe to deal with him directly. It had taken Krona several years to work out that the specimens he had spent so much time and effort trying to catch were more like a glove than anything else to it.

The memory of Krona's frustration at that had brought it a little cheer in many long moments during its time in the material universe.

It had been everything possible to be. Men, women, boys, girls, animals, plants, elementals. It had created what the mortals called 'magic', a sort of intelligent algorithm woven into this particular universes makeup when the 'pinhole' had been created.

It had been Krona's idea, in the beginning. Many years of effort had brought the two to a wary respect of each others abilities. Despite the adversarial nature between them, both had always felt it appropriate to allow for some dignity when dealing with each other directly. So when Krona suggested that they collaborate together to make a perfect, hidden place for work in studying the multiverses, it had seemed like an appealing idea. Such a thing would create a tunnel through the multiverse, drawing a little energy from many of them near the original universe. The Ancient would no longer be limited to a single reality, but be able to access many, many realities beyond the cluster of multiverses that it could access naturally. So much potential.

It was even working out, when Krona disappeared. The notion of using a single person connected to many multiverses had been sound, but seeing the whole of the event, the Ancient had decided in the end to simply let it play out. The individual he had chosen was fascinating in their own right and it wanted to continue to see what direction his apotheosis was taking. Krona's death had brought his meddling - and his company - to an end. That was that.

It knew how it would go and felt the loneliness of the lack of company even before the event took place in the experience of its material self.

But the event had also opened a door, allowing the Ancient to draw another through to the small pocket universe that had been created. Then several others, similar but not the same, either. In its boredom and loneliness it wanted to be distracted, to have a focus until it found something better to do.

Manipulating emotional light hadn't been particularly difficult. It was only one more part of what seemed like a weave to it. It hadn't created the rings, but rather, stole them instead, picking and choosing between events in linear time in various multiverses to take what it wanted, then simply adjusting the tools of the Maltusians to its own needs. They were an apt, intelligence sort of mortal, but still only mortal. Nothing to really be impressed about. Perhaps near the end of their universe, or when they achieve apotheosis beyond Time.

But watching the events play out, to throw the denizens of many universes together just to see what happens, kept it distracted. Each time a new arrival came it would change the direction of Time in the pocket universe and there would be a new story, a new probability. The Ancient was no longer subjected to always knowing the end of the story before the events played out.

Then the crazy bastards blew up their own batteries and the resulting damage to the pinhole had... well, not closed it, exactly. What had been a surgically precise incision between realities was now more like broken reinforced glass, shattered but still retaining the same general shape, the reach of it extending far, far beyond what the Ancient had set up to draw in others to the pocket universe.

Now pieces of universe it had never intended to be there are arriving, but the Ancient isn't upset about this. The assumption had always been that any excess damage to the tunneling would result in an incursion of the Bleed, which would have been like a hole in a submarine under thirty miles of ocean. The pocket universe would have imploded, the Ancient along with it.

It hadn't interfered, letting it play out anyways. An end to its existence would also be a salve in its own way, freeing it from being.

But this was better. Still standing and now, not even the Ancient could predict how it would go. It was so far beyond control, so unpredictable. Not being in control was a completely new concept to it.

But an interesting one.

For now.

 

"Merry Christmas!" The Boys grandparents had given him the most amazing christmas dinner, most of the family attending. It had been a good night. Most of it, he hadn't known what to do with himself so he mostly hung out with his cousin until it had been time to go home, getting to try games he didn't have because he had a different console.

So it had been a surprise when he'd been called downstairs. "Merrrrry christmas?" He was a little confused. Usually he just went to his room to do whatever. To be out of the way.

"Your grandparents asked me to let you pick one thing out for tonight, so you could enjoy it for a few hours before you go to bed."

"Anything?"

"Mhm."

He hesitated a moment, looking at the ones under the tree. In his mind he was looking at the shapes, trying to visualized things they might be. To make guesses at what his family might have chosen, so as to choose the best one. The one looks a lot like the shape of a game box... "Umm... that one?"

"No."

He blinked. "But you said -"

"Pick another one, leave that one for the morning."

"You said any one though. That ones looks kinda familiar, so -"

"Why the fuck are you arguing with me about this?"

"What? I'm just -"

"Why are you always so ignorant? You can't just leave it until the morning because I asked? Fine, take it. Jesus christ."

He wasn't sure what to do for a moment, until it was picked up and tossed across the table at him. He grabbed it to keep it from sliding off.

"Merry fucking Christmas, why do you have to ruin everything?"

He ended up playing it until two in the morning because being alone with his thoughts until he was too tired to do anything but sleep immediately wasn't something he wanted to do.

Neil growled as he opened his eyes, shaking his head in an effort to make the memory go away. To shake it off. His ability to move was fairly limited because he was strapped to a wheel hung in the air, surrounded by a yellow barrier that he didn't make. Trapped in his own light.

He was still wearing the ring and the ring was generating the construct, but it wasn't under his control at all. It had stopped speaking to him as well and it wasn't until now that he'd realized how much he'd actually enjoyed the company of the snarky, smug AI that inhabited it. Or the ability to move, for that matter. He wasn't sure where he was, or if he was still or moving or anything. Just a yellow glare everywhere that reached him even through closed eyes.

He wasn't sure how long he'd hung there. Probably a few hours, but it felt like days. Maybe it was days. He had no way to tell and no matter how long it was he never seemed to get hungry or thirsty. When the barrier suddenly blinked away he was surrounded by darkness and for half a second, he actually wondered if he'd died.

Then his eyes began to adjust to the lack of glare.

The thing looming in front of him wasn't solid. It kept changing, flesh shifting and reshaping itself until it took on a shape much like himself, but far larger. Its skin was an obsidian black and its eyes all white with no pupils. Its head alone was nearly his size and he realized that he was suspended in a massive, dark space underground somewhere.

"You are troublesome."

"Thank you."

"Hmph. It was not a complement."

"Yeah, this is fascinating and all, but since you clearly have the ability to do anything you want, you mind if we maybe get to the fucking point?"

"Hmph. Impatient." The construct manacles holding him against the wheel vanish and he drops to a small platform of the rings making, landing hard on his face. In front of him, the thing ripples, a wave passing across its entirety. Another wave, the being getting smaller each time until it's no longer a towering giant, merely huge. It made Neil feel like a little child again.

He didn't like that.

"I can do to you whatever I want." Its voice had changed and he couldn't put his finger on exactly what it was. "So what you're going to do is listen. This entire place is the work of beings far beyond what you have ever seen. This little universe. Your actions nearly destroyed it."

"Well, you know, aim high and shoot for the moon. Or just shoot the moon. I put that one down on my bucket list, but I haven't found a moon I dislike enough quite yet."

"I do not involve myself personally in such affairs, as a general rule. But now it is over and you are here. It would, perhaps, have been easier for you to die."

"Okay, that's cool. Can I have my clothes back now?"

"I am not going to kill you."

"Would it kill me to have pants?"

"I am going to let you go, because I want the game to continue. But I also want you to understand something, little mortal."

"That you really want to see my ass? I mean, you could have just a-"

Neil felt himself actually spin a little in place, the ring helping him to do so against his will, when the Ancient backhands him across the face.

"YOU ARE POWERLESS AND IF I MUST STEP IN AGAIN ONCE MORE BECAUSE OF YOU, YOU WILL DIE FOR YEARS. DO YOU UNDERSTAND?"

Neil rocked side to side a little, then cleared his throat. "Yeah man, I get it. Usually when you spank someone you don't do it to their face but hey, maybe you're just built different." Turning his head, he spit to the side, tasting blood in his mouth. Just his lip, though. "So you're the one responsible for all this, huh?"

"When you return to your citadel, remember this - whatever games you play here are yours. I don't care. But if you ever attempt to interfere with the structure holding this pocket universe in place again, I will kill you, ressurrect you, torture you, then kill you again and do it all again the next day. For decades. Centuries. I will forcefully keep you alive in a state of perpetual agony by extending your life span for the sole purpose of allowing you to suffer far longer than any mortal should ever be able to experience."

"Yah, got it. Don't break your sand castle. Don't suppose you're gonna tell me who you are, are you?"

The Ancient stared at him, silent.

"Also I could really go for some pants right nooooooaaaaaAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHHAHAHA-"

Space folded around Nemesis and for a brief second, overlapped with his citadel at the same time before blinking out, leaving the Ancient alone in the cave, staring into the dark.

 

It took three days before Elise started to get it under control.

On the third day she'd been able to start taking visitors again. Talking to people. When she expressed a desire to get outside the building there was a little hesitation, but only a little.

When Ainsley had designed his keep, he'd gone for a simple, blocky fortress with a wall extending into the mountainside which formed a courtyard from the front of the keep to the main gate, allowing people to walk back and forth along the wall. She was doing just that when she saw Ainsley and Fela walking together. Stopping to watch them for a moment, the way they interacted with each other. Elise could see him at ease inside Fela's personal space, something she'd never noticed around him. He'd always seemed... not unfriendly, but slightly distant. Something inside her became profoundly sad at the fact she never really had a chance because of how she looked, what she was.

The urge to go down and beat Fela's face into a mushy pulp was pretty strong too, but by now she was getting into the habit of allowing it to burn without acting on it.

"Almost enough to make you hate them, isn't it?"

Elise wheeled around at the voice, knowing it and not believing it for a moment. But there she was.

"Vera."

"Ferret."

"My name is Elise."

"Good for you." She managed to make it not sound completely patronizing. Somehow. "I'll try to remember that."

"Why are you here? You did this to me." Elise took a slow, deep breath and exhaled. "Why."

"You're pretty pissed, Elise. I don't mean right now. You have a deep, deep well of rage inside you and you covered it up with cheery, bubbly joking. But it was always there, just underneath, wasn't it? Like poison." Vera hopped down from the edge of the wall, sighing. "Oh, believe me, I know. You also needed it. I think if that fight had gone down without you getting to hurt somebody, it might have seriously broken you. You and I aren't the kind of personality that takes feeling weak very well."

Elise just stared at her in sullen confusion. This was the most she'd heard Vera speak in at a single time. "I can't turn it off. I can't get rid of it."

"I know. That's also why I'm here."

Elise tilted her head slightly. "You want it back."

"I do. I think you've probably worked out why."

"That means I have leverage over you."

Vera's face hardened a little. "I'm doing you a courtesy coming to talk to you, Elise. Don't be stupid."

Folding her hands behind her back, Elise began to pace, hmming thoughtfully. "No, not being stupid. I don't really like this thing but on the other hand... you being able to recharge." She turned to look at Vera. "You don't know us, do you? Species altruism is built into us. Hardwired. Genkits were designed to put the good of others above themselves, to support each other even when total strangers. We made it that way. You, Vera, are a threat." She sounded grim. "Denying it to you would neutralize that threat. Until I'm satisfied that you're not a danger to us, I'm not giving you what you want."

Vera didn't stay anything, just stared at her for awhile. It was really only a minute or so but the silence seemed to draw it out between them as she stared Elise down and Elise stared back. Sensing no capitulation, Vera nodded slowly. "So what does that entail, exactly?"

"You work with us. For awhile. Until we get a better sense of you."

"I have my own interests to take care of back on Psyche, you know."

"Yes, I know. There's probably some crossover there. You'd be surprised what we're capable of."

"No, I wouldn't." Vera snort-laughed. "The fucking balls on you. Yeah, alright." She nodded slowly. "You help me, I help you. You get to go back to normal, I get..."

"Why do you want that thing anyways?"

Vera looked like she'd been struck, blinking hard. "What?"

"The red ring. You hate it. I know you hate it, I can actively feel you hating it right now so why don't you just take it off?"

"Do you think that weapon is the only part of the red light that binds itself to you? Infects you? It's not. I can't take off the ring. It would probably kill me. I've tried."

"Mind numbing pain?"

"No, when I tried, my heart stopped. Somebody putting the ring back on my hand rebooted me."

Elise frowned. "You're a prisoner too then, aren't you?"

"Sure, you could say that. But you've had a ring. Don't tell me you don't miss that power, that ability. Don't try to tell me seeing that tiger boy of yours flying around with it doesn't irritate you."

"Oh shut up." Elise sighed. "Aetius is a good guy."

"He hates that armor of his as much as you hate your weapon. Pretty funny, don't you think?"

"I'm not laughing."

"Noooot that kind of funny." Vera walked over to her, putting a hand on Elise's shoulder. "I'm not a wild, violent lunatic. I'm a directed violent lunatic." She gave Elise's shoulder a friendly pat. "Entirely different, you know."

Walking past Vera, Elise smacked the woman with her tail as she did it. "That's not very encouraging. What do you do on Psyche, anyways?"

"As far as Nemesis was concerned? Ruling my own little kingdom. In actuality? I was the reason he didn't rule every settlement on the planet. My country is the only place free of him. Most of my work was in trying to help make it self-sustaining but red rings aren't as good for building things as your blue friend apparently is."

"Ainsley would help you, if you asked."

"I don't ask for things." A flat, this-isn't-an-argument tone to it. "You want me to work with you, that's fine. You want to offer to help, I'm happy to take it. But asking? Not my style. With that said..." She shrugs. "They do ask for things. You only saw the worst of the planet, gather your friends up and come find me when you're ready. I'll be waiting for you."

"You don't have to sound like a video game quest!"

"Just going for what you know!" Vera yelled it back as she rose into the air, then took off in a streak of red.

Elise stared at the spot for a second, lashing her tail side to side behind her, ears pinned back against her head. She didn't even feel that irritated, despite the body language. But the prospect of being free...

And the coming uselessness following that.

 

The weather battered Maudre as she made her way across the fields, the wind blowing the rain almost sideways and making it difficult to see. But she knew these fields well and the compass inside her head told her which direction to go. Sometimes she would hesitate and there would be a flicker in the air ahead of her, guiding her. Her elemental was weakened in most conditions but the conditions to make lightning were the same ones that allowed it to come to full strength and project ball lightning to show its friend the way.

Usually the valley didn't see much in the way of bad weather, but ever since the world had shattered, everything had gone crazy. Weather patterns would shift suddenly, strange animals and people never seen before suddenly appearing, confrontations breaking out all over Tovalon as new arrivals sometimes clashed with the people, supplies running short from a population that suddenly grew...

Mired in her own thoughts she almost missed the light in front of her, not guiding, but stopped. The elemental was waiting for her.

"What is it?"

A flicker, two pulses. Danger.

"Enemies?"

A single pulse, followed by a gradual brightening, then a quick fade. Unknown.

"Then what's the danger?"

A repeat of the same.

"Well, I can't just stay out here! I need shelter! If I can't get into the house, can you guide me to the back of the barn?"

Three quick pulses. Yes. It began to move away, leading her.

Moving in this direction, the rain was blowing into her face and it was all she could do to follow her friend. One hand holding her hood up from being blown back by the wind, the other in front of her eyes to allow her to see at least a little. She could make out the front of the barn, a reinforced long house made of stone, mortar and metal. Not like the wooden houses they usually make.

If anywhere would stand after the storm, it would be that.

Almost sliding down the slope leading to the back, she made her way down in the mud and found herself being pulled inside by hands as soon as she turned the corner, the heavy door thudding shut and snicking as the arm-bars drop into place.

The hands released her and she whirled to see who had grabbed her. As far as she knew, she'd been alone out here. "Wh-! I know you!"

King Noah(A title he hated, but most seemed to understand; after all, Tovari had never had 'kings' before) gave her a look of surprise. "You do? Most don't know how I look, personally."

"What... why are you in my barn?" She blinked as she registered the full longhouse behind him. It wasn't just her animals, but at least forty or fifty other Tovari she had never met in her life. "Where did you all come from?"

Noah relaxed a little, looking relieved. "It's yours? Good. I'm sorry about the intrusion. When the storm began, we were a little further down the valley. We grabbed what we could, but a flash flood scattered most of our stuff across the entire area. We'll be lucky to recover any of it." He sighed. "All the carpets and cloths..."

Maudre nodded slowly. "Um, there's a food supply in here. But it's sealed and buried, to keep it cold. It's about three inches under the floor there, in the corner." She pointed behind herself, at the corner away from the door she'd entered. "I left it there in case of something like this. All my seed grain, too. I suppose you'll be wanting to use that for some of your animals."

"We can use it to make bread, too. We have stone and fire elementals, we can form a small oven. I swear that you won't go without in the coming season."

Maudre pulled her cloak off and the others behind Noah seemed to collective exhale, taking it as a sign that there wouldn't be a problem. "I'm not sure I'm going to have a house in the coming season."

"I'll make sure you do, even if I have to drag half of Tovalon here to get it done. Your kindness won't be forgotten, I promise."

Nodding, Maudre went over to help dig up the stash. To her surprise, Noah did too. After some effort between the two of them - and a short spade she'd hung on the wall for this - they pulled the chest out of the floor enough to be able to open the lid and begin passing the dried fruit and salted meat out to the others.

After that had mostly been taken care of, she found herself sitting with her back up against one of the jorka sprawled out on its side, all six legs flopped as it snored away. When Noah walked over to sit and join her, she found herself curious instead of nervous in the way she might be with visitors she didn't know.

"What happened, Noah?"

He grunted softly as he sat down, one of his ears flopping. "What do you mean?"

"Why is the weather going insane like this? Why did part chunks of the forest here suddenly change? We've never had weather like this before, it's crazy."

"I don't know." He shook his head slowly. "Saxali went with the lightsmiths to fight... something. I'm not sure what, the letter didn't really say. Just that something major was going to happen. But it's been a week now and I haven't heard from her."

She turned her head to look at him as he spoke. "Are you alright?"

"The lightsmiths, they travel almost instantly over long distances. If they haven't brought her back... why?"

"Maybe they need her help with something?"

"Can't think of what." He shook his head again. "If your house is wiped out, do you want to come with us until we can return and build another?"

"I won't have anywhere else to go."

"Well." He patted her shoulder. "A very kind person once took me in when I had nowhere to go. I'd be a shitty leader if I couldn't do the same."

When he got up and headed back to the small crowd, she found herself looking at him thoughtfully. I really need to meet Saxali. Maybe she's the sharing type?

 

Alert. Hope detected.

I glanced down at my right hand without thinking as we landed. "Ring thinks there might be a hope artifact nearby."

Elise is in full combat gear next to me, sans the weapons. The weapon bonded to her is behaving a little like my ring though, causing all the seams to glow in red lines. Against the black fur and the little mask around her eyes, it's kind of intense, actually. Every time she looks at me, she looks a little feral. "Here?"

"Nobody is more surprised than I am, but we never visited this part of the planet before."

I do love a view. It's one of my favorite things about the ring, being able to fly to any vantage point and just drink the whole thing in out to the horizon. We're standing at the edge of a sheer cliff overlooking what looks a little bit like a continental rift. Like a loaf of bread split apart at the top, a rent in the skin of the world stretches out for miles on either side of us, reminding me of the Grand Canyon. Only bigger. This rift has become large enough to fill with soil and become its own little valley, slowly getting a little larger every year. But very slowly.

Most of the valley appears to be settled in some way, which makes sense, kind of. Rather than settle on the floor of it - however far down that might be - they've dug out adobes into the canyon walls, stringing hundreds of bridges back and forth, make out of some kind of blueish rope or vine. Thousands of tiny lights glitter across the valley walls as people mill back and forth traveling around, more little lights moving with them as some folks carry lanterns of their own.

There's music drifting up to us, very faint but riding the wind as it climbs the canyon walls up to where we are. Light, playful, the tune dancing on the tips of its toes like an irish jig. The bloody sky that all of Psyche seems to have hangs overhead but this place almost seems untouched by it, somehow.

Elise folds her arms next to me. "We should be careful, then. This could be a trap."

I nod, creating a platform for us to step on, then sliding it down the cliff face slowly like an elevator. "At least the rings are more advanced, Fela's wings are pretty niche."

Elise's tail lashes side to side next to me, just once. "Mmmm. Yes. I noticed you two have been together a lot, lately."

Inwardly, I can't help but sigh. Everything she says now, she sounds like she's barely tolerating my presence. I like to think it's the thing bonded to her. "Consequences of being similar, I suppose. She's been good company." I shrugged. "But it's not a thing or anything."

"Mmm."

As we come to the top level of bridges, the people milling around have begun to notice us. Not all of them are the same dark-elf-reminders I met before and... Ring, how many of the Vali are here?

17 individuals. One breeder with a small cluster, the rest are the same gardener caste as previously encountered.

The bug folks I met below. They were helpful in making contact with the temple guards, so I should take some time to make sure things are going alright while I'm here.

As we step out onto one of the bridges, a young girl in homespun brown approaches us while the rest just sort of do the looky-loo thing of pointing and staring at the weird people.

"Ainsley and... Elise, I presume?"

I nod. "You have us at a disadvantage."

"I'm Pel. I was sent to bring you to my master when you arrived." With the absolute presumption that we could do nothing but follow, she simply turns away, heading back into the crowd. I shrug at Elise and follow her, trotting to catch up a little.

"We wouldn't have had any problems finding Vela, you know."

She looks over her shoulder at me but doesn't say anything, instead ducking into one of the adobes. When I follow her it apparently houses a staircase cut into the rock, which she's moving down.

"Never shuts up, does she?" Elise speaks quietly behind me, closer than I thought she was. Shit, she's quiet when she wants to be.

"It's not far, don't worry." Ducking into a doorway back outside, we cross one of the bridges further below where we were and enter an antechamber cut into the rockface, leading further inwards. At the far end of the antechamber, Pel stops, gesturing inside.

Nodding to her as we head down a short flight of stairs, Elise and I emerge into a large, open room. Part of it is clearly a recreational area with a couple couches and lots of pillows on the floor, the other part a kitchenette.

Vera is standing near one of the couches, on which an older man is sitting cross legged, wearing the same sort of homespun robes that Pel had. He has salt and pepper in his hair and beard. Hair tied back in a knot, bare feet with his boots next to the couch. There's something...

"Ainsley. I didn't expect you to come as well." My attention flickers away from the man over to Vera.

"Oh, you know. Friends don't let friends wander into deathworlds by themselves."

"I can take care of myself, Ainsley."

I nod. "Oh, I know. Not doubting you at all. I just didn't like the idea of you not having any backup at all."

Elise considers that for a moment, then nods.

"Ainsley, this is a... friend, of mine."

I nod to the man, then look to see what hope he carries.

And I'm hit with the most intense amount of blue light I've ever seen in a single individual. It's staggering. I can't help but blink the effect away, a little started at the man standing up to offer me his hand.

"Pleased to meet you. I'm Obi-wan."

 

"Hello there."

My answer doesn't seem to illicit any response from him but the sort of polite nod you might give to anyone you're meeting for the first time. Oh well, so much for that, I guess.

"Vera failed to mention those devices have other types. I don't suppose you've ever heard of Jedi, have you?"

Elise shakes her head next to me but I can't help but sort of wince, causing him to glance at me. The only thing I can do is sigh. This is going to be really awkward.

"Uh, yeah, actually. Only, you're not real."

"Pardon me?" Kenobi seems a little taken aback while Vera just tilts her head at me, looking puzzled. Even Elise is giving me an odd look.

"When I first arrived here - not Psyche, but this place, this little... universe, I guess - I didn't remember anything. I've had a little help recovering things but mostly it's happened through association. Sometimes I'll see or hear something and it'll remind me of something from Before This, but it's always barely related to what I'm doing, some culture reference or a story. It's almost never anything actually useful. But the moment you mentioned your name, I remember a whole lot of crap about you in particular."

"This sounds really interesting, actually." Vera looks intrigued, sitting down on the couch with her arms out on the back of it, legs crossed at the knees. "Just what do you think you know about him?"

"Tell me, Master Kenobi. Does the name Anakin Skywalker mean anything to you?"

That stops him short, the amusement wiped from Obi-wan's face immediately. "I never told you my last name. How do you know either of those names? I haven't thought about the boy in years."

"Can you tell me what you know of him?"

"Very little. My master, Qui Gon Jinn, wished for the boy to be trained just before he died. He was a bit of a rogue in my order. Which I'm beginning to suspect you know all about." That gets a nod from me. "When I brought him before the council, they assessed him and decided that, ultimately, it would be too dangerous to train him. He never became a padawan but being as Force-sensitive as he was - not to mention being an orphan - we couldn't very well just leave him to his own devices. From what I remember, he ended up in the Service Corps of the temple, joining the Exploration Corps. He had a knack for mapping out new hyperspace lanes and was quickly building a reputation as a pilot when I lost track of him."

"So he was never trained, never became a jedi?"

"No."

"And the clone wars?"

"The what?"

That makes me stop up. "What I remember doesn't match up with what has happened to you. You're the same person from the story I know, but your story is different. In the one I know, Skywalker was taken on as your padawan immediately after Master Qui Gon died. He became a pretty powerful jedi, right up to the point where Darth Sidious turned him and he exterminated the jedi order. Sidious had managed to take control of the Republic while doing it, turning it into a new Sith empire and starting a 20 year long civil war."

The look he's giving me is one of mild horror. "That's... who was this Sith lord?"

"Sheev Palpatine of Naboo."

"The senator from Naboo? No, he never really gained any true political power. He went missing shortly after Skywalker was reassigned. No one ever knew what happened to him."

"My guess is Darth Maul managed to kill him. His apprentice. You know how it goes with Sith."

"That means there's still a Sith Order back home." I nod. "That changes things."

"No, it doesn't." Vera speaks up. "First of all, timelines. You know damn well your when is as important as your where and Pel being here suggests the when is optional." She glances at me. "Same order, different point in history."

I nod. "How many other Jedi are here?"

"Excuse me." Looks like Elise has finally lost patience with not being in the know. "Are you just going to spend this entire conversation without explaining anything at all?"

I nod. "You're right, Elise. Sorry about that." That mollifies her a little. "Jedi are monks. A sort of galactic peacekeeping order. They're nomads who roam about helping people and have been doing it for at least a dozen millennia when Obi-wan here was born."

"And you say all this is just a story to you?" Kenobi looks intrigued, slowly pacing the room back and forth. "Well, having spent a week here, I can't say it's impossible. This place is a madhouse."

"How did you end up here?"

"Well, for me it was Dathomir. That's where I thought I was when I came upon Vera here. So I'm afraid I couldn't say, for me it was rather like turning a corner and finding myself in another universe."

"I died." I blink, turning to look behind myself at Pel. "My ship exploded and I got stranded in space. Ran out of air. I blacked out in my suit, woke up with my face in the dirt here."

I nod slowly. "Like the universe pulling elements it thinks doesn't belong and flushing them down the drain, but we're the drain catch."

Vera looks a little surprised. "I've been trying to come up with a metaphor for that for a week. Fucker, you beat me to it."

"Sorry, not sorry."

"Ah, we're getting rather off track here." Kenobi draws a circle in the air in front of himself. "Why don't we all sit down and have some tea while we discuss things? This whole visit is to learn a bit more about this place, isn't it?"

Elise nods next to me, but I shrug. "I'm just here to hang out with Elise, mostly. This is her show."

Elise walks past the two of us, moving between Kenobi and I and invading our personal space for a second. As she does it she locks eyes with me, giving me a look I can't decipher before sitting down next to Vera.

"Okay. Ainsley, you say you know this guy. Is he okay?"

"Kenobi here is probably the most jedi Jedi I've ever heard about. He's a living personification of the ideals of their order." He's giving me an odd look. "No, seriously. Even after the order is wiped out, you had a hand in trying to revive it. I'll tell you about it some time."

"Pel?"

"Of course." As she ducks away, Kenobi moves to sit cross logged on the opposite couch and I simply hover midair, since it takes less power than making a construct seat.

"She makes very good tea." Vera takes a deep breath, then exhales. "So. Let's begin with what I've been doing here."