Spoiler
Setting:
<Cred> paleolithic age, but all the dinosaurs are made of nano-bots

Plot:
<Sai> Character A has achieved a position of military authority through politics rather than merit and finds themself beset by an invasion led by Character B. Character A must turn to the unlikely advice of Character C to save their outpost.

Characters:
<Chwoka> #1, a hardboiled private eye who speaks with his fists
<Chwoka> #2, a hardboiled egg eating champion whose addiction to hardboiled eggs is ruining their life
<Chwoka> #3, a dead architect

SpoilerIf there's one thing I've learned in this business, it's that things can always get worse.

I thought it was bad when I messed up and punched the Minister of Finance in his nanotech jaw, only to have it turn out that the Minister of Justice was the real brains behind the money-laundering scheme.

But then it got worse when, after the cabinet shuffle, the Minister of Finance was shifted to Minister of Defense and he pushed through a bill mandating that all hard-boiled private eyes be drafted into the defense forces.

At first that didn't seem so bad, but then I got a sudden "promotion". Specifically, they gave me the lowest possible rank they could that would legally let me be assigned to take command at Fort Labrea. The place was a dump, and worse than that, it was the least-defended spot on the border. So if anyone did try to invade us, they'd be going right through there. It was exactly the sort of place politicians send nanosaurs they never want to see again.

I knew we'd be facing an invasion, but I didn't expect it two days into my command. And I especially didn't expect her to walk back into my life.

They called her the Eggsecutioner. She was an oviraptor who liked her eggs hardboiled. I mean, really hardboiled. Everyone joked that was what she saw in me.

Of course, it was never gonna last. It was only a matter of time before she wasn't satisfied with the cloned nano-eggs and took to robbing nests. She could never get enough eggs. When I found out, I let my fists do the talking with their integrated speakers, and she was exiled for her crimes.

Apparently she'd done okay for herself in exile, judging by the army of stegosaurs and triceratops behind her. She was mad - mad at the country that had abandoned her, and mad at me for my role in it.

And I had no goddamn clue what I was gonna do about it.

I didn't know military tactics. I only knew punching. And there were way more nanosaurs out there than I could punch.

The best hope I had was to find someone in this dump who was more qualified than me. I stayed up all night scouring personnel files for someone, anyone who might have a chance at turning this fight around.

Then I saw it.

Private Hardy Boyle. Before joining the army, he'd architect, but not just any old architect. Fort Labrea had been his work. There wasn't much we could do to stop the Eggsecutioner from getting in here, but maybe, just maybe, we could use some kind of trick in its construction to gain an advantage when they arrived.

Thrilled, I called the nearest grunt and asked her to get Hardy Boyle into my office. She just sort of stared at me.

"You mean, dig him up?" she asked in disbelief.

That's when I noticed just which personnel files I'd been looking through - the casualties folder. Hardy Boyle had been dead for three years.

On the other hand, in my old line of work, when your only lead was a dead man, that was just a Tuesday. I decided to dig a little deeper into what had happened to old Hardy.

Turned out, his death hadn't been on the battlefield. It had been ruled an accident - but, on the other hand, you didn't hire the good investigators to check out Fort Labrea. The case might be cold, and I might have an invasion to fight off in a few hours, but the last thing we needed was a murderer in our ranks when it all went down.

So I started with Hardy's quarters. Turned out the place hadn't been touched since his death - everyone thought he was a little weird, and bad luck, and generally all sorts of unpleasant rumors. I had to run my internal dust filters on high once I opened the door to check out the scene of the crime.

According to the report in his file, Hardy had been killed when the titanium-alloy bookcase he'd been building in his spare time crushed him, and then his nanokettle malfunctioned at that exact same moment and blasted him with an EMP that shut down his self-repair functions.

It was all nice and clean. Too nice and clean. You had a better chance of getting fried in a lightning storm at the exact same moment they announced you'd won the cyber-lottery jackpot. Not to mention that nanokettles without hypersurge protectors were even more decades out-of-date than most of the shoddy equipment we got here at Labrea.

That kind of old junk would be stuck in the storerooms, and that means there should be a record of who requested it, and who filled the request. Keeping records was the one thing they took seriously around here, after all.

I checked the serial number against the storage computer, and it turned out that Hardy had requested a kettle... but according to the timestamps, the request was made five minutes after his life support systems had stopped sending updates.

Something smelled here, and it smelled like foul play. On a hunch, I ordered them to dig up Hardy's grave.

It was just as I suspected. The body was gone. The EMP hadn't fried him - it'd just disabled his transmitters and taken him off the grid. Hardy hadn't died, at least not when everyone thought he had - he'd just found his way out of this hell.

And he might just have shown the rest of us a way out, too.

---

When the Eggsecutioner arrived, she found the place littered with inert bodies. A quick check of her scanners showed all essential systems inactive. She laughed.

"I knew my ex was incompetent, but disabling his whole unit? Never thought he'd mess up that badly. Oh well, guess that just makes things easier for us. Everyone rest up, tomorrow we start marching on the capital. And see if you can find any eggs to boil up! I'm hungry!"

Of course, Eggsy didn't know what my new pal Hardy had taught me about hiding essential life-sign transmissions. That night, when the invaders were in sleep mode, we all got up from and took the enemy by surprise. They didn't know what hit 'em.

Namely, my fists.

Spoiler
Characters:
Character A is shy, withdrawn, inquisitive, and apologizes frequently. Also a werewolf.
Character B is imperious, arrogant, domineering, and caustic. Also a demon.
Character C is social, conciliatory, friendly, and good-natured. Also a vampire.

Setting:
A feudal kingdom of bickering nobles and subterfuge, except in space.

Plot:
Character A has sworn their life to protect the loved one of Character B, but has failed them. Now they must face the shame of telling Character B of their loss. Bracing themselves to accept death or disgrace, they reveal the situation to Character C, who surprisingly volunteers to help them in this emotional task.

When the time comes for them to confront Character B, Character C reveals the true purpose of their offer.

SpoilerGATE 49/NOT

---

The House of the Flame-Scorned. Proud traders across the planes, their scions and psions straddled the narrow boundary in between existence and void, creating the lucrative market in selling to infinite eldritch horrors residing in the space between universes. Theirs were the Gates of Is/Not, twisting pale tendrils wound about great orbital towers that removed space from the universe and replaced it with… the other thing.

Leiletta, heir to House Flame-Scorned, stood before the Gate, black lip curled. Her red eyes flashed with impatience and anger; her foot, sheathed in an elegant too-sheer high-heeled boot, tapped impatiently on the obsidian deck. Her husband, Danel, had failed to return with the universe shards she had sent him after, and his retinue, too. Not that she minded so much, but he had been carrying their child (Her? The Demon Queen of the Flame-Scorned, born of the union between the Void and the Real, the Unbroken Gatekeeper of the Zerofjords, the Omega Constant for the very Universe, spend months carrying a dependent around in her body? Perish the thought, the Flame-Scorned clan had said, and made the useless ones do it instead), and genetic spawn were so bothersome to replace. Plus, the familes of the lost staff were bound to seek recompense...

---

BEYOND THE VEIL AND

---

Onto the lapping waves of a black sea against the black sands of a black shore…

In pieces, Snowy awoke. She coughed, then vomited, spewing dark, sweet water onto the blackened grains under her face. She whimpered, feeling the cold fluid puddle against her muzzle, but she couldn’t find the strength to move. It was as if she’d been repeatedly battered in the brain with a rock tumbler, leaving disconnected thoughts to roil in a grey slurry.

There was a hand on her cheek. Weakly, she turned her head, but the touch was gone as quickly as it had come. Cautiously, but fearing the worst, she reached for her leg, for the knife strapped there - the one she hoped she’d never have to use. It was gone, of course. Probably swept away in the… the… what had happened, anyway?

“fngnan, little one. poor, poor, child.” The touch was back, and this time it came with a silky, calming voice. “the waters did let you go. others were not lucky as you were.” Snowy felt stroking motions with in her fur, and the sensation as she slowly shrank back into her humanoid form. “your form was strong, and the waters could not take you all. the rest are no more.”

“No, no…” she began, but the hand (pale and waxy, but reassuringly five-digited) shushed her. She felt herself be lifted upright, though the painful blackness of the light made it difficult to take in her surroundings. “I’m sorry.”

“why, my little chonut? are you afeared for the others? they broke with such glory. and the child is the next of the fire-clan. we will return her in time.”

Snowy’s eyes brimmed with tears, not least because of the anti-light, and she sputtered, “The Demon Queen will kill me! I was supposed to protect Danel and their baby, and, and, and...I’m so sorry, you don’t want to hear me talk…” She tried to look up at her savior, but through the tears and the light, all she got was a pale, blurry mess.

“my name is r’nthis-” and here all Snowy got was a cluster of interlapping, meaningless syllables - “-eneyrhl’neyathkknen-ro'esn.” A pause. “but you may be better to call me risen.”

“Risen.” She staggered to her feet, brushing sand from her ripped and torn combat uniform. “R’nthnn… Sorry. Yes. Risen. I’m Snowy. McPhearson.”

“be careful. do not touch eyes.” Snowy’s hands, halfway to her teary sight globes, stopped in their tracks. “let us go home. away from the glory sea. beautiful, but not home. better to you that we leave the waters behind us.”

“Can we get back to a gate? Back to my plane?” She tried to shake her head to get the water out, like she would as a wolf, but the effect was muted on her short gray hair. “I don’t know what I’m going to do. Risen… I’m so sorry to be dumping this on you. She’s going to banish me back to here, won’t she? And it won’t be a nice dip in the glory sea, she’ll put me right over the Zerofjords and I’ll go mad right then and there in the infinite...”

Risen seemed to contemplate this for a moment. “we can explain to the fire-clan monarch. i will come. will you feel comforted? i will come and say, ‘it will be okay’, as you say.” The voice was surprisingly warm. “i do not desire to see you hurt.”

“Oh, would you, would you? Maybe if you explain, she’ll spare me. Please, it was an accident! Was… was it? Why can’t I…”

“the seas took much from you, kgnleyh. your container came through the gate and fell, fell up into the waters, swallowed, as like a spark in the neverending void.”

“An accident.” Snowy held firm to her conviction. “Risen, can we get back to the gate?”

The blur that was the eldritch figure with nice hands made a motion that might have been a nod. “another. your old one is closed now. may have made mistake, your directioners, opened the gate in the glory sea. it has happened times in abundance.”

“Good. Thank you. Sorry.” Snowy’s thoughts were scattering again. The pounding at her head was back, and the water seemed so warm and inexplicable… “Risen, I think we have to go. Now.”

“where is the fire-clan queen? describe it to me.”

“She… she…” Snowy fought to think. “She’ll be in her palace office. At Gate 1/Not. Waiting for a report. F-from me. It’s a nice room, all wood paneled and carpeted, but the walls still smell like blood...”

“hold my hand.”

---

Leiletta was toying idly with her favorite cat-o-nine tails in her luxuriously appointed office - she occasionally took a swing at a virtual model to test her injury scores - when every Gate in the system opened at once. Instantly, she was on her feet, cooly receiving reports and issuing orders - at first, to lock down the terminals, and then to scram the gate reactors when it became clear the failsafes were themselves failing. In all the fuss, she didn’t notice the tear in reality open behind her… at least until Snowy fell face-first onto her desk.

The lip curled. “Where’s Danel.” As flat as the curl was cruel. A slowly-smoldering hand clutched the handle of the many-tongued whip.

Snowy knelt as low as she could go, prostated on the floor before her queen. “I’m so sorry, I’m so, so, sorry, I’m sorry, I’m-”

“Enough!” The Demon Queen punctuated her sentence with a mighty whip-crack against an innocent end table, which shattered. “Where’s Danel,” she began, “and this time, answer me, or I’ll have to-”

“Danel is dead.” Risen’s voice emanated from all corners of the room. A black-blue mist began to pour from the open tear into the Void, settling on the floor and obscuring the carpets. “The contingent was lost in the Uncomprehencean. Their ship suffered a fatal containment failure and breached, filling the cabin with Lethean waters.”

“It was an accident, my queen!” Snowy shouted from the floor, even as the mist blocked her from view. Above ground level, the mist-shrouded figure stepped from the fracture, one foot, then another. But all could see his handsome mouth as the dark clouds cleared away, and all saw his white and pointed teeth as he said…

“Accident, my arse.” Risen rose, shrugging off the clouds like a cloak. “Untold infinities I spent in there, no more than an eldritch ghost. I’d forgotten this bright and beautiful world. Poor, poor Snowy. All I needed from you was a tiny little memory, and then it all came flooding back.”

“Risen Rose.” Leiletta spat. My family sealed you behind the Gates in the very beginning, when we first took the Void Pact. “The First of the Vampyres, the Sanguine Voidspawn.”

Risen sneered at her. “Good, you haven’t forgotten me. I already joyed in reducing your unborn daughter to shreds. Now I will joy in doing the same to you!”

“Come and get me, you undead shadow of a blood lord!” In one motion, she set the cat-o-nine-tails aflame with a blue, shimmering fire. Neatly, Risen returned the gesture by drawing a sword of voidmetal, with a black, searing blade. They ran at each other across the narrow confines of the room, and the resulting battle was an epic not worth telling.

And Snowy was sorry.
And so was the rest of the universe.

Eventually.

THE END

SpoilerValura stared at the dissolving body in her arms. There was no question about it - she had failed in her charge. Lord Bloodwrath the Fearsome's spawn had been banished back to the Devil Realm, and these thrice-blessed angelbots had no blood to use to replenish the body.
Of course, Valura's own blood would be useless. Lycanthrope blood was already corrupted, and of no value to the Boundary-Keepers. Besides, the holy water dispersed by the angelbot grenades was burning through her fur. She had to escape if anything was to be salvaged from this mission, and the devilspawn was too liquid to carry.
And the angelbots were coming closer. There was only one thing to do.
"I'm sorry!" she sobbed suddenly. "I'm sorry we claimed this citadel for the gods of darkness and sacrificed thousands of innocents to bring forth a new demon brood!"
The angelbots stopped suddenly. Valura was surprised - she hadn't expected that to work at all. It had been desperation more than anything.
But to her greater shock, the templar commanding them stepped forward. Templars never exposed themselves to attack like that - not that she had any intention of attacking, not now, after her failure.
"You are sincere," the templar said calmly, or as calmly as he could through the echo in his helmet. "That would surprise most templars, but not I."
He removed his helmet, and Valura was shocked to see his pale, fanged face.
"You're a vampire," she said, mouth agape.
"And I have joined the Great Church of Heaven's Touch because I seek redemption. Perhaps I can never find it, with all the sins I have committed in my long lifetime, but perhaps I might do some good with the search."
Valura broke down in tears.
"What is troubling you, child?"
She pointed to the bubbles that had once been demonspawn.
"I told Lord Bloodwrath I would protect his brood. I swore upon my life. How can I tell him I failed? I'm... I'm not ready to die. But were I to back down from my vow! What good is evading death when all that remains of your life is disgrace?"
The templar nodded.
"I understand your plight. The choice you face is not an easy one - but there may be another way."
He pressed a button on his control device, and the angelbots shut down.
"I surrender."
"You what?"
"I wish to help you speak to your lord, but as a templar, the only way I could enter his fortress is as his prisoner. So, I accept that responsibility in order to help you."
"That's... I'm speechless." Valura started sobbing. "I'm so sorry for putting you through so much trouble!"
"Do not apologize. This is what God would have me do."

And so, Valura took a shuttle back to Lord Bloodwrath's space fortress, with a high-value prisoner aboard. She was guided to his throne room, along with the prisoner.
Lord Bloodwrath smiled a wicked smile. It was enough to frighten small children.
"A templar!" he cackled. "This is just what I need to gain the Great Fiend's favor. Especially once we tear you up and find out what you know. Hmm, might be trickier than usual with a vampire - now there's an odd one, but the Great Fiend is sure to be even more delighted with such an unusual gift."
He turned to Valura.
"And how fare my spawn?"
Valura's face tensed up. She couldn't think of what to say. But the templar spoke up for her.
"Your spawn perished at the hands of my angelbots," he said calmly. "Your enforcer fought valiantly, but in the end her efforts were futile. My force was simply superior."
"WHAT?" Lord Bloodwrath screamed. "Valura! Is it true that this holy wretch killed my spawn?"
"It... it is, my lord," she sobbed. "I'm so sorry! I wasn't expecting holy water grenades!"
"You know the price for failure, Valura. Even capturing a templar cannot excuse the loss of my spawn."
"I know! But, I couldn't - I can't - I - I..."
"Lord Bloodwrath," said the templar. "It may have been Valura's task to protect the spawn, but it was my task to destroy them. In the end, I am responsible for their deaths, not her. You have me, and so it would be meaningless to end her life. You would only lose a loyal enforcer."
Bloodwrath glared at the vampire.
"She. Failed. I have no use for failures! And I don't take advice from blessed templars!"
He raised his bloodscythe towards the sky.
"Tonight, we feast on the cursed blood of Valura Agrus, for failing to protect that which is most precious to me: my spawn!"
"Wait!"
It was the templar again. Lord Bloodwrath was clearly not entertained by his interruptions.
"And what the heaven do you want this time, prisoner?"
"I confess, I had another purpose in coming here. I have something that will be of great interest to you."
The templar reached behind his back, into his cloak, and pulled out a goblet and a bottle.
"What is that?"
"Despite my position, I still have certain needs, and this is how the Church provides them. I thought I would share this gift with you."
He poured out a thick red liquid into the goblet, and raised it.
"For you, Lord Bloodwrath."
Lord Bloodwrath sniffed it suspiciously. Then he growled.
"What are you trying to pull? This is just ordinary mortal wine!"
"That is what I, too, believed at first. But taste it, and you will understand."
Bloodwrath glared at the prisoner, then at the goblet, then at one of his guards.
"You! Drink this. I'm not trusting anything that comes from a churchman."
The demon guard complied, and as he sipped, his eyes widened.
"That's the most amazing blood I've ever tasted," he said. He was about to take another sip when Bloodwrath pulled it away from him.
"What kind of trick is this?" He sipped from the goblet, and stared in awe.
"This is what they've got in the church?" he asked.
"The Blood of Christ," said the templar. "They also have the Flesh of Christ, but I'm not as keen on that. It might be more to your liking, however."
"Well, sign me up!" Bloodwrath laughed. "If they've got more of this, I'd be more than happy to switch sides!"
He turned to Valura.
"Awright, girl, you're fine. I can deal with failure if it tastes this good!"
And that is the story of how the Bloodwrath clan joined the Great Church of Heaven's Touch, much to the surprise of essentially everyone. With the sheer might under Lord Bloodwrath's command, the Church soon wiped out the other demons and everyone lived happily ever after.