Masks 2

Radka gives a, what some might call a laugh, or it could just be the wheezing of some very broken organs. “This, is your opening salvo? Really? Helping that woman first while I’m still very much still in the fight?” She just gave out a tsk. 

Her body started to grow dragon like scales in its entirety, the bullets Red Reaper was shooting were slowly starting to plink off as they were forming a bit more slowly. “Always bullets with this one. At least the fire is new.” She quipped as she made a clawlike gesture and shot finger bones out of her hands like bullets in the direction she was getting hit from. No illusion could really block out that. 

The root system did look to be lagging a bit and the work the heros were doing to it seemed to be working! Good job! She gave a few displeased grunts as she looked about and could not really see past the illusion no matter how many eyes or ears she had. Well this wouldn’t do. With her tendrils not being able to feel anything out, she tried a new plan.  

She ripped out the flesh in her wrist and an unnaturally huge flow of blood came from it, oh, and it seemed to be boiling. She held it up and let it spray over every spot of the area. Giving light burns to all the heros there, if they didn’t have a supernatural way of dodging this attack. 

“Now I can see you.” She snarked. And then she snarked back at Orla. “Of course. That was a blob monster. We’re nothing alike. Like the hotness gulf is like…. SO fucking wide.”

Finn and Esen did manage to get close enough to do something physical to her. They would be attacking her as she’s spraying blood. 

The arms do fall of of candy and any sort of flesh bone thing around her disintegrated.

Cadence comes back to consciousness from the groups efforts! She’s still a bit stunned though.

Therea hasn't been noticed! Yet.

Raven took a step back looking at the godless abomination Radka was turning herself into and realising his necromancy as it was, was only barely slowing it down and people were still too busy getting into positions to do solid damage to her. And those dragon scales she was growing were going to be a problem.

He patted down the packs at his side and the pockets before fumbling out what looked like a small, clear, if irridiscent, plastic bag filled with white powder with a label slapped across it with 'Druggie Dougie's Super Special Slam Jam' scrawled upon it. He tore off his raven mask, sighed briefly before tearing open the bag and-

Snorting up the entire fucking bag of white powder.

He shook violently for a second and his eyes flashed a deep purple taking a deep, gasping breath... And bellowed out a spell in magetongue firing a thunderous wave of lightning straight at Radka to break through her defenses.

Esen does her best to dodge the boiling blood and attack at the same time, but if she's gotta sacrifice damage in order to not get horribly burned and scarred that's a trade she's willing to make. She does her best to concentrate her shots on one spot, in order to get through the scales and crack Radka like a crab.

Radka's fingerbone bullets flew out towards the Red Reaper and largely failed to hit him, though a few glanced off his armor. Ceasing his fire, he moved to relocate and resumed firing from there. He kept up the constant relocation, doing his best to avoid retaliation.

Nick and Elizabeth kept up their efforts at misleading and misdirecting Radka, hoping to minimize the damage. Darkmagic, having filled a lot of the roots around her with necrosis, switched to shield bullets and fired a couple in front of Elizabeth and Nick. Then she switched to firing them them in front of whoever Radka happened to be firing at.

Tony Margera, spotting the roots that Umeko had ripped up, began grinding atop them to set them on fire. Salamandra aided in this endeavor, tearing up and setting roots on fire.

They had no idea if that would do anything, but they were doing their best.

"KZZZTTTATTLMOST THERE. HANG OKZZZTTTTTTTT, came Emily's voice through their comms, crackling with interference.

Finn has cut back enough tendrils to come at Radka. Much as it's going to hurt to beat in a pretty meat face with far too many eyes, a gal's gotta do what she's gotta do!

She's got no illusions about the danger of the thing -- after all, if Radka could basically suffocate Candy with one hit, Finn would hardly fare any better -- but someone's gotta be on the vanguard, and she's not about to volunteer Orla or Essen or their cool demon buddy for it. So in she goes!!

Using the same technique as before, she tries to do a flash-dash-slash on the almighty babe before them. Minimizing the contact seemed for the best -- she's just gonna try and land a solid blow as she passes by. Hopefully doesn't get caught and suffocated by a giant tentacle or anything.

Orla winced as the burning blood splashed over her, but pushed through it. It was a low grade pain she was able to ignore as it melted into her skin and grew back at the same rate, beginning to push forward and just, charged directly at Radka.

The basic logic being even if you're an immortal unkillable pseudo avatar of the planet, hopefully you're not so inhuman that you don't get potentially distracted in the thick of combat by someone running at you screaming, and throwing a spear at you for attention as the other hand cut a path forward with a sword.

She didn't seem concerned about throwing herself into friendly fire either.

Once Raven's Necromancy was lifted, Radka instantly reformed from all the damage that was dealt to her. She didn't get much of a chance to celebrate that though, as horrible lighting started to hit and course through her. Now, fun fact, Radka can't feel pain, but she did actually still let out a scream. Her face changed from taunting to terrified for a second to absolute anger. All her priorities were to get this wizard the FUCK out of here. With a small gesture wooden fleshy walls appeared all around Raven in a dome and enclosed around him and brought him underground.

"I don't think that will hold him for long. So, my friends, I think our time is over. I'm very aware of hero's overcoming in the last second so its time I wrap this up, to avoid anymore of THOSE attacks." She says quickly as the melee fighters approach.

Radka sizes up Esen and decides to let her have the opening and just rip through her. Her chest gets pierced open and blood and gore splatter all over Esen as her attack strike true. Unfortunately it already looks like shes putting herself together. Just flesh though, the scales have been peeled off for now. It seems her counterattack isn't happening yet. Strange.

She just let Red Reaper fire at her, the bullets were either bounced off or taken and spit out by her body, it didn't really seemed she was concerned about it. Probably hoping it would ricochet into an ally probably.

For Finn, all eyes turn towards her. All of Radka's manually designed reflexes react and reach to catch Finn in mid air. She did manage to get her sword through the scales though so those are gone around her arm, but her arm kind of expanded for that to not be much of a problem to hold her.

Radka turn to Orla and grinned, and turned to charge at her naturally fast, and met with her charge and let the spear take out half her torso from the spot Esen hit. But a hand shot out of her hip and grabbed Orla. With a grin Radka says.

"I've noticed you've got regeneration. That's a pretty good one. If you weren't against me that is." And then, a pulse of energy shot through Orla, and she felt herself growing multiple limbs twisting around her own ones, tangling them up to impossible ends with just masses of flesh connecting to all of them, until Orla was just a ball of flesh and bone.

"That should hold you for a while."

Then she closed her eyes and felt her blood mingling on the others, seeing through the illusion. "Well that is, when your healer is gone." With that Emily also got enveloped and taken into the tree.

"Now. Let me show you something." She turns and says to Finn. Then they both disappear into the tree as well.

---------

Finn and Radka appear outside the tree actually, out on a branch.

"Here's a fun thing I've been wanting to tell you guys for a while. You will do though. Take a look Girlie." Radka nods her head out to the horizon. For Finn to see massive titans of Radka coming from the earth and vines for miles.

"I've already over taken the earth, Darling. It's already all over. I have multiple versions of myself in each tree and now as titans cleaning up the place. I have already achieved what I came here to do. Even if you heroes DO  manage to get out and regroup, heck, lets say even if you kill me. You will also be killing the earth itself as well!"

She drops Finn from her grasp onto the tree branch as she laughs hysterically. "It's SO FUCKING EPIC!! I DID IT!! I've been in control for HOURS! Ever since all the trees I planted connected into one circuit!! The ones in all major continents!! There was even one in the ocean! Ever since that point there was absolutely no way to stop me!!! My Gaia seeds sprouted into fruition, and no one ever noticed. This is over."

She just continues to laugh right on that tree branch.

------------
In the main chamber. 20 Radka's walk out of the wall and grin at each individual hero.

"Were here to clean you guys up." They say in unison.

------------

To Emily and Raven, they are in their own little hollows in the tree, separated from the others, and a Radka for each of them appear before them.

"Time for some alone time don't you think?" She says to both of them.

Dr. Hartmann looked around the little hollow, before her tired eyes fell on her own personal Radka.

"So what's the game here? Hold me here until the end of time? Show me all the horrors you plan to unleash upon the Earth?" Emily shook her head. "Do you even have any long-term plans? Because it seems like you haven't thought anything through past 'become the Earth'. So unless someone's left some faster-than-light engine lying around somewhere, I hope you're looking forward to drifting in space forever."

---

Theraea remained crouched in place, still furiously working away at her project. Time was running out, but she had a little - she'd deflected the wave of burning blood with a hastily-conjured barrier, and it would take at least a moment for Radka to track her down. That was enough.

The Weaver's fingers flew across an alien keyboard, hastily rewriting the functionality of her reality anchor, while even more hastily rewiring it to charge with several times the safe tolerances in Abyssal energy. Enough for one singular pulse. One discharge of laws rewritten. One last hope, if this would even work. It would need to be well-placed, and it would need to count.

If the Radkas managed to see past the illusion, they would see Theraea standing tall, a strange gun in her hands. A black, rectangular door stood in front of her, clearly wavering and distorting from some interference from the tree itself - and it remained open just long enough for Theraea to fling her improvised device through. When that was done, she reached into a pocket and, impossibly, pulled out what appeared to be an authentic 13th-century Mongolian lance. With a beat of her wings, she charged into battle alongside her comrades. This was out of her hands now.

---

Meanwhile, just to the left of conventional reality, a lone Weaver sat in her room, enjoying a session of Stefano Kart: Twin Tear!! - a brand new game recovered from a drifting scrap of reality by an intrepid scouting team that had nothing better to do. Rather insistently, a message notification dinged, and she was forced to pause her game to check.

FROM: Mender Theraea, 17-Ibuarska
TO: Observer Cydia, 1-Amgarsk
PRIORITY LEVEL: CRITICAL

Cydia-

Package delivered to portal chamber. DANGEROUSLY UNSTABLE. Disconnect mauve wire and IMMEDIATELY send into CORE OF EARTH PRIME or otherwise CENTERMOST POINT OF ANOMALOUS TREE NETWORK. HURRY.

If I make it out alive, we should hang out more.

- Theraea

---

And in the portal chamber of Observation Post One, there sat a mass of hastily-MacGyvered technology, with a number of wires and other bits of machinery sticking out in all directions. Dormant for now, a new set of laws hummed away within, ready to explode out violently once set in motion.

A cessation of communication, to disrupt the networking of the trees.
A cessation of regeneration, that Radka might not heal from all wounds.
And an ordinance of withering, that the part of the plant network disrupted might not so easily be restored.

A gamble. A gamble atop a gamble atop a gamble. But maybe it would be enough to give the world's heroes a chance.

Ezren was EXTREMELY jealous of the magic coke that one guy was huffing. He paused briefly, not because of the awesome boiling blood spray, or the banter, not to check on Cadence, but to see if he could spot any more on the guy and figure out if it'd be worth asking.

But then he was somewhere under the tree.

"... Damn it..."

Probably not worth it anyway. He didn't seem the type to share. Ah well, he gave Cadence a little pat on the head since she was, ehh, ok enough, and snipped the hedge shears shut, the whole thing reforming into a comically large axe. Peering around at the frankly awkward living contents of the room, he whistled, "Damn, a 13th-century Mongolian lance? I thought you were all gonna be squares I was putting up with for better tree fights, but it turns out you all know how to party. Invite me to the next one!"

Delighted, he shuffled around to be somewhere between Cadence and Orla since they both seemed to be.... a bit preoccupied with their own Things. Then, hefting the axe over his shoulder, he charged! Time to hack down some Radkas!

Esen looks from Radka to Radka, sizing them all up. She calls out to the others, and tries to remember if she has an earpiece that still works.

"Hey, guys? Is one of these the real one, or do we gotta kill all of them?"

Using her hookshots, she maneuvers back to try and defend alongside the other heroes. Power in numbers and all that, evens the odds.

Orla was... horrified in the brief moments before life became a monstrously painful overwhelming crash of sensations of pain.

The fact that there were multiple limbs locked together and only one brain to control everything was an issue.

A moment of brief sanity as the conscieseness of Khazra gave Orla a brief respite, to contemplate a... nightmarish option to perhaps escape her own regeneration.

SpoilerShow

And that was when the giant ball of flesh and meat and blood and hair and teeth began tearing itself apart. The only blessing was that this was only relatively less painful than the state she was already in, although the sight of limbs and bodies being torn out of the central mass of Orla was made even more... Awful, because of how the bits were rapidly regenerated into Orlas before falling over dead as the regenrative abilities cut off, so bits of limbs forming into half healed bodies, heads and faces and masses struggling to form into twitching wholes. The worst were the ones that seemed to come out mostly as full Orlas and just laid there, making small feeble motions and and making .

Absolutely drenched in blood and visera, pulling herself out of the masses of her selves, a hand shoved it's way out, and a sword flew into it's hand as Orla cut herself out of the remaining bits attached to herself as she finished trimming.

"Okay. That was, one of the worst things I've had to do." She said, a mad look in her eyes as her armour flew to the apparently core Orla, attaching back to her as she stepped over herselves, looking at the other Radkas.

"This isn't going well then." She said, looking at the grinning maniacs and the missing spaces some heroes had been, the remainers now outnumbered.

"Any chance you can... stop these bits coming back when I kill them?" She asked Khazra, grimacing.

Nick Urias surveyed the twenty Radkas, sighed, and looked to the Demon.

"Lizzie, you're the smart one here. Anything?" he asked.

"I've got nothing, Nick," she replied, readying her sword. "Just keep fighting."

The heroes continued battling Radka, throwing everything they had at her to very little effect. Little did they know that their powers were goddamn useless here.

Then Theraea's reality-anchor bomb teleported right into the nucleus of Radka's tree network and exploded, sending destabilizing shockwaves throughout the abyss as Radka's own tree network suffered under the assault of the reality anchor. For a few moments, it seemed that Radka was falling apart as her tree network was broken apart and her regeneration was disrupted. She let out a few involuntary screams, the Earth itself thrashing around in pain.

Then time snapped forward, then back, then forward, then back. Everyone experienced this happening, finding themselves catapulted through multiple states as their perception of time was jarred back and forth. Radka herself, after a few brief moments of pain, managed to pull her network back together and heal.

She was still the Earth. She was weakened, she was in pain, but she was far from dead.

Around the chamber, the heroes were being shot around as they tumbled forward and backward through time. Everything was in chaotic flux, and Theraea's equipment was all on the fritz. The bomb should NOT have done that. Exploding reality anchors had NEVER done anything remotely like that before.

Desmond grit his teeth, a trickle of blood flowing out of the corner of his mouth as his eyes periodically flashed a luminescent purple. He replaced the Raven mask back across his face to hide the damage the magic cocaine was doing to him as he raised his ancestral sword and readied to answer the cheerful Radka clone with yet another blast of lightning rather than indulge in her narcissism.

But then the foundations of the world itself shook and they were thrown about the wooden chamber like pinballs in a blender. One moment he was impossibly old, skin grey and dry, but he stood in his school he remembered from his youth, an eyeblink later he was a child, tumbling down a flight of stairs in a kingdom of ice, being shouted at by giants. Yet at every point he was bodily colliding with the walls, his own sword, Radka's various bloody body parts while experiencing all the sensations and sights of every point in his life simultaneously.

While HIGH AS A KITE on magic drugs. He was not having a good trip to say the absolute least.

At some point he just lost his shit and panicked, summoning up another thunderous blast of lightning to blow his way out of the pod just as the shaking earth and time dilations ceased.

Finn's face scrunches a bit at the term 'epic' -- and at the whole world domination thing. "Right, as much as appealing as the prospect of an infinite amount of eldritch alt-milfs are, I think I'm going to have to protest! Story ain't over 'til the final page, love -- you'll have t'kill me if you want me to give up!"

Then the explosion goes off, and reality is a much looser concept than it was a few minutes back, and everything is turbofucked, but they have a chance!!! She's got to take it!!!

She pours as much lightning into her blade as she can and starts swinging -- there may be an infinite amount of Radkas, but maybe it's a countable infinity rather than an uncountable one! Maybe they've still got something like a chance!

The Radka's took a second to catch their breaths and then looked extremely pissed off.



"You people LITERALLY could've killed the earth!!! Like!!! Do you know how much of the microbiology verse I control??!?!? That would've been IT! I KNOW I'm bad!! You guys though, you guys call yourselves heroes, yet you were willing to just kill anyone to take me down!! That's fucked up!!! I fucking hate heroes!  You guys do anything over the guise of (all of her uses finger quotes here) 'Doing the right thing.' Yet here you guys are blowing up fucking time, what the fuck. I hate you guys. Fascist assholes. (All of the Radka's continue to curse here)
You even have a terrorist RIGHT HERE (She points to Red Reaper) This guy is literally a psycho terrorist and bombed a building full of civilians and you just let him run fucking free. I hate this. You guys suck. You guys are Idiots. How did you think blowing up time would shake out from this?? A bunch of hypocrites."

She turns to Red Reaper. "Fuck you dude." Multiple bone blades from hundreds of Radka's just start firing at him without stopping until he dies.

The Radka in front of Finn just sighs when the blade hits her. It does massive amount of damage but she just ends up just splitting from her damaged half and reforms. "Killing you guys is turning out to be more work than I was anticipating." Then she just forms a huge bone wall around the tree branch and it just starts moving forward in an attempt to push her off.

Radka wasn't having a good time along with the Raven and like after all the lighting blasts she was like "Shit bro just go I'm having an awful time too." And she just reopened the earth to let him out to the other hordes of Radkas (with a few super hero friends.)

The Radka's just watching Orla were pretty impressed actually and like, all clapped for her when she got out, then laughed a little when time broke where Orla had to go through that again a couple of times. "That was pretty cool and baller, but we still have to like, kill you since you're not stopping." Three Radkas Jumped at Orla with the intention of inducing cancer like growth again.

The ground came up and grabbed Tony Margeras  board and bring it into the earth and then, mutated dogs and squirrels came out from the grown to devour him, oof.

The Radka's were getting just tired at this point and were just trying to grab Nick and Lizzie to shut their organs down.

She just answered Esen. "They are all of me Darling. We are all our own person, a bunch of down to the molecule perfect replicas. And don't try that stupid clone bullshit argument of like, who's the original or something, We don't give a fuck.

Candy finally got to her feet and thanked Ezren for covering her and then started screaming at all the Radka's, to her credit she was pretty effective, Screaming so hard that the atoms vibrated away from the Radkas but it was taking a toll from her.

A very large Radka grabbed at Ezren and grinned. "Wanna go for a ride?"

Radka rolled her eyes at Emily. "Forgive me for not thinking and planning ahead for the entire INFINITY of the universe. I don't plan to hold you here to torture, just to stop your dumb idiot healing. Also there's aliens and space ships I got plenty of options. And when heat death comes I'll just die, it'll be fine."

Well with Therea's stunt there are definitely at least ten Radka's approaching her with bone spears and bile blood and flesh changing toxins.

Well, sure, a bunch of Radka clones approaching was certainly bad. Not having a reality anchor to dampen their powers was worse. Having a biology largely foreign to Earth that might slow down Radka's efforts to kill her? Good, but if it got to that point it would also be unlikely to matter.

Still. None of that was really nearly as important as the fact that time just broke. That was... impossible? Improbable. "Impossible" isn't a thing. A reality anchor of that scale shouldn't have been able to do any damage to the fabric of spacetime. It didn't even kill its target! Theraea stumbled to her feet- off her feet - to her feet, taking stock of the situation and gripping her lance tight as it rapidly crumbled to rust and put itself back together simultaneously. She slapped her communicator a few times, hoping she could get some kind of a message out.

"We've got a massive temporal anomaly in Earth Prime proximity!" she yelled to, possibly, no one, blinking across the chamber to dodge Radkas. "I repeat, massive temporal anomaly! Please respond!"

She turned to one of the Radkas, bringing up a barrier just in time to deflect a bone spear into her arm rather than her vitals. Wherever her vitals were. "There's something... much worse than you coming. We didn't blow up time. It did. Killing us won't stop your reality from unraveling at the seams."

The Red Reaper attempted to dodge, but hundreds of bone shards from multiple directions were really hard to avoid. They ripped into him from all sides, with many slipping between the cracks of his armor. His expression couldn't be seen, but his body language conveyed agony. A few moments passed, and he collapsed lifelessly to the floor.

Throughout the battlefield, Radka finally cracked down, moving to kill the various heroes. The bone wall came in and pushed Finn off the cliff, Orla lied on the ground with tumors overwhelming her, the immobile and horrified Tony Margera was devoured by mutated wildlife, Nick and Lizzie were suffering catastrophic organ failure as the ground swallowed them, Candy was screaming her voice raw trying (and failing) to blast down Radka, and the others were getting hacked apart by infinite Radkas.

Radio static came through their earpieces as a panicked AI Emily spoke. "We-kzzzzt-can't break-kzzzzt-through! Come in! -kzzzzt- are you okay!?"

As she spoke, her words seemed to slow for those still living as the time anomaly froze everything down to complete stasis.

Then another voice spoke up, one distinctly familiar to Theraea and the Raven.

"Well! Uh, this is bad! This is really bad!" Zine shouted, their voice echoing through the timeless void. "So uh. Hang on!"

Finn, Esen, Candy, Orla, Theraea, Ken, Desmond, Emily, Elizabeth, Nick, and Darkmagic suddenly had their spirits separated from their bodies and pulled into a void far away from Los Angeles. There, a house-sized rainbow-scaled incandescent dragon stared down at them. Around them all was a void of stars, planets, and moons all on a purple and blue backdrop that swirled around and around.

"Okay! Hi everyone. I am Zine. I am a dragon. I'm new at this, and you were all WELL beyond the point where there was ANY possibility of winning. And because of how your Earth connects to the multiverse, Radka is shaping up to be a multidimensional world-ending threat. And I'm not SUPPOSED to intervene even then because it's super dangerous and super against the rules and the Creator will be SO mad at me but...well! I don't care! I don't like this."

Zine shrugged super nervously.

"Like, that time anomaly you experienced was actually caused by me sending you back in time. It created, or will create, a temporal anomaly that reacted really badly with the reality anchor. Sorry about that! I'll fix it! I just need to send you back first. Oh, yeah. Right, the plan! I couldn't pull your demon friend out, sorry about that. Their soul made that difficult! Demons are weird. They'll be okay! "

Zine slapped their scaly head and sighed, floating around.

"Right now, you are in a space outside reality. Like, if your world is the house and the abyss is outside, then we're in the space between the walls. Kind of. Sort of. Anyway, you can't beat Radka as she is now. She's become too strong. You need to go back in time, but that's SUPER against the rules. So basically, I am going to weaken the temporal walls of reality, the arcanists among you will form a circle and perform an incredibly powerful forbidden spell that isn't even POSSIBLE outside of here at this exact moment, and Theraea will need to soften the walls of the abyss. And then you're going to go back in time as far as I can send you and stop Radka before she does all this. Warn everyone you can, get everyone together. Stop this from happening. Can you do that? Any questions?"

Theraea waved. "Hi, Zine! This is... okay, technically this is the kind of thing I'm supposed to prevent from happening. Pretty much everyone at the Citadel has agreed that time travel is... um, a terrible idea. Rogue timelines, dimensional fracturing..."

She considered, then shrugged. "I also don't really care. Containment is way more important here. Cleaning up the, um, Earth-Double-Prime we're setting adrift here can happen later? This isn't even the first time I've been shunted into another timeline, so... Um. How far back are we going, exactly? Are you doing a full... core-implantation here? Um, I mean, projecting our souls into our bodies in the past? Or are you generating new ones for us to inhabit earlier in the timeline?"

Theraea actually had a lot of questions.

"The former! You'll all be planted back in your contemporary bodies," Zine replied before slumping sadly. "And I'm not sure much can be done for that Earth. I'll try, but this is likely all I'll be able to do before the other dragons come down on me. I cannot overstate how angry they're going to be about this. The Earth that Radka is consuming is going to be thrown into quarantine to prevent a full-scale multiversal planet virus from taking root. Just...try not to think about that. What we're doing here is saving as many universes as possible by minimizing the number of universes that Radka does this in and quarantining the worlds where she succeeds. Your actions here won't just save the world you're being sent to, but countless Earths across the multiverse."

From what everybody could gather, Zine seemed like a bit of a kid. If they were a dragon, they probably weren't an old one.

Desmond puts his hand up. Now that he was, quite literally outside his own body and no longer suffering from the physical effects of his magic drug overdose, but still probably very much suffering the magical effects, he could actually think clearly.

"About that forbidden magic spell us magic types are casting," Desmond began cautiously. "Exactly what level of forbidden are we talking here? Whats the arcane consequences? I mean I'll still do it but you know, professional concerns and all that."

"The spell is forbidden by dragons because time travel is absurdly dangerous. Mind you, it doesn't stop people from DOING it. There's a few sneaky time travelers and the like going around, but it always ends up creating a bunch of new alternate universes if you aren't careful. This is GOING to create a bunch of new alternate universes. No avoiding that! If we stick to the rules and avoid that, then we abide the creation of a multiversal planet virus and I'm not really okay with that."

Zine sighed, shaking their head.

"There won't be any significant consequences for all of you. Don't worry. You're not going to have the dragon police coming down on you."

"Oh... Well thats good."

Esen is completely out of her depth here.

"Time travel? Multidimensional virus? What. The. FUCK???"

She freaks out a bit, flailing in the void and looking from hero to hero.

"I dunno about you but I got into this hero shit to fight the megacorps, this is way, way, way outta my league! For fuck's sake, I do parkour, I have a weird telekenetic... thing. That I can use. I am not the kinda a-tier hero that goes around saving the universe! Goddamn."

Orla looked around, blinking. Because, she was like a barely sorta (timeywimey) maybe teenage still girl and she'd just been turned into a bunch of tumours again which was so not okay for so many reasons that made her shake with the memory of nightmares ever since she'd looked up how cancer worked herself at 13.

She just, crouched a bit in the void, becoming a little round ball as the space magic dragon said words.

She'd just, she hadn't even been able to die. And that horrible time jolt where she'd experienced both the past of cutting herself apart and being overcome with Radka's healing energy in the future to just become a helpless mass again, unable to help John be torn apart. Everyone else falling.

Orla was taking the pause moment to have a quiet little cry actually. Not like, bawling or anything, a fairly stiff expression, but, still. She needed some time to compartmentalise the pain of seeing everyone die even though that wasn't going to be what happened anymore. And also, just, feel like she didn't need to tear her own flesh off as it rebelled against her, a horrible mass of...

If you could vomit in magic space dimension, Orla hurled.

Finn stared at the wall. They... really failed, huh? They'd let the world end. And now they were going to try and stop it, sure, but in the process...

"...so we'll essentially be killin' the versions of us from this other timeline? Or... becoming them? Or will we be dying and being a vision of great disaster that lets them do something new at the last moment? This... the questions of selfhood an' who's bein' what really are startin' to fuck me up, but--"

She put a hand on Essen's shoulder. "...If the dragon kiddo thinks we've got more we can do, then we've got more we can do. Sounds like they're puttin' it all on the line for us. Don't think they would if we couldn't make something happen. I just have one question. I mean, two -- the selfhood shite's *really* got me fucked -- but one that's important."

She looked at Zine as she moved to pat Orla on the shoulder, to try and give her what minute comfort could be provided here. The question seems to be double-pronged, designed to hit two targets at once.

"...You gonna be okay at the end of all of this, kiddo?"