Re: Intense Struggle! (Round 6 - Frozen Destinies)
12-22-2012, 04:55 PM
Originally posted on MSPA by Lord Paradise.
”This doesn’t feel right,” remarked Crazyman Dragonarms, finishing the knot.
“It’s tight,” agreed Cerise, who didn’t understand why they were bothering tying her up anyway.
”Shut up,” Dragonarms snapped, with a gruffness that leaned precariously towards affection. “All I’m saying is, this ‘Lord of Skulls’ guy doesn’t seem like the type we want to make our friend.”
No one pointed out the sobering truth: “Well, without him and the commandrix, we don’t have the event nexus. Without the event nexus, you’re all stuck here.”
“Sacrificing three individuals for the fate of three worlds is, mathematically, the moral action!” said XMO. “The circumstances are, indeed, regrettable, but the most effective solutions allow room for regret!”
“While of course we agree with my companion the Robot Who Sucks,” offered a member of PAX/TOM, “There is a reason why the Non-Infringers squad is constructed of two purely rational, unfeeling entities and two emotionally compromised mavericks. A more holistic analysis of this course of action may be in order. Iota, can you confirm your colleague’s sentiment that ‘this doesn’t feel right?’”
The leprechaun opened his mouth to speak when a dragon flew in to the portal chamber. Two skeletons tossed the limp bodies of Aegis and Clara to the ground next to the chair in which Cerise was tied.
“We can talk around them, I think,” said no one. “No ears.”
Iota sighed. “I confirm the blasted sentiment,” he confessed. “Necromancer type gives me the willies. Plus, we’ve gotten terribly... infringe-y, haven’t we?”
“’Infringent,’” corrected XMO. “Or ‘infrung,’ depending on dialect.”
Cerise surveyed the two unconscious figures on the ground. “I think you’re doing the right thing,” she offered.
Dragonarms snorted. “I didn’t give you a name just so you could give it away at the first opportunity, Cerise. Grow yourself a will to live.”
Cerise grew contemplative.
“In any case, there’s no need for us to see this through,” said a PAX/TOM. “We should try to get in contact with base sooner rather than later. I think we have little enough reality here that we can punch through to the Tangent.”
“Very well,” said XMO. “Yogic transdimensional bellows deploy.” XMO began to hyperventilate, his massive robot lungs tearing at the fabric of the tri-universe at the seams. PAX/TOM set their equipment up in front of XMO—big chrome antenna-laden monstrosities dotted with multicolored buttons—while Iota crossed his fingers. Something began to beep, as though from a distance.
“I feel like we’re still not finished here,” said Dragonarms. “Cerise, you still haven’t told us how you wound up here.”
”The pursuit of knowledge, being the highest of all goals, is forced to bow to the low,” dismissed a spare PAX/TOM. “Our survival takes precedence. Cerise, you may relay your story if you feel so inclined.”
Cerise sighed and shrugged. ”We, um... There’s someone... something called the Monitor. He’s really powerful. He took eight people and has been making u—making them fight in what I think have all been different worlds. I don’t know why.”
Crazyman Dragonarms and Iota exchanged a glance. “The three of you are all from different universes, then?” asked Dragonarms.
”I think so,” nodded Cerise. ”Her magic works different from what I know. And D’Neya...” The nymph shuddered against her restraints. ”There was someone else involved, too. I think there are more than one of these battles.”
Iota nodded. ”’T may be so,” he said. “We’ve heard... rumors. Yer story is the first confirmation we’ve heard that these things are truly goin’ on.”
“Which makes it all the more imperative that we conduct this data to the Tangent. Mr. Dragonarms, if you please.” A PAX/TOM separate from the one who was speaking held out a long, thick steel cable for Crazyman to clamp his namesake hands down on. Once the dragons bit, a spark shot out, and the transponders whirred to life, marking the iterations of its S.O.S. beacon with a rhythmic beeping.
The air around XMO began to swirl, resolving itself into a holographic image from the Non-Infringers “home base.” Cerise contemplated the cables tying her to her chair. Most of Aph’s chains had been self-forged, and she had borne them happily. Was she any different?
A young woman’s giant head resolved itself around the Non-Infringers. “Comms here,” she asked. “What’s your situation?”
“Non-Infringer squad in dire need o’ extraction,” explained Iota McTaggart. “An’ I’m afraid this is one o’ those ‘ask questions in the debrief’ situations, there bein’ a transuniversal fission event imminent an’ all.”
“Roger. Please stand by.” The giant head in the air looked over at something offscreen for a few seconds. Cerise heard several more beeps. “Your request has been processed and approved,” confirmed Comms, turning back to the Non-Infringers. “Extraction in five seconds.”
The Non-Infringers huddled around the transponders. Iota nodded at Cerise. “We can’t promise we can do anything to help ye, but we’ll look into yer ‘battle’ situation,” he swore before vanishing into a singularity. Where the Non-Infringers had been, nothing remained.
Less than two minutes later, a beak-toothed and yellow-nosed human dressed in robes of fur and bone entered the chamber, escorted by an honor guard of skeletons. Cerise, feeling a sudden need to avoid confrontation, pretended to be asleep. “Ah, good,” he cackled. “The sacrifices have arrived.”
“And the other party has already taken what they needed and departed,” added an intricately armored woman, her eyes glued to a screen on her forearm. “While you do your thing, I’m going to see if I can’t figure out how they escaped. It’s possible we’ve fallen into the trap of thinking too small. Why conquer three universes when you can conquer a billion?”
The Lord of Skulls’ skeletons began to arrange candles and incense around the three prisoners. The necromancer turned to Clara and scrutinized her closely. “Hang on,” he said. “We’ve been swindled! This one’s already dead!”
“Medic,” called the Commandrix, snapping her fingers absently.
An infantrius ran over to Clara and took out a small black device, touching it to her skin. “She’s dead alright,” the soldier confirmed. “That said:”
He slapped Clara. The nun awoke, sputtering. ”Why, I never—“
”Not traditionally dead, I’ll admit,” the medic pointed out helpfully.
”What do you people want from us? I swear, it’s one thing and then another.”
”Undead,” sneered the Lord of Skulls. “If anyone should have seen that coming, it’s me.”
“That’s not sufficient for you?” asked the Commandrix.
“Not by a long shot. I require a sacrifice of three lives. Three beating hearts, not just six flapping gums.”
”A ritual sacrifice, is it?” Clara rolled her eyes. ”Well, there you go. It won’t work. So let us go and find some other lives to toy with.”
Commandrix Saga examined Clara. “Well, she’s well-preserved,” she remarked. “We should be able to fix her up for you.”
”You should be able to what now?” demanded Clara.
”We set her up, you knock her down. Beating heart, breathing lungs, the works. Give us five minutes in the medical tent.”
Clara began to panic. ”You will do no such thing!”
”It’ll need to be a true reanimation, mind,” warned the Lord of Skulls. “No cursed half-lives, no touch of the grave, no vampirism. I need warm flesh.”
“Only the best medical science has to offer,” confirmed the Commandrix. “The only problem might be that this sort of procedure has only ever been performed on cadavers that are, you know, properly dead. But that’s easily sorted out, I imagine.”
”Everyone keep your hands off me!” shouted the necropolitan. ”I won’t have you killing me only to bring me to life only to kill me again! I’ve done all the dying I intend to do for the time being!”
Her shouting brought Aegis to consciousness in time to watch helplessly from his chair as the homo infantrius dragged Clara kicking and screaming into the depths of their forces. Aegis made no attempt to be subtle. He twisted his gloves into something unwieldy enough to snap the cables around his wrists (a particularly ornamental hammer) and then got a little overexcited and ended up breaking the entire chair. “CLARA!” he shouted as he rose, as though that would do anything.
The Lord of Skulls turned to view his third and (to his gaze) least impressive captive. “Hmmph,” he said. “Those gloves will look good on my mantle once I’m back home.” He drew a sword possessed of a property that could only be described by saying the words “cold” and “dark” at the same time and then throwing in the word “smoldering” for good measure afterwards. “Now, boy,” continued the sorcerer, “I’ll forgive that outburst if you sit back down quietly and wait for your turn to die.” When Aegis did not comply with this directive, he snorted and added, “If it helps, you’ll be saving the world.”
Aegis was silent for a moment. How would any of this save the world? Then he understood. “Oh, you mean this world?” he asked. He looked around for a moment. “Yeah, that doesn’t help.”
He turned one of his gloves into a whirling flail and whipped it at the Lord of Skulls’ knee. The colddark sword swung down to intercept, and upon touching the sword, the flail simply flopped to the ground, losing all its energy. “An impressive artifice,” said the Lord of Skulls, signaling for his skeletons to stand back. “But you haven’t so much of an ounce of magic in your body, and I’m the most powerful wizard in seven generations. This is not going to end well for you.”
Cerise kept her eyes closed.
The first lightning bolt—a black and gangly thing, like a very confused stick insect falling out of the ceiling—glanced off of Aegis’ shield and dispersed into the walls. The second one caught him in the shoulder, the dark energy sending him into spasms, but he remained standing.
The necromancer then summoned a wall of black fire around the young man’s feet, forcing him to step back. Aegis fashioned one glove into a bow and another into an arrow, backing up as the flames dogged his steps.
A steel bow with a steel bowstring is not the most efficient delivery device for steel arrows, but Aegis had had a good amount of practice with it. The arrow shot through the flames into the Lord of Skulls’ side, breaking the sorcerer’s concentration enough to dispel the flames. “Get him!” shouted the necromancer to his skeletons, who, fearing for their master’s safety, obliged readily. Aegis ran, refashioning his remaining glove into a longsword, as the skeletons’ crude spells rained all around him, battering him with hail and spiderwebs and grabbing disembodied hands.
He considered killing the dragon first, then using its body for cover, but he needed chaos if he wanted the slightest chance of surviving, and the beast could serve him better in that area if it were alive. He jumped on its upper jaw, covering one of its eyes with each hand, clamping its mouth shut with his legs. The monster growled and thrashed about, shattering a few skeletons and buying Aegis a bit of time.
Cerise opened her eyes. She sat and half-interestedly watched as the wounded Lord of Skulls tore the arrow out of his body and tossed it to the ground, where it turned back into a gauntlet. The necromancer then waved a hand over his wound, depositing a cluster of anti-maggots who diligently began to repair the flesh, binding the wound with silk and pus. Once he caught his breath, he turned towards Aegis and the dragon and began to chant.
Aegis quickly lost all sense of direction as the dragon whipped its neck around, but when he thought he felt it rear up on its hindlegs, he dismounted, falling glove-first onto its back. He then turned his glove into a serrated pick and drove it into the dragon’s wing, causing it to involuntarily flap and drive itself around in circles. The skeletons kept their distance warily, throwing spears.
Cerise’s bindings fell to the floor.
For a moment the nymph thought this had been the result of some unconscious piece of magic on her own part, some secret deep-held desire to escape; then a voice didn’t whisper in her ear, “It doesn’t seem fair that you should miss the party, Cerise.” The voice was neither mocking nor sympathetic. “Now, go help your friend.”
A torrent of magical energy was swirling around the Lord of Skulls, growing with every syllable he fed it. Aegis was too caught up wrangling the dragon to notice the danger. Cerise simply stared at the nothing before her, which stared back with piercing eyes, constantly judging. The nymph wondered if this was what it was like to have a mother.
Skum, the Flawless, didn’t sigh dejectedly, nor did she bodily pull Cerise out of her chair, stuff a dagger into the nymph’s hand, or toss her at the Lord of Skulls. One might conclude therefore that Cerise was acting entirely upon her own design when she lashed out instinctively, driving the dagger into the Lord of Skulls’ back.
The half-uttered spell backfired, obliterating the necromancer’s head and searing Cerise’s hair. The nymph dropped to the floor as the Lord of Skulls fell on top of her, protecting her from the brunt of the blast.
There was a sense of exhalation, like Death was unlacing a particularly uncomfortable corset. The skeletons, deprived of their master, dropped to the floor. Aegis ran up to the dragon’s neck and hacked its head off with four or five swings of his greatsword.
Cerise stood awkwardly by as the young warrior dropped off the dragon and moved to pick up his other gauntlet. He nodded in her direction. “Did you do that?”
“Yes,” <font color="red">said Cerise, feeling that ‘No’ would be slightly more dishonest.
Aegis put on the gauntlet. “So are you, like... okay now?” he asked her.
Cerise had to consider this question only briefly. “No,” she concluded. </font> “Why? Are you?”
Aegis shrugged. “I guess not.” He glanced over to where Clara had gone. “I need to go save Clara. Are you going to help?”
“No.” Cerise looked down on the Lord of Skulls’ corpse.
“Alright, well,” said Aegis, jogging off hands-first with his usual determined, apelike gait. “You try and work things out.”
Cerise turned to nobody. “Why did you do that?” she asked.
Nobody smirked. “I didn’t,” she didn’t say.
”You’re stuck here with us, now, aren’t you? You can’t get back to your home base.”
Nobody shook her head. “On the contrary, Cerise,” she didn’t explain. “I’m already not there.”
* * * * *
The Tangent was mostly beige. Brightly-colored lines of paint signaled the roots to the bridge, to the teleportation zone, to the interstitial escape pods, to the barracks, and the uniforms were similarly garish, with miniskirts and shiny belts and glittering badges with an outer-space motif. One’s eye was drawn, however, to the beigeness of the place at large, an endless expanse of decorative vacuum separating the few splashes of color.
This aspect of the Tangent’s interior mirrored its outside, for the grand snowflake-shaped pandimensional spacetime station that was the Non-Infringers’ home base was locked in the Multiversal Interstice, touching upon each of a million realities in exactly one point. If there were any windows in the Tangent they would look out into a nothingness so profoundly nothing that it lacked even a definite color—it would be just as beige was it would be black, or maybe the yellow-red strobe of closed eyes. And still it would not be empty. Profound nothingnesses caressed the hull of the Tangent, some deliberately watching and waiting, others simply drawn unconsciously to the presence of such an exotic thing as Something.
Skum had never been one of these extremophiles, or if she was, she wouldn’t admit it. Her nothingness was not a property of physics but something more existential, like a held breath, like an old widower waking up in his bed to find himself alone. Some had theorized she had been created in the thoughts of children whose mothers had left the room, a manifestation of the profound absence brought on by their lack of object permanence. Others said she was created by a secret cabal of advertisers, a tangible lack that was the basis of all want, a bogeywoman that could only be dispelled by endless consumption. Others had pointed out, smugly and unhelpfully, that she wasn’t anything at all.
Owing to the dangers of allowing a non-extant being, of interstitial origin or otherwise, aboard the Tangent, Skum was obliged to wear a cohesion suit while on base. The suit was of her own design, and eschewed the normal spangly-red-or-blue dress code in favor of a sleek full-body black outline of womanly form.
If she had to exist, she was going to make damn sure people noticed her.
The woman in black walked along the blue painted line in the beige spacetime station.
“Where have you been?” asked Crazyman Dragonarms when Skum entered the debriefing room.
“Nowhere,” shot Skum, her voice a bit more articulate through the constraints of the suit but still ringing with a certain hollowness that shut down all potential rebuke.
“Just have a seat,” said the only other female in the room, an austere bebuzzcutted human redhead, her uniform decked all up and down the right side with badges, awards and other signs of rank. This was Admiral Fair-Use, commanding officer aboard the Tangent and leader of the Non-Infringers. If she answered to anybody, she kept quiet about it. “Skum, you can confirm everything they’re telling me? You caught a transuniversal battle in mid-stream?”
Skum nodded. “Overseen by something that calls itself ‘the Monitor.’ Dropped three souls into a potential reality-collapse site just to see what happened.”
Fair-Use pressed a finger to a spot right above one eyebrow. “Is this Monitor a player?”
“Not o’ any game we know,” remarked Iota.
The admiral nodded. “We’ll watch those universes closely. Once this bout ends we should be able to track the teleportation signature and hopefully get a drop on this guy.”
“If the universes are still there at the time,” pointed out Skum. “Last I saw, attempts to head off the reality-collapse situation had... gone south.”
“Was that deliberate, do you think?” asked Crazyman Dragonarms. “The second we catch wind of these matches, the crime scene is on the verge of imploding. Can we send in another squad in time to stop it?”
“I’m not sending any more of my people into that deathtrap,” asserted Fair-Use. “In fact, retreat the Tangent from the collapse site. We’ve lost this battle.”
“Bless the ‘oly causal matrix we all got home when we did!” affirmed Iota.
“So what’s our next move?” asked Dragonarms. “Scour the entire multiverse for missing person reports?”
“What about missing universe reports?” asked one of PAX/TOM. “Whoever’s running these things clearly aren’t being subtle about it. They’ve probably just left a signature so big we need to pull back a little to see it.”
“PAX/TOM, you work with Quantitative Analysis to try and draw some patterns,” commanded Fair-Use. “The rest of you, try to work out a way to defeat something who can harness the energy required to host one of these things.”
“No foe can stand against the might of a Non-Infringers squad!” droned XMO. “However, there are certain allies we may be able to bring in to ensure our victory.”
“There’s also the question of ‘why,’” pointed out Dragonarms. “What does ‘the Monitor’ get out of forcing a bunch of curiosities to fight each other? Is he just bored?”
“He could have had any number of reasons for wanting to send a team into the frozen tri-universe,” answered Skum. “The battle could just be a cover.”
“On t’other hand, boredom is a pow’rful motivator,” added Iota. “Anyone with the power needed t’ pull this sort o’ thing off is a child with too big a toy chest.”
“If the Monitor is some sort of divinity,” said Crazyarms, “It could be playing a game out on a metaphorical level. In that case, you need to think about who it’s playing against.”
The table went silent. Iota wheezed. “Well, I’m bushed,” he said. “If ye don’t mind, Admiral, I plan t’ find meself an Ireland an’ sleep off the slings an’ arrows.”
Fair-Use nodded. “Everyone get some rest. You’ve earned it. But you’re back here tomorrow at dawn-standard minus fifteen. Tomorrow we’re at war.”
The Non-Infringers departed—Crazyman Dragonarms to his trophy room, PAX/TOM to their bunkbeds, XMO to go find a recharge outlet, and Iota to the green fields of any one of a hundred thousand Irelands. Skum headed off, too, though where she goes when nobody’s looking, nobody is certain.
Admiral Fair-Use retreated to her own quarters. Battle plans leapt through her mind like sheep, lulling her to sleep.
* * * * *
Clara liked things to be neat, if possible. Obviously she was used to handling a little bit of gooey stuff, if the circumstances required it, but her preferred state was one in which everything was in its place and the dust kept to the corners where it wouldn’t offend anyone.
Commandrix Saga’s medical tent was not neat; it was clinical. The air was thick with sanitizing agents and every surface shone a sharp white that promised to burn any inconvenient microorganism away upon context. There were a lot of transparent blue bags full of transparent blue substances and the sharp metal things only showed themselves in flashes, under tarps or passing by on hovering trolleys. This wasn’t a place of order so much as it was a potential mess, a honeypot to attract blood and death.
Clara, despite her warm relationship with death, was horrified by the place. There was something horribly unnatural about it. Could they truly restore her to life? True life? What kind of horrid civilization could wield that sort of power? The idea was abhorrent to Clara. Her undeath was her connection to her God as well as the source of her continued existence. It was, in short, her way of keeping things neat.
The soldiers lay Clara down on a table. “So,” said a doctor, standing over her. “We need to terminate her... vestige state... without damaging the corpse so much as to hinder the reanimation process. Correct?”
“Correct,” confirmed the Commandrix.
“No heartbeat, no respiration, most vital organs are dormant, neural activity is faint, but there,” said a nurse, reading off a glowing clipboard.
The doctor turned to the Commandrix. “She responded to a stun charge before, correct?”
“Correct.”
“Well, then, disrupting the nervous patterns is the way to go. Someone get me a neuroelectrical interface with all the safeties turned off.”
“Roger,” said the nurse.
“You’ve brought us quite the case here, Commandrix,” said the doctor. “I have to admit I’m a little excited. Someone stop her chanting!”
Before Clara could get the incantation out, an orderly tossed a crude gag inside her mouth. The nun screamed through the gag, losing her patience with these people utterly. They were graverobbers and defilers; their vain pursuit of rational answers to spiritual problems was an affront to every deity in the cosmos. Clara tried not to think about the desecration of her corpse by their medicine. She had heard Aegis shouting for her. He would come.
Everyone lost a second or two.
When the universe came back online, it was showing some signs of wear and tear. The colors were bleeding together, and the lines were blurred. The general trinity nature of this place was beginning to take its toll. “Shit,” cursed the Commandrix. “We need to work fast.”
“Here’s the NEI,” said the nurse, returning with the buzzing device that would kill Clara. A slight box of metal and wiring on wheels, it was everything Clara despised—its numerology was all zeros and decimals, and the instruction manual tucked into its base was thirty pages of pale blue ink on pale yellow paper. The handful of switches and dials that operated it were labeled by angular white engravings, and Clara looked at it and tried not to think, They’re going to turn my brain off with this thing. It was a graceless oblivion, devoid of meaning, the sort for which Schleier apologizes.
In barged Aegis, as promised. He didn’t look good. Parts of him were still twitching from stun charges, and most of the rest of him was covered in blood, either his or others’. Even his weapon seemed somewhat beaten up, bits of its current blood-spattered halberd shape crawling mischievously up its owners hand as though confused or underfed.
“Keep your hands off her,” he wheezed.
“Gloves, actually,” pointed out a doctor, pointing to the layer of sinister-looking rubber covering his hands. “That man is a potential contaminant. Get him out of here.”
“Done,” said the Commandrix. She and her infantrius soldiers rushed Aegis from all sides, weapons set to Cripple. Aegis charged. The doctor held Clara’s head still. Out of the corner of her eye she watched a man’s head fly across the room and damage some sensitive equipment. The doctor hooked a cable to her ear.
Reality blinked again, for what felt like longer this time.
The Commandrix returned to the universe to find that everything in it was rather worse off, except for Aegis and Clara. Her armor was melting. Everyone else was dead—most from Aegis’ whirling halberd, one from a brain aneurysm.
She raised her sidearm and fired. The charge left her gun, wound itself into a sphere, and hung inert in the air.
Aegis turned his weapon into a morningstar and brought it down upon her head. In this instance, reality conformed more or less to the expectations of what the Commandrix expected would happen, given a morningstar and her head. The sphere of energy changed colors several times and then vanished.
Clara felt a weight on her chest as the doctor dropped dead on the table, a very heavy crossbow bolt having pierced his eye. Aegis tossed the body aside and the bolt reintegrated itself into his glove. He then went about untying Clara, supporting his weight on his elbows. The nun couldn’t tell if his legs were broken or if the floor was just turning to jelly or something. Either way, there was cause to worry.
Clara ripped out her gag and sat up on the table, surveying the mess around her. She couldn’t imagine what it must be like up on the surface. “Clara,” said Aegis. “If the world dies while we’re in it, we all die.”
”I know,” said Clara.
“And I’m dying anyway.”
Clara opened her mouth to make some argument against Aegis’ proposed course of action, but could come up with nothing. The boy’s nobility rendered her silent.
The table began to float.
Aegis, breathing heavily through a cracked lung, placed one glove to each of his temples. “Thanks for helping me through this,” he said. “And you were right about Aph. I think we might be able to trust her now.”
The gloves turned into swords. Clara felt something like a tug on her collar.
About forty seconds later, three universes were rent asunder. Matter ceased to be matter, and energy ceased to be energy. Graphed a certain way, the data of what happened in the three formerly-frozen worlds could have been rendered to look like an implosion, though that wasn’t entirely accurate.
Far away, four men who were one man took measurements, attempting to interpose numbers between themselves and the atrocity.
In the absence of three universes, the exotic nothingnesses began to swirl into being, squealing silently. A new branch of Interstice bloomed like a budding flower.
”This doesn’t feel right,” remarked Crazyman Dragonarms, finishing the knot.
“It’s tight,” agreed Cerise, who didn’t understand why they were bothering tying her up anyway.
”Shut up,” Dragonarms snapped, with a gruffness that leaned precariously towards affection. “All I’m saying is, this ‘Lord of Skulls’ guy doesn’t seem like the type we want to make our friend.”
No one pointed out the sobering truth: “Well, without him and the commandrix, we don’t have the event nexus. Without the event nexus, you’re all stuck here.”
“Sacrificing three individuals for the fate of three worlds is, mathematically, the moral action!” said XMO. “The circumstances are, indeed, regrettable, but the most effective solutions allow room for regret!”
“While of course we agree with my companion the Robot Who Sucks,” offered a member of PAX/TOM, “There is a reason why the Non-Infringers squad is constructed of two purely rational, unfeeling entities and two emotionally compromised mavericks. A more holistic analysis of this course of action may be in order. Iota, can you confirm your colleague’s sentiment that ‘this doesn’t feel right?’”
The leprechaun opened his mouth to speak when a dragon flew in to the portal chamber. Two skeletons tossed the limp bodies of Aegis and Clara to the ground next to the chair in which Cerise was tied.
“We can talk around them, I think,” said no one. “No ears.”
Iota sighed. “I confirm the blasted sentiment,” he confessed. “Necromancer type gives me the willies. Plus, we’ve gotten terribly... infringe-y, haven’t we?”
“’Infringent,’” corrected XMO. “Or ‘infrung,’ depending on dialect.”
Cerise surveyed the two unconscious figures on the ground. “I think you’re doing the right thing,” she offered.
Dragonarms snorted. “I didn’t give you a name just so you could give it away at the first opportunity, Cerise. Grow yourself a will to live.”
Cerise grew contemplative.
“In any case, there’s no need for us to see this through,” said a PAX/TOM. “We should try to get in contact with base sooner rather than later. I think we have little enough reality here that we can punch through to the Tangent.”
“Very well,” said XMO. “Yogic transdimensional bellows deploy.” XMO began to hyperventilate, his massive robot lungs tearing at the fabric of the tri-universe at the seams. PAX/TOM set their equipment up in front of XMO—big chrome antenna-laden monstrosities dotted with multicolored buttons—while Iota crossed his fingers. Something began to beep, as though from a distance.
“I feel like we’re still not finished here,” said Dragonarms. “Cerise, you still haven’t told us how you wound up here.”
”The pursuit of knowledge, being the highest of all goals, is forced to bow to the low,” dismissed a spare PAX/TOM. “Our survival takes precedence. Cerise, you may relay your story if you feel so inclined.”
Cerise sighed and shrugged. ”We, um... There’s someone... something called the Monitor. He’s really powerful. He took eight people and has been making u—making them fight in what I think have all been different worlds. I don’t know why.”
Crazyman Dragonarms and Iota exchanged a glance. “The three of you are all from different universes, then?” asked Dragonarms.
”I think so,” nodded Cerise. ”Her magic works different from what I know. And D’Neya...” The nymph shuddered against her restraints. ”There was someone else involved, too. I think there are more than one of these battles.”
Iota nodded. ”’T may be so,” he said. “We’ve heard... rumors. Yer story is the first confirmation we’ve heard that these things are truly goin’ on.”
“Which makes it all the more imperative that we conduct this data to the Tangent. Mr. Dragonarms, if you please.” A PAX/TOM separate from the one who was speaking held out a long, thick steel cable for Crazyman to clamp his namesake hands down on. Once the dragons bit, a spark shot out, and the transponders whirred to life, marking the iterations of its S.O.S. beacon with a rhythmic beeping.
The air around XMO began to swirl, resolving itself into a holographic image from the Non-Infringers “home base.” Cerise contemplated the cables tying her to her chair. Most of Aph’s chains had been self-forged, and she had borne them happily. Was she any different?
A young woman’s giant head resolved itself around the Non-Infringers. “Comms here,” she asked. “What’s your situation?”
“Non-Infringer squad in dire need o’ extraction,” explained Iota McTaggart. “An’ I’m afraid this is one o’ those ‘ask questions in the debrief’ situations, there bein’ a transuniversal fission event imminent an’ all.”
“Roger. Please stand by.” The giant head in the air looked over at something offscreen for a few seconds. Cerise heard several more beeps. “Your request has been processed and approved,” confirmed Comms, turning back to the Non-Infringers. “Extraction in five seconds.”
The Non-Infringers huddled around the transponders. Iota nodded at Cerise. “We can’t promise we can do anything to help ye, but we’ll look into yer ‘battle’ situation,” he swore before vanishing into a singularity. Where the Non-Infringers had been, nothing remained.
Less than two minutes later, a beak-toothed and yellow-nosed human dressed in robes of fur and bone entered the chamber, escorted by an honor guard of skeletons. Cerise, feeling a sudden need to avoid confrontation, pretended to be asleep. “Ah, good,” he cackled. “The sacrifices have arrived.”
“And the other party has already taken what they needed and departed,” added an intricately armored woman, her eyes glued to a screen on her forearm. “While you do your thing, I’m going to see if I can’t figure out how they escaped. It’s possible we’ve fallen into the trap of thinking too small. Why conquer three universes when you can conquer a billion?”
The Lord of Skulls’ skeletons began to arrange candles and incense around the three prisoners. The necromancer turned to Clara and scrutinized her closely. “Hang on,” he said. “We’ve been swindled! This one’s already dead!”
“Medic,” called the Commandrix, snapping her fingers absently.
An infantrius ran over to Clara and took out a small black device, touching it to her skin. “She’s dead alright,” the soldier confirmed. “That said:”
He slapped Clara. The nun awoke, sputtering. ”Why, I never—“
”Not traditionally dead, I’ll admit,” the medic pointed out helpfully.
”What do you people want from us? I swear, it’s one thing and then another.”
”Undead,” sneered the Lord of Skulls. “If anyone should have seen that coming, it’s me.”
“That’s not sufficient for you?” asked the Commandrix.
“Not by a long shot. I require a sacrifice of three lives. Three beating hearts, not just six flapping gums.”
”A ritual sacrifice, is it?” Clara rolled her eyes. ”Well, there you go. It won’t work. So let us go and find some other lives to toy with.”
Commandrix Saga examined Clara. “Well, she’s well-preserved,” she remarked. “We should be able to fix her up for you.”
”You should be able to what now?” demanded Clara.
”We set her up, you knock her down. Beating heart, breathing lungs, the works. Give us five minutes in the medical tent.”
Clara began to panic. ”You will do no such thing!”
”It’ll need to be a true reanimation, mind,” warned the Lord of Skulls. “No cursed half-lives, no touch of the grave, no vampirism. I need warm flesh.”
“Only the best medical science has to offer,” confirmed the Commandrix. “The only problem might be that this sort of procedure has only ever been performed on cadavers that are, you know, properly dead. But that’s easily sorted out, I imagine.”
”Everyone keep your hands off me!” shouted the necropolitan. ”I won’t have you killing me only to bring me to life only to kill me again! I’ve done all the dying I intend to do for the time being!”
Her shouting brought Aegis to consciousness in time to watch helplessly from his chair as the homo infantrius dragged Clara kicking and screaming into the depths of their forces. Aegis made no attempt to be subtle. He twisted his gloves into something unwieldy enough to snap the cables around his wrists (a particularly ornamental hammer) and then got a little overexcited and ended up breaking the entire chair. “CLARA!” he shouted as he rose, as though that would do anything.
The Lord of Skulls turned to view his third and (to his gaze) least impressive captive. “Hmmph,” he said. “Those gloves will look good on my mantle once I’m back home.” He drew a sword possessed of a property that could only be described by saying the words “cold” and “dark” at the same time and then throwing in the word “smoldering” for good measure afterwards. “Now, boy,” continued the sorcerer, “I’ll forgive that outburst if you sit back down quietly and wait for your turn to die.” When Aegis did not comply with this directive, he snorted and added, “If it helps, you’ll be saving the world.”
Aegis was silent for a moment. How would any of this save the world? Then he understood. “Oh, you mean this world?” he asked. He looked around for a moment. “Yeah, that doesn’t help.”
He turned one of his gloves into a whirling flail and whipped it at the Lord of Skulls’ knee. The colddark sword swung down to intercept, and upon touching the sword, the flail simply flopped to the ground, losing all its energy. “An impressive artifice,” said the Lord of Skulls, signaling for his skeletons to stand back. “But you haven’t so much of an ounce of magic in your body, and I’m the most powerful wizard in seven generations. This is not going to end well for you.”
Cerise kept her eyes closed.
The first lightning bolt—a black and gangly thing, like a very confused stick insect falling out of the ceiling—glanced off of Aegis’ shield and dispersed into the walls. The second one caught him in the shoulder, the dark energy sending him into spasms, but he remained standing.
The necromancer then summoned a wall of black fire around the young man’s feet, forcing him to step back. Aegis fashioned one glove into a bow and another into an arrow, backing up as the flames dogged his steps.
A steel bow with a steel bowstring is not the most efficient delivery device for steel arrows, but Aegis had had a good amount of practice with it. The arrow shot through the flames into the Lord of Skulls’ side, breaking the sorcerer’s concentration enough to dispel the flames. “Get him!” shouted the necromancer to his skeletons, who, fearing for their master’s safety, obliged readily. Aegis ran, refashioning his remaining glove into a longsword, as the skeletons’ crude spells rained all around him, battering him with hail and spiderwebs and grabbing disembodied hands.
He considered killing the dragon first, then using its body for cover, but he needed chaos if he wanted the slightest chance of surviving, and the beast could serve him better in that area if it were alive. He jumped on its upper jaw, covering one of its eyes with each hand, clamping its mouth shut with his legs. The monster growled and thrashed about, shattering a few skeletons and buying Aegis a bit of time.
Cerise opened her eyes. She sat and half-interestedly watched as the wounded Lord of Skulls tore the arrow out of his body and tossed it to the ground, where it turned back into a gauntlet. The necromancer then waved a hand over his wound, depositing a cluster of anti-maggots who diligently began to repair the flesh, binding the wound with silk and pus. Once he caught his breath, he turned towards Aegis and the dragon and began to chant.
Aegis quickly lost all sense of direction as the dragon whipped its neck around, but when he thought he felt it rear up on its hindlegs, he dismounted, falling glove-first onto its back. He then turned his glove into a serrated pick and drove it into the dragon’s wing, causing it to involuntarily flap and drive itself around in circles. The skeletons kept their distance warily, throwing spears.
Cerise’s bindings fell to the floor.
For a moment the nymph thought this had been the result of some unconscious piece of magic on her own part, some secret deep-held desire to escape; then a voice didn’t whisper in her ear, “It doesn’t seem fair that you should miss the party, Cerise.” The voice was neither mocking nor sympathetic. “Now, go help your friend.”
A torrent of magical energy was swirling around the Lord of Skulls, growing with every syllable he fed it. Aegis was too caught up wrangling the dragon to notice the danger. Cerise simply stared at the nothing before her, which stared back with piercing eyes, constantly judging. The nymph wondered if this was what it was like to have a mother.
Skum, the Flawless, didn’t sigh dejectedly, nor did she bodily pull Cerise out of her chair, stuff a dagger into the nymph’s hand, or toss her at the Lord of Skulls. One might conclude therefore that Cerise was acting entirely upon her own design when she lashed out instinctively, driving the dagger into the Lord of Skulls’ back.
The half-uttered spell backfired, obliterating the necromancer’s head and searing Cerise’s hair. The nymph dropped to the floor as the Lord of Skulls fell on top of her, protecting her from the brunt of the blast.
There was a sense of exhalation, like Death was unlacing a particularly uncomfortable corset. The skeletons, deprived of their master, dropped to the floor. Aegis ran up to the dragon’s neck and hacked its head off with four or five swings of his greatsword.
Cerise stood awkwardly by as the young warrior dropped off the dragon and moved to pick up his other gauntlet. He nodded in her direction. “Did you do that?”
“Yes,” <font color="red">said Cerise, feeling that ‘No’ would be slightly more dishonest.
Aegis put on the gauntlet. “So are you, like... okay now?” he asked her.
Cerise had to consider this question only briefly. “No,” she concluded. </font> “Why? Are you?”
Aegis shrugged. “I guess not.” He glanced over to where Clara had gone. “I need to go save Clara. Are you going to help?”
“No.” Cerise looked down on the Lord of Skulls’ corpse.
“Alright, well,” said Aegis, jogging off hands-first with his usual determined, apelike gait. “You try and work things out.”
Cerise turned to nobody. “Why did you do that?” she asked.
Nobody smirked. “I didn’t,” she didn’t say.
”You’re stuck here with us, now, aren’t you? You can’t get back to your home base.”
Nobody shook her head. “On the contrary, Cerise,” she didn’t explain. “I’m already not there.”
* * * * *
The Tangent was mostly beige. Brightly-colored lines of paint signaled the roots to the bridge, to the teleportation zone, to the interstitial escape pods, to the barracks, and the uniforms were similarly garish, with miniskirts and shiny belts and glittering badges with an outer-space motif. One’s eye was drawn, however, to the beigeness of the place at large, an endless expanse of decorative vacuum separating the few splashes of color.
This aspect of the Tangent’s interior mirrored its outside, for the grand snowflake-shaped pandimensional spacetime station that was the Non-Infringers’ home base was locked in the Multiversal Interstice, touching upon each of a million realities in exactly one point. If there were any windows in the Tangent they would look out into a nothingness so profoundly nothing that it lacked even a definite color—it would be just as beige was it would be black, or maybe the yellow-red strobe of closed eyes. And still it would not be empty. Profound nothingnesses caressed the hull of the Tangent, some deliberately watching and waiting, others simply drawn unconsciously to the presence of such an exotic thing as Something.
Skum had never been one of these extremophiles, or if she was, she wouldn’t admit it. Her nothingness was not a property of physics but something more existential, like a held breath, like an old widower waking up in his bed to find himself alone. Some had theorized she had been created in the thoughts of children whose mothers had left the room, a manifestation of the profound absence brought on by their lack of object permanence. Others said she was created by a secret cabal of advertisers, a tangible lack that was the basis of all want, a bogeywoman that could only be dispelled by endless consumption. Others had pointed out, smugly and unhelpfully, that she wasn’t anything at all.
Owing to the dangers of allowing a non-extant being, of interstitial origin or otherwise, aboard the Tangent, Skum was obliged to wear a cohesion suit while on base. The suit was of her own design, and eschewed the normal spangly-red-or-blue dress code in favor of a sleek full-body black outline of womanly form.
If she had to exist, she was going to make damn sure people noticed her.
The woman in black walked along the blue painted line in the beige spacetime station.
“Where have you been?” asked Crazyman Dragonarms when Skum entered the debriefing room.
“Nowhere,” shot Skum, her voice a bit more articulate through the constraints of the suit but still ringing with a certain hollowness that shut down all potential rebuke.
“Just have a seat,” said the only other female in the room, an austere bebuzzcutted human redhead, her uniform decked all up and down the right side with badges, awards and other signs of rank. This was Admiral Fair-Use, commanding officer aboard the Tangent and leader of the Non-Infringers. If she answered to anybody, she kept quiet about it. “Skum, you can confirm everything they’re telling me? You caught a transuniversal battle in mid-stream?”
Skum nodded. “Overseen by something that calls itself ‘the Monitor.’ Dropped three souls into a potential reality-collapse site just to see what happened.”
Fair-Use pressed a finger to a spot right above one eyebrow. “Is this Monitor a player?”
“Not o’ any game we know,” remarked Iota.
The admiral nodded. “We’ll watch those universes closely. Once this bout ends we should be able to track the teleportation signature and hopefully get a drop on this guy.”
“If the universes are still there at the time,” pointed out Skum. “Last I saw, attempts to head off the reality-collapse situation had... gone south.”
“Was that deliberate, do you think?” asked Crazyman Dragonarms. “The second we catch wind of these matches, the crime scene is on the verge of imploding. Can we send in another squad in time to stop it?”
“I’m not sending any more of my people into that deathtrap,” asserted Fair-Use. “In fact, retreat the Tangent from the collapse site. We’ve lost this battle.”
“Bless the ‘oly causal matrix we all got home when we did!” affirmed Iota.
“So what’s our next move?” asked Dragonarms. “Scour the entire multiverse for missing person reports?”
“What about missing universe reports?” asked one of PAX/TOM. “Whoever’s running these things clearly aren’t being subtle about it. They’ve probably just left a signature so big we need to pull back a little to see it.”
“PAX/TOM, you work with Quantitative Analysis to try and draw some patterns,” commanded Fair-Use. “The rest of you, try to work out a way to defeat something who can harness the energy required to host one of these things.”
“No foe can stand against the might of a Non-Infringers squad!” droned XMO. “However, there are certain allies we may be able to bring in to ensure our victory.”
“There’s also the question of ‘why,’” pointed out Dragonarms. “What does ‘the Monitor’ get out of forcing a bunch of curiosities to fight each other? Is he just bored?”
“He could have had any number of reasons for wanting to send a team into the frozen tri-universe,” answered Skum. “The battle could just be a cover.”
“On t’other hand, boredom is a pow’rful motivator,” added Iota. “Anyone with the power needed t’ pull this sort o’ thing off is a child with too big a toy chest.”
“If the Monitor is some sort of divinity,” said Crazyarms, “It could be playing a game out on a metaphorical level. In that case, you need to think about who it’s playing against.”
The table went silent. Iota wheezed. “Well, I’m bushed,” he said. “If ye don’t mind, Admiral, I plan t’ find meself an Ireland an’ sleep off the slings an’ arrows.”
Fair-Use nodded. “Everyone get some rest. You’ve earned it. But you’re back here tomorrow at dawn-standard minus fifteen. Tomorrow we’re at war.”
The Non-Infringers departed—Crazyman Dragonarms to his trophy room, PAX/TOM to their bunkbeds, XMO to go find a recharge outlet, and Iota to the green fields of any one of a hundred thousand Irelands. Skum headed off, too, though where she goes when nobody’s looking, nobody is certain.
Admiral Fair-Use retreated to her own quarters. Battle plans leapt through her mind like sheep, lulling her to sleep.
* * * * *
Clara liked things to be neat, if possible. Obviously she was used to handling a little bit of gooey stuff, if the circumstances required it, but her preferred state was one in which everything was in its place and the dust kept to the corners where it wouldn’t offend anyone.
Commandrix Saga’s medical tent was not neat; it was clinical. The air was thick with sanitizing agents and every surface shone a sharp white that promised to burn any inconvenient microorganism away upon context. There were a lot of transparent blue bags full of transparent blue substances and the sharp metal things only showed themselves in flashes, under tarps or passing by on hovering trolleys. This wasn’t a place of order so much as it was a potential mess, a honeypot to attract blood and death.
Clara, despite her warm relationship with death, was horrified by the place. There was something horribly unnatural about it. Could they truly restore her to life? True life? What kind of horrid civilization could wield that sort of power? The idea was abhorrent to Clara. Her undeath was her connection to her God as well as the source of her continued existence. It was, in short, her way of keeping things neat.
The soldiers lay Clara down on a table. “So,” said a doctor, standing over her. “We need to terminate her... vestige state... without damaging the corpse so much as to hinder the reanimation process. Correct?”
“Correct,” confirmed the Commandrix.
“No heartbeat, no respiration, most vital organs are dormant, neural activity is faint, but there,” said a nurse, reading off a glowing clipboard.
The doctor turned to the Commandrix. “She responded to a stun charge before, correct?”
“Correct.”
“Well, then, disrupting the nervous patterns is the way to go. Someone get me a neuroelectrical interface with all the safeties turned off.”
“Roger,” said the nurse.
“You’ve brought us quite the case here, Commandrix,” said the doctor. “I have to admit I’m a little excited. Someone stop her chanting!”
Before Clara could get the incantation out, an orderly tossed a crude gag inside her mouth. The nun screamed through the gag, losing her patience with these people utterly. They were graverobbers and defilers; their vain pursuit of rational answers to spiritual problems was an affront to every deity in the cosmos. Clara tried not to think about the desecration of her corpse by their medicine. She had heard Aegis shouting for her. He would come.
Everyone lost a second or two.
When the universe came back online, it was showing some signs of wear and tear. The colors were bleeding together, and the lines were blurred. The general trinity nature of this place was beginning to take its toll. “Shit,” cursed the Commandrix. “We need to work fast.”
“Here’s the NEI,” said the nurse, returning with the buzzing device that would kill Clara. A slight box of metal and wiring on wheels, it was everything Clara despised—its numerology was all zeros and decimals, and the instruction manual tucked into its base was thirty pages of pale blue ink on pale yellow paper. The handful of switches and dials that operated it were labeled by angular white engravings, and Clara looked at it and tried not to think, They’re going to turn my brain off with this thing. It was a graceless oblivion, devoid of meaning, the sort for which Schleier apologizes.
In barged Aegis, as promised. He didn’t look good. Parts of him were still twitching from stun charges, and most of the rest of him was covered in blood, either his or others’. Even his weapon seemed somewhat beaten up, bits of its current blood-spattered halberd shape crawling mischievously up its owners hand as though confused or underfed.
“Keep your hands off her,” he wheezed.
“Gloves, actually,” pointed out a doctor, pointing to the layer of sinister-looking rubber covering his hands. “That man is a potential contaminant. Get him out of here.”
“Done,” said the Commandrix. She and her infantrius soldiers rushed Aegis from all sides, weapons set to Cripple. Aegis charged. The doctor held Clara’s head still. Out of the corner of her eye she watched a man’s head fly across the room and damage some sensitive equipment. The doctor hooked a cable to her ear.
Reality blinked again, for what felt like longer this time.
The Commandrix returned to the universe to find that everything in it was rather worse off, except for Aegis and Clara. Her armor was melting. Everyone else was dead—most from Aegis’ whirling halberd, one from a brain aneurysm.
She raised her sidearm and fired. The charge left her gun, wound itself into a sphere, and hung inert in the air.
Aegis turned his weapon into a morningstar and brought it down upon her head. In this instance, reality conformed more or less to the expectations of what the Commandrix expected would happen, given a morningstar and her head. The sphere of energy changed colors several times and then vanished.
Clara felt a weight on her chest as the doctor dropped dead on the table, a very heavy crossbow bolt having pierced his eye. Aegis tossed the body aside and the bolt reintegrated itself into his glove. He then went about untying Clara, supporting his weight on his elbows. The nun couldn’t tell if his legs were broken or if the floor was just turning to jelly or something. Either way, there was cause to worry.
Clara ripped out her gag and sat up on the table, surveying the mess around her. She couldn’t imagine what it must be like up on the surface. “Clara,” said Aegis. “If the world dies while we’re in it, we all die.”
”I know,” said Clara.
“And I’m dying anyway.”
Clara opened her mouth to make some argument against Aegis’ proposed course of action, but could come up with nothing. The boy’s nobility rendered her silent.
The table began to float.
Aegis, breathing heavily through a cracked lung, placed one glove to each of his temples. “Thanks for helping me through this,” he said. “And you were right about Aph. I think we might be able to trust her now.”
The gloves turned into swords. Clara felt something like a tug on her collar.
About forty seconds later, three universes were rent asunder. Matter ceased to be matter, and energy ceased to be energy. Graphed a certain way, the data of what happened in the three formerly-frozen worlds could have been rendered to look like an implosion, though that wasn’t entirely accurate.
Far away, four men who were one man took measurements, attempting to interpose numbers between themselves and the atrocity.
In the absence of three universes, the exotic nothingnesses began to swirl into being, squealing silently. A new branch of Interstice bloomed like a budding flower.