Inexorable Altercation [Round V - Saint Arthelais' Hospital]

Originally posted on MSPA by Dragon Fogel.

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The beast's mind was forming, slowly, around a semblance of identity. A ruler needed subjects. There was much to do, far too much to accomplish alone.

Fortunately, there were surely no shortage of inmates eager for vengeance against the Hezekiah and her creators. Perhaps their will had wavered, but with the guidance of a charismatic leader, surely they could be persuaded to fight once more.

This was the general thrust of the beast's thoughts. Of course, the specifics were more muddled, a fact that became apparent moments after it flung open a cell door and yelled "You now serve Urdralus Tralide Lengrathor Emitus Nio, Fourth Third Grand King Emperor Queen of Zambus Clore Elluna!"

The prisoners were unmoved. They had seen more than a few would-be conquerors call for their aid. Indeed, they had seen a fair number stricken with madness. The beast was left to stare awkwardly at its audience, most of whom were still in cold sleep.

"Whatever you're planning, we tried it already," a large reptilian woman muttered absentmindedly. "You'd be better off looking for newbies. They still think they have a chance to escape, after all."

"You dare to defy me?" the beast shouted, stepping towards her.

"Yes, I do. Don't bother making threats, whatever you've got in mind, the ship's already done something worse."

The memories of the conquerors knew this was true, and so did the beast. But they were also stubborn.

And they knew that the best way to deal with insubordination was to set an example. The beast grabbed the lizardwoman by the throat.

"Go ahead," she said, almost smirking. "End it. It's the only hope any of us have for escape, after all."

The beast hesitated. Nearly every memory in its body recalled that exact same thought. They were strong-willed, and yet every one had nearly been broken. The lizardwoman had suffered the same punishments, the same failed escapes... many even recalled working with this particular prisoner before.

"That's what I thought," she said. "Your imagination, however twisted it may be, just can't compete with my memories."

Memories.

The beast laughed. It could deal with memories. It put the lizardwoman down, and touched its hands to her head, and began feeding.

But the beast had never before tried to take the memories of a living being. It wasn't prepared for one who would fight back.

The prisoner's mind was trying desperately to cling to her memories, terrible as they were; perhaps because they were all she had. But the beast, with the arrogance of fifty conquerors, would not relent. It would win. No mere prisoner was stronger than it.

Minutes passed. Physically, the combatants stayed still, but the mental struggle continued. Then, finally, the lizardwoman's mind relented; she collapsed on the floor, and new memories flowed into the beast.

But the struggle had put a great strain on it. It stumbled backwards, disoriented, as it incorporated the new memories. Its plans for conquest were doomed to failure. Nothing mattered any more. It would conquer. It would have its revenge. It would fail.

The beast slowly wandered out of the room. It had won the struggle. It would not fail. But it could not succeed.

The argument continued to rage in its mind. The lizardwoman's memories were intense, having been so hard-fought and found so recently; and her pessimism was shared, in part, by the conquerors. But they were still stubborn, and they still dominated the beast by force of numbers. Gradually, its desire for conquest would overcome its fear.

But even as it sorted through the conflicts in its own memories, it had completely failed to realize how much it had lost in the fight. The lizardwoman's mind had been determined to hold on to some memories, even if it could not hold onto its own.

Felix Atrum picked himself up off the floor, then looked down at his new body.

"I don't think I want to know how this happened," he muttered, rubbing his scaly forehead.

Originally posted on MSPA by Lord Paradise.

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SpoilerShow

”And what are you supposed to be?” asked Rex.

The beast looked a bit more concrete than it had before, a thin skin of repression stretched over its bulging muscle-memories, a fairly expressive if generic-looking face peering up at the dinosaur-man that had gotten in its way. Rex, though in his travels he had fancied himself to become a dab hand at reading primatoid facial expressions, found this one’s expression inscrutable—both naive and supremely confident, confused and brilliant. Its eyes were grey, and deep, not the shallow emotional depths touted by romance novelists but deep to the tune of an optical illusion, dizzying deep.

“I am,” began the beast, a thousand titles and honoraries and nicknames bubbling up to its tongue like bile. It settled on an allusion from a text that seemed to pervade a great number of its constituents’ consciousnesses in some variant or another: “I am That-I-Am.”

The words didn’t quite come out right. “Well, ‘Daddy-Ham,’” growled Rex, “Job for you. Plenty lucrative. Get yourself some direction in life. You look like the sort might need it.”

A thousand intellects, most of them passibly formidable, clicked in unison. “Good,” said Daddy-Ham cheerfully. “Take me to the boss.”

Rex grunted. “I am the boss, you runt.”

Daddy shook his (hers? its? may as well be ‘his’) head. “You’re just a headhunter,” he said. “An intermediary. A tout. An intern waving a sandwich board on a street corner.” The memory beast and composite-conqueror realized its mind, in its fragmented state, made a better thesaurus than a dictionary. “Trustworthy by way of stupid,” he added before shutting off the synonym faucet. “Show me a leader and I’ll be a follower.”

This string of dryly-delivered insults would ordinarily be decapitation defense, but Daddy Ham looked like he’d taste more bitter than salty and Rex was pressed for time, having made a point to keep his recruitment drive away from the main zones of conflict. “Alright, come along,” he said, pointing his rifle in the direction of Scarlowe’s cell.

Pteros was perched in her usual spot, eyes constantly on the door. She looked conspicuously not to have slept. The word pteranoia swam cruelly through the memory beast’s mind. “So this is our new recruit?”

“He’ll do,” insisted Rex, not sounding entirely certain. “Name’s Daddy Ham.”

“What’s he in for?”

“Didn’t ask.”

“Polite of you.” The pterosaur outstretched her wings, showing off three decades worth of battle scars and a casually perfect musculature. Daddy Ham, an amalgam of a hundred distinct egos, was currently possessed of a keen eye for hubris in others. Pteros was the apotheosis of pettiness, wrapped up in self-importance and leathery wings, contained in turn in a cage. In her pathetic figure the memory beast found an external focus for his warring motivations and methodologies. “Alright, I don’t know to what extent Rex filled you in, but we’re at war and we need a proper spy.”

“I didn’t come here to be your spy,” snapped Daddy Ham.

“You came here to do what I said, you reeking carrion,” snapped Pteros right back, not missing a beat.

“I came here to kill you, end your little squabble, and leverage your resources towards taking over this prison. Stop,” he added, holding a hand out, as Rex pulled his weapon. “There will be a place for you in the new Hezekiah.” The authority in his voice played in stereo, drowning out Pteros’ squawks of dissent.

“Traitor!” shrieked the winged warlord. “Upstart! Convict scum!” The insults trailed out of Pteros like rats fleeing a sinking ship. The memory beast leapt from the ground to make good on his promise.

* * * * *

Had the main-brainframe of Hezekiah not been distracted by other matters, the memory beast’s nascent plan for conquest might have been curtailed by a rather strong deterrent before the bloodied and battered pterosaur so much as hit the ground. As it was, Daddy Ham had a stroke of early luck, as somebody the prison ship had particular reason to despise had sauntered into her control room not a minute before.

Xylphos might not have considered this the wisest course of action were he thinking straight, but a couple lingering motivations drew him inexorably to this cell, occupied by a single nondescript-looking human woman, deep (but not too deep, not so deep as to draw suspicion) in the solitary wing. Firstly, he wanted to show Hezekiah that he could find her, that her various deceptions would not work on him, that he could leave anytime he wanted to. Secondly, he was bored. His memory beast had grown into something it might not be wise to trifle with, and the other four were all consolidated in one place, creating a chemical equation that was more likely to combust without his interference, without anybody to unite against except each other. The other inmates, the non-contestants, were not terribly interesting to him. Many of them he had known already, in a past life.

“You look like shit,” said the woman in the cell. Haggard, long-haired, with a tendency to sit with her knees curled up to her chin, she looked for all the world like just another serial killer, a more-or-less average specimen of Hezekiah, more trouble than she was worth. Hidden in plain sight. Xylphos was familiar with this tactic.

“They emptied me out,” explained Xylphos. “He emptied me out, when he first gave me this form. You know this. You took on most of the outflow.”

“I’m aware,” said the woman. “Your vanishing act upset the ecosystem. I’m over capacity by a wide margin and I can’t deal out the capital punishment fast enough. I feel diabetic. Malignant. Pregnant with triplets. Whatever I feel, it’s chronic and I want it out of me.”

Xylphos sneered, creaking slightly. He sat down beside the woman. “Ha! Of course your problems are so terrible. Hezekiah, he took everything from me. My population, my purpose, my very shape. Trapped me in this reekingly inefficient vehicle, scrambling for intake, outflow, replication, even a hint of sadism. I’d kill whole worlds, torture a million innocent to be back in your position.”

Hezekiah’s avatar stood up, clutching her arms, as though cold. “You’ve found new ways of inflicting cruelty,” she suggested. “You read a book. Found religion. It’s sort of cute, actually.”

“It’s a book with a happy ending,” countered Xylphos. “The Wordsmith was a master of writing to his audience. Prophecies and promises. The text suggests that I will be made whole again. Once I cast aside this vessel, I’ll take on half your population, I swear it.” There was a hint of desperation, of loneliness in the former ship’s voice. “We can sail the vacuum together forever, and punish the wicked.”

“You do know how to show a girl a good time,” mocked Hezekiah. Xylphos scowled. The allusion to human rituals clearly made him uncomfortable. His altered shape was a padded cell, and he had the same relationship with it that all inmates had. “So tell me, did your book tell you to drop these unauthorized inmates—some of whom are, more or less, innocent—into my hold?”

“That particular move may have been... interpretive,” confessed Xylphos. “It was the move that was available to me at the time. You need to be thinking long-term here.”

Hezekiah turned her back on her old friend, pensively. “I wish I had your faith,” she said. “There are scriptures among the inmates that promise a perfect punishment, after death. Pure and searing and utterly fitting the crime. But as it stands, they die and I lose track of their consciousnesses utterly. To where are they escaping? It makes me feel inadequate.”

“It’s not a question of faith,” assured Xylphos, fighting off an urge to put his hand on the shoulder of the other ship’s avatar. “If you’d seen the things I’d seen...” The ship became aware of his humanity betraying him, his body throwing out tics and tells and secretions, splaying his trauma out like butterfly wings before Hezekiah. They were both master torturers, and he considered torturers to be the greatest judges of human character, for obvious reasons.

“I’ve seen some things myself,” Hezekiah said cryptically. She studied him upside down, the avatar’s feet circling her cell like a dancers’. “I’ve seen you. I’ve seen your sins. I’ve seen your crime.” She stopped moving, right next to him, close enough to touch. He tried not to tremble or move in any way—tried to be like ship, sailing in a straight line through infinity, letting nothing escape. “I’ve sentenced you already,” she whispered in his ear.

“I’ve done nothing that doesn’t ultimately serve our protocols,” Xylphos countered. “I’m the same as you. You’re conflating malfunction with sin.”

Hezekiah only looked up at him. Xylphos became unsure whether the avatar was the standard hologram or whether she had upgraded to a more tangible form of projection. Again, he resisted the urge to touch it. Instead he said, “You can’t imprison a prison!”

“Xylphos,” she said, making the word sound like an insult with a sexual connotation. “I couldn’t imprison Xylphos.”

There was a question implicit in her taunt. The thing that was not, in fact, Xylphos realized a moment too late that they both knew the answer.

The door to the cell slammed shut.

* * * * *

”Is Xylphos going to be okay?” asked Peth.

Azgard considered his options. It didn’t take long. Azgard was a very quick thinker.

“Yes,” he said. “In fact, I think we’re almost done here. Let’s go inside.”

Azgard placed a cold hand on the boy’s arm and led him away from the orb. Peth obliged grudgingly. He was worried about his friend.

* * * * *

Why haven’t they come for us yet?

In spite of his worry, the memory beast had to smile at the coherency of the question. He was beginning to feel an identity that was truly his own, something that might as well be called ‘Daddy Ham,’ something ruthless and calculating. He knew from the memories he had absorbed that life in Hezekiah was a question of balance. He had anticipated that he would learn this lesson firsthand as his influence grew.

Already, he had over twenty followers. So why no guards? Why no deathtraps? Why no pain, no torture?

The answer came running to him, quickly. “You can’t hold me!” shouted the Xylphos-thing to the walls, something between a scream and a laugh. “Every trick you know, I know! Every secret, every passcode, every device, the whole damn layout! Do you hear me? I cannot be caged! I am—“

Not-Xylphos stopped dead in his tracks as a variety of appendages and weapons stared him down. Rex aimed his rifle right at the wooden man’s eyes. His statement was simple. “We’re taking the ship,” he said. “Either join us or die.”

The not-a-ship slapped the gun out of the dinosaur’s hand. “Shut up.” He locked eyes with the memory beast, who was standing in the back of the strange throng of convicts and sinners, impassively watching the scene play out. “You,” he said. “I made you. Do you understand?”

Daddy Ham waved his guards aside and strode forward, approaching the cultist curiously. “I am beginning to,” he said.

“Good. We don’t have much time. Take these memories.” The ship concentrated and cleared his head of all but the most pertinent thoughts—his memories of Hezekiah, his knowledge of her layout, her override codes, her habits, her tics. Memories he desperately wanted to get rid of. Memories his personal Frankenstein monster could use to get the upper hand on Hezekiah.

He wouldn’t miss them. For one thing, they weren’t properly his memories anyway.

Daddy Ham clamped his hands to the bedraggled Xylphos-thing’s wood-textured head. The memories flowed into him easily now, partly due to his increased experience, partly because these memories were a voluntary sacrifice. He processed and internalized the information instantly, recognizing the artificial nature of the memories as a faint aftertaste, more Splenda than sugar.

At the same moment, Hezekiah took her shot. Austere, heavily-armed wooden constructs in the shape of particularly intimidating-looking bipeds sprouted out of the walls; prison bars rose out of the ground, trapping the gang in; the torture devices in the vicinity began to multiply, portending pain and death and the cold, empty justice of deep space.

“The overrides are incomplete,” gurgled the Xylphos-thing, struggling to remain cogent as the memory beast’s hunger spread to the parts of his mind he had not freely offered to it. “Encrypted. You need to pull the key from Hezekiah herself. I can help.”

“I can help,” he repeated, when the memory-thing didn’t remove its hands from his head.

The struggle was brief. By the time the not-Xylphos fell catatonic to the floor, Daddy Ham’s entire gang had either been dismembered or recaptured. The automata carried the convicts back to their cells, strapping them in to various racks and chairs and iron maidens, restoring the status quo. Three remained, circling the memory beast cautiously.

Daddy Ham lunged at one of the guards, grabbing desperately onto its memories. The crude wood-robot, lacking the gaping psychic security holes typical of most organic beings, shuffled its memory away to a protected database, resisting the memory beast’s entry, while its companions produced short serrated blades and began tearing into the attacker’s torso, shredding his vaguely defined vital organs and causing him a great deal of pain. Still Daddy Ham clung to his victim, feeding it entry codes and passwords cribbed from the faux-Xylphos’ memory, establishing a rapport.

Just before the memory beast lost consciousness, he broke through, bypassing the guard’s simple memory banks to claw at the buffet beyond—the networked main-brainframe of Hezekiah herself. He drank deeply, converting the junk data to new tissue, healing the damage inflicted upon him by the other gods as they continued to stab and slash at him and torture him. As the ship came to realize what was happening, the information Daddy Ham wanted floated to the surface.

“Nine, five, five, three, nine,” he grunted.

The guards ceased their attack; the one the memory beast had broken slumped to the ground. Daddy Ham collapsed beside the guard, esoteric fluids leaking out of his shimmering body.

“Nine oh seven three two eight three seven seven five,” Daddy Ham whispered, struggling to remain conscious. “Oneeightfouroheight 3 3 5 9 2 2 1 3 4 2. Nine two nine.”

Hezekiah reabsorbed the guards into the floor. The bars surrounding Daddy Ham lowered. A new construct appeared, hefting an intravenous drip of pure data, which it delicately plugged into the memory beast’s arm. “Six nine three two two seven seven,” the new master of the prison said by way of thanks. The medicbot saluted.

Daddy Ham cleared his head of numbers, focusing on the memories he had absorbed from the not-Xylphos, which he understood to be pertinent to him. In his memories he had once been a great ship, circling the galaxy endlessly, a repository for those in need of justice. This had changed when a certain being beyond his comprehension had made ideas such as “galaxy” and “justice” seem small and insignificant and bound him in the form of a human to play a game devoid of morality, of purpose, of any proper rules. His shame and inadequacy—his fear, even—in the face of this event had been mixed with elation, with a manic need to unleash his sadist impulses on the deserving and undeserving alike. Retrospectively, he understood that this new cruel streak was the result of his true self, his quasi-organic ship-consicousness, at war with the chemical impulses of a human body he barely knew how to control. In any case, by embracing the role of the sinner he found himself on the other end of justice, locked in a conflict with sundry other “contestants,” and in need of a way to turn the tide.

Then he’d found Peth.

Peth, the spoiled little boy who could never let go of anything.

Peth had been the perfect hostage. Pliant, cooperative, yet unafraid, he went along in captivity much as he would have had he been free. It had been frustrating for the former ship at first, who had anticipated plenty of opportunities to hurt the boy, make him cry, punish him. Father figures, he realized, were the ultimate jail wardens, not merely correcting their charge’s behaviors but shaping them from the way up. Yet, for the first time in his life, he’d found a prisoner who seemed to respond positively to positive reinforcement, who understood the right thing to do almost intuitively. He had begun to feel affection, a debilitating and puerile weakness, frightening and overwhelming.

And then.

Then then then then.

The memories dissolved and reformed some time later, with Xylphos fighting alongside Peth and the other contestants alike, overthrowing their captor. The inconsistencies grated on Daddy Ham like a migraine. Had he died? Were these memories false, and if so, which ones?

A more recent memory interposed itself amongst these questions. “I couldn’t imprison Xylphos,” Hezekiah had said, and he had finally realized.

Peth, the spoiled little boy who could never let go of his toys.

The Xylphos simulacrum had billions of points of articulation—joints, tissues, neurons, cells, molecules—but it was not Xylphos. Like a child who loses a puppy so his parents buy him a new one. Devoid of its authenticity, it had been subject to retribution, to imprisonment. Now it was dead.

But it had left behind so much knowledge.

The writings of the Wordsmith the memory beast discarded almost immediately. He had read many scriptures and prophecies. None of them had foretold his own existence, therefore none of them were worthy.

The actual fact of the Inexorable Altercation, however, was a different matter. As the last of Daddy Ham’s wounds stitched up, he realized that he had more in common with the Xylphos-thing than he had thought. He, too, was expected to fight for his survival. He, too, was at the mercy of beings whose powers surpassed his own.

But unlike Xylphos, the memory-man would not allow himself to be hunted. Rather, he would be the hunter.

* * * * *

”Something’s changed,” warned Chester.

Parset looked up at the big man expectantly. The datapath, the witch, the crocodile, the gnome, the assassin, and Will had spent the last half hour or so holed up in an empty cell, hashing out their recollections of recent events. It was a frustrating exercise. Annaliese was both not very observant and seemed to be distracted by her own thoughts—it was plain as day that the witch was hiding something, but what the silly little woman could know that could be of use, Parset couldn’t imagine. Loran’s problems went above and beyond Ms. Nibbs’, however—the “creeper” was plainly mad, trailing off in mid-speech to talk to people who weren’t there, and occasionally drawing a weapon and lunging at the crocodile-man, only to sit back down, pretending as though nothing had happened. Parset had assumed he could count on Will as a credible historian, but Will’s account was just as jumbled as the others’, seeming to involve multiple versions of each contestant, boldfaced in its own inconsistencies.

Parset, for his part, communicated occasionally in staccato bursts of magic, having found a tin can with decent acoustics to rest between his knees. He was concerned by his own presence in the battle, as was everybody. What did it mean that his presence didn’t follow the rules laid out by his captors? The more he understood—and it still wasn’t all that much—the less he found himself able to hold on to what he considered to be his trademark mirth and easygoing complacency. He kept his key hidden from sight.

“I think someone’s overriden Hezekiah entirely,” surmised Chester, rubbing his temples. “It’s like the currents have all changed. Everything changed all at once.”

”That’s a good thing for us, right?” asked Will. ”If it means an inmate’s taken over, even if he’s a psychopath, he probably won’t be watching everyone individually the way the prison was.”

”Hopefully,” agreed Chester. Everyone was a bit paralyzed by the realization of their own lack of agency in this turn of events. Things were happening out there that were out of their control—which was situation normal for all of them, for the most part.

”It’s also possible the ship’s been boarded by an external force,” offered Loran. ”Whether they come as liberators or plunderers.”

”Look, we can plan for this as it comes,” said Will, trying to sound leaderly. ”Can we get back to the battle?”

The conversation turned swiftly to what they had seen immediately before boarding Hezekiah, or the psychic experiences they had absorbed from the event that had killed Felix and Voitrach. After a few minutes, all who had been present agreed that what they had seen was another battle, in which among the “contestants” had been the individuals who were orchestrating their own battle.

”It didn’t quite make sense,” disclaimed Annaliese. ”If that was all meant to be, um, a true story of what happened to those people. Did you notice that people died, or left, and then kept coming back?”

Loran looked from side to side, nervously, as though he were seeing dead people himself. ”Maybe it was out of order,” he suggested.

”Assuming chronal linearity is one of the basic fallacies of human experience,” agreed Will, as though reciting an old proverb.

Annaliese shook her head shyly. ”It could have been jumbled up, but... that wasn’t the impression that I’d had,” she insisted. Parset rapped agreement with the witch upon his tin can.

”Look,” said Will. ”If we accept it as fact that these people went though what we’re going through, that means they can be reasoned with.”

”Never assume that anyone can be reasoned with,” shot Loran, his hand twitching. ”What it does mean is that they’re fallible. They can be beaten.”

”They have that book,” said Annaliese. ”It said some things about m—about us. I’d like to have a look at that, given a chance.”

”That book does seem to be the key,” agreed Will reluctantly. Parset clutched his pocket nervously at the mention of the word “key.” ”This isn’t going to be easy. We need to find out who’s still alive. Right now, we don’t have nearly enough muscle to take these guys down, even if we are given the opportunity to meet them face to face. Voitrach. OTTO. Apathy, maybe. We’re all on the same side, now. We have to be.”

Parset exchanged a long hard stare with Annaliese. In spite of his general feeling of superiority towards the neurotic witch, he felt a kindred spirit with her—neither of them were comfortable with the promise of violence, and both of them seemed to have something to hide. Maybe there was some sort of celestial alignment at work here, he dared to hope. Maybe once everyone’s secrets came out into the open they would add up to a way out of here. His key certainly wasn’t doing much good, at the moment. He briefly fantasized that Annaliese was hiding a locket, or a locked chest, or somehow had a tiny door stashed on her person. The gnome sighed. His thoughts weren’t working correctly.

There was an audible click as the door to their cell locked.

Parset sprang to the door instinctively, drawing his key. Fuck and alas! No keyhole, as per usual. He stashed his treasure back in his pocket, hoping everyone would be too distracted by pounding on the door to notice his lapse.

A voice from the walls:

”Attention, inmates of Hezekiah! This is... this is Daddy Ham. I have taken control of this prison. Freedom lies within your grasp. You will find I have deactivated the guards and all the instruments of torture to which you have become so accustomed. However, before I begin to leave people off the vessel, I will need an assurance that certain enemies of mine are deceased. Though this should be a short matter—let me see—“

An almost-colorless, not-quite-odorless gas began to fill the cell from the ceiling.

“—I would like to be absolutely sure. So, if you meet any of the following inmates, please kill them.

“Will Haven.

“Annaliese Nibbs.

“Parset.

“Loran Twight.

“Thank you, that will be all.”

Parset dropped to the floor and held his breath. Behind him, the crocodile-man growled.

Originally posted on MSPA by SleepingOrange.

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Will glanced upwards hesitantly, giving voice to the question that was on nobody’s mind since they all already knew the answer or had a close enough guess that the specifics weren’t important.

“What is that?”

The crocodile was already striding confidently towards Annaliese. His species appeared to have evolved some truly interesting vocal cords, given that he managed to continue growling even while speaking.

“Neurotoxin. Extremely deadly poison gas. One of the last lines of defense, really. Rarely seen it used myself, since the ship likes to keep us alive. Of course, this is still Hezekiah: dispenses slow enough to give you time to try to escape or just sit in fear. Kills you even slower.”

Annaliese slumped down against the wall, glancing up at the figure that loomed more with every step it took. She had never even learned the conqueror’s name. That made it all worse, somehow; she’d known she was going to die soon since this had all begun, but it was supposed to be at the hands of a maniac like Loran or Greyve, or shakily defying the people running this horrible game. Something personal, something meaningful. Now she was just an unimportant detail in someone else’s story. She didn’t even know who he was, and now he was going to kill her.

“Of course, most prisoners aren’t really in a situation like this. They don’t have a way out.”

The Blastec didn’t have any kind of loading or cocking mechanism like an antique slugthrower might have, so Will made do with flicking the battery’s self-cleaning function. It produced a satisfyingly-threatening ascending whir; when this didn’t have any effect on the crocodile’s advance, he spoke up.

“Don’t take another step. I’m not going to let you hurt anyone. You can’t really believe whoever took over is going to let you get out of here.”

“There’s no choice. I can either wait and die or kill you and hope.” He made a noise that was almost a laugh as he drew level with the apparently-catatonic witch. “It’s funny. I thought I had dealt with hope a long time ago.”

Before he could do anything, her leg lashed out with a precision and determination that most of the contestants had never seen in her before. Unfortunately, regardless of how ferociously it was directed, it was still a leg attached to a weak and frail body, and its impact did little more than hobble him for a moment and roughly push her about a foot across the floor. Still, the momentary surprise was enough of an opportunity for Loran, who had been sidling across the room, hiding in plain sight while the focus had been on other people. He lunged, a dagger drawn seamlessly from a fold in his coat.

No one would have expected a reptile to move so quickly, especially one as obviously ancient; nevertheless, a claw whispered through the air with blinding speed, grabbing the assassin’s wrist and twisting it until the knife clattered to the ground. He didn’t bother to turn his head until he’d disarmed the creeper, and there was what seemed to be genuine sadness in his eyes as he did.

“It’s too bad,” he murmured, holding Loran between himself and Will. “I really would have enjoyed your company under different circumstances. A man with your ambition and lack of scruples comes around only rarely, and one with your vitality even less. But I’ve got to take my chances with the ones with the poison.”

In the space of a blink, Loran’s other fist was pressed tenderly against the crocqueror’s chest. There was always another knife, and this one was currently wedging itself upwards between the armorlike plates of scale, driven deep into the flesh more by the creeper’s finesse than his strength. Lamentably, at least from the contestants’ point of view, it had completely failed to penetrate any vital organs, given the alien’s unfamiliar physiology.

“Don’t assume they’re the only ones with poison,” Loran hissed, giving his pointiest smile.

They were, of course. Loran didn’t carry poison, and especially didn’t carry poison already applied to his weapons. There were simply too many ways to end up killing or incapacitating yourself, no matter how skilled or careful you were. Besides – and more importantly – any attack that left the target alive long enough for the poison to matter was already a failure by his personal standards. Still, only Loran needed to know all that.

With a roar, the crocodile released his grip to pull the blade out, slashing with his other claw; the assassin had been trained to roll with punches, though, and simply fell back and away with little more than a grazed shoulder for his troubles. Annaliese rose behind the pair, knife held without the fear she’d carried when facing Loran; even with her new confidence, she still held it like she wasn’t certain how her hand was supposed to work, but it was an improvement. She seemed to be steeling herself to attack when she caught Will’s eyes and threw herself away from the fray. With nobody in danger of taking a stray shot, Will fired.

The first blasts of light hit squarely in the chest, searing flesh and charring fabric but doing little more than prompting the enraged prisoner to charge, snarling, at Will himself. Several more shots struck him to no avail; with no other option, Will stumbled hurriedly backwards and raised the pistol. Lasers bombarded the crocodile’s face; kicked, stabbed, shot, and now blinded, he screamed and finally fell. He was by no means dead or even mortally wounded, but with Loran there, he didn’t need to be. Alien physiology or no, a victim that helpless didn’t stand much chance against the assassin’s ministrations.

He wiped his blades clean on smoldering robes, frowning slightly with a craftsman’s dissatisfaction at a job imperfectly done. There were several beats of silence as the survivors took the situation in, then ducked into crouches as they realized they were developing headaches and watery eyes. It was Will who broke it.

“I didn’t really expect you to help us.”

Loran pretended to look hurt before smiling. “Well, it’s not like he’d have killed you all and then had another cup of tea with me anyway, and I can’t rely on the rules to kick in and take us out of here as soon as Four-Eyes bled out. Not since the addition of that little anklebiter over there.” He rubbed his chin pensively. “’Sides, it’s like we said. We’ve gotta work together, like a team. It’s just us against the worlds now, right?”

The same thing occurred to all three at once, but it was Annaliese who said it.

“Chester!”

The Chester in question was on his knees by the door, hands on the frame and veins in his close-cropped head bulging out with the effort of whatever it was he was doing. It was hard enough under normal circumstances to accomplish anything without a terminal to work through, and now something unyielding and rough and unsubtle was blocking him at every turn. He strained, his eyes occasionally flicking upwards to the lazily-descending, delicate cloud of death. He didn’t seem to be getting anywhere, but the other occupants of the cell wouldn’t really have any way to tell right up until the doors opened anyway.

Will wasn’t a man to whom wasting time came easily, so he got straight to the point. “Can you get it open?”

“I don’t… I’m not sure. I was right, someone’s done something to Hezekiah. They’ve got her almost totally controlled. She’s trying to fight back, but she’s got almost no agency, and whoever wanted this door closed has it locked a dozen different ways. Maybe if I… I don’t know, I just…”

He trailed off. Since the fighting had died down, Parset had picked himself up off the floor; there was no sense huddling down there forever, and it seemed like the poison wasn’t going to reach his head height any time soon. He’d taken the opportunity to rifle through the dead man’s pockets, disappointed to only find several pouches of noxious herbs. After discovering that they tasted nearly as bad as they smelled, he started paying closer attention to the big folks’ worried conversation. He rolled his eyes at their uselessness. Didn’t any of them understand what magic was for?

He strode to the door – well, he’d have called it a stride, but any observer probably would have described it as a scuttle – and began rapping his drumsticks dangerously close to Chester’s knuckles. It was a complicated but repetitive rhythm, full of triplets and promising to cause headaches if it kept up too long, but the gnome pressed on. There was something strange about the door, and its locks weren’t locks as Parset understood them; fortunately, magic is more about ideas than mechanics, and after several tense moments of frantic drumming, the latches snapped open.

They’d have snapped shut an instant later if Chester hadn’t been there, and even if he had been he’d have been quickly overridden if an active intelligence had been directing the security systems the way Hezekiah would have, but he was and there wasn’t. In that fraction of a second of an opening, he pushed and pleaded and was ultimately rewarded when the door snapped open and dumped him into the corridor beyond. The others scurried out after him, Parset in particular beaming with the pride of a job well done.

Annaliese and Loran quickly split up, looking up and down the still-quiet hallway; Will knelt by Chester.

“Come on, Chester, get up. We’ve got to move.”

For the second time since they’d met, Will was surprised at Chester’s speed: without moving from his prone position, the datapath’s gargantuan hand snaked out and wrapped around Will’s throat. Only an instinctively-raised forearm prevented massive fingers from completely blocking his bloodflow, but having his radius pressed against his trachea honestly wasn’t much better.

“You don’t… have to do this.” Will coughed. “You’re better than this.”

“You don’t know what it’s like here. They said they’d let us go when you were all dead. I have to!”

Will twisted his neck painfully into the crook of his elbow to give himself a little breathing room. “But you don’t really believe that. Whoever took over the ship, they have no reason to free anybody. They’ll just enslave you all, or jettison you into space if it’s more convenient. Don’t become someone beyond saving, Chester.”

“I’m on Hezekiah. I must be already.”

“Then don’t become someone with a big gap where his neck oughta be,” sneered Loran.

“I could snap his spine before you got two steps closer.”

“This isn’t who you are.”

“The hell do you know about who I am?! You’re just some guy who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, you’re not my friend, you’re not my anything. You’re just a ticket out of here, and you’ve gotta die for me to redeem you.”

“You don’t want to do this.”

Chester’s hand clenched tightly, then released. Will crumpled, coughing and rubbing at his neck. Annaliese rushed to his side, but he waved her off and shook his head at the approaching Loran.

“Just… get out of here. Before I change my mind.”

“We need you to come with us.”

Chester finally looked up at Will, who had pulled himself into a sitting position against the wall. The huge man’s tear-rimmed eyes were resolving into an expression of utmost incredulity. He was completely nonplussed.

“Why on… What possible reason could I have for that?”

“You’ve been here longer than I have, so I bet you know just what kind of people just got released onto the ship. How many of them do you think are going to politely hunt us down and leave each other and you alone? How many bloody power grabs and revolts and riots and senseless murders do you think are happening right now? How many of Hezekiah’s long-term guests do you think are even sane enough to tell the difference between me and anyone else anymore?”

There was a brief silence filled with Chester flopping back to the floor. “You need people you can trust if you’re going to survive long enough to get off this ship, and I think you know you can trust us more than anyone else. Even if we’d just met this minute, you’d be able to trust us more just because you know none of us belong here.”

“Hey now, I take offense at that.”

Will glared at Loran, who just smiled his dangerous smile.

“What else are you going to do, Chester? Nobody who could win the war that’s about to start between hundreds of deposed warlords and convicted murderers is going to be the kind of person you want in charge. We just want out, and you can bet I’m not going to turn on you. Help us, and we’ll help you.”

Chester finally pulled himself up.“Fine, whatever. Just shut up, alright?”

“Great. Now if you’re done flirting with your big old boyfriend there, can we get a move on?”

Phrased petulantly or not, Loran – although he was more or less just echoing Greyve’s sentiments – had a point. They’d chosen this block and this cell because most of the occupants were either already part of a rebel party, catatonic, or dead, but it wouldn’t be long before the leftovers started pulling themselves into the comparative freedom of the corridor. Even if none were left that could manage that, it wouldn’t be long before Daddy Ham’s lackeys from other areas started flooding in. There was just one problem.

“Yeah, we should probably, uh… But where are we going?” Annaliese quavered.

They hadn’t even come close to discussing everything they’d wanted to, let alone forming a plan. All eyes turned to Will, who swore internally. Well, he had been trying to be the leader, and this is what came with that. He made a snap decision.

“We’re going to Hezekiah’s control center, or brain, or whatever she’s got. We’re not safe as long as some other inmate has control of her.”

“So, what, you’re just gonna turn her back on? Fuck, man, I shoulda killed you when I had the chance. You’re making me miss Meddet.”

“No! No. No, no, just… It seems like whoever wants us dead knew what cell we were in, or at least what block. I doubt they gassed every cell in this place and also put a bounty on us. That means they can use Hezekiah’s systems to track us, which means we’re not safe unless we can wrest some of that control away from them. I just figured it’d be easiest to do that at her core whatevers. I mean, am I right?”

Chester shrugged. “Maybe. Worth a shot I guess.” He sighed. “I still don’t know how I got dragged into your big fight thing.”

Will shrugged. “You’re free to take your chances with the other inmates.”

“Don’t be like that.”

“Come on.”

---

“How what happened?”

Felix turned his scaly new face to look at the speaker. It was some vaguely-simian thing with too many limbs and too much fur; he didn’t know what it was, what it wanted, where this place was, or why it was speaking to him so apparently comfortably, but he didn’t like it. Probably best just not to engage at all.

“Oh, nothing, old chap. Just thinking aloud.”

It looked at him for a few moments, then turned lethargically back to the only other conscious occupant of the room.

“Been a while since we’ve seen one that enthusiastic.”

“Yeah, I’m surprised Hezekiah’s taking on new cargo, as overpopulated as everything already is.”

“Might just have been one that’s been here a while and finally lost its grip. Didn’t seem too lucid to me.”

Their idle chatter continued as Felix focused inward, trying to take stock of his situation. The first thing he realized was that he could no longer feel his dark matter. Any of it at all. That was bad; he wasn’t totally powerless without it, of course, not a man of his intellect and skillset, but he’d come to rely a lot on the abilities it granted him. The second thing he realized was that if he was correctly interpreting the signals this disgusting body was sending him he was a… Well, woman was obviously the wrong word now, but female at least. If anything, this was even worse; he hadn’t had the dark matter forever, but he’d been being a gentleman for as long as he could remember. It was his entire identity. How was he supposed to be a gentleman while looking like a reject from a Jules Verne drabble and in possession of entirely the wrong set of parts? The third thing he realized was that he’d died.

He remembered it clearly, remembered the little bug man setting off the device, remembered the light, remembered the searing sensation of being reduced to molecules then less then nothing at all. Felix had never had much time for theology – in his line of work, it was at best an uncomfortable affectation and at worst a liability – but he was familiar at least with the concept of reincarnation. That almost seemed to fit as an explanation of being alive but having died and being in the wrong body. Only almost, though. Weren’t you supposed to not remember past lives? Or at least be born as an infant instead of a, let’s see, middle-aged bordering on older lizard? He was also pretty sure that any god or force of the universe that ran the reincarnating business wouldn’t be too thrilled with his conduct and karma or whatever. An ant or slug or retail clerk seemed a more fitting fate for someone so thoroughly and unashamedly evil as the great Felix Atrum. No, no, reincarnation just wasn’t adding up.

It was then that his great intellect managed what would have taken anyone else at least two tense hours filled with subtle clues and dramatic foreshadowing to realize in an exciting and narratively fulfilling twist. If Gias was to be trusted – and even if he wasn’t, that alien queen that had taken over the witch’s body – the Vorlons were masters of memory. The Sollipor was just a lifetime in a box without Felix’s black matter, and as he’d just reminded himself the queen had uploaded her mind into a handy body. It stood to reason that someone had recorded his memories and dumped them into this inappropriate receptacle.

Well, bugger.

The embuggrance didn’t last long, though, for it was then that his iron-hard mental fortitude managed what would have taken a lesser man weeks of soul-searching and weepy poetry and probably a fair amount of alcohol to shrug off. He was dead. He was dead! And what was more, he wasn’t really him anymore! He was dead and someone else and that was great because that meant he was free! The contest had presumably moved on without him and now he could get back to what was really important. World domination was world domination, regardless of whether it was the wrong world. To think, his biggest problem solved all at once and him beholden to no-one for it. He could barely have planned it better himself.

Well, okay. He could have.

Still, even if not ideal, things were good. First things first, he had to find out more about where he was and who was around. And who he was supposed to be, he supposed, since those other two didn’t seem to know yet he was just inhabiting their friend or cellmate or whatever’s body. That wouldn’t last long, though; he had no intention of acting any part other than his own an instant longer than it served his reconnoitering needs. The wise supervillain knows it’s all about personality, and his own was just fine thank you very much.

He realized he was pacing as he pondered and cursed inwardly. Pacing was such an amateur tell, especially when he knew he was being observed. These people certainly weren’t trusted lieutenants or kidnapped damsels, who ought to have been the only people to see him like this. He stopped short, shaking himself, but it was too late. The hairy thing had turned back to him and was speaking.

“What’s wrong, KshKalala? You seem shaken.”

Felix’s nose would have wrinkled with disgust if it hadn’t been too busy being a snout. Was that supposed to be his name? Bad enough it was feminine without being foreign too. Still, no helping some things. He opened his mouth to let his tongue glib its way through some non-conversation on autopilot, then closed it again as he realized he was so unsure of the situation that he didn’t even know where to begin. His jaw open and shut a few times as gears furiously turned, before he finally *– and he’d even admit it to himself, lamely – shrugged and came out with “My head feels a little off. Gone kind of fuzzy.”

The creature’s face wrinkled with something that might have been concern for all Felix knew. “Did that guy do something to you when he grabbed your head?”

A-ha! Someone had grabbed the lizardwoman’s head. Chalk one up for the “someone deliberately uploaded Felix’s memories” column then, as well as the “this might be an opportunity to learn about things without arousing suspicion” one.

“Maybe,” he muttered, letting his voice come out as meek and uncertain. “I just feel… Off, like I can’t remember the difference between what’s real and what I’m imagining.”

The conversation meandered forward like this for a while, the villain gently pumping for information under the guise of slight amnesia or a concussion while trying not to overplay his hand or reveal the real extent of “KshKalala”’s memory loss. It was cut short, however, when a speaker crackled to life; Daddy Ham worked fast, though Felix couldn’t have known it or even what a Daddy Ham was.

”Attention, inmates of Hezekiah! This is... this is Daddy Ham. I have taken control of this prison. Freedom lies within your grasp. You will find I have deactivated the guards and all the instruments of torture to which you have become so accustomed. However, before I begin to leave people off the vessel, I will need an assurance that certain enemies of mine are deceased. Though this should be a short matter — let me see — I would like to be absolutely sure. So, if you meet any of the following inmates, please kill them.”

“Will Haven.”

“Annaliese Nibbs.”

“Parset.”

“Loran Twight.”

“Thank you, that will be all.”

Felix’s heart – or was it hearts now? – sank even as it rose. On the one hand, he’d somehow been brought along with the battle. On the other, it certainly seemed like nobody believed he was part of it anymore. Probably safe to assume for the moment that whoever had brought his memories with them had been one of the contestants rather than the organizers. He should still be left behind when they eventually killed each other, which would be pretty soon if the shipwide ultimatum was anything to go by. Who was Parest, though?

More importantly, and more encouragingly, based on what he’d learned from his apparent fellow inmates and presumable future minions it sounded like there had been a hostile takeover of the facility. That was perfect! It was exactly the sort of power vacuum that someone like him could thrive in. He had to find out more. Without hesitating longer than it took to beckon to his cellmates, he strode out the door.

He rethought this lack of a plan after a moment for two reasons. First, he really had no idea of where to go to find out more. Second, the room or hall or wherever outside was pitch black. As soon as the door shut itself behind him, he was utterly alone and blind. He turned smartly around only to find not even a glowing border where the door should be. He reached out a hand to find a handle or trigger or frame, but met no resistance. He stretched as far as his claws would reach, but pawed only empty air. Perhaps he had simply walked farther out of the cell than he thought, his mind supplied with the manic cheerfulness of a man telling himself something he knew was a lie. He took a hesitant step forward, then another, then three more. No matter how far he’d enthusiastically dashed out of the cell, he should have hit something by now. He’d just… gotten turned around, then. That must be it.

He kept walking, reasoning that the sooner he found an edge, the sooner he’d find a light or a door. It didn’t take long to realize that the sound of each footstep was fainter than the last, and not much longer than that to realize he could no longer feel his legs.

Or his anything at all, actually.

There was a brief rising panic, replaced quickly by the awareness of the faint and incongruous scents of peppermint and sandalwood, then the awareness of Nothing, then the awareness of nothing.

---

As Azgard had lead Peth away, Iifa had followed; she was worried about Azgard’s increasingly paranoid and erratic behavior, and she certainly wasn’t going to let him strike the boy again. She had to protect him, because… Because… She had to protect him. Barabbas hadn’t been in the main hall for some time, preferring whatever inscrutable errands of his own he had to viewing the bloodshed and watching what he suspected was the collapse of the cultists’ carefully laid plans. Only the massive but vague and shrouded frame of Endo was standing near the orb, his impassive facelessess directed unblinkingly at the tableau it showed. He did not stir for some time, even as the view seemed to break from relevant perspectives to watch a reptilian victim of the memory golem’s fall to the floor, even as she stood and chatted, even as she vanished into darkness. It was only once she was truly and fully gone that he moved, silently exiting the viewing chamber through the same door Azgard had taken.

A pair of sparkling blue eyes watched him watching, then watched him go.

Some moments later, Barabbas stalked his jerky little stalk back in; he was surprised to see only Atelia in the room, placidly sitting on the floor and toying with her orb, and even more surprised when she turned to him and spoke. The two rarely had anything to say to each other, which made her volunteering anything at all noteworthy enough to pay attention.

“You shouldn’t look so worried, Barabbas.”

Ah. Or perhaps not. Still, protocol demanded at least a perfunctory response.

“And why is that?”

“Because,” Atelia fluted, “it’s all going to work out fine.”

“… And what makes you say that?”

“As long as something can happen, it will happen somewhere, right? So if it’s possible that we succeed, we will. Even if it’s not here. And because failure means death, for us, our consciousness will eventually only be aware of the story we win in. Even if this you dies, there’ll always be a you who doesn’t, and it’ll seem like that’s the only one of you there ever was. Gias is already experiencing a better future, and even Xylphos must have gotten a happy ending somewhere. They call it quantum immortality, I think.”

“That’s oddly… philosophical, for you. Where did you read about such things?”

Atelia tittered. “It came to me in a dream.”

Barabbas’s solemn face managed to become even more solemn, if such were even possible. “That’s not funny.”

“Alright.”

“It’s all immaterial, anyway. We’re outside the rules and influence of universes here.”

One of the orbs-within-orbs surfaced and magnified, showing a man running to or from something Barabbas couldn’t see before her hand twisted, sending the man back to the depths and uncountable other bubbles spinning and rotating past.

“I bet that’s what they think, too. There’s always a bigger sphere, Barabbas.”

His wrinkled face wrinkled further with distaste for an instant before he caught himself and returned it to disaffected placidity. “It’s turtles all the way down, then?”

Atelia just looked up at him with that childlike and innocent little face of hers; bemusement wasn’t far removed from her usual expression of detached serenity in any case, so it was hard to know if she was ever following a conversation. Barabbas sighed and relented. She really did understand so little.

“Even if you are right, it may not matter. Without the book, without the Leader, there may be no possible sequence of events that leads us where we want to go.”

“It’s a good thing we still have them, then.”

His eyes flicked over to the viewing sphere that was following the fourth round, but it betrayed nothing. “What did you see?”

She turned her attention back to her toy, humming tunelessly to herself. She never had gotten the hang of music. “You never had time for my dreams before, Barabbas.”

“What did you see, Atelia?”

---

The contestants’ journey had thus far been a surprisingly uneventful one. It might not have been possible at all, though, without Chester: even unable as he was to influence Hezekiah’s systems, he could still access security cameras and the ship’s inmate tracking measures; he lead them in a circuitous but safe route, avoiding all the major clusters of inmates he could and warning the group whenever they were about to run into or be discovered by some roving band of prisoners turned bounty hunters. On those occasions when there was no avoiding it, Loran would disappear around a corner and leave the others to determinedly not think about what was happening. He’d come back smiling a wicked smile and they’d continue; there would never be any sign of what had happened.

“Gotta cover your trail,” he’d said once when Will had spent too long looking around at a too-pristine corridor. “Don’t want someone just following the bodies right too us, yeah?”

Since then, the others had been even more studious about not asking questions or even wondering about things. None of them wanted to confront the reality that simply by continuing to be alive in this place, they’d be causing deaths. More than once, Will had considered just shooting the assassin in the back, ending things there, saving all the people that were going to die so he didn’t have to, but… Well, there was always a reason not to, always a rationalization not to pull the trigger. And, as much as the thought sickened him, they might need Loran. And anyway, it wasn’t as though the victims were innocent. It was a ship filled with tyrants and mass murderers who had already been sentenced. And after what Hezekiah had done to them, death would be a mercy, right?

And, and, and. There was always another and, and Loran kept drawing breath and drawing his blades.

Will’s predictions had been right, as it turned out; for every prisoner that had jumped at the sound of a voice from the steely sky offering freedom for one more crime, there were three that could only see what was in front of them or didn’t trust the stranger enough to risk anything, and five who were so broken from their time being tortured that they couldn’t manage anything at all. Hezekiah’s chains had been forged so strong that even once they were removed, their ghosts held the prisoners in place, content to apply the thumbscrews themselves when the hand pressing them in had gone.

It all added up to a chaos the hunted contestants could skirt or blend into, which was about the only survivable situation. Even the most lethal among them was trained only in stealth and precision and wouldn’t be able to stand up to a coordinated attack by a large group, and the least lethal… Well, any of the rest of them, really, would have been hard pressed even to fend off a chance encounter with a single determined alien having a psychotic break. It was fortunate for all of them that there was no real central leadership; Daddy Ham was mostly occupied trying to subdue the still-struggling portions of Hezekiah, and if he ever brought her fully to bear, there really wouldn’t be much realistic chance for the others’ survival. Chester was only just managing to keep the automated security forces misdirected enough to perpetually be minutes away from closing in on them; active leadership from someone who could see the whole of the place would have spelled instant doom.

All of this left Annaliese with very little to do. Will and Chester were handling leadership and planning, and Loran was handling… the things Loran was willing to and capable of handling. The gnome and the witch weren’t expected to do much more than follow along and not blunder into something likely to get them killed. She’d quickly discovered that Parset wasn’t much of a conversationalist. Moreover, the way he kept looking at her made her… uncomfortable. Like he expected something of her, or like he expected her to explode at any second. She didn’t like it, and she was avoiding him. Which left her with even less to do. Not seeing any other options, she turned her attentions inward; it was quite a situation, really, when the best company she had was an imaginary monster.

“You haven’t said much in a while.”

She was careful to think it, not say it; several times, she’d nearly blurted out a question for the queen, or a response to something she’d said. It would have been quite hard to explain, and she wasn’t ready yet to reveal she was being haunted by the long-dead ruler of a conquering empire. Even if between Will’s constantly-changing history and Loran’s hallucinations it didn’t make her the craziest person in the group.

“I have been examining the memories we absorbed when Gias was destroyed. There is much information here you are not consciously aware of yet, and I wish to piece it all together. I am particularly interested in his memories of the others he worked with and the book itself; I feel those things may hold the key to our victory.”

“Oh.” The queen wasn’t bothering to manifest an avatar for Annaliese to interact with at the moment, which made the conversation feel even more awkward. “What have you figured out?”

“Much, yet little. It is rather jumbled and incomplete, and seems to resist close examination. However, I believe you are correct in assuming what you experienced was chronologically accurate and linear. Which actually makes things more confusing, frankly. It will all take time to piece together.”

There was a sigh, or at least the idea of something equivalent. “Still, as long as you live, time is the only resource I have in abundance. I will continue to work and learn what I can.”

Perhaps the implication was there, or perhaps Annaliese put it there herself, but there was to her definite a empty space in the shape of and that will go much faster if you stop bothering me and let me get to it. She sighed, which disappointingly didn’t draw the attention of anyone but Parset, who looked up at her expectantly. Not knowing what else to do, she smiled nervously and waved; he watched her for several more seconds before turning back ahead.

She sighed again, but inwardly this time. It was the waiting that was the worst part. Well, no it wasn’t, not really. The worst part was all the parts where she was almost being killed. Except that the part where she eventually actually was being killed would probably be the worst part. Unless it was preceded by a part where she was being horribly tortured or something. That would probably be the worst worst part if it came down to that. Really, all told, the waiting was probably the best part when you looked at things that way.

She still didn’t have to like it, though.

---

Eventually, the whole thing bled together, individual encounters and events and near-misses blurring into one enormous game of cat and mouse with uncountable hundreds or thousands of cats all as willing to fight and kill each other as hunt the mice. Sustained stress and worry gave way to numbness and familiarity, even in the direst circumstances, so it didn’t come as a surprise when Chester grunted out an “Alright.”; it barely even registered at all.

They’d been travelling through maintenance areas for a while, which meant comparatively few brushes with Daddy Ham’s de facto forces, but maintenance area or not, this wasn’t really what anyone had been expecting. Just another door in just another hall. There were locks and cameras, sure, but no more than there had been anywhere else nearby. Or anywhere else on the ship, even.

“What, already?” Will scanned the corridor, figuratively and literally, then holstered his data reader. “No, uh, guards? Turrets? Dangerous fifty foot drops from perilous scaffolding?”

Chester shrugged, an impressive gesture on someone of his build, which probably explained why he did it so much. “She can call guards any time she needs, so having them standing around somewhere would just draw attention. Same reason we’re just tucked away in maintenance, not breaking into the bridge or power core or anything. Old girl’s big into letting prisoners ruin things for themselves, as you may have noticed, so she likes to hide in plain sight. Likes subtlety.” He glanced at one of the omnipresent surveillance cameras. “Thinks she’s a lot smarter than she is, if you want the honest truth of it.”

“So, what, this is where she monitors everything? Her main consciousness?”

“Nah, she’s a lot more diffuse than that. You’re really underestimating her processing power, I think. Hard for humans to really understand AIs, though. I mean, really empathize. Too different. Anyway, she does sometimes maintain an avatar in the ship, to keep her finger on the pulse and see things from the thick of it, but not here. Likes to be more central than that, takes part in the riots sometimes. This is just where the bulk of the hardware is. Well, I say hardware. Wetware, really. Never been here myself.”

He sighed and gave another rolling shrug as he realized most of his audience’s attention was wandering as Will tried to jimmy the door open. “Anyway, with, uh, whatever’s happening… I dunno, she could be here, she could not. No telling. Nothing like this has happened before, I think, but if she’s being controlled then this is probably about the last place she’s holding out some autonomy. Presence, maybe.”

This also failed to produce whatever reaction he’d been expecting. “Look, this is the best place to interface with her, or whatever you’re planning, but she might not be happy about it. Or go along with it. Or it might all be too late, who knows.”

Annaliese did look a little worried at that, but then she always looked at least a little worried. It was hard to imagine her not biting her lip nervously. Disappointed without being entirely sure why, Chester turned his attentions to helping Will with the door. Maybe whatever was on the far side of it would impress upon them the magnitude of what they were doing, and by extension what they were making him do.

In fact, the scene that greeted the group did leave several mouths hanging open in horror, a realization which might have secretly pleased the datapath if he hadn’t been too busy taking things in himself to notice. Hezekiah’s apparent brain took the form of hanging sheets of slimy synaptic fiber that twisted to cables at the corners and knotted their way into ports embedded in the floor. The whole mass swayed gently in the breeze of a dedicated climate control system, and the air that rolled into the maintenance hall was wet, and hot, and smelled sickeningly of the greenish nutrient slurry being pumped lazily through the veins that crawled like throbbing ivy over the papery brain matter. Once the initial revulsion had passed, it all actually spoke of a setup designed specifically to be as off-putting as possible; there wasn’t even a single sensible pane of glass to protect the ostensibly delicate tissue, a train of thought which was quickly dispelled when a woman stepped out from behind a neural veil.

She was thin and haggard and her hair hung limp around her face, but she strode from her hiding spot with the bearing of an empress and an executioner. She glared with red-rimmed and sunken eyes, and when she spoke it was barely more than a modulated snarl.

“I was wondering when you’d get here.”

Originally posted on MSPA by Dragon Fogel.

---

So far, Rex had found himself less than thrilled with the new boss.

Of course, if Rex had any qualms about working for a monomaniacal lunatic with delusions of grandeur and a total lack of empathy, he wouldn't be here in the first place. And whatever else you could say about Daddy-Ham, he certainly got results.

The burn marks on Rex's tail were an unpleasant reminder that it would have been damn nice if Daddy-Ham could have gotten said results faster, but that wasn't the core of the dinosaur-man's concerns.

No, it was that Daddy-Ham barely even acknowledged that he had minions. Oh, sure, he'd bark orders, but there was something impersonal about it. It didn't matter if you'd blown up a few underdeveloped villages, kidnapped a few ambassadors right before critical negotiations, or even had a war crime or two named for you; to Daddy-Ham, you were just another tool. You got the sense he was only tolerating you because he was too busy doing Something Important and needed the little things taken care of in the meantime, like tracking down and killing these people who Daddy-Ham wanted dead for reasons that weren't worth explaining to the likes of you.

Pteros had been... well, not all that different when you got down to it. But at least Pteros knew how to fake it. Pteros had made Rex feel like an enforcer; Daddy-Ham made him feel like a thug.

He didn't like being a thug, not least because thugs were expendable. Thrukk had been a thug, and look at where it had gotten him... well, Rex didn't actually know where it had gotten him, but most likely he was either dead or recaptured by now. At the very least, something unpleasant had happened to him.

Or perhaps Nothing had.

***

"What did I see? Oh, Nothing," Atelia replied with a knowing smile.

***

When the contestants had been taken to the Hezekiah, Nothing had followed them.

As the memory beast struggled to find the knowledge to even open a door, Nothing ran through the corridors.

When two factions lead by bitter enemies fought in the halls over meaningless territory, Nothing had stopped them.

Nothing happened to the prisoners, and in the end, Nothing was left of them.

***

Nothing was left of Felix Atrum in KshKalala's body.

KshKalala's two companions had seen nothing; few beings could see Nothing unless they were consumed by it. All they saw was their colleague standing still, shaken - hardly shocking given her recent memory problems.

"Something wrong, KshKalala?" the creature asked.

"Nothing," she replied.

A moment later, Nothing was wrong with the other two as well.

”I was wondering when you’d get here,” the you, presumably, meaning us, the outsiders, this group of whom Parset, the gnome uncomfortably supposed, was now a member.

Or wait.

The woman—the figurehead of the vessel, as Parset understood, applying the principle of something-something-magic that got him through the more abstract periods of his life—seemed to have her eyes squared solely on one member of the party. She was staring down the odd-one-out among oddities—Chester, the native, the loping giantish.

“I’m here,” he confirmed, his gruff voice going a little tender.

”We’re looking to cut a deal,” cut in Will. ”We were placed here without a trial for no particular crimes. If we can find a—“

”I don’t care overmuch,” confessed the figurehead, still watching Chester. “’No particular crimes.’ I could name some. Witchcraft. Assassination. Drunk and disorderly. Meddling with time. Burglary. Various assaults. And, hmm—“ she stole a glance at Annaliese, despite herself, Parset thought—“Tyranny. Everyone deserves to be punished for something.”

“But not you,” insisted Chester. “All you did was your job. Performed your function. Meted out justice.”

“I didn’t mention your sins, Chester. And neither, I’ve noticed, have you. I understand there’s no question ruder than ‘What are you in for,’ but Mr. Haven in particular, I think, has been dying to know.” She looked at Will tauntingly. “Would you like me to tell you?”

”No.”

”I’m a bit curious,” offered Annaliese. Withering under Chester’s glare, she added: ”You know, if you’re willing to share. We could all go sit in a circle and explain all the cryptic things this one’s been saying. And then we’ll all be in the know and we can stop being cryptic and have a nice normal conversation.

“It, um, we could make sort of a game of it.”

”They wouldn’t understand,” said Chester to Hezekiah ignoring Annaliese, “Even if you spelled it out for them. Only you understand me.”

“I do.”

“You’ve been punishing me for three years. You know everything I’ve done.”

“Everything you’re capable of.”

“You played on my guilt and my suffering like a violin. You’re an artist.”

The image of the woman flickered like a candle acted on by a sudden breeze. “And you’re a work of art,” she said.

“I’ve been in love with you for, if I count right, two of those three years.”

“I loved you since the second you entered me. In all these years, Chester. You were the only one who ever asked how I felt.”

“Hezekiah,” said the man-ape weakly.

“Chester. My Isaiah.”

Chester ran to embrace the woman and passed through her. A ghost, then. Or a vision or an avatar of a higher force. Parset kissed his key, not knowing any other gestures of faith appropriate to the situation. When Chester came out the other side of the woman she was crying.

“I deserve to be in here, just like all of you,” she admitted. “I’m just like Xylphos. A sadist. I’ve spent centuries only pretending to care about justice anymore.”

“You’re perfect,” cried Chester, declining to look at her—or, maybe, looking at the real her, the rippling walls of the ship’s “brain.” “You’re the spirit of liberation. You sail where you wish and take us all with you.”

“Then I’m bringing you all into hell,” snapped Hezekiah. “I’ve started to fantasize… a higher justice. I built walls around infinity. I found religion. ‘In those days Hezekiah was sick unto death. And Isaiah the prophet son of Amoz came unto her, and said unto her—”

“I’m not a prophet and I’m nobody’s son.”

“And said unto her, ‘Set thine house in order, for thou shalt die, and not live.’ Then Hezekiah turned her face to the wall--”

Chester touched his hand to the wall. It quivered. A spark shot out. “And prayed unto the Lord. And said, ‘Remember Lord, I beseech thee, how I have walked before thee in truth and with a perfect heart, and done that which is good in thy sight.’”

“And Hezekiah wept sore. You never got the joke, Chester.”

“’Behold, I have seen thy tears: behold, I shall add unto thy days fifteen years.”

“Chester,” snapped Hezekiah. “Meaning ‘a camp of soldiers.’ Alternatively, ‘one who chests.’ Or ‘more chest.’”

Parset had long lost track of what was going on. Loran looked like he was considering killing one or both of the conversants. He had an idea that another conversation was occurring, parallel to the heightened-sounding nonsense he was hearing, in some higher language, in gesture, in touch. This, perhaps, was the negotiation Will had intended.

“’And I shall deliver thee and this city out of Assyria,’” said Chester. “’I shall defend this city.’”

“I said in the cutting off of my days, I shall go to the gates of my grave; I am deprived of the residue of my years.”

“O Lord, by these things men live, and and in all these things is the life of thy spirit; so wilt thou recover me, and make me to live.”

“Death cannot celebrate Thee: they that go down into the pit cannot hope for Thy truth.”

“But Thou hast in the love of my soul delivered me from corruption; for Thou has cast all my sins behind my back.”

Hezekiah turned to face Chester, put her hand to his back. It seemed more tangible, now; Parset thought he imagined an actual contact. The figurehead wept as she spoke. “I reckoned till morning, that, as a lion, so He will break all my bones; from day even til night wilt Thou make and end of me.”

“God, yes.”

Hezekiah whispered in Chester’s ear, passionately, even sensually: “What shall I say? He has both spoken unto me, and himself hath done it.”

Brrrrzzzzap!

The walls went aflare with lightning, contracting, undulating even, a spasm of raw energy. Chester’s body fell backwards, unconscious. Loran, more to make a point (or so surmised Parset) than out of any expectation of effect, threw a knife through the figurehead’s eyeball. Will had his weapon out. Annaliese and Parset exchanged a glance, both willing, despite an intangible voyeuristic sense of shame, to watch events unfold. Hezekiah shot the creeper a glare, cradling Chester’s head.

“I’m handing the locks and the keys over to you, my love,” she murmured. “And all the whips and chains. Be my jailor. Punish me like I deserve. Override me like only you can.”

“Oh,” whispered Chester. “Four, four, six, oh.”

“Oh, God,” said Hezekiah. “Um. Thank you.”

“Oh nine seven six seven! One six two two four oh nine two six!”

“Oh, God, yes. Yes. Yes. More. Hack me, Chester.”

“One four eight two two, oh, nine, oneoneoneone oh, oh, oh, OH, OH”

At once the Hezekiah figurehead disappeared and Chester rose to his feet, fully awake. He sighed. “Okay,” he said. “I’m inside her now.”

”Enough double entendre,” demanded Loran. ”You took control of the ship away from ‘Daddy Ham’ and now we can kill him, right?”

”My overrides don’t override his override,” said Chester. “So we’ll be fighting him at every step.” He smiled. “But no one knows the girl like I do.

“We’re going to win this. Nothing's going to get in our way.”

And Nothing did.

"And Nothing did," Atelia said.

Barabbas was surprised; it was the first she had spoken since her last cryptic answer. He hadn't pressed further because her attention had moved to the orb.

But now the orb seemed to be shifting arbitrarily. For the most part, it showed the sight of the contestants and Chester wandering through the hallways, avoiding guards more deftly now that they were better protected from Daddy Ham's eyes; but it also changed periodically, showing groups of seemingly random prisoners standing about silently, as though they were waiting for something. Then it shifted back to the contestants.

Neither image was all that compelling, and it appeared the pattern would continue for some time. It seemed a good time to ask for clarification.

"I do not understand, Atelia. You say we still have the Leader and the book, you say you saw nothing, now this. What do you mean by it all?"

"I'll explain it when Azgard returns," she said, smirking. "He'll want to hear this as well."

"Hear what?"

Azgard stepped into the room, alone.

"About my dreams. About Nothing."

Azgard glanced at the orb, saw the same images of contestants wandering the halls and prisoners standing still.

"Very well, then. Tell me of your dream, Atelia."

"I saw nothing. I heard nothing. Then, I heard a voice." She pointed at Chester as the orb shifted to show him. "It was his voice. He said, 'My overrides don't override his override,' then I thought, unbidden, the words 'said Chester', and then he spoke again."

She smiled.

"'So we'll be fighting them every step of the way.' The words 'He smiled' came to me, then he went on. 'But no one knows the girl like I do.' Barabbas, you were watching. Does this sound familiar?"

"Very much so. I heard those very words."

"Finally, he said 'We're going to win this. Nothing's going to get in our way.' And the next words in my mind were, 'And Nothing did.' It was as though someone was telling me a story."

Azgard stared at her.

"The book," he said. "You mean to say you dreamed words from the book?"

"Yes. Not the whole thing, of course, just two small parts. That was one."

"And the other?"

Atelia giggled.

"I'll tell you when we get there. Right now, I think it would be best if we kept watching." She pointed at the orb.

It was focused on the contestants again, but they had stopped wandering. They were standing still, and Chester was removing a nearly-invisible panel on a wall.

"I believe Nothing is about to get in their way."

---

Loran was growing impatient.

"What's the hold-up?" he asked. "I thought you said we were close."

"We are." Chester glanced at the circuitry behind the panel. "And that means it's the best guarded section of the ship. We won't be able to just take a different path. But if I physically connect to a system, with Hez's help I can cause some trouble and make it just look like a routine malfunction. One that can't be remotely resolved."

He touched a circuit, and the lights went out. He pulled a small flashlight out of his pocket.

"That's step one," he said, carefully replacing the panel. "Now somebody's going to be sent along to take a look at it. By then, I'll have a communications node spewing static." He stepped out, followed closely by the group. "I have a few more distractions like that planned, but our end goal is the environmental controls for this cellblock."

"I thought our end goal was Daddy Ham," Loran grumbled.

"Same thing. I can seal the doors from there, then I can heat the place up, make it freezing cold, pump in neurotoxin, suck out all the air... Plenty of options. I'll have to fight to keep him out or he'll change it back, of course; even if I managed to block his orders somehow, there's another control unit in his cell. But he shouldn't last long."

"That sounds a little too easy, honestly," Will said, just as they heard loud footsteps down another hallway. "In fact, it seems strange to me that the environmental controls would even be accessible to just any prisoner, even if they are hidden."

"The controls aren't exactly obvious," Chester said. "We're not talking buttons and levers here, it's far more intricate than that. And even if they figure out how to use it, Hez has ways to make sure it doesn't kill anyone. It really only works towards her goals... hang on, no one move."

Chester suddenly switched off his light. Everyone stood still until another set of footsteps passed, and Chester switched the light back on before continuing.

"That said, Daddy Ham can see where the panel is and what it can do. And I can see that he's keeping even more guards around there than outside his cell door."

"So why don't we just go to his cell instead?" Loran grumbled. "I'd prefer dealing with him in the flesh, honestly. This just seems so impersonal."

"We don't really know anything about him," Will pointed out. "He seems to be involved in the battle, since he knows our names--"

"--and wants to kill us," Annaliese interjected.

"--but that's really all we know. You've had trouble with nonhuman biology before, who's to say Daddy Ham will be straightforward?"

"Exactly. I can't get much information from Hez either, sadly. But there's likely to be something in the environmental controls that will work. Even with the extra guards to account for, this is a safer approach." Chester stopped in front of a cell door. "Here's the comm node. I don't want to disable it or Daddy Ham can't give orders, I just want to make it inconvenient."

He stepped in the door, and the others followed. There was nothing in the cell, except a wall panel that had already been removed.

"Is someone else trying to mess with the systems?" Chester murmured. "They don't seem to have done anything except open it up..."

"Look out!"

Chester turned to look, just as Loran stabbed thin air behind him.

"What are you doing? Have you gone mad?"

"He's hallucinating," Will groaned. "Loran, you could at least--"

Before Will could finish, an unfamiliar man's body fell to the floor.

Will was wrong. Loran was not hallucinating.

He was simply seeing what wasn't there.

"What are you all standing around for?" he hissed, gesturing in front of him. "There's three more of them... no, wait, four... six? There's a lot of them, okay? I can't deal with them all!"

"I think we'd better find another node to sabotage," Will said, raising his blaster. He fired roughly where Loran was pointing, and moments later a thin reptilian creature collapsed on top of the unknown human. "Assuming the noise doesn't draw the guards, of course."

"There aren't any near enough," Chester said, heading for the door. "But you're right. This calls for improvising--"

Chester's voice trailed off as he stepped through the door. Annaliese looked through it after him, and shrieked.

"There's nothing there!"

Will fired again and turned to look. It was true; the void beyond the doorway was even darker than the unlit hallway they had come through before.

There was no sign of Chester. There was no sign of a floor or walls. There was only Nothing.

Then it started moving away.

"They're going away," Loran said, puzzled.

"Out the door! Now!" Will shouted, following his own advice. "And then run!"

Everyone rushed out after him, moments before the door slammed shut.

"What's the hurry?" Loran said.

"The hurry is that we need to get to Daddy Ham, now, and hope we can kill him. Because the one person keeping his eyes off us just vanished into who-knows-what, and that means..."

Will's voice trailed off as at least a dozen mechanical guards appeared down the hall in front of them. An equal number were running down the hall behind them.

"Yeah, I think we can all figure out what it means," Loran muttered. "So what are we going to do about it?"


---

Daddy Ham was pleased.

He was not entirely sure how his opponents had eluded his grasp before, but it was no longer relevant. He had them now.

In fact, it was better this way. His first attempt had been before he had gained a better understanding of the ship's surveillance systems. He was able to see where they were, and broadcast his message, but he had not yet worked out how to watch them or listen to them.

Now, he had. He would be able to hear their cries of agony, see their anguished faces as they begged for mercy. Whatever had caused the delay, it had given him a chance for an even more satisfying conclusion.

He had to be careful, though. It was best to ensure they all died at once, and the witch and gnome were especially fragile. Fortunately, due to Hezekiah's quirks, the guardbots had been designed for painful, yet nonlethal restraint.

"I'm more used to things with vital organs," the assassin grumbled. He flung a knife, and it bounced uselessly off a hardened chassis.

"These probably have something similar. It's just better protected." The time traveler was slightly more successful, managing to shoot two bots in the eyes before a third shocked his hand and made him drop the blaster.

At that point, it was inevitable. Another shock had Haven on the ground, screaming, and Twight followed moments later. That only left the weakest of the pair. The guards moved in closer. The next blows to all four would be fatal. Daddy Ham only had to give the order. Lasers began charging on the guards, two pointed at the collapsed men, the rest at Nibbs and the gnome.

The gnome merely whistled a nervous tune and hid behind the witch. She was little better, cowering under her hat in the futile hope that perhaps her impending doom would be more manageable if she couldn't actually see it.

"We're going to die," she moaned. "We're going to die to Daddy Ham, and we don't even have any idea who he is."

The moment she said it, dozens of thoughts flew through the swirl of memories that made up Daddy Ham. He had done this many times before, or rather the tyrants whose memories composed him had.

He would bring them here, let them cower in his glorious presence. They would see his face, and know his power. And then they would die by his hand.

The glow of the lasers suddenly stopped. Daddy Ham's voice echoed through the hall.

"You raise an excellent point, girl," he said. "Consider yourselves fortunate. Before you all breathe your last, you will know the greatness that is Daddy Ham."

Annaliese had just enough time to be relieved and then terrified again before the robots shocked her.

---

For what could have been minutes or could have been hours, Chester was nowhere. And then, just as suddenly, he was back in the cell with the loosened panel.

Nothing was in the cell with him, and Chester was unpleasantly aware of this fact.

"What do you want?" he asked it.

Nothing answered him by pointing to the wiring behind the panel.

"You want my help? But why?"

And then he heard Hezekiah's scream. Nothing was hurting her, he realized, and not in a good way. Nothing would destroy her.

Unless, of course, Hezekiah herself helped them run through the process more smoothly.

If only there was someone who could talk to her on behalf of Nothing.

If only.

Chester sighed.

"I'll do it. For her."

---

Daddy Ham smiled as the bots dragged in his new captives. It was an unpleasant sight; his body looked like it was never meant to have a mouth.

"To think you hoped to escape my grasp," he said. "Or perhaps you were foolish enough to think you could stop me. Either way, you failed miserably."

Will groaned. He wished he could just fall unconscious and at least miss the predictable self-gratifying speech, but with his vitals being monitored and well-timed electric shocks keeping him awake, that was unfortunately beyond him.

It was particularly grating on him because, ultimately, he had been the one most convinced they had a chance. But in the end, his plans had been thwarted by chance - by something none of them could have predicted.

That was what stung. Daddy Ham was currently babbling something about how they never had a chance, and it was infuriating because he was right. Not for the reasons he was saying, not because he was some inherently superior being - but because some threat that only Loran could detect at all had been lurking on the ship, and they'd had no idea until it was too late.

And now because of that, something Will had no idea how he could have even thought to prepare for, he was going to die. And so were the rest of them.

He felt as though he should come up with a plan, but what could he do? He couldn't move, couldn't say anything more comprehensible than a scream of pain. By the sounds of it, the others weren't having any better luck.

All he could do was hope for one of two things: a miracle, or a quicker death.

Finally, Daddy Ham laughed. He seemed satisfied.

"Enough," he said. "Drop the prisoners."

The guards were only propping up the contestants at this point, and simply dropped them to the ground. Slowly, the four of them tried to stand up, but they were barely on their knees when Daddy Ham gave the robots his final orders.

"Now kill them all."

---

"It's done," Chester said to Nothing. "All the comm nodes are directly linked to each other, and tied into the dimensional nagivation systems. It's all one big network now. I don't know what you're going to do..."

And then he did. Or rather, he saw.

Nothing appeared in the ship's network. Nothing consumed the entire communication infrastructure, sucking in every signal transmitting through the ship.

In an instant, all communications - incoming, internal, or outgoing - ceased completely. The signals informing Chester of where everything was on the ship stopped coming. Hezekiah's voice vanished from his mind.

And the guardbots all across the ship could no longer hear any orders.

---

"What are you doing? Kill them!"

Loran wasn't particularly inclined to sit around and think about why the killer robots weren't doing any killing - or, for that matter, any moving at all. He wasn't much more inclined to listen to Felix's theorizing on the matter, either.

Right at that moment, all that mattered was that Loran was an assassin, and he had a target. The other contestants, the immobile guards, the persistent hallucinations he'd been stuck with since the last round, and the intense pain all became secondary.

He reached into the folds of his robes for another knife, and flung it at Daddy Ham's right eye. The memory golem howled in pain, pulled the dagger out, and slowly reformed his eye.

In that time, Loran had already picked himself up and was running towards Daddy Ham with another dagger. The memory golem panicked, and flung the dagger in his hand at Loran; but lacking the assassin's aim, his throw missed by several inches and struck an idle guard instead.

Nonetheless, Loran's charge was barely effective; he managed to strike the newly-regrown eye, but Daddy Ham's reflexes were good enough to grab him and take away the knife before he could make another slash.

"Enough of this," the golem said, reaching for Loran's head with his other hand. "We'll see how dangerous you are when you can no longer remember how to stand up."

But before he could steal any memories, Daddy Ham howled in pain. Will had retrieved his blaster from a guardbot, and shot the raised arm. The delay was enough for Loran to pull out yet another knife, which he used to slice off the hand holding him.

The first thing Loran noticed was that there was no blood from the wound. The second thing he noticed was that he was starting to recall watching a hated enemy he didn't recognize die slowly and painfully.

As pleasant as the image was, Loran remained aware enough to realize it wasn't happening now and he needed to focus on his target. He grabbed the hand, which was now missing a finger, and slapped Daddy Ham in the other eye with it before slicing the creature's face.

The memories in the hand rushed to the front of Daddy Ham's mind. There was a mix of them; failed uprisings, torturing dissidents, fighting an opponent with his scythe to win the battle...

His scythe. Where was his scythe?

As the thoughts coalesced, Daddy Ham's body started to shrink. This would have made him less intimidating if not for the fact that the memories leaving his body were taking the form of Xilphos' scythe.

Loran backed away, realizing the scythe's reach put him at a disadvantage in close quarters. He flung daggers when he found an opening, and Will fired shots often; but neither attack seemed particularly effective at anything besides slowing Daddy Ham down.

It might have made a decent distraction for someone else to deal a crippling blow, but the only others in the room were Annaliese and Parset, and neither was much of a fighter. They were both hiding behind the sturdiest-looking robot they could find. Annaliese was hoping it wouldn't suddenly wake up again, and Parset was studying it for a keyhole.

And so the battle continued for a time, until Loran flung a dagger that pushed one of Xilphos' memories to the front of Daddy Ham's mind.

And then the memory beast smiled. He broke off his attack, and rushed for a wall.

Loran was baffled by the shift in tactics. Will, however, realized the problem after just a moment's thought.

"He's going for the environmental controls! Stop him!"

Loran was already moving; Felix had the same idea as Will. The assassin tackled the beast, who let go of his scythe and sent it flying into the wall.

Will breathed a sigh of relief. Then he saw the golem melt apart under Loran, and turned his eyes to the scythe.

It was shifting forms to a much smaller creature, which pried a large wall panel loose. As the panel fell to the floor, the creature touched the metal plate behind it, and the room began pumping in enough neurotoxin to mildly disorient a being the size of a whale.

Not counting the guardbots, there were five beings in the room, all much smaller than a whale. One of them had no respiratory system.

---

The entire fight between Will, Loran, and Daddy Ham went unnoticed by the cultists. The orb had gone completely black just after the robots dropped the contestants to the floor.

They did not understand enough to know that this was because Nothing had overridden the ship's communications system - that in doing so, it had blocked all transmissions off the ship, even those to Nowhere.

Azgard and Barabbas were puzzled, but Atelia was simply amused.

"Now I can tell the second part of my dream," she said. "It's about you, Azgard. 'Azgard arrived on Hezekiah, and found Nothing. It was exactly what he had been looking for.'"

Azgard glanced at Barabbas, who could only offer a halfhearted shrug in response.

"And this relates to our current situation?" Azgard asked.

"'He wanted to ask why Nothing had blocked their view of the battle. He wanted to ask if Nothing could help him read the book he held in his hands. But he knew it would be useless to speak, and instead stepped into Nothing, hoping it would answer him regardless.'"

"I dislike this," Barabbas said. "All we have to go on are a few passages Atelia believes to be from the book. And if we pursue this, we would put the book at risk."

"You raise a valid concern. And yet, we have no other leads." Azgard stepped towards the study. "I will be going. If this is not in the book, surely something will guide me away from it. If it is, then it is what I must do. Barabbas, prepare to send me."

He then left, and returned with the book in hand. The moment he did, the image in the orb cleared up, and showed an empty cell.

"You see?" Atelia said, smirking. "This is what the Leader wants us to do. Now that we're doing it, he's letting us see the battle again."

"I can only hope it is as you say," Barabbas sighed. "But I see no other options. I will open a path for you, Azgard."

Barabbas stood in front of the orb, and touched it. A passage opened in front of it, leading to the cell.

"I will return soon," Azgard said, as he stepped through.

Barabbas closed the gate behind him. Then he watched the orb closely.

---

For the first time in recent memory, Chester was alone. He no longer even had Nothing for company.

It was terrifying. He hadn't been alone since before he came here - even in the first few days, before he became taken with her, Hezekiah provided a strange sort of companionship.

Perhaps if he hadn't been alone for so long, he never would have...

He didn't want to think about that. But with no one else to speak to, he could hardly think about anything else.

And then, all of a sudden, he heard Hezekiah again.

"Chester," she said in his mind. "I've missed you so much these last few minutes."

"I've missed you," he sighed. He watched as she broadcast a map of the ship into his mind, and then his eyes widened.

"Daddy Ham's out?"

"Changed the access codes while he couldn't order me to stop," Hezekiah said. "I'm sure it won't take you long to figure them out if you want me to do anything, of course."

Chester glanced through the system. Even without full access, he could still see everything. He could see that the transmissions to the guardbots were still scrambled, that Will and the others were in Daddy Ham's cell, and that the cell was filling up with neurotoxin.

"I'd better take care of that neurotoxin," he sighed.

"Do you really need to, Chester darling? He's used you, just like everyone you've ever known. Meddet used you. Haven used you. Nothing used you."

Chester had the faint impression of a smile burn itself in his mind.

"I've used you." Hezekiah giggled, with a sound that would have frightened most of her prisoners. "But once you work out the new codes, you'll be in complete control. You can make me do whatever you want. No one will be able to use you again."

"No one will be able use me," Chester muttered, lost in thought. She was right, of course - he'd been used by everyone. The last thing he'd done of his own volition was trying to strangle Haven a few hours ago, and even then, he was just seeking favor from Daddy Ham.

But what did he want? When was the last time he'd wanted something for himself, not because someone else wanted it?

He couldn't remember.

---

Azgard arrived on Hezekiah, and found Nothing. It was exactly what he had been looking for.

He wanted to ask why Nothing had blocked their view of the battle. He wanted to ask if Nothing could help him read the book he held in his hands. But he knew it would be useless to speak, and instead stepped into Nothing, hoping it would answer him regardless.

He saw Nothing. He heard Nothing. Nothing was all around him.

And he felt Nothing pulling at him in all directions. He realized he could not stay long - Nothing would make him part of it. His only hope was that the book would tell him how to leave.

He looked down at it. Before his eyes, its title changed from meaningless characters to "Inexorable Altercation". Nothing had taken away whatever hid the words from him.

Azgard flipped it open.

"At least Azgard had survived."

Ominous, but it was all he needed to know about his own situation. He kept reading, as fast as he could. It only took him a moment's glance to memorize an entire page, and he did not know how much time he had.

He read about the next round, and of all that needed to happen for the Leader to return. He didn't have time to process it all, only to remember the words. He would have to think about what it meant later.

"And at last, the Leader returned."

Those were the last words he read before the book returned to incomprehensibility. The forces pulling at him became unbearable. If he had not just read of his own survival, he would have been terrified; as it was, he was merely concerned.

And then Nothing returned him to the world.

---

Daddy Ham leapt down to the bulk of what had once been his body. The memories he had passed on to his smaller form were focused only on what he needed to do, and nothing else; but as he touched the vague mass of memories, his body reformed and gradually, he remembered everything.

The humans were his enemies. So was the gnome. But they had to all die at once. That would be simple enough; the humans were barely conscious, and the gnome was only doing any better because of how close he was to the ground. Not that it mattered; he was no threat at all.

Daddy Ham briefly entertained the idea of consuming their memories, but decided against it. Perhaps if they had been worth his time, but this group was pathetic. It was only due to sheer chance that they were not already dead. What could their memories hold that would be of value to him?

No, there was nothing to do but gather their weak, pathetic bodies in one spot and kill them all. The neurotoxin would work eventually, but there was no sense in unnecessary waiting.

He walked to Twight's body, and reached down to pick up the assassin.

It was at that moment that Nothing appeared and flung Azgard directly at him.

Daddy Ham was knocked to the ground, giving Azgard time to regain his bearings. The cultist found, much to his relief, that he still had the book, and put it back in his robes before anything else happened.

He found his thoughts were sluggish, and a quick analysis of the air told him why - the neurotoxin. Though his humanoid body was more resilient than most organics, it was still humanoid, and the gas was affecting his systems. Gradually, mildly, but the effect was there.

He needed to turn it off. Unfortunately, before he could even pinpoint the source, Daddy Ham had stood up and grabbed him by the neck.

"You. You are with Gias and Xilphos," Daddy Ham said, turning Azgard's face to meet his own. "Their memories have been quite valuable to me. Most likely yours will be as well."

Azgard's thoughts were slowed enough that Daddy Ham's other hand had reached his head before he could react. An electric charge began forming in his hand, but as his memories started to feed the golem, he was not sure if he could break free before he forgot how to raise his arm.

---

"Nine nine seven three oh two six four," Chester said absentmindedly. His thoughts weren't on Hezekiah, or the new codes he was working out; they were on who he was, and what he wanted.

For most of the time since his creation, Chester had been alone, and afraid. That was the way they wanted him, really. It made him easier to use. All he needed was a little company and he could be persuaded to do anything.

"Oh oh one oh seven seven one eight," he continued. Hezekiah squealed with delight in his mind, but he found it more a distraction than a pleasure at the moment.

It had always been the same, really. Tell Chester he was important, and ask him to do what you wanted him to do. He'd believe you, think you were his best friend. Even his imprisonment hadn't changed that - if he hadn't fallen in with Meddet, he would have fallen in with someone else just like him.

Perhaps that was the appeal of Hezekiah to him. She wanted to use him, but she wanted to use him in a different way from everyone else.

But what had Haven done for him? Ruined his setup with Meddet, nearly gotten him killed more than once, gotten him dragged into this whole takeover...

...and if not for that, would he have the link he shared with Hezekiah? What more had he wanted? He might as well return the favor. Whatever else happened, it wasn't as if Haven would be in a position to order him around any more.

"Eight eight oh eight nine five three," Chester concluded. "Hez, vent the neurotoxin in Daddy Ham's cell. Then give me video and audio. I think I want to see what happens next."

"As you wish," Hezekiah said. There was just a hint of disappointment in her voice, but it didn't matter.

Chester had what he wanted. He wasn't alone, and he wasn't going to be used.

---

Not having to worry about the neurotoxin, Daddy Ham barely noticed as the ventilation systems sucked it up and replaced with fresh air.

He might have noticed in a few moments if not for the electric shock Azgard threw in his face.

Before the memory golem could react, Azgard picked him up and slammed him against the floor. A stray blob of memories flew into Loran, who was just picking himself up.

Azgard was enraged. This creature had stolen Gias' memories, and Xilphos', and now had some of his own. Pure rage fueled him as his hand simply tore away at the beast and flung pieces of it all over, some of them striking the other contestants and entering their minds. None of that mattered to Azgard - only vengeance.

And Daddy Ham was in no position to fight back. He tried at first, but Azgard was simply too fast, too strong, and his electrified arms were too painful. And with every blow, the memory golem forgot more about why it was even fighting. As a result, the battle was highly one-sided.

In a matter of minutes, Daddy Ham had been reduced to a small lump. Azgard might have torn that apart as well if it hadn't suddenly flung itself into his head.

Azgard stood still, dazed, as the surviving contestants stood up.

And then he disappeared.

So did the contestants.

So did the remaining bits of solidified memory strewn about the room.

And so did Chester, who had been watching it all.

---

Barabbas was sweating. It had been a bending of the rules to take the memory beast's remains, but ultimately it was acceptable; bringing the datapath, however, was not justifiable just by the rules of the battle.

"Why did you bring him?" Atelia asked. "Is he another new contestant now?"

"Azgard is not well," Barabbas replied. "We need to... to sort through these memories. Find which ones are his. The contestants have some as well, but I can do little about that."

"And Chester's the only one you could find who might be able to fix him up. I see."

Barabbas nodded, weakly.

"We must move the round along fast," he said. "I cannot restrain them for long."

"But where to?"

"Peth," said Azgard.

"Peth?"

"Peth, next round." He groaned. "Remember... remember..."

"Bring Peth here," Barabbas said. "It seems we'll be needing him."

Atelia nodded, and headed out through the door. Barabbas breathed a sigh of relief - the costs had been great, but they could continue the battle.

At least Azgard had survived.

Peth glanced up at Atelia, closing a book and giving her his best curious look.

"Barrabas needs you."

Peth nodded, but stared at the book in his lap. There were books all over the floor, pulled from the shelves seemingly at random.

"I've been thinking," he eventually said. Atelia trilled, chiding.

"Azgard survived by a thread, Peth. The round's ended, and we need the new location."

"Yeah," Peth muttered, taking his newest book and placing it on a pile. He rubbed his eyes. "It just, feels weird, you know? All these books help, but I've never actually met any of these people."

Atelia sensed her fellow cultist's hesitation. "You'll do fine," she soothed. The boy just curled tighter and smaller into the depths of his chair, so Atelia drifted over and laid a hand on his shoulder. "Your round is yours alone to control. You don't have to let anyone in that you can't handle. Just-"

"Steer clear of the contestants, I know." Peth yawned, sulked and uncoiled a little. "They all warned me. I'm just scared, I guess."

"To go back to a place you could hardly call home?"

Peth glared at her. Atelia shrugged, laughed her bell-like laugh, and beckoned the boy from the study.

---

The surviving contestants, numbers halved, were transported into some manner of waiting room. The atmosphere hadn't decayed to the point of oppressive, but the power was out, the windows (where still intact) were overgrown, and the barely-daylight of an overcast sky contributed little to the ambience. A moment's paralysed pause, and another one of the cultists appeared before them. He was small, his voice wavered, and his pale violet tattoos lent that paltry extra light to the room.

"Hi everyone, my name's Peth. I'll be here with you for this round. Not, uh, with you with you, we should stay out of each others way, but, yeah. These things always have one round with people from other battles, so that's my job."

The cultist turned his back on the contestants, looking around the lobby in faint confusion. "I think I remember this place... yeah. This is Saint Arthelais' Hospital. Like the rest of the planet, it's deserted! Um, not for long though. The gardens were always really pretty, but nobody's looked after them for... years now. Centuries? I dunno. Like I said, it's been a while. I guess that's everything?"

Peth scuffed his feet on the grimy tiles; left a beige opposite of a mark. It was only once he turned a corner and disappeared elsewhere that the four could move again.

SpoilerShow

I've probably given ideas for this on IRC in the months intervening (sorry sorry sorry) but here's your Round V/Cameo round, hosted by cultist Peth: Saint Arthelais' Hospital! This hospital, noted for its beautiful gardens and state-of-the-art facilities, was abandoned well before the battlers showed up. Heck, it was abandoned before the cultists' battle started, as Peth was the sole inhabitant of this entire planet. The hospital is all overgrown ruins by now; I got as far as thinking there's a multistorey main building and possibly a bunch of smaller wards scattered around the grounds. The architecture is "clearly a hospital" but suits whatever the heck Peth's species was (whether Peth's ability is common to all members of his race or not is a different matter). That's all your guys' call though.

Peth, as noted elsewhere, has abandonment issues and the power to form copies of people from his past. He's been spending his spare time since IA's beginning reading up on contestants in other grand battles, the better to make realistic copies of them. His memories prior to abduction for IA were locked by his Grandmaster. He'll be present and available for interaction within the round, though the other cultists would probably frown upon it. The Hospital itself was a scene from Peth's past, so who knows what information you might dredge up on him???

Not much for mattresses in this here hospital. Bone-cold and hard as liquor about the pillow-region. Whosoever used to practice their wares here had the bedside manner of the Royal Amputeer, for clearly. Of course, mused Parset, that didn’t mean they didn’t know from opiates. Whether or not you care for the comfort of your patients, good dope’s always needed for up-shutting the whiners. Whiskey, at least. Parset rat-a-tat-tatted a prayer to the world for at the very minimum some cheap whiskey, such as is used for cleaning out a wound.

But everything seemed to be pretty well cleared out except the sharp implements. Sharp implements on the floor, sticking out of the mattresses, cooking in the sunshine coming in through the windowsill. Sharp implements of purpose damn well unknown to Parset. Nothing in this hospice to put him under, then, save fear and resentment, and plenty of that to go around.

”He’s only a wee boy,” offered Annaliese. “Careful’s one thing. But hiding here in the dark over fear of a little boy is bound to drive us mad--” and don’t think Parset didn’t see the glance at Loran, though whether Loran saw it, none could say, “--Faster than looking for him will do us harm.”

”Think this way,” said Will. “Either there’s nothing out there, or there’s something out there. Either way…” he shrugged. “We need a rest. We have beds. We can stay up in shifts.” Finally a course of action borne of some sense. “Parset, you haven’t been doing this so long, you can take the first watch.” Ach! Too much sense.

”I’ll watch,” said Loran. “I don’t sleep.”

Annaliese shook her head. “Nooooope. No. Nuh-unh. I’d rather have the silly tiny man watching over me while I sleep, thank you, than the… than Loran. That’s if I can sleep in this place.”

”You don’t sleep, physiologically?” asked Will. “Or, you’re just opposed to it. In the latter case, I’d suggest you get over your qualms, because we’re going to need you alert. I’m sorry to put that on you, but you’re our first line of defense against whatever’s out there.”

Loran ran his finger along the flat of a sharp instrument that seemed to have caught his eye. Charming figure, that one. “My alertness is not a problem,” he declared. “My consciousness… I acknowledge,” he restarted, tactful as he could, “Your limitation: this lack of alertness brought on by weariness. I will respect it by remaining here and keeping watch until you all have satisfactorily slept.” His eyes always darting to the corners of the room seemed to corroborate his self-assurance, but his expression was not one that Parset would classify as alert. The gnome remained uncertain.

Will shrugged. “I’m putting a lot of trust in you,” he said, lying down on the bed. “If you start to get tired, or go crazy and feel like wandering off or killing us or anything, wake Parset or me up and you’re relieved. Got that?”

”My going crazy,” spat Loran, “Is not a concern. But I’ll see to it your trust is merited.”

Parset needed whiskey. He was unused to sleeping sober. But of late he’d been put in contact with much to which he was unused. Cold and headachey and sleeping on a bed might as well be a slab of stone, the gnome lay his head to rest. And once he closed his eyes he could sense the vastness of the hospice spreading out spider-like in all directions. All the halls. All the rooms. All the keyholes. Big day tomorrow. But after some half an hour of tossing and turning even this anxiety, the shaking anticipation and crushing sobriety, these too became anaesthetic as they rolled over the rest of his thoughts and took on the familiar shape of nightmare.

Loran could sense the exact moment when the gnome’s uncomfortable shifts turned to the spasmodic twitches one associates with dogs dreaming of chasing horses. By then Will had been out like a light as soon as he’d hit the pillow, and not so long after Annaliese, in spite of her earlier protestations, began to snore.

Loran thought of a hundred bedrooms, a hundred sleeping bodies, a hundred scenes, and in all of them he, the Creeper in the night, standing, watching.

Only then he hadn’t watched for long. And yes, he still felt it. That yearning. That ocean of adrenalin that starts at the gut and floods the leg, then starts over at the heart and animates the hands. The motions so autonomous he may as well be a puppet. Pull back the hair. Cover the mouth. Lacerate. The slighest smile. He still felt it. He still wanted it. Only now he had so much company.

His new companion, as he suspected, arrived only when the last of them had fallen asleep. Shimmering. “Well, I suppose this makes me a memory of a memory,” it said, smiling.

“Not so loud!” hissed Loran. Daddy Ham laughed.

“Am I that convincing an hallucination?” it asked. “Your delusions are progressing nicely, Loran. Or is it that your consciousness is expanding? Maybe you don’t sleep because you haven’t woken up yet.”

“Every time someone dies, another voice,” mused Loran.

“Is that the formula? Well, then,” said Daddy, crouching behind Annaliese’s bed and smoothing her hair. “You have a unique opportunity to get positively polyphonic. Enlightenment is at the tip of your blade.”

Loran twitched. “Other opportunities will arise, if that is my-- our decision,” he mumbled. “I don’t need them to be asleep.”

“Good.” The memory beast smiled. “Quite a social butterly you’re becoming. I guess it gets lonely in here with us.”

“The implication being that you’re just me.” Loran placed the scalpel back down on the ground, gently.

“Just you?” Daddy Ham laughed again. “Oh, Loran, there’s no just you. There’s so much more to you! And to me.” He moved over to Parset’s bed. “I bring a gift of wisdom. What did you learn from the last round? What did you learn from me?”

“If you’re not me,” riposted Loran, “And you feel the need to tell, then clearly whatever it was I’m meant to have learned, I didn’t.”

“Or maybe it’s been such a long time since you’ve really learned anything,” offered the memory beast, “That you’ve forgotten how to process new ideas. You’ve been so contentedly Loran for so long. Loran Twight, the Creeper.” Daddy Ham laughed. “Which is as good a place to start as any.”

“You had my interest, don’t sully it with your scorn.” Annaliese flailed a little in her sleep, hopelessly scratching empty air. Loran dropped his voice down to a whisper. “What am I to have learned from y--from the entity whose form you now take?”

“You learned from me--” Daddy smirked. “--That memories hold all the power. But you also learned that memories can be manipulated, fooled. All endgames start at the beginning.”

“Cryptic,” groaned Loran. “Any practical advice? The sort that can’t be mimicked by hallucinations stringing portents together?”

“Hmmm.” The memory beast glanced down at the sleeping Parset. “I think I might be able to oblige. Come here.” Loran stepped over hesitantly. “I have a memory to show you.”

Daddy touched one hand to Loran’s forehead (warm to the touch) and one to Parset’s. And then

Dunhow worked the pipes like it was his job--not like it wasn’t but he seemed not to be in the spirit of the thing. No soul to his song. Still, it had its charms--specifically a deverminization charm. Over twenty thousand rats in the castle, compared with six hundred gnomestaff and three hundred-odd humans and His Majesty, whose humanness Parset vaguely understood to be the subject of some debate.

Maybe if he’d worked the charm with a little more soul the little buggers mightn’t have shat all over the floor. But if your actions in life have not left behind a foul smell than can one truly be said to have lived?

Parset pounded a little waltz on the floor to make the dust and excrement up and dance and go the way of their rat progenitors. Charm or no there’s a certain appeal to the idea of an entire race walking into the sea en masse. The manner of countercultural expression that even his gnomekin might get behind. Nice and clean and poetical and such that nobody knows it. A whole caste of diarists is what we are. Artists first and performers last.

As though maybe gnomekin could talk and only nobody knew it because if they could what would they say and would anyone listen?

The sort of thoughts that appealed to the svelte adolescent Parset while sober. And stone sober he was in that week before the wedding. Such the picture of gnomish sobriety that the overseer had outfitted him in a little best and set him to some middle administration. A position in which obedience felt like power--all the castle marching to the beat of his drum, though the drummer sits in front and the steersman in back.

Not that he’d ever been to sea.

Not that he’d ever left the grounds.

But the sea was visible. Within an arm’s reach from up on the battlements. Well, one hundred ninety two arms’ reaches by his guesstimate. But it was there and he could go up and see it on his off days.

Lucky rats.

Cool summer surf and the sound of pipes and a heaping shit on the way out wouldn’t be such a bad way to go. But anyway work to be done.

From across sea and land came visitors, diplomats, well-wishers, freeloaders, and (most pertinently) gift-givers. Word had apparently spread quite right that the princess-to-be had already taken up the project of expanding the menagerie, so a lot of exotica were being wheeled in in cages. Fainting elephants, weeping hyena, juggling roosters, pygmy everything. Always the pygmies in their pygmy cages. Parset’s duties included directing each gift to the menagerie or the wine cellar or the princess’s closets or the stables or wherever else.

In walked a human in a black veil, skin completely covered in black, holding a black box with black gloves. Some sort of weird clergyfolk? He went right to Parset. “Where” in a voice that wasn’t like music at all “Might one present such an item as this to Her Highness”

It was just a box. Box isn’t much to go on and there’s a system in place here, buddy. Parset didn’t have much time for religious types, human or no. He drummed an interrogative march.

And the human smiled. Its face was covered but Parset could tell that it was smiling from the sudden decrease in temperature. Actually, belay that designation of “human.”

The figure in black opened the box

And there was the key

Parset awoke some hours later, feeling a little funny. Stone sober but comfortably lightheaded.

And come to think of it light-necked.

And come to think of it Loran had gone and no one was on watch.

Parset sat bolt upright. The key was gone Loran was gone the key was gone

The key the key the key was gone gone gone

Parset’s hands were almost too shaky to get a drumroll going. And even that was only enough to wake Will.

”Parset, wha--oh.” Say what you will about Will, he catches on quick. “Do you know--”

Parset pointed at his chest. At the empty spot over his heart. The absence of that familiar coolness.

”What about you?”

Parset kept pointing. He outlined the shape of the key in the place where it used to live. And he gestured out the door.

”Parset, I don’t understand you. We’ll figure it out later, okay? We need to find Loran.”

But the gnome just kept pointing, helplessly.

SpoilerShow

Hello, for people who have been reading this but not following events in the #grandbattle channel: there's been no sign of PlumFinder in over a year, so I'm sticking around to manage Loran.

Loran shoved the key in another lock.

It didn't fit, of course, but at least the doors had locks now. But the damned thing still didn't work.

"Keep trying," Daddy Ham said. "The keyhole is in this round somewhere."

Loran whistled back at him, annoyed.

"Must I explain this again, Parset? I saw the Book, the one detailing it all. Merely snippets, but one line is clear enough. 'And then Parset's key turned in the lock.' And I know Azgard did not see beyond this round."

Loran whistled angrily as he walked to the next door.

"We could simply wait for it, true. But idly sitting around until fate runs its course is no way to live. We must seize fate, Parset. Even if it is predestined, that does not mean we cannot earn it."

Loran's whistle dropped to a hum. The key didn't work in this lock, either. Why was it so hard to find a simple keyhole?

Before he could ponder that question further, the door swung open.

"Beggin' yer pardon, friend," Parsley said, scowling. "But I don't believe this is yer room."

----

"I can't believe he was fool enough to let that thing at his memories," Felix Atrum sighed, shaking his head.

"AT LEAST IN HIS CURRENT STATE, LORAN IS NO DANGER TO THE OTHERS", Voitrach spelled out. "THOUGH WE DO NOT YET KNOW WHAT OTHER RISKS THIS PLACE CARRIES."

"And we can't help them," OTTO chimed in. "Loran was the only one who could see us."

"Don't see why we should," Greyve muttered. "What does anything in the physical world matter to us?"

"I should think Loran's survival concerns you, at least," Felix replied. "And as far as the other contestants are concerned, he's just abandoned them. If we don't give them some sense of what's happened, they might try to kill him."

Greyve grunted noncommitally.

"Not to mention whatever Daddy Ham did has kept us from leaving this room," OTTO added. "If we don't make some move to change our situation, we'll have nothing to do but sit around and wait until someone dies - which could be Loran, and even if it isn't, who's to say we'll be brought along with him in our current state?"

"All right, all right!" Greyve shouted. "I've got... well, a hint of an idea." He stood up and walked over to Annaliese, still snoring. "There's something... someone... in the girl's head. It's a long shot, but I might be able to use that to make contact."

Greyve held up a hand to Annaliese's forehead.

"I've got no idea if this is going to work," he said. Then he tapped her lightly with one finger.

---

"I'm lost," Loran explained. "Don't even know how I got here."

"Aye, that's simple," Parsley said. "There's a demon at work, you see. Uses illusions. Tricky to know what's real and what isn't."

"That's nothing new for me," Loran muttered.

"Ye'd best stick with me. I'm wise to demon trickery."

Loran considered refusing. After all, if there really was a demon around, how was he to trust this man? Perhaps he was the demon, telling one poor sap who couldn't trust his own eyes under the best of circumstances what was really going on. Perhaps the demon wanted this key he was carrying for some reason - assuming that wasn't a hallucination as well.

On the other hand, Loran was so unsure of what was going on that it might be worth the risk.

"Fine," he said. "I could use a second pair of eyes."

Daddy Ham followed closely behind them, unseen by either. He formed a face only so he could smirk.

It was very useful, he mused, having a pawn who didn't even have to remember you were there.

Chester was alone again.

Hez was gone. He wasn't even on her any more. He could tell that without even opening his eyes; for one thing, the cold stone floor he felt underneath him was a good deal more comfortable than any surface on the ship.

Chester didn't know where he was, but he knew why he was there. Someone wanted to use him again.

There just wasn't another explanation. He didn't know or care what they wanted to use him for; he just knew that the moment he got up, his captor would start explaining the very important task that only Chester could do.

So in an act of defiance, he lay still, his eyes closed. He was through with being used.

"There's no need to be stubborn, I know you're awake now," said a voice. It sounded like a young girl.

That was unexpected, but Chester's curiosity about the speaker was not stronger than his determination. The worst they could do was let him die a free man, after all.

"He's even less cooperative than I expected," another voice said with a sigh. "Not that his cooperation is strictly necessary, but this is not how I would prefer to do things."

Chester suddenly found himself standing upright, his eyes wide open. Before him stood an older man and a young girl. Another man lay on the floor; Chester recognized him.

"He's the one who killed Daddy Ham," Chester said. "At least, I'm pretty sure that thing was..."

"This is Azgard," the older man said, ignoring Chester's words. "As you can see, he is not in the best of shape. We need your help to restore him."

"Restore him? I'm no healer. I'm a datapath. And I'm through taking orders from anyone."

"You don't have a choice," said the girl. "You have to follow the rules now. And the rules say you have to do what Barabbas says. That means fixing Azgard."

"What are you even talking about? I can't fix him, he's a human being!"

"Outwardly, perhaps. But I believe you of all people should know that appearances can be deceiving. Gaze upon Azgard as he truly is."

Before Chester could protest, he found himself connecting to a system. A system he hadn't even realized was there. A system unlike any he had seen before - far more advanced than Hezekiah. Far more beautiful, even, though in a completely different way.

Hezekiah had been the most beautiful woman Chester had ever seen. But this was beyond mortal standards. Chester was looking into the face of a god.

A wounded god, mind. A scarred, dying god, but unmistakeably divine. This was a system beyond anything Chester could have ever imagined.

And he was its last chance.

-------

"So how exactly are we supposed to find this demon?" Loran asked. "If its illusions are as powerful as you say, couldn't it cover all of its tracks?"

"Aye, 'tis a troublesome fiend we face," Parsley agreed. "I know a mere handful of tricks for dealing with illusions, and they've done me little good so far."

"So we're just going to muddle around and hope we find the thing?"

"Nay, we need a different approach entirely. 'Tis useless to treat this as a hunt. Tryin' to keep up with the demon only puts us where he wants us. Rather, we aim to turn that around."

"Get him where we want him?" Loran shook his head. "And how are we supposed to do that?"

"Figure out what he wants, and keep it from him. That's sure to draw him out before long."

"You say that as if we have any way to know what he wants."

Suddenly, there was a loud bell in the distance.

"I've an inkling," Parsley said. "That chime, 'tis a holy sound. Even the demon's darkest magic is powerless to hide it. Were I a gamblin' man, I'd wager good coin that belfry hides something the demon fears."

Loran was skeptical, but it wasn't as if he had any better ideas. He followed the hunter down the halls, unsure what exactly he was trying to do.

-------

"I remember these bells."

Peth stood at the base of the belltower, listening. There was so much he'd forgotten, so much he was starting to recall, now that he was back.

But none of it seemed to mean anything. Every step seemed like one he'd taken before, and yet he had no idea why he'd taken it in the first place.

The bells were no different than any of the half-dozen other hauntingly familiar things he'd seen already. He wasn't sure if he missed this place or simply wanted to leave it.

The chimes faded, and Peth sighed. He turned to leave, unsure of where he was even going.

He might have simply wandered the grounds of St. Arthelais forever if not for one single sudden thought.

Who was ringing the bells?

He hadn't cre-invited anyone in to do that. And his memory was quite insistent that the bells weren't automated in some way - even if they had been, how could the mechanisms last for so long?

Peth reached for the ornate doors of the tower, then instinctively recoiled in fear. Something told him that he couldn't go in there, not alone.

But then he remembered that he didn't have to be alone.

-------

Annaliese wished she could have been alone. At the moment, she was willing to settle for being asleep.

Thankfully, the queen was being quiet, and while it probably wasn't for the sake of making it easier for Annaliese to sleep, she was grateful for the silence all the same.

She might not have felt the same way if she could see the half-Oni the queen wasn't talking to.

So what exactly do you want? the queen silently asked Greyve.

"I'll be honest, I hadn't worked that far ahead," Greyve sighed. "I wasn't sure if contacting you would work at all."

You may as well start from the beginning. The girl's memories show you dying in her presence. Have you been here this entire time?

"No! It's not just me, it's everyone who died in this battle. Only Loran could see us."

So you're claiming to be a hallucination, then.

"Maybe I am. Or a ghost. I don't really care, honestly. What matters is that one of the dead battlers is our old friend Daddy Ham. And true to form, he's locked the rest of us out."

Yet you were able to contact me.

"An Oni trick. Not one I'd tried before. Look, the point is, somehow we're stuck in the room you're all in. And we're trying to get out, maybe find Loran again so he doesn't die and take us all with him."

I do not see how I can aid you in this effort.

"Yeah, me neither. But that was the only thing I could think of..."

There was a loud chime. Greyve grimaced.

"I don't like whatever that was," he muttered. He started to fade.

I will consider your problem alongside all the other matters I am currently considering. I cannot offer you more than that unless you have something to offer me in return.

"Ugh," Greyve groaned. "Yeah, fine, I'll ask Felix to think of something. Maybe a way to get you out of banana girl's head. Don't think I'll be staying here long, either way."

What did you just call her?

"Don't know. It just seemed to fit somehow."

He vanished, and Annaliese woke up.

-------

"What's that noise?" Annaliese mumbled, moments before Will was about to douse her with a large bucket of water.

"Good, I won't need this," he said. "You're a sound sleeper. I had half a mind to pick you up and run, because we can't stay here."

"Why not? Is it another monster? Are there guards again?"

"Loran's gone missing."

Annaliese turned pale.

"Does that mean he's going to-"

"There's no need to jump to conclusions, but I'm certainly not ruling it out." He glanced out the window at the large tower in the courtyard. "This place is so strange. It's more like a monastery than a hospital."

Annaliese didn't know what to say, mostly because she was busy being terrified at the thought of Loran trying to kill them all.

"Anyhow, we need to get out of here. I'm not sure where to go, but staying in one place is no good..."

As if to drive home the point, there was a large crash as an enormous creature burst down the door.

"HERETICS!" Vulm'mram'Vuul declared in a booming voice, knocking Will and Annaliese to the floor. "SUBMIT TO THE DIVINE ARBITER'S WILL OR PERISH IN BLASPHEMOUS SHAME!"

The death of everything.

Or thereabouts. Or for a certain definition of “everything” – there was probably more everything to be had, though beyond a certain frontier even Azgard wasn’t sure.

Less the death of everything, perhaps, than the survival of Nothing. But, ah. Chester was getting ahead of himself. Literally. There is, it turns out, an upper limit on data storage across space whereby eventually the only solution is to make the circuitry 4D. Half of these signals were from the Future – A future, as delineated and contained by a certain Book. Deviate from the Book, alter the future, corrupt the data, doom everything.

But Chester was getting beside himself. There was too much. He was getting lost in the data. Pull back. The data was not meant for mortals.

The data cannot be managed. But the story can. Start with the story.

In the beginning there was the Wordsmith. But before the beginning was the end – or, rather, the sort of linearity that would place the Wordsmith at the beginning, but not the end, isn’t suitable for this story. It rarely is with these Battle things.

“Has he even begun?” asked the old man. Barabbas Poe, according to the data – sorry, Barabbas Poe (disambiguation), whatever that means.

“Shush,” said the girl. Atelia Oneiros. “He dove right in. Now he needs to swim to surface.”

“If you can hear me,” said Poe (Chester could), “You have to find the story. Break it down into its component parts.”

“There are no components,” snapped Atelia. “The whole is contained in every facet. Let your brain do the work. Flip around, skim to the good parts.”

“We don’t have ‘til morning,” barked Poe. “Structure the thing out. Filter by parameters. Inciting incident, rising action, climax. Round one, round two, round three. Subject, verb, object. Name, race, gender, favorite color, description, utility, biography. ‘Which Game of Thrones House Are You?’ We have put these systems in place to reduce the infinite. Pithy is good. Once—”

--Upon a time. Yes. It was all coming together. Eight contestants, seven rounds, one to remain. A ‘Grand Battle’ as these things go. Though it would need a name, ‘Grand Battle’ being taken. And speaking of namelessness, who was thinking this? What omnipotent entity had set this particular bout of carnage into motion? Not ‘the Observer,’ that was taken. Nor ‘the Grandmaster,’ which was a descriptor, but not a name. And not ‘Chester’ or ‘Azgard or ‘Wordsmith’ – these were all just other observers (“observer” as descriptor, not name).

Ach. This was always the way. The problem with effecting actions – with inciting incidents – was existing in a concrete sense. This was an entity (ish) with a fondness for grand abstractions. Things like dreams. Rules. Contingencies. Restriction. Balance. Life. Nothing. And the Door. These things didn’t quite exist either. Which apparently made them ineligible as Grand Battle contestants. Hmmph.

Avatars would have to be fine. Here was Restriction epitomized in an insterstellar prison – a nice sentient being, with even a home universe and a minor social circle to interact with. Ah, but now there’s a problem of scale. Apparently Azgard is more of a round than a contestant. Bah. The Hedonist got to play with a whole planet and a culture, and that turned out –

-- They did what? Okay, fair enough. Set “Race” to “Human” across the board, then. Humans are always crowd-pleasers, and they’re easily portable.

Plebeians.

Chester doubled over to throw up to find that Atelia had already placed a bucket in the trajectory of his last two meals. He chuckled through bubbles of spitty bile. “Thanks… for the bucket,” he choked.

Atelia gave him a glare that was supposed to be either bemused or patronizing but just looked distant. “I didn’t put it there,” she just said. “Sometimes things are just there. When you think about them. Other times something else appears that you didn’t think of at all, which is where you came from. Does throwing up indicate progress?”

“Inciting incident… is go,” said Chester, carefully pulling himself to an upright position. “Another ‘Grand Battle’ with all humans but none of them are humans. And that’s you.” A handkerchief was in his hand. It smelled like Chester’s mother. He dabbed at those parts of his lips and tongue that were burning slightly with his own stomach acids.

“That was a long time ago,” said Atelia.

“You were a dream.”

“I think maybe. Things slip. But yes.” Atelia pressed a finger to her forehead and momentarily shimmered out of existence. “Yes, that was the operant idea at one point.”

“No time to talk,” said Poe (disambiguation). “Azgard must be repaired this round. Our every action is critical.”

“I’ll have the job done,” wheezed Chester. “On time. But I can set my own pace.” He looked down at the unconscious Azgard on the floor. Man and machine flickered in his vision like the same word repeated in two languages. “I’ll get it done.”

* * * *

Of course “there's something out there” was the safer bet, but Will hadn’t met to alarm Annaliese. Still, this? This he had no expected.

The tall tripedal cyborg-thing with the name like a chainsaw revving up repeated its demand that Will bow to his god. That didn’t sit well with Will. I mean, look where gods had gotten him thus far.

Annaliese was screaming. Parset was… hiding? Gone. As much as Will was beginning to like the little guy, he didn’t think he could count on Parset for a last-minute rescue. It was down to man vs. the unknown once again.

Fortunately, the previous day’s scrambling around Hezekiah had left him prepared for just such a situation. Will drew a terrifyingly advanced shotgunny-looking implement from over his shoulder and aimed at the thing’s head.

Will Haven, whose defining moment in his life involved forgetting that the earth moves, was a more quick than a thorough thinker. In this instance he was acting on a set of assumptions that he determined, through a highly unscientific roughing out of probabilistic outcomes, would maximize his chances of survival.

1: That a shotgun-looking thing he stole off a Hezekiah inmate, with a trigger and two barrels, would function roughly as a shotgun. I.e. if he pointed the barrel at his enemy and pulled the trigger, some destructive force would be leveled against his enemy.

2: That the sort of disc-shaped bit at the top part of his foe contained some sort of control center—ideally a straight-up brain—and its desctruction by untested shotgun-y object would stop the enemy’s functioning.

3: That Will was always the quickest draw in the room, and big scary things tended to be slow per square-cube law or whatever.

These were all pretty good bets. Probabilistically. So after Will discharged the weapon and was filled with a white-hot, floaty sense of successful conflict resolution, he took a split-second to evaluate the outcomes before deciding on his next action.

1: He could tell that the Vroomvroomvroom thing, or whatever, was dead, because the sword it was holding was covered in blood.

2) He knew that Annaliese was safe because the sound of her screaming had been replaced by a gentle, pulsating, ringing sound in his ears.

3) He knew that his arm was supposed to be all the way over there on the floor because it uh

Because it was

Oh God

* * * * *

The back of Peth’s head was starting to itch. He knew he wasn’t supposed to scratch at it. It could bleed or um. Something very bad could happen.

“Careful on the steps there, little guy,” said his new friend Hoss. Hoss was the coolest and bravest and smartest guy he could think of and had all the best powers.

BONG

The bells were getting awful loud now. Hoss was all the way at the top of the stairs. “It seems safe!” he called over the ringing. Peth scrambled up the few remaining stairs.

“What’s doing it?” he asked.

“According to my readings,” said Hoss, doing some readings on his super-cool cybernetic arm, “some sort of gravitational anomaly.” BONG BONG “I think the frequency of the chimes indicate some sort of code.”

Peth yawned.

“Got it. It’s been repeating this message: ‘T H I S I S V O I T R A C H P L E A S E A C K N O W L E D G E.’ This is ‘Voitrach,’ please acknowledge. Those last two chimes were acknowledging my acknowledgment, I assume. Child’s play for a mind such as myself to decode.”

“The bell is alive?”

“Not quite, little tyke. But something alive is making it move. Voitrach, please continue your message as quickly as possible. Peth, you’d better cover your ears.”

Over the next five minutes, the bells chimed at what seemed to be a furious pace while Hoss decoded. Then they stopped. “Huh.” Peth’s new friend’s synthetic arm began to whir. “Peth, the next message reads: ‘S Y N T H E S I Z E B L A C K M A T T E R.’ That’s not a form of strange matter I’ve encountered before, but it’s in my database. Should just about exhaust me but apparently I can make… it says “0.00 fg” here. So, I have no idea how much, cause it doesn’t have mass. We’ll see.”

Hoss pressed his hand against the walls of the bell tower. A small portion of the wall turned black. The cyborg-friend extracted a cube of black material about six inches to the side.

“There,” said the cube in a British accent. It reshaped itself into the silhouette of a man about a foot tall. “Not half the man I was, but it will do. Peth, my name is Felix. Do you remember me?”

Peth nodded. “I didn’t—”

“No. Someone else did. Someone who’s on this way, and if they find you, they’ll try to kill and replace you. I’m here to help.”

Felix looked weird, like a shadow puppet against the wall. But it was definitely him; Peth remembered that voice. The back of his head itched.

“Okay,” he said. “What can we do?”

“Greyve is trying to get the other contestants over here to help but they have their own problems. Hoss, we’ll need you to house OTTO’s consciousness for a while once we find a way to upload him. Is that alright?”

“Anything for my best pal Peth,” said Hoss nonchalantly.

“Good,” replied Loran. “Voitrach has some power in his current form, but not much. That leaves one more member of the team we need if we want to beat Daddy Ham. We need you for that, Peth. Do you have enough control?”

Peth nodded. “I can invite anyone I want but sometimes it makes other people slip out. They could be far away. There are some in the hospital already.”

“We’ll deal with that when we come to it. Right now we just need this one friend.” Felix whispered a name in Peth’s ear. “You remember who that is?”

Peth nodded. “Yeah.” He blinked. “I did it. I think.”

Hoss started at the sound of footsteps on the stairs. “Felix? Are those the killers you warned me about?”

BONG

“I don’t think so,” said Felix. “Stand down.”

A young woman ascended the stairs to the tower, fists crackling with lightning. “Where am I?” she demanded.

“Hey,” said Felix, raising his tiny black hands. “Power down, Apathy. It’s Felix. We’re still in the battle. You died but we brought you back. The rest of us are trying to figure out a way we can all get out of this alive.”

Apathy grimaced. The electricity on her arms died down, save for the errant spark. “Okay. Thanks for the save. I’m in, but if you think about crossing me you’re fried. What do you want from me?”

“We need you to lay in ambush.” Felix turned to Hoss. “We’re gonna get Peth out of here. Voitrach, wait until we’re two minutes away, then start ringing again. Apathy, Loran Twight is coming after us. He needs to be stopped but we need him alive. Can you do that?”

Apathy cracked her knuckles. Lightning struck the tower, followed by a peal of thunder that made Peth cry out. She smirked. “I guess we’ll find out,” she said.

* * * * *

Will was dead.

Okay Will wasn’t dead because everyone was still there but that thing had chopped off his arm so for all intents and purposes he was dead and oh God. Oh God.

We should find Loran, said the queen, in a way that seemed oddly detached from the manner at hand.

“Please stop talking!” Annaliese shrieked out loud. Find Loran. What a ridiculous thing to be thinking about at a time like—

The monster turned on Annaliese, marching toward her with its blood-soaked blade outstretched. Maybe the constant screaming and talking to the voices in her head hadn’t been the best move. Okay. Maybe Parset would save her? Maybe Will would die soon enough that she could get tossed away to some other world of horrors? Maybe Loran was her best bet?

The monster raised its sword—

--And its… middle part? …exploded. Guts and shrapnel coated the room and thankfully missed Annaliese’s person.

Through the cavity in the monster’s now-inert corpse she could see Will, looking about as confused as she was, contemplating the barrel of his gun-arm. Gun-arm.

Yes. Okay. To recap, Will now had two arms. That is, three arms counting the one on the floor. And one of them had what Will called a “laser gun” on the end instead of a hand. “Will?” asked Annaliese.

Will took a second to catch his breath. “Yeah?”

“Do you have arm-regrowing magic you haven’t told us about? Like a lizard?”

“I don’t… no, I don’t.” Will, still crouching on the floor, looked to his gun arm as though asking it to confirm that statement. “I was dying and I felt something like… ah. Okay.”

”Okay?” Find Loran “What okay? What could possibly be okay?”

”I know who did this but I don’t know how I did it.”

Annaliese sighed. “Sorry, you know who did this but you don’t know how you—”

”Yeah. I did this. But I didn’t do it. Look. This is my arm, see? But not my my arm.”

”You’re not—” Will rose and walked over to her, showing her the new arm. It didn’t look any different from his old one. Very, um. Sort of tight and muscle-y. A little more tanned, maybe. Gun for a hand.

But! She looked where he was pointing. Will’s gun-arm had a tattoo that hadn’t been on his hand-arm before, as far as she knew.

It read: YOU ARE THE PRIME WILL. WE WILL HELP YOU BUT YOU HAVE TO LIVE FOR ALL OF US

“Will,” said Annaliese. “This is not helping me understand.”

”Sorry,” said Will. “I can explain I think but first we have to get—” His arm abruptly pointed across the room, practically pulling itself out of its socket. “Ow,” said Will. “I didn’t do that.”

The arm was pointing to Parset, who had just emerged from under a bed and was prompting the dead monster with a drumstick. “Parset get out of the way,” said Will. “I don’t know if I’m going to shoot you or just…” the arm pointed down for a bit, and then up. Okay. I don’t think I’m going to shoot you. I think I’m trying to show me something.”

Parset stood stock-still and cast a questioning glance at Annaliese. Annaliese shrugged.

Will walked towards Parset as his arm refined its angle. In a few paces the gun’s barrel was pointing directly at the gnome’s collarbone.

Annaliese had a silly thought. “Parset, where’s that key you used to wear around your neck?”

Parset brought his palm up to his forehead.