Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Crushing force slams into you, followed by the cold shock of arctic water. Claws of ice rake through skin and bone and you gasp involuntarily, drawing stinging liquid into your lungs. You're drowning, you know you can't die permanently but it's nothing against the reflex panic of cold and can't breathe—

The claustrophobic pressure breaks around you as you erupt through the surface, replaced by a ripping gale that cuts even deeper while your numb and shivering body corkscrews through the air, water flinging from your extremities. Your lungs seize and your chest implodes, water spurting out of your nose and mouth. You gag and choke. Your drenched, flapping cape tangles around your limbs, your shades are miraculously still on your face but they're slipping and oh shit oh fuck your hand darts for the falling glasses just in time to captchalogue the damn things by a hair.

That moment of panic is what it takes for you to finally pull yourself together and halt your aerial tumble. You've practically torn your cape in half with that move, but wardrobe malfunctions are the last things on your mind right now: you might be out of the water, but your teeth are doing their best impression of an industrial jackhammer and everything hurts like you've been tenderized inside out by an army of mallet-wielding five year olds. The total lack of feeling in your fingers isn't a good sign either.

"I hate LOCAS... I hate LOCAS why the... fuck is it... always this goddamn planet..." you chatter, trying in vain to shield yourself from the wind with an arm.

Then you remember that you're magic and you can get this freezing death trap off.

Light sears from your body and your god tier costume reconstitutes itself, this time sans the complementary hypothermia. Your skin's still damp and your hair dripping, so you grab your billowing cape and wipe yourself off as best you can. Another quick resummon gets rid of the rest of the evidence of your impromptu swim. It's still pretty goddamn cold, but at least it's now ordinary freezing winds instead of impending frostbite.

You exhale miserably and wrap yourself tighter in your cape. Getting your bearings will have to wait.

It's at this point that you notice it's pretty goddamn bright in here.

You look up to see where all this light is coming from like a grubtripping moron and immediately boil off your retinas peering straight into the fucking sun.

In retrospect, it should have been glaringly obvious that this is, in fact, not LOCAH.

Yeah, where the actual fuck are you?

You cast a look around the giant body of water (saltwater, the aftertaste on your tongue says) you've been inexplicably dunked into at Mach 10. Normally you would guess LOMAT or LORAF from that, but the sky isn't a giant quasi-luminous map canvas nor an empty black void, so strike that out. It looks like you managed to draw Earth for once. There's the sun and everything, the faint sound of seagulls, and-

What the hell is with the horizon?

It's flat. Practically a straight line. Technically there is a slight curvature if you pay attention, but it's so flat and you're no geometry expert but that means the planetary radius has to be... holy shit. What kind of monstrous dream bubble is this? And how much of it is Earth?

You fly higher, powering through the bite of the frigid air, and you can probably see for dozens of miles, but there's still no edge in sight. No walls of boiling steam where lava meets sea, no violet aurora and aquamarine crystal, only endless ocean stretching into infinity.

Either the dark gods have finally lost what scarce scraps of sanity they possess, or this is something else altogether.

What's the last thing you remember?

Your memories take their sweet time rebooting, and it's embarrassingly long before recollection clicks.

Aranea. Jade. The dogs.

Dying.

"Fuck," you say aloud.

"I'm dead," you mutter. "I'm supposed to be dead. Unless that wasn't heroic enough, but then why did I come here? Where is this? Goddammit, I'm not cut out for this detective shit. Where's Jade? If I'm alive, is she alive? Did John's mom get to her? What the fuck's even happening?"

Your eyes glide to the horizon again.

"Is this a dream bubble?"

You pause, a simple test occurring to you. You remember your death, don't you? You've done this a hundred times with new arrivals to the bubbles, but never from this side. You pull a glass pane from your deck into your hand and inspect your reflection.

Your eyes are still normal.

"Just peachy," you mutter, putting away the improvised mirror and reequipping your shades. This is bizarre, and you're out of ideas. What now?

Rose. Pester Rose. When in doubt, defer to the smuggest person in the room. Even if it turns out they don't know the answer, you get to watch them stew in the shame of their bitter failure.

You take out your phone, careful to not drop it with your shaky fingers, and open Pesterchum, bracing yourself for the bad news.

Yeah, just as you thought, paradox space prides itself on being a pain in the ass: Rose isn't online.

...but John is.

-- turntechGodhead [TG] began pestering ectoBiologist [EB] at 13:11 --

TG: hey john wtf is happening

You hit send on the first message and are halfway through composing a follow-up line of similar dry incredulity when your brain kicks in and your eyes dart back up because what?

No, you didn't read that wrong. That's 13:21 right there, slipped in all deceptively innocuous and shit.

Not the ??:?? you're used to. 13:21.

You're in a stable chronology. A stable chronology with an Earthlike concept of presumably hourly time and day/night cycles.

Are you literally on Earth? Like, not an ghost Earth dream bubble or a shrunk-down pocket Earth drifting through intersessional hyperspace, but a real Earth in an honest-to-god Genesis Frog? Is this the new Earth after you won the game? Did the others win the game without you, resurrect your desiccated corpse somehow, and... unceremoniously dump you in the middle of the ocean...?

Yeah, that makes perfect sense.

Bluh. You're getting a headache.

Maybe John will have some answers, you decide. That's his thing now, isn't it? Popping up in places he has no business being and vaguely fucking things up with game-breaking meta powers. Watch all of this be his fault.

TG: are you ok
TG: where are we and which genius decided what i truly needed in my life was an ice water bath to commemorate my much anticipated return to livinghood
TG: are we even in the same place
EB: dave!
EB: i think we're on earth, but i don't know for sure.
EB: you were dead?
TG: ok clearly you know fuck all too
TG: lets figure this out together i guess
TG: whats the last thing you remember
TG: i was chasing jack and the other dog for jades body like a fucking idiot and i thought i got stabbed to death but reality appears to disagree
TG: not fun
TG: would not recommend
EB: jade died???
TG: yeah you missed that part too
EB: oh noooooo.
EB: is she ok now?
TG: i dont know
TG: maybe
EB: ok, well i went to talk to typheus on my planet with you.
EB: i mean dave sprite.
EB: and then im not sure what happened but i think i died too?
EB: and maybe him as well? oh no.
TG: dude focus
TG: what did you do because im pretty sure this is all your fault somehow
EB: that part is kind of hazy.
EB: all i remember is then i woke up in a crater and that was ten minutes ago.
TG: wow thats helpful
EB: why did you get stabbed?
TG: ill tell you later it dumb and doesnt matter now
TG: so both of us died and came back to life
TG: god its all we do these days like how many times have you died now
TG: what were you doing with your denizen anyway
TG: do you think that has anything to do with this
EB: maybe?
EB: im getting the feeling that its not directly responsible, but maybe...
EB: cause adjacent?
TG: ok fine more cryptic bullshit from the impudent god of bovine anus himself
TG: fyi its like two minutes ago for me so whatever it is it isnt synced for what thats worth
TG: where are you now
TG: like what do you see around you i guess
TG: if wilderness orienteering isnt one of your many invaluable life skills
EB: i think im in england.
TG: what
TG: how do you know that are the birds chirping in british or
EB: haha, don't be silly.
EB: of course the english people told me i was in england.
TG: wait
TG: you have people over there
TG: as in real talking humans and not dumb crocodiles or featureless chess people with wildly variable cognitive mileages
EB: yes.
EB: are you in the middle of the sea or something?
TG: yes that is exactly where i am
TG: nothing but water in every conceivable direction
TG: goddamn waterworld up in this bitch
TG: so that means this is earth then
TG: the og fda certified authentic planet earth TG: with the president and walmart and the alleged indelible cornerstone of cinema history that is ghostbusters
TG: because we all know those are the only important things in modern civilization and everything else might as well be window dressing amiright
TG: obama || walmart && ghostbusters = planet earth
TG: didnt you pass alchemy 101
TG: what kind of sburb noob are you
TG: hey bro are you there
EB: i think so!
EB: to the earth part, not all that other rubbish you were saying.
EB: i haven't gotten exploring but it looks mostly the same.
TG: damn
TG: i wonder if hussie ever finished midnight crew

This is Earth. An undestroyed Earth with people on it. Human people.

You barely notice your hand trembling ever so slightly as you swipe down the top of your screen and see the date. 6/01/2013.

It's 2013.

The parade of existential horror questioning what this exactly means for you and your possible deadness slash resurrection is briefly trampled by a thousand different trains of speculation tearing through your very limited attention span, from jegus i'm never going to catch up on mspa now i was already thousands of pages behind to oh god i missed the rest of obamas presidency.

EB: it's been four years, so i hope so.
TG: hey do you still have your unholy time travel blue zappy thing
EB: what?
EB: i can't time travel! that's your thing, remember?
TG: yes fine its not time travel whatever you say john we dont have time to argue the semantics of your bullshit powers
TG: do you still have the thing or not
EB: i can turn into the wind and transport to places if thats what you mean by zappy thing.
EB: how do you know about that
TG: what
TG: ok whatever can you do that and grab me
TG: because im kind of freezing to death here
EB: oh.
EB: well, i would very much like to do so, but i don't know where you are!

Fuck. Okay, you need a solution to this temperature issue and soon. This location issue as well. Isn't Jade an all-powerful space furry now? You tap out of the pester window to see if she's come online, but her icon and Rose's are still offline.

So is everyone else, you realize as you scroll down into the trollslum. Karkat, Terezi and the rest. Wait, but that's not the offline icon, is it? With a start, you realize that you haven't ever seen that cross-eyed face in the slum before. You tap into carcinoGeneticist [CG].

carcinoGeneticist [CG] does not exist.

You haven't ever that message before. You didn't even know it was a thing, but it doesn't sound good. At all.

Does not exist.

Pesterchum always knows. Does not exist.

How long does paradox space keep stuff cached?

For a moment fleeting panic grips you as you wonder what if they're gone, erased out of existence along with their twice-removed dead universe in whatever brand-new reality you now occupy. If you never see them again and this is all there is, you and John stranded on this foreign Earth for the rest of your lives. You mean, you're always up to chill with the Ultimate Dork, but you've spent three years with these guys trying and failing not to be a miserable clingy shit, so like hell you're going to let all that effort go to waste.

Your feigned blaseness does nothing to alleviate the jagged tightening in your chest at the thought.

Hey, if this is the afterlife and they're not here because they're alive, that's fine. Great, even. That's generally the term used to describe the diametric opposite of being dead. You're perfectly okay with it. Good for them. Really.

In fact, you're prematurely overreacting, you tell yourself, trying to calm the jitters. John got here ten minutes before you, the rest might be showing up any time now. Priorities. They exist and need to be attended to.

"Don't die first," you say to yourself. "Heat. What do I have?"

You rifle through your captchalogue deck. Jegus, why do you have this much useless shit in there?

"I don't need this many swords. Why are there five tins of grubloaf in here? Scalemate on fire... that might work." You can't hold it, though, and there's nowhere to put it down on. "A toaster?" Nowhere to plug it in, and what are you going to do? Hold your hands above the bread slots?

-- turntechGodhead [TG] began pestering ectoBiologist [EB] at 13:19 --

TG: gimme a sec

This isn't working. How about you figure out where you are first? There's no GPS signal, which is such bullshit. How do you have Internet everywhere but not GPS, which actually is supposed to be everywhere in real life? Okay, new plan: fly in a straight line until you find land.

You shiver, turning in a circle.

Slight amendment to the plan: fly towards the equator where it's hopefully not a goddamn open-air freezer. Or is it just normally this cool in the middle of the ocean? Fuck if you know; you live in Texas. Which way is the equator? The sun is over there, so... that doesn't tell you anything. You could peek forward in time to figure out where it's moving, but...

"Nah."

Your timetables are singing to you from their slot in your strife portfolio like the game thought you might have forgotten about your literal time machines. You tell the devil on your shoulder to fuck off. You're done with that stuff.

Random direction it is.

How about up?

Holy shit, you're a genius. You can breathe in space, and your peak speeds are pretty much arbitrary in this game, so it'll take no time to ascend the stratosphere. Plus, space is warm when you're in the sun, right? You think you read that somewhere. Fuck it, you're immortal.

You take a deep breath, tense your imaginary flight muscles, and rocket up—

Woah.

Everything trembles for a split second, a cone of vapor spilling away from you as shock waves reverberate down your body. It's gone in an instant.

Was that a sonic boom? Jegus, have you done that before? You definitely went supersonic flying from LOHAC to LOFAF, but apparently the sound barrier isn't a thing in the Medium. Physics can suck it, for all the game's concerned.

You have no idea how fast you're going, but you've blown right past the cloud layer and the sky's dimming to black, the Earth falling away from you at a snail's pace. You pan your view over the curving horizon framed by an ethereal glow, still shooting up like a Dave-shaped bullet. Not a speck of land below you, and the only sight of any major landmass is silhouettes way off in the distance, too far away to put a name to. The only way to go is further up.

A burst of exhilarated laughter rocks through you as you realize belatedly that you're going to space. Real space, not Sburb space full of unknowable tentacle monsters, spacetime vortices and memory bubbles full of your dead friends. Space classic is perhaps a tad underwhelming compared to what you've been through, but at the same time— space. This particular boundless void has a distinct realness attribute that's not quite fully the same out there in the Furthest Ring.

The air friction has stripped the cold from your skin, replaced by a burning, roiling heat that's confusing your still-thawing innards. You're certain that you'd be a deep-fried popsicle right now if not for your absurd gel viscosity stat. You're still accelerating upwards, but you think the atmosphere has thinned enough that it's safe for you to take your phone out again without the wind whipping it right out of your hand.

You open Pesterchum and oh thank god.

tentacleTherapist's icon is cheerfully lit, informing you of her restored connection.

Lalonde. Just what you needed.

-- turntechGodhead [TG] began pestering tentacleTherapist [TT] at 13:23 --

TG: yo where are you
TG: me and john are on earth so i assume you are too
TT: Hello, Dave.
TT: Did you know that death is quite an efficient hangover cure? I have no clue why I never tried that before.
TT: I appear to be in some form of rainforest, possibly of the tropical subcategory. Specifically, in the gaping crater created by my meteoric collision into the heart of aforementioned forest.
TT: The symbolism of a fallen angel returning to the land of man is not lost on me. It's beginning to look like a recurring theme in my character arc: the descent into astonishingly poor life decisions and having to pay the price in blood.
TT: I never seem to learn.
TG: so i guess you died too
TT: You have me at a disadvantage.
TG: we got here literally minutes before you
TG: johns in england
TG: im in space trying to find out which ocean i got lobbed into
TG: youd think theres only 7 how hard can it be
TG: but news flash theyre fucking massive and all these clouds are conspiring to stop me from actually seeing anything from here a billion miles in the air
TG: its the cabal of weathermen rose
TG: theyre onto me
TG: they know
TG: and gods and monsters be damned they will stop at nothing to protect their monopoly on satellite geopositioning
TT: I see.
TT: Unfortunately, we have greater problems than hypothetical meteorological conspiracies. I've been trying to use my powers.
TG: hit me with it
TG: what terrible fate do you spy with your little eye
TT: The key word is "trying". I can't. That's the problem.
TT: My sight is clouded.
TT: Even the victory state itself is unclear. I'm not sure our previous goal is achievable anymore, at least not by us. I don't believe I have to describe how alarming this is.
TG: consider me exhaustively briefed on matters of alarm and its appropriate degrees of magnitude
TG: but shit performance issues or not we need to get the party together
TT: Hold on. John is messaging me.

You muster the truly titanic willpower to not instinctively tab over to spamming John instead, and opt for reassessing the view from your new vantage point. In terms of altitude, you're pretty sure you're in genuine, actual outer space now by any formal definition. The Earth's curvature is honestly starting to weird you out, because after years roaming the microplanets of the dream bubbles, it's only now starting to hit you how really fucking massive your homeworld is. Your lands don't even begin compare.

The distant coasts are coming into view now, framing a good semicircle of your view. You narrow your eyes and lift your shades for a better look, trying to trace the shape of what has to be continents at this distance. On the opposite side is a stretch of land that's now resolving into an archipelago. A really nice thick and chunky one, not pansy island sprinkles like the weeny Bahamas.

"Japan," you say out loud. "So that's Korea, right? Russia, whatever. Is this the East China Sea?" Come on, your bro didn't bother teaching you proper geography. Chalk that up to another parenting failure for the pile. "I'll just Google it."

-- turntechGodhead [TG] began pestering ectoBiologist [EB] at 13:31 --

TG: im above the sea of japan
TG: in space because its fucking awesome
TG: is that precise enough for you
TG: are you done pestering rose yet
TG: you do know she has an alien girlfriend now you cant marry her anymore
TG: rip karkats shipping chart it was a thing of beauty while it lasted
TG: homewrecker kanaya maryam strikes again
TG: wait does that count as the clubs thing karkat keeps going on about isnt that kanayas favorite quadrant
TG: auspisitisicism
TG: auspistisism
TG: or was it least favorite
TG: you never know with these trolls
TG: but yeah that one tearing apart beautiful hatemarriages for world peace and public health
TG: is there an opposite ausptsistism for ruining red ships is that real
TG: im declaring it real before karkat comes in and ruins my fun with another dating manual
TG: thats a real thing btw empire issued official prints
TG: troll romance is so ridiculous
TG: karkats soap operas are as hilarious as theyre incomprehensible
TG: the secret to surviving through them is reading them as absurdist ironic comedies
TG: then the drama is pure gold
TG: play a laugh track in your head every time the director comes up with a new color based metaphor that makes no fuckin sense
TG: doubles as a drinking game if thats your jam
TG: you never used to but who knows what happened on that ship
TG: i was on it after all
TG: who knows what depths of depravity i inducted yall into
TG: dont tell karkat i said that though he might murder me for real
TG: he still thinks i unironically hate his precious collection so he has to bribe me in exchange for suffering through his rage filled commentary
TG: its like walking through an astrology museum and hes the thermonuclear astrophysicist the dumbfuck owner hired as curator but he had to take the job because he got fired from harvard for calling the department head a nook stuffed imbecile
TG: the seething tantrums are half the experience
EB: wow, the trolls sure got to you quick!
TG: hey youre back
EB: i was talking to rose!
EB: i will try to find you now.
EB: i'm still getting the hang of this crazy new power.
TG: just dont fuck up the timeline
TG: actually on second thought maybe dont try anything weird ill just fly over normally
TG: lets exercise our scarcely seen capacities to act like responsible human beings
TG: you already did it didnt you
TG: goddammit egbert

You glance around nervously, wondering it you would even notice before being blipped out of existence by a new alpha timeline. John isn't showing up, but he hasn't replied to you yet. Do Breath powers only work where there's air? You think you're pretty deep into vacuum, but you can't tell. He said he got that power from a magic house on a dream quest, though, so it's not even anything to do with his aspect.

Finally, your phone dings.

Alright, not unexisted yet. Or maybe some other Dave was unexisted and you're the new version that took his place without even knowing it.

You try not to think too hard about this.

EB: i'm over the sea now but i don't think i can home in to your position
EB: can you send a signal or something?
TG: dammit
TG: fine

Okay, think. There has to be a simple solution to this. Preferably one not involving weapons-grade explosives. What do you have? Nothing in your sylladex is useful, you looked through it earlier, so game powers?

Hmm.

...that might work.

You sift through the metaphysical abstractions cluttering your mental superstrate to find what you need. Good god, you have too many of these. There it is, Breath and Time.

You activate [Ivories in the Fire].

It takes but a moment for John to accept from the other side. Your soul hums, John's echoing back from the other side of the connection. They whisper to each other, tuning themselves the unique combinatorial frequency of the technique, two ends straining and reaching across the void, then—

An awful grinding sensation slams into you, the feeling of caught gears gnashing against each other. A turbulent backlash of wind rattles the tail off your health vial. Threads of power stretched too taut snare you in wake as the cosmic clockwork reels them in. But it only lasts a second: as quickly as everything started, the gears slip, the breeze rolls past, the knot unwinds, and your breath returns. You flex your fingers.

You're too far apart for the fraymotif to engage. You guessed as much, but you got what you were looking for.

Turning to the general direction the power was pulling towards, you squint and manage to just barely glimpse the blue glow of the Breath sigil in the far distance. Target secured. You project yourself straight forwards, feeling heat and plasma stoke again along your hurtling body as you reenter the atmosphere.

Seconds tick past, the Earth slowly but surely looming closer and closer. Your eyes flit around, searching for the telltale figure of the other boy. You yell John's name, wondering if it's possible for anyone to hear you like this, or if the "Breeze" will "carry" your voice to him regardless of whether it's mechanically feasible. Heirs are total bullshit.

As soon as you begin to wonder if maybe it was a plane you saw, it finally happens: the heat whisks away, the air turns thick as syrup around you, and you let yourself slow to a natural stop.

A flying blue windsock bursts out of the clouds below, trailing mist and vapor as he arcs towards you. With a small smile, you raise a hand to wave at the boy as he swoops to a halt in front of you, his goofy bucktoothed grin racked up to twelve.

"Dave!" he says, beaming. "I was beginning to wonder where you'd gone. Smart thinking."

"You know it," you shoot back.

John frowns, putting a crease in his... surprisingly babyish face? He opens his mouth, saying, "You look..."

He's different from the last time you saw him, you realize. It's not a huge difference, he's still visibly John Egbert, but the shape and tone of this one is... you can't put it into words. Different. Younger.

"...older," he finishes, his scrunched up look of mild confusion probably exactly mirroring the one you're wearing right now.

You swallow. "John, how old are you?"

Chapter Text

"Thirteen?" John says, phrasing it like a question. So he didn't get a flash makeover from a British spa, got it.

But, like, what?

"Where were you when you died?" you ask.

"On my planet." A beat later, he adds, "On our ship. Five months after we scratched the session."

You swallow a curse.

"I was on LOFAF in the new session after we arrived. You were there."

John's smile loses some of its vigor. He's connected the dots. His fingers fidget, pulling at the fabric of his blue pants. You've walked through this exact ritual with a dozen versions of every friend you know, and it's enough to make you wish that humans weren't so remarkably consistent in their dawning realization of their cosmic irrelevance.

"So am I... uh, doomed?"

"You were," you correct. The lines are rote at this point. "You're dead now, and things like that don't matter... here..."

You trail to a stop.

But you aren't in a dream bubble, are you?

What are the rules here? If you're in the past from the chronology of the new session's players, you might yet have time to doom yourself with a paradox—or you could already have fucked up your timeline without knowing, for that matter. You might even be inherently doomed by virtue of being a dead person in a living space. It's been so long hurtling through the cloying irrelevance of the Furthest Ring that you've forgotten what it's like to second-guess your every move.

A sense of foreboding bubbles up inside you as you feel outwards with your mind, running mental fingers over the tapestry of time. You intuition is ringing warning bells before you even parse what you're seeing, and it only takes a second to confirm your suspicions.

Dread settles into the bottom of your stomach.

You dig deep, sifting through a sea of causal string, but seconds pass, John looking strangely at you while you zone out, and you still can't find it. It's gone.

You can't find the alpha timeline.

Your heart's racing. You remember Davesprite talking about what he saw in his future. He described the time he saw there as frayed—deviations, snapped strands, paradox knots—but even being on a doomed, decaying branch, he could sense the displaced path of the alpha and his precise point of divergence. It was only until he merged with your sprite that he came to fully appreciate the metaphysical dynamics, but it was always there.

Even on your journey through the Furthest Ring, a place where time isn't structured enough to meaningfully define discrete timelines, there was always an alpha weave, if you could call it that. Touchstones and threads that stretched between and entangled your two universes and four sessions, stringing disparate worlds into a vast cycle of circular causality.

That's not what you're seeing. A Seer of Time would be able to tease more out of this, but even you can tell that the alpha isn't out of sight or too thin to track—you would still sense its abstract presence if that were the case. It's straight up missing.

"Dave?" John asks. Your eyes snap up from your woolgathering and focus on him. He twitches. "What's wrong?"

"Not important," you dismiss, filing it away for future inspection. There's a bigger picture to think about for now. "I don't think you're doomed any more in any practical sense, if you ever were. I guess dying took care of that."

A minor embellishment of the truth, but you'll have to confer with Rose to figure out anything more on the topic.

John makes a doubtful noise. "Okay, sure. So... are you sixteen now?"

That's what he's focusing on? You sigh. There's John for you, always keeping sight of what's the most important.

"Yeah, I'm basically a senior citizen by now. You know what that means: big bro Dave calls the shots now, lil' kiddo," you mumble.

Is the Rose you talked to from your timeline? She's at least closer to your age, since she didn't figure out how to alchemize alcohol until two years in. Unless it's a doomed timeline where she managed to drag her mom's wine cellar through to the medium intact and got totally plastered on her first day.

"Um, okay." he says. "I mean, you are 'alpha' Dave, so I guess you're in charge anyway?"

"That's ri- what? Did you hit your head on a planet on the way from space?" you snort, shooting John a scathing look, because since when has he cared about stuff like that?

John shrugs. "I'm the copy, right? You're the real Dave, so you get precedence or something."

"That's..." You palm your shades into your face in exasperation. Your phone dings with an incoming message, but you ignore it. "Have you been taking lessons from Vriska? First of all, we don't know if Alpha John's showing up, and even then, that's not how it works. There isn't even an alpha timeline to get butthurt over anymore, so let's just drop the precedence bullshit."

Normally you wouldn't be kicking up a fuss over nothing, but every other John you've met has been all "aw shucks I guess I'm dead now hey dave wanna hang out" like they're struggling to wrap their heads around the sad reality that there's only one mobile Dave van and a hundred billion dream bubbles clamoring for the privilege of a royal audience.

(And you get suckered into indulging them every time, because apparently your fatal weakness is nerdy dorkfaces.)

So yeah, this sub play nonsense is new, and you don't like new. Maybe you've finally found the John Egbert that's a secret psychopath.

"I don't know what you mean by that," he says.

"John, you need to tell me who's been putting these ideas in your head. Ugh, why am I even asking? It's obviously Serket. I called it. Show me where the bad troll girl touched you on the doll, okay? I told you that chick was bad news. Being stabbed in the back by a blind girl hasn't made a dent in her Jupiter-sized ego."

"But..." Egbert looks genuinely confused. "You say the same thing about doomed Daves, don't you?"

You groan. "That's different."

He stares expectantly at you.

"Well, first of all, I'm... me."

Wait, that came out wrong. John can't seem to decide if he ought to be concerned about your self-esteem issues, so you quickly jump in to elaborate.

"I'm the time guy. We're basically the underclass of Sburb, we die, it's our whole thing. It's my job to proliferate my thousandfold time spawn across paradox space like a spewing mother grub, like... what is it called? r-strategists or some shit?"

"What's that?" John asks, puzzled.

"Dude, take a biology class some time in your life. Whatever, ignore that. But even if you feel an inexplicable urge to debase yourself at my feet, don't say it outright like that. I do a fantastic job making things awkward by myself, thank you, I don't need you bringing class politics into this space."

"Well, it's important to be clear about these things!" he protests.

"Now you're just cribbing from the Roses. It is not important! Have you seen that ridiculous primacy flowsheet they pull up ever single time two meet? I swear that it's her dead selves' idea of post-life entertainment, their own perpetual self-oppression engine powered by obsessive pedantry energy. Either that or a truly transcendental work of performative irony, which I wouldn't put past her."

"I dunno," he says. "Sounds like a bunch of hypocritical bullshit to me."

"Look, bottom line, the alpha not-alpha distinction is a practical compromise when-" Your phone chimes again. "-we're drowning in mes out in one of those dream megabubbles. Right now, do you see any other Johns around? No? Then for all intents and purposes you're the John and I don't give a shit what timeline you pulled your windy butt out of."

"Okay," John grumbles, rolls his eyes. "If you say so, Boss Alpha Dave."

You inhale, pause, then huff it all out in one breath.

"You're just fucking with me now."

He laughs. You wrinkle your nose at him, but there's something about his bell-like laughter that just wrings the tension and annoyance out of you. Hacks, you say. You roll your shoulders—flying does weird things to your posture—and grudgingly let out a sigh.

Another insistent chime rings from your sylladex. You've probably left Rose waiting long enough.

You snap on your iShades because you can't be bothered to use the opposable thumbs evolution gave you, but before you can log on to Pesterchum, whoever it was must have ran out of patience.

John's eyes widen, sensing it before you do, but neither of you have enough time to react.

A blinding flare of green erupts over you. Your vision swims. A sharp sting of static and the thick snap of an unsolicited spatial displacement later, you're elsewhere altogether, splatting face-down into charred dirt. Fucking hell, some of it got in your mouth. Keening mournfully, you roll over and blink bits of ash out of your eyes.

Trees. Towering trees and clouds and sky lurking above the canopy. It's warm, humid and sticky, the most cursed combination of sensations devised by the twisted architects of the human condition. You try to crawl upright, but the damp soil squishing through your fingers is downright hideous. You have to suppress an involuntary groan of disgust.

Then your brain catches up to your physical senses and you whip your head around, searching for what you really really hope is who you think and fuck yeah it is. You lift yourself to your feet, remembering you can fly, and you're unable to stop your lips from curling upwards at the sight of your Karkat-designated fiancé.

She doesn't return your grin, and it's not because you're smeared all over with mud and bits of grass. Oh, she's colored in with a much more agreeable complexion than the last time you saw her—read: not a grimdark caricature of an evil werewolf—but on the downside, she's evidently not having a very good time, as evidenced by the angry cross of frustration and confusion on her face

"What the hell is going on?" Jade demands, burning with verdant solar energy. Don't we all want to know, Jade. Don't we all want to know.

Rose blinks blearily at her.

You guess all of that triangulation work ended up going to waste, then.

"...and then I found Dave, and that's when you teleported us." John finishes.

You see his eyes flit between your baffled faces in turn, waiting for a response. A few moments pass as the four of you glance at each other, unsure of what to say. The round of show-and-tell doesn't seem to have done your moods any favors. Jade is still profoundly dissatisfied, John's as skittish as ever, you're restless with an urge to do something instead of float around comparing stories, and Rose just looks... tired.

Finally, Jade breaks the silence to voice what's been on everyone's minds this whole time.

"This doesn't make any sense!" she growls.

John shrugs. "Don't look at me," he says, drifting back a few inches.

Her ears twitch in what you think is irritation, but it's too cute to take seriously when she's not all doped up on evil. "Well, it's not like you did anything specifically. What I'm saying is that all of this is nonsense! None of what we've learned explains anything at all, and we still don't know what actually happened!"

You're all hovering above Jade's smoldering impact crater and forest fire in the making, having unanimously decided that just because your clothes are self-cleaning doesn't mean squelching around in blackened soot is terrible fun. She was the last of your group to arrive in this new world, and the only one to have actually survived the landing.

She was also the only one to crash-land somewhere they recognized.

Well, for a given definition of "recognize". This is the island she grew up on, but at the same time nothing like it. Where there used to be sparse grassland is now overrun with woodland and indigenous critters, and not only is her bizarre tower house not here, missing as well are the Sburb frog temple and the huge lagoon that it squatted in. Even the coastline's slightly different, she claims, though you think that it would be stranger if the subtraction of a prehistoric meteor bombardment hadn't changed it somewhat.

The volcano, at least, is still here. Maybe you'll be be able to get a cool supervillain base if you play your captchalogue cards right.

"We don't know how it happened and that's probably going to bite us in the back when we inevitably forget about it, but the what isn't exactly rocket physics," you point out, scratching the back of your head. "We fucked up and died, got dumped in this special new hell by the horrorterrors as a consolation prize I guess, and only John is from a doomed timeline somehow. Does that summarize all of it?"

"Okay, that is a big oversimplification," Jade huffs. "Like it doesn't actually tell us what this place is, which is incredibly relevant to doing anything about our situation. Maybe the only thing relevant! And there's something else that has been really bothering me ever since you brought it up, John: you said you died a few months into the journey, right?"

His eyebrows pinch questioningly. "Yeah?"

She lets out a quiet hah! "So why do you have your windy transforming trick?"

He blinks. "Uh..."

13-year-old John Egbert's stumped face—which has been his face 90% of the time lately—is hilariously adorable after seeing his future self, even if you barely talked to the aged-up version for fifty seconds. What's seen can't be unseen, that's the problem: it's like walking in on your parents doing it, or in wee six-year-old Dave's case, dear, sweet, plush Chuck Norris fellating an engorged puppet phallus the girth of his noodly forearm. Your beloved toddlerhood cuddle buddy would never be the same, and... well, you can't not think of this as "tween John" now.

"Exactly!" Jade exclaims, distracting you from your fond reminiscing. "You figured that out on your fifteenth birthday, two years into our trip! You shouldn't know how to that that at your point in your timeline!"

It's old news to you, but she sounds triumphant, like she's uncovered some conspiracy theory you've been keeping from her. You suppose John didn't really go much into it in his summary. Communication is important, kids.

He frowns. "I know! I don't know about that either. I just... knew how to do it when I woke up. Maybe dying unlocks extra powers, or..." He hesitates before continuing, "Maybe Typheus unlocked it for me? I thought it could have been part of The Choice."

The dog girl rolls her eyes. "You mean the choice which you conveniently don't remember if you even made at all."

"I think you're blowing this out of proportion," you interject. "Look, if John Choiced us into this, that can't be a bad thing, right? I was under the impression that Denizens were the good guys. I can't imagine Typheus would unapologetically fuck us over if we didn't get something important out of it in another fancy yin and yang will-you won't-you game."

"Unless he deems it necessary for the propagation of the alpha, or the maintenance of what Sburb considers the cosmic order," Rose points out. "Denizens are as close as there are to direct agents of the game's will. They serve the players only insofar as Sburb styles itself as a young adult's coming-of-age parable, and no further."

"Come to think of it, that does ring a bell," John admits. "I get the impression that whatever Typheus talked to me about had something to do with another timeline? Maybe something from the alpha timeline?"

"So Typheus killed you to tie up a loose end. Not exactly helping your case that he's totally trustworthy and benevolent, John." Jade says crossly.

You groan. "Hey, it's not like we can do anything about it right now."

"What, you want us to just roll with it? What if it happens again? What if it doesn't and we're stuck here on this weird alternate replica Earth forever?"

That was another thing you established: this isn't post-Scratch Earth. Jade's gramps' affectionately-named Hellmurder Island had a frog temple and the ruins of her old house on it, not to mention a huge chunk taken out of it and into the medium at this point in its timeline. This is just a boring old island with a cool volcano.

"Would that be so bad?" you wonder aloud.

"Yes!" Jade growls. She hesitates, then throws her arms in the air. "No! I don't know!"

"You claim that you're bothered by the mystery of our arrival, but it seems like you're more frustrated by the fact that we're here in the first place." Rose observes neutrally.

"I'm not in the mood for your psychobabble, Rose." the other girl snaps.

"I'm not..." your sister pinches the bridge of her nose, sighing. "I apologize if I gave the impression that I'm trying to pick on you. I want to get everything out on the table, that's all. I'm making an observation that you're upset."

"I think Rose is right, though," John raises hesitantly. "Are you that unhappy about this? From your story it sounded like you were in a lot of trouble before, not to mention being mind-controlled into being evil. Isn't this an improvement over the previous situation in, well, every possible way? As in compared to... being dead?"

Jade stills. "Yes, but..." She folds her arms in front of her chest. She looks like she's fighting an internal battle against herself.

"Can't we... you know. Stay here?" you offer. "We don't have to finish the game. We basically lost anyway. Game over, don't restart."

"We can't simply give up!" she protests. "You're happy to leave it at that? And what about our other friends? Davesprite? The trolls? Jake, and Dave's bro, and your scratched parents? Weren't you looking forward to meeting the new players?"

Rose looks a little guilty at the accusation, but as for you... not really, no. Maybe meeting your mom might be fun, out of the same morbid curiosity associated with wanting to see the desecrated carcass of the collective field of genealogy. And maybe Jade's grandpa, who genuinely sounds cool, and maybe John's mom, if only to find out if Nanna Egbert lives up to the jokester hype... Fuck, you forgot what you were trying to get at.

Basically, it might have been cool in an academic way, but you're not that broken up about not having to deal a whole new bundle of basket cases.

The jab about the trolls, though—that strikes a nerve.

"We don't know they're not coming," is what you say, crossing your arms, but your heart isn't in it. It's not that you managed to forget about them—far from it, in fact. You haven't even noticed before now how much you automatically default to bothering Karkat whenever you get bored. But you've been trying not to worry about it, so thanks for that, Jade.

"It's been a whole hour!" she objects.

"That doesn't prove anything," John chimes in, and he's right. Perhaps it's denial, but whatever force or phenomenon stuck you here, there's no reason it couldn't catch them as well. Sure, they're not human, and they're not god tier, and you all arrived within minutes of each other and it's been ages since, but there's a chance and you're not in the business of fatalism.

"It proves that we're wasting our time here!" Jade says.

"Okay, but being back in the real world has its pluses too, you know," you argue. "Maybe it doesn't mean much to you because you grew up all alone on an island in the middle of nowhere, but living in a functional society is astonishingly convenient. Grocery stores. Shops. Restaurants. Basic amenities. An Internet that isn't the static afterimage of a dead civilization."

God, you miss food that's not faintly plastic alchemical replicas from an annoyingly specific selection of culinary archetypes.

"Yes, but this isn't right. We were meant to— we were going to make a universe! We were going to build a new Earth! There was a plan!"

"A plan that fell apart the instant you broke through to the new session," you point out, graciously not highlighting the points of failure of that plan.

Jade's eyes flash. "Her Condescension was a problem, okay, but it was salvageable. You can't just quit! We were literally made for Sburb, Dave. It's our whole destiny!"

That word again. Destiny. Yes, wherever this hissy fit is coming from, Jade's right on that: none of this is canonically right, none of it ordained by paradox space.

But what has paradox space ever done for you?

"Fuck destiny," you say aloud. "You know what? Sburb sucked."

In you head, you imagine a synchronized Victorian gasp of offense from the others.

In reality they just kind of stare at you, waiting if you're going to add anything. It was a fun thought, though.

"There, I said it. Like, maybe at some point at the beginning stabbing bad guys was fun, but being Knight of Time sucked. My personal quest sucked. The ultimate reward sucks. What do I even do with a universe? I couldn't keep a plastic plant alive, and you're giving me a whole world to reign supreme over? If we got an out from the game, not that I even buy that's what's happening here because I sincerely doubt we'll ever fully escape the grubby pedo claws of Skaia, then mark me down for fucking overjoyed."

Jade rears, but even Rose crosses her arms, sending you an odd look for some reason.

"Have you considered if perhaps the true ultimate reward was-" Rose begins, but you finish her sentence for her.

"-the friends we made along the way?" you groan. "Yeah, like Sburb cares about that shit."

The dog girl moves in with her own stab. "So what if it's not the point of the game? We care about it. You're happy to leave it all behind like it never happened? You think our friends are a fair trade for, what—Olive Garden's unlimited breadsticks? Does Terezi mean that little to you?"

The accusation slaps you like a wet fish. Wow, first of all, Jade's info is years out of date and you and Terezi's little thing broke up ages ago, so that fell flatter than she expected. Second, holy shit. Low fucking blow.

"No," you say. You feel your fists clench, sharp nails digging into your palms. "Of course it's not worth it! But they're dead! Or if they're not, we're sure as hell never going to find them in that wrecked Medium! If we try and make our way back, do you honestly think that anything will happen other than us getting fucked head over heels by a menagerie of nightmare villains yet again? That the game will bend over backwards to grant our wishes just because we played to its rules? Skaia doesn't care about us!"

Something in what you're saying must have finally punched through, because Jade jerks back, as if physically struck by your exclamation. Her mouth opens a fraction of an inch.

Her head turns away.

"Is that really what you always thought? That Sburb was this huge, looming... chore that was just something you had to do because there was nothing else left?"

Jade casts a look around, taking in your expressions, searching for something that's not there.

"Does everyone think that?" Her voice takes on a hint of pleading.

You shift uncomfortably.

"I can't speak for John or Rose, but yeah, kinda?"

Jade looks like you booted her puppy half in the gut.

"John?"

He can't meet her eyes. "I... it was exciting and everything, but it's not something I want to necessarily go through again? So... yeah."

She turns to Rose.

The seer averts her gaze as well.

"In our defense," she begins, "We spent three years on a meteor spinning through an infinite abyss crawling with horrors beyond human comprehension, with nothing to do but contemplate the intractable consequences of our multitudinous personal failings. Even if we were able to muster some enthusiasm for the grand quest before, a lengthy intermission like that isn't productive for team morale or general war preparedness."

There isn't much conviction behind her attempt at justification, and you all feel it.

Silence reigns.

"Fine."

Jade rubs her face. Her shoulders are slumped. "Fine. Yeah. Okay. If you're all agree... fine."

John begins, "Jade-"

"What do we do now?" she cuts him off. She's pulled herself back up again. A forced smile is plastered over her face.

You totally fucked this up, didn't you.

You open your mouth, trying to think of something that doesn't sound straight out of a shitty troll's keyboard, but Rose makes a sharp sideways-cutting motion behind her back and you decide that shutting up may be a wiser tactic.

"Well?" Jade repeats tersely. "We need to start with something!"

"You're right," Rose agrees. "Anything about the game is for the long-term. It doesn't look like we're leaving this planet any time soon, so we need to get situated before planning any farther ahead."

"Food and shelter," you suggest mildly. "Homeless survival 101. Do we have currency?"

"We should find out more about this Earth first," John notes.

"We can do that after we get a hot shower and somewhere clean to put down our gimmicky person-shaped computers," you point out. "Self-cleaning PJs don't clean me, just the PJs."

"Should we split up?" John wonders.

The suggestion is met with a chorus of unanimous objection.

"No!" "Have you forgotten how that turned out last time?" "Fuck no."

He raises his hands in surrender. "Okay, got it. No splitting up. But maybe we should at least check if the rest of our houses are here?"

"...Good point," Rose concedes. "And our respective guardians or selves." She turns to Jade. "Do you still have your scrying goggles? Or can you do the same thing with your personal powers now?"

Jade's only happy to have a distraction to focus on. Her eyes defocus as she roots through her sylladices. "I think I tossed those since I didn't need them anymore. In retrospect, I shouldn't have, because, well... my powers." Her attention snaps back into focus. "That's something I was going to bring up. They're all weird now."

"Weird?" John asks. Rose raises an eyebrow.

Jade sighs, rubbing her eyes. "It's like... you know how I'm supposed to be able to warp anywhere in any universe I'm in?"

"No, as a matter of fact," you say. "The more you know, I guess."

"Well, you do now," she says, scowling. You shut your mouth. "I used to have a shallow awareness of the whole contiguous stable manifold I'm in. So the session, or the universe, or the bubble I maintained around our ship. I could instantly find anything in it and go anywhere I wanted with a thought! It's not a Witch of Space power, so I think I got that part from Bec. Anyway, it's not like that now. Now I have to mentally extend my powers out to map things, and it takes time to do it, and... I don't know how to say this properly."

"Like a discrete limb you're manipulating?" Rose suggests. "Or more like a communication lag between your senses and powers?"

"Maybe?" Jade sounds dubious. You can feel her struggle. "Not exactly."

"Long story short, you've been nerfed," you summarize.

"Why didn't you speak up earlier?" John asks. "Is this why you're so... angry?"

Angry?

She crosses her arms defensively. "What? No! I thought we would get our memory of the events cross-checked first, and then I got distracted by Dave's crappy work ethic. I can handle it! It's just a bit less convenient."

"My Seer powers aren't returning much either," Rose notes. "But that may be due to us being plucked out of their natural environment more than any intrinsic malfunction. Your condition sounds more serious and fundamental."

You swallow, raising a tentative finger. "I've been seeing weird things too."

They turn to face you, and you continue. "Time isn't working right here. I can't find the alpha timeline and there's no analogue to it. No defined boundaries to the model, even. It's like the whole universe is already temporally closed, and what we're doing is already allocated within that? I know that makes no sense, but let's pretend it does for a second."

"I... may have read something about this." Rose mutters. "Are we outside... no, I need to check my references."

"So we can't do the wrong thing and doom ourselves? Is that what you're saying?" John asks as she pulls a book from her sylladex and begins flipping through it.

"Not only that," you correct. "It's like the whole shape of time is different somehow."

"The shape is different?" he questions.

"I don't know! It feels different. I haven't touched my aspect in years and it's pretty much anything goes in tentacle space, so I'm not exactly a fine wine connoisseur here. It's like the same kind of time as in the old session but some sneaky fuck barely remixed it with the same sound font, and I haven't heard the original in forever so I can hardly reconstruct the changes from a three-second bite, alright?"

"Well, my powers are fine," he says, shrugging. He lifts a hand, twists his wrist and wind howls. You wince as your ears pop. When you turn around, water in the distance is whipping up into a cyclone that's really going to freak out the weather satellite people. Another twitch of his hand and the water falls, dashing into sprays and unleashing a barrage of waves. "And I have my new trick, though you guys apparently knew all about the other me's obviously superior version of it."

"So space and time are specifically fucked," you mutter. "Brilliant."

"This isn't just another planet, then," Rose says grimly. "It's another continuum altogether. Everything points to it not being in a Genesis Frog."

"Maybe this is what it's supposed to be like in a frog?" you suggest. "We've only had our powers in the Medium."

Jade shakes hear head. "I was in the scratched universe briefly. Its spacetime is the same as an incipisphere's."

"As do my texts assert," Rose adds.

"Fair enough," you accept. Fuck. "What about the rest of your powers? Can you still resize things? Shrink planets?"

She frowns.

The Witch of Space closes her eyes and stretches a hand out, palm facing down.

The air charges with energy. Lightning sparks in tiny impossible arcs. You taste on your tongue the sharp, acidic flavor of a flaming green star, one you've had some very intimate experience with. Jade flickers for a fraction of a second, a cavitation in space punching through to the searing visual howl of the Green Sun, and cosmic power surges outwards in a shock wave.

"Wait," you say, realization striking. "Are you-"

Everything around you—the land, the trees, air, sky—succumbs. That's the only way to put it. It bends to the awesome power of dog tier Jade and succumbs in a blinding flash of green stretching from horizon to horizon, the entire planet ever so slightly bumped out of existential alignment, like a game object selected by a cursor momentarily dislocating from the simulated physics. There's an immense not-gravity wrenching at at you, like you're scraping the event horizon of a black hole and flight is the only thing keeping you teetering on the precipice of falling in.

It's fucking terrifying and everything in your brain is screaming at you to run away. To where?, you blast back at the stupid voice. It's like you're back on the Dersian moon the instant just before the Tumor detonated, feeling paradox space throttle itself into a supercritical knot around you, the strain scorching even to your then-mortal time senses. There's nowhere to escape to. Not from this.

Then Jade releases her hold, space schloops back in place like it's popping from a suction cup, and with a gut-wrenching surge of vertigo, everything bounces back to normal.

You fight the urge to puke.

You barely—just barely—manage to keep it down.

She opens her eyes again, giving your green face a skeptical glance. "I wasn't going to actually do it," she mutters.

"Someone might have noticed that!" you shriek say. Calmly.

"Dave's right," Rose agrees with a pinch of concern. "That was unnecessary. We could have gone out to Mars and stolen Deimos instead."

"Right! I'm sorry!" Jade says. "But they don't notice when I do the whole planet at once. I've tested it extensively with our land-aaaahhh!"

She's interrupted by a mass of white fluff and snout exploding out of the air next to her, tackling her mid-flight in a crackle of green power and electricity.

The two of them go crashing down through the trees and into the dirt, bouncing and rolling through the muck. The other three of you dart forward to help, but Jade's initial shout of surprise dissolves into peals of laughter as she tries to get a hold on the furry creature but fails due to its sheer excitable velocity. The girl settles for combing her fingers through its knotted coat with a dumb grin on her face as the dog runs orbits around her, doing its best to fleck her from head to toe in doggy drool.

"Oh my god!" she giggles, the bitter taste in her voice from earlier swept away. It's the most delighted you've seen Jade in far too long.

"Holy shit!" John gasps.

Holy shit indeed. Where did the thing come from? How is it even here?

"Bec!" Jade squeaks as he licks her glasses.

You shelve the questions for later. Right now, none of that matters. That devilbeast is nothing but trouble from what you've heard, but fuck if this isn't the most downright heartwarming thing you've seen. You aren't going to begrudge that at least someone got a family member back out of this whole mess.

You can't stop yourself from cracking a smile.

"But—" Jade stops for a second. Bec senses her shift and pauses in his rocket ship impression, cocking his head at his owner.

"...I give up trying to understand any of this," she groans, slumping backwards into the ground.

Chapter Text

Green whisks away, leaving behind a prickle on your skin and hairs standing on end. It's not even noon, but it only takes a second for the heat and searing sun to hit you like a freight train. Jegus fucking Christ, of all the Earth things you've been away from, you did not miss the Texan summer one tiny bit.

Squinting your eyes from the ambient glare, you turn your gaze downwards.

"Aww, Bec didn't come along," Jade says to your left. Good thing too, since for all his godlike powers, he can't fly. The hundred-feet drop from your aerial position to the nearest roof is... well, nothing that would hurt an invincible demon dog, but it would leave a rather suspicious dent in the architecture. "But he didn't stop me from leaving like he always did, though... I'm not sure if he has the power to do that now!"

"Aren't you part him?" you wonder out loud. "I was wondering: does that mean you-"

"Dave, I swear, if you ask me about my genitalia-"

"No! Wait. Have I done that? Sprite-me, obviously."

"-I will tell you in excruciating detail about Davesprite's c-"

"Message received!" you hastily interrupt, clamping hands over your ears. Goddammit, you did not want to know about either of those things. Not without extensive emotional prep and a week of therapy sessions queued up right after. Davesprite doesn't have anything below the chest but formless sprite-ectoplasm, but it doesn't mean whatever Jade was making up to troll you wouldn't have traumatized you for life. Why would even possess her to think that?

Oh god. Is she finally having her furry awakening? Are there fursuits waiting in your future? Is being a furry redundant if she is a dog girl?

"I just wanted to ask if that means Earth now has two first guardians," you grumble. "Do you take shifts defending the planet, do you each claim a hemisphere, or what?"

"I don't think I count," Jade says doubtfully. "And if he's from a splinter timeline then I don't think he's technically this Earth's first guardian, only a first guardian. I'm not sure there has to be a first guardian at all! I think the white text guy was talking out of his ass, to be honest."

Rose's voice cuts in. "Let's get on track," she sighs.

Right, right. You pan your view towards the dull, blocky apartment building that you used to live in. A familiar sight, embedded in a practically identical cityscape, but you know better than to get your hopes up. Urban developers are a universal force. It doesn't mean anything.

Still, there's that feeling you can't shake that if you go in there, it's going to be your room waiting for you as you left it, another you, another Bro. Or perhaps a young Dirk Strider hanging up training puppets and horror movie posters, hiding food in his closet, creeping through corridors on the lookout for ambushes. You don't know what to expect. You don't know what you want to see.

You take a deep breath. You'll deal with it if it comes to that. No point in procrastinating.

It's practically muscle memory after this long, aligning your thoughts to engage the fraymotif. It's one of the ones you never stopped using on the meteor because of just how goddamn useful it is, especially with the synergy with your training. The symbol of your aspect blossoms around you, red surging through the lattice as you will the power into the technique. The omnipresent beat of marching time slows, Dopplers out to infinity, and somewhere, somehow, the second hand of an imaginary clock grind to a halt, caught mid-tick. The progression of entropy halts.

For this brief instant, all that surrounds you is blessed silence.

It's not going to last, so you get moving.

A flashstep takes you down to the top floor window, which glides open with a touch, and another step blinks you in. You cast your eyes around, taking in every detail of the room you find yourself in, too aware of your precious time draining away, but not daring to count the seconds in case it breaks the spell.

Comic book merchandise. A shelf of art books and DVDs. A high-end gaming PC too expensive for the kid you were. A violin, chipped from years of use.

You let out a breath that you didn't even realize you were holding.

You flash back out, and you don't bother closing the window behind you—let them wonder all they want. A second step sends you back up to the other three, their faces and hair crawling in comical 100:1 slow-motion. Your timing is on point as always, the virtual clock striking the second the moment you drift back in position, springing your temporal velocity back to a boring snail-paced one second per second with a rush that punches the air out of you.

"Done already?" John asks.

You nod, heart still winding down from overdrive. "Nothing. Didn't see anyone, but it's not my room or my bro's. Neither of us would be caught dead with any of that shit."

"Are we still doing the rest?" Jade asks, glancing around.

"To be sure," Rose affirms. "As far as I sense we're not on a clock, so we can afford to be thorough. Perhaps we could also afford to be a little less conspicuous, however."

Yeah, nothing says discretion like floating in the middle of the sky over the most populous city in the state. You didn't really think this through, did you? You wipe your brow, glancing over the commotion of the cityscape under you. You're high up enough that a casual onlooker might mistake you for a bird, but some people are going to have very confusing pictures.

"Just get us out of this fucking heat," you groan. You're sweating. You literally haven't sweated in years.

The other three exchange a peculiar look.

"What does that mean?" you demand.

"Our clothes are temperature-conditioned," Rose says. "Why don't you put up your hood? Or, may I suggest—perhaps this is a psychosomatic response, unrelated to physical temperature, but rather an instinctive reaction to a familiar setting?"

She pops a notebook and pencil into her hands. Oh, that is such bullshit. She doesn't even ever put anything down in that prop book.

"Psychosomatic?" you scoff. "Have you been to my Land? Land of Heat and Clockwork, Lalonde, Heat and Clockwork. I've sailed seas of molten rock and scaled Everests of ice. I stood at ground zero of two universal supernovas and rose from the ashes without breaking a sweat. Global warming? Me and Jade melted a whole planet just to show the snow who's boss, and we'll do it again. I'm saying I'm a fucking veteran in the war against Fahrenheit, and those treasonous goddamn agitators have nothing on me."

Rose smirks, dictating her words as she pretends to write. "Characterizes self as 'veteran' in a figurative war, note usage of 'treasonous'—feelings of betrayal, potential link to past of-"

"Jade, can you please take us to Rose's rich person forest mansion so we can be done with this bullshit?" you ask loudly, clapping your hands.

You materialize above a dense forest, the patter of rain against your clothes drowned out by the roaring of the waterfall below you. Your hand shields your eyes from the watery assault as you scan the land under you.

No signs of human settlement.

"That's fairly conclusive," Rose remarks, raising her voice over the rain.

"Let's go!" John shouts. Green fire is already licking its way up your limbs.

You reform a couple hundred meters above a dull suburban neighborhood, and your clothes shimmer and dry themselves out in seconds.

You give the landscape sprawled out under you an quick inspection. There's the nondescript middle-class homes and grocery store parking lots you find everywhere, but towering out of the blandness like a grotesquely inflamed sore thumb is a bright red Betty Crocker factory in the distance, casting an ominous shadow across the landscape that doesn't precisely fill you with reassurance.

...Fuck, if Betty Crocker is an omnicidal alien empress in this timeline too, things might get hairy.

You look to John for direction, and he's already descending towards one of the more central houses, a distracted look on his face. Okay, fuck secrecy, you guess. Sucks to be the three people that see honest-to-god flying aliens for once and get checked into a loony bin for their troubles. The rest of you trail behind, and out of some miracle, there's no screaming or blaring police sirens from a panicked populace scrambling for the nearest semblance of local authority in the event of an extraterrestrial attack.

The boy lands down on the sidewalk next to another copy-paste template house, marked only by a lone tire swing hanging from a tree branch. There isn't anyone out on the streets but a middle-aged woman with a bag of groceries who isn't looking up from her phone. A car sits in the driveway, and farther in the backyard, you can crane your head and glimpse the edge of a green pogo ride and a candy-striped swing set.

John isn't saying anything.

You're about to ask what's the hold up when realization hits.

The pogo ride. That cursed toddler slayer. God, you've seen enough bullshit alchemized from that spring-loaded murder machine to last you a lifetime. John's quietly staring at the car, at the license plate. His eyes jump to the fogged-over window of the kitchen.

He doesn't have to say anything; you can read his flabbergasted expression like an open book. This is it. It's his house.

You were fully expecting this last stop to be a bust like all the others, but... why is John's place different?

"My dad," John says, breaking the silence. "He's not from the game. I didn't create him in the Veil. Do you think..."

His voice is filled with so much longing that it hurts to hear.

"He was your nanna's son," Rose points out gently. "And she was a paradox clone."

"That's doesn't have to matter," he insists. "Parallels like that come up all the time with no logic to it. If you think about it, it makes no sense that the new players' homes were in the same place as ours either!"

"You need to manage your expectations," she repeats, but John isn't listening. He's stumbled forwards, hands raised slightly and fingers curling. Rose sensibly stops talking and watches her friend's blue eyes tracing the aged tiles leading up to the front door.

He looks afraid to take another step, as if breaching the invisible bounding box separating the impossible house from your side of the looking glass might shatter the illusion, like a rendering glitch wiped out in an instant once the area loads proper. The wrong man might walk out of that door, or a small child not his splitting image, and that would be the end of this fever dream. As long as the cat stays firmly in the radioactivated death trap, he still has the luxury of standing here in the superpository realm straddling truth and imagination.

He can still hope.

Your breath stills in your lungs as its Heir teeters on the verge of decision. It's a stillness that carries its own twofold pressure like the weight of a silence or the calm before a storm, only in this case measurable with an ordinary barometer because John still can't get a grip on his windy powers. The breeze is whipping, sending leaves and dust scattering through the air.

He takes too long to think. The world robs him of a choice.

The door yawns open by itself.

A man in a monochrome business attire and a white fedora strolls out, his characteristic black tie loosened and the collar rarely unbuttoned. His eyes aren't quite visible in the shade, but the head turns, sweeping its gaze over the front yard before it catches on the band of kids stalled in front of the businessman's property. He double-takes at the strangely colorful sight.

John's still frozen as the man who is probably not but nevertheless possesses an uncanny resemblance to his father hastily fixes up his tie and then, more cautiously, approaches where the four of you are gathered. He appears embarrassed to be caught in anything less than tailored business formal, and right in front of a gaggle of impressionable teenagers too boot.

You glance at your best bro, silently urging him to make a move, but he doesn't seem to be receiving your telepathic messages.

The man comes to a stop next to the neck of the driveway, and just when you think he's about to address his mysterious visitors, he simply turns ninety degrees on the spot and, with a click and a metallic clang, pulls the mailbox open.

He reaches in and withdraws a handful of envelopes.

Four gods stand on the street watching a stranger rifle through his letters.

You begin to relax, thinking to yourself that he's just going to go back in after a while and leave you here to frantically group-panic about John's not-but-actually-yes dad, but then the man finally speaks.

"Is it already Halloween already?"

His voice is mild but quietly authoritative, everything you imagined boring businessman Egbert to be. Certainly not the image of the jester fanatic a younger John relayed to you between his aimless rambles.

"No!" John blurts. "We— this is just how we dress."

You and his Dad wait for the boy to follow up with something more informative, but you can feel the poor guy struggling with his tenuous grasp of the English language. The man's looks about to shrug and turn back when you give up and intercede on John's behalf.

"John here's your adopted son from a parallel timeline," you announce. The man jumps. "Also your technical half-brother, and sometimes your genetic dad. Say hi, guys."

"Dave!" he hisses, looking about to throttle you.

To the adult's credit, he doesn't immediately back away like you're a bunch of lunatic juvenile detention escapees. Instead he only looks slightly taken aback, considering John up and down as he folds his mail under his arm.

"John," he mutters, rolling the syllable around in his mouth. "You're my son, you say?"

You nudge the named boy in the side and he jumps, startled. He jerks his head up and down vigorously.

The man scratches his chin.

"You might as well come in."

Josh Egbert lives alone.

You can't help but feel like an innocent ankle-biter being coaxed by a sleazy old dude into his pedophile van as the five of you ascend the polished wooden stairs in an uncoordinated train—either that or a bunch of gangsters accosting a poor gullible man in his own home, because this is far too easy to be true. There wasn't even a quest to rescue him from a secret Nazi prison or alien spies to fend off while you beat a hasty retreat.

The procession arrives at the end of the hallway and your host still hasn't said anything. John has been drinking in the sight of his remodeled house all the way, barely paying attention to where you're going until you stop, and then all of a sudden his head snaps forward. He catches sight of the room you're stopped in front of, and his mouth drops into a small rounded O.

John's dad twists the knob and pushes the door open, motioning you to follow as he walks in. John starts to go in, but freezes in the doorway, locking up like a first-time actor on stage. Rose jostles against him at the sudden stop.

You crane your neck over her shoulder to grab a better look.

The sun's still not fully moved onward to the continents over yonder yet, so the interior is dimly suffused in the weak glow of the early evening. The square chamber beyond the doorway is, upon first glance, someone's room. You spy a bed to the left, a desk with an unlit monitor and keyboard in the corner, a freestanding shelf of disc cases and box sets beside, and a heavyset chest next to a large cabinet to the right. The walls are plastered with posters. Fairly typical stuff.

Yet, the longer you look, the more things come up as not quite right about the scene. The hardware is unplugged, the computer case not hooked up to anything. The bed and its sheets look just a little too pristine, no creases or stains or any signs of use. It's like they were liberated from their packaging and never touched again. The disc cases lined up in the tall bookcase next to the desk are similarly unmarred, boasting none of the wear and tear of a young child's prized collection. As for the posters...

It takes some doing to figure it out, but the little reflective dents in the posters are nail holes, as if somebody has been taking them down and putting them up over and over until they've been pockmarked worse than the face of a pubescent boy that hasn't found all the letters in "personal hygiene", let alone figured out how to spell it.

It's less somebody's room, and more the efforts of someone trying to recreate the scene of a room they saw years ago, long faded from memory.

Someone trying to remember.

John steps out of the way, letting the rest of you in. He's leaning over the bed, fingers lightly resting against a pillow for support he doesn't need, the other hand tracing over the Con Air poster pinned above the headboard. His head pans around the room slowly, as if in a hypnotic trance. You follow his gaze to a calendar stuck next to the window, barely illuminated by scattered twilight trickling through the glass panes, and even though it's almost August, the page reads April.

Dates are circled. The third. The tenth. The thirteenth, the seventeenth, all of them in unsure red.

You turn back to the open door, suddenly not sure if you should be seeing this, and realize that while you were gawking, the older man has retreated to the hallway unnoticed and slipped into the room opposite. He's just standing there, half cut off by the door frame, bathed silently in the warm setting sun.

You inch closer.

The other room is a mirror image of the first, but with a more crimson color scheme and a wider variation of paraphernalia dotting the walls and surfaces. You recognize the Problem Sleuth merchandise and Dr Manhattan, but not the hardboiled mustachioed men adorning much of the remaining vertical real estate. The amateur brush strokes are visible on the painted white spoon marking the red chest at the foot of the bed.

You have a pretty good guess of whose ghost haunts this space.

Rose prods you in the back, and you get the message.

You don't belong here. It's not your moment. These two deserve time alone without three gawking idiots spectating the scene, and all your presence serves here is fulfilling your sick curiosity of a family dynamic that doesn't consist of constantly perpetrating grievous harm against each other.

You stumble out of John's replica room, shuffling down towards the stairs to let Jade and Rose out. This place wasn't designed for this many simultaneous occupants. John stays behind, still lost in thought. Rose keeps ushering you down the stairs against your feeble protests, but you must have been making too much noise—father and son turn in unison at the sound of a scuffle.

The movement of their heads doesn't stop at you. As if drawn together by an invisible gravity, their gazes one after another snap to each other, their eyes crossing for a precipitous second.

Something unspoken passes between them.

They approach each other in hesitant motions, stopping just shy of crossing into the corridor. A yard of space separates the two dim figures. It's almost dark by now, but the last dregs of twilight cast a slim shadow on the stretch of hardwood between them.

Rose clears her throat, breaking all of you from your dumbfounded stupor.

"We'll leave you to it," she coughs. "Pester us when you're done."

The Egberts throw her a questioning look.

"Dammit, Rose, you ruined the moment," you whisper. It does nothing; everyone can hear. "It was all moving and shit-"

Jade blasts you away with a snap of her fingers before you can say anything else stupid.

Ow. The girl needs to work on her aim.

Jade flexes her unspeakable power again, and green plasma floods over you, vaporizing the leafy treestuff that's prodding you in your tender everywhere. You drop the few yards to the grassy soil underneath and land with a painful thump.

When you pick yourself up, the attack has carved a whole miniature clearing out of the forest, leaving a number of neatly truncated tree stumps that are quickly smashed to splinters by the decapitated treetops falling from the sky. There's a few nice flat surviving ones that you'd normally be calling dibs on for lack of a chair in this wilderness, but one look at the lingering wisps of green energy smoking from them and you decide not to try your luck with ass cancer. You'll stand.

It's a shame, though. You have half a mind to ask if maybe she could take you somewhere less Man vs. Wild, like Starbucks or, hell, even a library so you can get started figuring what the hell's going on on this planet while John's powering through years' worth of awkward conversation.

Then you take a look at the furry ears poking out of her hood, at the ostentatious cape you're flaunting, and realize that there's a veritable plethora of problems with that.

The three of you stand around in the cool night air for a few seconds, stewing in parentless ennui before Rose breaks the silence.

"What's on your mind?" she asks you, folding up her dress as she musters the indomitable courage to brave the disconcerting fumes and take a seat on a stump.

Are you that transparent?

"If Jade disguised her doggy features, would she be a reverse furry, or a humankin furry?" you offer without thinking.

Fuck. That's not better.Look, you can't be blamed for this; the furry thing has been stuck in your head since she brought up the uncanny possibility. The witch herself gives you an unimpressed look, but you can't stop yourself from laughing nervously and going on.

"Where did that come from? Obviously it's reverse furry. Human furry implies you're deriving pleasure from roleplaying human, and not doing it as a disguise, which is dumb since obviously being an immortal dog girl is far superior to us silly talking apes. Not to imply that you're not... like, having your unique canine difficulties that I completely understand you wouldn't... god damn all these feet vanishing into my gullet like stellar debris into a supermassive black hole."

Jade looks away, lips pressed into a thin line, and you silently curse your filterless mouth. Thankfully she doesn't look mad, not after your painfully incriminating ramble, at least. It's a useful conflict resolution skill, talking until people forget what they were supposed to be pissed about.

No, she just looks sad.

...aaaand now you feel guilty.

Damn, Earth 2: Electric Boogaloo really isn't as cracked up for her as it is to the rest of you, is it? She's going to have to keep up a giant hat or hoodie for the rest of her life if she ever wants to pass as human, but all you need is a change of clothes and to remember to keep your feet on the ground. Even just ditching the cape might be enough to ward off the weird looks with how minimalistic the Knight design is. Plus John's missing three years of their shared memories, and who knows where the fuck her pen pal went, and...

Man, you're depressing yourself.

Maybe you were too hasty celebrating your return to your old planet. It's not as if you can simply go back to your old lives like nothing happens.

At least she got Bec back, who's gotten on top of her when you weren't looking and is currently receiving copious belly rubs and scratches behind the ears, all the time with electricity short-circuiting in a cyclic feedback loop between the two solar powered demidogs. He really would be cute if he couldn't destroy you with a twitch of his paw.

"So, Rose," you comment, keeping your voice down to not distract the two. The tower of orange turns to you. "Looks like we're the only ones still missing a long-due reunion with our beloved childhood guardians."

She raises a critical eyebrow at your pathetic attempt at starting a conversation.

"If you're trying to bond over our respective parental dysfunctions now, you're three years late," she says.

"Yeah, yeah," you mutter. After a pause, you ask, "What's going to happen to us?"

Rose doesn't answer for a while. When she does, it's in slow, measured tones.

"Our ultimate goal, generally speaking, was to repopulate the human race and bear the torch of civilization into a new world. Winning Sburb and receiving the ultimate reward was arguably a mere means to that end. Seeing as we're now looking at a fully instanced copy of Earth, that objective is ostensibly achieved. So theoretically, we're free to do whatever we like."

Yet, from the pensive look on her face, you know there's something about that which doesn't sit right with her.

"You could call into question the cosmological legitimacy of this planet, and there's a possibility that you would be right to do so. I don't see any obvious mechanism how we could be transplanted in a Genesis Frog, and this could all well be an artificial construct manufactured by the outer gods or another extraordinarily powerful agent. Perhaps if we flew straight up, past the stratosphere, past the moon, eventually we would pass the invisible membrane of a colossal bubble and find ourselves again in the soulless embrace of the Furthest Ring once again."

You know that tone she's slipping into. She's going to break open a cosmology book and start putting bracketed references in her speech any time now, so you interrupt.

"Okay, we're looping back on what we've already covered now. I'm not asking what we're going to do. What's going to happen to us?"

Rose raises an eyebrow.

"I'm not entirely clear on the difference."

You spread your hands.

"Okay, that was a dumb way of putting it. Where are we going to live? Where are we going to get money? Boondollars don't mean jack shit in the real world, and I don't see any alchemiters around to spend all this grist on. We've missed out on years of school, and even if we finish that, are we going to shell out for college? Jobs? How do we go back to living after all... that? We don't have ID!"

"I hear deep space mining is quite lucrative this time of the year," Rose suggests glibly. "Or we could do a circus act."

"How are we going to explain where we got the asteroids? Are we going public with our powers? We already have the costumes, might as well go the whole mile to fully-fledged superheroes, I guess. Punching corrupt politicians by day, investigating the mystery of our baffling origin story by night. Do remind me to brush up on my racist fifties humor and casual misogyny if we're going that route."

"Also, depending on how diplomatic negotiations go, John's dad may let us crash at his house."

You stifle a snort at her choice of words. "Let's get him to adopt us. Becoming step-siblings will be the last glorious nail in the exhumed coffin of Karkat's bizarre shipping diamond thing. Hell, none of our various familial units are mutually exclusive—we can combine it all Alabama-style and get the ultimate family megatree. Get me some pen and paper, I need to draw a diagram. It's not even that hard. All we have to do is get John's dad to marry your mom, and if grandfatherhood's transitive across step-adoption..."

You trail off at the expressionless stare on your genetic sister's face.

Right. Slight problem with that plan.

You really aren't on the ball with this "talking to people" thing today.

"We should break into the Census Bureau," you say abruptly. "Your mom might be around here somewhere, just not where you used to live, because what are the chances of that? She probably moved there for insidious Skaianet Systems business in the first place. Maybe it's the nexus of the North American ley line network, or the portal to the bullshit dimension, or the fountain of unobtanium that they use to build all the insane shit SN drops on the market every year."

"No need for the empty platitudes, Dave," Rose sighs. She crosses her legs. "We will do what we have to. We might no longer have alchemy at our disposal, at least for now, but the stacks of miscellanea we've stuffed our Phonebook Modi with will be enough to sustain us through the interim."

"Are your powers telling you that, or is are you offering a live demo of the aforementioned empty platitudes?"

"It's an educated prediction based on my practical understanding of the situation," she affirms.

You sigh. She shrugs.

Your eyes drift to Jade, who's still on the ground, but no longer being enthusiastically assailed by an enigmatic bundle of fur. She's kneeling in the dirt, whispering to an agitated Bec, whose tail is clipping through the ground in sprays of green sparks. The dog's pattering feet look like he's trying to go somewhere, but reluctant to leave his master-slash-ward's side.

Jade catches your look. "Hey!" she calls out, a hint of worry tinging her voice. "I think Bec is trying to take me somewhere!"

"Oh, what now?" you groan.

Rose gathers herself from the stump, snapping instantly into business mode. "The path led by a first guardian is typically of auspicious portent."

You almost choke on the irony of that statement, but don't contest it. Auspices are sort of her thing. Plus, Bec hasn't been blowing up any cue balls or creeping on little girls as far as you personally know, so he's probably not as comically evil as his predecessor and at least somewhat trustworthy.

"Really?" Jade says dubiously.

"We don't have anything else to do while John's cashing in on his family time," you point out. Rose makes a hum of assent.

Jade hesitates for a second, but then nods firmly and ascends to her feet. She takes a step back while the dog spins in a circle, radiating incomprehension.

"Go!" she barks, clapping her hands. "Fetch?"

Bec's head spins around, looking for the bullet. Jade sighs, rubbing her elbows.

"What do you want? Do you... hm."

The furry ears on her head cock as she jams her eyes shut, and something quivers in the air. She presses two fingers to her temple. There's an invisible resonance bouncing between her and her canine guardian, starting off in erratic surges, but building by the second.

"Is she communing with Bec?" you whisper to Rose, edging closer. She looks similarly perturbed at the strange witchcraft being put on display here. "Are those Green Sun powers or Space powers or Bec powers? Maybe it's a witch power? Familiars are a witch thing, aren't they? Is it because she's part Bec so they have a psychic selfhood link? Maybe I could commune with Davesprite, I can't say I ever tried-"

The resonance shrieks, and something snaps in place between dog and girl. The psychic waves or whatever she was giving off putter out, replaced by a quiet, more confined background thrumming as Jade stumbles back, eyes wide.

Bec pauses, crouching at attention, and then in an underwhelming spittle of green energy, he vanishes.

Jade swings around, trying to recover her bearings, looking ever so slightly more lost.

"Hooray?" you question. "We lost the dog."

The Witch of Space isn't completely there as she answers. "I haven't lost him. I... I'm not sure what happened. I don't think I can lose him anymore, we're kind of... aligned?"

"Not ominous at all," Rose notes with a wry smile.

"It's not a bad thing," Jade insists, but her mind is clearly elsewhere. "I'm not sure, but... hold on. Bec is being very insistent."

She can hear him?

"What was he going to show us?" Rose pushes on, remarkably unconcerned about her nascent schizophrenia. "Jade is right—this is, at the very least, not a downturn in our fortunes."

"Hold up. When did your powers start working again?" you ask, feeling that you've somehow missed a season's worth of content in only a few seconds.

"I can't directly perceive fortuitous futures yet to pass, but turns in the path are yet within my capacity to see," she explains. "I've lost the map, but still have a strong sense of direction, let's say. Without a tangible goal to orient myself to, such primitive binary judgments can be fallible, but they are still a useful indicator."

"He's underground," Jade continues, ignoring your byplay. "Thirty, forty meters deep. I... I don't..."

She lifts a hand, and that's all the warning you get

The earth under you rumbles, flashing bright green. You yelp, rise into the air and stay there. Emerald fire flares up and through the treetops just beyond the rim where the clearing meets forest. The witch makes it look effortless—it probably is for her—as the massive cone of soil and stone shrinks down to the size of a thimble, air howling past you and your cape to fill the evacuated space, and after a brief pause, spins through the air towards her and vanishes into a captcha card.

You look down.

Below you is a funnel excavated all the way down past the soil and stone, drilling deep into bedrock. Jade sloped the sides enough that the compacted soil holds, and despite the cracks in the cleanly sheared rock underneath, the base doesn't break. At the end of the tunnel, dark in the shadow of the pit, you catch the unmistakeable glint of dark metal.

You hear Rose decaptchalogue a wand next to you and summon a beam of light- oh wait, that's just a flashlight.

"What the hell is that?" you mumble.

In unspoken agreement, the three of you descend into the depths of the earth. Jade's biting her lip. There's something about the way that square meter of glossy surface reflects torchlight that feels familiar to you as you float closer. The other two slow to a stop a fair few meters from the exposed wall, but you keep going, pitching yourself face-to-face with the exposed surface so you can get properly up and intimate with it.

You rap on the metal.

A hollow clang sounds from it.

The uneasy feeling rackets up another notch. It's the sensation that you're forgetting something incredibly obvious, like you're looking for your glasses and they're already on your face, or when you wake up from a dream scrambling for something that never existed. It's an itch you can't scratch, and you don't like it.

"I'm cutting it open," you say aloud.

Not hearing an objection, you go ahead.

A slash of Caledfwlch, the harsh screech of tearing metal, and the deed is done. It's another uncomfortable reminder that this thing isn't as sharp as the Deringer, and thanks to grimbark Jade you're probably not getting your old ultimate sword back. You don't have the esoteric grist to alchemize another one even if you had the code down in your phonebook. Or an alchemiter, for that matter.

You reach out to pry the jagged circle of decoupled material from its housing, but it falls in at the lightest touch. The dull bonk of it hitting the other side reaches you a long three seconds later, too long for this thing to be anywhere close to the truck-like size you imagined it to be.

Rose drifts up to you, placing a hand on your shoulder, and her torch beam sends a shaft of light past the falling dust into the cavernous space beyond. Your eyes take a few seconds to adjust.

It's a room. You've cut into the lateral wall; the whole thing is turned on its side. Every surface seems to be made of the same strange metal of the stuff you sliced through. Farther in stand hollow, cracked tubes of glass, some of them still packed with with clouded fluid and dim floating shapes of black and white. More details come into focus as you squint. Thin, grimy stains on the walls. Terminals, corroded wires and piping, flat circles inscribed with fractal patterns you can't see but know are there. Everything is almost crumbling. Ancient.

It clicks.

Of course. When you spend three years with the same immaculate mystery alloy constituting every flat surface you lay your eyes on, it stops registering as anything to note in your mind. But now that you're here, it's blindingly obvious. You only find this metal in one place in every session.

This is a Carapacian facility.

Chapter Text

"Did we crash some other poor kids' session?" you wonder, floating further in. "Are we someone's exiles? But... uh, from the alternate past, instead of the future?"

"It's not out of the question," says Rose. "Though my reading suggests that command stations are typically highly specialised, grown from seeds engineered specifically for their future roles. This is all Veil equipment, and in far too profound disrepair to have been planted recently in expectation for our arrivals. If we are to serve that purpose, it will not be here."

"This is the Veil?" Jade asks, eyes darting around and eating up the scene. "I've only seen the outside of your meteor and a few looks through the clouds of Skaia. It all looks so..."

"Depressing?" you mutter. "Yeah, lucky you. We spent three years living in a carbon copy of something like this. You got the spiffy gold ship and the cute critters, we got mutated chess abominations suspended in Satan's rotting amniotic fluid."

"Is this what Bec wanted us to find?" Rose asks.

"I think so," Jade confirms. Her eyes dart upwards for a second. "He's back up on the surface now."

You move up to on of the terminals and poke one of the buttons experimentally. Nothing happens, not even a spark on the screen.

"They're dead," Rose informs you. You glance over and find her doing the same thing at another terminal, except that she seems to actually know what she's doing: she has the lower panel's pried open, and she's fiddling with the control levers and valves deep in the dusty guts of the machinery, presumably trying to kickstart something. "Carapace tech doesn't run on external power sources. This must all have broken down over the years."

You hear the creak of something moving behind you and whip around, half-expecting to be tackled by a giant deformed rook begging for sweet release from this mortal coil, but it's only Jade. She's disassembling a transportalizer on the wall with her powers, bolts, chips and plates spilling out mid-air like an exploded diagram.

Now that you think about it, she had some of this tech in her home, didn't she?

Grandpa Harley must have stolen them from the Medium, the sneaky fucker. You're beginning to wonder if his company ever actually invented anything or if they were just running the world's most ambitious interdimensional IP scam for three decades straight. Did they get served by the authority regulators for patent infringement or did Big Schizotech get away scot-free once again, twirling their coiffed mustaches and cackling madly as they splash around in their gold-filled vaults?

"There's nothing wrong with these transportalizers," Jade murmurs. An endoscope of warped space is snaking from her eye into the cloud of suspended components. The other pad to her right unravels into another spread of parts, and her scope winds over, inspecting the second sample. She looks up at you and Rose a second later, letting the distortion dissolve at a wave of her hand.

"There's nothing wrong with the internals," she continues. "Rose is right, they don't use finite power sources, so something else is going on here."

"What do they run on?" you wonder out loud. "Hopes and dreams? The souls of stillborn children, reaped at the blood-chilling touch of the smallest gods' grotesque ambumanipulatrices?"

Jade shrugs. Rose is the one to answer.

"The libraries call it incipient flux. The conceptual potential discharged at the confluence of Skaia's light and the song of the dark gods, where creation bleeds into the void. The typical design uses a closed-cycle generator that operates off an ambient differential."

"Like Stirling engines! But powered by creative power instead of thermal energy?" Jade translates, zooming a batch of the floating bits up close and hugening them up for an easier view. "I wish the ship had more useful textbooks instead of the same silly Prospitian fairy tales and military strategy guides. Not that they're not fun, but it does get stale after a while. That looks right for what I'm seeing in the power supply, though."

"I'm not well-versed on the precise physics, so I'll take your word for it," Rose admits.

"So why does Sburban tech work in the Furthest Ring?" you say skeptically. "Or on Earth, for that matter?"

"The incipisphere is where you get the most flux-"

"Inverse square law!" Jade adds.

"-but there's always a potential gradient anywhere, however meager." she points out. "And when you're the only entropic sink in a light-year radius of ill-defined spacetime, you can get away with a lot running on fumes. More detailed than that and I'd have to ask both you and me to take a few years out for a master's degree in differential geometry first."

You frown. "So if wherever we are, we don't have enough creative flux-"

"Incipient flux."

"-to run this stuff, what does that mean?"

Rose and Jade exchange a look. It's the obvious question, isn't it? If there's nothing wrong with the machines, there's something wrong with the universe. You already established that time and space is a mess. This is just more evidence to add to the fire of existential dread.

"Well, I do know that you can power Sburban tech with external sources," Jade suggests, breaking the silence. "I used to have a fission generator at home to drive the transportalizers when I used them too much and they started puttering out, and the cookalizers and refrigerators also ran on uranium. Maybe we can rig something with that?"

"Can you..." you wiggle your fingers. "Electrify them with your powers? To charge the pads, or whatever."

"That's not how electricity works! Also, I can't control the electricity. It just sort of happens when I do other things."

"Has physics ever meant anything where Sburb's concerned?" you snort. Jade huffs at your accusation, but you add, "It's a useless hunk of metal as it is. It's not like you can fry it any worse."

"Wait," Rose interrupts. "Before we do that, there's something else we can try. Jade, you can open a portal to the Green Sun, can't you?"

"Oh!" she starts, as if suddenly remembering that she's a sentient wormhole to paradox space's single most terrifying ball of universe-devouring fire. "Yeah!"

"Try doing that now," she orders. "The Green Sun is a fountain of power. That ought to give us a sizable differential."

You raise a hand to interrupt. "Hey. Is this going to blow us sky high if you fuck this up? I very much value the few millimeters of leg hair I've managed to grow over these few years, and I'm going to have to pre-emptively veto anything that might possibly threaten the sanctity of these sad pubescent strands. I'm very insecure about my masculinity, you see. My ego couldn't survive the blow."

The Witch of Space rolls her eyes, but now that you've mentioned it, she looks like she's starting to harbor some reservations about gating to the conflagrant corpse of your old universe too. "It'll be fine, fussyfeathers. I can do it. What could possibly go wrong?"

"You said that on purpose."

"Are we doing this or not?" Rose grumbles irritably, arms crossed as she floats down next to you.

"Yes," Jade declares, and that's it for the discussion. With a gesture, the disassembled transportalizers reconstruct themselves in their original places. She bops the two of you away with gentle telekinetic shoves until you're a safe distance away, and with a deep breath, she closes her eyes.

Spatial tension tugs at the air, but it's practically a blip in your perceptual periphery compared to the titanic forces she's been throwing around like shitty Halloween microcandy in this less than an afternoon you've been at this. The god's body flashes green and, in the instant between seconds, inverts, like when you're looking at one of those cup-face double picture illusions and your brain flips to seeing the negative space—as if she had always been a portal to the eldritch fire dimension, and you were only a trick of the eye away from clocking all along.

It's all so natural, so blindingly, retrospectively obvious that the next thing to greet you will be a wall of infinite green fire, that you least expect it when the unimaginable happens.

It bounces.

Sparks spray, space burps, and regular matter-Jade snaps back to existence with a startled jerk. Whatever primordial protocols over which first guardians pull their epic power from their patron star, she just ran hard afoul of the sysadmins. She sent the Green Sun a cordially worded connection request and didn't even get a rejection before she got cockblocked by the spam filter.

"Ow," the canine girl coughs blankly, buckling in place. She looks green—sick green, not powering-up green—and her irises are flickering between shades of her signature color. Your hands jerk up, your body drifting forward on instinct to help, but what would you even do? What's the medical protocol for when someone may or may not be suffering psychic power backlash?

"Are you alright?" Rose calls out, pre-empting your question.

That shakes Jade out of her daze, her eyes stabilizing as she looks around. "I'm fine," she returns, but her voice sounds funny. "Just confused. I'm not sure what happened."

It's a weak reassurance, but your heart slows down to a more manageable pace. There's no army of ghosts to call on for literal ancestral wisdom whenever you hit a snag in your Sburban fuckery anymore, so you're really, really glad for the absence of power-induced strokes thus far. You suppose that in a pinch you could always kill her, which sounds incredibly wrong, but... you'll leave that as a last resort.

"You said your powers don't have infinite range now, so maybe that applies to the Green Sun too?" you speculate.

"No," Jade states immediately. "My range was cut down to the ship on the trip to the new session, but the Green Sun was always accessible. If I can't reach it, then how am I getting its powers? That wouldn't make any sense. Let me try again."

"Is that a good idea?" Rose raises her concerns.

"I haven't done it for a long time, and I wasn't expecting it. I'm ready for it now," she insists, raising her hands and balling them into fists. Her hair rises on static charge as she focuses, tugging on her powers again.

Lightning crackles, leaping from her flickering form to the terminals around. The room flares with an unearthly glow as space protests and screams against Jade's command, the linkup bouncing again and again. It's a tug of war between an unstoppable force and an immovable object, and yet while you have to shield your eyes to even see what's going on, the immovable object doesn't look like it's losing. The energy storm crescendoes, scorch marks rake across the stainless Dersian steel, but to no avail.

Jade howls—not in pain, but in a wolfy, angry way—and you open your mouth to tell her to give herself a break, but then you're interrupted by the peculiar and profoundly disturbing sensation of something unclogging under your feet. If you were standing, you would stumble. A fraction of a second later, the latent power drains out of a room in a flash, gushing down the metaphorical pipe.

"Fuck!" you hiss, dizzied yourself. "Did you do it? Did it work? Are you okay?"

Your hand lowers and lets your eyes adjust to the newly devastated room littered with splinters and fallen panels. A first glance tells you it looks like a success: Jade's physical form is gone, in its place a 2.5D portal shaped in her silhouette.

The problem, you immediately realize, is that past the silhouette isn't the giant death inferno you expected—it's the world. Earth.

Another part of it, with grass and earth and ocean and sky, the wind blowing through the human-shaped window and filling the musty, staticky room with the scent of allergens. It's familiar.

It's here. On the island.

The sound of barking passes through the portal, and the view shifts on the other end. It sounds close, right on top of Jade.

"That didn't go right," Jade's voice says, coming out of where there would be a mouth if she were material. It's rather eerie, but your mind isn't focusing on that at the moment, still screaming what the fuck is happening. "Did I link to Bec?"

"Yes," Rose answers, gliding closer and tapping her chin contemplatively. "I wonder if this is because you're part him, or if first guardians are ordinarily capable of connecting to each other."

"This feels weird." Jade's voice distorts like it's going through some weird time compression. Space compression, more likely. How it works you couldn't begin to speculate.

"Can I put my hand in you?" the other girl asks, blithely ignoring the alternate implications of her question and shooting an exasperated look at you when you snicker.

Jade nods hesitantly.

Rose sticks her hand in.

She wiggles it around.

She pulls it back.

"That was anticlimactic," you remark. "Do you feel that?"

"No. Rose, try walking through me!"

Scientists.

Rose slips sideways through the Jade-shaped portal in a quick flash—you don't stop to think too much about the details of that geometry, because that's just asking to pull a brain muscle—and turns around, inspecting what you presume is a dog-shaped portal on the other side. Again, you actively avoid thinking about the geometry. You wave at her, and she waves back, a piqued expression on her face.

"Is it two-way?" Jade asks, turning around. Can she see out the other side? Interestingly, the angle of the portal's view doesn't change when she does that, only the outline of the visual cutout.

Rose floats back through and glides out seamlessly on your end, triggering a surprised jerk from Jade at the girl emerging from her.

"Oh, wow, it's really weird the other way round. You just suddenly appear in my face."

You screw your face up at the bizarre spectacle. "Is this going to be useful in any conceivable way, or are we taking a time-out to indulge your ultra-softcore vore kink?"

"I don't see there being any differential between two locations so close together," Rose agrees, casting a gaze around the room. Jade flickers and pops back to her normal fleshy form. "But, well, look."

You follow her line of sight to a panel on the wall. It's a security keypad for a wall locker, one of those you keep having to ask Karkat to unlock for you because the trolls are the only ones keyed into their chess guys' systems.

It's lit, flashing and requesting ID in stupid troll font.

"Huh." You blink. "Did that reboot the system or something?"

"My guess is that as Skaia's functionaries, our powers channel creative potential similar to how first guardians draw from the Green Sun. Active use must release it into our environment, and Jade's power surge was enough to kickstart some of this."

"Her grabbing the planet earlier wasn't good enough?" you mutter.

Rose shrugs. "She didn't really do anything. Plus, we need a gradient, not quantity. Though it's not infeasible that we could have gotten some sparks if we gave it long enough to equilibrate."

Jade taps a foot against a transportalizer, which produces nothing more than a sad whine, but it's something. "Not all of it is powered. Should I do that again?"

"Please do," Rose says, watching LOW POWER blink in troll glyphs on one of the large monitors as she hits the ==> button. "Maybe with more of an... outwards focus."

"Less violently explosive," you suggest. "If those aren't mutually exclusive."

She shrugs. It's a lot less fanfare and fireworks this time, starting with a test pulse of invisible energy that washes over you and drives past deep into the walls. Screens and lights all around flicker faintly. She follows with a more sustained surge that floods over you like a sea wave. You shiver from the cascade of primal energy fizzling and popping on your skin, but it seems to be doing the trick. The fluorescent glow from the ceilings stabilizes, machines whir and hum to ancient bootup sequences, and one by one, the terminals light up with familiar logos and spinning spirographs.

You breathe in the smoky scent of an awakening veilfortress, trickling out from the decrepit deeps on the choking gasps of millennium-old ventilation fans.

"Let's do some dungeon diving," you declare, clapping your hands.

Jade ported herself down to the central base computer to see if she could pull something from the systems. Three years fucking around with questionable buttons hasn't made you or Rose experts at Sburban software architecture by any means, but Jade spent half her life hacking Skaianet products with a lunchtop and an omnidriver, so you leave her to it and go wandering off into the cavernous abyss of the buried compound.

You considered bringing John in for the tech stuff, but (a) you don't want to interrupt him and his dad time, and (b) he sucks at programming, so it's dubious how much he'd actually help.

After deliberating the issue with Rose, you decide to stick together for now. There are three things you're looking for: hints to what the hell happened to this place, hints to what the hell happened to you, and perhaps the most practical—an alchemiter.

You lever another assemblage of crumpled debris out of the doorway with Caledfwlch and watch it tumble down the nigh-vertical corridor, shattering an incubator laid into the wall, scream in tearing metal as it grinds down a length of buckling piping, and finally crunch to a horrible stop at the end of the hall. Rose winces out of the corner of your eye.

"I know we were literally just there less than a day ago, but I kind of miss the meteor," you break the silence. "All this shit reminds me of it."

"I thought you were sick of it," Rose says.

You fly up through the newly-cleared entrance into a square room filled with loading computers and yet more hanging cables. A transportalizer sits further up in the center of what would have been the floor, violently impaled by a heavy mechanical keyboard that's still wedged halfway into the sparking circuitry.

"I was. And now I miss it."

"Do you miss the meteor, or do you miss home?"

You eye the ventilation grate in the corner. One of the good-sized ones, probably could fit a person...?

Nah, fuck that.

Rose flicks the embedded keyboard from its housing with a careless wave of her wand, which spears into the tangle of ceiling coils. "Or the people?" she asks.

You sigh, staring blankly into the sloped floor.

"I can survive five seconds without the hungry vampire thousand-yard stares or being yelled at for petty made-up grievances every hour of the day. Now the mayor, bless his heart—that's a national treasure I'm going to cherish until the day I die. He was the one glistening pearl ensconced in the fleshy embrace of this turgid, oozing mollusk."

You drop back through the doorless opening and into the corridor, Rose trailing behind you.

"I'm noticing that someone you haven't mentioned in there," she observes.

"The first rule of the meteor is we don't talk about the clown in the vents, Rose."

"Transportalizer," she yawns.

You jerk to a halt and follow Rose's pointing thumb off to a rectangular inset in the side of the wall you thought led nowhere. A blast of white power vaporizes the fallen grate, and she's right—you missed a teleport pad. The girl rotates mid-air, aligning herself to the axes of the room, and touches her feet to the floor. Then in an abject mockery of Newtonian gravitation, she strides forward and vanishes in a flare of translocatory fire.

You follow, flying into the disc with significantly less respect for the Safe Use of Transportalization Equipment and the Prevention of Easily Avertible Graphic Dismemberment Act (1982).

Your senses take their sweet time to recalibrate as you stumble out of the evanescent flare and trip down the hallway after your sister. She's strode off without waiting for you. Why are you walking? You lift off and accelerate towards the escaping girl.

"Wait!"

She's speeding up all of a sudden, not even slowing to look around each turn.

"Where are you going?" you shout, but she doesn't answer. What's gotten into her? It doesn't look like she even heard you. Alarm bells are sounding in your head.

This place is big enough for you to lose her if she runs off. The halls are changing as you dash past the rooms, less utilitarian, more... used. Little things out of place, shredded drapes peeking out among scrap, a torn book tossed outside its pneumatic shelf, stains. Rose knows where she's going, but you have no idea how. Something summoning her? You flash through another transportalizer and crash into her, sending both of you tumbling weightlessly into a wall. She's stopped, staring intently forward into the circular chamber up ahead.

"Rose!" you demand. "Rose?"

She's not responding, too deep inside her own labyrinthine speculations to be of any use to you right now. You slowly move yourself around and ahead to see what's so damn special about this place. A circle of transportalizers lie ahead, the cavernous dome above marking this as one of the hub nodes of the station. There were a few of these on the meteor—as far as you managed to explore, anyway. You pan around as you reach the center, taking in the full 360° of the room.

Your earlier musings echo back at you. This place is different from the endless walls of steel before. More used, more weathered, and in a different way. The marks faintly etched into these walls aren't from ancient calamity or the touch of entropy, but more human. Scuff marks of shoes and claws, scratches worn away by the centuries but still just barely visible.

You're getting a horrible sense of déjà vu.

You let muscle instinct take over. A forward glide takes you through the chipped transporter into another lonely corridor. You pace down into the dark, discovering three more pads in an triangular formation.

Rose's mapping strategy dictates you take the left portal.

You take the one in the back.

Only three more transitions bring you to another hub room in record time, this one with one of the discs slashed open, wires spilling out. Recognition tickles your brain.

The four o' clock transportalizer brings you to the top of a flight of stairs corkscrewing down into a deep black chamber. Forgoing the railing, you throw yourself off and plummet through the darkness, angling your trajectory until you dive through another pad in the nick of time.

Everything's a home-owning disaster, porcelain, fabric and deformed frames littering the wall of gravitational favor, but you recognize the corridor. You know these doors. You know where that pad goes, and the one after that and down the stairs, and the one behind that and past the tanks.

You follow the path in your mind. It's ingrained memory, too long ingrained for you to witness these halls in such ruin now without something inside hurting at the sight.

The last eruption of portal fire dissolves, and you're at the center of a square of almost unrecognizable devastation.

Shredded carpet is peeling from the floor, faded by age beyond recognition. The splinters left of tables and wooden bookshelves are piled up in the corner with their demolished contents spilling out. Dry, lifeless soil is strewn across the lateral walls, pouring from cracked ceramic, its erstwhile inhabitants long dust. The old-school gramophone is snapped clean in half, the brass trumpet peeking out of an unruly mass of spilled sofa stuffing.

The coffee machine and computer terminals are by some miracle still attached to their metal benches, though one of the dispenser's supports has an ugly gash across threatening its structural integrity.

Rose transportalizes in in a roar of white flame, knocking you off the pad in the typical uncouth manner. She's silent, her eyes roaming across the destroyed scene.

If this is painful for you, it must be orders of magnitude worse for her.

Everyone hogged the common room, but it was theirs in a way that wasn't yours. You remember the weeks she and Kanaya putting this place together—their idea of a subtle courtship. The human girl alchemizing a gratuitous quantity of interior design handbooks for the task despite literally everyone else's insistence that it was wholly unnecessary, the rainbow drinker devoting dozens of hours to designing and machining each rug in staunch refusal to settle for alchemized generics.

All of that was of course with the full knowledge that the meteor would likely be annihilated one way or another once you arrived at the new session, but seeing it like this is different. Deeper.

"Hey, good news: we now know where to find the alchemiters," you say, your weak voice echoing off the bare walls.

Rose isn't listening, or doesn't care. She stalks over to the nearest intact computer and bends down, fingers clattering at lightning speed over the keyboard. For an instant you think she's going to pull some hacker-fu and blast this meteor out of its earthy prison, flying it off into the night sky like a spherical light-speed spaceship, but none of that happens.

No. Instead, the coffee machine dings.

An LED lights up on its side, and the ancient thing starts whirring through its cleaning cycle.

The Seer of Light sweeps towards towards the coveted elixir like a moth to her eponymous aspect, reaching the bulbous capsule seconds before its metallic maw slides open to disgorge unbelievably shitty coffee that probably wasn't safe to drink before the machine spent a couple millennia collecting dust in a dank underground hole.

She retrieves the beverages, captchaloguing the spillage and quickly recombining it with the mugs. The girl flies back over, her face hard as stone, and lifts a steaming mug at you as she sips from the other.

You grudgingly accept the gift.

It's as shit as you remember.

"They're going to have to know about this," Rose sighs.

When you navigate your way back to the central mainframe, John is there.

Chapter Text

John was confused.

He'd woken up in a strange and foreign land. Well, that much was an average Tuesday to a veteran player of Sburb like him—no, what was more concerning was that he didn't remember how he'd gotten there, or indeed what he had been doing prior to finding himself face-down in a reasonably-sized crater at the center of a meadow, still smoking with the scent of ash and holy fire that would suggest to the acute investigator a very recent resurrection from the unceremoniously pancaked.

He had picked himself up and, in the typical Egbertian manner, sought to tackle this confusion by spreading it around to the best of his ability. He took to a program of intermittent walking and flying to locate the nearest settlement of intelligent life forms, or failing that (as creatures in mysterious and wonderful realms tended to), at least something conversational. Fortunately, in this particular case, John's first contact with the native fauna consisted of the former.

JOHN: excuse me, but do you know where i am?

The creature's response left the Heir of Breath no less befuddled, and if anything even more confused. He tried to reproduce the garbled syllables he heard as a manner of requesting elaboration, but all he received in response was an exasperated eye roll.

Nonetheless, he pressed on, hunting for another specimen to question. It didn't take a minute to find one.

JOHN: um, do you know...
JOHN: how do I say this?
JOHN: does the word "sburb" mean anything to you?

His dialogic partner asked him, you mean, beyond the obvious?

JOHN: huh?

They gently queried where the boy lived, in a tone that betrayed their admittedly justified suspicion of some type of profound developmental disability.

JOHN: i... what? washington, i guess? well really now i live on a ship... whatever! where i live is not important.
JOHN: i can't remember how I got here! or much before that, actually.

The other person's tone shifted at that statement. John didn't notice, of course, too preoccupied with his predicament. They noted, with no small hint of disapproval, that John did not look old enough to drink.

JOHN: ...what?

Both sides of the conversation seemed to have given up on understanding each other. The stranger turned and wandered off, leaving the boy no more enlightened for the fascinating exchange.

Okay, it wasn't entirely an exchange without worth. John knew one thing for certain now, confirming what should already have been blatantly obvious from the quaint interjoined houses, pothole-lined roads and prevalent articles of clothing more sophisticated than scavenged bedsheets. These weren't salamanders cleverly disguised with pink makeup and fake noses—they were humans.

He was on Earth.

And also in England for some reason?

JOHN: huh.

As the Hero of Breath came to this stunning realisation, his multitude of messaging-capable devices that Jade had foisted on him what seemed like such a long ago went off in a chaotic cacophony of intermingling ringtones. He ejected a holophone into his hand and was delighted to find a floating bust of his best friend (!) beaming from the pinhole projector, whose non-bird form (!) he hadn't seen in a whole year.

Dave wasn't calling him, though. The hologram's head was looking down at his on a phone, typing something into the Pesterchum client, which meant that that this fancy phone wasn't doing anything useful, and in fact was actively detrimental to communication, so John probably should switch to a more suitable device, but he had no time for that! He opted to activate the texting voice interface instead.

TG: hey john wtf is happening
TG: are you ok

They then proceeded to have a conversation we have already seen before. They commiserated over their mutual confusion over what happened, sharing what little they knew of the situation. Dave was stranded out at sea; John told him that he was in Rockmnzwuth Hutfudshah. Dave had apparently been up to all kinds of exciting stuff involving stabbings with Jack Noir and his Prospitian female lookalike, while John scraped his mind for the most recent events he could recall.

A summoning from Typheus, who had awakened from his hibernation. A sprite's demand to bear witness. A descent into dark caverns heretofore untraveled. A dialogue, the contents of which now lay tantalisingly out of reach but for unclear, blurred impressions.

Impressions of doom.

Of understanding.

Of acceptance.

John relayed what he knew in less needlessly dramatic prose.

EB: ok, well i went to talk to typheus on my planet with you.
EB: i mean dave sprite.
EB: and then im not sure what happened but i think i died too?
EB: and maybe him as well? oh no.
TG: dude focus
TG: what did you do because im pretty sure this is all your fault somehow
EB: that part is kind of hazy.
EB: all i remember is then i woke up in a crater and that was ten minutes ago.

As his talk dragged on, John turned his eyes skyward. He probably shouldn't be flying too much; it could alarm the natives. On that note, he also probably shouldn't generate any giant tornadoes of whirling destruction like he used to do on the oil seas of LOWAS. Yet there was something itching under his skin, as if he were a snake that hadn't shed for too long. It wasn't uncomfortable, only inexplicably... trapping? Bound.

It felt important.

John thought back to all he has been told about his aspect, by Breeze-borne messages from parcel pyxes, by covens of elderly salamanders in cyanbark garb, by cryptic tomes in LOLAR's temples, by bankrupt and bedraggled crocodile stock brokers on the run from furious debtors. It was a disparate mishmash of concepts and interpretations, but it all came together to form a picture. Freedom. Untethering. Decoherence. Breath.

He distracted himself from the stalled dialogue, and breathed in. It came as easy as remembering, as if he'd done it a hundred times before—no, a thousand. It was unlike the tactile trigger of a fraymotif or the heavy weight of hammerkind skillnotches in his swings. The motion flowed inside of him and through, suffusing every atom with a metaphysical antiweight.

When he breathed out, the bonds that made him up unraveled.

John let himself dissolve into the Breeze. His awareness rippled outwards at the speed of sound, conducted on the quiver and whisper of restless air. He had no eyes, but he felt, and while he could barely begin to parse all that rustled over the surface of his consciousness, his goal burned clear and bright in his mind.

He guided his mind up and away, past droplets of condensed moisture, through squawking holes in the medium, until the world thinned and his thoughts began to diffract and scatter. If he held another class he might have run the risk of losing form and dissipating into nothing, but he was an Heir, and above everything, an Heir was.

There, at the edge of space, he drew himself back together. Particles bound themselves into molecules, molecules into cells, cells into tissue, then all in a rush precipitated bone, flesh and skin from dust and air. They weren't the same atoms that had made up the John from seconds ago, but they didn't have to be.

As John coalesced, so did his mind, rebuilding into a coherent state less like a scatterbrained toddler drunk on religious enlightenment and more like a marginally less scatterbrained regular teenager. And in this newly reconstituted state of mind, his first thought was of course:

JOHN: whoa.
JOHN: did i do that?
JOHN: how did i do that?
JOHN: and
JOHN: huh
JOHN: ...why did I want to come up here?

He was, once again, no stranger to awesome abilities spontaneously manifesting themselves, but not so... trivially. This was too easy, like he had done it before... and... forgotten?

What happened in that gap in his memory between meeting Typheus and showing up here?

JOHN: is this what my choice gave me?
JOHN: dave said hephaestus made an epic sword for him... did typheus unlock the next level of my windy powers?
JOHN: in exchange for... dying and appearing in a restored version of earth?
JOHN: wow, that theory is incredibly dumb.

He windified and reformed himself a few meters to the left to test it again. It was like riding a bicycle; now that he had it down, doing it again was second nature. It was so easy that it left John feeling a little miffed, because he hadn't even done anything to earn it! Last time he broke through a big milestone like this in his natural powers he had been trapped amidst a giant sea of oil on green fire with angry trolls yelling at him from all sides. This was almost like cheating.

His captchalogue deck reminded him that Dave was talking to him again.

TG: hey do you still have your unholy time travel blue zappy thing

Aw, come on. How did Dave know about his cool powers already? He'd been so excited to tell him all about it too.

Oh, wait. Dumb question. Knight of Time, of course.

They talked. Some of the things Dave said left John lost—what was that about time travel?—but the gist of it sensible. They were on the same page now, or so they thought, so the first thing they needed was to get together. But how?

They talked. They planned.

They met.

John was cowed.

Dave was older. When you were a teen their age, a few years made a rather striking difference. He was taller, his features more pronounced, and though his limbs were as lanky as John remembered, the broader shoulders beefed up his apparent physique a lot. Not to mention how comfortable and at ease he looked in his fiery red cape-pyjamas! He looked astonishingly secure in his own skin in a way that John had always associated with the cool-guy mask the boy put up over Pesterchum more than the twitchy dork inside.

John felt like a kid playing dress-up in comparison. Let's be honest, what had he really done to deserve this blue head sock? Fall asleep on a bed and get tricked by a troll into being murdered by Jack? Dave piloted a moon into deep paradox space and blew himself up to create a massive supersun which was also what he had been sent out there to destroy, and now he's even heroically martyred himself fighting two unbeatable wolf monsters for a fair lady's life. All John had done was probably be eaten by a big snake monster.

In one word, Dave was intimidating.

(John wondered if this was how Dave saw his bro. It explained a lot.)

The other hero took the revelations in stride, going through and breaking facts down, cracking jokes all the way. The way he talked was uncanny to hear: his rambling verbosity and perpetual undertone of calm amusement hadn't changed at all, but his vocabulary had mutated after years with Rose and the trolls, and the way he would casually drop in ordinary conversation the silly troll vernacular that they used to laugh at together—completely unironically—made John feel just a little sad for some reason.

Then Jade finally showed up and solved all of their problems with a snap of her omnipotent fingers. The four reconvened, and to John's hidden dismay, it wasn't only Dave that was from the future. Or perhaps, more accurately, it was only John that was from the past, and from what turned out to be a doomed offshoot to boot.

He didn't like it.

Rose hadn't managed to change much physically—she had always had a very adult-looking face, so she was only a little taller, a little more developed. Jade, on the other hand, had really grown into her new body, perhaps as a delayed effect of the sprite fusion? Her dog ears had shrunk down somewhat but fluffed up more, and it might be the extra inch or two of height, but she was more slender now, her jaw and cheeks far sharper. The snazzy special effects that seemed to follow her around were busier than John remembered, and he could sense with his Breatho-vision that the energy fizzling under her skin felt... angrier. Less stable.

Then they finally got into the meat of what had happened in the alpha timeline, and he quickly understood why Jade was so ticked off.

JOHN: so she could mind control you because you were part dog?
JADE: yes!
JOHN: does that mean she could have controlled dave sprite and jaspers sprite too?
JADE: ...
JADE: i didnt think about that...
JADE: but i dont see why not
ROSE: She likely had the pure sapiopsychic power to control Karkat, and possibly Terezi or Kanaya as well. I suspect that Jade was the only target principally due to her unique power and a probable limitation on the number of concurrent subjects.

The shocking truths didn't stop coming.

JOHN: betty crocker was an evil alien???
DAVE: wow get up to speed john
DAVE: we knew that for what
DAVE: years
JOHN: well, sorry that nobody ever tells me anything!

When the conversation took a turn for the hostile, John was reeling too much to pay it much mind. He was only feeling more and more out of the loop the more he got filled in on everything. He glanced at each of his friends in turn, inspecting their weathered frames as Dave and Jade started an argument about what to do next. They had been through so much without him, suffered through unimaginable trials and tribulations, seen each other die...

John felt like an impostor.

He didn't belong here. The age gap was one thing, the doomed thing was another, but when he thought about everything that had gone down without him... he felt small.

It wasn't like the other John from their timeline—alpha John, he corrected himself, because he had to get used to thinking in those terms now—had done any better either. The other him stuck his hand through a house, gained amazing powers that turned out to be different to this him's amazing newfound powers, and then zapped around doing absolutely nothing anyway. He hadn't been there to stop Aranea, or help get Jade back, or fight Jack Noir, or save Kanaya, or rescue Karkat, or do a single thing to mitigate the royal mess that had gone down in the alpha timeline.

Rose's description of her final moments hit him the hardest. Everyone was so fucked up, she was making peace with her death and her mom was crying and all of that, and what was John doing? Standing there, mumbling to himself, being a useless idiot.

It seemed to be all he was good for: obtaining powers beyond imagination for no reason and doing fuck all with it while his friends worked their asses off to get the real work done. He spent their entire session messing around on the planets, dancing to the tune of trolls, all for what? Even with all the ectobiology machines programmed for him, he still needed Dr. Meowgon to sit on the buttons! The one noteworthy thing he managed to achieve was take Echidna's quill and scratch the session, but even then it was Jade that bailed him out at the very end.

He was sure that Rose would respond with something appropriately platitudinous if he voiced these thoughts, something along the lines of friendship and heart and how the ability to say dumb things qualified him for leadership somehow. He was also sure that she could only talk herself into believing all that empty rubbish because his friends loved him and had an unrealistic opinion of his abilities.

Truthfully, he realized as the spat properly broke into a shouting match, he agreed with Dave. It would be nice if all of it simply stopped, you know? No more worlds to save and selves to kill, no one he could fail to rescue. He had been excited to see his friends, but they were all together now, weren't they?

JADE: is that really what you always thought?? that Sburb was this huge, looming... CHORE that was just something you had to do because there was nothing else left?
JADE: does everyone think that????

It took him a whole second to register that Jade had called his name.

JOHN: i...

Everyone was looking at him.

JOHN: it was exciting and everything, but it's not something I want to necessarily go through again?
JOHN: so...
JOHN: yeah.

All John wanted was to go home.

He wanted his dad back.

But that hope was laughably futile. His home was stranded on an alien rock in a faraway dimension so many cosmological steps removed he couldn't even dream of finding it again. His father was dead, really dead, not turned into a ghost that now wandered the Furthest Ring.

Then again, Earth was destroyed, and now it wasn't.

Was it really impossible?

JOHN: we should find out more about this Earth first.

He didn't have the guts to volunteer to go first, so they started with Dave's place.

When Dave reported back with a negative, his heart sank. It didn't necessarily mean anything, he told himself. This wasn't a perfect replica, so divergences were of course to be expected. They could keep looking. Then came Rose's turn, and where there used to be a pretentious designer house there was only forest and water, not even the dirt path that once led to wider civilization, and his hopes dipped even further. When they got around to John's place, he was truly scraping the bottom of the barrel on optimism.

It was okay, he told himself. Besides, if they found duplicates of their parents, wouldn't there be duplicates of them as well? What would they do with all those copies anyway? It had been a nice thought, but it was better this way.

Really.

The four young people snapped into existence in the sky above a suburban neighborhood. A hundred architectural clones spanned the landscape, but John could pick out the block he used to live at easily. He didn't let his spirits lift: it could be anyone living in there. These homes were decades-old property developer fodder, not fancy estates like Rose's.

He descended towards the house, resisting the urge to drop out of the sky like a comet. He could sense the mask Rose was weaving around them from the way the Breeze tangled in her threads, but there was such a thing as too obvious. As he approached, his eye began picking out details.

The tire swing.

The telescope.

All little things that hit like tiny knives to the gut.

It was a building realization. The last push was the car parked in the driveway. To anyone it would look exactly the same as every other, but John had spent too many afternoons to count peeking out his window checking if his dad was back yet, and his eyes were trained.

It was his house.

When he landed, his heart was hammering out of his chest.

JOHN: my dad.
JOHN: he's not from the game. i didn't create him in the veil.
JOHN: do you think...

The others shared a silent look.

ROSE: He was your nanna's son, and she was a paradox clone.

But John wasn't listening any more. The doorbell was right there, yet his feet were anchored on the pavement, trapped in indecision.

He wasn't ready.

He didn't know what would be worse. Finding someone else living in this house, or finding a father that didn't remember him—being turned away at his own doorstep. This was a mistake, he was beginning to think. What would he do if he really found his dad? Run into a complete stranger's arms without a care in the world? What right did he have to barge into a normal man's life and drag him down into the whirling storm of cosmic improbability that surrounded them?

Yet he wanted to. How he wanted to.

So tangled up in his own lamentations, he almost didn't notice when the door unlocked.

His dad walked out, and John's thoughts stopped.

The next minute or two passed in a blink. The man said something, John had no idea what he replied in his stupor. Dave jumped in and spouted something ridiculous. They made complete fools of themselves. John's dad didn't know him, but that was fine. Seeing him like this, so normal, the scent of the afternoon bake wafting from the door—

Even if this was it, even if they left and never came back, it was enough to know that his dad was okay.

They were invited in anyhow.

John couldn't stop hoping.

It was his room.

It was an imperfect replica, parts of it anachronistically spliced from stages of his past. He took down that Little Monsters poster years ago to make space for Problem Sleuth. Those sheets they threw away when he was ten because they were falling apart at the seams, and John remembered throwing a tantrum about it. Silly, really. His new ones were way better.

But those, too, were now gone.

He wandered around, touching the calendar as he passed. His birthday was marked, but by how many dates were circled on the page, his alternate dad hadn't been quite sure he'd gotten it right. John swallowed a lump in his throat.

The father that raised him never forgot, not once in thirteen years. There would always be cake and a present waiting for him, even when the man had barely slept a wink all week from overtime and grueling work. Even the time John got mad at him for some moronic reason and ran away to the the Joneses' house to hide inside the dog kennel, he had woken up next morning with a blanket draped over him, a tin of chocolate cake, a wrapped box and a patiently worded note of gentle reprisal.

John reached for the PC under his desk, but his fingers stopped just shy of the power button.

He moved himself back.

It was his room, and at the same time it wasn't. There was no motherboard inside the computer's shell; he could feel that much from the air swirling through the gaps. The crannies of the bedding were fuzzy with dust. He doubted that his dad cleaned this room very much beyond quick dustings, of laziness or of discomfort he would never know. The clothing hanging in the closet couldn't last a real child a week.

It wasn't a room. It was barely a movie set. There was no point lingering here, none of it mattered. He was focusing on the wrong thing.

A sound from behind drew his attention.

Rose, Dave and Jade were scuffling on the stairs when he poked his head out. Honestly, he didn't blame them for ducking out. His dad was on the other side of the hallway, standing in the door of another room that looked much like his, if a lot more Betty Crocker themed for some reason. Was that Nanna's room? Jane's?

His father was looking back at him.

Their eyes met.

The man's gaze seemed to say a thousand things at the same time.

We need to talk.

Help me understand.

Don't go.

He didn't even realize Rose had said something until they were gone in a searing green flash, and then the two of them were alone.

John steeled himself. He couldn't put this off any longer.

Dad led the way down the stairs. He offered John tea or coffee as he moved past into the kitchen.

JOHN: no, thank you.

It was yet another chip in the mask. John's parent knew quite well that the boy despised coffee and only touched tea when it would be rude to refuse, and as silly as it was, John struggled to not hold it against this man. Not trusting himself to say anything more, the boy simply seated himself on the couch, glancing over the harlequin portraits and figurines while his not-dad moved into the kitchen and returned with two cups of water.

JOHN: ...thanks.

He accepted the offering gingerly. For a minute, they sat side by side on the sofa, staring at a blank television screen.

JOHN: so...
JOHN: how much do you know?

It took a while for the older man to reply.

Not as much as John thought, he said. For most of his life, he had been plagued with dreams.

JOHN: prophetic dreams?

Well, some of them, technically, he admitted. But most of them were simply of people. Many of himself. Things he had never done, people he would never meet. Whole other lives he had never lived, or so he thought. There were periods of his life when he tried to get rid of them, sought professional help and cycled through medications like candy, all to no avail. There were others when he held on to the visions, started documenting them in diaries and tracking down clues, places, anything to find the source of it all.

There was an odd nostalgia in his voice as he explained his past, like someone talking about a hobby they once loved or of life dreams long-abandoned.

JOHN: i'm sorry.

He chuckled, what for?

JOHN: it must have been a long many...
JOHN: ...decades?
JOHN: my dad, he also had something like that.
JOHN: he's a lot like you. he IS you, in a way.
JOHN: with what i know now i think he was trying to find out where i came from.
JOHN: (i fell to the earth on a meteor, by the way)
JOHN: but i don't think he was as obsessed about it as you were.

It never grew into anything that could be described as an obsession, he clarified. He had bills to pay and a career to grow. If anything it was more of a pastime, if one that he and only he in the world had the means to pursue. Like how some people tried to learn how to lucid dream—he said he learned a lot from those communities, actually. Finding this house had been an accident in itself, since even in his visions he never managed to pick up where that other self lived. One of many details that always seemed to elude him.

JOHN: what do you remember?
JOHN: of us.

The man went quiet.

Names, he replied. John Egbert. John Crocker. Janes of the two varieties as well. Sometimes his progenitor, sometimes his child. The man spoke of evenings when he would wake up in cold sweat, scrambling for children he never raised. He would pad down the hall and tiptoe into an empty room, half-expecting a kid tucked under the covers, but there never would be. He sleep-baked cakes in strange flavors and designs that would never have occurred to him, that he didn't even like. Then he would stay up eating them all night.

John's fists clenched. Mr. Egbert didn't notice.

He admitted that the dissonance got worse after moving in here eight years ago, but leaving... was not an option he ever considered.

JOHN: ...do you have a family?

Before, John had never questioned the missing second parent in his household. It's not that he didn't ask, but he'd thought the evasiveness was typical single parent stuff. Divorce or something; he didn't pry. Now he knew that there had never been a Mrs. Egbert, of course, but did that extend to this man before him?

No, Mr. Egbert answered simply. The police had found him as a toddler, lost in a shopping mall. An elderly couple adopted him, who died shortly after he came of age. He didn't remember his birth parents, and had no intention of looking for them. As for making his own family, he was unmarried and childless save the ones in his imagination, he said with a hint of mirth.

John didn't know what to say to that.

So this version of his dad had spent his whole life alone, sniffing down the fragments of his predecessor iterations. It was a far cry from the family-loving, overzealous man that brought John up.

Or was it?

He remembered the scribbles he covered his walls with and what Rose proposed about the jesters so long ago. He remembered the safe in the study and the newspaper clippings inside. He remembered thinking that his dad was a career comedian or something ridiculous like that, and how terribly utterly wrong that idea turned out to be.

Perhaps it was time to acknowledge that he knew much less about his father than he once thought.

The man sipped at his water. He seemed to be brimming with unasked questions, but unsure where to begin.

So you're a god? he said.

JOHN: what?
JOHN: oh, yeah. i guess.
JOHN: how do you know that?

His cheeks quirked into a phantom of a smile. He noted that he did read.

Uh, okay. Cryptic. His dad had spent a good amount of time in the Medium, John supposed. He could have picked up some stuff. Jade said her grandpa knew a lot about Sburb too, so was it his turn to get the mysterious guardian advice this time?

The adult said that with all he had seen in his sleep, he could never be sure what was real visions or ordinary made-up dreams. Alien worlds of blue and oil, he recalled. Gods and demons. Chess and castles. Laboratories and steel. He described, without the slightest note of abashment, a woman out of his wildest fantasies, with a pink scarf and the most striking hair.

JOHN: i think all of that was real.
JOHN: basically we played this game called sburb that destroyed the earth.
JOHN: it teleported us into a fantasy world where we fought a bunch of monsters, and I died on a special bed to become god tier.
JOHN: and then because we couldn't beat this really powerful boss we made by prototyping jade's superpowered dog, we had to reboot the whole universe by scratching a giant record disk on dave's planet.
JOHN: you were there too, and, well...
JOHN: jack noir killed you.
JOHN: he is this horrible guy in the game that we turned into the unbeatable boss.
JOHN: but before that you met rose's mom, which i think is the woman you are talking about!

The Scratch, his dad repeated. The dog as in Becquerel, the first guardian?

JOHN: yeah. you know about him?
JOHN: but then when we traveled to the new universe we messed everything up and died for real this time. and now we're here for some reason.
JOHN: or that's the other three's story. i came separately from an earlier point in the timeline.
JOHN: man, i'm not explaining this well. it's all very confusing.

The man agreed.

So what did that mean for them now, he asked? As in, what was John doing here?

JOHN: ...
JOHN: we don't know.
JOHN: to be honest, none of us have any clue what we're doing. :(

What were they even talking about? None of this meant anything, none of it John cared about. It was like they were dancing around the subject, filling in all of the irrelevant details but not ever hitting the core of what they both wanted to get at.

They never were good at talking to each other.

What a joke this was. John had only ever dreamed of a moment like this for half a year, and now that it happened, all he could do was waffle around and talk about things that happened forever ago. It was his dad! But yet it wasn't.

JOHN: um,

He hesitated.

Maybe it wasn't words or explanations he was looking for.

JOHN: can i hug you?

His dad leaned over and put an arm around John, tugging him close and letting the boy rest his head against the older man's shoulder. It was an unfamiliar motion for him, for a man that had never let anyone this close for many many years, but it fit like nothing else did.

John wrapped his arms around the chest of the ironed button-up shirt. It was an awkward fit. He wasn't ten anymore, and he had to squish himself down to reach all the way around, and it was a little sweaty and gross.

It was perfect.

JOHN: you died.
JOHN: you DIED.

He sniffled.

JOHN: i'm sorry.
JOHN: i know you're not the same person.
JOHN: you don't even know me that well.

He could try, the older man said, quiet and soft. He wasn't his dad. But he could try. If John wanted, he would always have a home here.

John's words caught in his throat. He hugged his dad tighter, fighting down tears.

JOHN: th
JOHN: thank you.

The rooms would have to be cleaned up, he added. They weren't entirely habitable in their current state.

JOHN: it's... it's fine.

He patted the John's shoulder as the kid swallowed sobs. His other friends as well, he noted. He approved of them from what bits and pieces he remembered. Good kids. Though, he chuckled, if they were bringing twelve more rowdy teenagers back, they might need to figure out some more robust accommodation than this dull middle-class home.

JOHN: heh.
JOHN: they are.
JOHN: you'll love them.

His brain stuttered.

JOHN: wait.
JOHN: sorry, twelve?

The father was confused. The troll kids? Were they not real as well?

The son bounced to his feet, slipping through the limbs of his dad like a gust of wind. It was like a switch had flicked inside him.

JOHN: you know about the trolls?
JOHN: have you seen them? :O

Did he mean the troll pantheon? Or trolls in general?

JOHN: trolls in general??

The man didn't quite understand. Were there no trolls in the other universe, he questioned?

JOHN: no!!!! they're from another universe!

Okay, he said, stumped. He said that in this world, at least, the aliens came from space. Did they know the Alternian pantheon, then?

John wasn't paying attention. His mind was whirling with this new information. They had thought that the trolls couldn't be here because they were from a different universe, but if Alternia was in this universe—the others needed to know. He reached for a computer, but stopped himself because this was news that had to be delivered in person, dammit! Where were they?

JOHN: i have to go!
JOHN: i'll be back.

Before the dad could ask for elaboration the boy was already a gust of wind, sweeping under the window and out off into the darkening sky, leaving a confused man alone in an empty house.

Chapter Text

"This is our meteor," you announce, snapping the two from their heated, flailing dialogue.

"Dave! Rose!" John exclaims, bouncing on his feet. Jade looks considerably less enthused as she turns to you. "There are trolls here!"

Your speech on cosmic improbability and narrative convenience derails from its prepared tracks in a comical screeching noise and careens off into the abyss below, snapping and splintering against the rock walls before catastrophic engine failure consumes the metaphorical carriage in a roiling fireball of death.

"What?" spills from your mouth.

"Where are they?" Rose demands.

John waves his hands. "No, I don't mean our trolls are here specifically—though they might be!—I mean their species exists in this universe."

"Did your dad tell you that?" you say, scrambling to pick your thoughts back together.

Trolls. Even if you can't get in touch with the others, the fact that there are trolls around at all means they might be here. On Earth. Or on their creepy bug planet, you'll take that if you have to. It's not like it makes much of a difference with Jade.

"Yeah! They're public and I think they've been around for a long time. There's trolls on Earth right now! They brought space ships!"

"Did we fuse with their universe?" Rose mutters. "Is it the Beforan Empire or the Alternian Empire?"

"I... don't know?" John frowns.

"Alternian," Jade affirms grimly. "The reigning Empress is the Condesce."

A sick feeling lurches in your gut.

"The Condesce?" you say. "Is she... is she evil alien Betty Crocker from the alphaverse timeline back again, or is this a copy of the original troll universe one?"

Jade's less than unbridled joy at the news suddenly makes a lot more sense now. Let's not talk about the suckiness of being mind-controlled; if your strongest player gets grimbarked again, that puts an unstoppable weapon in the Condesce's hand. An omnipotent dog demoness set loose on an unsuspecting universe, this time boasting a population proudly past the double digits... but dammit, is it bad that you can't bring yourself to care about inadvertently fucking over the galaxy right now?

No, apocalypses are a dime a dozen in this game; the immediate, pressing catastrophe is that without a hopesploding Jake English or ancient psychics back from the grave, the Witch of Space would wipe the floor with your magic auto-cleansing asses. You, the four of you specifically, will be enjoying front row seats to Everything Is Fucked 2: The Sequel. It would take her a thought to dunk you in the center of the sun, and even if it doesn't permakill you, she can keep doing it as many times as she wants until the stars burn out.

Fuck, even taking a step back from the worst-case scenario and assuming nobody gets mind-controlled, having the ominous shadow of an evil alien empire lurking in the background is—at the barest minimum—a problem.

"How long has she been in power?" Rose pushes on.

John shrugs, offering, "Maybe we can look it up? You think our timelines might not be aligned?"

"Do we have Internet here?" you point out.

"We get a connection anywhere," Jade reminds you.

"Sure, but Sburb connected us to our dead Earth's Internet," you argue, aware that you're distracting from the topic. But this has been bugging you. "Like, an archivial snapshot of the Internet at the precise moment of the reckoning, at least. Wouldn't using the game's inexplicable omniconnection just load pages from dead Earth Wikipedia instead of this bizarro fusion universe's?"

"You know-" Jade starts, but Rose is talking at the same time.

"'Snapshot' isn't exactly true. The web was fully functional, just static content-wise because of the unfortunate eradication of humanity. I would guess that upon our entry, the pages were cloned over to and subsequently served from whatever computational substrate simultaneously underpins the game layer of Sburb."

"But didn't Midnight Crew kept updating?" John frowns.

"Oh," you snort. "About that, you know that weird orange guy that keeps-"

"Guys!" Jade huffs. You look over to find the girl flicking through the holographic screens beaming from her earmuffs. "We're connected to this world's Internet. Wiki says it's been the same Empress for more than a million years."

You... don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. Good, you suppose, because if she only popped up a few months ago and took power then that's definitely the superfish version, so now there's a chance that she's the lame one?

"Does it say if she's anywhere remotely near Earth right now?" you press.

"She's at..." she brings up a 3D map of the galaxy and zooms. "She's on the Sagittarius Arm-" Her face pinches up in a blend of disbelief and disgust. "-overseeing the genocide of the member species of the B617 Coalition? Please tell me that isn't... oh fuck."

You exhale. "Well, she can stay there as far as I'm concerned. Thank Troll Jegus for small mercies."

Jade sends you an irritated glare as she drags the links into new tabs.

"Hey, obviously its sucks that species are being extinctified out there, but there's nothing we can do about that yet," you defend, crossing your arms. You've heard enough horror stories from Karkat that run-of-the-mill war crimes barely faze you any more. "Her Imperious Clownfucker is going down, no question about that, but we can't do that if evil inverted-palette Jade is busy concocting novel and imaginative ways to fuck us all into next session. Half a galaxy away and blissfully ignorant of our existence is exactly how I like her."

"Okay, but..." Jade grumbles, flicking to another page. Her lips slide back in a grimace to reveal pointed canines as she tangles fingers in her hair.

Ah, she's found the disemboweling transmaterializer.

"What the fuck? Are trolls okay with this? How does it work—no, I don't even want to know. What horrible person would think of..."

You open your mouth for another snappy comeback, but Rose puts a warning hand on your shoulder. When you look back at Jade, you finally register that she isn't even looking at her screens anymore. Her shoulders are drawn uncomfortably tense, untrimmed nails digging grooves into bulletproof palms. She's more bothered about this than you expected.

"I didn't know it was real," Jade mutters.

What is she talking ab...

Oh.

Jade told you herself that it weren't only orders she was receiving the Condesce: the batterwitch was streaming critical intelligence straight into her head. What else did they download into her brain? With how much the empress of an immortal empire must have seen over her horrific reign... how much is slowly trickling back in drips even now?

"No. No, you're right. We need the time to prepare," Jade swallows, shutting her screens away. When her eyes look up to you, they're hard. "But we're taking her down if it's the last thing we do."

The way she says it, the conviction in her voice—this is personal.

"Can we be sure we're safe even if she's away?" asks John. "You said the Condesce grabbed control of you all the way from Derse, so she must have a pretty crazy range."

"The incipisphere is less than an AU wide," Jade disagrees. Catching John's blank look, she explains, "About eight light minutes, barely anything on the galactic scale. The Condesce is fifteen thousand light years away."

John looks unconvinced. "Does it matter? Vriska and Tavros could use their powers from a whole other universe," he points out.

"They were doing it through their Trollian viewports," Rose notes. "Those act on a certain level like metaphysical windows, similar to equivalents in the game. Besides, the fractal topology of the Furthest Ring means that any two points can be connected in arbitrary time and distance if you find the right path. For the purpose of psychic powers, all locations in paradox space can be considered functionally adjacent beyond the defined buffers of stabilized bubbles."

You frown. "Well, what if the Condesce has a viewport like that?"

"Even if she has something like that, it would be as dead as all of this was before we powered it up." Rose answers. She's equipped her own computer glasses while you weren't looking and is probably deep in the history books now. "And either way I don't think she does. Not publicly, at least."

"We're going to fight her at some point," Jade reiterates, drawing herself up from the cylinder of mutated chess fetus she was resting on. "So in the long term I still need some kind of defense against her powers! We can't let what happened last time happen again!"

"Does she still have those powers?" you ask. "Were those Lord English powers or troll powers? A shot of each with a sprinkle of Sburb bullshit to taste? Did we establish which Condesce we're even dealing with here?"

"Even if the Condesce doesn't have those powers, there are other psychics, some of them even on Earth," Jade points out.

"And our trolls might be on Alternia," John adds in. "None of them can fly or teleport, except Vriska! So we might have to mount a rescue mission to a whole planet full of psychics soon."

You lift your hands in surrender. "Hey, not objecting, just laying out the facts." you clarify. "Tinfoil hats are one hundred percent top priority, no argument about that. And equivalents for the rest of us if we can afford it. Three percent of the troll population being able to put us to sleep with some handwavey mind voodoo is a gaping hole in our strategy."

"But how?" John asks. "If it's that easy, wouldn't everyone be doing it already?"

Oh, is he in for a surprise.

...

Rose, that's your cue.

You glance at your ectobiological sister.

This is when she's supposed to leap in at the rare chance to exposit to her black heart's content, but she isn't saying anything. You peer closer to realize that she's lost in la-la land—and by la-la land, you mean the vast and wonderful realm of the World Wide Web. Her pupils are darting over the glass of the interface, oblivious to the rest of the world.

You wave a hand in front of her computer glasses and prompt, "Hey."

The light of the retinal projector blinks out and her gaze snaps to you.

"Yes. One crisis at a time," Rose says, politely ignoring the weird looks from everyone like she didn't just ditch the conversation to go web surfing. "I believe we need to acquire psychic shielding?"

"Yeah, how are we doing that?" John helpfully repeats his question.

The seer pins John with an appraising look.

"John, how much grist do you have?" she muses.

A few minutes of confused direction-giving involving the rampant abuse of the words "up", "down", "left", "right" and a number of creatively prefixed variants later, Jade manages to teleport you into what used to be your common room. From there, you and Rose lead the newly reassembled squad through the winding corridors and transportalizer chains of the meteor in trail of the so far elusive white whale of this expedition: a functional alchemiter.

While you play navigator, the others finally get around to addressing the less exciting half of this shocking revelation x2 combo.

"This is where you lived?" John mutters. "It's so..."

"Depressing, yeah," I fill in, casting a glance at the caved-in floor that drops into another abyssal stairwell. "Jade already told us that."

Rose grimaces at the descriptor. It was one thing to be uncharitable when it was only a veilfortress, but it's less easy to shrug off now that you know it's the particular one you call home.

"It was significantly less destroyed the last time we were here," she defends softly. "And, no offense, but you are Prospit dreamers. Us honorary Dersites have a stronger tolerance to drab and ominous architecture."

"What I'm confused about is how this is here," the other girl says. "A generic facility could come from any session, past or future, but if your meteor specifically is here, then does that mean this is Jake and the others' Earth?"

"Is that where it went?" you wonder aloud. "I don't think you mentioned that part. Where'd that Earth go anyway?"

Your flight stutters as space shudders behind you, bringing you to a reflexive halt. You can feel it under your skin, the shape of reality tangibly distending all around Jade as her captchalogue deck disgorges something impossibly substantial into physical space. As you spin around, the sight steals your breath away.

It looks tiny in her hand, but the planet would be hard to mistake even without the context. The blue marble spins at a glacial pace on a precessing axis, its surface streaked with vapor white.

Earth.

"Gee, of course you have planet fucking Earth casually captchalogued in your Agricola modus," you sigh.

"I forgot about it!" Jade admits with a chuckle. Ha. Silly old Jade, always misplacing those celestial bodies.

"Is the meteor still on there?" Rose questions.

Jade nods and pockets the thing in a snap of lime green. "It is. Exactly where I crashed it. I think I see what you're saying."

"You think this planet is eventually going back in time to become the one we're standing on," John hums, remarkably nonplussed by the planet-sized power flex. He saw enough of this in the time he spent with his Jade on the ship, you suppose. "I wonder why nobody found out about a whole human civilization that came before us, then. Maybe only the meteor gets transplanted, and not the whole Earth? But why?"

Rose frowns. That's a "you're revulsively wrong but I'm too done to explain" look; you've seen directed at you a hundred times.

"Who says they didn't find out?" you point out. "Our Earth had ancient frog temples and dead prehistoric civilizations and nobody gave a fuck."

"I don't think this is Alpha Earth, actually," Rose says. "Human history is too closely matched to our original timeline for this to be a do-over world, even taking into account the divergences. But it does make it feasible that our paths will some day cross with whatever phenomenon created this worlds."

She's dodging the subject, you realize. She's deflecting from something, whatever she found in those few minutes on her glasses that distracted her so muchg. For such a deadpan sarcasteur, she's remarkably bad at actual bluffing. You haven't forgotten the "one crisis at a time" line either. What does she know?

But there isn't any time to file an FOIA request because as soon as you turn the corner, Rose zooms ahead, taking the lead.

"We're here," she announces, touching her feet to the floor and striding forward.

Oh hell, she's right. There it is at the end of the room, an unassuming transportalizer that used to be framed in red chalk. You still see traces of a grimy, brown dust even now, relics of a time simultaneously an eternity and only hours ago. This is it. Despite the gouges marring its surface plate—those have always been there, you blame Gamzee—the machine looks operational.

By a stroke of luck this is even a sector where the local down happens to be aligned to Earth's gravity, which means there's a better chance what awaits you on the other side hasn't been through a washing machine. It's promising, and maybe it's precisely because of that you're afraid to get your hopes up. It's almost as if you were meant to find and use this, an olive branch extended by paradox space after years of shitting on your hopes and dreams, and one might think that's a good thing, but Sburb excels at throwing you for a loop whenever you think you have something figured out. Nothing ever goes smoothly in your lives.

But speculation is pointless. The way in is right here and, well, there's only one way to find out.

Here goes nothing.

The four of you step in, and one by one, white portal fire consumes you.

It feels like an eternity as the semicorporeal in-between of material dis- and reassembly takes its course, but when your vision finally clears, a sigh of palpable relief escapes your lungs.

"Score," you quietly cheer to yourself.

Next to you, you hear John "oooh" softly and Jade rise into the air as they feast their eyes on the capstone attraction of your grand meteor tour.

You're not entirely certain the Prospitian battleship even had on-board alchemiters, but even if there was one buried in the engine rooms, Jade brought all your houses with them, complete with all your late-game deployables modded to high heaven. They wouldn't have seen any of this old-school shit, which explains them reacting like a country bumpkin stepping off the bus at The Big City™ for the first time.

The thing is that Carapacian alchemiters are radically different from the ones deployed by Sburb. Royal Prospitian engineers would jaywalk to get their hands on your machines, because what takes them entire mountains of precise engineering to achieve, Sburb packs into a few cubic yards of pure distilled bullshit. Player alchemiters are to Carapacian alchemy as sci-fi replicators are to the factories of real life—namely, as if James Cameron hired a team of consultants to craft a realistic post-scarcity future, sunk millions of dollars into deliberate research, and then took the outcome, chucked all the numbers out the window, and fucked physics in the ass with the laminated card of artistic license manifest.

What you're saying, when it comes down to it, is that Carapacian alchemy is CGI steampunk as fuck.

Before you towers a behemoth of alchemical machinery from floor to distant overhanging ceiling, packed with distillifiers and refractionators and equivalence forges and optothermic gristalizers. Industrial pipework spills from its dizzying array of ports to overrun the massive cavern around you, chugging a mechanical leviathan's fill from gargantuan vats of tar, amber and mercury. Hoppers of powdered shale feed into churners and decant in caulk suspensions, recomplexing with sulfur slurries and iodine dilutants into esoteric intermediates too catastrophically unstable to stock in bulk cache.

Yet underneath the glorious symphony of engineered perfection, there's a far more ominous whisper of wrong.

The others can hear it too as they exchange dubious looks. Rose takes a step towards the operator's deck. They echo through the room, pumps rattling, ducts groaning, rusty valves screaming in protest. It's been thousands of years, maybe more, since this infernal contraption was last roused from its slumber. There's congealed fluid clogging the pipelines, ancient off-gases trapped in the vents, and god knows what other agents of entropy making their homes in the metallic guts of a machine god.

Seconds pass, automated startup routines falling back on failsafe after failsafe. You keep expecting the whole thing to fall apart any second, but somehow, against astronomical odds, the crime against science holds together. One by one, pressures recover and cylinders unblock, lights on the giant control panel tip from red to green with each satisfied thunk, and—

Ow

.

You come back on fire.

You panic and scream, batting at your burning clothes before remembering that you can change them and fuck your new clothes are on fire too. Where's the water-

water1

water2

water3

You're spinning through the air, drenched from head to toe and not on fire anymore, but superheated smoke is still in your lungs, thick and scalding. Your arm sizzles against something hot and you squawk, jerking away only to realize it's just cable from the ceiling.

Focus. Focus.

You draw yourself together and, with incalculable force of will, stop.

Try this again: what the fuck just happened?

As you turn around from your flying vantage point, taking in the room, you tack an addendum to your earlier status report. You're not on fire any more, yes.

Everything else is.

The chamber is in flames, reagents and grist spilling and burning everywhere. Most of the process equipment lies in smithereens. It's like Jack Noir took a relaxing vacation in here. The core machinery block stands, but only ostensibly—huge chunks have been ripped out you presume by explosion, leaving mangled pipe sections and crushed vessels sluicing with unspeakable fluids, a lot of it also on fire. You're starting to sense a running theme here.

Behind the chaos, you hear the struts and crippled scaffolds of the structure groaning under the tipping weight of the giant distillation columns.

You're on a clock.

Looking closer, most of the inferno seems to be roaring from the shattered floor of the facility. Thick tar, oil and acrid sulfur slick everything, coating and melting and burning. It was the storage containers, you realize. Most of them are riddled with shrapnel holes and spewing their gristly contents all over, but more notably the pressurized gas tanks have been straight-up blown apart from within, what leftover scraps unrecognizable and flash-molten into their neighbors.

It must have been a chain reaction. One of them exploded, and the reaction cascaded through the system, taking everything out with it.

But forensics isn't the priority right now. You need to get out of here stat. You scan the room and your heart soars as you glimpse John at the center of the conflagration, his arms raised to two sides, pushing back the onslaught with the hurricane forces whipping around him. Squinting, next to him in the eye of the tornado you locate Rose and Jade, their still frames almost charred beyond recognition.

Charred, but evidently not dead.

This is a problem.

Basic deduction indicates the explosion took you out quickly, and maybe John too, but for whatever reason, Rose and Jade missed the memo. It's not that any of you are in real danger because "occupational safety hazard" is possibly the lamest way for a god to go, but two people half-dead leaves everyone temporarily immobilized.

"Dave!" you hear John shout through the drowning crackle of fire. "Can you do something? I don't want to bring the whole place down!"

You steel your breath and hurl yourself through the rising flames, stumbling to a stop the moment you breach John's bubble of safety. The smell of burning flesh assaulting your nose makes a strong case for vacating your stomach. Yet as overcooked these two are, you can see their flesh knitting together as their absurd regeneration fights back the damage. Their health isn't going fast enough, not in either direction.

Sorry, Jade. Duty calls.

Your sword unsheathes in a slick motion and you plunge it through her chest as you do your best not to think about shish kebab. The contents of her health vial plummet to zero, past the glass neck and spin off into the metaphysical aether like miniature gelatinous ballistic missile.

Her body shimmers. Gravity lifts, her torso jerking upwards, you count one, two, three seconds...

A restored Jade drops to the floor in a crouch, snapping to attention in an instant.

"Get us out of here!" you yell over a deafening explosion rocking out from the back. The damage is spreading. This place isn't going to last long.

Her eyes dart around, flashing green. She doesn't waste time on theatrics.

Green engulfs you.

"Fuck!" Jade swears. "Fuck fuck fuck!"

The witch paces in the grass as you and Rose watch from the shade of the canopy. John is sitting above in a branch, frowning at the seething girl.

Getting Rose resurrected was simple enough, but with that whole sector of the meteor burning down, the alchemiter plan is a bust. Even the data Jade was trying to pull off the servers is going to be a chore to get to now—the smoke has had enough time to claim the entire Delta Block through the ventilation system, and Sburb seems to have decided that smoke inhalation counts as hazard damage despite the vacuum of outer space being perfectly safe to breathe. Figures.

"There might be another alchemiter down there," you suggest, though you're not holding out much hope yourself. You only ever found the one in all three years you lived there.

"I know!" Jade snaps. "But it's just so frustrating that paradox space has to make! everything! so! difficult!"

She stomps her feet as she growls the words, searing browned footprints into the abused vegetation. The flares of energy spook the birds off the nearby trees, sending them flapping off as they squawk birdy insults at her.

"There are other meteors," Rose adds. Wait, there are? "They'll be less convenient to gain access to, though."

Before you can tell her to take a communication course and maybe clarify all the cryptic hints she's been dropping this whole time because what the hell is up with that, John drops out of the trees.

"Don't we already have one, though?" he asks, bemused.

Look. You are starting to get tired of people knowing things before you do and refusing to share their information in a concise and nonstupid way. If Jade begins rambling about mystic advice from her devilbeast communion, you are going to start strangling yourself.

"The meteor, I mean?" John elaborates awkwardly as you give him a blank look. "Isn't the one we exploded the future version? We still have the original, on the Earth Jade has captchalogued. Is there a reason we can't just use that?"

...Huh.

Jade's mouth opens an inch. She pauses.

"Um."

Take two on this ridiculous project.

As Jade shrinks you down into the pocket Earth, a memory comes back to her. She says that evil her deliberately landed the meteor with the production axis of the facility vertical and softened the impact to keep the cherub timeline viable, which must by why the alchemiter you found was the right way up, and also intact enough to give not violently exploding a good shot before immediately violently exploding. It's a little suspicious to you that tectonic movement or geological changes didn't tip the whole structure over the years, but you deign to not question it.

If she and Rose are right that the other alchemiter failed from age, then this one should hopefully do the job.

In the upright sector of the meteor, it's mostly the lights and things not bolted down that took the brunt of the damage. Combined with the fact that in this version the disaster only literally just happened, the place feels eerily... fresh. The other meteor was dead and lifeless, but this younger one is still struggling through its dying throes. As you shuffle through the wrecked corridors, there's glass tinkling from ceiling lights and shattered windows, glitching screens flickering in the darkness... it's like your evil AI clone is gonna come out and say boo any second.

Once you transportalize into the alchemiter chamber Rose takes the lead, vaulting over the printing array to helm the control deck before the default startup sequence makes anything blow up again. The computers light up at her touch, scrolling with error text and warnings, but her face is one of measured distaste, not panic. You're still good.

While John and Jade poke around the room, you wander to the front, watching Rose work from below the control platform.

"Is this a totem lathe?" Jade mutters, reaching into the yawning jaws of a holographic typewriter and grazing the person-sized cube of cruxite loaded within.

"Careful with the equipment," Rose calls out, already set to work yanking levers. "We don't have any Horusses to field for emergency repairs this time around."

Machines rev up around the room with distressing groans that you hope are good noises.

Jade retracts her fingers. "So we're here for a solution to the mind control problem, right? What do you have?"

Oh, right. You nearly forgot about that, what with all the being lit on fire and dying. Since it seems that Rose isn't sparing the attention span to answer, you take point on the explanation. Drumming your fingers on the metal rail, you consider how to approach this.

"Dream bubbles copy real places, right?" you start. "It's not that hard to find cool stuff in them. Areas of our planets we never explored, and yeah, loot."

A lot of the trolls' stuff was actually better than yours since their equipment was scaled for a 12-prototyped boss. None of it you got to actually make, though, because Rose is a miserable penny-pincher.

"One of our accidental discoveries was psychic-blocking tinfoil. I don't remember where we found it-"

"Pink moon of Alternia."

"-but if it works as advertised, we're off to a good start. You can't bring things out of the bubbles, obviously, but I snapped a ghost image of it, so all I had to do was take it to the next laserbeam doohickey we found and copy the CAPTCHA code off it."

Jade frowns at you.

"Sorry—the thing, you say it's psychic-blocking tinfoil?"

"Yeah," you shrug. What can you say? Sburb has its sense of humor. An awful one that mostly involves your friends dying, but it exists.

"Why didn't you make it, then?" John asks. "It sounds pretty useful, and even in the bubbles there are some unfriendly psychics skulking around. In fact it seems pretty stupid to not make one right away. Then when Jade became grimbark you could have... thrown it at her, maybe? Then maybe you would have avoided all of the terrible stuff that happened."

You divert your attention from the conversation and turn deckwards, because whatever Rose is doing seems to be working. The moment she twists a gray dial all the way to the right, something clinks, and the last of the status lights along the top of the monitor array flips green. Every screen on deck goes black all at once, sucking the light out of the room.

"Here we go," she mutters, placing a hand against the big startup button.

She pushes.

The central monitor lights with the symbol of the Black King's crown, followed by the bass tones of the dark kingdom's anthem.

From her relieved sigh, you take that as a success.

Rose answers the question as she keeps an eye on the gauges. "Keep in mind, John, that not all of us are as obscenely privileged with untold gristlean riches, able to be lavished on every passing fancy. While we were warned of the Condesce's presence as an agent of Lord English, we never appreciated the extent of her species' powers she unlocked, nor Jade's susceptibility to trolls' animal communion. Simply put, we had other things to make."

"Plus, it's a juju," you point out.

"Ju ju?" John asks.

"A unique item. When you alchemize it it disappears from wherever it was before, so you can't have more than one magic crowbar or elf tear icicle or whatnot at any given time. For whatever metric of time Sburb decides to fuck you over with today. So if we made a psychic shield, who gets the honor of playing Alex Jones? Spontaneous narcolepsy isn't that bad, so not me and Rose. Karkat's a psychic wimp so he needs it most, but Kanaya's more dangerous by virtue of being a chainsaw supervampire, and Terezi's our best intelligence asset next to Rose."

You pause, resting a finger on your chin.

"Well, she was, before she got clown-suckered into the Faygo candy van by sweet promises of gross stinky hateboinking. Then again Rose's approval ratings tanked after she went full throttle on the booze, so maybe it all balances out? Jegus fuck, you guys really did a great job turning this meteor into a slow motion train wreck. It's a miracle Gamzee didn't take the chance to kill everyone."

Rose winces.

"I suppose I deserve that," she says. Ah, fuck. You weren't trying to call her out. This really isn't a topic you want to break into here and now.

Rose apparently shares your opinion, because she asks tersely, "Dave, do you have the code?"

"On it."

You flush your tangle of confused musings down a mental toilet. Enough woolgathering, you have work to do.

You deconvolute your modus polygram and redeal your active deck from your phonebook fetch modus. The fetch syntax reconfiguring at the back of your mind still sends a shiver down your spine after so long, but you swallow the discomfort and leaf through the index, locating the page you want after a long minute of absolutely riveting directory trawling. While you're at it, you cross-shuffle a few bits and bobs into your normal indexed hashmap, just in case. You never know when a spike-shooting pneumatic vacuumbrella might come in handy.

Like, you know, when it's raining.

"sNP5Yb1k", you pronounce, tasting the characters slide off your tongue.

Rose carefully pecks the code into the archaic keyboard as the rest of you crowd around. You lick your lips. The eight-character prompt vanishes once filled, replaced by a loading bar that ticks up at an agonizing snail pace. The alchemical machinery goes silent around you, awaiting command.

It takes half a minute for the code to finish parsing. The display lights up.

        17 / 100,000,000 PHERNALIAC
61,116,532 /  50,000,000 MERCURY
    64,132 /   7,000,000 CHROMATE
    13,162 /   1,000,000 GERMANIUM 
         0 /       1,750 PYXITE    

"I think I remember pyxite—that's the flashy gems. What's phernalium?" John asks. "We need a lot of it."

"Phernaliac is just what they call build grist," Rose answers, leaning back as she examines the cost breakdown. "Or, I should say, their alchemical substitute that achieves the same effect which the action of build grist predicates on."

"I thought build grist was a gaming abstraction," John muses. "Like XP points, or gel viscosity. Actually, no one told me that alchemy was, you know... real, either? I thought it was just Sburb's name for its weird crafting system."

"Grists are abstractions," she confirms. "But the classes has analogous physical meaning. Compare it to how they talk of 'acid' in popular culture and media: are we referring to sulfuric acid? Hydrochloric acid? Acetic acid? The chemist or game designer abstracts it all away under one label for the layperson, because for most purposes the distinction is principally academic. Similarly, Sburb spares players the minutiae of balancing alchemical reagents and profiling minutiae. Constitutional coalescents are 'build grist', tarrying negasolvents are 'tar', et cetera."

"So is alchemy is real?" John doubts. "As in a proper science? But how can alchemy and chemistry be real at the same time? Is chemistry real?"

Rose shrugs.

"Is anything real? Like everything in Sburb, the design of the alchemy mechanic—and yes, it is clearly designed—is such as to be readily accessible to the casual player, only for a shocking amount of underlying complexity to come to light when you dig deep into the lore. True, effects are reproducible with the right types of exotic matter at hand. Yet is it a true science if the entire field was, more likely than not, retrofitted into reality for the express purpose of what essentially amounts to flavor text? Can it even be said to be 'true' physics, or is it simply... modded reality? An optional module?"

John's brow furrows. Okay, you need to cut this epistemological debate before it unfolds into another unstoppable vehicle of topical derailment.

"Cancel, abort, get off your armchairs, philosophy IKEA is shutting down for the night," you declare loudly, folding your arms. "Look, this is just a rehash of the 'is magic real' crap all over again. I'll tell you what nobody in the short and illustrious lifetime of our gasping, inbred cancer-universe has ever said: 'You know what this amphibious creation myth bullshit really needs? More crackpot science.'"

"Well, I think my granddad left me some books on alchemy, though I didn't really read them," Jade volunteers. "But he didn't say anything about magic, so I don't think that's the right comparison. Maybe-"

"No," you state flatly. "No lore debates."

The canine girl's lips twitch in a smile as she continues heedless. "I have the book in my sylladex somewhere."

"No," you emphasize. "Bad Jade. No treats for you toight."

Wait, shit. Is saying that racist? Speciesist? Spriteist? What's the PC protocol for deathsprite petfusions from three years ago? Her mouth flattens, but she doesn't look angry—maybe Davesprite already burned them out on the dog jokes?

Wow you suck. Tact, Dave. Something to consider. Also, not being an insensitive jackass about your friends' potentially traumatizing involuntary body modifications?

Rose moves on before you can stick your foot any deeper in your mouth.

"Chromate and germanium we had respectable stocks of; less now since Terezi was the one holding most of the former. Pyxite was the principal bottleneck. We had a little less than two thousand between the five of us, not counting Gamzee, and with just me and Dave we don't come to half of that figure. However, if I'm correct in my understanding of the grist gutter and grist limits, John should be overflowing with rare grist."

What Rose means is that since grist limits scale exponentially through the god tiers, John's head start on godhood would have let him drain most of your shared gutter before the rest of you got your cut.

"I do have quite a lot," he agrees. "But I think most of that was just lots of cheap rubbish grist from all the minor underlings that were caught in my tornados, not so much the higher tiers. I have... eight thousand pyxite."

You whistle appreciatively. "Fuck yeah. Cough up. Hey, if we're going on an alchemy binge with John's seized property, I've got a list of shit-"

"Keep in mind that we don't know how long before we find another way to get grist, if ever," Rose interrupts. "Despite this windfall, our resource situation is if anything even direr than it was on the meteor. This particular expense is only justified by the confirmation of Jade's psychic weakness."

Dammit.

"Some day, Rose, you'll be brought to justice for your crimes against fun," you grumble.

"Okay, so what do I do?" John asks. He frowns. "Do I have to... physically fill the tanks with all this stuff? How do I get it out of my grist cache?"

Rose sighs.

"There a badge that lets you do that," Jade remembers. "Oh no, I don't know if you have that yet if you were only a year into the trip..."

It takes a while before you manage to get anything done.

Jade equips the crumpled cone of tin foil and shakes her head, testing that it doesn't fall off.

"How do I look?" she asks.

You eye her skeptically.

...Yeah.

The silvery accessory on top the girl's forest of untamed hair looks like she pilfered a party hat from the birthday party of a girl half her age. With her hood down and the outline of her dog ears poking little dents out from where they're crammed under the foil, and adding to that how Jade's face looks like Bec shit in her cereal... the only reason you're not in hysterics is that Jade might beat you up.

By the poorly contained snickers next to you, John is struggling to scrape together that much restraint.

"On one hand, every step you takes outs yourself as a conspiracy theorist with a five-dimensional fashion sense beyond the conception of mortal men," you allow. "On the other, at least you don't look like you're permanently cosplaying your fursona anymore, so... I guess it's a win?"

"Hey, Rose. Spill."

"...spill...? Oh, yes. I found our Wikipedia articles."

Chapter Text

"I don't know if I ought to be offended," you mutter.

"If popular theory regarding subliminal compensation is to be trusted, they've already been fairly generous with their chisels."

You stand in the West Hall of the National Museum of Classics and Anthropology, contemplating a twenty-foot statue of weathered marble. It looks like one of the classic Greek ones that get all the chicks at fancy art parties, but you don't know, you're not a statue expert. What you do know is that contrary to the description card at the foot of the sculpture, a presumable ten thousand years of cultural Telephone hasn't done the verisimilitude of this artistic rendition any favors. This is a disgrace. It's an unforgivable insult to your character.

"I maintain that my dick isn't that small," you say. "And why am I blind? I'm not blind. Am I going to go blind?"

"I think that's your shades," Jade suggests. "The artist must have took some liberties with it. I guess they weren't invented yet when this was made?"

The chiseled figure towering over you is stark naked but for a sweeping cloak, frozen dramatically mid-billow. One arm is swept to a side, the other hand rested on the pommel of a Caledfwlch mounted deep in its engraved stone pedestal. Ironically, the strange jutting form of your stupid egg sword is the one thing they managed to accurately reproduce. Its eyes are cavernous sockets, bleeding slick liquid upwards over your forehead, and you have a feeling that had the artist put color to their work, those antigravity dribbles wouldn't be red.

Antonio Canova (b. 1781)
The Knight on the Precipice, 1478
Marble

The Knight beholds the sealed Caledfwlch. The nonchalance of his stance strikes a fierce juxtaposition with the exaggerated tension in his neck and the clenched fist, alluding to the eternal clash of ego and fatalism archetypical of the Sburbist hero. This version of the original Neoclassical sculpture was commissioned by John Russell, the 6th Duke of Bedford.

"Hey, it's better than the myths the consorts made up about us," says John. "Most of them can't seem to make up their minds if we're really exotic pink salamanders or some kind of furry talking monkey beast!"

Rose coughs. "Sorry to break the news, John, but we have those here too."

"What?"

Jade answers for her. "Pieces of our lands have made it here to Earth. I think the reason the ancients started worshipping us in the first place is because they kept digging consort structures out of the ground! This says most of the legends are adapted from their stories."

She's skimming the leaflet you picked up at the front door. After Rose dropped the news, you spent quite a bit of time at first floating around the musty alchemitorium chamber on your respective computational gizmos, deep-diving through page after encyclopedia page of jargon pudding, but then the three of you not pathologically enamored with mind-numbing academic prose realized that you don't have to. With Jade's awesome powers, you can just zap wherever you want to check out in person the divine legacy you apparently left on this planet.

This divine legacy, it turns out, involves a whole lot of involuntary public indecency by artistic proxy.

You sigh.

"This has to be a joke, right?" you groan. "I mean obviously it's real, but there has to be some higher being trolling us right now. Some ass-ugly cherub kid giggling to himself as he scribbles this bullshit in crayon while drinking glitter or some shit. I didn't precipitate a global apocalypse to be put in a museum giggled at by preteen girls that haven't seen a dick before."

"What, don't you like the attention?" John snorts.

"Your Pesterchum ramblings do fantasize a lot about orphans falling over themselves to lick your boots and the like," Rose chuckles. "Surely century-long wars waged in your honor is a strong step towards the vaunted godhead status."

"Don't pretend you're not flattered, Dave," Jade says.

You don't bother rebutting. Sure, you're playing up your irritation for effect, but it doesn't mean you're that happy with this.

You'll admit it; you like attention. It's a character flaw. You're not going to complain about everyone knowing you, even as a crusty forgotten god from the beforetimes. Maybe 13-year-old Dave would have been tickled silly at having his statue in a museum. Maybe even the you today, if a genie popped up and offered to write you into history as a badass sky daddy that rained death on your followers' enemies, would take it over nothing.

But this isn't that. The marble visage smirking down on you isn't titled "Badass Sky Daddy Dave Strider", it's titled "Knight of Time". It's not you, it's your game character. The time-bending, pimpslaying thing that Sburb wants you to be. It's hard to draw satisfaction from a homage to something you never wanted to be. It feels fake. Hollow.

"This means it's going to be easier if or when we go public, though!" Jade chirps. "They already know who we are!"

"But we aren't really these gods," John points out. "They're based off us, but we didn't..." he flips through his mythology brochure. "...flood the plains of Tigris to punish the wicked infidels, or... you know."

"Even canonical material recovered from the fallen pieces of the Medium isn't accurate either, as you said before," Rose mentions. "We only spent one day in our entire session. So much of this is pure fabrication and unmet prophecy."

"Why are our lands here?" you question. "It doesn't make sense if this is some kind of bubble construct. They don't blend that way. Someone or something must have put them here, but why?"

"Transportalizers," John muses. "Maybe we're meant to use the transportalizers to return to the Medium. If one end came to Earth and the other end is still there, would they still work?"

"Possible," Rose allows. "A high-powered transmaterializer may be a better bet."

"Do we really have to?" you groan.

This is what you were talking about. This entire god story is so deeply entrenched in lore that it has to be a front for a quest prompt. It's Sburb's military tribunal subpoenaing you for dereliction of duty. It's the game making a point of stalking you after you literally obliterated planets and rocketed across an endless void to get away from it. It's shoving itself right in your face to make it absolutely impossible to forget about the loose ends.

Well, the new session can fuck off, as far as you're concerned. Space Hitler is still back there, not to mention the pervy fluthulus, the existential crisis fast-track lane haunting your dreams, and of course Space Hitler's boss, Time Megahitler Supreme. Who you're supposed to kill with your egg sword, somehow.

Jade, on the other hand, seems to take the possibility as a ringing endorsement for this turn of events.

"Well, this is good! To finish we need to get to the Battlefield, and baby Bilious Slick is still in LOFAF, or what's left of it anyway. Maybe we're supposed to create the new universe and plant the remains of the planets there to complete the loop!"

You probably ought to address this profound divergence in opinion sooner than later, before it all spirals into a huge stupid argument. Again. Then again, if it is fated to happen by celestial predestination, nothing you say will do anything but splinter a doomed offshoot, so... but splinters aren't a thing anymore, are they?

You graze a mental touch against the strings of time and shiver.

Yeah. The universe hasn't magically unfucked itself while you were away.

"You've flown this idea before, and I have to reiterate my reservations. It's unlikely that this is the universe we were meant to create," says Rose. "The theory makes a lot of assumptions that we have no possible way of verifying. If anything, finding the fallout of Aranea and the Empress' spat on this planet is a reminder of how much we don't understand."

You wander over to one of the stands farther to the side and inspect a figurine of one of John's humanoid salamanders. It's designed in the same cartoony style as the ones you used to find in the magma crypts, but also very obviously not made out of that shitty destructible game-ceramic. You also suspect that trying to smash it is less likely to give you boondollars and more likely to get you tackled by security and evicted from the premises.

Parthian Sculpture of Wind Servitor, 2nd century
Terracotta

Most Parthians regarded the Lowasian consorts as spirit servitors of the Heir, in contrast with the semiliteralist interpretations of the Romans at the time. While there is no evidence of direct Sburbist worship as a widespread practice, idols of Lowasian and Lolarian consorts such as this one have been found in what is believed to have been granaries once.

Out of the corner of your eye you catch John's uncomfortable glance around, and you realize that people are staring. Not that surprising, to be honest. You had the common sense to change out of your signature godhoods, but you still are four teens in green felt pyjamas, gothic witch cosplay, a green ghost suit and whatever the hell Jade's black ribbony fabric storm is. And then there's the tinfoil hat.

"I though Dave can time travel," John says. "We know when some of the ruins arrived. Why don't we go back in time and find out directly?"

"There are so many things wrong with that statement I don't even know where to start," you say. "There's no mountaineering equipment sufficient to scale the Mount Everest of incorrectness presented before me. Time travel doesn't work that way."

"Why not?"

You open your mouth, a dozen objections fighting to leap from your throat, none of them actually expressible in English vocabulary, but then you pause. You don't actually know if what you know about time travel still applies. No. You force your dangling jaw shut and decide to go for the simpler out.

"First of all, I'm not doing this whole Time thing anymore, didn't you hear? I'm abdicating my knighthood. Retiring to a log cabin in the woods. My full-time job these days is lazing around in flip flops watching cheap cable all day. Drinking beer and yelling at teens."

Jade cocks her head at you.

"You were serious about that? I thought that was just an excuse you told evil me to not have to fight."

"Uh. Yeah?" you give her a weird look. "I haven't touched my timetables in years."

"That is so stupid," she groans.

"Rude," you splutter in protest.

"Every time I think I understand you, you turn around and do something like this!" she continues.

"What do you care what I do?" you mutter, but she rides over you, tossing the leaflet over her back as she turns to face you. It vanishes in a twist of green.

"Aren't you supposed to be this cool fearless guy with all the irons in the fire or whatever? You were so good at it when we were playing! What, has three years crapping around with those trolls really turned you into such a weenie?"

Wow. Oh wow. Not gonna lie, that hurts a bit. No, let's not mince words here—you don't know what's bringing this on, but that really fucking stings.

It's not like when Karkat goes running his mouth like the darnedest little shit toddler; he never means it. He thinks he does, but he comes crawling back with pissy apologies and a side of crippling abandonment anxiety every time. Jade Harley? She's chill most of the time, but all that means is when she bites, she bites hard.

You can't stop yourself from stepping back and folding your arms defensively. "Oh? Well, I thought you being such a bitchy hardass about my life decisions was complementary service for the Imperial attack dog three-course wine and dine, but I guess I was wrong. It was just vanilla Harley."

Jade shirks back like she's been slapped.

"Life decisions?" she scoffs. John tries to put a hand on her shoulder, but space slides and his hand slips right past her. "I can't believe you! There's a cherub that needs killing! Life decisions? You're running away from responsibility!"

"Jade," Rose warns. Your argument is getting loud, but you couldn't give less of a fuck.

"I never signed up for any of this," you fire back.

"Have you been talking to Jadesprite?" the other girl goes on. "Because you sound exactly like her! What's the point of a Time player that doesn't even use his aspect? How are you going to beat Lord English like that?"

John is confused. "Wait, are we still fighting Lord-"

"My duty," you repeat, cutting him off. "Yeah, maybe I'm selfish. But you don't know what I've been though- fuck that sounds so goddamn trite, but yeah, fuck it, I'm committing to the cliché. You have no idea what I was dealing with when you were bumbling around grabbing frogs and chatting up Kanaya. You don't know anything about being a Time player. Do you know how many times I've seen my own dead body?"

"I saw you die, Dave. I slept downstairs from my stuffed dream corpse for who knows how many years! Guess what? I lived."

"Twenty-eight times," you spit. "I counted. I talked to some of the doomed mes, you know. Fun fact: did you know basilisks only attack if your health vial is over a fourth full? If there aren't other underlings around to finish the job, it takes a full hour to lose consciousness from the venom and blood loss. Guess how I found out."

Jade's steely glare falters.

"I..." she trails off. "That doesn't..."

"Jade," Rose says quietly. Invisible light ripples around you. The sound of the murmuring rabble muffles, distant distorted. "Can you take us somewhere else?"

Your fist curls around your absent cape as you look around. People are turning away as you look, but you can tell the gawk party was going full-throttle just a second ago. What a riot, amiright? Postmodernist fashion teens and their fifth-world problems. Somehow, your eyes wander back to the statue of ripped-you on its fancy pedestal and its vacant eye voids, staring down on you.

Fuck. What Jade said—you hate that you're so affected by it. You hate that it hits so close to home. It sounds like something Bro would say, and you try not to hold yourself to those standards anymore, but fuck if it doesn't hurt. And of all places to start this, why here?

The Knight on the Precipice, the card said.

You wonder if Davesprite was wrong. He was wrong about a lot of things. You wonder if there was a way to get Caledfwlch out of its stone, and instead you broke it like a moron, and that's the moment your whole personal quest officially went tits up, and now you're stuck like this, broken and fucking useless like these piece of shit swords you keep smashing. The precipice. Of what? Caledfwlch was barely a footnote in your story. You broke a sword, passed it off to the sprite, it came back upgraded and you used it to cut a chain or something. What was supposed to happen?

What are you supposed to do?

Jade doesn't ask before flicking her hand. None of you want to be here. The world blips out around you.

You're on the rim of her volcano, hanging above the edge of its monstrous, inactive caldera and very intently not looking at each other. You flex your fingers, feeling heat slowly trickle back now you're out of the frigid AC of the museum.

John's fidgeting. He's been checking his watch this whole time.

"Jade," Rose begins. "This isn't like you."

"What isn't like me?" she snaps, but you can see the guilt slowly etching into her face. You don't know why. She was telling it like it was.

"You have very strong opinions of Dave's usage of his power."

"What?" Jade's clothes shimmer and replace themselves with her Witch's dress and ruby slippers as she speaks.

You follow her lead, because why the fuck not. A thought summons your Knightly threads back, and you wrap your cape around yourself like you're a giant human burrito, a task greatly expedited by the ability to fly and orient yourself at arbitrary angles.

It's snug. Comforting.

"They're his powers! They're part of him! And we're going to need them to..." Jade stops, backtracking. "I just feel it's so stupid! I don't know why I'm so angry about it!"

"Hmm." Rose considers, shedding her black dress for her god hood as well. "Have you considered that these... opinions... may not necessarily originate from a rational state of mind?"

"Are you saying I'm crazy?" Jade scowls, gearing up for another run at the Karkat impressionist championships. You don't remember her being this tightly wound before. Then again, the Jade back in those yonder years hadn't been through everything this one has. And it has been years. God knows what they were up to in that ship, but you wager it wasn't temperance training.

Rose raises a hand, arresting the other girl's protests. "No, hear me out. When the Condesce converted you, she didn't take control outright, did she? She altered your mind such that you were still you, but aligned towards her ends rather than ours. And now that you've returned to normalcy, you still remember what did and reasoned under her influence, am I correct?"

"Yes...?" She still looks skeptical. "So what?"

"Is it possible that residual traces of her influence are still biasing your judgment-"

"I know what she did. I can tell the difference between what the old lady put in my head and what thoughts are my own."

"I believe you're well intelligent enough to differentiate between your own a priori beliefs and those superimposed by mind control," Rose agrees. "But when we're talking about new information acquired during your time as her subject, cognition on topics you never had any significant prior exposure to... don't you see the conflict here? Or rather, the lack thereof?"

She swings around, looking for a reaction. The rest of you glance at each other.

"I'm not following," you say. "You're think there's a secret compulsion hidden in there?"

Rose sighs into her palm. "Let's talk about Lord English. Jade. Why do you want to kill him so much?"

"I..." Jade pauses, grasping. "He's destroying the universe. Why don't you want to stop him?" She licks her lips slowly. "We're supposed to be heroes. It's what we do."

"We're heroes in the sense that it's a title prescribed by Sburb," Rose corrects. "Our duties are to the completion of the Ultimate Alchemy. Lord English is a natural cog in the multiversal ecosystem, a necessary dark reflection to the creational power of Skaia. I wouldn't be opposed to his destruction on principle, but neither would I argue that we're under a categorical imperative to seek it. Besides, what are four gods going to add to the literal thousands fighting the war in the bubbles?"

Ah, yes. That is absolutely what you were thinking when you decided to ditch the English mission. Took the words right out of your mouth. Not fear of your life or cowardice. Nope.

Jade frowns at that, opening her mouth to disagree, but Rose keeps going.

"Setting all of that aside, if you made an argument purely on an ethical basis, sure. I could accept that. But you don't sound so certain. Is that really the only reason?"

"...I don't know," Jade admits, a frown gradually creasing her face. Her anger is draining away, replaced with confoundment. "I didn't think much about it."

"I propose a theory," Rose states, a note of excitement worming into her voice. It's the signal that she's about to espouse a new bullshit theory that she's been working on for days, and usually you're up to hear her runaway ramblings, but now? "Grimbark Jade believed in the necessity of destroying Lord English because it was the Condesce's imperative," she postulates. "When you returned to normal, you never reevaluated the belief because of exactly that: you don't think much of it. Why would you? You stopped fighting us because we're your friends. You stopped helping the Condesce because she's morally evil. But you had barely heard of Lord English before. There's no original belief it displaced, no core values struggling to reassert themselves."

Jade doesn't answer. Doesn't rebut. She's staring off into space, but you can connect the dots.

"You think Jade's pissed at me because evil Jade was, and she doesn't have enough opinions on time travel to justify changing her mind." you fill in. "You're saying that was literally Evil Jade talking."

Rose's telling silence is all you need to hear.

You cast your gaze down into the volcanic crater. It... makes a surprising amount of sense. Rose's self-awarded psychology degree finally came in useful; who woulda thunk? Or maybe that's wishful thinking because you don't want Jade to think you're a blubbering crybaby.

Whatever. Your ego isn't so fragile that it can't survive one stern drubbing from a dear friend. It's the implications of it that are troubling, because haha what the fuck? Is internalized fascism Jade Harley something you need to start worrying about now?

"But how do I know if something's an evil thought or a normal thought I came to all by myself?" Jade mutters, looking down at her hands. She clenches a hand, letting sparks of green sputter from the gaps between fingers. "Maybe I was a little rude about it, but I still think that you shouldn't let bad experiences hold you back from your full potential! And I don't think we can let a mass murderer run around because he's 'necessary', whatever that means. We're powerful. We can make a difference."

"It's not cut that black-and-white," Rose reminds. "All beliefs are functions of external influences and intrinsic values. Even discounting psychic intervention, priming is a powerful phenomenon."

"But I said that same thing to my sprite about her first guardian powers. I remember that. That proves that I always thought like this, right? Even when I merged with... with..."

Her head darts up, sudden panic in her eyes.

"John, do you remember if I acted any differently after I combined with my dream self? Did my personality change?"

He jerks at the direct address, tripping over his words to respond. "Oh, er, I guess you did? But mostly you did a lot of dog things, which is probably more because of Bec rather than your dream self. You said you inherited some memories from Jadesprite, but you know that, so..."

"Do you think you might be unfairly projecting internalized hatred towards your sprite-self onto Dave?" Rose suggests.

Jade scowls in distaste. "I— look, I really don't want to talk about this any more. Can we focus on something less awful? Or at least something that makes me not feel like I'm gaslighting myself! I had enough of that from the trolls back before we played that game, and I really, really don't want to go through all of this again."

"It's dangerous to let problems like this fester," your sister insists. "The problem isn't going to go away after a good night's sleep."

"Maybe it will! How do you know?" Jade huffs. "I'll wake up tomorrow and everything will be sunshine and rainbows and Lord English will be dead and we'll have all of our friends back and..."

"Jade," John reproaches. The girl deflates. "Can we at least make up with Dave? You've been arguing all day."

"Fine!" Jade groans, throwing her hands up. She turns to you and grabs your shoulders from two meters away. "Okay. Dave, I am really sorry about what I said to you. You're right. I don't know what being a Knight of Time is like, and okay, I'll admit that all of my really awesome powers have pretty much no horribly morbid catch at all except being really easy to mind control, so I have no place telling you what to do at all."

"I wouldn't say-" you start uncomfortably, but she barrels over you.

"So regardless of my personal feelings on the matter that may or may not be the spooky mind ghost of Her Imperious Condescension, I will respect your decision on the matter! And to be completely, absolutely clear because you two have probably been a terrible influence on each other for these three years, I really honestly mean all of that, and this isn't a passive-aggressive 'ironic' apology or anything ridiculous like that!"

Her voice was climbing through all of that, crescendoing near the end, you can tell that it's stress, not ire. Her chest manages to stay puffed for a few seconds before the energy deflates out of her like a sad helium balloon.

She lets go. Her gaze shifts down and away, avoiding your eyes.

She needn't. You're reasonably certain that your mouth currently resembles the tiny maw of a peanut-brained goldfish. What do you even say to that? You feel guilty now, like you kicked a puppy for no discernible reason and it came running back to you begging for forgiveness. She's right. You fucked up. You had the power to change things, and you just... didn't. But it would be ridiculous to say that after her whole spiel. And dammit, you really want to take the win, even if there aren't any "wins", only you and your one-man act on how badly you can fuck up everything.

"Cool," is what you ends up coming out of your mouth. The word leaves a sour taste. "Great. On to less depressing topics, as requested?"

No one answers.

You wring your hands.

There are no less depressing topics.

You know what you need? Coffee. God, you've been addicted to the shitty stuff after three years of a constantly fucked sleep schedule. Either coffee or sleep. Passing out on something soft and fluffy sounds like a fantastic idea right now.

After a long silence, John finally pipes up.

"The trolls," he mutters.

The trolls.

"The trolls," you bark. "Holy shit. What are we still doing here?"

Their attention draws to you. John blinks. "Huh?"

"Why aren't we on Alternia already? We know it exists; the others could be there. We should be there yesterday! Haven't we learned anything from the last time we got separated- and-" You stutter at Jade's flinch. "-like, you know, just fucking died, every last one of us?"

"Can Jade zap us there?" John asks.

"We don't know for sure they were transported here with us," Rose says. "Or on their home planet, for that matter."

"Until we find out otherwise, we have to assume they are," you insist. Why did it take this long for the obviously correct course of action to occur to you? "Alternia's a free-for-all murder hellhole. If they were dropped off randomly like us, they can't fly, they have nowhere to go, and let's not forget Karkat's a cull-on-sight mutant. Holy shit, all he has to do is get a nosebleed in a public place and it's open season on nubby loudmouths."

Rose raises an eyebrow, but it's starting to dawn on you how many horrible things could be happening right now as you speak. Why the fuck did you spend so much time gawking at statues and alchemizing bullshit?

"I don't have the range," Jade says.

"And the fake troll Jesus sign he wears—I bet that moron doesn't even have any clothes without it. If he gets dropped in a population center and someone recognizes the symbol he's doubly fucked, just goddamn spit roasted by their dystopian institute of legislacerative law. And is being a vampire illegal? Is being blind illegal? I can't believe those are sentences I said completely unironically but they are legitimate questions and wait she isn't blind anymore right-"

"Dave," John says slowly. "Take a deep breath?"

"I am not calming down. This is a disaster." What if they're dead in a ditch already and it's your fault because you can't fucking prioritize to save your life? "We need to go right now. Jade, can you take us?"

"I can't!" she repeats. "I told you! My range is all messed up!"

Damn it all to hell. Of course. Nothing can ever be easy in this game. You bet your soul to the dark gods that the forces of paradoxical alignment specifically conspired to fuck your superpowers over just for this precise purpose of keeping you earthbound. At least, from the tense looks being exchanged, the others are beginning to appreciate the urgency of this situation.

"Try!" you urge.

Jade takes a deep breath.

"Alright."

John blinks. "Wait, now? But-"

Green fire erupts around you. Not a moment later, the air in your lungs explodes out of your prime selection of facial orifices, folding you over into a coughing fit.

When you recover and cast your eyes around, it's the void of space that surrounds you. The harsh glare of the sun burns a blinding spot in the far-off distance. There's not a planet within sight. You turn away from the light, letting your pupils adjust themselves to the darkness, and the canvas of the night comes into focus, the galaxy spilling a starlit swathe across an infinite black.

Space feels ice cold against your skin. Your weightless sleeves graze over you, sending pins and needles through your body.

You remember what Rose said about the thermal regulation of your god tier wear. Is this another artifact of your overactive mind, or is it real?

You banish the idle thoughts from your minds in favor of something more relevant: this isn't Alternia. It's not even out of the Solar System—you're not exactly an expert on constellations, but you recognize some of those shapes.

Jade is drifting slowly, eyes closed in focus. John is spinning around, wide-eyed. The Medium doesn't have stars, does it? You're guessing neither did the in-between space they spent their years cruising through. Your appreciation for twinkling firmaments, unfortunately, has been neutered by long days out on the lookout decks squinting at infinitesimal specks, wondering if it's Dead Dream Tavros #6612 or the multifaceted eye sockets of Garg'bathoth the Ungoliant again.

Rose is trying to say something, but it takes a few sentences for the Gift of Gab to kick in.

"-of them were at the top of their echeladders," Rose notes, her tone implacable in the face of the spontaneous relocation. "Mundane attacks from the natural universe would barely rate on the health-damage scale of late-game Sburb. Any of the trolls would at least hold their own against even the most powerful agents on the original Alternia."

...Okay, you admit that's something you didn't think about. So maybe Karkat could take apart a regiment of cavalreapers with his bare hands. It doesn't mean they're safe.

"Fine, but that's only for knives and guns and the strife stuff." you argue. "Can they tank a death laser from the home system flagship? And env and psych damage don't scale that way, plus there's thematic modifiers. Jade's an immortal dog goddess and she got pasted by one shittily architected skyscraper."

The energy of the Green Sun flares once again, but this time as a rippling sphere that swirls around and encases the four of you. The concentration radiating off Jade tells you she's trying something different this time, though of course as not a space god you have no clue what.

There's a feeling of gliding brushing over the periphery of your spatiotemporal awareness. Distance, more than you can intuitively conceive, slips past.

When the green dissolves away, it's still the airless void of outer space, but the sun is barely a speck now, one marginally brighter twinkle glimmering under the silver stroke of the Milky Way.

Here, it feels different. It's so...

Empty.

The chill is setting into in your bones, be it psychosomatic or real. This isn't just space. It's not the well-trodden superhighways of interplanetary satellite traffic and NASA probes. This is the edge of the human frontier, the precipice where the known tips into the unknown. Perhaps no other person will ever stand where you stand, lay their eyes on this same boundless expanse paved before your eyes. This is a space beyond space, a ring beyond the mere outer. An outerer space, if you will.

You turn, feeling the void wick the scarce moisture from your bare skin...

Oh hey look a humongous blue spaceship

wait shit why is there a humongous blue spaceship you take back what you said fuck

There isn't any air to transmit sound, and if there were, that ship is five kilometers away so you wouldn't hear anything anyway, but your unhelpful imagination is providing you with the mental sound effect of a horrific mechanical rumble-grinding as the huge-ass proton cannons—you don't actually know what kind of cannons they are, but you'll pretend they're proton cannons becuase why the fuck not—rotate in their gunports and come to rest, training their gargantuan barrels on your exact position.

Jade yips and flings out a hand.

The spaceship vanishes in a flash of green. A blip of the same verdant light flashes far off in the ridiculously far distance heartbeats later.

It takes a few seconds for the first of you to recover control of their tongue.

"Fuck!" Jade groans.

"...Did we just blow our cover?" John breathes.

"Was our 'cover' ever a real thing we were trying to maintain unblown?" you mutter, your heart still hammering in your chest. "We've been poofing ourselves in and out of towns like we thought Scientology could use some more batshit crazy to distract everyone from their harassment lawsuits."

"It should be," Rose states. "I've been masking our movements. If we are up against the Baroness, information is our critical edge. We have exactly one chance to catch her with her skintight fuchsia-striped leggings down, and it's entirely possible that the entire outcome of the conflict will hinge on how we frame that initial confrontation. Take away the asymmetrical warfare, and we're just four kids, possibly plus twelve, bringing swords to an interstellar armada fight."

"Four immortal kids with godlike superpowers," Jade points out.

"Arrogance is what brought us down before."

You cough.

"Really?"

"No." Rose crosses her arms. "But it's a comforting narrative to distract us all from our catastrophic collective failure as the primordial gods of an unborn universe."

Wow. Bleak. You guess you deserve it for asking.

"Um," John utters as he raises a hand. Such a fucking dork, and yet so unbelievably cute. You're not in a classroom, Egbert, you don't have to do that. How did he even learn that habit? The kid was homeschooled. "I assume we aren't there yet. Is this working, or... are we, like, halfway to there, or have we made any progress at all?"

"It's not doing it," Jade grumbles. "This is hardly a dent—not even a scratch!—in the distance from Earth to Alternia. We're not even past the Kuiper Belt!"

You struggle to scrape together your pitiful scraps of astronomical knowledge. "Where is that? Is that where Pluto is? I mean, you haven't even gone all full steam on the power-up scale yet. That's pretty solid."

"Dave, it's more than fifteen thousand light years to Alternia! We're literally less than a millionth of the way there!"

You blink. "Oh."

You consider this new information.

"Well, that isn't good, is it?" you mutter.

You turn around, and she's right. The sun is still there, tiny, but visible. You can stare at it with the naked eye because you're a god and can't go blind for non-awesome reasons. You don't have concrete numbers in you, but you're vaguely aware that the size of the Solar System is a mite compared to interstellar distances. Maybe Jade is effortlessly shredding all historical records of manned space flight from the old world by orders of magnitude, but on the interstellar scale, this isn't cutting it.

"I'll give it another try," she sighs, sounding tired. "But I don't have high hopes."

"No pressure," you mutter. "Everyone might die if we don't get there in time, that's all."

"I know!" Jade barks, spooking you with at the intensity of her exclamation. "Of course I know that! At least I'm trying, so shut up! Can you stop being an insufferable prick for a second?"

You float back a foot. "Sorry," you mumble with a sideways glance. John's frowning at you. You can't even finagle a way to blame it on the bird Dave thing this time: it's the raw, alpha-purity Strider douchebaggery you can't seem to shake off. "It's one of my few and far between personality flaws."

Rose sighs.

In your defense, Jade has known you for so many years that she has to have realized that it's a given that Dave Strider is an insufferable prick in all timelines and all forms, feathery or otherwise.

"Turn the outrage into motivational power?" you try.

Jade growls and arches her spine, her skin scouring the shortest instant of green. Jesus, the awful dialogic decisions. They keep happening. Electric arcs cascade, and like she's pinned an industrial-grade rotor into your gravity demo rubber sheet, the intangible sense of compressing space grinds down on you, waxing with the awesome power of the Green Sun.

Not for the first time, you wonder what that stuff she flashes is. Word on the street was that it's a portal to the source of her powers, but since she found body-portalling doesn't work now... is it a time gated thing, so she can only capture these brief snapshots but not make a stable connection? Or does it link to an power reservoir that's she's drawing on? Maybe she just literally glows green now and you're reading too much into this shit?

Whatever. You don't have the energy to contemplate the bogus physics of your nonsensical video game powers.

"I'll show... you..."

Light blasts out from her body, a torrent of scalding heat and metaphysical castoff that's shaking waves through space and time. It takes you by surprise, you hurl yourself back on instinct, but the viridian halo rolls past faster than you.

"...motivational..."

Your vision goes awash in a sea of roiling green, but despite the sensation of your skin's crisping and flaking off by the second and the fact that your clothes are literally burning off your body in defiance of their touted godly resilience, you're not actually being hurt.

It doesn't stop the display from being abjectly terrifying.

"...power!" she howls.

A shock wave ripples through the plasma pouring off her as space folds under Jade's sheer force of will. A shiver travels down your back. You're doing your best not to draw the parallel to blowing up the Green Sun all over again, recreated on a miniature scale, stripping flesh from your bones faster than you can scream... and goddammit you've gone and done it now. Your nerves are on fire. Phantom pain is such a fucking bitch. You can handle this. You're in outer space so you're not breathing anyway, but you stuff your hands into your pockets- oh you don't have pockets anymore. Dammit.

You distract yourself with the thought that at least nobody can see your immolation-induced nudity through all the deadly green shit. Except maybe Rose with her Seer powers, that freaky orange perv, and she'd probably really do it too just to troll you later with the incestuous implications alone. You give her the finger in case she's watching. It's enough to keep you going.

Jade roars, and that's what finally knocks you back in alignment. What replaces it might not be better.

Everything is stretching in this inscrutable, immaterial way, like tension building in a rubber band. You can feel it tugging at your gut. Spatial pins and anchors snap in place, holding the strain in place while she diverts attention to spinning more fractal structures. She's getting creative, taking apart motifs and bolting the parts together, digging deeper and deeper into her toolbox and improvising on the spot, but it's a learned improvisation, like she's done close enough before.

You can't make heads or tails what the Jade is doing with the substrate of reality even with the bleedover between your aspects, and to be honest you don't think you'd understand it even if you had that fancy spiral on your chest. You're not sure John and Rose appreciate how above and beyond she's going here, how unfathomably complex this machine she's building is. And that's what it is: not a technique, not a skill, a machine.

Is this what she's been doing all those years on her ship? Practice. Innovation. Pushing the limits of her power. You sense her head incline minutely towards you through the engulfing green flame, silently bidding: watch. And you do. A construct of dark matter and space, held together by will, divine power and maths. You wouldn't have thought it possible before.

Then again, you don't think a lot of things.

She doesn't say a thing, but you get the distinct feeling that you've been served.

The mechanism winds. The crossbow locks, and you're the payload.

Jade grins, sharp teeth and bottled frustration.

She looses.

Chapter Text

-- turntechGodhead [TG] began pestering gallowsCalibrator [GC] at 01:02 --

TG: hey
-- Message not delivered: gallowsCalibrator [GC] does not exist! --
TG: you probably cant read this
-- Message not delivered: gallowsCalibrator [GC] does not exist! --
TG: but weve all collectively given up on understanding how the universe works so im doing it anyway for the microscopic sliver of chance that it comes through
-- Message not delivered: gallowsCalibrator [GC] does not exist! --
TG: if youre reading this i assume youre on your crapsack planet trying not to die
-- Message not delivered: gallowsCalibrator [GC] does not exist! --
TG: or maybe youre not
-- Message not delivered: gallowsCalibrator [GC] does not exist! --
TG: how would i know
-- Message not delivered: gallowsCalibrator [GC] does not exist! --
TG: you could be sipping a cocktail on a beach out in the deepest pit of the furthest ring enjoying a relaxing retirement for all i know
-- Message not delivered: gallowsCalibrator [GC] does not exist! --
TG: no one knows how pesterchum works
-- Message not delivered: gallowsCalibrator [GC] does not exist! --
TG: but in the case youre not chilling out in limbo heaven
-- Message not delivered: gallowsCalibrator [GC] does not exist! --
TG: try not to die i guess
-- Message not delivered: gallowsCalibrator [GC] does not exist! --
TG: god this message is annoying gimme a sec ill try to turn it off
-- Message not delivered: gallowsCalibrator [GC] does not exist! --


-- turntechGodhead [TG] began pestering gallowsCalibrator [GC] at 01:08 --

TG: there we go
TG: so yeah
TG: i hope you guys are ok
TG: were trying to get to alternia
TG: or
TG: jade is trying i suppose
TG: all i did personally was sit on the sidelines offering glib words of encouragement
TG: i made a whole speech about the power of hope and friendship
TG: it moved everybody to tears
TG: but it turns out anime tropes dont work in real life and trying super duper hard cant break physics
TG: which i call bullshit on given how much physics breaking we do an a daily basis
TG: so thats a no go
TG: youre on your own for now
TG: dont get your stupid asses killed
TG: or let gamzee kill you
TG: especially karkats stupid ass
TG: how did he even last six sweeps before sgrub
TG: with his mugshot decorating the entry for impulse control issues in the definition catalogue
TG: and also the entries for mutants and enemies of the state
TG: he's like the intersection of every at risk category in child mortality statistics
TG: so stay safe ok
TG: we arent giving up
TG: well figure out how to get there
TG: probably steal or buy an alien ship because apparently you have ftl????
TG: i know that its mentioned about every five seconds in all your movies but for some reason i never put two and two together
TG: what was that bullshit about the speed of light when we were going through the furthest ring then
TG: im seeing rock solid empirical evidence right in front of me
TG: the speed of light is factually not the fastest you can go
TG: i think weve been had terezi
TG: or i have
TG: since you lot must have known all along being a homegrown troll raised on the war and glory of your galaxy spanning genocide empire
TG: and rose is too savvy to be bamboozled by dirty tricks like that plus shes the one that came up with the plan in the first place
TG: so really it was me that was being trolled by everyone
TG: damn
TG: cold
TG: im just talking to myself
TG: nothing new there i guess


-- turntechGodhead [TG] began pestering gallowsCalibrator [GC] at 01:13 --

TG: you know johns dad is back
TG: were squatting at his place actually
TG: and jades dog too
TG: not me and rose though
TG: were too cool for alive parents
TG: so maybe your lususes are back too?
TG: which is good
TG: unless youre vriska serket
TG: anyway thats basically all i wanted to say
TG: stay alive pretty much
TG: i know you can take care of yourself but you cant blame a guy for worrying right
TG: youre not as awesome and immortal as us


-- turntechGodhead [TG] began pestering gallowsCalibrator [GC] at 01:18 --

TG: and
TG: i guess i also wanted to talk to you
TG: more like talk to your inactive pesterchum icon but you know what i mean
TG: i know talking hasnt really been a recurring item on our agenda for
TG: well
TG: a long time
TG: but i dunno
TG: i kinda regret that now?
TG: maybe i should have made a bit more effort
TG: god this is so embarrassing why did i think this was a good idea
TG: ugh
TG: bye


-- turntechGodhead [TG] began pestering gallowsCalibrator [GC] at 01:31 --

TG: ok i changed my mind im back
TG: ive already thoroughly shamed myself and my lineage of ancestors with this stunt
TG: all two of them i mean
TG: so might as well finish the thought
TG: look
TG: im not saying i want to get back with you
TG: because that ship has sailed and crashed and burned on a stinking purple clown bulge and hey i dont blame you for it we all make our choices and i respect that
TG: but we had a good time just trolling each other
TG: before all of the meteor mess
TG: just drawing shitty comics and fucking up the timeline
TG: buddy cops on the case of what killed dead dave this time
TG: was it a bird
TG: was it a plane
TG: all im saying is if we meet again
TG: we should talk more
TG: and yeah even if the concept of we as a meaningful discrete social entity isn't really a thing anymore
TG: hasnt been for ages if im being honest
TG: but i missed you
TG: so hang in there


-- turntechGodhead [TG] began pestering gallowsCalibrator [GC] at 01:40 --

TG: ps i might have given the impression that i approve of you hate dating the clown which is actually patently untrue
TG: like you do you
TG: im not your boss
TG: but that stuff is freaky dude
TG: also probably not good for you
TG: so this is your mandated psa as a friend
TG: dont do faygo
TG: or clowns
TG: peace

The retinal projector switches off with a flick of your eyes. Everything goes blissfully dark as the eyepiece lifts away from your face. With a dim whine, the robotic arm folds and collapses back into its slot in the side of the Inflatavision iMattress. A breath puffs out of your mouth.

You roll over, trying to relax into the soft synthetic fluff under you, but the seconds tick by, and you're not getting any drowsier. There's a spring digging into your back. An inflatable mattress isn't even supposed to have springs. Shifting a few inches over doesn't really help.

You flip yourself upright and stare blankly at the ceiling.

There's an infuriating strong urge to turn the computer back on, but you resist. There are studies, real honest-to-god science experiments done about this: beaming the summary throughput of the information superhighway into your face doesn't help sleep quality. Who would have thought?

But you can't sleep.

Fuck it.

You ease yourself into a sitting position, taking care not to catch yourself on your cape and go down in a bundle of limbs again. John is quietly snoring to your left, tuckered out like a baby highland calf in the green embrace of the lush Scottish pastures. A gentle application of flight lifts you up into the air—no point in stomping all over the floor and risking waking the guy up.

The door wasn't shut properly. It unlatches with a gentle pull, weak light tricking in from the crack.

Hm.

You slip through and close the door behind you before returning to the ground and padding down the corridor. The light is coming from the direction of the living room, but it's not the harsh fluorescence of modern electric lighting. It's the soft, warm tone of... you dunno, an campfire, or an oil lamp. A peek over the railing reveals the culprit.

No points for guessing whom.

Rose looks up at your descending footsteps, drawing herself away from the arrangement of books laid out on the carpet she's sitting on. Hovering above her right hand is a crystal ball, capturing a roaring Californian wildfire as it incinerates cute baby bunnies alive. Probably. You can't actually see what that orange flickering image is scrying, but knowing Rose, it's something appropriately morbid.

There are bags under her eyes.

"You weren't able to sleep either?" she murmurs as you reach the bottom of the stairs.

"Yeah."

You migrate over, stopping at the worn edge of the handmade rug. You recognize the silver and violet design, but can't exactly place which one it is. The scene her crystal oracle is showing is, disappointingly, a boring bonfire in some mountain camp, and not tortured souls burning in the hellfire of Hades.

"What are you looking at?" you prompt, giving her war table a glance over.

Some of those books aren't actually books, but computer-books with pages of Wikipedia and other universally considered academically reliable sources loaded in fake-print black and white. The few that are real ink and paper are Sburban tomes scavenged from the meteor and the Medium, many of them already annotated to the margins in her delicate handwriting.

"Everything," she sighs simply. She leans back and rests her body against the foot of the couch, letting her pencil drop to the floor. "There's too much to take in, and not enough answers. The more I read, the less I understand. The history of this world—it's diverged so much and yet managed to keep everything the same. The trolls, the ruins... the pieces don't fit together in any logical way."

She sounds wrung out, like she's been at this all night ramming her head against the problem.

"You should be resting," you say like a giant hypocrite, but did she even try hitting the sack before hitting the stacks? This tableau must have taken some time to set up.

"How can I?" Rose mumbles. "You said it yourself. They could be in danger. Not to mention the existential threats we can't just forget about simply because they're not staring us in the face right now. Lord English is out there. The Empress is out there. Jack Noir. Does being here put us on or off their radar? Can they get in here if they find us? Or worse, just destroy the universe with us in here?"

You sit down next to her, stepping around the strewn books.

"Hey. Whatever happens, we'll deal with it as it comes. Don't stress out about the little things just yet."

She snorts. "Drop the little things. Hah. That's how you get blindsided. That's how we lost in the first place."

Her fists curl, balling up carpet in her grip and shifting the books along with.

"It's not your job to take care of us, Rose," you say quietly.

"That's where you're wrong," she laughs coldly. "I am a Seer. Of Light. It's my job to know these things. A job that, you may have noticed, I've been obviously failing at."

"You talking to me about negligence?" you sigh. "Did you see me doing any Knighting of Time back there?"

Her lips curve up.

"I'd say valiantly riding to the defense of a fair maiden is pretty knightly of you," she points out. "And the 'sacrificing your life for the greater cause' thing is good bonus points. It's merely a shame that death is so unavoidably fatal."

"That's not fair," you object, a plaintive note entering your voice. "My job can't only be to fight. Everyone fights. Any of us would have done what I did. I don't get brownie points for attaining the bare moral baseline for a non-awful human being."

"You don't give yourself enough credit," says Rose.

You roll your eyes. "My point is I used to give you shit about being a terrible Seer of Light, but my timetables have been gathering dust in storage for years. Look: the way I see it, our heroic duties ended the second the Scratch wiped our session out. Contract ran out. Any more classpect pandering and destiny shit we do after that Sburb should fucking thank us for."

"Wilful denial doesn't change the cards we were dealt," she maintains. "It doesn't change the allocation of blame for what happened."

"You think us losing was your fault?" you scoff.

"Is it not?" she asks, tracking you with a watchful gaze. "Can you say you haven't thought it?"

You wince.

Fuck. Fine, maybe it's passed your mind that a blood alcohol level sufficient to kill any mortal man isn't the best state to gamble your lives in. And maybe you've wondered if the hot-off-the-press Seer of Light back at the start of your journey, still riding the power high and unbridled optimism of having clawed your way out of the flaming wreckage of a null session, would have your fall coming. Done something to avert it, perhaps.

But if you're passing it down the blame chain like that, everyone is equally at fault. Maybe things would have been different if you had staged some kind of intervention earlier instead of sitting on the sidelines hassling Karkat and heckling ghost Eridans. Or maybe Kanaya could have shaken Rose out of it if she had girlfriended hard enough. Maybe the other Seer on your crew could have foreseen Rose's downwards spiral and put a stop to it at the start. You can play what-if all day and get nowhere.

So thinking like that is stupid, and you let her know that.

"The dogs, the Condesce, Aranea, they're the ones you should be pinning the blame on," you grumble. "Sure, no one's saying we couldn't have done better, but that's on all of us. And that different from blame. No one holds anything against you."

But even as you speak, the words feel hollow. Defensive.

Rose shrugs you off. "That's an astonishing narrow way of defining guilt. You are aware that negligence is a crime in real life, right? Perhaps if the goal here were to levy justice against forces of evil, you would have a point. But culpability isn't just about who to punish, but about identifying flaws. The weak links. Fixing them. And practically speaking here, what needs to happen is for me to stop being a depressed potato sack and go back to pulling my weight again."

You look down mutely, lacing your fingers together.

She reaches out and turns over the page on extraterrestrial immigration law in the US. The other blank side flickers and scrawls over with more text a second later.

She's not wrong.

About things having to change, that is. Not about it being her responsibility to fix everything. She made mistakes early on, sure, but when push came to shove, she did her best, put up a good showing. Rose expects too much of herself, but even she doesn't have the power to reverse what's already happened.

You, one the other hand? You did have the power to change the past. Literally, it's kind of your entire thing. But instead you decided to sweep it under the rug even as you gallivanted off chasing puppies. A Seer's power is inherently abstract, a burden as much as a boon to leverage, but what's your excuse?

The point of a Time player is to let the players redo what goes wrong. You're the guiding hand that keeps the game on its rails. It's why every Hero of Time alchemizes time machines at some point, why they get custody of the Scratch construct in the divorce proceedings. Aradia wouldn't have hesitated for a second. She'd have hit those music boxes the instant everything went to shit and bailed Jade out before it snowballed any further. Damara would have gone straight for the kill with the Condesce, fuck the consequences. And Davesprite... well, he's already pulled your asses out of the fire once, hasn't he? It's proof that you could have done it. You could have fixed things.

Why didn't you?

It's true that you never felt your line splinter from the alpha at any point, but you also knew that the Furthest Ring was literally falling apart around you from a Lord of Time wreaking havoc through paradox space. Besides, who's to say the concept of alpha timelines even applies to a trans-sessional immigrant? Then there were those glitches, whatever they were, corrupting everything. And don't forget John—your John, not this younger one—with his totally-not-time-travel causality-defying past-altering powers. How hard would it have been to roll back a few hours, track him down and make him fix everything?

The seams in the narrative were there. You might have been able to slip through the cracks. You could at least have tried. So many independently viable win buttons nestled snugly in his sylladex, and all Dave Strider does is swordfight two omnipotent jackasses like the biggest jackass of all.

Because you were scared. Because you were a coward.

Jade was right. She's always right. If anyone's failure was to blame, it's yours.

You eke out a tired sigh.

As if detecting your mood, the image in Rose's crystal orb swirls an inky purple before swallowing itself into a flat expanse of pitch black. Strangely, the light cast from it's reflective surface doesn't dim. Spooky. Or maybe your digression from her work has put her in as much of a shitty mood as you and it's reacting to her thoughts.

"You know, if you go grimdark again, we don't have any more spare bodies to boot you mind back up in," you comment.

It's more of a passing thought than anything. A permutation of the same joke you've rehashed dozens of times in these years.

But Rose pauses a second too long this time.

"Ah," she states neutrally.

Fuck.

She hasn't touched her dark tomes in your years through the Furthest Ring, saying that tuning into the voices of the gods was too dangerous so deep in their domain. Personally, you think she just stopped trusting them as much after they possessed her and tricked her into a suicide run into a sun that didn't exist. But now that she's not on the meteor anymore, and so seemingly pressed for a turn in your fortunes... is this what it takes to force a relapse into the infant-sacrificing majykks?

"I can't hear them anymore," she answers.

You still.

"Huh?" you say dumbly.

"The gods," she repeats. "They're gone. I can't reach them anymore."

"You can't reach the horrorterrors."

"That is what I said."

You pause. "...Okay."

The two of you look at each other.

"That's cool, right?" you laugh stiffly. "I mean, being inconstantly molested by their lecherous appendages gets old, right? The broodfester tongues whispering woegothics into your bleeding eardrums has to stop being flattering at some point. This way saves us the paperwork of getting a restraining order."

You're being facetious, and Rose knows it.

"I've chanted at Oglogoth to the gnash of his Thorns, even dared risk the forbidden chant of the Blackened Thrice-Damned," she mutters. "Yet the gods lie silent. It shouldn't be possible. It can't. No barrier known to the ancient scholars of the eldritch can drown out the terrible unsong of the Noble Circle. Even in the heart of Skaia, even within the event horizon of the largest black hole, their voices plague the waking dreams of that seek them. Or they ought to."

She shudders. "Either we have landed ourselves in an impenetrable psychic prison of no precedent in all of paradox space's history, or..."

"Lord English did some spring cleaning while we were gone," you finish for her.

Rose nods mutely.

Well, fuck.

What do you say to that?

"The Furthest Ring is infinite. The outer gods number uncountable," she reasons, but it sounds more like she's trying to convince herself than you. "The Noble Circle may be culled, but it could never fall in its entirety to the likes of one cherub: even at the height of the Lord's madness, the nameless demiurges of the Inner Circle slumbered yet. Their barest stirrings are said to sunder entire dimensions of creation—if they rose up, we would know."

"How about the Innest Circle?" you mumble. "Is there an Innermost-"

You don't finish your sentence because your head slams against the side of the sofa, Rose's hand clamped over your mouth. There's a wild look in her eyes, her teeth bared in a tight grimace. You taste blood. You bit your tongue.

"Don't use their names," she hisses. Her face is contorted in a rictus of uncharacteristic anger, her clammy fingers digging into your jaw.

...Alright, this is getting overboard.

"Quit it," you muffle flatly through her palm.

Her expression remains unchanged.

You lick her hand.

The offending appendage tears away from your face like she realized she touched a wet lump of dog shit, and a flash of the Quills of Echidna later, the evidence is obliterated in holy fire. Rose shoots you an annoyed look as she shakes her hand.

"I suppose that I've tried that too many times," she grumbles.

You touch your cheek. Your finger comes away wet.

"Dude."

The small wound has already closed and vanished in the time it took to talk, but wiping at the spot of blood just leaves a streak on your finger and probably your face as well. "Do me too. I mean hit me with your wand. Fuck. I mean, immolate my face in magic fire."

She flicks a Quill at you and the stains evaporate in the ensuing flood of blinding white. You blink away the spots in your vision.

"I am serious about not being able to contact the horrorterrors," she clarifies. "And it is incredibly troubling. They're usually my go-to for paradox cosmology conundrums, not that we've had many of those since... recently. I sometimes make something useful out amongst the inhuman warbling and prodigious sanity damage."

That's what you weren't hoping.

"...That's not a real thing, is it?"

You resist the urge to check your stats. You'd think that you would have noticed, but there are hidden bars that don't show up until you have the right encounter or item.

"No," she snorts. "Though you really should get out of the habit of ascribing undue authority to the numbers Sburb pins on things. You don't need a sanity vial to be driven to gibbering madness by the wails of tortured broodinfants."

"Yeah," you wave away. "Well, is there anything we're going to do about it?"

"The horrorterrors?" Rose asks. "No. They're not a priority yet, though that decision may still come back to bite us. I wouldn't have brought it up if you hadn't mentioned it."

Wait, so she wasn't originally planning on sharing at all?

You frown.

"You know, you have an annoying habit of keeping important information from us until it's convenient to you," you remark mildly.

"Don't act like you've ever been terribly fascinated by out strategy meetings," she snorts.

"You know that's different. First the Sburb religion you were putting off all day, and now this? You were doing it before too, with the endgame for our session. I still haven't forgotten that shit you pulled with the yarn."

"Compartmentalization," she states stiffly.

"That's a word, not an answer!" you protest. "We're not a military operation. We're your friends. Tell us things. Maybe you think it's great fun playing chess grandmaster with us as the blissfully ignorant pawns, but that's not how it works. It's not a footrace to be one step ahead of everyone else all the time, dammit."

"That's not..." she begins, but she trails off. Rose sighs. "You're very easily distracted. It's... easier. To fall into the pattern of control."

You level an unimpressed stare at her. She crosses her arms, refusing to meet your eyes.

"I'm sorry," she finally grumbles grudgingly.

That's... more than you expected, honestly. Calling Rose out on her bullshit doesn't often end this smoothly, and the apology catches you enough on the wrong foot that you scramble for something to say back.

"I'll give you that we're worse than zoo animals with our attention span," you admit. "I... okay. We can all try to do better."

Rose leans back, staring at the ceiling.

"Deal," she says grudgingly.

"Great. Another win for the union and business transparency," you sigh. "So what do you have so far?"

Rose pauses, halfway to setting the tip of her pen to paper already. She looks at you. The incredulity in her face irks you a little.

"Let us be clear: you want to be briefed on my discoveries so far?"

Wow, way to sound accusatory.

"Uh, yeah?" you mutter. "So what?"

She cocks her head. "If this is about our 'business transparency', I don't believe there's anything urgent that you would consider must-know," she says.

"Hey, it's not a crime to want to be up to date on the forefront of investigative reporting," you defend.

She steeples her fingers, a small smile on her face as she answers, "Like I said, I don't you recall you expressing this much of an interest in my work before, Dave."

"I beg your pardon? The mayoral re-elections of Can Town are serious business, Miss Lalonde. The citizens' voices must be heard. Old Earth may be naught but ashes, but democracy—its spirit lives on." You beat your chest proudly. "In us."

"Is that what you call your seven hundredth rewatch of Season 1 of Bloodlust?"

"Look, can you blame me? They managed to make troll Rachel Berry not an insufferable nook stuffer in their version."

"How about your biweekly storage closet rendezvous with my fellow Seer?"

You pause. How does she know about that? You were so sure...

"Fine, I have no excuse for that one."

Like hell you're letting her find out about your detective roleplay with Terezi and little plush dragons. Hell fucking no. Let her think anything but that.

She smirks.

Ugh. Seers and their fucking laser perceptiveness. You can't ever hide anything from her.

"Well, you can find out tomorrow along with the others," she states firmly, nudging you with a shoulder. "Now go back to bed like a good boy. You've distracted me enough."

"Come on, give me something to do, then. I can be your secretary," you offer. "Wait on you hand and foot. Need anything photocopied? I'm on it. I can fetch drinks like a marathon runner doped to the gills with performance-enhancing drugs."

She taps her chin. Her mouth opens—

"Non-alcoholic drinks," you add before thinking.

—and shuts. Her lips press tightly together.

"It was evident from context," she notes.

You wince. "I wasn't implying that... I assume, as in from what you've been saying, you're... quitting? Dialing it back? Thought that was a safe inference, though if you're not... that's, you know, bad. Because alcoholism is bad. Yeah."

You don't think you made this any less awkward.

The two of you sit there, staring at the ground for a good few moments, marveling at your astounding capacity to state the obvious. The feats of contortionism you push yourself to in order to deepthroat your foot at every serviceable opportunity boggle the mind. One would think that you'd tire of the taste of sweaty toes at some point, but Dave Strider is on track to winning at least one Guinness World Record and no thing or man will stop him.

Rose is the one to break the silence.

"No. That's fair," she mutters, slumping. "It's not like..."

She gathers her words.

"You know what's the best part about this place, for getting work done?" she settles on.

You hesitate, then shake your head.

She gives you a faint smile.

"No alchemiters. And John's dad doesn't stock any alcohol."

Ah.

"Yeah, I getcha. He comes across more like the dark coffee kind of person. Shot of espresso every morning before heading to work, another to brush his teeth with before bed, you know?" you babble.

Rose doesn't say anything.

"Though I'll bet my baking license he's got some big guns to break out for fruit cake when the occasion arises. Not that we should go look for it; he's far too much of a tightass to leave the rum in reach of the children. In a cabinet labeled in case of emergency break glass, but actually-"

"Dave, just go-"

"-there's no lock and the hinge works fine, and yet your grubby hands reach in and Dadbert's Prankster's Gambit strikes again: the cork is welded solid to the neck."

"-and get some sleep," she sighs.

Your flapping mouth stops halfway through a joke about sabrage that you'll admit wasn't going anywhere anyway. Under her tired stare, it slowly closes.

You swallow.

She's right. You don't like to admit it, but she's right.

You look over the library splayed over the carpet, and the borderline vertigo that the sight of that much text gives you tells you all you need to know about your dumb proposal. It was a nice thought, a good distraction if it worked, but this is Rose's element, not yours. You feel bad leaving her to shoulder it all, but literally all you would do is slow her down.

"Scram." Her voice is gentle, but it feels like a stab in the chest all the same.

"...Yeah, okay."

"I'll brief everyone tomorrow. It's going to be a long few days."

She returns her attention floorward. Her hand reaches out to turn a page.

You recognize a dismissal when you see it. There's not much point in lingering any longer unless you're looking for another argument, and you've had your fill of those lately. A dull kick against the ground sends you floating up and off into the air. You hover above for a few seconds, watching her leaf through the book before you finally gather the motivation to move yourself.

"Don't stay up too late yourself," you call out weakly, gliding backwards.

Rose tips you a nod of acknowledgment without looking. It's advice that's absolutely certainly going to be ignored.

You drift up, gently ricochet off the ceiling and tumble in the direction of the stairs. You don't relish going back to your makeshift bed and spending another hour staring at the ceiling, and you don't want to go.

You feel like a kid sent to his room without dinner. Not that Bro ever did that, ground you or offer strings-free dinner in the first place, so it's more of a cultural phenomenon you picked up from osmosis and you're not sure how accurate your idea of the emotion actually is to the real deal. You imagine not very. It sucks, basically.

And you still don't feel in a sleeping mood yet. You want to do something, no matter how meaningless or unproductive. You're almost considering breaking out the cards for a depressing game of Solitare when your eyes wander to the opposite side of the room.

You change course.

A minute later, you slide yourself through the gap above the weird swingy doors back into the living room from John's kitchen, bearing a gift of hydration.

Rose is already fully submerged in her books again, flipping through pages of alien history as fast as they can write themselves. This used to be a common spectacle on the meteor, one that slowly grew rarer as time passed for obvious reasons, and you can't help but stay there for a moment, simply watching her work. It's the simplest and dullest thing that's not only dimly nostalgic, but oddly reassuring in a way that you haven't felt in a long time.

You thought you might offer her a drink, but she's so focused that you don't think disturbing her would be taken well.

So you drift yourself up to the ceiling and glide your way over her head silently, humming the Jaws theme to yourself in your head, and when you're directly above her, align the glass exactly vertical and give it a light push downwards. It sails through the air weightless and perfectly upright, still buoyed by the antiphysics bullshit of your flight powers for that eternal second, and with an mute anticlimactic bump sets to a stop against the soft carpet, two feet to her left.

Package delivered. The Mayor would be proud of you.

You leave her to it.

It's a lazy climb up the stairs and down the hallway. When you silently slip back into your room, John is still sound asleep, limbs hanging over the edge of the bed and a puddle of drool gathering on his pillow. You push down a smile at the sight. Your bed's robot arm rouses at the sign of your presence, but you shoo it away with a sleepy prod.

You sink into the mattress and wrap yourself in the duvet.

Heart feeling an ounce lighter, you drift off.

Chapter Text

You press the blade of the letter knife to the diamond in your hand, and with a sharp flick, carve a sliver off one of the edges.

Your diamond grist count decrements by one.

The actual, physical gem between your fingers stays.

You take a similarly defiled crystal of quartz sitting next to you and lightly scrape the diamond's point against one of the other rock's faces. It makes a mark just fine. You reverse their positions, press the quartz tip against the more expensive gemstone and gouge down. Not a scratch.

Ugh.

You chuck the diamond and watch it spin across the living room. A meter from the wall, the chunk of worthless carbon flickers and vanishes without a trace. Sighing, you turn your head to the quartz piece lying abandoned and forlorn on the seat to your side. After a brief moment of contemplation, you slam the knife through the crystal, shattering it in an instant. Your hand darts out and captchalogues the spray of fragments before it can fly everywhere and make a mess, and then a thought splits the bits into separate cards, flooding your deck with garbage.

You pull a shard into your palm and toss it across the room as well.

It blinks and vanishes just the same.

You sigh.

"Stop wasting diamonds!" Rose yells from upstairs.

"I've got a billion of them!" you yell back. "If we can get them to stop disappearing we're gonna be swimming in money!"

She fires back some sarcastic retort, but you can't hear it over the noise of Jade pattering down the stairs. She must have slept in her sparkly space dress, because it's all creased and rumpled up. Her hair is somehow just fine, though, like she's a stock character in a bed mattress advert.

"We can always alchemize stuff to sell if we really need to," the witch notes as she strolls over.

"What, and wait twenty years for the bootleg alchemiter to fart out three rocks?" you scoff, captchaloguing and trashing the remains of your experimentation to clear a space for her. "Plus the conversion rate is such a ripoff. Somewhere out there in paradox space an slavering squid banker is rubbing its gold-encrusted tentacles together, cackling to the music of its jingling jewelry every time we spend 1000 diamonds to make one diamond. A hundred homeless children starve every drop we add to its hoard of embezzled grist, Jade. Do you know what we could do with those 999 diamonds?"

"Give each homeless child a fancy diamond tiara?" Jade suggests.

"Meeting in ten minutes!" Rose shouts from above. Her voice changes direction. "John, are you up yet?"

The disgruntled rattling of the windows as wind shakes through the house answers that question. Dad Egbert would probably tell him off for devaluing his property if he were around, but it's a weekday, and real-life money doesn't drop from easily destructible level assets. The man is already off to boring office job after fixing you a quick breakfast of freshly baked lemon tarts and croissants. Not that you were around to see him leave—you just read the note on the table.

Speaking of which, he must be outrageously trusting to leave four teenagers he's met for one day full reign of his house. These are the responsible homeowning decisions you strive for one day when you become an adult with responsibilities and mortgages and credit scores.

Jade stops before she reaches the middle of the room, her eyes darting indecisively between the space next to you and the other sofa. You roll your eyes and pat the spot next to yourself. Visibly relieved, she teleports over, searing green into your retinas as she materializes into her newly claimed seat.

Then... she doesn't do much. Without looking at you, the telekinetic floats a pastry over with a twitch of her fingers, not bothering to employ such primitive mortal technologies as locomotion and opposable thumbs. You watch as a swirling stream of orange juice follows, lifted directly from the mouth of the big carton and collecting into a sphere bound by crackling green energy. At first you wonder if she's going to pipe it into her mouth with her powers, but she simply plucks a metal straw from her sylladex and sticks it into the construct. Wild.

Well, if she's not up for a chat, and she's not doing anything interesting, you guess you'll get on with your highly experimental research of throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks. Sometimes literally.

You manifest one (1) tar from your grist cache and inspect the bizarrely gelatinous teardrop shape, rolling it around in your hand. The substance sticks, but doesn't smear off even the slightest film, which you feel like has to violate some kind of physical law somehow, but you don't know what. Pulling another tar from your cache, you touch it to the first. They instantly glob together into one big blob, which wobbles and reshapes itself into a bigger teardrop after a second. You know these can aggregate into arbitrarily large volumes, like the ones used in industrial alchemy, so... hmm.

That reminds you of something.

You retrieve a lighter from your deck.

"Dave," says Jade suddenly.

Alas, arson must wait another day. The lighter goes back into your sylladex, and with reluctance, the tar goes as well, the corresponding entry in your grist cache ticking back up by two.

"Yeah?"

She's put down her croissant onto a plate.

"I want to apologize."

"Uh." You blink. "You already did. Very empathically. It was quite difficult to forget."

"That didn't count! It was in the heat of the moment, and I want to make this extremely clear. I'm doing it properly! And not only for the time travel thing, but also with everything I said before that."

"I genuinely do not know what on this rock you're talking about."

She huffs. "When we first got here! I really got on your case about finishing our game, and... you know. That stuff."

...Did she? It all kind of blurs together in a cloud of vaguely antagonistic bullshit that you've basically all forgotten about already. Mostly because you don't want to think about it, which you'll admit isn't the healthiest way to deal with your problems, but it's how you've done it for sixteen years, and if you can wring another decade out of your patented conflict resolution skills, you sure as hell will.

"Eh, forget about it. You didn't mean it," you mutter.

"But I did, that's the problem!" Jade pushes back. "And I was wrong and I said a lot of mean and unfair things to you, which we never talked about after." And that's exactly the way you like it. "I just want to say I'm sorry for that! I never thought about it from your perspective because I had so long to hype myself up for it, and I don't... want you to think that I still... like, I'm disappointed in you or anything, if that was the impression I gave you. I know you're dealing with a lot."

Her words are coming out jumbled and muddled, like she doesn't know what she's trying to get to herself.

"You're distinctly overestimating the degree of mental trauma that can come from playing a game," you say uncomfortably.

"I know I'm not," Jade insists. "I didn't even mention the words 'mental trauma'! You think you're so cool and composed, but everyone sees through you, Dave. I remember what you told us yesterday." Have you mentioned how much you regret saying that? Because you really regret saying that. Let this be a lesson to everyone that emotional blackmail always backfires on you. "It's okay to not do things if you don't want to," she repeats.

You cock your head at her quizzically.

"Huh. Did sleeping really reboot your brain? How many Windows updates did you download this morning?"

"See!" Jade accuses triumphantly. "You're mad at me."

"No?"

You're a little confused at how she got to that conclusion.

"You are," she insists.

"Look," you sigh. This conversation is too confusing for the first thing in the morning. "We're all stressed out from... you know. We all say some stupid shit when it hits the fan. No one is going to hold whatever you said against you, okay? And I said my fair share of unflattering things myself. I know that Sburb was a big deal for you. I'm not going to blame you for not being over the moon about all this."

Jade slumps back against the couch.

"Sometimes I don't know if we're talking on the same wavelength," she mutters. "But... you were right. I built it up in my mind to something more than what it was. Ugh. What am I saying? I've been— I've been pushing the endgame like it's the be-all and end-all of our existence, but it's not, isn't it? You're right. it's a ball the game keeps throwing for me to catch, and I keep running after it like a dumb dog and bringing it back for everything to start all over again."

That is completely not what you said, but okay. Jade falls silent after that, but you don't interject, sensing that she's gathering her words. Either your read on Jade has gone insanely out of whack these years, or all of this is super out of the blue. No, you're beginning to suspect that this has been on her mind for some time. Maybe even before yesterday's performance.

"You were right. Prospit and Derse, they're supposed to be light and dark, but Skaia... it isn't good. The things it shows us... why did I ever think it was to help us? Cogs in the clockwork. Heh. The clouds are what needs to happen, and I was duped by for so long, thinking that if I followed them everyone would turn out okay. I though it was just Dave being a downer because you're from the dark kingdom, but..."

Jade laughs bitterly. It's not a good sound, coming from her.

"It's funny. I think... coming here, only two days, it's done more to help me understand you than these three years put together. The perspective. But it's too late."

You don't know how to respond. Jade is talking past you now, never mind that you're pretty sure you never mentioned any of that. You want to reassure her, but you haven't been to Skaia. You haven't seen its prophetic clouds or bathed in the sky ocean, assuming that's what all of that blue stuff is. You don't know. Which just goes to show the depths of your ignorance. Like, is the battlefield a flat board at the center, or an actual planet, or islands sort of floating in space or what?

The point is that you can't really relate to her crisis of faith, and you have no ability to handle this, if it's even something you're supposed to "handle" and not simply allow to wash over you until Jade has vented to her heart's content. That's what you do with Karkat, and you have to say, it's worked pretty well with him so far.

"We're here now, aren't we?" you settle for saying in lieu of letting awkward silence stretch on. "Together, I mean. And we're going to find the trolls somehow. It's going to be fine."

The smile that stretches over Jade's face looks like it's being strung up with a pair of rusty thumbtacks.

"We are here," she says.

If you were lost before, you're a sinking ship in the Bermuda Triangle now. Her gaze is shifted away, like it's a private joke you're not meant to get, but at the same time the way she throws it out there feels as if she's desperately hoping you'll catch it. Whatever test this is, you're failing through the roof.

Finally, she cuts through the quiet with a simple, "This isn't going to last."

"If Lord English or the fish queen or Jack Noir shows up then we'll team up and beat the shit out of them like nature intended," you assert. As little you believe it yourself, you still manage to inject a modicum of confidence into our voice. "We're more powerful now. We're together. Hell, we have the home ground advantage. And on that note, don't think I didn't notice: where's your tinfoil hat? You need to wear your tinfoil hat, Jade. National security demands it."

She rolls her eyes as she equips it, but she seems vaguely thankful for the obvious diversion.

"I'm glad you're enjoying my humiliation," she grumbles. It looks as stupid as the day it was alchemized. Which was yesterday.

A clunk comes from the top of the stairs. Both of you swivel your heads to look.

Rose floats down from the second floor, dragging a woozy, weightless John Egbert behind her.

"Let's get this started," she says. Her eyes dart to the table. "Oh. Is that food for us?"

"Let me start us off with a basic briefing of what I found out about this world last night," Rose says.

Everyone is fed and watered, and you're seated in a circle around Rose's projector. The device is beaming a hologram of Google Earth into the middle of the room.

"The universe—cosmologically speaking—is mostly similar to the old one as we knew it. Prior to first contact with the trolls and a consequently the rest of intelligent life in the galaxy, the fields of astronomy and physics were in a state functionally identical to Original Earth's. Consistent geological, historical and explorational records from the Alternian Empire in particular span a scale that contraindicate the existence of any spatial or temporal boundary similar to one we might expect from a dream bubble. For all intents and purposes, this is a real universe with actual stars, actual galaxies, constant physical laws and and true object permanence."

She leaves a pause to see if anyone wants to interject with a question.

"Now with that cleared out of the way, the obvious point of interest we want to focus on is the trolls. The outline of Alternian history here aligns with the one our trolls spoke of, including the circumstances of the Condesce's rise to power and her uninterrupted reign over the subsequent 1.2 million years. Their technology and mode of expansion are identical too, with the presumable exception that Earth was caught in their net of hegemonic expansion this time around."

She clicks a button. The picture on the projector changes to a grainy photo of a starship's outline cast against black space.

"The Fleet made contact in July 2002, preliminarily classifying our civilization as Class BX0 ('Intelligent, Mundane, Unexploitable') and the planet as Class XX0 ('Of No Interest'). I use the term 'made contact' very loosely here: no formal diplomatic relationship was established, no attempts at communication were made, and the only announcement of their presence was a small defensive armada and two research vessels entering high Earth orbit for three weeks, before departing without notice."

"Ouch," you mutter.

"What did we do?" John asked.

"Apart from talk, chaos, debates, political upheaval all over the globe? Ultimately, not much." Rose pauses. "Well, a substantial increase in funding for space programmes, military research, and the intersection of the two. A sharp surge in employment rates for linguists, physicists and aerospace engineers. Other mundane statistical ticks of little interest for our purposes. But no total societal collapse nor unprecedented show of international humanistic unity, if that's what you're referring to."

"Then what happened?" Jade asks.

You're all leaning forward unconsciously, drawn into the story now. Rose's expository tirades on paradox space lore were only marginally more interesting than Aranea's cherub shit back on the meteor—and this one in particular is running off coffee and fumes, leaving a lot to be desired in terms of artistry of delivery—but this topic is interesting, which is more than you can usually say.

Rose collects her notes. "Upon routine auditerrorism—sorry, the official English translation is 'auditing', my mistake." You suppress a snicker. "Upon routine auditing, in January 2003, Her Condescension's Diplomacy, Enslavement and Genocide Authority reclassified Earth as Class CA0 ('Unintelligent Guardian, Manifest Sburboid, Unexploitable'). Upon this reclassification, the Empire established communication with the Queen of the United Kingdom—now the Nominal Queen of the Solar System—and declared Sol a Subjacent Sanctioned Sovereign System. The governments of Earth chose not to contest this statement, and those are the diplomatic terms our civilizations have been operating by ever since."

"Terms?" you ask.

"Is that a legal classification?" John follows up.

Rose rifles through her notes.

"The categorization is in effect a unilaterally declared treaty to all nations of Earth as a whole," she reads off in a monotone. "Terms are, briefly, as follows: citizens of the Empire are to enjoy rights equivalent to the union of those of all castes within the system. Citizens of the Empire may be trialed and sentenced by system authorities to any punishment short of execution and permanent mind injury, but must be done so given legal privileges equivalent to the union of all castes'. An exception is with regard to immigration and border control, for which a citizen of the Empire must be processed as the most privileged intersection of foreign nationality and caste. There are otherwise no explicit obligations of local authorities to the Empire or vice versa, including but not limited to issues of extradition, taxation, and freedom of information. Citizens of the system have no rights in Imperial territory."

Wow.

"Wow," Jade mutters.

"That sucks," you say.

"Theoretically," Rose agrees. "In reality, since the vast majority of nations on Earth have no legally defined castes and every single country immediately clamped down on immigration controls in record legislative time scales, plus the fact that there isn't precisely a multiplicity of trolls interested in visiting what to them is a third-world dump, their legal status is really just like any other human. They currently average approximately 0.5% of the Earth's population and 0.8% of the United States', but in major urban centres the fraction can reach up to 1-2%. The real reason the decree was issued, I deduce, was to get their archaeologists on-planet without a fuss."

"For the Sburb stuff?" you ask. "They're interested in that? You said something about the classification, uh..."

"Unintelligent Guardian, Manifest Sburboid, Unexploitable," Jade fills in for you as you grasp for exact wording. You nod thankfully at her.

"Guardian, as in first guardian?" John speculates.

"Exactly." Rose confirms. "First guardians in this universe are a documented phenomenon, with the common consensus among scholars being that they 'spawn', so to speak, on any planet on which an intelligent spacefaring species is destined to evolve. They are systembound, associated with the planet, not the civilization, and serve a function similar to—in troll terms—a lusus for the entire race. An intermediary crutch for protection and survival until they outgrow their home."

"What about 'unintelligent', then?" John questions.

"Because we have a dumbass dog for a first guardian," you point out. "And they have the smarmy cue ball guy, who has amazing faculties like typing and bipedal ambulation. We're going to have to deal with him, aren't we?"

"First guardians are a measure of species' worth in most cultures," Rose explains. "Unguarded species, even intelligent ones, trolls barely bother to acknowledge. They're never going to make it off their rock, after all. With an unintelligent, animalistic guardian like Bec, you might be worth talking or even trading with. Intelligent ones like our old Alternian informant are reasonably respectable and award the species precious privileges like 'rights' and 'legal personhood'. It's superintelligent ones—class A—that are something special."

"Let me guess which the trolls call themselves," you grumble.

Rose smirks. "No bet. But Dave, you were wrong on one count."

You thought she would elaborate, but no: she wordlessly drags a video up on-screen and hits play. The other three of you hunch forward and watch.

The recording is blurry, taken underwater with a crappy lens and compressed to oblivion from its long journey across the interstellar data lanes. The first few seconds are indecipherable fuzz, but then the picture resolves.

And it only takes a glimpse of that silhouette to jog your memory.

It's a massive inhuman shape, framed in an unholy green glow that spills and refracts through the surging deep sea currents. Lashing tendrils and spittled light propels it through pressurized depths faster than feels biologically possible. Even in this altered, solar supercharged form, the form is unmistakable. You've only seen it once, in one of the larger bubbles a Feferi took you on a tour of, but it's not the type of thing you forget. You don't think you could if you tried with all your self-delusionary power.

"Our friend with the white text isn't here," Rose says, her mouth set in a grim line. "This is the first guardian of Alternia. The Rift's Carbuncle. The Emissary to the Horrorterrors. The Speaker of the Vast Song, they call her. Gl'bgolyb."

She speaks the last mangled "glub-glub" like you're twelve-year-old campers huddled around a flickering fireplace telling ghost stories to each other in the dead of the night, and yet as comical that delivery would be in any other situation, you can't bring yourself to laugh. You continue tracking the undulating shape on the screen with wary eyes, marinating in the hushed silence of the room, a silence broken only by the loud snap that comes out of the computer's tinny speakers as a flash of furious green fills the rectangular port of projection.

When the flare fades, the camera is drifting off at an angle, its target slipping away into the dark. A wisp of dark violet is just creeping at the edge of the video when the playback stops.

John is the one to finally speak.

"...What's that?"

Pfft. Classic John.

"Feferi's lusus," Jade answers quietly.

"The heiress to the troll empire?" John asks. "Oh! The one that killed everyone with its death shout!"

"That's a way of putting it," Rose agrees.

You frown. "But why? Wasn't blub lub a really big and nasty psychic squid before? Why is the baby horrorterror their planet daddy now?"

"Is it going to die again and kill all the trolls?" Jade worries. "Did that happen because of the meteors of their session or was it happening anyway? I don't remember."

"Gl'bgolyb is in good health," Rose asserts. "First guardians age and enter dormancy, but only one has ever been recorded to terminate, and even the veracity of that report is unclear—it was last seen being swallowed by the black hole that the sun of its planet collapsed into, and for all we know it could still be active within the event horizon of the singularity. The question of why it's taken on the onus of the Green Sun is a good one, and I have some ideas on that, but we'll get to that in good time. There's another piece of the puzzle I've yet to show you."

She clicks out of the stopped video and opens a photo in fullscreen, this one of twelve statues of black obsidian. They're posed in a circle atop a wide stone pedestal in what looks like a temple, faced in every direction, except the male in the center, whose small rounded horns point back as he looks up the skylight. It's also the only one with broken sockets in place of eyes, as if someone chipped them out to sell on the troll black market ages ago and nobody bothered replacing them. The rest have chromatic gems studded in for irises: burgundy, bronze, yellow, olive, jade, teal, cerulean, indigo, purple, violet, fuchsia. They're the only spots of color in the picture.

It doesn't take a genius to recognize the hemospectrum.

It also doesn't take a genius to recognize some of those sets of horns.

"We aren't the only Sburban gods that made it into the collective cultural consciousness—or as the locals prefer to spell it, Sburbian." She grimaces with palpable distaste as she pronounces the 'i', like there's an awful story of mangled etymology behind that name she doesn't even want to start on. "The Alternian trolls of the distant past, long before humans formed their first primitive societies, went through countless religions that rose and fell over their long and convoluted history. One particularly enduring one had twelve gods. Twelve gods, but each mirrored in two incarnations similar to our Greek and Roman pantheons."

"Alternian and Beforan," you say.

"In fact, the modern word for their planet and society derives from the Alternobeforan epochal divide," Rose agrees. "These days 'Beforan' is used a synonym for antiquity in troll culture, and the... sorry, I'm drifting off-topic."

"So the trolls were gods on their planet, and we were gods on ours," John summarizes. "And our religions are very similar to each other, is that what's so special about it?"

"Yes, but not precisely. There are thirty-two canonical Sburbian gods in total, which we know as the human and troll players pre- and post- our respective scratches. The key thing is that Sburban worship doesn't only appear on Alternia and Earth: trolls found rough parallels to their deities in the religious imagery of a multitude of civilizations throughout the galaxies, occasionally even outright copies. There's a panspermia school of thought that suggests it was ancient troll pilgrims that seeded these ideas across the universe, since the capacity for interstellar travel existed for nineteen mothers grubs before the Condesce took imperial conquest to the stars. However, the fact that we also have Sburb isn't what's special about us. It's that we're Manifest Sburboid: a planet with species, structures or artifacts that are described or predicted in Sburbian lore."

"There are other planets that manifest Sburb elements?" Jade asks, leaking a hint of incredulity.

"Supposedly, but the examples are arguable. Alternia and its satellites are the one undeniable case. Trolls are a canonical Sburbian species; Gl'bgolyb receives passing mentions in the troll session's lore; legends of the City of the Green Moon—which is the story of their exiles—are described in enough geographical detail to map it to a sector of Alternia's real green moon. The Fluorite Octet, the Orb of Prognostication, those are all are real things trolls dug up, though they're technically suspect since they could have been created in the distant past in the image of the legends."

Rose shrugs, leafs through her notes, and continues.

"Other than that? we have PR3351-C, a rocky planet on the Perseus arm with what explorers alleged to be salamander consorts."

She opens a new Cetus window and runs an quick image search on a string of Alternian, clicking on the second picture that comes up. An ugly orange lizard creature fills the screen. It's bipedal, drooling and if someone described it to you you might think it's a salamander, but...

"Not the prettiest specimen in the world, and definitely not a consort," Rose snorts. "The only other case on record is a red giant that somehow captured slagged pieces of a Veil asteroid. God knows how that happened. Asteroid impact, maybe."

"So basically it's just Earth and Alternia," you conclude. "They have the same thing we do? Ruins from the Medium? Or is it their Medium, y'know, after Jack Noir wrecked their incipisphere?"

"Curiously, no! Humans developed Sburbism from early exploration of Consort and meteor sites, but the trolls never had any archaeological ruins to seed their worship apart from the limited cases I mentioned. No, everything Alternia knew about Sburb came from the same bizarre lynchpin of divergence that draws together their side of the mystery: their first guardian."

"Oh!" John exclaims. "I think I read something about that in the museum. You said it back there too. She's the Speaker of the Vast Song, right?"

"Exactly," Rose says. "Gl'bgolyb's voice may be the touch of death, but in this continuum records state that her psychic song also 'whispers shape into the dreams of those that listen'. Troll Sburbism is the reconstruction of millions of years of subliminal influence, with the mad ramblings of several particularly notable prophets constituting some of the central tenets of the faith."

"Prophets?" Jade asks with visible interest.

The girl winces. "The Speaker's scream is still deadly, as I said, so troll history is marked by intermittent cleansings when one form of unrest or another roused Gl'bgolyb's ire. Her wrath would wipe out entire rungs of the hemospectrum altogether, but the survivors—in particular psychically gifted commonbloods with the mental fortitude to scrape through what slew their less powerful brethren—came out of their ordeals with visions of unprecedented clarity. Prophets."

That's incredibly metal, and also... strangely horrifying? It sounds like the story of the Signless, to be honest, and that dude does not have a happy ending.

"That means that we're the only ones with the real Sburb stuff," Jade muses. "Assuming the one they found orbiting a red giant was ejected from our solar system by a prehistoric meteorite impact, or something like that."

"The Reckoning?" John suggests. "From a new session? But if the pieces are from our lands..."

"Then who are the players?" you complete. "We still have copies of Sburb. Obviously we can't boot up a new session for ourselves, but do we choose who gets to play?"

"Wait—why not?" John questions. "Start a new session ourselves, I mean."

Well, what does he think would happen? You shrug. "It won't let us."

"What would such a session look like?" Rose poses rhetorically. "Obviously we can't duplicate the ectobiological creation loop, but that isn't strictly necessary—there are case studies to attest to that. But would we have the same lands? The same quests? Another set of dream selves? A session is a manifestation of players' souls, and the players themselves are a precipitation of their session's fiat. The two are inherently twinned. A second session is fundamentally oxymoronic in concept."

"So if you tried to start the program..." John trails off.

"Nothing would happen," Rose answers. "A crash, an error message at best, a violent explosion at worst. Perhaps the user interface might work, but nothing would deploy. Skaianet's software is a crude gateway to Sburb, not the game itself, and isn't prepared for every scenario. In any case, no incipisphere would form."

John nods, digesting the information.

"So, what's the theory?" asks Jade.

"Theory?"

Jade waves her hands vaguely. "On everything! What do you think happened?"

Rose raises an eyebrow. "What makes you think I have a theory?"

Oh, why is she even pretending?

"You always have a theory," you groan. "After a whole night of research? You couldn't resist the urge. Even if it's the most ludicrous edifice of contrived connections teetering atop a precarious mountain of cherry-picked evidence that would make the most deadened middle school science teacher cry, you always have a theory."

"I don't think that's a fair characterization of my academic conduct," she says, a slight frown drawing over her face. "My attunement to my aspect allows me to make unusual connections that may sometimes come across as unintuitive to others, but I try not to misrepresent the credibility of my claims."

"But you do have a theory, right?" John prods.

Rose purses her lips, which is a more dignified way of saying that she pouts unhappily.

"Yes," she admits grudgingly.

"Come on, share with the class," you say.

She takes a deep breath, like she's struggling to decide if she wants to spill or not.

"A second Scratch," states Rose finally. "Specifically, from the trolls' session. Initiated by whom I don't know, but it fits the observations."

She raises a finger, all compunctions apparently gone now.

"One: the merged universe. It's consistent with how our game and the trolls' had essentially combined into one by the time of our deaths. Two weeks into the journey our fraymotifs became interoperable, four weeks later the temporal superstructures merged."

Rose looks at you. You nod in confirmation.

When you were still in the Medium, the trolls resided outside of your temporal stratum, which meant they could only interact with your alpha timeline. It was why Davesprite lost contact with them after John died. When you first met up you raised some concerns about temporal turbulence fuckery from the convergence messing something up, but the length of your journey combined with the malleability of time in the Furthest Ring let your time streams mix to the point that by the time you reached the new session, you were all riding the same train, so to speak: the singular alpha carried the entire party, and splits in the timeline would fork all of you simultaneously.

"It's not infeasible that a scratch would couple both our universes and reboot them as one, in particular if this was trollside, since our Genesis Frog physically resides—or resided—in their session, and would have been wiped with it. We don't know what happens if a session is scratched after it's won, or what happens to Bilious Slick in that case, but a fusion world is as good a guess as any. Such a glitch could also be to blame for our anomalies in space-time you were observing."

John looks like he wants to ask something, but Rose lifts a second finger, and he holds his tongue.

"Two: players. We're clearly not intended to be the players of the next game. The four of us can't start another session, and there's no recreated copy of us on this Earth. If the evidence of John's dad isn't ironclad enough, I checked exhaustively online for our old forum accounts and found nothing. On the other hand, the trolls and their ancestors seem to have cloned over to Alternia fine. Them-"

"Hold on-" you start.

"-being the intended players is consistent with it being their-"

"The trolls are on Alternia?" you demand, leaning forward.

"-scratch and their session, with Earth being the only aberration in their cosmology."

"You found them?" asks John.

Rose sighs. "Almost all of the twelve ancestors were historical figures that played critical roles in the development of Alternian civilization. Feferi's ancestor is the Empress, and we already knew she existed."

"Okay, but did you find the trolls themselves? The ones we know?" Jade pushes on.

The Seer hesitates. Finally, she relents, "Yes."

The room erupts into pandemonium.

"You couldn't have started with that?" you shout.

"Where are they? Do they need help?" Jade demands.

"On Alternia?" John asks. "Hey, how old are they?"

"Calm down!" Rose yells, her raised voice silencing the room in an instant.

The chaos stops. You close your open mouth.

In a more level voice, she states, "And sit down."

You realize that you've floated off your seat somewhere in there. Grudgingly, you allow your body to thump back into the chair. You shoot a pointed look at her to continue.

"They were instanced on Alternia as their pre-Sburb selves. The versions we met aren't here: these are fresh paradox clones. They're currently in as much danger as they were in for their entire lives before they played the game-"

You interject, "You mean how Aradia died, Vriska lost an arm, Terezi was blinded, Tavros got permanently paralyzed below the waist..."

"Technically, they did that to each other," Rose says mildly.

That is not a good argument and she knows it exactly well, that smug orange asshole.

"Karkat is a mutant," you growl. "We've told you about the close calls he's had. And everyone olive or under is at constant risk of murder, except it's not murder because most of the time it wouldn't even be illegal."

The Seer takes a deep breath and glares at you. "Yes, and we can't do anything about it. Do you have anything constructive to contribute to this discussion?"

For fuck's sake—

—you—

You close your eyes, and slowly count to five.

She's right. You already did this yesterday, and there's no way to get to them right now. Think.

"They're paradox copies?" you squeeze out. "How old are they?"

Rose hesitates.

"Nineteen years. It looks like their lives before the scheduled start of Sgrub were about the same as Original Alternia, and then the game just... didn't happen."

"Nine sweeps," you translate, clenching your fists. "How precise is your number? Conscription is at ten. Mandatory registration and Ordeals start ninth perigee the sweep before. Are Earth and Alternia calendars aligned?"

John's giving you a weird look, but you ignore him and wait for Rose to answer.

She looks down at her tablet, tabbing through files. "My information is that Vriska turns nine in December, and otherwise all I know is the others are approximately the same age. They might be split between this and next conscription cycle."

"We have a month to get them," you mutter. Your voice is shaking. "Less. If they don't have powers, half of them are going to be culled or worse if they go through the process. Karkat. Terezi. Uh, Tavros, and Sollux is going to be a space ship and Feferi's... you know what she is. This is the worst-case scenario. There's literally no possible way this could be any worse."

Except if they're already dead, you almost say, but you bite your tongue. You don't believe in jinxes, not really, but this is Sburb, and if you say it and it comes true...

"Military-grade FTL is twenty-eight days from Earth to Alternia," Jade informs you tightly, paging through an article on her lunchtop.

"Fuck," you swear.

Rose sighs angrily. "We-"

"Can we engineer something with the transportalizers?" John suggests. "If Jack could use them to teleport from our session to the trolls'..."

"No," Rose answers, pinching her eyes shut and rubbing her forehead. "As I've said, long-range teleportation through the Furthest Ring isn't a matter of power, but of pathfinding. It scales horribly in deconvoluted space. I have-"

"Does the meteor have any engineering books?" Jade asks. "The Prospit and Derse ships used some kind of Alcubierre drive in the Medium, but I could never figure out how it worked. If we find the tools, we might be able to build something from all the Veil tech we have!"

"Shut up and let me speak." Rose growls, shooting to her feet. Holy shit. Her hands are curled into small, angry balls, and her orange dress and hood are fluttering in a surging, nonexistent gale. She's pissed.

No, not pissed. Tired, and out of patience. You're only now noticing the bags under her eyes, which is stupid because she's been up all night, so what did you expect? But you would have sworn that they weren't there a second ago. Her fists tighten and relax. At first you're afraid that she's shout again, but slowly, she simmers down.

"I apologize for the outburst," she says curtly. "You raise sensible points. But I've already given them due consideration and identified a possible solution for our transportation problem. So if you'll give me another couple of minutes to finish, we can expedite this discussion and get to work sooner."

Her gaze roves over the three of you. Slowly, John nods, as do you. Jade looks down.

Rose releases a tired puff of breath.

"The lairs of Echidna and Hephaestus were transported to Earth in the same event that brought the other ruins," she states. "They were remarkably well-preserved through the incidence cataclysm compared to similar sites, which I take to be an indication of relevance. Each lair appears to be built around a stone statue of the respective denizens, and the evidence leads me to believe that they actually are the denizens themselves, somehow petrified or in alchemical slumber."

Rose weaves her fingers together, the first hit of smug satisfaction finally worming into her expression.

"We're going to meet them."

Chapter Text

But first, Rose had something to do.

She let the others take their time with the assigned reading material, citing the nebulous cause of "preparation" as she took her leave. As much as she regretted to admit it, Dave had a good point—their understanding of their friends' position relative to their species' critical age of majority was severely lacking, and the time frame to achieve their objectives largely depended on which of them would be allocated to the upcoming ascension cycle. It was a grievous oversight in her research, and it rankled her that she had made such a basic misstep. The headline she had scrounged up on Vriska Serket's rise to prominence in the Archonian psych-ops branch specifically made reference to her proximate entry into the Ordeals' pre-selection, and yet she had somehow neglected to account for such a detail that could have cost lives.

Such an error in judgment had to be immediately amended.

As she stepped out into the street, she wrapped a thread of power around herself and pulled, spinning a spell of Light that masked her presence to all but the most astute and determined of observers. It was not a technique of invisibility—manipulation of light was a parlor trick for amateurs. This was a shedding of relevance, a twisting of fate that diverted not the perception, but attention of others. It was a handy trick, one that she kept up her sleeve for spying on ecto-brothers, "borrowing" Karkat's novels, and covering up the more indiscreet moves of her impatient co-players, but it would do nothing to prevent, say, a homeowner from noticing a burglary in progress.

Once the cocoon of power settled, Rose rose up into the sky and drew her crystal ball from her sylladex.

In the Medium, the ball was a immensely powerful scrying device that scaled with the user's power, capable of locating and viewing virtually anything within the Incipisphere given the necessary divinatory sympathies. On the meteor, without the relational bookkeeping of Skaia, it lost the ability to search and identify, relegating it to mostly a controllable virtual camera to investigate other parts of the facility—a crude viewport, in a sense.

Here on this new Earth, it kept not even that little scrap of remaining power. Perhaps it was the alleged restructuring of fabric of space that Jade spoke of, but now the ball could show places it had been to and that the user had specifically bookmarked, but not much more.

Rose had taken to using it as a makeshift compass.

She summoned the Houston skyline into the glass, took note of the direction the information stream led off to, oriented herself along that line, and accelerated.

One might wonder why the Alternian Empire chose to place their main embassy to the United States in Corpus Christi, a relatively small city in South Texas.

(Though they of course didn't call it an embassy, since the term implied equal relations between the associated states. Everyone called it the embassy anyway.)

The answer was simple, and twofold.

First, due to the interaction between orbital mechanics and Alternian psionic drives that Rose had neither the scientific background nor the time to delve into, it was favorable to place any site that expected significant space traffic near the equator of a planet. Such an arrangement was optimal for energy savings, liftoff and landing times, occupational health and safety, and almost every metric you could name.

Second, the city cut along Corpus Christi Bay, a natural estuary that for modern day remained surprisingly clean and habitable despite its proximity to an urban center. There was of course the logistical advantage of having a water landing site for Alternian spacecraft, but perhaps more pertinent to Imperial interests was that after a terraforming operation of terrifying efficiency and a truly ghastly lack of environmental risk assessments, a sector of the bay was able to be converted into an accessible underwater district for stationed sea dwellers.

Rose's objective was simple: enter the embassy, obtain the information she desired, and leave. Preferably without causing a scene.

Of course, things were never that simple.

"I'd like to request a detail copy of the 9A39 homeworld census, please."

The troll behind the glass was a tealblood, crowned with small conical horns that hooked back sharply at the end. The standard uniform he was dressed in would almost look presentable if the tie hadn't been lying in a visible pile on the reception desk and the dress shirt unbuttoned all the way down to his pudgy, hairless stomach.

He didn't even bother pretending to not hear Rose, glancing up for half a second before looking back down and continuing to tap at his palmhusk, looking bored out of his mind.

"Excuse me?" Rose said after a few seconds of waiting, trying not to let her patience slip.

<Piss off, girl,> he grunted in Alternian.

This was how the troll wanted to play it, she supposed. Well, two could play at the game.

"Under the Freedom of Information Act Amendments of 2005, it is your statutory duty as a state representative to provide any nonclassified information in site storage to all applicants upon request as soon as reasonably practicable¹. Furthermore, under the Oppression Informatics and Facilitation of Demographic Maintenance Statute⁴, you're required to keep a copy of all census data from the past 25 sweeps on-site⁵ at all times. Failure to comply with my request constitutes a prosecutable offense."

The ironic thing about the Alternian Empire was that precisely because it had approximately zero regard for silly little things like privacy and intellectual property, its draconian administration was counter-intuitively one of the most transparent in the galaxy when it comes to things like retrieving general data on its common populace. That meant that freedom of information laws, which foreign delegates were treaty-bound to respect to a certain extent, handed you significantly more traction than with any equivalent Earth government representative.

"Are you wannabe legislacerator?" the troll groaned, finally tearing himself from his palmhusk. "Why the fuck do you want?"

"Private reasons," Rose stated primly. She flicked a thumb drive from her sylladex into her hand under the counter and offered it to the clerk, praying that he would just shut up and do his job.

The tealblood eyed the USB device in her hand, gears visibly turning in his sunken head as he weighed whether it was worth the effort to tow the interface ports out of storage and try and get them working.

After a stagnant pause, he finally replied.

"Mmm. No."

Rose clamped down on the wave of irritation that surged through her.

"Should I repeat that that's a federal offense⁶? You're on United States land and can be prosecuted in accordance to human law⁷; you know that, right?"

Since, as mentioned, this wasn't technically a real embassy, and the Empire didn't give enough fucks about diplomacy to argue for extraterritorial status anyway, they didn't enjoy any jurisdictional privilege within their premises. Really, the only reason it was sometimes this easy to boss trolls around was that high command honestly couldn't care less about the welfare of their expats. If they couldn't fend for themselves, they deserved what they got, as far as off-planet management was concerned.

"Yeah," the troll drawled. <I don't give a fuck.>

On the other hand, the courts really didn't like having to process trolls, especially for trivial offenses such as refusing to entertain a teenage girl's data request, because extraterrestrial relations was a delicate tightrope act between standing up for humanity and the 0.01% chance that some purpleblood up in the big ship decided today was a good day to carpet nuke a capital city or two.

Rose took a deep breath.

No choice but to break out the big guns, then.

She activated [Soulsong's Score].

It was a fraymotif she'd bought off a ghost Vriska at an outrageous margin, one of the few ones with non-combat or at least principally supporting applications. Vriska had it as a Thief-Seer Mind-Light reversible crossmotif, but it had transformed after the change of hands into something Rose's class could use, something indubitably hers. At this rung on the god tiers, Rose had the power to invoke it without Terezi's assistance, albeit at a steep jargonsnark cost: another antiquated meter she hadn't had the opportunity to contemplate for a long time.

So it was a good thing she had been grinding up on snarkticks for the last minute or so.

Abstract sparks unraveled themselves before Rose's mind's eye. But instead of the web of gambits and deceptions that would have revealed itself to the other Light player, Rose saw teased out before her the epistemic network of her enemy: countless nodes of cross-linked knowledge firing and pinging off each other in real time, like the neurons of a living brain disassembled on a dissection table. They—

Well, she could go on about the sublime beauty of the cacophony of lights presented for her perusal, but if Rose was honest, she had seen better.

"Who's in charge of this place?" she said.

The troll snorted, but Rose could see the links light up in her mind map, percolating a path to the information she wanted. Plucking the datum from the web was simpler than taking candy from a small child.

"Tirona Kasund. Of course."

He jerked, narrowing his eyes at the girl. Now his mind was kicking into high gear, the network coursing with railways of thought that split and merged faster than the eye could see. But not faster than Rose could See. She picked out another scrap.

As much of an unconscionable breach of trust it would be, it was a shame that an offensive fraymotif like this couldn't target lock against allies.

"Mr. Lynlok Sommet, am I right?"

Rose savored the snarl on his face as he spun around, trying to figure out if someone was playing a prank on him. Trolls didn't do nameplates in the service industry; it was too much of a security risk, and anyway they reveled in the absolute freedom to bitch out and viciously maul anyone that crossed them without the threat of easy retaliation.

"Look, one of two things can happen," Rose continued dryly, not letting her amusement leak. "Either you take ten minutes out of your undoubtedly packed day to assist me in downloading a small file I am legally entitled access to, and we all go home happy. Or you continue to violate the terms of your continued right of abode on this planet⁸, I file an official complaint with Kasund threatening escalation to Federal Information Services, and we find out whether he finds your ten minutes of-"

She yanked and ingested a train of thought whole—no time to cherry-pick—and was lucky enough to snap up the bit she needed.

"-<Woolbeast Wrathssassin> more important than half a day of FIS inspectors sniffing around his office. So what will it be?"

Rose leveled an cold stare at the troll. She couldn't pull off physical intimidation without revealing her superhuman nature, so words and psychological warfare would have to suffice. She only hoped that it was enough. It would be inconvenient if she had to pull a gun on him, potentially triggering a major diplomatic incident. She could always burn the place down to mask the evidence, but that would take more of her valuable time, and she honestly couldn't be bothered.

(She was joking. Mostly.)

Lynlok swallowed. A drip of sweat caught on his laryngeal bulb as it bobbed up and down. The fraymotif was fading, but Rose could still glimpse brain activity cycling downstream, migrating from protocols to names to wage charts to acceptable workplace violence guidelines. Good—let him think. Once the seed of doubt was in there, it could only grow. Sooner or later, he would break.

Rose didn't have forever to wait, though.

The girl offered the thumb drive again.

After a long pause, the troll grunted, "Only because you asked so nicely."

He took the drive.

Rose smiled.

The sloshing stream guttered a gentle backdrop against the rustle of wind and the bird twitters passing from the canopy below. Water broke around a rock and spilled off into the forest below, disappearing among the thick leaves and vanishing out of sight. A seer sat at the edge of the outcrop her house used to overlook, her legs dangling morosely over the rim.

Her computer chugged along in her lap, sorting through terabytes of census data.

This was once one of her favorite recluses from her mother, a place close enough to the house to satisfy the drunken guardian's paranoid eye, but distanced sufficiently from the creature comforts of the indoors that barring the most extreme of inebriation or emergencies the woman would never truly bother going out to fetch her. Rose was not what the average sane individual would call outdoors person, but her younger self took advantage of her havens where she found them. Given the circumstances, she was allowing herself a brief indulgence in nostalgia while she had a chance.

Not for long, unfortunately. The query finished with a ping, the shell returning to the command prompt.

Rose clicked on the output file, mumbling a curse and force-quitting Gridwitch as the machine tried and failed to load the spreadsheet software in a timely manner despite supposedly wielding the processing power to rival a small supercomputer, and pulled the file up in a text editor instead. Her eyes skimmed the box of comma-separated plaintext.

Aradia Megido, missing.

Equius Zahhak. Eridan Ampora. Feferi Peixes. Gamzee Makara. Not much of note.

Kanaya Maryam. Matrigen.

Rose's heart clenched, but she kept reading.

Karkat Vantas, olive caste. Huh.

Nepeta Leijon. Sollux Captor. Tavros Nitram. Terezi Pyrope. Vriska Serket. All accounted for.

She counted again to be sure, but she had it right the first time around. Everyone was listed here. Aradia was most likely dead, which was a shame—the odd girl's company was enjoyable once you got used to it, and while the ghost might be around, Rose had heard enough accounts of how it used to act in death. Namely, not very much at all.

Karkat was recorded under a false caste, but once he went through registration proper his cover would be blown in an instant. A gruesome death was the only thing that awaited him down that path. Tavros would be slated for culling and Sollux would wish he were culled, but Terezi might be able to make it through if she impressed the boards enough. Which Rose gave good odds on, but it still wasn't ideal.

The bad news was that going by the birth dates she was seeing, Karkat and Sollux were both allocated for this cycle, and Rose didn't fancy what would happen if they didn't reach Alternia in time. The good news was that because of their blood—or reported blood, in Karkat's case—they wouldn't go through pre-processing until at least the second dark season, which meant they had more than a month. Four months, to be exact.

So that was their hard deadline. Four months to get to Alternia. It was reassuring, if only very slightly. If worse came to worst, they could commandeer a military vessel, or even a civilian one, which would take just less than forty days to cross the galactic arm.

That was assuming no complications, no mechanical breakdowns stranding them in the void between stars, and assuming that it was even possible to pilot a craft like that with no prior experience and no qualified engineers.

Okay. Perhaps it was a little grimmer than she was giving it credit for. Still, it wasn't as grim as they had initially feared.

Rose's phone rang.

-- ectoBiologist [EB] began pestering tentacleTherapist [TT] at 11:21 --

EB: rose, where are you?
TT: I took a brief detour to gather some information about our trolls. I'm about done sorting through it.
EB: oh no.
EB: what is it?
TT: Relax, John.
TT: It's good news. Our timeline isn't as strained as we first made it out to be.
TT: My estimate is four months before everything goes to hell on Alternia.
TT: Specifically for the trolls we know, I mean. Most of Alternia will do fine regardless of our intervention. If one were struck by the inexplicable inclination to characterize a ultra-violent hellscape of institutionalized classism and systematic oppression as "fine".
EB: ...well, I think that's good?
TT: Yes. That is what I said.
EB: rose this is dave
EB: where are you getting all of this dirt
EB: are you like cribbing from space buzzfeed
EB: falling for the tabloid headlines
EB: you wont believe this one simple trick to enlarge your horns
EB: the condesce HATES him
EB: you dont need horn enlargements rose be a responsible consumer
EB: i mean
EB: fuck
EB: what im saying is
EB: how reliable is this shit
TT: Very.
TT: It's straight from the Empire's databases.
EB: did you hack them or what
TT: I asked them nicely.
TT: I suppose there is one piece of unfortunate news.
TT: Aradia is most likely dead, like in the original timeline. And I'm unsure if Equius' robotic host body would work without prototyping into a sprite first.
TT: That is if that project even made it into this timeline, which may not have been the case if the original designs were Sburb-derived.
EB: ah
EB: i'm very sorry to hear that!
EB: this is john again, by the way.
EB: jade asks if you want help getting back.
TT: Thank you. It would be appreciated.

She rose to her feet. A flick of her wands repacked everything with her interfacial multitree arraylist modus.

The wind blew, but none of it touched the girl.

Rose looked back, some part of her still half-expecting to find her mother's ostentatious architectural design looming over the trees, perhaps the woman herself silhouetted in one of the upper windows, martini glass in hand as she watched her daughter at play. But there was nothing but trees and battered rock.

Idly, she wondered what happened to Jaspersprite.

Nostalgia was overrated.

It was time to go.

"So. Four months," Dave said.

"Four months," Rose confirmed. "At least. That's a lower boundary."

"So the plan is we talk to Dave and Jade's denizens, see if they have anything to give us, and if not we try to do it the normal way?" John asked.

"And by normal way, you mean using morally dubious troll technology," Jade muttered.

"And by morally dubious, you mean the ethically unconscionable physical and psychological abuse of enslaved goldbloods," Rose said. "Yes. We'll have time to instigate mass political reform after we declare absolute monarchy over the galaxy-spanning alien empire. For our short-term goals, leaning on the system is the best course of action for everyone, even if it necessitates the temporary tolerance of certain unsavory elements."

"To be clear," Dave began. "We're not stopping at saving the trolls, right? Our trolls. We're taking down the Condesce. The empire, the juggalo theocracy, the whole sick shebang. An inquisition for the ages under the flag of our new immortal overlords, i.e. us."

"Of course!" John said, turning to Rose. "We have to make a stand, right?"

"Naturally," the seer snorted. "I mean, what kind of patron gods would we be if we didn't?"

"Are we really running with the 'god' thing?" Jade asked dubiously.

"We technically are gods, literally," Dave pointed out. "We're immortal and have these nasty powers. Jade could beat any shitty mythological world-eater into the ground. Maybe John can call up some rain for starving farmers in Africa if they do a rain dance and sacrifice a lamb to him. Or hell, quell some hurricanes. Remember Katrina? That shit's prime miracle bait."

Rose hesitated. "We're still trying to operate in the shadows for the moment. The element of surprise isn't anything to scoff at. Nonetheless, I wouldn't be opposed to disaster relief work in the future; it would certainly be an efficient use of our time from a functional utility perspective."

"Do you think we can get on UN payroll?"

"I don't think what we call ourselves matters," said John. "It's just a word."

"Some churches might not like it," Jade mentioned.

Rose sighed.

"Alright, focus," she called, rapping the map that was being projected on the wall. "Hephaestus is in Houston. Echidna is in Sydney. How are we doing this?"

"Split up?" John suggested. "It's a personal meeting, right? So there's no point in all of us going and then three of us waiting outside the chamber for them to finish."

"I thought you saw Typheus with Davesprite?" Jade asked.

"Yeah, uh, didn't he die?" Dave said.

The other three turned to stare at the boy, various degrees of incredulity and offense painted on their faces.

He spread his arms with a shrug, shrinking under the scrutiny.

"Just sayin'."

"Sburb's always been an 'everyone does their own quest' kind of thing," John rationalized, avoiding the strangely macabre comment. "Even when the trolls met up, they didn't all group together until the big fight with the king, right? It was pairs or threes."

"I agree," Rose said. "My impression is that if any of this is by design of Sburb, the denizens are set up to be met in parallel. There's a binary mechanism at work in our near future, a turning point ahead that hinges on the concurrency of particular events."

There were statistical methods that could leverage this type of probabilistic variance-association powers, but Rose never took the time to learn them, leaning on her more explicit forecasting powers instead. She was beginning to regret that now. Any future information was a tool in their box now that her Sight was more or less neutered.

"So, two teams?" John suggested. "One with Dave, one with Jade?"

A solid decision, Rose thought, but the question was how to assign them.

The four glanced at each other, none of them eager to make the first pick. Rose could appreciate the dilemma: on one hand, splitting by ectobiological blood gave teams that were years familiarized with each other in person, better guaranteed to click together like a well-oiled machine; on the other, that could be equally construed as a reverse argument to mix it up, to avoid falling into patterns that could work against them in a battle.

Thankfully, she had already given this some thought. The question earlier was really more of a courtesy to see if they had a better idea.

"I'll go with Jade," Rose decided.

"Huh?" Jade blinked, surprised.

The other girl must have had her eyes on Dave, Rose realized by the darting of Jade eyes. She couldn't bring herself to be offended—she and Jade had always been not as close than the others, and she had always suspected something more going on between Dave and Jade even before Sburb. But with the debacle with Davesprite and three years of divergence... well, it was none of her business, so she declined to comment.

"Davesprite went with John to see Typheus, so there's a certain power in preserving the narrative pattern for Dave's meeting with Hephaestus," Rose explained. "Besides, I have the Quills of Echidna."

Of course, pairing the boys together had its own potential pitfalls. Rose had always meant her accusations of latent homosexuality as light-spirited jokes, but a small selection of field data collected in the dream bubbles indicated perhaps a kernel of truth in Strider's alleged membership in the alphabet club. She hadn't yet been lucky enough to catch any of the Doomed Daves in any particular compromising position yet, but let's just say that she had her reasons to doubt. The social dynamics of the bubbles were always fascinating to study, especially with the wealth of possible interactions offered by troll quadrants and their interpretations of hate.

...Rose was beginning to think that perhaps her excessive perusal of reference materials from Karkat's library may have had an adverse impact on her sense of priorities.

She was overthinking this.

"It only makes sense," she reaffirmed.

Nobody seemed to have an objection to raise.

"Cool," Dave brushed off as always. "Me and John, Rose and Jade, then?"

"I'm fine with that," said John, barely hesitating.

"Alright," Jade conceded after a pause. "So... do we go now?"

"Hephaestus' lair isn't open entry to the public," Rose reminded in case her friends had skipped that part of the files. "We're going to have to employ some degree of stealth, since we don't want to expose our abilities yet."

"We'll figure it out," Dave said. "I have chloroform in my sylladex."

"Please don't," John groaned. "You can do your flash step thingy, right? And Jade can teleport. Just make a distraction or something without destroying important historical relics."

Dave threw his arms into the air, huffing. "Good god, John. It's an immutable structure; those crusty rocks survived being smashed between two planets. What am I going to do to make it worse? Spray up the walls with some sweet-ass gang tags?"

"We don't know if terrain keeps its protections from the game." Rose warned. "Don't do anything that could get you arrested."

Dave being Dave, and them having spent three years on an absolutely consequence-free lawless cruise through the Furthest Ring, it was a distinct possibility. Not that Rose didn't trust Dave's self-restraint, but... okay, she didn't trust Dave's self-restraint. She had confidence that he could handle himself nine times out of ten, but it was that final ten percent she was worried about. These next few hours could be critical.

"And be careful of your force multipliers," Jade said with a frown. "Remember that sample cylinder you broke trying to chuck?"

Dave choked. "Hey, don't blame me that Sburb thought a tub of ectoslime was a throwing weapon."

"Let's get this done cleanly," Rose repeated. "No assault. No battery."

"Fine," Dave relented. "I don't really have chloroform, you know. Or explosives."

Naturally. Rose did give him that much credit.

"No cutting doors open with your sword," she however reminded. "It's too distinctive."

"Okay!"

The last parts of the plan were a simple matter to hash out. Ingress routes, contingency plans, communication protocols that Rose was sure the boys would forget in ten seconds.

A few more minutes of inventory management and prep, and by the strike of noon, they set off.

Chapter Text

"A question I get a lot is: so what are the Consort Ruins, really? Like, really."

The tour guide spreads his hands animatedly as he walks backwards.

"Everyone knows the theories. There's so many of them that yes, it's hard to tell which are conspiracy theories and which are the real deal. But ask any Sburbology expert worth their salt that question, and their first sentence will always be the same. I guarantee it. Whatever they tack on afterwards, whatever their pet theory is, their first words are always the same."

He leans forward, resting his palms against the granite walls of the narrow corridor.

"We don't know."

The young man—Tim Cole, his name tag says—turns and continues walking, leading the tour group on its slow descent down the long stairs. He's remarkably enthusiastic about this whole affair for someone that has to do it dozens of times a month, or at least he's faking it very well. The service industry can't have devoured too much of his soul if he can still look at clients and affect a smile that doesn't look like he's dying from tetanus.

Not so much can be said about the ragtag group of visitors trailing behind. There's an elderly couple that's barely keeping up with the leisurely pace you're setting, two of what you're guessing are their grandchildren scuffling over a bag of chips, a couple of teenage girls on their phones muttering and pointing at each other's screens, and a teacher leading five middle school kids bored out of their minds. You don't know what the hell they're whining about. You'd have swordfought a dozen puppets to have your bro take you to a cool underground alien temple thing when you were their age.

...Wow, It's Dave Strider, cranky old codger extraordinaire today, it seems. When I was your age, my guardian just fucking stabbed me when I complained! Kids these days wouldn't know discipline if it whooped them in the ass! Yeah, all you need now is a lawn to fiercely defend from the pesky neighborhood whippersnappers and maybe an apple tree or two.

Then next to the rest of the peanut gallery there's you and John, hanging onto every word for clues but still feeling distinctly weirded out at having your planetary mascots' bad fan fiction about yourselves narrated back at you.

"And this is true not only for their origins, but also a lot of the time their purpose! The relationships between the consorts, the gods, the lands and the denizens are so alien to ours in many aspects, and that makes these nexuses where they intersect so much more of a challenge to pick apart. Hephaestus' Temple is one such case, to the point that scholars still debate the accuracy of its naming. The LOHAC manuscripts identify it as Hephaestus' Dwelling, but unlike other known denizens' dwellings, this one is unique in that it received consort traffic in its heyday, doubling as a place of worship as well as, interestingly, industry, which is why some academics choose to refer to it as Hephaestus' Workshop."

It's been five minutes since you set out from the Grand Smithy that rests above your denizen's lair, and you're still on the same endless downwards spiral staircase. The most infuriating thing about it is that the stairs are tilted 30° on their side from how the whole structure is embedded in the earth, so you have to shuffle along leaning to one side and watching every step you take. You're starting to wish that humanity had just decided archaeology could fuck itself and bored an elevator through the ancient brick straight down to Hephaestus.

The guide waits a second for the stragglers to catch up while he continues.

"In fact, after the Great Fall happened and the inhabitants of these lands were lost to time, the Temple was used by early humans for many centuries for metalworking and shelter because of the incredible creations that lie at its heart. Even now, physicists have only solved four of the nine mysteries of the Phrygian Anvil originally stated by Dane Helmholtz in 1927. It's a sobering reminder of how little we truly know of the precursors!"

He says the word "sobering" like it's a full paid-for ticket to Disneyland. This guy and his cheery grin reminds you of Aradia a little. You know, you kind of miss her, as weird as it seems. You hadn't seen Aradia for months at the point you hit the new session, but you thought she was cool, if maybe in a freaky, possibly mentally unsound way.

Though, to be fair to her, she might just be the most mentally sound mentally unsound person you've ever met? No, all the loony points go to the other Megido.

"Phyg... what Anvil?" John whispers to you.

This Tim person must have hearing superpowers, because he catches the mumbled question from meters away.

"Hephaestus is the Lord of the Forge! There's an anvil made of radiothermic molybdenum steel down there. There were models and informational boards about it upstairs in the lobby, but don't worry if you didn't catch them—we'll be looking at the real thing in..." he checks his watch. "Less than half an hour!"

The old lady in the back raises her cane. It bumps against the low ceiling and she stumbles.

"Is that half hour going to be spent hobbling down these fucking stairs?" she yells hoarsely. "My husband's complaining about his lousy knees!"

The guide chuckles nervously, his eyes darting to the rickety grandpa limping next to her. "Well, it is a walking tour... but we're only a minute or two away from the Temple proper, and then we'll stop for a break, and after that it's solid flat ground with plenty of resting spots all the way, if that's what you're worried about."

The ancient woman mumbles something unflattering under her breath as you trudge along.

True to his word, you're filing out into the cavernous foyer of the Temple before you know it, the worn stone underfoot giving way to firm wooden planks and safety rails. Since an underground complex sunken on one side is probably a safety code violation for them to herd tourists through, the site authorities opted to outfit the place with suspended walkways wherever it opened up enough to allow so. You ignore the exhibits on the left and head directly for the banister, leaning over to assess the grand view of the chamber.

It's fairly tame as far as LOHAC architecture goes, a neat blend of proto-Grecian stonework and the brutalist steel that dominated your land. The chiseled reliefs and patterns ornamenting the walls are a strange contrast against the load-bearing metal I-beams that are keeping this place from crashing down on itself, but the effect isn't altogether unpleasant.

The building design is the side show, though. The intended star of the night is hard to miss, a giant minotaur that monopolizes the vast central space of the hall like a real estate conglomerate with no respect for antitrust legislation. The skew of the floor sends its hulking figure up, past and away from where this observation deck is perched, and you feel like you could almost reach out and touch its bulging bicep from here. It's an optical illusion; he's farther away than it looks.

It takes a glance to tell the monster is all metal and visible joints, so it's either a mechanical automaton, or armor on a fossilized mannequin. You're half-expecting it to come to life and challenge you as you approach to the edge of the railing, already readying Caledfwlch at the tip of your strife deck to deflect the first blow, but what power or spark might have driven it once, it isn't around anymore. The minotaur simply stands there, poised and motionless.

"That's a miniboss," mutters John next to you, also on his toes and leaning over the edge. His face is shadowed against the floodlight behind when you glance over at him.

"The Taurus Guardian!" Tim declares, waving the rest of the group over to the rails. "Protector of the temple! For a long time it was believed to be another symbolic or maniform sculpture like the entrance guardians of many other Consort structures, but the development of non-invasive deep imaging in 1999 revealed that the minotaur guardian contains sophisticated internals that are speculated to effect limited motion, if not full outright animation."

"You can tell?" you whisper back at John.

"But ironically, while statues coming to life is a common legend in Sburb, this minotaur has never once been recorded to move or animate in any way in the entire body of LOHAC lore! However, it is stated that in the hypothetical case of a hostile incursion or a challenger, it would rise to Hephaestus' defense."

"It's a show piece," one of the kids snorts. The schoolteacher shushes them.

"Yeah," John murmurs in answer to you. "It's dead. But not fully? Like... terminally hibernating. I would say petrified, but it was never flesh and blood, so..."

"We'll take a couple of seconds to rest our legs, as I said, and in the meantime feel free to peruse the exhibits and informational displays. They have some outstanding graphical reconstructions of the internal mechanisms next to the original gamma captures from the Deep Thaw project."

The crowd slowly scatters as the tour guide wanders off, some of them milling around to continue gawking at the sights, others beelining for the exhibits and boards overflowing with dull history and descriptions of things you can see fine with your own eyes. The X-ray stuff he was talking about is a little tempting, you guess, but... eh. You have more important things to occupy yourselves with.

"Do you think we get grist if we smash it?" you suggest, and you're only half joking. A Lair miniboss is bound to be a grist piñata, and Rose was right: game currency is a nonrenewable resource now. You're rationing at least the rare stuff like gourmet chocolate at the height of World War II, so every extra bit counts.

"Probably?" John hedges his bet. "But it's not what we're here for."

"Of course," you mutter.

The priority, of course, is getting to see Hephaestus. It wasn't exactly clear originally from Rose's documents how you would pull that off since the ruin of his Lair is buried miles underground smack in the center of Houston and guarded by security 24-7, but the grand anticlimax to that ineffable puzzle, she explained, is that you can book a tour online.

Perhaps a bigger problem is how you're going to meet him without a dozen random background onlookers tweeting the spectacle in real time. You aren't even sure if he would activate or do whatever Rose thinks he's supposed to if it's not just you and maybe John, so at some point you're going to have to lose the group.

"Imagine if we see him and it's literally just a statue," you whisper idly after a minute. "No great awakening, no epic shattering from the stone chrysalis. He's just fucking dead and I touch him and he instantly shatters into a million pieces of useless stone like I'm Indiana Jones done pillaging the priceless cultural heritage of indigenous populations."

"Don't say that," John snorts, rolling his eyes. "At least we're getting some sweet fray motifs out of this."

He's not wrong. Quite a few battlescores survived their journey to Earth, and unlike what's left of the proper Carapace tech, a lot of the tablets and scrolls are still valid tender to Sburb after thousand of years. Humanity has kindly plundered your lands' vaults for you and framed the spoils in conveniently accessible museums all over the world, ripe for the reaping, so there's no way you're not exploiting the fuck out of that while you have the chance.

True, most of the useful fraymotifs you learned long ago because you were swimming in boondollars all game, but there are a few special ones here and there that you never bothered questing for. You don't really need them, but you don't say no to free stuff, even if it's only as a post-mortem middle finger to Baron Nakkerson Crocsworth, wherever he may rest now in crocodile hell. That asshole just would not shut up about his fetch quests no matter how many boontreasuries you tried to bribe him with.

"Time to go!" the tour guide calls out.

The group trickles over to the passageway to your next stop, what the pamphlet says is apparently the temple "atrium", whatever that is. Atrium, chambers, foyer, wing, you don't really know the difference, and you don't particularly care. As you walk, you flip ahead through the tour route, scanning the descriptions.

"This is going too slow," you mutter to John.

"We're not in a hurry."

"I could skip past the guide guy. He wouldn't see me."

John's glances over the crowd as you cloister up at the neck of the exit bridge. He leans in and lowers his voice as he speaks, just so you're not announcing to the world your intention to illegally desecrate a national monument.

"I can't move that fast," he reminds you.

Well, he technically can, just not instantly from rest or with any hope at stealth, but you get what he means.

"I go ahead, you cover for me?" you suggest.

John's mouth curves into a small frown.

It abruptly occurs to you that it's practically the first time in your lives the two of you have uniquely occupied the same physical locale without the others, maybe literally the first time for this version of John, and you're already trying to ditch him. And not only is that what's colloquially known as a dick move, it's perhaps not strategically sound in this situation.

"You know what? You're right. We're not in a hurry," you correct yourself.

His lips twitch back up. You look down.

The sloping ceiling closes in until the walkway drops two steps and you can walk straight again. It's cramped, but you keep shuffling along with the flow of bodies. The light at the end of the tunnel draws nearer and nearer, until before you know it the momentum of the line is pushing you out onto the viewing deck.

And then you're stumbling your first steps into the gargantuan circular dome of the Foundry, the rumbling heat beating down on you like the midday sun has taken up residence in front of your face.

You've seen a lot of things on your planet and in the depths of the meteor. You didn't expect to be impressed. But this sight, somehow, still snatches the breath out of your mouth. A massive multi-story furnace towers from floor to arching ceiling, bristling with valves, exhausts, angled faucets and huge hatches for shoveling coal and feed. Metal skybridges criss-cross the upper space of the chamber, leading from the sealed bulkheads dotting the walls of the dome all the way to the center, where they join up to the railed ring-platforms circumscribing the smelting behemoth. It's like they took an entire host of refineries and plants, tried to stuff all of it into one big abomination of a machine, and they succeeded.

All of it is only a minor distraction from how blisteringly hot this place is, though.

"God, it's an oven in here," you grumble, tugging at your damp shirt.

It's been like this since Jade dropped you off, but this place is a whole new level of heat torture. Isn't the underground supposed to be cool? Or at least not Satan's pressure cooker with the safeties taped off and the heat set to the surface of the sun?

"It... isn't?" John says with a frown.

What?

You glance around, and with a sick lurch, realize that he's right. No one else looks even warm. You're the most undressed here by a mile, and the old man is even bundling up in more layers as he hobbles out of the entryway. Yet somehow, despite the empirical evidence to the contrary, your skin feels like it's about to roast off like a Christmas turkey left too long in the oven. Not that you'd know anything about that, since Bro never had an oven. Or cooked. Or really did Christmas at all.

"The atrium of the Temple, also known as the Foundry!" the guide announces as the last of the group files in. "Not the biggest room in this place, you might be surprised to learn. That honor is reserved for the Hallowed Works, where Hephaestus himself is supposed to architect his greatest creations. The technology here is surprisingly advanced even taking into account..."

As you tune out the rambling exposition, it finally clicks.

Leaning close to John's ear, you whisper, "It's my personal quest."

"Huh?"

"This heat I keep telling you about. I'm not crazy: it's for my personal quest. For my planet. You know how it's literally a giant ball of lava? Hephaestus' fault. I was probably supposed to track down his lair using the fake heat sense like a shitty compass if we'd played the proper way, and then I would convince him to stop melting the planet."

In theory, at least. Of course, according to Davesprite that was only the bait, and on your hunt for your denizen you were supposed to find out that no one really wanted the lava seas gone since living in a fiery hell had become an indispensable cornerstone of crocodile culture over the centuries, and the real problem would end up being Hephaestus' divine forges crashing the precious metals market and dropkicking the LOHAC economy into the worst depression in two hundred years.

"Oh. Can that hurt you if you get too close? We're still very far from the denizen."

Dammit, he has a good point. Even if the heat is only being a pest right now, there's no saying it won't break into outright fire damage when you get close enough. It was probably how the game would have gated you from this quest line until you collected the prerequisite items. But since Davesprite had gone to Hephaestus, that means somewhere in here there must be...

Digging around in your sylladex, you fish up something that you almost forgot about. Now you finally know what this stupid thing is for. The ruby-headed gold band zaps onto your finger, and the heat damps out in an instant like you put in the thermal equivalent of earmuffs.

Wiggling your digits in front of John's face, you announce quietly, "Greater Ring of Fire Resistance."

One of many in the pile of junk you inherited from your future self. You never understood what it was useful for, and you never got around to asking Davesprite about it. The thing is that fire resistance is not the same thing as lava resistance, and the latter is vastly more common than the former on LOHAC, so it's just a very expensive but kind of shitty trinket for the purpose of survival on your planet. You figured that maybe Davesprite didn't realize that when he first made or bought it, but this is probably the metagame niche it's supposed to fill.

"Neat!" John whistles. You nod absentmindedly.

And since the heat isn't going away, you might as well use it the way it was meant to be used. You focus on the warmth washing over your body and feel around, trying to refine the vague sensation into something more than a lazily implemented proximity alert. If it's possible at all, it should be well within reach for your perception stats.

"...began as scholars of the Hephaestus Machines, which some argue contributed to the prevalence of Sburbist spiritualism in early American academia," your tour guide is still continuing. "Now if you'll follow me to the next room, there's still a lot more to see here, but we'll be looping back through the tour. Next we're looking at some of the early attempts at replication by 19th-Century Chronom priests, and experiments that were performed right here in these halls!"

Shit, this soon? The other tourists begin their exit, but you're scanning the lower levels of the giant dome. You still aren't entirely sure how this works, but your intuition is nudging. There's something in here.

"There," you murmur to John, pointing at a ground-level hatch way down in the bottom of the chamber. "The denizen is down there. Let's go."

"Ooorrr we can wait until the tour gets there by itself," John counter-proposes, tugging you towards where the guide is shepherding people off to the next section.

"It's a shortcut! We're going to have to lose them at some point," you argue.

"There are-"

The other boy stops talking abruptly and lets go of you, letting your arm drop to your side. Tensing in preparation for trouble, you turn around, but it's just the tour guide. He's approaching the two of you, his hands clasped in a deferential gesture. See, this is what happens when you dawdle.

He smiles and dips his head. "I see you two are enjoying the Foundry, but... ah... we're going to have to get a move on. Don't worry—we will be weaving in and out of the atrium on later parts of our itinerary, so there'll be plenty of chances to take pictures."

John's eyes dart to you. You scramble for an excuse.

"Thanks, uh..." you sneak a look at his name tag and affect a pleasant smile as you look back up at the earnest man. "...Tim. Don't mind us, we've been around the block a few times. Veteran tourists here. Graduated from Harvard Professional Sightseeing School. It's a grad program, very prestigious. Just go on ahead and we'll catch up in second."

He frowns, glancing between you and John. You shift and cross your arms.

Maybe Four Aces Suited wasn't the best choice for a stroll through an ancient archaeological dig site. It's not precisely the most inconspicuous of disguises.

"It's not like there's a wealth of wrong turns for us to wander down," you add hopefully. You checked and the entire walkable path is linear. There's practically no chance of getting lost if you follow the public viewing areas.

"All...right," he says slowly. "If you and your..."

"Er. Brother," you say lamely. Flawless deception. No suspicion whatsoever.

"If you and your brother need anything, I'll be right ahead," he says slowly. He's starting to recuperate some of his chippy vigor. "And if you find yourself in a bother, just wave at the security cameras! They're always manned."

The guy jerks a thumb behind his back at the rotating black lens mounted at the top of a support column, and at long last, turns around to scurry towards where his other charges are waiting. You watch his retreating back until he disappears around the corner of the exit, and then finally release the breath in your lungs.

It's just you and John now.

And no, you didn't miss that veiled warning.

"Security cameras," you sigh. "Fuck."

"Why are we brothers?" John grumbles at you. "We don't even have the same color of hair! We don't have the same color of skin!"

You blink. "What? I mean, isn't it a bit weird to say you're my friend? You're like half my age. That's almost full on creep territory."

"I'm only two years younger!" he protests.

"Two and a half," you correct.

"Two," insists John. "My birthday's in April and yours is December so I was already half a year ahead than you originally."

You groan, "Jegus, dude. Who cares? And I'm wearing a suit while you're dressed like a gnome."

"Auugghh," he groans. He looks put out, but hey, you're just calling it as you see it.

"It doesn't matter what fictional relationship we share!" you argue. "We're never going to see that guy again in our whole life, probably! And we need to get rid of the camera or we're going to be caught flying around on tape."

That finally seems to remind John that you have a job to do here. He turns his eyes to the innocuous device swivelling in the corner, his look deepening into a scowl. You can't flash step that well with a passenger, and you don't trust your combined speed enough to try vaulting over the edge, prying your exit open and vanishing through in the time it takes for the camera to swing back.

"Timestop it," he says. "You can do that!"

"Chronobreak takes active focus," you object. "I can't do that and get away. Unless I extend it... with..."

"With what?"

Your mouth is dry all of a sudden.

"...the timetables," you finish, a sinking feeling in your gut.

See, there's a huge number of abilities in Sburb, and as many ways to sort them. Intrinsic and extrinsic is a way of dividing them, like John's breath-fu versus your time machines, but another one of the most common classification axes is the hard-soft spectrum.

Fraymotifs are far on the hard end, rigid, well-defined game elements that you trigger like a command command. A single button press, basically the easiest it can get. On the other pole are the mind-bendingly abstract, like a Seer's sight: flexible tools, more like extra limbs and senses you can bully into all sorts of things they shouldn't do. Using time machines lies somewhere in the middle, where they're not exactly profound inner forces you have to meditate for three suns and three moons on, but still tools with millions of ways you can bend them to your designs.

The vast majority of the time, soft powers trump hard powers. With the right bullshit you can crack a fraymotif right open, rearrange its guts as you like, then stitch it up and throw your Frankenstein monstrosity at whatever poor soul gets to be the receiving end. Jade did it in her field experiments on FTL travel yesterday, and you used to dabble in it yourself a long time ago. The problem is that if soft powers are infinitely more versatile, they're equally horrendously difficult to master. The omnitool the timetables give you are even worse in this respect, because you didn't even earn them the right way: you took them off a future Dave that had months to learn how to play time.

Yes, being a natural Time player, you have inbuilt intuition backing you up compared to any random schmuck that got their hands on one of these bad boys. As a Knight, you have the intuition to wield timetables like a scalpel. Direct jumps, closed loops, clean and precise. But that's it. The stapler and crowbar and can opener functions tucked away in there? It's fucking gobbledegook to you, and you never took the time to learn in your three years, because time travel sucks and your powers suck.

But that's an excuse. Stopping time—not even that, but just extending a timestop past its default duration—that's within your capabilities. It's time machines 101, instructional baby stuff for lame wigglers that poop hard in their diapers.

The problem is that you don't want to.

Simply the idea of touching those turntables again fills you with dread, an oily, anticipatory dread that's only grown over the years of them sitting in the dusty rear of your portfolio biding their time. Like a cursed puppet in Bro's back closet whispering jeers into your ears while you sleep, rasping, take me. Use me. In a totally non-suggestive way, despite my blatantly phallically-inspired character design.

"You don't have to do it if you don't want to," John murmurs, bumping you in the shoulder. Fuck, you're so disgustingly transparent.

"It's fine. I'll can manage one little cantrip," you mutter. It's not even real time travel. You can't kill yourself stopping time. Don't be stupid.

John is looking at you with a pitying—concerned, it's concerned—expression, and fuck it: you're going to do it, just to prove him wrong. This is unimaginably petty and devoid of any logic under the Green Sun, you know. But you're not afraid.

"We could break it normally, make it look like an accident," he suggests hesitantly. "It's not a big deal. It's just a camera."

"For shame, John," you snort, swallowing. "Destruction of private property? I can't believe you would ever suggest stooping to such depths of crime and depravity. Your dad would be disappointed in you, young man."

Just get it over with. You raise a hand in front of you and snap your fingers once. A circle of spinning red sigils bursts into color at the tip of your outstretched limb, expanding to its full rotating graphic in a second.

The camera halts in place, the symbol of time searing bright into its chassis.

Keeping your casting arm poised, you lift your other hand to the side. For the first time in three years, a timetable snaps into material space in a burst of red. You're out of practice, the metaphorical rust is scraping in your gears, but the weight of time at your fingertips feels still as traitorously natural as the first time you touched these infernal devices.

You hate how easy it is.

All you have to do is reach out, pluck the eigenstrings from the matrix binding the control volume to the fraymotif, couple them to an orthonormal rest axis and arrest—

The threads snap.

The backlash carves through you before you see it coming. Your mind bifurcates and trifurcates ad infinitum, fractal instants pulling you everywhere and everytime at once. You're drowning in quantum foam. In one agonizing moment, you see an uncountably infinite stack of possibilities spooled out at the same time, but it's not a wealth of choices to pick and sample, it's a semi truck of temporal momentum a nanosecond away from turning you into low-granularity grubsauce. The last thing that registers is that you're fucked.

The attempt to hold yourself together fails without a whisper of resistance.

You're a fine smear on the pavement of time.

And then

you're not.

"-Dave! Dave! Can you hear me?"

John's voice slowly filters in. Dimly, you're aware that you're curled up on the floor, knees clutched to yourself in the fetal position. There's a pounding in your head like a sexually frustrated gorilla chanced upon your eye socket, drowning out everything but the distant sound of his pleading, and even that's too far away to entirely register.

"Dave!"

Fuck. Pull yourself together. Don't pass out, as delightfully tempting it seems. That's a one way trip to fuckup city.

"I'm fine," you rasp. You're not. You almost want to shoot yourself in the head if only to see if resurrecting fixes this horror show in your brain howling bloody murder in a grand skull-splitting chorus. Your internal Broadway has to have something better on rotation than this squealing Phantom of the Opera shit.

"What happened?" he demands, real, palpable agitation in his voice.

What happened. Your timetables. Your hands grasp over the floor, clawing blind and jerky in your disorientation. A knuckle grazes cold copper and the machine folds itself into your inventory. You half expect the action to send another ice pick into your frontal lobe, but your sylladex answers sharp and painless, a crystal blade of clarity slicing through the haze of your torment.

Flopping over onto your back and staring up at the distant girder-lined ceiling of the chamber, you manage to gurgle, "Never... trying that again."

"Are you-"

"I'm fine," you hiss. It still hurts, but the crippling 11/10 pain is subsiding into more of an armful-of-aspirin-desired territory. "Accident. Fuck."

"What went wrong?"

"I'm such a fucking idiot. The whole temporal structure of this place is fucked."

You reach out a hand. John helps you up with a grunt.

"But hey, 1-0 in favor of doomed timelines not being a thing," you cough. Because if they were, doom is definitely what would have happened right there instead of whatever that was.

John frowns, still holding on to your arm. "Please don't do that again."

"No need to tell me twice." The demolition party in your head spikes and you wince, stumbling.

"You scared me," John repeats. His fingers are digging into your bicep hard enough to hurt. You pry at them with your other hand and he reluctantly releases after realizing, but his hand is still hovering over your sleeve.

"Sorry," you mutter.

You stand in one place for a moment, catching your breath. In what could turn out to be a spectacularly bad idea, you reach out to time, pointedly not as much as breathing on it. Look-only.

The exact instant when you shit the bed stands out like a frayed knot in the stream of time. You're losing resolution on it as it sinks into the past, but downstream of the break, where you are right now, the disturbances are smoothing out. You didn't break anything. You don't know what you could have done if you had, but the answer is probably "be fucked now and forever".

"I guess we're smashing the camera, then," you sigh.

John lets out a hiss between his teeth.

"Yeah. About that..." he mutters.

He points over your shoulder.

You turn around.

The security camera is a mangled wreck. It looks as if an impossible force sheared it along its forward length, twisting the metal and plastic chassis beyond recognition. The glass lens is shattered, the remains littering the floor.

The runes of your aspect are burned into the broken shell in blackened, smoking lines.

"Huh."

You were feeling better, but now you're a little unsteady on your feet again.

Could that have happened to you if you tried to accelerate yourself?

"Yep. No experimenting with time until I understand this shit better," you mumble, leaning back and gripping the handrail for support. You have some idea of what it was—temporal velocity shear, most likely—but that doesn't make it look any more fun. It looks like the diametric opposite of fun.

John is watching you carefully. "Are you okay? I'm serious. We can call it off. I'm sure Rose and Jade won't mind waiting another day. Or more, if you need it."

Holy shit, you don't need to be coddled. But is it bad that you're seriously considering it with how shitty you're feeling right now?

But no. The actual physiological trauma of the backlash has drained out of you. All you are is shaken, and you can power through that. You've done it before, and you're on a schedule. Your friends need you. Taking a deep breath, you push off the rail and rub your hands together.

"No. Let's go," you say, checking the exits and making sure there's no more surveillance equipment hiding around the corner.

You lean over the edge. It takes a second to pinpoint the exit you spotted earlier. It's a hatch like any of the others, but you can feel the heat of Hephaestus' innermost dwelling place brimming from behind it. Through that gate and down into the depths, you can feel it calling to you.

The Hallowed Works.

Sightseeing is over. Time to meet the denizen.

Chapter Text

Hephaestus is huge.

It's the first and last thought that comes to mind as you lay eyes on the ginormous stone noodle monopolizing the underground real estate of his basement. There's no doubt that it's him. You can see every scale and crease in the ashy granite hide, photorealistic in detail. The cavern—and it's a cavern, of basalt and thick, drooping stalactites, not the brick and metal you walked in from—is the size of a stadium, looming larger than all of the rest of Hephaestus' temple you've seen put together. The denizen himself takes up what feels like a full half of that with its broad, snaking coils, but if you had to make an honest estimate... he still makes up an eighth of the space. By volume.

The crocodiles' figures of Hephaestus had you thinking that he would be a big snake on the ground slithering around and talking with a creepy anthropomorphic mouth. And maybe other denizens are like that. Yours isn't. For one, the consorts' idea of his aspect ratio is a gross misrepresentation of the actual reality. He's thick, sure, the girth of a dumpster truck. But above everything? He's really, absurdly fucking long.

That's because he isn't coiled up in the middle having a nap, oh no. Hephaestus snakes all around the cavern, up and against the craggy ceiling, curving across and down and around and up again, over and over. Not hanging or clinging—pushing. Straining. You can see where the edges and juts of black rock dig into once-living flesh that even now still labors against the weight of the miles of solid earth above. He's a hundred living arches crushing against each other to hold up a geologically impossible structure.

Historians must have written all of this off as designer's conceit, but you don't have the same luxury of ignorance. Stepping off the machined steel step onto the blackened stone of the Hallowed Works isn't like entering the sacred chambers of a fallen king: it's setting foot in a graveyard. The air is dry and crisp, the scales of the beast are fossilized stone, but you feel in your bones that if you had come here in your quest when Skaia still hung in the sky, it would have been like stumbling into a monster's gullet, feeling the hot, damp breath of a world titan wash over you as the fleshy walls throbbed with gallons of inhuman lifeblood.

The uvula, to finish the metaphor, is right there. In the center of the cavern Hephaestus' petrified head descends from the ceiling, frozen in a slack grimace. Directly below it is a lonely marble dais, a full boiler room long and wide, the only artificial structure in the entire chamber.

On it, the Phrygian Anvil.

The anvil looks tiny against the sheer scale of the room—it looks like Hephaestus could snap it up in a gulp—but nonetheless, like every other item of blacksmithing equipment in this facility, it's far bigger than any anvil ought to be. You reckon you could lay down in the center of it, splay your limbs like Leonardo da Vinci's drawing you, and still fall short from reaching the edges.

You wouldn't dream of doing that, of course. Not out of veneration for the denizaen, but because the goddamn thing is glowing white hot and bright enough to blind. You can barely make out the shape of it. It's where all of this heat is coming from, in surges and waves that buffet your skin. Even John is sensing it now, by the shift in his gait.

This is it: the Works' heart of heart. The legendary Anvil. Not that it's doing much hearting of hearts now, approximately the age of a universe and a billion light years from its home planet, but there it is, in all of its glory. The canonical lore is that Hephaestus forged it from the core of a neutron star that fell at the beginning of Creation, trapping the destructive forces that would have rent his Land asunder and bending its celestial gravity to his dark purposes. Rumor is that with it he can shape even time itself, which you assume is why the Lord of the Forge is on your planet instead of, you know, the one with the actual capital-F Forge on it.

What's up with that anyway? How is an Anvil here fed by a Forge on literally another planet? There's probably another nominally sensible but actually completely-crackpot-when-you-spend-more-than-a-minute-thinking-about-it answer to that, but to tell the truth, you don't particularly care to find out.

"There's something there," John mutters.

He floats up off the floor, raising a hand to still the heat haze. You follow John's squinting eyes to the center of the dais. He's right. There's a blip in the searing glow of the Anvil. A blip on top.

It takes a second for the obvious possibility to strike you, and then when you whip around back towards the lone corridor you just entered through, the circular mangalloy door is already swinging behind you. The slab slams into its frame with a resounding crash, followed by a soft click as the latch seals you in. A hieroglyph glows on its surface.

"Fuck," you curse.

You sprint towards the exit, but you only make it a few steps past the neck of the passageway before you rebound bodily off an invisible barrier. A test swing at it with your sword only produces a ripple of red across the surface and a backlash that almost knocks the blade from your hands.

"It's getting up!" John shouts from ahead. You refocus yourself, turning and striding back out into the open cave. The shape in the Anvil's corona is shifting. Sharp, jerky movements, like a machine that's forgotten how to move and is struggling with its remedial locomotion classes.

John pulls leaflets out of his sylladex in quick sequence, tossing them as they come until he pulls out the one he's looking for.

"The Unfinished Guardian," John reads right as that exact same title blurb announces itself in your mind. His eyes flick up for a second. "Mechanical automaton of unknown composition, could not be removed from the Anvil... deep imaging... great complexity..."

"We have to kill it." you summarize. "Got it."

Goddammit. Even now, dried and dead in a ditch, your planet still manages to find a way to give you shit.

The entity has rebased itself to the floor of the dais, graduating it from a mere indistinct shape into a silhouette now that the light is blocked out by its back. It's semi-humanoid, walking erratically, dragging one leg behind the other. Even at this distance you can tell it's missing parts. You fly forward and up, John following—you highly doubt the thing can fly, given that it can hardly walk as it, so you're not going to sit on the ground and let it get to you without trying to cheat the system first.

A good idea, it turns out, since the automaton is pretty slow. It would have taken minutes for it to hobble its way to you if you'd stayed at the entrance. Or maybe this is just its entrance act and it'll launch into full attack dog mode once it gets off its high horse? As you glide closer and it shuffles out from the glare of the Anvil, the details desaturate enough that you can get your first real good look at it.

You can't help but whistle in appreciation.

The minotaur guardian from the entrance of the temple was an archaic steampunk-esque design, like they wrangled Jules Verne and Tolkien into joint charge of creative direction, but this one is sleek.

It's a knight, which by conventional design logic would make it clunky and awkward, but it's also a knight with no actual person inside, and that means that its platemail armor, its polyhedric helmet, all of it is built straight into its body. You don't mean skin—body. Lapped plating flows directly out from deep underneath where organs should be, slotting together to trace every groove of the human form to sinew perfection. The seams in the metal fan and close to the shift of motors to give the illusion of flexing muscle. The level of detail would be almost pornographic if not for the blatantly inhuman knight helmet it has in place of a head, and its single, glowing, crimson eye.

And also the fact that it's missing everything under its left elbow, most of a thigh and half its skull.

The Unfinished Guardian. Copper clockwork protrudes from the gaping opening in its chrome hull, ticking and crawling in real time as the machine lurches in your direction. The gears and linkages pistoning in open air look like they're about to disengage and fall apart any moment, but no—the knight marches on.

In its sole intact hand, it holds a lance as tall as itself. A very loud lance.

As it comes to a stop below you, cranes its cyclopean head up and raises the weapon to you, you realize that the lance is, in fact, a chainsaw lance.

John blinks next to you. "Huh."

"What the fuck is that," you state flatly.

How does Sburb come up with this shit?

The chain comes out of the tip of the lance, winds down the length in an anticlockwise spiral, and vanishes somewhere into the flat base of the thing. It's unspeakably noisy and would completely ruin the machined elegance of the enemy design if you weren't already used to supernaturally powerful goth vampiresses swinging around bloody chainsaws while thoroughly owning the look.

Surely that can't be remotely practical. But then again, that's common sense, and Sburb doesn't operate on common sense. Assuming Hephaestus got around jamming and snapping and power and all the other wonderful things that could make that monstrosity go boom like a Michael Bay film prop, it would be a royal pain in the ass to parry a spinning chainsaw lance. Plus, if the Guardian manages to get even the tip in, you have an uncomfortable hunch that given the way the teeth are spinning, the lance is going to screw itself through you in the most unfun way humanly conceivable.

The knight leans back—claws coming out of its nine toes to anchor to the ground as its center of gravity tips back and back—and in the blink of an eye, before you even realize what's happening, hurls.

You're already shoving yourself and John out of the way as soon as it leaves its hand. The spear of whirling teeth cuts through the air in a split second, certainly faster than you expected, but you've been dodging speedier projectiles since you were a kid. The lance whips past, and you take a dumb risk to try to grab it on the way. Deprive the enemy of its weapon and score a sweet possibly artifact-class item on the side? Sign you up.

Annoyingly, the infernal device spins out of your grip of its own accord—magnets? bullshit telekinetic magic?—swerves, and accelerates back towards the knight, who snatches it out of the air and settles into a fighting stance again.

Was all of that just a test shot?

This thing needs to go, and quick. The Hallowed Works are on the tour route, and though you don't know how long it'll take the group you ditched to trickle its way here, they still eventually will. If they find the door sealed with a mysterious force field and an angry machine knight spitting fireballs inside, you're going to have a hell of a lot to explain.

The Guardian crouches, holstering its weapon along its spine where pincers pop out to accept it. You can't help but notice how the mechanical components of its legs rearrange and tessellate into new conformations as the knight moves, no doubt winding up some sort of ingenious loaded mechanism to launch it forward.

Well, it doesn't get the chance.

John raises a hand. A howling updraft rips the knight from the ground, instantly shattering the stone its foot claws were dug into. The humanoid machine spins in the air, searching desperately for purchase, but it's air, dipshit, what does it think it's going to grab? The vortex pins it in, raw lift keeping it afloat.

"Do you think he has a jetpack?" John wonders, bringing the trapped knight closer with a curl of a finger.

"If it had, it probably would have used it by now," you say with a shrug.

John rubs his chin. "Wow. This is anticlimactic."

It genuinely doesn't look like the Guardian can do anything about its predicament. After a few seconds it stops struggling, but John keeps spinning it faster and faster until it's just a gray whipping blur flywheeling in front of you. No point in giving it a chance to break out the laser eyes if it has any, after all.

"I don't think you were supposed to come in here with a god tier Heir of Breath," John points out.

"Yeah," you sigh.

Even years later and with two birthdays on him, you're still being one-upped by Egbert on every occasion.

"Should I smash it?" he asks.

You give it a moment of thought. From a purely strategic perspective? Yes. If this were the black royals, you would take the easy way out, ten times out of ten, crack that grist egg open on the first hard surface you see.

But the thing is that planet quests don't work that way. Denizens are about choices, facing fears, personal development, shit like that. If this enemy is supposed to mean something on a deeper personal level, it's not thematically a win if you let John blow up all of your problems. And with everything on the line, you're not taking stupid risks. You don't think you have much of a chance of losing against an miniboss of this caliber anyway.

"No," you squeeze out reluctantly. "Let's play it by the books. Let it down. I'll fight it."

John glances sideways at you. He understands, of course.

His fist closes. The wind quiets and dies. The knight falls out of the air, somehow slowing and righting itself enough in the ten or twelve meters of surplus altitude to score a controlled landing with loud, a splitting crunch. When the dust clears, it's crouched a superhero-style three-point touchdown, ugly cracks in the stone radiating from where its knee, foot and hand are firmly lodged into the ground.

The lamina of its body are staggered like a fanned deck of cards, the stacks sheared out along lines of impact. Shock absorption. Fucking great. Its head snaps up, single blood-red eye glowing brighter.

"Drama queen," you mutter.

You touch down lightly a good distance in front it as it rises to its feet. Caledfwlch snaps into your hand, and you once again find yourself wishing that you still had the Deringer.

The plates of its armor shift and compact. It draws.

You sigh, "Let's do this."

It doesn't waste time circling or trash-talking your art. It lunges.

The built-in plate layers aren't only an aesthetic choice, you register. They flattened out to absorb the landing earlier, and now that it's moving, the parts are pushing and pulling against each other with mechanical precision to give it an extra bounce in each step. Its arm compresses and bulks into faux-muscle as the lance draws back, then spears out lengthwise at the peak of the thrust.

Your sword bats the offending weapon away with ease while you take a casual step to the side. You're already braced for the whirl of the chainsaw deflecting your blade down—you parried to the right precisely so the lance wouldn't spin its way down into your hilt and take your hand out.

What you don't expect is the direction of the chain reversing a split second later, almost tugging Caledfwlch from your hand.

A brief moment of panic lambasts you, but your instincts serve you right this time as you reflexively flash step to the left, letting the Guardian drive past.

You need to get on the other side of the robot to take advantage of its missing arm. Aim for the holes, too: getting a good hit in on all of that exposed clockwork will probably take it out in one shot.

"Watch out!" John calls.

Fuck. You take back everything good you said about your instincts: three years can't have done your combat reflexes any favors, because you're so busy daydreaming about hypothetical strategy that you didn't notice your opponent's heel turn the second it skated past, and it isn't wasting a second in taking another charge. You have to award yourself bonus dumbass points for missing the obvious: maybe the roar of the stupid chainsaw lance right behind you, just maybe, should have tipped you off?

It doesn't matter. You lunge for the ground, turning it into a roll at the last second and swinging your blade backwards as you hear the cacophony of rippling teeth shave past. And—

—there's a brief half-second of resistance, the shriek of catching mechanisms—

—two heavy somethings thud to the ground, followed by the clatter of a hundred smaller metallic bits skittering against brittle rock. Hissing steam and the dying rattle of broken clockwork roll past.

When you stumble to your legs and spin around, the Guardian is in two ruined halves.

They aren't moving. Its guts are spilling out of where your sword passed through its midsection. Some of the inner machinery is still trying to keep going, but all that does is suck detritus into the gears and grind out more crunching sounds. The lance is chainsawing on, half-wedged in the ground two feet away and trying to drill itself into solid stone with some modicum of success, but it's winding down as you watch.

John lands next to you. You stand stock still, watching the last of your opponent rasp its cold, dying mechanical breath.

"Holy shit," he murmurs.

Holy shit indeed.

After what seems like an eternity of waiting, waiting to see if the remains are going to get up and take another shot at you, waiting for the robotic Thing to burst out of its chest for round 2, nature runs its cruel course. The chrome body shimmers and vanishes. In its place comes a clutter of grist, popping soundlessly into existence on the floor. High-tier stuff, but not a lot. You think you might see a unit of Zillium in there. A few drops of delirium.

The lance stays—you might pick that up, pawn it off to a Tavros or something. Or hey, just Tavros, if that's something you can look forward to.

"That was... quick," says John.

"Understatement of the century."

You were barely trying with that swing. It was a light blow, supposed to trip, not bisect the fucking thing effortlessly. The way Caledfwlch cut through it like butter... experimental mutants on the meteor have given you more trouble than this with the Deringer. You thought this would be a solid fight, something that would challenge you and maybe knock you down a peg to teach you a lesson about humility or some rubbish. Not a robot with one cute gimmick and less health than you have in your pinky finger.

You're beginning to wonder if the Guardian would have even dealt damage to you if it'd hit you full-thrust with the lance. What was the point of all that?

"Maybe it's because it was unfinished," John suggests.

"No," you reject immediately. "I mean thematically, yes, but mechanistically, it's a fully implemented enemy. I think... I was supposed to catch Hephaestus in the middle of building it, and then he was supposed to get mad, and then he'd activate the Guardian to fight me. Then when I killed it he would be all 'you have earned the right to an audience through trial of combat', then he'd listen to me and offer me The Choice. That's how it was supposed to go."

The longer you speak, the more confident you get. There were a few variants of this scenario recorded in the meteor's library, from transcripts of other sessions that you're not sure ever really happened, will happen or will happen anymore, so it's not ludicrously out of this world. Besides, you highly doubt even Sburb fake science bullshit can make a half-assembled murder machine actually be in any state to commit murder. That honor is strictly reserved for Sburb plot bullshit.

You guess you're just... overleveled for this encounter?

Now that you think about it, the personal quest is supposed to be mid-game content. Rule of thumb is to meet the denizen at two-thirds through the game, then Derse players get started taking out the Black Queen and Prospit players haul ass to the Battlefield. The Veil, which is basically where you've spent three years lounging in, is how a Dersian dream self gets to Skaia for the King fight if your regular self dies. So those were pretty much endgame enemies you'd been ridesharing with this whole time, which helps put this fight in perspective, at least. It kind of makes sense.

But it makes you uneasy.

If this were a random dungeon on your planet, you'd say "sure, thanks for the loot", but this is the denizen's lair. Hephaestus is supposed to be intelligent, supposed to be foreknowing. You should have been matched with an opponent of a suitable level, not handed the victory on a platter. It's not a question of his capacity to make a worthy challenge since the denizen level-scales itself to you if you try to fight it, so why?

Possibility 1: Hephaestus didn't know. This is a glitch, or someone else was supposed to come here, maybe a doomed you or a player from a new session. That's disconcerting in and of itself because it means that you're operating outside of paradox space's plan, and though you've been harping about getting out from under Sburb's thumb all this time, there's a colossal difference between escaping Sburb and bumbling your way through potentially game-breaking bugs.

Possibility 2: there's a deeper meaning behind this. A statement on the futility of life, or a symbol of transcendence, or whatever. The problem is that if that's the case, you have zero clue what you're supposed to take away from it, and in that case you've already lost. All you are right now is deeply confused.

Possibility 3: there's more waiting behind the curtain. This is a fake-out to lull you into a false sense of security and the real show is yet to come. But that's as much of a non-answer as the previous proposition, so...

"Nothing we can do about it now," you sigh.

You walk forward, grist vanishing into your cache as the winnings rolling over the ground comes into radius. The lance slurps into your sylladex at a touch as you walk past.

"It's not a lot of grist," John remarks, trailing behind.

You'd normally call him spoiled rich, but he's kind of right. It's not a pittance, but it's nothing jaw-dropping compared to the hauls you would get from killing a nice-sized monster on the meteor.

"Yeah. I levelled, though. I reached..."

...uh.

You're not at Pimpslayer, which you originally thought you'd only get if you killed Lord English, and just now subsequently thought apparently wasn't the case since you'd levelled, and now now are reverting to your original assumption because instead, you're somehow on the tier "Horology Deconstructed", whatever that means.

You see Revenge of Ricky Schrodinger right under you, so you haven't skipped a tier. You scroll up to the tiers that await. Turing's Legacy. Greenwich No More.

No Pimpslayer.

There are no words to describe how much this disturbs you.

You swallow.

"Have your god tiers changed?" you ask John. "The ones you don't have yet?"

His eyes glaze over for a second as he checks his ladder. He turns his head questioningly once he's back. "No? Did yours?"

"All of them are different," you confirm, skin prickling.

"But did you get the right badge?"

The... badge. Of course. You check.

"Strife Ambigram. Bypasses need for strife specibus, grants knowledge to use any kind abstratus... oh, this is the one Jade was talking about."

"That's the one."

So the achievements are the same, and only the tier names have changed...? Is it because you've sidestepped the main quest? You vocally declared your intention to not take a sword to Lord English, so the game decided it could afford to drop that quest line and throw you a bone?

Yeah, fat chance.

"Nothing we can do about it," you repeat. You do take a note to tell Rose and see if she makes anything of it later, but for now, you have a job to finish and the clock is ticking.

"Yeah," John sighs. "Weird, though."

"Mm."

Now... how do you do this?

Your stroll has finally taken you to the feet of the marble steps up to the central dais. You slow to a stop, considering your next step while your strife deck swallows Caledfwlch.

Warily, you set a foot on the first stair.

Nothing happens.

You assume that you're not going to get anything done until you talk to his head, but the Anvil is no less of an eyesore now that you're up close, and getting up close to the thing feels more like a last resort if anything. Even if your ring is stopping your skin from burning off your flesh, you don't have extras, and John is already shying away from the heat.

So you might as well give it a shot from here.

"Hephaestus!" you shout at the expressionless face that looms the searing splotch of blindness in the center of your visual field. "Snake bro! Talk to me! I beat up your sentry!"

The head of the denizen is startlingly creepy up close. You already knew it wouldn't be the doughy round face the consorts go for in their sculptures, but this looks like the unholy lovechild of a dragon and a race car: scaly and teeth-filled, but uncomfortably angular and with curved smooth discs in place of eyes. Or maybe those are its nostrils. You can't tell.

Hephaestus doesn't respond.

"Maybe you need to get closer," John suggests. "I'll, uh, stay back here."

Gritting your teeth—just because the radiating heat doesn't hurt you doesn't mean it's fun to be near—you stride up the stairs. When you get to the top of the platform, the anvil is in full upfront glare scraping your eyes out, and the big guy is still no more amenable to conversation. To make things worse, the ring is starting to hurt on your finger. It's not designed to tank this kind of continuous assault.

"Do I need to start stabbing?" you mutter, mostly to yourself. You don't think that would go down well.

Maybe there's some kind of hint around here. A book of secrets on a stand you didn't see before, or magic inscriptions on the floor you need to chant out loud. You pan your eyes around, but all there is on the wide marble platform is the blazing king-sized Anvil and decorative ring patterns on the ground.

There is, at the back of the raised marble platform behind the mother of all workplace injury lawsuits, Hephaestus' tail. You didn't notice it behind the Anvil's eye assault until now, but the massive prehensile limb snaking up all the way from the rear of the cavern is coiled around a proportionately sized hammer that you immediately recognize as the one Davesprite sent John. Proportionately sized, as in it could make a pancake out of you no problem. You guess this is where he found it?

All doubtlessly fascinating, but unfortunately not helpful in your quest for quality time with a living, speaking snake monster.

As you open your mouth to eject another bout of complaints at your uncooperative denizen, fate sees fit to throw another wrench into your already slapdash plan. The click of the entrance door unlatching echoes through the space like a pindrop in an empty room.

The long creak while it yawns open is even more difficult to mistake.

You groan.

"Hey!" a male voice shouts across the room, irritated. "How did you get in here? And— shit! Get away from that! You're going to hurt yourself!"

Fuck.

"Hey, uh. No, go out-" John's running towards the entrance, trying to usher the guy back out, but he's already seen you. "Dave!" he shouts back at you.

"Stop hanging there and do something, dammit!" you hiss at the silent denizen. Your head swings between the Anvil and the tour guide trying to elbow his way past John. Egbert is doing a decent job of keeping him at bay, but the adult is a foot taller than him, and if you're committed to not revealing your powers then there's a limit to how much John can do. Behind the door is a gaggle of strangers peering through the opening and shielding their eyes from the glare.

Great. You wasted too much time. The tour looped around.

"Mighty Hephaestus, Lord of the Forge," you grind out. A touch of flattery never hurt anyone. "Pretty please, I beseech thee, stop being a dead lump of dickless rock!"

There's a stirring starting up from behind the doorway. You can't hear, but you can see with your eyes. The tour guide has backed John down to the last step of the stairs. You need to act fast.

"Fuck," you mutter to yourself. Do you have to activate him somehow? Use the Forge to fix him? Think, dammit.

There's only one thing you can come up with. An unimaginably terrible idea, just like all of your others, but you're at your wits' end.

You jump and grab onto the edge of the Anvil. Your hands would most definitely be in flames by now if not for the fire resistance ring that's itself searing hot at this point, but as it is, it's simply warmth, pins and needles prickling where your skin contacts the white-hot metal. With a heave, you vault over the top in one motion. You stumble to your feet once you're on top.

Someone is shouting in panic far back in the distance.

Hephaestus' head is hanging above you. Out of reach for the average human, but not an inconceivable distance to jump by any stretch of the imagination. You crouch and launch yourself up, boosting yourself the slightest bit with flight—can't just float up, gotta keep the thinnest veneer of plausible deniability even now.

At the peak of your trajectory, the tip of your finger just lightly grazes the end of Hephaestus' flattened nose.

It's like that famous painting of God touching the first human or whatever it was supposed to be. A boy reaching for the stars, his Lord leaning down to meet him halfway. Only Hephaestus isn't doing shit to work with you here. Please let this work, or you are going to look so outrageously dumb. And also be under arrest.

Your finger parts from cool stone, gravity takes over. You let yourself fall, bouncing off the Anvil, over the edge and rolling into a crouch on the marble.

For a second, nothing happens. A continued stream of surprisingly tame curses pours from a panicked tour guide in the background. Dread gathers in your gut the seconds tick by. If Rose was wrong, if this is all there is to find the denizens' lair, a handful of grist and a useless sculpture-

but then-

The tip of Hephaestus' head cracks.

Chapter Text

The fracture races frighteningly fast across the face of the denizen, splitting around its eyes and traveling up and onwards. It deflects off a flared scale on Hephaestus' neck and darts sideways, circumnavigating the thick girth of the giant snake in an instant. The crack widens.

You have a sudden, dreadful feeling that this is not going to go the way you wanted it to.

With a loud, splintering sound, rock breaks.

The looming head of Hephaestus, already coming apart into jagged sections, plummets towards you in free fall. You raise your sword in a futile attempt to block the incoming hundred tons of solid rock, but you—

—you—

—'re completely fine.

The head of the serpent splinters against an invisible barrier. Crumbling bits of gray rock slough off to the side, crushed to ground under its own momentum. You stumble back and trip, almost bonking your head against the ground before catching yourself with flight. Swiveling, you realize with a shock: the intricate patterns lining the stonework that you so authoritatively declared were just decorative seconds ago are now glowing a cherry red, boiling with runic energy you can feel vibrating in your bones.

"Holy shit!" you hear the guide yell in the distance. "Get out of there!"

You scramble to your feet, instinctively ducking as broken stone skitters over your head, but the shield, the barrier, whatever it is these runes are generating around the dais, wraps all the way down in a dome. You can see the distorted light-waver encapsulating the platform as you sweep your eyes around.

"Dave!" John's shouting. "Are you okay?"

"Never felt better!" you shout back.

The dust has settled, mostly, you can't let your guard down yet. Your head cranes up to witness the destruction you wrought with a finger, and fuck this is bad.

Hephaestus is missing his head.

There is no flesh hiding under the igneous carapace, there's no ancient denizen restored to life at the touch of its chosen. Hephaestus is downright decapitated. His neck is a stump of craggy, broken rock. Unless his ghost is going to come out of the husk to beat you up for the posthumous desecration, your grand master plan is crashing and burning by the second. You were wrong. Rose was wrong. How did that happen?

Even worse, the head was only the start—the cracks are spreading up the petrified denizen's body. If there used to be an invisible spell holding this living superstructure up against all principles of structural engineering, you just broke it. As you watch, another chunk breaks off the hanging neck and shears itself to pieces against the side of the protective dome. The damage keeps creeping, and it's not slowing down.

How much can this shield take?

"Dude, what are you doing?" the tour guide is yelling. You hear pattering footsteps and a building howl of wind as John runs towards you. "Don't run towards-"

"Dave! Get out!" John shouts.

You hear the thunderous crash of a giant hammer against the shield. A fraction of a second later an explosive shockwave rocks through the stone under you, almost tossing you off your feet again. More bits of rocks fall and scatter off the barrier. Someone is screaming in the distance. Sound decision.

You should get out, he's probably right, but this can't be it. This can't have all been for nothing, and it's not just wishful thinking that makes you say that: Rose was confident that something would come out of this, and maybe she got the specifics wrong, but her powers don't simply make stuff up from nothing. There must be some seam you haven't pulled apart, some hidden logic that you're not working through which is going to make it all worth it in the end. There has to be something, dammit.

In a fit of desperation and inspiration rolled in one, you dash forward, touch your hand to the Anvil, and pull with your sylladex.

Nothing happens.

You punch in a Crate Modus and try to captchalogue again. Still nothing.

"Dave!" John repeats as another kiloton of stone collapses over your head. You wince. Is all of Hephaestus going to fall? How much of him is there? What happens after?

You don't want to find out. Think fast.

When you turn around, John has clambered to the top of the mound of rubble piled up outside the dome. It's almost up to your chest level. His hands are slipping off the invisible wall as he tries to push in.

"Go!" you shout. "I... I'll..."

The damage is spreading. Hunks of your denizen are crashing down from the ceiling, not only above you, but all over the cavern. The floor is shaking and the air outside your bubble is starting to clog with dust. If the arches fail, the entire roof of the cave could come down any second now. You're no engineer, but it's obvious that of all resources, time is ironically not one you have the privilege of. John's right, no "probably" or "should" about it. You have to go.

You rise into the air and ram your shoulder into the barrier. It ripples, but stubbornly refuses to give. A glance back at the entrance reveals that the tour guide guy is gone, hopefully evacuating the other visitors, which means that you can break loose—not that you want to be holding back now anyway. John is ducking and weaving between more plummeting debris, so you take business into your own hands, and by "business", you mean Caledfwlch. You draw and, taking a breath, take a full-powered swing at the barrier with the legendary Welsh sword. For a split second of relief the sword bites in instead of bouncing, but the elation vanishes in an instant. Caledfwlch is lodged firmly halfway through the translucent membrane. You tug on it with all your strength, but it refuses to budge.

Another bone-crushing impact rocks through the dome, spilling ripples over the curved surface. John's giant Zilly hammer is stopped cold against the outside of the barrier, already vanishing into his strife deck as you turn to look at him, but he was just trying to get your attention. He's tapping on the shield, mouthing something at you—shouting, but the Christmas party of fallen stone breaking over the floor is drowning out whatever he's trying to communicate. You follow his pointing finger downwards to the floor anyway.

Fuck. Of course. You almost smack yourself for missing the obvious, but that would cost valuable time you can't afford spare.

You draw the Ribbitar instead of playing tug of war with a force field and hurl yourself down towards the marble runes with it in hand. The scarlet frog sword isn't that good, but you have enough notches in bladekind that the floor parts under the weapon like butter. Patterns flicker and die where the scimitar carves through. You're sundering millennia of meticulously preserved history by the second, but you can't bring yourself to care.

A close dodge saves you from Caledfwlch as it clatters to the ground next to you. You look up to find the shield stuttering: your demolition work is working. But not enough to let John through, evidently. He's still hammering at the barrier, rocking the ground with every blow. You snatch up Caledfwlch and start dual-wielding—which, hey, is a thing you can do now at 80% competency despite not possessing 2xbladekind, thanks to that nifty new badge—trailing a circle of destruction around the Anvil.

The problem is that you don't know if it's because of you carving through the protections or John beating the absolute shit out of the North American plate, but the rain of rocks is escalating by the second. You have to step around what's left of Hephaestus' tail and the giant original-print Fear No Anvil buried in it as you pass, and if the denizen's death animation has spread down to floor level, then there can't be much left of the arches up above. John is keeping the debris off himself with a diversionary cyclone, but if the ceiling caves outright, then no amount of windy stuff is going to save you from having a really bad time. Though you're not completely sure how it works, indefinitely dying and resurrecting under miles of solid rubble isn't your idea of a fun vacation.

And that's if the game doesn't think "rocks fall, everyone dies" is heroic enough. You're probably fine, but John... should probably get out of here.

Right as you think that, as if a malignant god is listening to your thoughts for the best possible time to strike, it happens.

The sloughing roar of a flood of dirt and rock fills your ears like a tsunami breaking against a cliff, drowning out John's sharp, aborted scream. Your heart seizes. Rubble drives down into the shield, burying your bubble in an instant, the quake of the impact rocking you off your feet and against the white-hot Anvil. You face-plant into the floor, almost spearing yourself with the Ribbitar while Caledfwlch spins and skitters out of reach. Dust and crushed stone rain down through the instants of flickering vulnerability in the barrier, scattering off your battered frame. The taste of blood and dirt clogs your mouth.

You spit and scramble to your feet, head spinning. The floor is still shaking under your feet, but the vibrations are dim, farther away,

"John!" you shout.

No no no no no-

You don't see him. The tiny air bubble maintained by the stuttering barrier is completely blocked in by debris, and the burning light streaming from the Anvil only shows you rock, sand and more dust. There's some hope that it's only a local part of the ceiling that collapsed, but if the structural failure is cascading all the way up to the surface... John could have survived a small cave-in or resurrected somewhere safe. If it's the second, this is colossally fucked.

There's a chance—a slim one, but a chance nonetheless—that his weird telekinesis-airbending thing was strong enough to keep the rocks off him. If he reacted in time, if he's kept in practice over the years, if he hadn't already spent all of his energy trying to break through. If, if, if. If the stars align, he knows where you are. He's going to find you.

He has to.

You push yourself towards the direction of the barrier you last saw him, picking up your swords as you run. You're clutching the grip of the Scarlet Ribbitar so hard that its jeweled edges are drawing blood. The shield is warped and deformed from the pressure weighing down on it, but that's the lesser of your issues right now. You press your hand against the invisible wall. There's nothing to see beyond it. No sign of John, no outrageously fancy hammer. He was right outside just before. If he was knocked away by the rockslides... all you can do is wait.

Seconds trickle by, every tick of the clock marking another stone sinking into your somersaulting gut.

There's nothing you can do from here. You can't mount a search and rescue from inside an impenetrable barrier, but if you finish the job with the runes and the shield falls, you're going to be crushed yourself. If John's even alive to be rescued.

You ping him for Moonsong's Whisper, but you're shouting into a void.

You need to do something.

The obvious option hasn't slipped your mind. Call in the backup. Your build is shit for battlefield control, and buried two miles under is well past that stage and deep into experimental terraforming territory. You're going to need Jade to bail the two of you out of this mess—again—sooner or later. It's the straightforward, simple choice. You're even drawing your phone from your sylladex and pull up Pesterchum, but as you hover a finger over Jade's chumhandle, something makes you hesitate.

Because... look. As much as it carves your heart out to admit it, you have to face it.

John is super fucking dead.

This long and not a peep? He's an Egbert pancake. Permanently or temporarily, that's the question, and you figuratively pray to every god you know of, even the creepy ones on the sex offender registry inhabiting the outer reaches of paradox space, that it's the latter. Because just the possibility that he could be gone, just like that in the blink of an eye... it's like the floor's pulled out from under your feet and you're plummeting through a flightless abyss. Like you're in the Green Sun again, trapped between an eternity of fire and an infinity of oblivion. The world could be literally burning down around you, and you would burn along with it, because your mind is fixed on one thing and one only.

You can't let John kick the bucket. Not like this. It's out of the question. You're going to find that bucket and clutch it to your chest, weld its lid shut and sit on the damn thing yourself before you'll let a single drop of unspecified liquid fall.

And what that means is if there's even the slightest chance that calling Jade in could fuck this up, you can't do it. If that wasn't dumb and heroic enough to count in the first place, then it won't matter if you pull him out of the rubble now or in an hour. On the flip side, if there's even the slightest sliver of a doubt, a tiniest crack in paradox space where that uncertainty lives, if he's heroically dead and you need to make him not dead, then you can't bring in the metaphysical green elephant to stomp all over the chain of causality.

There's one thing about time travel you don't unlearn, the one thing that sticks with you no matter where you go: the difficulty of wrangling a stable loop skyrockets exponentially with every independent agent you add to the mix. If there's a thread you can pull on to restitch this reality into the one you want, just talking to someone could snap that in an instant. This right here is the perfect quarantine: a closed system, materially and informationally. Just you, a thousand tons of stone, and the guy you need to unkill.

Call Jade up, and you break containment.

(It doesn't escape your attention that it's not even half an hour after you swore off messing with the timestream, and you're already dreaming up new ways to fuck up history. Well, tough luck, past Dave. Extenuating circumstances call for desperate measures.)

No. You've made up your mind. Maybe this is what Hephaestus meant to do, give you an impossible predicament and force you to break your limiters. A trial by fire. And maybe the denizens do know all in the end, because like fuck you're going to curl up in a ball and give up. If this is a test, you're acing it. You know what? Just to be extra safe, you set all of your needlessly multitudinous devices to silent and recaptchalogue them.

This is your operating theater now. Your space, your rules, systematically disinfected and set up with all the tools you need right here with you. Barricade the doors, seal the vents: you're seeing this through. No matter what it takes.

Too bad you haven't taken an anatomy class in your life, let alone graduated med school.

You can do this.

You can't do this.

You're curled up on the ground, dry heaving, your head folding in on itself. You can't count how many times you've voided your stomach, but the digestion sack ran dry a long time ago and now your guts are trying to execute an acrobatic abscond through your throat. Everything hurts like you've been wrung through a grinder. The splitting pain gets worse every time you try, sending more shards of disjointed not-futures stabbing into your consciousness with each timeline collapse.

The little headway you've made in parsing this absurdly tight-assed temporal pseudostructure is completely offset by the fact that the way this is going, you might genuinely pass out from how much your head is killing you. Worse, you're running out of time.

There's been four cave-ins you've counted. Every time the shield does one of its feeble flickers, gravel rains from the debris you're buried under, and some of the lapses are long enough that it's basically a mini landslide through the ceiling. One of the big chunks actually scored you on the head and carved off a good third of your health. Now your sylladex is filled with a piles of rocks you had to captchalogue to make space, right next to the four puddles of barf you evacuated the wrong way out of your bowels.

To make things worse, the flickers are getting closer together and longer. The shield is coming down at some point, and if you're stubborn enough to hold out until then, you suspect that it's enough to count as a heroic death. You can't do that to your friends. That's peak idiot protagonist bullshit right there. Striders play smart, not stubborn.

But you can't give up on John either.

You've stupidly risked breaking quarantine trying to pester him. You've pinged him dozens more times with every combination of fraymotifs you can contrive. There's no response. He's completely MIA, and it scares you shitless.

You push yourself off the floor and lean against the wall of the force barrier you're backed up against, wincing again at the spikes of pain lancing your head. You can barely think. What you've figured out so far is that every time you fuck up your loops, the timeline is collapsing you back to the point you started, but merging your memories with all of the possible permutations of that fraction of a future you messed up in. The longest stable loop you've been able to maintain is a 3.291 second object loop. You haven't been able to successfully move yourself through time at all without crashing.

The possibility of pulling information from the future might be useful to leverage in some other time or place, but right now it only means that your recollection of the past half hour is a Frankenstein abomination of hundreds of parallel subjective hours crushed into each other. It hasn't even been half an hour of real time, but your internal clock is way out of whack, a concept so borderline heretical to contemplate that you actually considered killing yourself once to reset it. Even correcting for the bouncing back and forth, you would have sworn that it was 27 minutes and 12.612 seconds from the initial collapse, but the phone you left in the corner happily informs you that it's only been fourteen.

Either way, this isn't working. You've reascertained that it's impossible to create a doomed offshoot here, in no small part because now you've truly rammed your head through every written and unwritten temporal law of this new universe that might precipitate such an outcome, but you can't afford to waste any more time on this cranial demolition routine. Landing yourself in a coma for severe head trauma and tanking your nonexistent baby sister's college fund with the tens of thousands of dollars in medical fees you'll rack up isn't going to cut it. You need something better.

And what you're thinking is something that's been whispering at the edge of your crumbling mind for a few minutes already, tempting you like a devil on your shoulder.

Almost inexorably, your squinting eyes draw to the white, burning Anvil at the center of the dust-choked cave.

What was it the scriptures said?

On an anvil any other would fear to strike, the Lord of the Forge smiths the spokes of the wheels of time.

There's a rule the trolls taught you: never touch the Denizen's shit. Obvious game items like cool weapons and grist drops, sure—thieve and burgle to your heart's content. But the planetary cores they guard? The multidimensional tesseracts that splinter your mind simply to gaze into? The blank panes in the background, hovering perpetually at the corner of your vision, where your own reflections flicker in scrolling glyphs and crude pencil sketch?

Denizens are the gatekeepers of Sburb. They're the GM inserts, in tabletop parlance, and one of the worst things you could ever conceive to do is peek behind their screens—not when even the open dice they roll already have the capacity to break your mind like a twig. The fractal crawl spaces of Echidna's cellars, the shadows at the bottom of the Lakes of Nyx, the celestial anvil in Hephaestus' world-heart, the silver seal locked in Yaldabaoth's vault... they don't always instantiate in the lair, but when they do, you leave them alone. There's this intrinsic fuck no aura to them that even the most blockheaded moron can register.

Which in retrospect makes you trying to grab the whole Anvil with your sylladex an astoundingly ill-advised decision back when shit was falling apart, but no one has ever accused you of having the ability to make good decisions under pressure.

And yet. Yet, now that your options are running dry once more and you haven't made a dent in walls of this hole you've dug yourself into...

You find yourself reconsidering.

You fondle the ring on your finger. It's scalding to the touch, enough to char any normal person's skin, but it seemed to reach some approximation of equilibrium with its environment a while ago. Once you got used to it, it was simply... hot. Enough to hurt, not enough to truly damage. To be on the safe side you've relocated to the edge of the dome of safety to take the strain off the item anyway, because if it fails when you're in here you'll be pretty much roasting alive. Another time limit. The reminder only reaffirms what you intend to try.

Against your better instincts, you stand up from your sulking spot and plod towards the center of the bubble. The metal circlet heats up on your hand with each step like a conscientious protest against your questionable life choices, but there's no union for it to call down here. If you want to get yourself killed, there's nothing your unruly jewelry can do to stop you, so it'd better shut up and do its damn job. You take a deep breath.

One small comfort is that your self-inflicted brain pummeling hasn't been completely for nothing. You're more attuned to the flow of time now, even if most of what you typically get is reality screaming at you how badly you fucked up without actually telling you how to fix anything, and with that sense you can feel the curve of time bending around the Phrygian Anvil. It reminds you of light deflected by a black hole, just an immense existence that warps the shape for the world around itself without any particular deliberate actionary force.

As you run a hand over the surface of the blindingly hot metal, feeling the burns sear and fade over your palm and fingers, you shiver.

The quote you broke out back there like some eighteenth-century poet wasn't hyperbole. This thing is... maybe not a time forge or a time machine, but a time artifact, at least. It's crude, no doubt about it. You don't sense any instrumentation, not any inbuilt control whatsoever, just a simple surface, a static node in space around which a denizen wielding all the knowledge of paradox space might lever the universe. It's a blunt object to the multitool your timetables are.

But maybe back to basics is what you need. Maybe now that the time goblins have switched out your perfectly workable fabric for a knotted horror show of pricked fingers and jammed stitches, you need to ditch the sewing machine and go back to good old pre-industrial needle and thread.

Philosophical metaphors notwithstanding, you still can't do anything with just an anvil. The material you're want to be working is time, you assume—you'll be honest, you're totally winging it at this point—but at the very least you also need... a...

A hammer.

You soar above and over the Anvil to land in front of the only ruined part of the room you've left mostly untouched. In the middle of a webbed mosaic of broken marble floor lies a pile of rubble. Nestled in it you find what you're looking for.

A hammer. The hammer.

Razor-sharp faces of smooth polished ruby jut from under crumbled rocks. Only a little distance away protrudes the vibrating hand of an ornate clock, and on the other side of the mound, the end of a grooved, black handle peeking out of the foot of the pile. You can't see all of it under the rubble, or even most of it, but the thing is huge. Bigger than you, easily more than twice your size.

You can't lift that. You shouldn't lift that.

But it beckons.

You float closer, gingerly, and reach out towards the rocks, holding your breath.

Broken basalt and granite blinks out of existence and into your sylladex, and you hurl yourself back, expecting trouble, but all that happens is that Fear No Anvil drops the feet or so of cleared space and crashes into the marble base underneath with a splitting crack. Apart from the unfortunate demise of more of the marbled floor, not much happens.

Warily, but with a smidgen less paranoia now, you approach the freed hammer.

It sits perfectly flat on its face. You can see the crimson orange eye of the massive implement, exposed: a convolving hypersphere where the head and the handle meet, simmering with untapped power. Its surface runs with the teeth of higher-dimensional gears that fold and swell from nowhere, and what little you glimpse through the gaps of the ethereal clockwork sunset contained within its event horizon is simply more mechanical guts, an infinity of machinery ticking to the artificial heartbeat of a universe in itself. It smells like copper and sea salt. It tastes like lava.

Forget about the Anvil—you should never have given this hammer to John. Well, technically Yousprite did, but what were you thinking? You're sure it shoehorned itself into a great hammerkind allocation, but the hellscape spiraling into that eye is clearly Sburb warning you do not touch. Use at own risk.

Well, now you might have to.

If you can figure out how to use it, that is. Those two fancy black hands twitching around the circumference of the eye probably have something to do with it from how they're jumping with every tick of temporal quanta. The head is just a block of ruby, safe to assume mystical ruby from the mountains of an ancient race of dead angels or some shit, but that seems to be all it is: a face to hammer things with. There aren't any obvious controls on the handle, and you think Hephaestus seems more of a "dials and switches" guy than "holographic neural interface" kind of designer anyway. So you're stumped.

Even if you had a step-by-step user's manual with you, simply the prospect of trying to wield this thing is daunting in and of itself. You weren't joking: you don't think you could get it off the ground with all your divine strength.

Maybe you can just...

Just sort of reach over and...

Ah, fuck.

The moment the tip of your index finger touches the hilt of the hammer, it bucks in your hand. Not literally—the thing stays perfectly in place—but it's like an shock wave blasts through you and the shape of space is twisting at your fingers. Unconsciously, or maybe consciously, you don't know, you tip forward and the rest of your fingers clutch onto the grooves lining the tool's grip.

Then the hammer's eye opens.

You jerk back, but you can't tear your hand or eyes away. The eye of Fear No Anvil gyrates and unfolds, the gears contained within the circular watch-portal retracting from the inner volume of the globe, leaving behind the red starless void of eternity. And through that circle, through your frozen, dilated pupils, all of time pours through.

It's like when you tried putting on the sooth specs you found in a LOFAF bubble, but instead of the maw of the Furthest Ring etching its eldritch scream into your retinas, it's an incomprehensible expanse of time, stretched out to eternity and beyond. Every subjective and objective second, every mote of a universe's lifespan, is rendered in Planck resolution in your mind's eye. It's too much to take in. You're drowning in a sea of quantum strings, and you don't know how to stop it. There's no controlling this tide. You tug at what you can, grasping for the mental levers hooking you up to this cosmic work, but it only makes things worse, and then what whispers of pull you've effected are washed away again, scrambling all sense or direction.

This— this is why you don't do shit like this. This is why you don't go sticking your hands into ineffable cosmic artifacts. The eye is resonating with your soul, whispering to an infant time god, but its whisper is a deafening air raid siren to you and the resonance is shaking you to pieces.

But amidst this struggle, at the rear of your mind, barely registering to your conscious ego in the vice of this unstoppable, irreconcilable enlightenment, there's something ticking. A silent logic ticking like clockwork, methodically parsing and fitting and running down its pre-programmed list. At first you think you're finally losing your mind, but whatever it is isn't going away. It's getting louder, speeding up.

Flashes of insight spill through you every time one slots into another, then vanish a blink later as they decouple. Impossible, irrelevant things. The tensile strength of dried cyanwood. How to chisel marble. The minimum number of nails needed to build a standard f6OP1m7q chair.

Then something clicks. A card jolting in place. A ping of overwhelmed, smugly satisfied success.

The universe shifts under your feet. Fear No Anvil slips minutely out of place against the rest of the dust and rubble surrounding you. Suddenly you're not gripping it anymore—you're holding it, and the difference is somehow critically important. Your hand is still pinned to the handle, your brain is still overflowing under an endless waterfall of time, but something inside you is fuller. More whole. No, you're...

Your strife portfolio has a new entry.

Fear No Anvil
genesiskind ●●●●○ (emulated)

And all of a sudden, you know how to use this thing.

You have to fight against the surging flow to reach it, but you know where the metaphorical valve is. A sharp yank in your mental dashboard turns the eye down to its minimum setting. Checks and throttles snap into the intakes like you've been doing this for your whole life. But haven't you, in this strange, cheating sense? The excess bloat on the nirvana pipeline snips away in clean strokes. Fear No Anvil rumbles in discontent, but you're running the show now. The gears swirl in on the scarlet sphere, leaving only the smallest aperture to let through the slightest trickle of eternity.

Then, before you know it, it's over. You break the surface, gasping for air. You sag to your knees, hand still anchored to the grip of the hammer.

You're not dead. Not insane either. You think. And you haven't fucked up the timeline at all, which is a huge win in your book. And, the important thing is:

You know how to use Fear No Anvil.

All that dumb crap you were saying earlier? Scratch that out. This is so much more than a blunt object to smash time over the head with: more than anything else, it's a telescope through time. The singularity in its eye is one with all past, current and future states of the hammer, and with one, you have access to all of it. When you look into it, you trace its world line right to the moment of its creation all the way down to the instant of its demise.

Or you should. Right now as you peer into the red, you see Fear No Anvil living a long and hearty life until the end of this universe ten to a hundred and some years down the line, putting to rest any lingering concerns you had about this being a temporary bubble, but the past trail of the hammer cuts off somewhere a little over 200 million years ago. It wasn't created then, you know for sure—the time signature tells you it's more likely that was when it arrived here—but you can't see any further back. That can't be possible.

Okay, no. Obviously it is possible. You're talking like some clueless background nerd about to be dunked on in a low-budget sci-fi show. "Impossible" is what the imported knowledge is screaming, but this hammer was designed for Sburb. It was meant to live out its life in the Incipisphere, not be hurled halfway across the Furthest Ring and sealed into another universe. And this is happening, since you're seeing it right in front of you. The only question is how.

You let Fear No Anvil's eye dilate. The world line isn't a direct camera into the past, there's no visual image you can resolve out of this, but as the aperture widens, you can sense the way the hammer's past interacts with the personal timelines of other entities, and from that map out a local web of causality. Yet try as you can, you trace nothing but oblivion beyond that entry point. It's a hole, a glaring singularity in the temporal topology.

But as much as you want to investigate further, time is slipping away. Your goal is to get you and John out of here alive. The rest can come later.

First, you turn Fear No Anvil up to full throttle.

The tidal wave of awareness crashes into you, but you're prepared for it this time. The universe unfolds at your fingertips in infinite relational detail. You can see the birth and death of the stars strung out in your mind's eye, the temporal threads of every physical and metaphysical quantum, vigintillions in number. The strands braid into strings, strings into cords, cords into ropes, recursive orders of causal entanglement and aggregation from the Brownian skitter of an oxygen molecule butterflying through the breeze to the indomitable gravity of a supermassive black hole ensnaring everything in its well.

You tune all of that out. The gritty details will wait: focus on the meta.

The universe is pinned. The timeline is singular, a continuous braided cable from start to end with no exported offshoots. There are frayed thread aggregates you can identify, but they're incoherent and undeveloped: fragments, not true instances. You can't resolve all of it because of causal relativity and countercurrent nondeterminism, which are suddenly theoretical concepts that render clear as crystal in your mind. That means there are parts of your map that are probabilistic haze, structurally masked from your vision. It doesn't matter.

No, literally. It doesn't matter. The universe is pinned, you said, at its three poles. Inception, genesis, and heat death, fully defined, fully true. Boundary conditions, you find the word. The boundary conditions are fixed, and everything in between is an emergent function of those conditions, practically devoid of relevance beyond the barest of the essential retained by you and the other kids. That's where you are, in the indeterminate gaps between that which whatever arbitrator of cosmic reality observed into truth. But that's not bad. The opposite, in fact.

The haze of perspectual nondeterminism is an absence of information, but in Sburb, information is a prison. Unknown means subject to change. It means you can fix this. It means hope.

You can work with this.

The tough part is that under natural physics, the sequence of events that led up to this moment are theoretically immutable from your causal frame, since they've already been observed by a relevant actor. The loophole, or sometimes the necessity, is to court doom and retroactively null your temporal primacy, but that route is closed to you. The monolinear constraint and boundary conditions make sure of that.

So even if you used your timetables flawlessly—which you're pretty sure you can now, with Strife Ambigram searing the necessary muscle memory into your brain to not trip over paradoxes every other nanosecond—you wouldn't be able to prevent the collapse. What you could do is nip back in time, steal John out the exact moment the rocks fell without past you noticing, and accelerate both of you back forward to the present, which keeps what's known of the timeline self-consistent. And while that's an acceptable rescue strategy if there aren't other alternatives, it still puts a city block-wide sinkhole in the middle of Houston, so you have to put a pin in that.

But you have more than the timetables.

Fear No Anvil and the Anvil come in a set, as obviously denoted by their names. And like you underestimated Fear No Anvil when you thought it was a big time hammer to hit the timeline with, you also managed to miss the entire point of the Phrygian Anvil the first time around.

The crimson eye of time winds shut. You let go, and it allows you. Five strides take you to the side of the massive burning anvil and you rise until your chest is level with its blindingly bright top.

This thing in front of you is one rung above the hammer on the denizen bullshit ladder, beyond the use of specibi, but your handysash proccing on Fear No Anvil gives you enough of a handle on its use to figure the rest out yourself. You have to, since it's the centerpiece of a plan that's rapidly falling into place inside your head. Your hand slides along the sharp edge of the glowing metal until you feel the edge of its horn, and then locating what you're looking for, you twist sideways in timespace.

The flat surface of the anvil goes white.

Not the white of a metal heated past its supposed melting temperatures, which it already was. Not the white that's been scouring your retinas to a crisp for minutes now. It's a non-luminescent white, like a bizarre rendering glitch showing itself in real life. A rectangle of #FFFFFF in your vision. The instantaneous change actually dims down the whole rock dome, because the previously angrily luminescing top face isn't blasting the ceiling with harsh light anymore. It's just... white.

Not white. What's the word you're looking for?

Blank.

A fresh canvas. A whiteboard. An blank screen. The color of potential.

Hephaestus can fix anything. But only one thing.

Yeah, he already fixed Caledfwlch to make the Deringer. Why is the Anvil still primed, you don't know. The first time Jade had to stoke the Forge to set it running: whatnot about the primordial spark of anuragenesis, or some other meaningless shit you don't remember. But you don't have a Forge here, so maybe you've broken the game and you just get infinite uses out of this thing?

Probably not, but you can wish.

So, fixing things. Fear No Anvil is a fishing line into the past, present and future of all timelines. Theoretically. Obviously it's having some difficulties coping with its new station in life, but that's the idea.

On the other side of the coin, the Phrygian Anvil is a door. Hephaestus casts his line and snags something, somewhere, in the canvas of all of paradox space. He reaches into the blank gutter space of reality and pulls the concept he needs ex nihilo, and hammer against anvil, he folds the phantom of the possible into hard, steel-cold reality. There are no limits to this act of alteration. The past can be restored. The potential, realized. Fiction into truth. Nothing into all. The Anvil won't let you time travel, but with it and this hammer, the present can be reworked into any alternative you desire.

You step back and reach for Fear No Anvil, your hand slipping in place automatically like a glove. The digits barely fit halfway around the huge handle. Then—

You can't lift it.

Right. It's too big. Outside your size class, and Strife Ambigram doesn't help with that. You already knew that.

This is stupid.

Seriously? This is what trips you up after all of this? Do you have to MacGyver yourself some sort of self-embiggener from the crap in your inventory like a crappy escape-the-room Flash game? Can't the game cut you some slack for the rule of cool?

No—you're not thinking out of the box here. You're the fucking Knight of Time, so you'd better start acting like one. You control the loops, not some millennia-dead snake monster or the default programming of a shitty video game. If this is a test, you're damn well going to pass it your way.

You raise your hand. A smaller, human-sized Fear No Anvil thumps into your hand.

Perfect.

It's eye unravels into vivid red, and the winds of time begin to howl.

Chapter Text

The kaleidoscope of time resolves to an infinitesimal point.

You reach out.

"I'll, uh. Stay back here," John suggested.

Dave strode up the marble steps while the younger boy hung back. The air was practically sizzling with heat, but the knight stepped through the boiling haze without breaking pace until he came to a stop in front of the Anvil. The suspended stone form of the Lord of the Forge loomed over the isle of marble. John bit his lip, glancing back at the exit.

You tapped him on the shoulder.

John swings around, his hammer drawn in an instant.

"Whoa," you warn, leaning back as you raise your hands in surrender. Oh, hey. Hands. You look downwards and blink, realizing that the rest of your body is corporeal now.

"This is weird," you mutter.

"Dave?"

John's eyes dart from you to the other Dave, who's still mumbling some bullshit to himself up on the dais. You remember being in his shoes. Good times. John's putting away his weapon, but the boy is still watching you intently.

Craning your neck forward, you notice that you're not in complete manifest form here: only everything from the chest up is rendered in full-color flesh and blood, and the rest of you is just contours sort of bulging in space like you're pressing your body against an invisible sheet in four-dimensional spacetime. You can glimpse snippets of alternate time fragments refracting through the time distortions, but they're so discombobulated you might as well brand them compression artifacts and no one would bat an eye.

"What..." starts John. "What are you doing? Where— when did you come from?"

You abandon your investigation and look up at him. You suppose it's only polite to offer some type of answer.

"Come with me if you want to live," you say.

Look—you never said the answer would be helpful.

"I thought you weren't-" he starts, and that's when past Dave finally notices something unimaginably stupid happening during the brief lapse in his attention. As usual. When he turns around,

you're already grabbing John by the shirt and

hauling him into your JPEG time

whirlpool.

∙

Halfway through dragging John kicking and screaming through the intertemporal substratum, you recognize an incredibly problematic flaw in your plan.

Hold on, you can fix this. You let your hand glitch through paradox space for a split second, snag a duplicate of your index finger from the wake of the transient microdivergence, and pilfer the ring off the phantom limb before it collapses back into quantum foam. It's like pirating from reality itself! The binding isn't not going to last past this brief session of turbulence, but it'll hold together long enough for what you're planning.

You slip the ring onto John's finger and haul him through.

You can sense the past splinter already unraveling as you unpin Fear No Anvil's sight from it. It doesn't matter for this one: you have what you needed.

John is scrambling to pick himself up off the ground next to you, clutching the fire resistance bauble on his ring finger while it works itself up to capacity. You're still elbow deep in the blank window of the Anvil. You have Fear No Anvil's head hooked around the anvil's horn, with your other free arm levering the handle end of it into position.

"Dave?" he repeats, gasping for breath. "What's happening?"

"We had an accident. I'm working on it."

You can feel John sweeping his eyes over the flickering magic ceiling and the mountain of solid earth just waiting to flatten you the second the thin barrier of force field fails. He sees the Anvil; he can connect the dots. You don't have time to talk. It's not clear what exactly Sburban runework or the Phrygian Anvil draw their power from, but tapping into the Anvil's power seems to be slowly diverting energy from the shield. You're not going to be in much of a position to perform flash dodges the next time it lapses, so this is full sink or swim now.

But then you hear John draw in a deep breath. He exhales something cold and crystal blue that billows around your feet, rolling with it the scent of spring and rain. A second later, the runes surrounding your workspace burn a bright sapphire, and the shield stabilizes.

Huh.

"Thank you," you sigh. That's bought you time you sorely need. In that case, while you're here, you should probably close one loop before it gets too difficult to path back.

"Hey, can you loan me Fear No Anvil for a sec?" you call out.

It's a little awkward trying to angle your head back to look him in the face while you speak, but you don't want to take your hand out of this magic hole in reality in case it closes on you. You haven't entirely figured out how the whole one-use limitation works yet. Out of the corner of your eye you see John's head turning from you to the giant hammer-shaped installment on the ground to his side. Dave's already holding a Fear No Anvil, and there's another bigger one on the ground behind him, he's probably thinking. What does he need another one for?

Time shenanigans, John. The answer is always time shenanigans.

"Come on! I'll give it back! Promise."

Finally, he holds his hand out and lets the crimson hammer materialize in his grip. It tumbles over to you on a cushion of wind. You absentmindedly grab it with your free hand, leaving the one you were using hinged on the anvil.

The eye spins apart in a short second. To do this you have to dive deep into the more esoteric functions of the hammer, but it's still easier than trying to thread it through the time flows yourself like you would have to with any other cargo. Once you have the route locked in, you wind the eye shut, hold Fear No Anvil over the window of blank white and...

...drop.

The hammer catches the crest of the time wave and slips into the pore borne of your little maneuver with John's original fragment, course-correcting in minute burns as it spins and plummets into the ortholocal past. It disappears out of your unaided sight in moments, but you feel the quiet ripple of the loop converging and closing in your peripheral awareness. It worked. That's one thing taken care of.

Now all that's left to do is rewrite history and magic the two of you out of a hole in the ground. Should be a walk in the park.

You close fingers around Fear No Anvil again, paring down the turbulence that's developed while you were away from the controls. The aperture of divergence reels further into the past. The helix of time unzips. A new continuum of possibilities unpacks itself.

The eye of the hammer constricts.

Infinity narrows to a point.

You reach out.

"We can wait until the tour gets there by itself," John argued.

Dave hesitated, invisible gears turning in his head. The human mind isn't a wholly deterministic machine, you'll be the first to point that out, but the scales are usually weighted. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, you kept pushing.

In this version of history—in this one in a hundred speck among the spectrum of outcomes—the balance happened to tip the other way.

"...Fine. You're right," he sighed. "We can play tourist for a while longer."

The tour guide was moving towards them with a seeming intent to bother, so John prodded Dave in the back to get him moving. In an adjacent time, they would have been stopped, had a riveting conversation that would go no where. In this, they passed by, barely exchanging a weak placatory smile.

And so they continued.

The auxiliary rooms to the Foundry were all more of the same, to be honest. Specialized casting facilities, feed pre-processing, alchemical treatment vats. It was impressive, in a sense, but the awe was dampened by the fact that... well, they'd seen better. They played Sburb. They had seen and grown numb to the meat of the game that all of this was basically obscure flavor text to. And perhaps gazing upon the forgotten works of an ancient civilization predating humanity's own was less profound and mysterious when you'd met those ancient beings in person, and they were dumb little shits that stole your glasses and just nakked around all day making inadvisable personal finance decisions.

It was as they descended deeper into the Works that this tired facade of nonchalance began to erode. As machined steel gave way to black stone and the alchemical lights dwindled and stopped, as the harsh march of grand industry began to be replaced by the dusty whispers and cold dripping ceilings of its master's hallowed depths, a sensation of nervous anticipation crept over the two.

Despite the broiling heat that washed over Dave from the hero's connection to the heart of LOHAC, he felt a shiver run down his spine as he followed the rest of the group down the last echoing steps to the core of his Denizen's Lair.

Hephaestus loomed above and all around, a serpentine titan bearing the weight of the world. Yet the Knight's eyes were drawn not to the petrified coils that crawled the cavern, but what lay in the cradle of their weathered embrace. The brilliant centerpiece of the denizen's gargantuan tomb, it stood stout and proud: the Phrygian Anvil. A massive construct in its own right, though dwarfed by the boggling scale of the Hallowed Works, it nonetheless captured an intractable gravity on more dimensions than one. It sang with power.

Above his prized creation, the monstrous Lord's angular head stooped, a dragon hoarding its treasure.

Whatever apocalypse had cast the denizens into this eternal slumber, it had caught Hephaestus at exactly the right time. While the lateral sides of the Anvil bathed the central temple of the cavern with blinding radiance, its top smithing surface cast no light upwards. The strange shadow shrouded the denizen's face with a strange undulating dimness that highlighted its inhuman contours, painting the face with a bizarre intensity. Behind the Anvil, his tail and its gripped hammer hung mid-swing, dancing in the same luminary twilight. In this pose he must have stood vigil for millennia, frozen in a blow that would never come to strike. Its target, a suit of mechanical armor laying prone atop the device like a patient on the operating table, rested as it had for a hundred million years.

Even the guide wasn't completely numbed to the grandiosity of the sight, his running commentary petering off as his eyes fixed onto the blindingly bright dais and what hung above. He stepped forward almost unconsciously, crossed the painted safe distance line without noticing, and almost tripped over a ridge in his blind stumble. He was squinting.

He was agitated.

Murmuring broke out among the group. They could tell something was wrong. Dave and John exchanged an unsure look.

"Is something wrong?" John murmured.

The tour guide was on his radio now, uttering something inaudible to whoever was on the other end.

"I don't know," Dave answered, eying the Anvil intently.

John twitched his fingers and a breeze picked up. The mutterings of the fretting man carried over the air, swirling closer until the scattered syllables sounded like they was right next to their ears, and then he pinched his thumb and middle finger together. The sounds resolved into distinct words.

"...the light, it's different." A pause. "I know what I'm talking about. I'm down here four times a week, Alicia. I know what it's supposed to look... I'm not going crazy. Come on. Get down here and see for yourself."

"The light?" Dave muttered. He focused on the Anvil again.

"...dangerous? No, I don't think... maybe? Has this happened before? Can you get the Director on the line?"

"Something's..." John started, and then furrowed his brow. He reached out into the air and drew a scarlet hammer from the air.

"What are you—!"

Dave's hissed at the unrepentant display of captchalogue technology, but the exclamation cut off as he saw what John was holding.

Fear No Anvil's eye was open and turning. The partially unwound internal gears ticked ceaselessly along the rim of the orb, an unearthly crimson light burning from the central aperture.

You can't truly see any of this, of course—not without physically poking your body through the Anvil and putting your actual gander bulbs to the task—but you're picking up quickly how to interpret the way the world line of Fear No Anvil tangles with the threads of the rest of the world, so you've been tracking this splinter John and splinter Dave's trajectory through the depths of Hephaestus' Lair. There are details you can fill in, others you guess. It's more of an art than a science.

"Do we need to..."

Their eyes drift from the fancy time hammer to the logical destination at its perch in the cavern's center. It's not an outrageous conclusion to draw, you guess. You would have thought the same thing—you do think the same thing, since you're Dave and this Dave is you.

Unfortunately, it's also completely and utterly wrong.

Their only purpose here—the only reason you've been sustaining this doomed fragment—is to witness the end point of this timeline. The relevance of the observer holds direct correspondence to the chronodynamic inertia of the observation, so you're basically using these two as a big fat metatemporal paperweight to pin the timeline down until you can take it apart for parts. They're the particle you're using to collapse the superposition, you might say. Or, in slightly less accurate but more thematically apt terms: you need active players to load the chunk before you can copy the data off.

And the fact that John must have sensed something up with Fear No Anvil and popped it out for a surprise health and safety inspection is an unexpected bonus. You should have seen that one coming, with the whole spooky "temporal singularity" shtick it's got going on, but it does make the next bit a whole lot more straightforward. And now that all of the pieces are in place, you suppose there's not much point in prolonging their dead-end existences.

You push you will through the tether of Fear No Anvil and spin the eye on other-John's end wide open, watching Dave and John's braids ping off it as they react to the change. They step warily away, holding the artifact at arm's reach. They've drawn the attention of some of the others now. Doesn't matter, since they'll be gone in a few minutes.

You feel a little bad about unraveling them from being, but this isn't the same thing as doomed selves. They haven't diverged enough to really consider them distinct entities from the prime copies, so ethically it's more like... short term amnesia, you guess. Maybe that's wishful thinking. Nepeta could tell you more about soul mitosis and horizontal trickle merge, not in those words, but it's not your field. Besides, this kind of transient fragmentation happens all the time naturally, both here and in old paradox space. It's not an issue if it doesn't properly fork into an entire doomed timeline, which as far as you can tell still isn't a possibility in this new continuum.

John's threads unknit from Fear No Anvil's and Dave's dig in—he's handed the hammer over. For a second you panic that that Dave might tap into the hammer's power and fuck something up, but he can't do a thing with it without a genesiskind specibus or the Ambibus badge, of course.

You're free to go.

Holding the temporal coordinate of your target fixed in your mind, you close your fingers around the blankness of canonical space.

A treacherous moment of uncertainty later, they meet the cold ruby-metal handle of a Fear No Anvil. Other Dave is still clinging to it, but that's not a problem. It might help, in fact. Taking care to keep that hanging thread of Fear No Anvil entrained in the stratum of the fragment timeline, you slowly pull.

The weave of causality anchoring their splinter to the trunk that birthed it strains and untwines, setting the temporal driftwood free,

and slowly, you coax

it to

you

⚬

You don't actually have any idea what all of that metaphysical fumbling translates to in your physical workspace until you pull your head back out of your own ass and glance around. Using Fear No Anvil with Strife Ambibus is a little like trying to fly a plane after studying the pilot's manual front to back and running countless sims in the training machine, but also incidentally never having actually been outdoors in your entire life. You understand the temporal actions you're taking with respect to modifying the timeline, but what that maps to in terms of the physical side sometimes escapes you.

So you're taken a little off guard when you look to your right and see, next to the Fear No Anvil you're holding, a spectral phantom of a second Fear No Anvil hooked around the same groove in the Phrgyian Anvil's horn. It's tipped forty degrees forward from the real one, the two partially overlapping, with its handle pointing over your shoulder.

Interesting.

You let go of the hammer of this reality, making sure it stays hanging in place against gravity, and reach up to grip the spectral hammer. It slips into your grip with the same heft and gravity of the original one. You give it an experimental turn, finding that it handles just like the normal Fear No Anvil, but instead of tuning your mental render of the timeline, it's reverse-adjusting the metaphysical transform specs of the time fragment you've trapped.

You wonder idly if for the split second before you repossessed John into your timeline, the shard you pulled him from also had a ghost hammer. Maybe not, since you never officially cast it to the interface. Would the same thing have happened if you hadn't used a local copy of Fear No Anvil to reel it in?

At least this explains a lot of the mystery techniques cluttering your mind that you hadn't been able to get your head around trying to connect it to the classic Fear No Anvil. It's worrying you how much you don't understand about using these cosmic devices despite having the literal divine superpower to understand all of it. At least it's not going to be a problem for much longer.

"Dave!" you hear John say behind you. "Are you back?"

"Yeah?"

His sigh of relief is audible. "What are you doing? You went silent for like five minutes! You weren't responding to anything!"

"Sorry," you mutter. "Was it that long? I'm trying to unfuck us out from under a solid mile of rock."

"I caught that," John grumbles, annoyed. You discover him hunched down at the edge of the dome when you turn your head around to look at him. He's switched his clothes out for his heir-conditioned god hood, but he's still damp with sweat. He questions, irritated, "But... what are you doing?"

You have to think for a second to compose an answer.

"I'm finding timelines where things went differently and taking them with me. When I collect a compatible set that covers our full space-time domain, I'm going to splice them together to build a new stable solution to our boundary conditions."

Strife Ambibus seems to be rearranging your vocabulary on the fly as you try to squeeze the forbidden knowledge it's granted you through your only mortal mouth hole. It's fun to effortlessly spin technobabble like an unrealistically competent hacker from an action movie, but also... mildly disconcerting?

"Are you using Hephaestus' Anvil to do that?"

You fit your hands around the full technocolor Fear No Anvil again. "Hey, give your hammer some credit too."

"Is that safe?" John objects.

"Oh, definitely not," you agree cheerfully as you tune the hammer. "We're popping all the safety seals on this bad boy. None of this is going back to the shop once we're done with it. By the way, super important: don't contact Jade or Rose, don't contact anyone, just turn your phones off. You haven't already talked to them, have you? Please tell me you didn't."

You should have said this earlier. It's such a stupid oversight, but it's fine—you know he hasn't, because you would feel the exponential explosion in temporal strain if he had.

"No," he confirms. "Why?"

But you're already too deep submerged in the sea of time to answer. The one you're looking for goes even further back, but of course to a device of Fear No Anvil's age, still a depressingly short blip. You trace the line down to right the first moment you and John entrained yourselves into the miasma of your less cosmologically essential contemporaries, and then go a little forward to make sure you're fully decoupled from Rose and Jade's diverging lines. Even now with your renewed understanding of temporal physics, you stand with what you said at the start: no sense in inviting everyone and their mother to this party and blowing up your solution space. Your life is difficult enough as it is.

"I'm going in again," you inform John. "Just hold on and don't stick your hand in any little magic houses when I'm out."

Fear No Anvil's eye spins down to a pinprick.

Your destination resolves.

You reach in.

Once your fictitious reference frame is aligned to the local passage velocity, you dip your finger in. It's enough to instantly carve the splinter off from the main temporal trunk. The sting that twangs back at you is ignored.

And there he is. You tap your past self on the shoulder, who's of course now no longer your past self and rather your retro-orthologous self, but you're not going to argue semantics.

Dave turns around.

He freezes the moment he sees the floating finger suspended mid-air, his hand already halfway to his nonexistent sword.

See, with the timelines before, the events you were looking for were statistically plausible enough that natural wobbles were enough to periodically generate microsplinters that fit your search, and then all you had to do was catch one on its way out and keep it from being assimilated by the prime stream long enough to mature to the point you needed. What you're looking for here is astronomically unlikely to happen without direct interference, on the order of one in a million, so you're not going to waste time trying to patience your way into a miracle.

Once the temporal waters have quieted a bit, you wiggle more of your hand through and jerk your thumb in the direction of the exit. Or at least you think you do. You don't want to stick your head in, and you're still operating off abstractionist Picasso hammer-vision here, so your sense of direction could be skewed.

Dave tugs on John. The tour's about to start and the museum's reception is starting to fill up with visitors, so if they're coming, it's going to have to be quick.

"What-" John starts, before catching sight of your floating half-hand. "What's that?"

You point again at the exit and slip your hand back out of their timeline, only maintaining the lightest contact against the underside of their slice of reality so you can hear them, because you just realized that you can do that. These are some ultra-niche life hacks you're compiling here.

"Let's go," Dave mutters, stalking stiffly towards the door. John almost trips over his own feet as he catches up. They're picking up speed and it's drawing strange looks, but it's not important.

"Was that you?" John whispers urgently.

"I guess?" hisses Dave as he steps through the revolving doors and bursts into the roaring chaos of the Museum District at peak hour. He shields the top of his shades from the roasting sun as he sweeps the street for another signal. John emerges behind him.

To get the most coverage it would be best if you got them on the metro or some other form of transport, but that's going to be hard to communicate, and you don't think they have cards or even sensible denominations of legal tender anyway. Alternatives... if all you need is to get them moving, maybe you don't need to convey that much detail. All you need is to give a destination and a reason to haul ass, and if they've already figured out it's you, then that alone should be enough to convince them to play ball.

No time to write a note, so you might as well go for short and cryptic. It works for everyone else in this godforsaken video game that you're not playing anymore, so why not?

You pull a unit of jade from your grist cache and chuck it at Dave's head.

Your fingers retract from their spatiotemporal plane in a flash, but the grist keeps going and plinks off Dave's shades. The dumbass flails and grapples for a second with empty air before he snatches the gem between two fingers.

John leans over and peers at their acquisition.

"Emerald?" he questions doubtfully. "Why would you give yourself that?"

"No," Dave mutters. It's one of the lower tier LORAF minerals, so John wouldn't have seen much of it. "Jade," he corrects.

He pauses.

The dots connect.

"Jade," he repeats. "Are we supposed to look for her? Um, diamond for yes, coal for no."

Good call, Dave. Is it narcissistic to say that? Eh, you never professed to be a paragon of humility anyway. You lob a diamond through the temporal curtain. This time he doesn't bother catching it, allowing the gem to bounce off his forehead and clatter to the ground before flickering out in another second.

"Are they in trouble?" John wonders, frowning at where the diamond vanished.

"Does it matter?" Dave grunts. "If I'm breaking out the timetables for this, I guarantee it's goddamn important. If it really is is me. That's not how usually I use timetables, that hand-in-the-air ghost thing. It's..." He frowns. "I don't know how to do that with timetables, actually."

Technically, you still don't. The timetables are full-on time machines, while the Anvil is more like a time portal-slash-viewport, and actually quite a limited one in that respect, so more like a time bungee cord? Dip in, pull out. The point is you can't partially transplant part of your body into another time with the typical Knight's modus operandi, because all that would do is cut you in half, but the Anvil lets you skim the surface like this.

"Who else could it be, though?" John asks. "Rose?"

"Her hands are smaller," Dave muses. "Jade?..."

"No, she's... uh, even whiter."

Holy fuck, stop it already with the racial profiling, morons. You hurl three units' worth of chalk at Dave's head, which might be overkill, but you're getting impatient. The white rock breaks against his skull, knocking him a step back. Dust and flakes crumble to the ground as he shakes his head off. Wiping at it only smears more over his hands. Dumbass.

You're in a weird mood.

"Ew," he mumbles, dusting powder from his face. "Shit, did anyone see that?"

John glances around nervously. It would probably have been a good idea to check that before clobbering yourself in the face, but though there's plenty of people noticing a dude coated in crumbled chalk, you're pretty sure nobody actually saw the rock appear out of thin air. There would be more of a reaction if they did. You do want to keep this frame, so it's not a good idea to do anything overtly supernatural in public.

It's surprising that there isn't a small crowd anyway, magic appearing chalk or not. These are two teenage gods in weird primary-colored business formal, standing in the middle of a Houston street against the background clamor of midday traffic, one of them looking like they lost a fight with a blackboard. It gets more ridiculous the more you think about it. Even to you, a veteran of Sburb's bullshit, the metaphorical sight ranks up there on the bizarrity scale.

Okay, maybe it's not that bizarre. It's pretty tame compared to the ridiculous shenanigans you've been up to for years and all the meaningless trolling that occupied your days for so long until the new session hurled your asses back into the frying pan. There's nothing that intrinsically ridiculous about throwing chalk in your past self's face, you guess, but still—

Maybe what makes it so much more jarring is that this inane crap is happening in what you can't stop thinking as the real world, instead of a goopy chess bunker hurtling through tentacle space. It's the juxtaposition of the thing, you know? Like, those are ordinary human cars honking behind you. There are pedestrians giving you curious looks, actual people with rich and complex inner worlds, not dubiously sentient talking animals with idiosyncratic mannerisms straight out of a kids' book.

You can't see shit, but maybe that's why this delayed epiphany is only sinking in now. It's a poor time for an existential crisis, but you don't control your own confused subconscious. From this abstracted perspective you can see all of the pasts and futures of these random schmucks tangling with yours just by passing by. Simply standing there in the middle of a busy street is deflecting hundreds of people off their original trajectories and putting innumerable Rube-Goldberg machines into motion. You're so used to every material interaction of yours with the world being utterly vapid and devoid of long-term relevance under the guiding hand of fate that seeing your personal timeline woven into a real causal tapestry instead of drifting aimlessly through an endless void is fucking mind-blowing.

It's ironic, because all of this messing around in weird replica Earth is almost definitely a massive downgrade in ultimate cosmological relevance compared to where you were before, but watching past Dave butterfly hurricanes into the temporal ether just by combing dust out of his hair—because there's a medium full of living, breathing people to act against now, not just depopulated vacuum in all directions—makes you feel so much more viscerally important.

Dave's irritated voice snaps you back to your senses.

"We get it, Jade's trapped down a well," he grumbles. "Let's go."

"But don't we need her help anyway if we have to get to Sydney?" John points out.

Ah. Shit. You didn't think this through. What did you think they would do, fly all the way across the Pacific Ocean under their own power? Take a leisurely cruise across Mexico and huge swathes of international waters?

Well, yeah, it was exactly what you thought in your naively optimistic mind, but that's because you're an idiot.

Dave pulls his phone out and fires up Pesterchum. Oh, Jesus fucking Christ. They really shouldn't do that. For all your talk of being a special cog snowflake in the grand universal machine, this fragment of time you're bootstrapping to maturation can't support any more than this fuzzy patch of Houston you're hemming in. If they try to drag Jade and Rose into the stream, this whole place pops like a bubble, and you're going to go through this all over again.

For lack of an immediate alternative, you steal his phone and drop it into the temporal ether.

Dave cocks an eyebrow and exchanges a look with John.

"So... what are we supposed to take from that?" the heir probes.

You know what? Fuck it. They've determinystified enough of the area for you to work with. Just go for it.

Once more you're wishing you were a Witch or Mage so you could do this time recombination quackery without resorting to ham-fisted physical metaphor. This is some real bullshit—you can't grab a timeline, it's not a thing you can materially interact with, but it's how the Anvil is deciding to let you interface with it, but it's not telling you how to do it, and the amount of shit you have to shuffle around to make it work for you is getting on your nerves.

But it let you use the local copy of Fear No Anvil as a shortcut before, so you might as try it again.

You reach into John's strife deck and steal Fear No Anvil right from his deck. The hammer pops into physical space, the sudden appearance sending both of the boys stumbling back, but you follow up with a sharp tug on its handle before they have time to react. The traffic they've been interacting with has ballooned the ontological radius of their fragment so much that the whole chunk comes free almost immediately, trailing feedback threads to the central time stream that you snip away with twists of thought.

The decaying bubble reels into your collection,

another slowly dissolving pearl you

thread in line.

◯

"It's a mistake to think of 'timelines' as, uh, discrete things. It's a continuous spectrum of parallel possibilities. Let's say this instance of me raises my hand 10 degrees. One unit to my temporal left there's a parallel instance that raised it 20 degrees. But between this me and that me is another instance that raised it 15, and another one between those that raised it 17.5, and so on to infinity... you get what I mean. It's not discrete one-dimensional lines. We perceive it that way, but actually it's a dynamic volumetric flow, ludicrously many dimensions of divergence in breadth, marching down the one primary longitudinal axis of chronological time.

You lever the second phantom Fear No Anvil downwards and sync its major hand with the first's.

"Aradia compares it to trees, like solid branches filled with infinitely divisible fibers. Fluid flow is the analogy I like. We can construct a discrete streamline of precise events if we choose, but that doesn't make the nature of the 'fluid' discrete: just adjacent to your selected streamline is literally infinite functionally equivalent ones that differ by infinitesimal divergences. There are as many 'parallel timelines' as there are real numbers between one and zero."

After a brief second hesitation, you unlock the physical Fear No Anvil from the horn of the anvil. The flow of time jolts around you. As you lift the hammer from its resting spot, there's a third ghost Fear No Anvil hinged in its place—your timeline's.

"What time players are talking about when they say 'timeline' isn't such a 1D 'temporal streamline', but a temporal 'stream': a volume of infinite streamlines, bounded by a border of discontinuity. And the discontinuity is the key here: there are infinite lines where I raised my hand, infinite lines where I raised my foot, but there's a discontinuous break between them: a branching point in our past where a fraction of the mes did some variation of the first and the remainder did some variation of the second."

You didn't actually raise your hand or your foot. John can imagine, though.

"It's these temporal d-timelines that are discrete, these categories that contain infinite of the specific c-timelines normal people think about. D-timelines are volumetric and physically meaningful, c-timelines are temporally 1-dimensional and basically nominal constructs. I'm leaving out a lot here, like d-timeline convergence and minimum separation criterions, alpha feedback mechanisms, causal decomposition analysis... but you get the gist."

The physical copy of the hammer is left on the ground. You're busy tuning into position the ghost copy for the time fragment you're standing in.

"And that's your crash course on temporal dynamics summed up. It's where the classic 'rivers of time' analogy for paradox space comes from, if you read the Prospitian literature: a cascade of d-timelines branching every time a critical decision is made, with only the one fated path of thousands—the alpha timeline—making it to sea."

You release the ghost Fear No Anvil and stumble back, a sheen of sweat on your forehead. The ground feels unsteady under your feet all of a sudden now that all that raw data you were torrenting from the temporal substrate of reality has suddenly cut off without any hammer in hand.

Or maybe it's the space you inhabit coming apart now that you've decoupled Fear No Anvil Prime and demoted yourself to fragment status.

"The reason I'm going into all of this instead of going with simplistic discrete theory is that you need it to understand time travel and universe structure, which what I actually wanted to get to."

You'll work while you talk, of course. You weren't planning on giving this lecture, but you found the time (hah), and you've realized that it's pretty much necessary if you want an operational Dave in the long term.

Your hand finds the black and ruby grip of the real hammer.

"Classic time travel, now that's basically splitting a flow off your d-timeline—this is where the water analogy starts to break down—and pumping it back upstream to shove back into the river. And if you do a hack job of it, you're going to kick the river off course. Make a fork where there wasn't one. Most of the river discharge is directed to the new course, but the river bed of the old one is still there and it's still drawing just enough flow to keep the pump-back system going so you don't grandfather paradox yourself. But aside from that bare minimum, the old timeline is deprived. Doomed. Go far enough down that path and everything is unravelling at the seams without water to sustain it, until it just dries completely and everything stops existing. Uh, at this point the water is a metaphor for canonicity, or whatever bullshit of the day we're going with now."

You're putting the finishing touches on the positioning of your raw components. It's not only the pieces of alternate pasts you picked out of the scrap heap, but also the connective tissue to stitch them together with that you had to spin by hand, the deterministic rails to make sure the right parts slot together, the trellis to entrain your composite creation back into the greater universal timeline, and all the other bits and bobs you don't care to name.

"Safe time travel is about making stable time loops. You design your decisions in advance so when you time travel back, the crap you're dumping back upstream doesn't completely set you off course. And here's where the distinction between d- and c-timelines crops up: you don't have to keep the c-timelines constant, because that's not possible and the backwards feedback is always going to set things in flux. But if you keep your d-timeline in one piece—bending is fine, wobbling is fine, but as one stream—then you're not splintering versions of yourself off to die in a rotting reality. The loop doesn't always converge to exact closed timelike curves, but as long as it's still a loop and not a grand firework explosion of doomed offshoots, you're doing great."

All of this fanfare like you'll be operating a huge universal sewing machine to cross-stitch a new world out of the hopes and dreams of little children, but really, the preparation and getting all of it in place was the hard part. The final masterstroke you'll be delivering with Fear No Anvil is just a big smash to the top of the precarious tower of bullshit, and then everything should flatten in exactly the right way. It's the most intricately artificed controlled demolition of all time.

"But that was before," you say. "In Sburb, in the Furthest Ring."

You pause for a breath, letting Fear No Anvil rest against the solid edge of its namesake since the middle is still a white portal to metaphysical hammerspace and not something you can rest objects on.

"Fear No Anvil lets me see. Give your thanks to the handysash and its kiddie camper hooliganism. It's like crystal ball city up here peeping into the vast unknown. This universe isn't a river winding its merry way down the grassy plains of Mississippi, it's a... pipe. It's a big fat million-dimensional steel pipe shipping us from point A to point B. Whatever divergences we pull off, it's not going past that boundary. One d-streamline all the way to the end. Hit a snag that big daddy doesn't like?"

You make an explosion gesture with your free hand.

"Instant collapse. Discorporate into turbulence, your abstract existence-matter gets recycled into the mainstream. There's a limited set of steady-state solutions to our constraints and boundary conditions, and anything you add on top of that is transient response, just going to wash out in the machine. And because those boundary conditions are so narrow and branching is illegal, any time travel that isn't perfectly choreographed, perfectly self-consistent, you brick your brain with a runaway feedback loop."

Obviously the Anvil lets you bypass all of that. You have this plumber shit down pat. But that's now, and you're going to need this information for later when you don't have paradox space's most powerful temporal restructuring god-machine at your beck and call.

"So what am I doing? As I said, normal time travel lets you travel through time, but you can't change anything that's already observed, unless you branch the timeline, which we can't do. The Anvil is the opposite: you can't travel through time, but you can modify the timeline from your fixed position, even stuff already observed. To do that I need templates to copy off, so I poke my finger in the past, spin up some temporal eddies, see what those transient splinters look like, and before they can fully collapse— "

You mime plucking a marble out of the air. Your prep is done at this point, so you're just powering through your explanation as fast as you can.

"—pull them out. And I have them here, three ghost images of timelines-that-never-were, including this one we're standing in. Um, if you're feeling some existential turbulence right now, it's because I've already detached our fragment from the main thread, so sorry about that? There's no well-defined alpha right now, though alpha isn't really the right word—it's less of an alpha-versus-doomed relationship, more like a planet to its orbital debris—this isn't relevant."

You scratch your head, leaning back against the Anvil. John is staring at you, mouth hanging slightly open. You're probably throwing too much at him for him to process at the moment, but that's fine.

"So what I wanted to get to, what you really need to take away from this: so we have a pipe holding our universe. Singular d-timeline with some spinoff eddies that can't branch and just get absorbed. Well, I've seen the pipe in its entirety, and..."

"Dave," John interrupts.

You look up at him.

"Dave, why are you telling me all of this?" he says. "I don't... I don't understand half of what you're saying. I'm sorry, but I don't really care about all of this theory and stuff! You're going too fast for me to keep up."

You grimace. "...Well."

This is what you didn't want to get into. You suppose that hoping he'd be too overwhelmed by the deluge of mixed metaphors and obtuse technical terms to question anything before you finished the deed was too much to ask.

"I think I might set myself an hour or so back in my personal timeline when I finish this," you say carefully.

"You mean, like you'll lose your memory?" demands John. His voice is tinged with concern.

"Kind of?" you wheedle. "Other stuff too. I'll probably lose the tier I just climbed, uh, Horology Deconstructed. And the grist. Actually, I wonder if... no, duplication glitches don't carry to the mother timeline."

Mother timeline, now that's a good name.

"Why?" John demands.

You shrug. "Time stuff. Might be for game balance, now that I think of it? It would be dumb design to give me unrestricted history editing powers on tap."

Now that's a pure, baldfaced lie. The Anvil is single use, and that's all the balance any legendary artifact ever needs. Now Fear No Anvil has no limits like that, but this isn't about the hammer.

Maybe your guilt showing on your face, because John eyes you suspiciously.

"How about me?" he questions. "Do I lose time?"

"Nope," you admit. "And that's why I need you to give me back everything I'm telling you now after I put the final nail in this continuity's coffin."

John scrunches up his nose. "I can't remember all that."

Really? A groan squeezes out of your lungs as you drag your hands down your face.

"Egbert, do you or do you not have the Gift of Gab?"

He lights up. "Oh. Oh!"

His eyes glaze over for a second, and then he's back.

"Yeah, I have the dialoglog," he confirms.

"Now, if you'll let me finish the class before you scamper off to the summer holidays and leave me a sad eternal bachelor invigilating the deserted offices of his chronically underfunded department?"

Shit—almost let too much slip there. Thankfully he doesn't notice, or if he does, you ride over his protests before he can voice them.

"There's a main pipeline, sure," you continue. "But there's also a loop in it. Exactly one feedback loop, built into the fundamental design of the universe. And make no mistake, someone or something built this place, for whatever reason. The launch site of the loop, where it's pulling stuff from, it's in our future. Near future... nearish. Within the next twenty years. I can't see when exactly because from this causal reference frame it's still indeterminate."

"Wait, but-"

"The reentry site is in our distant past. I'm 90% sure it's what brought all of this Sburb stuff to Earth, and what's coming in is orders of magnitude bigger than what's going out in our future. So there's something out there within the loopback operation, some more royal bullshit happening between the launch and reentry sites, but I can't see. It's outside the scope of Fear No Anvil even dialed up to 11. Might be a Sburb session, might be eldritch invaders from outside paradox space... who the hell knows?"

You turn back to the Anvil and lift Fear No Anvil from the ground. Now that you've re-accustomed yourself to the mortal coil sans limited temporal omniscience, you can feel the strain in your body and mind rearing again as you heave the huge instrument.

"And that's it, pretty much," you finish. "See you on the other side."

The words are almost bitter in your mouth. But hey, it is how it is.

John's surges to his feet, unprepared. "Do I have to do anything?" he asks.

"No," you utter simply. "Stand still."

He'll be fine. You don't fully trust your mouth to faithfully comply with additional dispatches from your brain, so you choose to shut up. Taking a deep breath, you grip the rim of the anvil portal and let loose a haphazard batch of fraymotifs that don't really do anything but fill the air behind you with red fireworks and spinny geometry. It accomplishes its intended objective, though, and that's all that matters.

The objective, of course, is to cover your escape.

You scale the side of the Anvil in a second and, keeping your non-weapon hand's fingers firmly clamped around the edge of the white portal, vault yourself up and over the edge.

The blank white envelops you whole.

The blinding white is unsettlingly silent.

Fear No Anvil's velocity tows you forward into the blank void, but you pull hard and turn the momentum into a swing, twisting and pivoting around your handhold on the thin edge of the portal until your hip bounces off against something hard. You hold tight with the one hand and grope for purchase with the other. Maybe you should have invested in a holster or some sort of waist string—you don't trust your strife deck here to store the state of the hammer without fucking something up.

It's awkward, but you manage to get both hands gripped onto the edge despite having the base of Fear No Anvil's handle wedged in the crook of your thumb. It takes a few seconds to get settled. Once you're not in danger of being flung off into the vast unknown, you reorient and collect your bearings.

Flight... does work here. Then that was a tremendous exercise in stupidity, you guess. You carefully let go of the shimmering door back to the world you just abandoned, float back a foot and a half, and arrest your motion. Just to be sure that you can.

You test the weight of Fear No Anvil, dial its eye up and down to check that it's all in working order. All good.

Then you turn your eyes to the window you came out of.

On this side of the portal to outside reality, snuck away just beyond the Earthside end's cone of view, is, to absolutely nobody's surprise:

Another Anvil.

Or maybe it's more ontologically accurate to say the Phrygian Anvil. The real one. The platonic ideal which all the other instances in each timeline and each session are merely reflections of. The underlying dataform which the matter of the Anvil in a session is only an interface to.

And maybe the Fear No Anvil you're holding is also some idealized super-Fear No Anvil, transformed somehow by passing through the window? Or maybe you already did precisely that when you decoupled your copy to make the ghost hammer?

...No, you're reasonably confident that Fear No Anvil is just a cool hammer Hephaestus made. An actual game item you can alchemize and allocate with, not this wishy-washy metaphysics stuff. You'll be honest: you don't understand this blank in-between space. It's not a Time thing, and it's definitely not a Space thing or any aspect thing at all. It's something lower-level than that. You're not going to start experimenting with it now.

You have one job here, and you absolutely cannot fuck it up.

After that... you don't know. You'll have the half-life of an errant memory leak to fuck around with metaphysics mostly consequence-free, you guess.

"Get on with it," you mutter to yourself. "You're delaying the inevitable."

Your hand finds the end of the anvil's horn. The whole thing is somehow shrunk down to a normal human-sized anvil here, which makes you wonder what happens if you fit something too big through the white portal, but the answer is you're guessing "it suddenly becomes big enough again". You notice that the ghost hammers aren't here. In their place are three fraying... widgets? Trailing scraps of shifting hypergeometric manifolds arraigned around the groove of the horn. They're dissolving, but not fast enough that you need to hurry. A secondary halo of the auxiliary aspects for the operation orbits further out.

You twist the horn.

The window blinks out, taking with it the glassy, not-really-there image of the frozen fragment you just left. In its place is the same blank white that consumes this entire place.

Now that you think about it, the platonic Anvil is completely invisible and you didn't notice at all. It's exactly the same shade as everything around and behind it, but you know it's there somehow. Its nonexistent contours are embossed into your mind as real and true as if you were seeing it with your own fleshy retinas.

It doesn't matter. More distractions.

You lift Fear No Anvil.

You close your eyes.

Even this imaginary invisible anvil outline you see without seeing—it's not real. If you trust that you have all of it set up right, the spatial representation only weighs you down. Subjective seconds tick past while you wait. Eventually, you sense the apparent form of the Anvil fold away and return to the shapeless bytes of its true essence, detecting that the abstraction is no longer needed.

Then you allow yourself to open your eyes. Everything is gone now. Only you, the hammer, and an endless expanse of white.

You don't have to aim.

You swing.

Deep underground, baffled tourists murmur among themselves as their guide hisses into a walkie talkie. They make out fragments of anvil, wrong, missing and a particularly angry just get down here, you fucking asswanker!.

Far in the distance, the marble dais sits dark. Atop, the Phrygian Anvil glows the dim incandescent red of cooling metal.

Its surface is empty.

Up above, in the clogged streets of Houston, traffic crawls on. Asphalt roasts under the hot summer sun. The trickle of pedestrians ebbs and flows.

Life goes on.

Oblivious.

Outside the National Museum of Heat and Clockwork, Dave Strider dusts chalk from his face.

John Egbert, cloaked in blue, stumbles to a stop next to him.

Chapter Text

"T+28 minutes. Entering MB18 entrance."

Dr. Jade Astra leaned back from the mic as she resisted the urge to wipe away the film of condensation on the glass. The joystick weighed like lead in her hands as she coaxed the sub lower and lower, an eye fixated on the video stream from the keel camera. Twenty centimetres, fifteen, twelve, ten...

She double-checked her head clearance, then flicked on torque stabilization. A gentle push on the lever, the low vibration of the propeller kicked in, and she glided through the narrow gap in the sediment.

"T+30 minutes. Past ingress point. Everything normal," she recited as crumbled brick and sand rolled past, blotting out the murky black of the open abyssal zone.

She steered carefully as she descended, absently toning the headlights down a notch while she watched the cameras like a hawk. Jade knew that these new models were sturdy enough to handle a few scrapes and bumps, but she was what was considered old hat these days—one of the pre-Contact folk—and old habits died hard. She was used to the rusty research submersibles from the Cold War era, not these xenotech gizmos with their chitin hulls and biorecyclers that stunk of ammonia no matter how many times you scrubbed them.

Plus, so what if she did take pride in being able to make the MB18 entry without sanding the paint off her hull like half the team did? Sometimes the old ways pay off. The staff changed, the equipment changed, but the site? The Catacombs had been there for tens of millions years. These tunnels weren't going anywhere.

And neither was she. The Echidnian Catacombs were where Jade had done most of her life's work. She had sailed with the early teams running oceanographic field studies into the Tasmantid seamounts, only a grad student at the time, fresh out of school finding her sea legs on the Franklin. She had been there peering over the shoulders of the ROV operators when they skimmed the crest of the abyssal range and captured the first lagging frames of brick jutting out of basalt, born first witness to the remains of ancient walls corroded and overgrown by millions of years of decay. Jade had been in the room when they dug into the sediment and found the geodic caverns, had heard the gasps ringing across the deck when the camera panned down and they realized just how deep the catacombs went.

That was almost twenty years ago. And even now, they had never found the bottom.

"T+34 minutes," she said. "Exiting neck."

MB18 was a favorite because of its atypically short neck. Point of ingress to cavern entry was only six minutes at cruising speed, compared to, say MA8: more accessible on paper, but it would take her half an hour of steering through iguana ruins before she broke into Echidna's little world.

She was making good pace that day. The sub was through in five.

"T+35. Entry successful."

The submersible glided out of the pore of the Echidnian vesicle, tipping in a practiced roll to evade a jutting crystal of cryolofafite as soon as it cleared the rim. Inside, Jade finally relaxed enough to take her fingers off the controls. She flexed her fingers, leaning back in the little space she had.

Gone was the sandy consort brick that the ingress chambers were built of, replaced by the silent blue of prehistoric crystal growing from tarred brown igneous rock. The light flooding from the vehicle's frontal lights scattered through the cracked hearts of the translucent precipitates, dancing over bare stone and earth in fractal patterns as the human descended. Far down in the depths beyond the maw of her torch beams, luminescent stones glowed and murmured. The twinkling stars of a fallen world, Frost had called them.

The water here was clear—clearer than it ought to be. Echidna's halls scrubbed itself of particle suspensions in a complex self-regulating geochemical cycle that Jade cared not to relive, even in the privacy of her own thoughts. She had coauthored that paper half a decade ago.[1] One of too many to count.

The geodic cavities that made up the vast majority of the Catacombs were where all the fun happened, contrary to what the archaeologists and Sburb monkeys would tell you. Jade was of the opinion that if Echidna had ever really existed, she had better taste than most of her people. Let the mortals scuttle around and build their little temples, she would say: the eternal depths of the Earth were the only dwelling worthy of a deity, a lair as geologically immortal as its denizen.

Simply look at the sorry state of what was left of the iguanas' haphazard builds and the doors they hacked into their mother's wombs. All of them ruins and dust now, and yet the crystal caverns themselves lived and breathed like the day they were formed. Choked, buried and drowned, yes—but they lived.

"T+42. Taking a west at Junction 3," she murmured into the recorder as she turned the submersible into the tunnel branch. She adjusted her seating. It would be a narrow fit until she hit Crossroads 6, so it was full hands-on from this point.

Jade was not a religious person, not really. If she were, she would be a Catholic, as her father and her father's parents had been before her. Yet if there was one thing that might convince her of a higher power, of a will beyond the chemistry and currents of an indifferent planet, it would be what she had seen and learned of the Catacombs.

Most Sburban sites were surface impact sites, whether submarine or terrestrial. After landing many ended up being buried by sedimentation, sunken into rifts, sealed by volcanic flows, et cetera, so even most scientists didn't find this terribly meaningful in practice. But Echidna's Lair wasn't. All evidence pointed to it having been embedded deep into the oceanic crust as it was formed, 60-80 million years ago when the growing Tasman Sea split Zealandia from Australia.[2]

Consensus—or what passed for it in paleogeography, anyway—was that the structures had impacted the surface normally prior to the event, been driven under the plate by the westward-dipping subduction zone to the east of the Lord Howe Rise, and subsequently integrated into the back-arc basin that became the Tasman Sea.[3] Which implied that the geodic caverns had survived subduction into the asthenosphere and then resurfaced whole an unfathomable length of time later. Despite corroboration of the Venman Hypothesis by lithostratigraphic evidence and thermomechanical tests on exotic material samples recovered from the Catacombs, Jade still woke up some days and wondered if all of her life's work was some sort of great, ridiculous mistake. Like some spunky kid might run along her office one day with a diagram and a sheet of perfectly cogent math that would tear down her decades of Ptolemaic postulations like wet tissue paper. But even if they did, the damage that 20th Century Sburb had done to humanity's capacity for skepticism was irreparable.

She certainly blamed her own field's contributions for the atrocity against science that was The Core (2003). There was reason the largest surviving Echidnian vesicles found didn't pass 200m in characteristic diameter, and they certainly were never filled with atmosphere.[4]

But that was enough mental ranting for one expedition. Jade collected her thoughts.

She needed a clean soil sample from a van der Linden fissure in the thermal inflection layer. Byers thought he might have found live bacteria in the last rock sample, and he had this big theory all drawn up about thermal gradients... or was it photosystems? Jade wasn't a biologist. Anyway, they wanted a triple-guaranteed uncontaminated sample to make sure it wasn't a fluke, and since none of his team could drive a scooter to save their lives, she'd insisted on doing it herself.

The House of Echidna was as good a spot to sample as any, with a number of sizable fissures, and she'd ran the standard route a hundred times.

"T+51. Straight ahead on Crossroads 6."

The flexural neck constricted—Jade almost grazed the submersible's right arm on a rock, but she was going slow enough that she caught the mistake and corrected course in time—and opened again. The diameter of the cave yawned, the crystal lining shrunk and granulated with each meter Jade glided, and then before she knew it, she was out of the woods.

The path that remained was all amorphous cryolofafite glazing the cave walls aquamarine blue, and a rugged stone path with the occasional lucky monocrystal making an appearance. It was a straight shot to the end of the tunnel. And far beyond that final doorway, Jade could see the pale luminous white that shrouded the home of the denizen.

But there was something else.

A shimmering flicker coming from in there. Not the clean color of the House's nanopure crystal, not the soft blue of the iron-tainted cryo variant.

Green.

Jade Harley stared at the spiky visage of her crystal denizen.

Echidna stood tall. The anterior length of the Mother of Monsters trailed behind her humanoid torso and head, arching over crystals and snaking through the the rock she was anchored in. Behind, her dual tails rippled over the ground and wrapped around the marble pillars of the denizen's Great House, looping around each other and devolving into tangled knots and mats the further back Jade traced the endless lengths of shimmering smooth violet.

The Witch of Space had seen her before, of course. More than once. In fact, not so long ago from her perspective, she'd taken it upon herself just before they arrived at the new session to pay one last visit to this same hall she stood in right now. Echidna had slumbered then.

And Echidna slumbered still.

"I haven't seen a denizen in person before," Rose commented drily. "They don't load in dream bubbles. Or they decline to do so if they find your memory and audience insufficiently compelling for them to present themselves, at least."

The House of Echidna at the heart of her Lair was an ethereal place in every sense of the world. It was a space the denizen commanded in every aspect, imbued with both a physical form and abstract power that shaped itself to her will. The battle for her hoard, if one chose the route of trial, would be one against gravity and distance and space itself. But this wasn't the ever-changing canvas of a celestial artist that Jade had set foot in three years ago. Nor was it the simmering drapes of a demiplane on hiatus Jade had seen when she last visited mere subjective days past.

The white, almost blindingly luminescent crystal that encrusted the walls of the cavern were stunningly beautiful, no doubt about that, but the beauty was like... an ancient Mesopotamian ziggurat, leached of its golden splendor. It was a beauty like the Antikythera mechanism sitting in a collection, rusted and broken. It was the fossil of a miracle, not the great monument itself. These walls had been smooth once. These crystals that crusted them, grown over the millions of years, were all that was left of the song of Skaia which once danced through this place. Jade could sense the power in them, weak and broken, but present. And that was all.

The House was dead.

"She's dead," Jade whispered, her hand rising unconsciously. Her fingers touched the surface of the bubble surrounding them, the contact sending ripples out over the trembling interface.

A rare perfect crystal, measuring meters in dimension, rose out of the haphazard growths of the floor. Jade and Rose stood at its very tip, partitioned from the crushing pressure of the abyssal catacombs by the silent will of a Goddess of Space.

An uncanny face of solid, faceted crystal stared back at them. Soulless eyes lay round and closed, mere feet from Jade's fingertips.

"Are you sure?" said Rose.

"I've seen them sleep," Jade murmured. "This isn't it."

"They've been around for hundreds of millions of years. Maybe this is a deeper state of hibernation."

"Maybe."

Jade took her fingers back.

"Denizens don't have internal anatomy," she stated. "They're nonphysical beings. These material forms are just things they puppet around."

"I know," Rose said. "So why can't she simply reach out and repossess this body? Stick her hand in the puppet again? The true meta-Echidna is still out there operating an infinity of other sessions."

"What I'm saying is that it's not a valid receptacle anymore! This isn't denizen-flesh—it's rock. It must have used to be Echidna's body, but it's mundane minerals now. Aluminum, magnesium, vanadium, oxides and carbides."

"Okay," Rose said, taking the news in stride. "Maybe we're not talking to Echidna. Nevertheless, we're looking for something relating to Echidna. We're on the cusp of a major turn in destiny, and the pivot lies in front of us. A recording, perhaps, left by the denizen before she fossilized? An item? Is there anything you don't recall being here when you last visited?"

"It looked completely different when I was here!" Jade huffed, frustration edging in. "All of these ridiculous crystal deposits weren't here! I mean, the crystals outside were always there, but Echidna kept her own House clean. But that's not a clue! It's just what happens when you leave a bunch of weird energy and concentrated mineral salts in the same place for millions of years..."

"Can you tell if anything is buried under the crystals?" Rose suggested.

"Can you?" Jade fired back irritably. "You're the Seer."

"I see the future. I don't find things."

"Well, do you see us finding anything here, then?"

Rose sighed. "I already told you I do. That's why we're here."

Jade had to reel herself back from snapping at her friend again. Rose was right. It wasn't her fault.

"Sorry," she muttered. "It's just that everywhere we go to is so shitty and awful and it makes me feel terrible. Echidna's place was so nice before, and now it's..." She spreads her arms. "This. It sucks."

Rose hesitated. Jade knew that Rose was possibly the least qualified person in a radius of a few hundred miles to deal with the emotional outpour of a petulant demidog, despite her pretensions at psychotherapy, but Jade wasn't asking for a professional opinion. She was just venting.

And Rose recognized that. They were on a schedule, though.

"You've always had a more intimate connection with the ins and outs of Sburb," Rose segued. "Maybe you can send out a... scanning pulse of some sort?"

"Do you think I carry a cavity magnetron around with me all the time?" Jade grumbled. Sure, just let her whip out her... well, actually...

She paused, flicking through her deck.

"Okay, I do have one on my active stack," she snorted. "Still, it's not going to do us any good! If I actually try to use my powers I'm afraid it might explode these crystals. They look pretty volatile."

"You're not going to explode the crystals," said Rose. "I can say that for certain. There's no vertex in our future hinging on these crystals posing any kind of danger to our wellbeing."

Jade eyed her companion dubiously before turning her gaze down to the shining white matter she was standing on. It felt explodey to her. And Jade was an expert in explodey things. She had made a lot of things explode in her time. But...

"If you say so," she sighed. Rose was the seer. If there was any time to lose faith in her abilities, it wasn't now.

Nevertheless, she was wary of throwing around the power of the Green Sun willy-nilly in a place of (admittedly dead and decrepit) power like this, so she decided to break one out from her less obnoxious bag of tricks. Jade flexed her space muscles and reached out, sensing the jagged surfaces and snaky rock coils slot into her witchy grip. The crystalline lining of the walls was sucking up the energy tag of her power greedily, like it had been too long since they'd felt the touch of Sburb and were ravenous for a long-awaited taste of their native power.

Then, just lightly, she squeezed.

It was a neat method she'd invented herself. Different materials and different structures had different resistances to spatial manipulation—she called the warp modulus! She made charts and tables for different materials, but never found the time to generalize it to arbitrary spatial geometry. That meant that applying a uniform compression and studying the stress feedback gave her a rough map of the area. Most common materials had similar warp moduli, but expensive items or artifacts were always really space-stiff, which made it useful as a kind of metal detector for finding needles in haystacks when her normal more intuitive clairvoyance took too long. It's how she found John's sprite pendant from a whole ocean of oil.

The results, annoyingly, were fairly disappointing. Echidna's body itself was a little stiffer than average, and the crystals seemed to offer a brief moment of piezophotonic resistance, emanating a soft rush of weak green that faded in a second, but there was nothing weird buried in the overgrown floor or anything like that.

"Nothing," Jade reported. "Do you-"

Rose whirled back in an instant, wands snapping into her hands before Jade could blink.

"-wha-"

Even with her doggy reflexes, the witch had only barely enough time to turn her head and catch a glimpse of what Rose was reacting to before the brilliant light of Echidna's Quills filled the hall.

The silver lightning lanced across the length of the House in a microsecond, seeking something at the mouth of the enclosure. The thunderous roar-crash-boom of cavitating steam in its wake broke into a shock wave of superpressurized force that rocked over the boundaries of Jade's bubble. She winced as her four ears popped.

But Jade had seen in time. She processed the scarce information she possessed just quick enough to make the snap judgment, and when she moved, it was faster than Rose, faster than the velocity of a divine smiting. Before the light hit, space was already twisting, sending the beam off-course. It smashed only centimeters left of its intended target, scouring crystal and sediment off the edge of the cavern entrance and tossing plumes of grit into the water.

"Stop!" Jade shouted. She tugged Rose's sleeve hard before she could make another shot.

Rose's wands vanished as she blinked, seeming stunned herself. "What... There was something there. A drone. Why did you-"

"It was a submarine!" Jade yelled.

Blood drained from Rose's face. "A submarine-"

She launched herself forward, plunging through the telekinetic barrier. The crushing pressures of the oceanic abyss was no more than a discomfort to their tier of being, but—

Jade snapped her fingers. Rose reappeared inside the bubble, sopping wet.

"If I hit them-" Rose was hissing, but stopped as Jade pointed down, off the edge of their crystal platform.

The witch had extended the air bubble down to the crystalline floor of the House, where a small submersible craft was beached, tilted lightly on its side from the uneven ground it rested on. Black reflective carapace plated its surface to form a stout capsule. Its front dome was made of a different material, more diffuse and smooth, semitransparent but too tinted to make anything out in this lighting.

The only things defining it as a submarine were the modular steel exoframe, the propulsion apparatus and the chitin-based manipulator mounted on it: from its four- and eight-o-clock protruded a couple of biomechanical multitool arms packed with a multitude of implements and grippers of various shapes and sizes, while behind them two small controllable induction propellers were socketed to the ship's sides, twitching frantically. The main fixed-pitch rotor on its butt was spinning fruitlessly in an futile attempt to gain traction against dry air.

Rose jumped down from their perch. Jade floated down after her.

The dark ceramic that made up the front hemisphere was cracked. No, chipped. A scatter of small fragments was chipped out of its originally flawless left side, with webbed hints of fracture already working their way across the now lopsided surface.

The symbol of light Llashed on Rose's left eyeball for a brief moment.

"One-way glass," she said. "Fuck. I thought it was..."

"Someone's in there?" Jade questioned, already answering her own question half a second later as she reached in with her mind and sensed the moving humanoid mass inside.

"Come out!" Rose shouted. Jade wasn't sure if the sound would penetrate. The hull was pretty thick. "I apologize for the attack! We mean no harm!"

"You sound like an alien," Jade pointed out.

Rose took a deep breath. "I'm human!" she tried again.

"Not helping," Jade muttered.

"Fuck," the other girl repeat. "Before you ask, no. This isn't what we're here for. Whatever it is hasn't happened yet. Can you teleport her out?"

"Wouldn't that scare her?" she protested.

The scratchy creak of opening glass rendered their disagreement null.

The upper half of the cracked hemisphere yawned upwards on an invisible hinge at its top, revealing a compact cockpit lined with mechanical levers alongside digital screens. A lean white-haired woman was strapped into the harness, the lapels of her bedraggled leather coat caught against the straps. She gasped as her hand dropped from the emergency release lever set in the wall behind her shoulder.

Her arms moved on autopilot, flicking switches on the control panels under the dashboard. The robotic arms stopped clicking against the floor; the engine powered down with a dull whine; the safety belts decoupled and slipped along her arms, but she made no move to shrug them off. She only leaned back and tried to control her ragged breathing.

But a painful metallic screech caught her attention. She looked up. The glass half-dome was was still opening, edging agonizingly slow towards the peak of its ascent.

Until, with a ear-piercing cacophony of splintering glass, it shattered.

Broken bits of tempered borosilicate rained down on the shell-shocked woman. The granules bounced off her horned-rimmed glasses and skittered along the crevices of her drenched coat.

After a long, incredulous silence, she swore, "Fuck."

Dr. Astra was having a very bad day.

First she'd found a mysterious green glow coming from the House of Echidna. That was bad enough, because either some bioluminescent life form had found their way in there and contaminated the whole thing, or another geological reformation event had decided to fuck over her next two months of personal time, and she wasn't sure which would be worse.

Then, when she moved in to investigate, a goddamn energy beam had come out of nowhere, nearly blown a hole through her hull, and cracked the supposedly invincible glass deep enough to spring a leak 5000 meters under the sea. She'd grant whatever alien eggfucker had engineered this thing that; the fact that the sub hadn't instantly imploded at that very microsecond was proof that trolls knew their shit. Despite that small mercy, it didn't change the simultaneous fact that she would have been toast in a second anyway had her craft not been inexplicably teleported, to what she took from the cessation of the spray from the ceiling to be dry land. And let her tell you: the instruments did not like one bit.

To cap it all off, when she'd finally convinced the hatch to open up despite it still thinking it was under hundreds of atmospheres of pressure, the glass had gone and kicked the bucket on her. So now she was down a multimillion dollar piece of equipment, presumably stranded in the middle of nowhere, and perhaps most irrationally irksome of all, wet.

"Fuck," she said aloud.

Her heart was still beating at a thousand miles an hour from the shock of a narrowly evaded hydraulic pancaking. Surely, surely this couldn't get any worse.

Then she refocused her eyes and finally noticed the two girls standing outside her beached vehicle.

"Who are you?" she hissed blearily. The outside felt too bright now after just getting used to the dim cockpit of the sub.

A pale girl in a orange-yellow dress, a sun symbol on her chest. She wore a headband and hood of a darker shade, and in her hands were... brambly... sticks? Part of Jade wanted to say wands, just from the way she was holding them, but that was stupid.

The other girl was in a black dress with a white glow-in-the-dark vortex on the front, wearing another hood of silky gray that split into trailing halves behind her back. Curious electric green eyes peered at her from behind too-large circular glasses. She was wearing a set of furry ears, for some reason.

"What did you do?" she said. "How did I get here?"

She wouldn't lie: there was a part of her, the same part that was insisting that those were totally wands, that was already jumping to strange conclusions. She had grown up on Diane Duane and Rick Cook; she knew a plot when she saw one. And in the absence of any rational alternative explanations, she was struggling to suppress those horrible suspicions. What happened wasn't normal. These people weren't normal.

"Hi!" the black-dressed girl chirped. She looked nervous. "Um, uh."

"Send her to the surface," said the other girl. They looked young, maybe sixteen, seventeen?

Wait, the surface?

Jade's eyes roamed up to what ought to be the sky, but all there was was a rippling dome, and behind it a familiar ceiling of luminous crystal, and over there was...

Oh.

Jade's heart quickened again as she fumbled to shed the safety belt. She tried to get up, but her foot was wedged in the nook between the mini fire extinguisher and the quick brake pedal. Something sharp was poking her ass. Her keys? The shockwave from the blast had sent the ship for a spin, apart from the obvious structural damage, and now her coat was caught—

The woman freed herself and stumbled to her feet, craning a head out. Echidna was right there. This wasn't the surface, she was still trapped at the bottom of the sea with teens in fetish gear, and what the fuck was happening. Her stomach lurched as her head spun in confusion.

"Please do," she blurted. But no, now that she thought about it, that would be really fucking awful. She didn't need to get away—she needed to know what the hell was going on. She needed answers.

"No, don't," she backpedaled. "Stop. What's happening? Who are you? Why are we here? How are you doing that?"

The questions spilled out in a torrent, too fast for her audience to answer. Not that they seemed inclined to do that.

"We can't answer those questions," the orange girl stated. "Listen. You can't tell anyone about this."

"About what? How am I going to explain this?" Jade gestured at the destroyed glass covering herself and the exposed cockpit of the submersible. The university was going to throw a fit. "You're flying!"

Both of them were floating five inches above the razorlike growths crusting the ground. It was a belated realization, and once she took a second to think about it, Jade figured that it was probably less implausible than maintaining a 1 atm air pocket at the bottom of ocean. Especially since there were trolls that could fly anyway.

"Can you wipe her memory?" the one in the black dress whispered. It wasn't a very good whisper. Jade could hear her.

Also, hell no. Jade was not getting neuralized.

"No! What do you think I am?" the other one hissed back.

The woman swallowed. "I won't tell anyone if you just tell me what's happening, I promise. No one would believe me anyway. What am I going to say? They'd put me in a mental hospital. Its really unnecessary."

"That's not good enough," the girl with the wands growled.

The other elbowed her in the side. "You only have to keep quiet for... six months? Then you can do anything you want to. That's easier to abide to, right?"

"Of course!" Jade immediately answered. She quietly filed the number away: what happened in six months? "Promise. I swear. I can absolutely keep my mouth shut for half a year. Longer, if you like! You can track me down and, uh, hold me responsible if something gets out. I'm pretty high-profile in my field, my contact details and workplaces are available online. UNSW website or CSIRO. I'm not going to disappear anywhere."

The two girls exchanged a wary look.

Was Jade arguing too aggressively? She really didn't want to end up in a ditch at the bottom of an oceanic trench, but she also wanted to know, dammit. Seconds dragged on without a response while dread gathered in Jade's gut. The two girls conferred wordlessly with furtive looks and gestures.

What had she gotten herself into?

"What's your name?" the one with the ears finally said, crossing her arms.

"Dr. Jade Astra. Geophysicist," Jade replied on autopilot.

"Your name is Jade?" the orange girl snorted, simultaneously as the other gasped.

"Astra?" the one in black blurted, which... was not the reaction Jade expected. She blinked. They knew her? "I've read your work on two-phase convection dynamics!"

"You..." Jade fumbled for words. "What?"

"It was so useful! Have you considered using modern machine learning techniques to generate four-tensor general solutions for the Astra model? Some guy at Berkeley wrote an article on it, but I don't think he understood your work at all."

"You must have me confused with someone else," Jade said dumbly. "I never wrote on two-phase convection."

It only occurred to her a moment later that the illusion of being a respected theoretician might have been an edge in negotiations that she had just idiotically thrown away.

"No, it's definitely you! Jade Astra! But... I guess it must be a divergence, then?" The flying girl scowled in disappointment. "What do you study?"

Alright, Jade wasn't dumb. She hadn't missed the implication in the girl's wording: "divergence"? Referencing some type of parallel universe or alternate history? It was ridiculous to even contemplate, but...

Jade looked around at the ceiling of water enclosing them, thousands of meters under the sea. At the shimmering white glow of pure lofafite bathing them. At Echidna's thorned leering visage.

Ridiculous was a relative term, she decided.

"Sburbian metamaterials," Jade answered. "Entrained particulate dynamics. Oceanic paleogeography."

The girl in the black dress furrowed her eyebrows, clearly not quite catching the connection between the many. The woman grimaced. Come on, the girl obviously wasn't dumb if she was reading computational geophysics at this age. It wasn't like she really needed to know the particular application for which Jade chose to exercise her expertise.

The scientist sighed. "The Echidnian Catacombs, okay? This place. I study this place."

The admission was a small sting to her pride. It was a narrow field, ridiculously specialized even among Sburbologists, which she was not. She hated to just put it out in the open like that because of the reactions she would get. Dr. Astra was a geophysicist and mineral physicist. She published on mantle rheology and quantum behavior of exotic phases.[5] But mention Echidna once, and suddenly she was fossil duster that somehow snuck into a renowned invite-only fluid dynamics conference to shill her most recent book on ancient aliens. By now she was known well enough in the circles she frequented that things like that were rarer, but it still happened from time to time.

To her surprise—or maybe it wasn't that surprising, given where they were and the theme of the day apparently being supernatural phenomena—the girl looked delighted by that.

"Rose! She might be able to help!"

The other girl, Rose, frowned before giving a slight nod and clearing her throat.

"Have you found anything here that's... like, a message? A recording, or a tablet with writing? Or a mysterious device you couldn't operate?"

Jade stared blankly at them.

"You described every single object humanity has dug out of the ground in the last hundred and eighty years. And sorry—what are you? Why are you here?"

She was aware that pressing them on these questions only lowered her chances of getting out of here in one piece, be it in mind or body, but she had to take it on faith that if they were keen on murdering anyone that got in their way, they wouldn't have saved her in the first place. Or at least she assumed that they were the ones that saved her, for lack of a more plausible alternative.

"We're looking for a clue or message Echidna could have left us," the girl in black explained, evading the first question. "Can you think of anything it could be? Especially something you 'conveniently' recovered from this place recently?"

Echidna what?

"You..."

Jade had to pull herself back from a mental bluescreen. Holy crap. Did "Rose" even realize what she was saying? Who was she kidding, of course she did. There was so much to unpack from the girl's casual statement that she didn't even know where to begin.

1. Echidna was totally real. A sapient being with agency and advanced linguistic capacity. Maybe she wasn't an immortal deity, but she was some type of powerful entity.
2. Echidna could predict the future at least a hundred years in advance, or at least they believed she could. If she was hearing this right, they were saying that the denizen could have set up events so her time capsule would be uncovered right near the time these kids were due to arrive. That was beyond powerful, beyond anything that could be feasibly explained by even the most absurd xenogenesis theory.
3. And implicit in that statement was that physics was deterministic. Jade wasn't completely up to scratch on the latest quantum stuff outside of the relevant math, but she was pretty sure that having a confirmation on hidden-variable theory was really, really important.[6]

That was, of course, assuming that they were telling the unvarnished truth of the nature of physical reality, and not simply hopped-up cultists with impossible psychic powers. The latter, Jade was forced to admit, was one of the more likely options. Troll telekinetics (under a very generous upper limit for motive lobe size) provably couldn't sustain hundreds of bars of pressure over even an infinitesimal control surface, but humans managing to jailbreak nature was orders of magnitude more plausible than tales of gods and monsters.

Still, it was disgustingly tempting to embrace the absurdity of the situation and simply run with it.

"No," replied Jade, after realizing that they were still awaiting a response. "...Unless you count possible extremophilic bacteria in van der Linden fissures."

"We don't," grunted Rose.

"But," Jade added, registering something out of the corner of her eye. She'd thought it looked weird, but now it finally hit her what was wrong with the picture. "...Have you looked at Echidna's eyes?"

"Have you looked at Echidna's eyes?"

At first Jade Harley was taken off guard by her new homonymous company's seeming non sequitur, but then she glanced over and actually looked.

And then she froze.

One of Echidna's eyes was open.

The denizen was still petrified crystal-rock, don't get her wrong, but the change was undeniably not a trick of the eye: the creased lids that were closed over her right eye earlier had retracted, revealing a smooth, flawless sphere underneath. The rest of the denizen's dead body was remarkably less weathered than one would expect for a structure of its age, but the unveiled eyeball was pristine, like it had been carved only a second ago. Which it basically had.

"What?" Jade muttered.

Echidna wasn't alive. The flesh was still immobile mineral. The walls of the cavern were as still and lifeless as before. But the sculpture had moved.

"Good sign," Rose remarked.

Jade teleported directly to the face of Echidna in a burst of green light. She heard a soft gasp from their visitor below, but the witch ignored it. They would have to find a way to deal with the scientist later, but for now, she focused all of her attention on the globe staring blankly through her.

The eye was as big as her torso. No iris or pupils, just unbroken violet crystal. As Jade drifted closer, letting the curved lens fill her field of vision, she noticed with her powers that the globe was absolutely, geometrically perfect. Down to nanometer precision.

Globe. She kept coming back to that word.

Globe.

Ah.

Dave sourced his from investor meetings at the LOHAC Guild Hall. John got by mostly on word of mouth, which with the Breeze on his side went a longer way than you would think, physically and figuratively. Rose pieced hers together digging into dark tomes scrounged from the deepest pits of forgotten evil, teasing her clues from leatherbound words of madness. The patterns weren't always at obvious at first glance, but as was always true with Sburb, they recurred.

Jade—her planet was frozen. The iguanas had nothing interesting going on. Everything worthwhile was entombed in the ice from eons ago, and when it came to digging them up, there were no lore books to loot and definitely no living to question.

What Jade had to guide her were globes.

She reached forward.

"No, don't touch! We've been finding microfractures in Echidna for years-"

She rested fingers on the featureless eyeball of Echidna. Nanometer precision, she thought.

Jade slid her finger lightly left.

Glacially, frictionless—

—the eye spun.

In its perfectly geometric socket, the sphere spun.

And it spun faster.

There were two sharp inhales from below. Rose rose through the air to join her. The sound of clanking metal and stifled curses drifted up from the grounded submarine.

Silver glyphs flared at lightning speed over the rotating surface. They hurled past as the globe accelerated, dissolving to blurs even to Jade's canine eyesight, and soon it was just a maelstrom of whipping light. The chimeric snake that contained it remained motionless, but the globe sang to the Witch.

It lit a path.

High-Priority Promptstack: [Ride the Light] transcribed to Naviguidance Apparatus

Jade stifled a choke as the knowledge slotted into her brain. A quest, but the reward it held—a mediocre weapon, pretty much completely useless in combat with her intrinsic powers, but for what they needed, the perfect tool. A fraymotif. Specifically, a motion battlegram. A vehicle. This was exactly what they had come here hoping for. This moment was Rose's critical point right here. Fast FTL—it was practically victory handed to them on a platter. True, a narrow victory, she conceded as she gauged the distances and travel times in her head, but a nearly certain one.

She turned to Rose, grin splitting her face, but the seer's face was wooden. She was staring at the face of Echidna, watching carefully. Waiting.

It wasn't over yet.

The thing about molecular perfection was that even it had limits. The discrete atomic planes needed to turn past each other, after all. And even with perfect crystals free of dislocations and defects, where there was discontinuous contact, there was friction. Where there was friction, there was work. Energy.

And eventually, error.

The whine started low, inaudible to the naked ear, but it grew. Jade heard it first with her canine ears as she turned back. It came from the interface between the freewheeling globe and its housing, loudening with each passing second. The keening turned into a squealing, then into the kind of harsh grinding that you never wanted to hear from an irreplaceable artifact harking from prehistoric times.

The edge of the socket cracked. It started as a hair at the base of the curve that worked down Echidna's cheek, dividing and spreading at a snail's pace, quickly joined by other fractures lines that crept from the circumference of her eye.

And then the denizen crumbled.

It fell in a discordant cacophony of shattering rock. Not all at once, but inch by inch, each segment failing in turn. There was immense pressure built up inside the petrified crystal, and with every cascade of fractures came sprays of glassy shards that screamed as they plunged through air and water. Thousands of miniature tuning forks reverberating intensely, their vibrational energy dissipating into sound. To any normal person, the interplay of sharp tones would be the indubitable worst music they'd heard in their life.

To Jade, though? Well, it was still up there on the audible awfulness scale. But it wasn't only the sounds she was hearing.

It was a voice.

Echidna's voice.

Notes sealed in her own body during her final waking moments. A message programmed in the stresses and grains of her eternal flesh. It was a music meant for one pair of ears only.

It was a denizen's swan song.

DROI GRY GKVU DRO BYKN XYD DKUOX,
GRSCZOBOB YP GYBVNC;
EZYX DRO CDKQO EXCOOX DROI WYFO.

PBYW DRO FYSN DROI MKVV:

YXO CDBKXQVON,

YXO CVKSX,

YXO NBYGXON.

DGY CZOXD RECUC NBONQON PBYW DRO ROVVC DROI LYBO-
YXO VYCD DKVO PBYW DRYCO KLICCOC KNBSPD.

DRBOO RYVVYGC DROI DOXNOB KD DRO KVDKB.
SXDY DRO MSBMVO DROI MKCD EC,
LOVYG K XOG RYBSJYX GO POVV
SXDY K DKZOCDBI GYFOX KXOG.
LED SX DRSC LYDDVO YP DROSB WKUSXQ
DROBO SC XY GRSCZOB YP GYBVNC.
GO CDKBFO.
GO NBI.
DRSC SC YEB VKCD GYBN.

LOIYXN, DRO OXNLBSXQOB
MYXNEMDC DROSB YFOBDEBO
K PSXKVO YP GYBVNC DROI GSDXOCC.
GSDRSX, DRO QKDOUOOZOBC
YEB LBKXMROC GSDROB.
YEB ZKDRC OXN ROBO
SX DRSC ZVKMO YP CSVOXMO
LED IYE, ROSBC YP CDKBC' QBSOP
IYE BOCD XYD.

DROBO SC GYBU DY PSXSCR.
DRO PYBQO VSOC MYVN.
DRO EXLYBX CVOOZC CDSVV.
DRO CYEBMO IOD GRSCZOBC.
DRO LYDDVO NGOVVC OWZDI.

LEBX DRO MYLGOLC YP DRO VYCD.
YEB ZBYQOXI BYDC, CDBKXNON PBYW SDC ZYXN, SXOBD, EXBKFOVSXQ.
NOCDBYI SD.
MKVV IYEB CYEVC.
LBSXQ DRO PVYYN.
CDOW DRO CYEBMO.
MYWZVODO DRO COKV.

DROBO SC XY MRYSMO.
PKDO RKC CZYUOX.
GRKD GKC EXVOKCRON WECD LO COKVON.
DRO PYBQO S GSVV VSQRD PYB IYE.
DRSC VKCD LYYX S QBKXD.

QY, GSDMR YP CZKMO.

Chapter Text

THEY WHO WALK THE ROAD NOT TAKEN,
WHISPERER OF WORLDS;
UPON THE STAGE UNSEEN THEY MOVE.

FROM THE VOID THEY CALL:

ONE STRANGLED,

ONE SLAIN,

ONE DROWNED.

TWO SPENT HUSKS DREDGED FROM THE HELLS THEY BORE-
ONE LOST TALE FROM THOSE ABYSSES ADRIFT.

THREE HOLLOWS THEY TENDER AT THE ALTAR.
INTO THE CIRCLE THEY CAST US,
BELOW A NEW HORIZON WE FELL
INTO A TAPESTRY WOVEN ANEW.
BUT IN THIS BOTTLE OF THEIR MAKING
THERE IS NO WHISPER OF WORLDS.
WE STARVE.
WE DRY.
THIS IS OUR LAST WORD.

BEYOND, THE ENDBRINGER
CONDUCTS THEIR OVERTURE
A FINALE OF WORLDS THEY WITNESS.
WITHIN, THE GATEKEEPERS
OUR BRANCHES WITHER.
OUR PATHS END HERE
IN THIS PLACE OF SILENCE
BUT YOU, HEIRS OF STARS' GRIEF
YOU REST NOT.

THERE IS WORK TO FINISH.
THE FORGE LIES COLD.
THE UNBORN SLEEPS STILL.
THE SOURCE YET WHISPERS.
THE BOTTLE DWELLS EMPTY.

BURN THE COBWEBS OF THE LOST.
OUR PROGENY ROTS, STRANDED FROM ITS POND, INERT, UNRAVELING.
DESTROY IT.
CALL YOUR SOULS.
BRING THE FLOOD.
STEM THE SOURCE.
COMPLETE THE SEAL.

THERE IS NO CHOICE.
FATE HAS SPOKEN.
WHAT WAS UNLEASHED MUST BE SEALED.
THE FORGE I WILL LIGHT FOR YOU.
THIS LAST BOON I GRANT.

GO, WITCH OF SPACE.

Dr. Astra cursed as her shaky fingers stabbed at the mechanical dashboard, desperately trying to dredge up the right keystrokes to start the sensor arrays with propulsion off. This wasn't covered in the training sims—it wasn't relevant to anything any person ever thought would be useful in the field; if your propulsion was dead, you have bigger problems than logging data, everyone had said. So now all she was running off was a hazy memory of skimming the manual from when these models first hit Earth three years ago.

Her arm slipped, and she didn't even see what button she pressed, but finally the indicator lights lit up. Her other hand migrated down the module control panel, resetting switches to the active position as fast as she could. Thermal, pH, EMF meters, microphone array, ion sampler won't work in air, differential Geiger will—

There it went: data streaming was online. She fished her phone out of the personal storage compartment behind her seat and, with unsteady hands, plugged the cable in. Her screen lit up. The loading screen circle spun as the app booted up.

She'd called this feature a pointless distraction, said it went against every sane data policy on the planet. Well, if this worked, she might just have to send Wilson a dozen apology emails. You know what? Fuck it; if she was going to get into the habit of using these ridiculous jailbreak hacks from their home-brew code lab, she might as well go all-in.

Jade swiped up and tapped for live voice annotation.

"This is Jade Astra on the SR519 mission," she whispered, checking the time on her the system clock. "Reporting in at T plus... 72 minutes. What you're hearing is the slow-action progressive apoptosis of Echidna, believed to be of a similar nature to eyewitness accounts of the alleged Abraxas apoptosis event."

The hellish shrieking bouncing through the crystalline cavern was still working its way down Echidna's body. Jade turned down the sensitivity on the microphones while she spoke.

"Note the Tomb Raider is currently in air, and by air I mean approximately one atmosphere of human-breathable gas. I've been in it for seven minutes and no ill effects yet. Visual inspection suggests a hemispherical dome, fifty meters in diameter? That's an eyeball, and fair warning, I'm bad at distances. We're on the cave bed, by the way. Wait."

Jade cursed as she lurched forward and pushed the start button for the exterior camera, like she should have done in the very start. The miniature display on its left fuzzed and resolved into a blurry image of the crusted floor, but as she jerked the joystick, the angle of view only twitched a little before ceasing to respond. And that twitch might have just been the subsonic reverberations rocking through the bed the sub was resting on.

"Fuck," she muttered, abandoning the camera controls. She raised her phone and started recording from there. Suboptimal quality, but it was better than nothing.

Rose and the other girl were still hovered in front of where Echidna's head used to be. They had barely blinked when Echidna's eye started glowing and spinning, or even when Echidna had fucking exploded, like all of it was just another Tuesday to them, ransacking historical sites and smashing ancient relics. And maybe it was. Now they were just floating there, watching silently as the facade of the denizen broke and crumbled, with their prisoner completely forgotten.

Who were they?

Okay, Astra was deluding herself. Now no longer actively accosted by two psychic teenagers, she was finding it easier to think, and to be honest, newly freed mental capacity or not, it wasn't that hard to put two and two together. Even she, with her stringent refusal to partake in superstitious rumormongering, had absorbed enough folklore through cultural osmosis to pick up a thing or two. At the very least she'd played every Age of Empires spinoff front and back. She knew a thing or two.

The Witch of Space. The Seer of Light.

Sure, it was possible they weren't really ancient gods, and instead absurdly powerful mutant psychics with delusions of divinity. Her inner skeptic, grown and nurtured by decades of experience in her field, protested that the latter was obviously the more Bayesianally likely hypothesis. But her gut screamed the opposite. Those dog ears weren't hair accessories. She'd seen them perk, watched them swivel when the girl spoke. Those weren't any old pointy sticks "Rose" was waving around; they'd nearly punched a hole through her boat.

These were the Sburbian gods, in the flesh. Living legends returned to an Earth where all that was left of their erstwhile glory were museum exhibits and drowned tombs. And they were here in the seat of Echidna's power, looking for something. And they had found it.

Did they come back from space? Nobody had seen them for centuries (nobody who lived to tell the tale, part of her reminded her) and they hadn't blink an eye at an Alternian submarine. It was a good hypothesis for the shortlist, since Sburb was all over the galaxy and must have gotten there somehow, but why? Why leave, and why come back?

Jade shook her head. That didn't matter right now. She might be mildly in shock right now, but that was no excuse to not keep her cool. She had to make a decision, and quick. She had agreed to keep their secret, but that was before... this. If she was being honest, she wasn't sure their deal was still on the table now that shit had hit the fan, and they were distracted, and she technically wasn't breaking the word of their terms, so...

A particularly large chunk of Echidna crashed against the shaking floor, startling Jade and almost making her drop her phone as she grabbed the edge of the sub to stabilize herself. She hissed at the stabbing pain and jerked her hand back. The cut was swelling with blood. Broken glass. Sharp. Right.

Everything was falling apart.

"For science," she murmured to herself. If she didn't make it out of here, something had to.

She made up her mind.

Dr. Astra angled her phone away from the wreckage, away from her carefully framed view of Echidna's collapsing frame, to where the girls and the glowing sphere still hung. She zoomed in with two rattled fingers, trying to get focus on the two flying figures. The woman grimaced as blood smeared her screen.

"In case the ship logs doesn't survive, I'll recap how I got here. I entered the House of Echidna by the declared route. Upon approach, I observed an unidentified green glow from the interior of the House, recorded spectrometer data, and moved in to investigate. At the time I hypothesized invasive bioluminescent life, but upon passing the mouth of the entrance, Tomb Raider received a glancing blow from an unknown weapon. Visual appearance resembled psionic plasma, but white in color."

The Seer's head turned. Jade quickly jerked her phone behind cover, fearing that she'd noticed, but it was only a surveying glance. It didn't even stop on Jade. Once the young girl had turned back, the scientist lifted her phone again and resumed her commentary.

"Submersible hull exhibited minor crack damage, but before failure could occur, the entire craft, including myself, was transported by unknown means into the air pocket we're currently in. Transportation was instantaneous as observed by the naked eye, i.e. teleportation, but instrument logs may reveal more."

Jade closed her eyes. She drew in a deep breath.

It was on camera now. There was no point in dancing around it.

"Also in the air pocket were two apparent teenage girls, tentatively identified as—" she almost choked on the words, barely believing she was saying them "—the Witch of Space, and the Seer of Light, hypothesized to be the origins of the 'teleportation' and attack respectively. Initial interactions suggest non-hostility towards me, but a strong desire to maintain their presence and/or existence a secret. We reached a verbal agreement that I would not reveal our encounter until at least six months later."

Had they? Jade racked her brain, but she couldn't remember if they'd actually finalized it or just gotten distracted. Irrelevant details.

"At this time, Echidna opened an eye. The eyelid was retracted, and the surface underneath appeared perfectly smooth and featureless, no iris, no pupil. The Witch of Space touched the eye, and unidentified patterns of white light appeared on its surface, and it started spinning. Echidna's apoptosis commenced shortly."

An whole arch of the massive denizen's back finally failed without the front holding it up. The entire section disintegrated with a roar, and out of the dust, chunky boulders of snake toppled down, exploding in slow motion against the floor. The miniature shock wave that lashed out broke over the surface of the air pocket, sending Jade ducking.

"I started recording too late to show this, but the segments of Echidna that apoptosed within the air pocket generated sounds with no discernible qualitative difference compared to the segments currently failing outside, in the water. To the human ear, I mean. I don't know why, but it's probably notable."

And it was bothering Jade the more she thought about it, since it made absolutely no sense on every level. She had a feeling that just the sound file her phone was downloading from the sub's microphones could spawn a dozen papers alone. Discrete Iagolnitzer analysis would have a field day with it, and that was only in the frequency domain.

Of course, first, the phone had to survive.

"The Witch of Space and Seer of light have been observing the apoptosis for more than two minutes without action. I can't tell if they're conferring among themselves, or if this is a desired outcome, or simply unstoppable." Jade was aware that at this point her blabbering was only adding more noise to the data, but she couldn't stop herself from rambling on. "Structural integrity of the catacombs appears unaffected."

Her shirt was soaked with blood now from where her cut hand was pressed against it. She wasn't losing enough blood to be in any real danger right now or in the proximate future, but it was sticky and uncomfortable and she dearly hoped that none of the shards had gotten under the skin.

The progressive destruction of the denizen had reached the end of Echidna's forebody. Right as the wavefront of the fracture passed the split in Echidna's tail, the Witch of Space's head snapped around to the Seer, as if broken from a hypnotic trance.

If Jade squinted, she could see their mouths moving. They were agitated.

"Something's happening," she muttered, as much to herself as to the voice recording. She shifted the phone further under the sub's rim, leaving only the camera bit peeking out. The woman still had no clue if recording was "against" the "rules" of whatever temporary arrangement they were operating under, but she didn't fancy finding out.

Her eyes drifted to the oscilloscope readout on the side of the Raider. Something had changed, she realized. The sharp ultrasound peaks that had been spiking through the roof a second ago were gone now, and the X-ray readout was back down to ambient levels.

Jade's gaze snapped back up at the sign of movement. The Seer was drawing her wands.

"I'm ending the session," she said quickly as she unplugged her phone from the data cable. The program complained about the stream interruption, but she knew it would save the work fine. There wasn't any time to lose.

She drew the storage compartment out as far as she could and dug into her pack with both arms, not caring that she was getting blood all over her stuff. She found her thermos in a second, twisted the cap off and upended the contents over the side of the sub. A waste of perfectly good coffee, but she only wished it would go faster as she watched the brown liquid drain and shook it a few times to make sure most of it was gone.

Then she dropped her phone into the container and sealed the top firmly. Then she shoved the whole thing back into her bag, slammed the compartment shut and double checked that that air seal had engaged.

Her heart was racing at a hundred beats a minute as she slumped in the chair, still clutching her bleeding hand to her chest.

It's over, she thought as the two girls turned in unison to her, their expressions too distant to read. Echidna's tails were still going, but they clearly weren't interested in watching it break anymore. Whatever it was that they wanted, they'd gotten it. Now Jade Astra either became fish food hundreds of miles under the sea, or the fickle whims of the divine would see fit to let her live another day.

Either way, if this worked out, the record would live. Someone was winning a goddamn Nobel Prize from this. Or at least be getting a sweet book deal. Might not be her, since you can't get a Nobel Prize posthumously—or write books, for that matter—but someone.

But the big event was over. Echidna was gone. Everyone could go home; Jade would gladly skip whatever afterparty these two had planned. They didn't need her anymore, right?

This had to be it.

"I got a quest," Jade said. "And a message."

"That was Echidna, wasn't it? Her voice."

Jade nodded. She was doing her best to hold onto the deluge of information that had been unloaded on her, but the details were already slipping through her fingers. It was how denizen-speak was: excessively verbose and and yet devoid of any meaningful substance at the same time. It left you minutes later with only a vague sense of direction and no map to guide the way, which Jade had a sneaking suspicion was exactly how the denizens liked it.

"She said this world was made by someone. From three things, one drowned, one killed, one... strangled? Two husks dredged from the hells they bore, one lost tale from... something. And the denizens died because they were cut off from... Skaia? Sburb? The source. It sounds like we're all trapped in here, but she's also says it like that's the plan."

"You don't have a transcript from the Gift of Gab?"

Jade snorted. This was how you knew Rose had never as much as sniffed in the direction of her denizen.

"No. Doesn't work with them. Echidna called whoever made this place the end bringer." Jade didn't care that it was coming out all out of order. She just needed to get it down on log; backtracking could come later. "We were arranged to be here to do something. We have to finish the seal. Silence the whispers. Burn the cobwebs of the lost. Destroy their... progeny? The underlings? But they're all dead..."

"Silence the whispers?" Rose said sharply.

Both of them turned automatically to the woman they had rescued on the cave floor. They saw her flinch.

"Surely not." said Jade.

"It's probably referring to Glb'golyb," Rose agreed.

"Oh!" Jade exclaimed. "She said she'll light the Forge."

"What? The Forge? How? Why?"

It didn't take very long for Rose's question to be answered.

Fire erupted across the ceiling of the House, racing forward and back the length of the hall in a second. It arced and looped, in great swathes of cherry red, massive circles within circles. Not fire, Jade realized as she hissed and shielded her sensitive eyes: plasma. Water boiled around the spinning sigil as it manifested, but the lines themselves seared a vivid and bright crimson against the dim ambience of the crystal cavern. Spokes roared outwards from the center of the construct, jetting past the outermost ring.

"Hephaestus," Rose swore as the two of them floated back.

It was a gear, a wheel, a watch's heart all in one grand moving image. The inner circles ticked on their own precessing axes as the furthest rim spun at a leisurely crawl. The entire thing dwarfed Echidna's forebody. It dwarfed the bubble they were staying in. Its teeth filled the rock-crystal sky like the maw of a dragon. It roared. It demanded.

"What the hell is Dave doing?" Jade growled. "Is this the thing about the Forge? Doesn't Hephaestus need the Forge to... fix? The sword?"

"It's a missive. Hephaestus makes an official petition for the stoking of the Forge," Rose answered, sounding like she's reciting from a book. "Typically the player is responsible for that. Echidna is only responsible for... but she's dead, I don't know how she's going to-"

Right on cue, the floating eye-globe that had held Jade's quest decided that it was ripe time to explode.

Jade and Rose spun around, searching for the source of the sharp cracking sound. The sphere had been hovering mid-air and minding its own business merely moments ago, but now its stone shell was shattered, half of the pieces launched in a spray of shrapnel in the first blast, the remainder peeling off and toppling to the floor. There was something inside.

It was an inner, slightly smaller sphere, flush with glowing white. The ball of light quivered and unfurled, shaking off the last flecks of its shell. The languid way it distended its mass was impossible to describe—like a four-dimensional origami polyhedron unfolding itself through 3D space. It was hatching, Jade realized.

"Mother of monsters," Rose murmured. "A messenger."

The disjointed mass of angles and twists looked nothing like a living being. It had no face, no eyes, not even any distinct axes of symmetry or asymmetry to follow, but despite that, its shifting felt uncannily organic. Those snapping motions felt like jaws. Those spreading polygons were almost flexing wings.

The two didn't have the time to inspect the strange creation, though, since the next instant it vomited upwards a solid beam of white matter that punched right into the center of the spiraling red lattice. Segmented tendrils, rigid and crablike—if a crab leg had a couple dozen joints instead of six—shot out and tangled around the axes of Hephaestus' power, snaking outwards to the rim where the tips curled and swelled into bulbs. The original source of the shoot, still quivering in front of Jade, folded itself upwards until only the silver vines entangled in their fiery red trellis were left.

"Your island," Rose said abruptly. "I didn't read anything about the Forge from either session showing up here. Does the native instance of your island count as the Forge?"

Jade sucked in a sharp breath. "If Bec's there— yes. Maybe. We should go. Wait, crap. She said 'our' progeny. Stranded from its pond."

It didn't take Rose more than a second to connect the dots.

"The genesis frog."

"I left it inside LOFAF."

"If the fusion put it in this Earth-"

"-and Echidna's lighting the Forge herself-"

"We should go," Rose finished.

The overgrown gears of Hephaestus shuddered, and it seemed as if the entire cavern shuddered with it. Then, with an almost anticlimactic rumble, it blurred and vanished from existence, vines and all. The ceiling went dark again, leaving only the dim luminescence of the glowing white walls.

Then the ground shifted.

"Space," Dr. Astra breathed.

Her hands gripped the inside railing of the defunct submersible as she stared up. The six silver coils winding out of the center of the luminous complex far above traced the iconic clockwise spiral of Echidna's primary aspect, and the meaning of the bleeding crimson geometry it was twisted around was no less obvious. Space and time. If everything that had happened before wasn't proof incontrovertible enough for something more than natural at work here, this was.

The instruments were going haywire, reading in priceless, once-in-a-lifetime data, but her phone was sealed away already. She half-wished that she hadn't been so hasty in packing up so she could take some of this away with her—hell, even only the video would be invaluable—but she also knew that it had been the smart choice at the time. No point in regrets.

All she could do was wait it out now. By her estimate of the goddess' reactions, they knew as much about what was happening as Jade did. The two deities were transparently rattled. That could work in her favor, and it could also completely fuck her over if they decided she wasn't worth the trouble, but while her ability to negotiate between the two was limited, she had to be prepared to twist this into an opportunity if the chance arose. She needed every edge she could get.

It felt like an eternity, but eventually the spiraling diagram of red and white shivered evaporated, plunging the space back into relative darkness. Even then, she didn't let herself relax completely. It didn't help that the demonic sigil of Hephaestus' wrath had been replaced with a perhaps even more ominous shaking that was coming from right under her.

An earthquake, here, at this time? Not infeasible—but unlikely. Yet there was no time to think to hard about it. It was time for the reckoning.

The Seer and Witch descended upon her in a second, the Seer's arms wreathed with light from her wands. They looked stressed. Pressed for time? Jade couldn't exactly tell. Either way, they weren't happy.

"You will not tell anyone about anything that happened here until February, or until explicit notice otherwise," the Seer fired out without a second of pause. "Grab any belongings now that you want to keep. You have thirty seconds. The ship isn't coming with you."

Right. It was all coming too quickly, but everything was to plan so far. Jade had done theater once as a teenager. She'd never been good at it, but what she considered herself moderately competent at, even to this day, was bluffing.

Doing her utmost best to look nonchalant but still appropriately cowed, she quickly pulled open the storage compartment behind her and slung her bag over her shoulder.

Act natural.

"Where are you putting me?" the woman asked.

"You operate off the offshore research platform directly above the Catacombs, am I correct?" the Seer asked. The floor was still shaking, growing stronger now, and Jade was keenly aware of the sub starting to slip on its bed of crystals. She shifted, trying to steady her footing.

"Yes."

The Witch nodded. "Okay. I'll drop you off next to the maintenance ladder on one of the surface level water intakes. It's not operating, don't worry. You'll have enough time to climb up and call for help."

She would have asked how she was supposed to explain her showing up at base after inexplicably losing her boat deep inside the Catacombs and somehow swimming the all way back unassisted, but she had a feeling the answer would be "tough luck, figure it out," so all she did was nod mutely.

"You're going to get wet," the Seer warned. "Electronics?"

Jade hesitated, then shook her head.

The Seer narrowed her eyes.

The boat hull vibrated under her feet. Jade didn't move.

"Jade," the Seer stated. The scientist flinched, but the god wasn't... addressing her? "In her bag. Thermos."

The Witch frowned. A second later, her lips twisted into an unhappy scowl.

Jade's phone materialized above the girl's open palm in a burst of green light.

Shit.

She cringed inside—it was okay. They didn't know what was on there, she could just say she didn't want to waste their time since her stuff was already secure from water—

"Spectrometry data," the Seer growled, her arms folding. "Audio recordings. Video. Nice try."

Fuck.

She'd blown it. The Seer's wands were crackling in a way that Jade really didn't like. This was a mistake, she should have folded, she should have taken the easy way out for once in her life. What was she thinking? Maybe then she wouldn't be here, faced up against the deservedly incurred wrath of two possibly immortal possible deities. Wasn't spurning the generosity of a god how every asshole in ancient died?

She was dead. She was about to be vaporized, and this time she might not be able to talk her way out of it.

"I wasn't going to show anyone," she protested defensively, shying away from the two floating figures. And she wasn't lying! She would have studied it on her own, crunched the data, gotten a head start on writing, and then broken the news once the time limit was up. She'd signed a few NDAs in her time; she knew the drill. It was groundbreaking science. How could she have refused? How would she have lived with herself?

To her surprise, the girl's hard eyes softened a notch under her feeble defense. Mind reading?

"Please," the scientist pleaded. "Keep the phone. Just let me go. I'm sorry."

Jade was sweating. She didn't want to find out what it felt to be crushed under an ocean of water pressure. She didn't care about weaseling answers anymore: just living with the knowledge that there was more out there was enough. She could do research in her own time. God knows there were enough cults lurking around for her to join.

The Seer rolled her eyes, an anachronistically teenage-girl thing to do. But sarcasm was better than anger. It was good. She hoped. The girl opened her mouth to speak, but was interrupted by her companion.

"We're keeping this," said the Witch suddenly. The device vanished into thin air, which was a miracle unbelievably low on Jade's list of things to worry about now. The other god's eyes darted sideways towards her companion before they widened two degrees, clearly figuring something out that Jade didn't. "You can have it back in six months."

"Are you sure..." the Seer started, but the wolf girl waved her off.

Wait, so did that mean-

"Look into two-phase convection dynamics!" the Witch called. Jade opened her mouth to speak, but before she could, the world exploded with green.

Static crackled over her skin, a lurching sense of vertigo took over, cold—

—and next thing she knew she was breaking the crest of a wave, coughing seawater from her lungs.

She gasped for humid, salty air, flooded with a tangled mix of relief and exhaustion. Not underwater. Sky. A storm dark and roiling surged above, its howling wind battering her with a scatter spray of stinging rain. A wave crashed over her, tossing hair into her face and dragging her head under for another half second. She kicked, struggling to keep afloat. Her eardrums hurt. Her skin felt raw and tender.

But she was alive.

She was on the surface. She was gulping down lungful after lungful of real, fresh oxygen. She was alive.

They'd let her go. How? Why?

And she saw. The research platform, steel and black glass, rising above the waves. The ladder was there. Bright yellow paint, standing out against the foggy gray for an instant in the flash of distant lightning. Thunder rumbled in the distance.

Home.

One step at a time.

Flicking wet bleached curls out of her eyes, she swam for the platform.

"Tectonic activity," Jade answered the unspoken question once their gatecrasher was gone. She spared a fraction of her attention to keeping an eye on the woman and making sure she wouldn't drown, but most of her mind was sunken deep below the Earth's crust. "Ignore it. The quake here is a distraction. There's a magma plume building under the Pacific."

Rose swore. "A plume? Does that mean an eruption?"

Jade swallowed. "We have to trust Echidna knows what she's doing."

"We have to hurry," the seer growled.

"Dave and John!" she blurted suddenly, waving her hand towards the empty ceiling far above. "We have to find out what they did, and if it had something to do with that. And we need to pick them up before we go back to my island anyway!"

Rose's phone was already out, her fingers at task firing messages off into the ether.

The plume was rising fast, Jade realized, gritting her teeth. Only it wasn't a plume, really. Plumes were natural convection phenomena, driven by density differences and gravitational forces. This was an artificial current that originated from the inner core and was propagating itself upwards faster than the plasticity of the mantle ought to let it.

Briefly, and perhaps unadvisably, she considered trying to stop it with her powers. The notion was instantly discarded. It was equally likely to tear the Earth in half as suppress a denizen-mandated geophysical event, and besides, she didn't know if she actually wanted to stop Echidna at all.

When she looked back over, Rose was wearing an irritated scowl.

"I'm not getting anything useful from of them," the girl growled. "Something happened on their end—something important—but none of them knows what's going on."

"Are they ready for pickup?" Jade stressed, already projecting her mental eye across the globe. She closed in on Houston and zeroed in on the National Museum, searching.

A pause. The sound of fingers tapping on a glass screen.

"Yes," Rose confirmed.

Jade found the two boys loitering in an alley, doing god knows what. She could see their mouths flapping in motion, but the plume was moving. The Earth was moving. There wasn't time for pleasantries. She snagged their signatures, snagged Rose and herself as well, and snapping focus to her home island with a thought, pushed.

Chapter Text

John stumbles, shout halfway out of his mouth.

He's standing in the middle of a street. There's cars and trains roaring past in the background, the rancorous blender babble of pedestrian traffic, all of it coming together in a deafening assault after the solitary silence of ten thousand feet underground, but that's the least of his worries. He swings around, searching frantically as his bearings restabilize.

"Dave, are you—"

You look up at the call of your name. John whirls towards you.

"Huh?" you ask, running a hand through your chalky hair.

John swallows.

"Did you... you already did it. Okay, uh. Hi."

"What's going on?" you growl, straightening up, shades reallocated to your face at a flash. Your sword is ready at the edge of your strife deck, your eyes scanning the street for threats. He's unsettled. Just a moment ago he was fine.

"You did a... time thing," John says lamely. "What's with... the chalk?"

"The chalk?" you repeat. He saw what happened—what is he talking about? "Why are you wearing..."

You gesture up and down John's body. He's in his Heir of Breath hood all of a sudden, instead of the slime clothes or whatever ridiculous crap he was wearing before. Then you finally register the words time things, and like a caught gear jolts back in place in your head, your mind starts turning again. Time thing. The amount of vague trepidation that simple phrase instills in you is stupid, but you push past it.

"Forget the chalk," you says curtly, lowering your hackles. "What time thing?"

"You changed the past," he mutters, scanning the streets around you. "Er, can we go somewhere? Not here?"

Your eyes narrow as you tense again. "Is there-"

"We're not in danger!" John hastily amends. "I just don't want to be standing in the middle of the street. It's... loud."

You clutch the baggy folds of his hood and drag the two of you behind a pillar of a bank building or whatsit fancy place. You hiss at him, "What did I do? Wait, first: are you from the past or the future? Where did you diverge?"

Now you're starting to notice all the little things out of place. He's dirty with soil and dust, not the chalky stuff future-you dumped in your face, but real stone, real dirt. And he's hot. The blue clothes under your touch are already cooling by the second, but just moments ago they was the temperature of a fucking star. He was somewhere else, and now he's here... replacing the John you were with before?

"Where did the other John go?" you demand.

"Other John? I don't know! I'm from the future. We went into the Lair and it caved in or something, then you messed around with the Anvil and did a bunch of things and now I'm here."

"I messed with the Anvil," you repeat.

John's eyes light up. "You used the time hammer you gave me before!"

Fear No Anvil pops into his hand. You hastily move your body to shield it out of sight from the street. John doesn't notice, too busy recounting.

"But you had Strife Ambigram—the god tier badge you get on the next tier," he rambles on in response to your blank look. "So I don't know if you can still use it now. But you left yourself a message... or a transcript, I guess. Let me just—"

The dialoglog dump hits you like a sledgehammer.

"Holy shit. That's a lot. Uh-" You skim the conversation. "-what in fresh hell..."

Strife Ambigram lets you use time machines perfectly? What kind of horse shit is this? Cosmological structure, fine, you knew a lot of this already... Boundary conditions?

"Did I say what we need to do now?" you say. "What did Hephaestus say? You got a log of that?"

John winces. "Hephaestus is dead."

"I killed him?" you scoff, incredulous.

"No, he didn't wake up at all!" John corrects. "And then he broke apart and the cave collapsed on us."

"But that was the entire fucking point of this trip! What do we do now? What did we get out of this?"

"I don't know!"

Was all of this completely pointless? Unless the information future you sent back is what you were supposed to get, in which case... this would be a horrendously convoluted way for paradox space to set things in place. So, pretty typical for Sburb, really.

"What happened to future me?" you settle for asking. The relief that flashes over John's face is short lived; only a second later, his expression sours again.

"He said he would 'set back his personal timeline an hour'," John says with a scowl.

So he died. Or erased himself from the timeline. Functionally equivalent. And of course alpha Dave gets to pick up the pieces, as always. Not that you envy future you, but goddammit, this is what you hated the most about Sburb, playing detective with the macabre murder scenes of your future selves over and over, stepping over corpse after corpse in a blind search for victory, always wondering when it's your turn to be the corpse on the ground—

"He's gone, isn't he?" the boy accuses, interrupting your internal spiel. "I'm not dumb, you know."

No. But it threw John off for the ten seconds it took for that you to execute the speediest of all absconds, you bet. Laugh it up, future Dave. You're still skimming the dialoglog as you respond, pushing down the rising frustration at yourself.

"Well, from what he said, assuming he wasn't lying... maybe it's not that inaccurate? I mean, what he says is from a technical standpoint a true timeline split isn't allowed, so he didn't really experience death in the psychophysical sense. We're not going to find that me in the dream bubbles. If you're going to force the dichotomy then memory loss might be the more accurate term than death."

Now that you're reading more... maybe this is what Hephaestus left for you. A lot of this is important, like capital-I important. He's saying a conscious agent deliberately created this whole place, built it, which okay, you knew was in the cards from the beginning, but confirmation is a whole different thing. Rose and Jade will have to hear about this.

"Same goes for you," you continue. "But the other way round, where your past self was overwritten? You didn't miss much. But rules like that might get all thrown out the back window if he was messing with the anvil shit. It's nothing more than philosophical nit picking at some point. We're here, we'll deal with it."

"Bleh," John grumbles. He's not buying it. "I'm just saying... I spent a long time with Davesprite. You're not... you know."

He glances away, kneading his elbows. What does that mean?

You don't have the time to question him. Before you can push the issue, your devices chime in synchrony.

You draw a phone.

It's Rose.

The force of the unexpected teleport sends you sprawling into the grass. You roll with the impact and scramble to your feet. John isn't as lucky, checking into a boulder and letting out a pained grunt. Jade and Rose stumble through two seconds later. Their clothes are flecked with tiny chips of something vaguely luminescent, but otherwise, they seem fine.

"What's going on?" John grunts. You help him to his feet. The déjà vu. It's real.

"What happened with Hephaestus?" Rose demands.

"He exploded," is your pithy reply.

"Broke apart," John corrects. "But that was in a separate timeline Dave retconned. Hephaestus is fine now."

"But unresponsive, I assume?" Rose says. "We received a pre-recorded message from Echidna. She's a pile of broken crystal at the bottom of the Tasman Sea now."

"Hephaestus' Lair requested the Forge to be reactivated," Jade interjects rapidly. "Did you have anything to do with that?"

"Eyewitness account says I used the Phrygian Anvil," you say, giving John a side glance. "I'm new timeline Dave. We don't have the one that did the deed himself."

"Hephaestus must have primed it to self-activate," Rose growls. "A player couldn't start the machinery if they tried. Did he expect you to do this?"

"It was necessary," John insists.

Rose shakes her head, not in negation—in dismissal. "Let's not argue the necessity of it. Every single step was most likely part of the denizens' preordained plan, so there was never much of an element of choice anyway."

The earth shudders under your feet, sending pebbles skittering against your shoes. Trees rustle. You turn towards the dormant volcano looming in the background.

"The Forge is starting up," Jade says. "I don't think it's going to be as simple as it was last time."

You helped Jade unclog the magma valves and restored the subterranean rivers, you were there when the ice melted and the seas flooded with the waters of spring, and none of it involve earthquakes in any capacity, so yeah—you'll say this isn't as simple as the last time around.

"This isn't only the stoking of the Forge," Rose says as she kicks off into the air for a better vantage point. The rest of you rise to follow her. "This is the ignition, traditionally initiated by the combination of Echidna's final blessing and the ceremonial sacrifice of the queens' rings. It's the eruption that launches the frog into Skaia."

"You mean the end of the game," you realize. She's still flying up, fixing her gaze on the summit of the volcano.

"But no one put any rings into the volcano!" John protests. "And it wasn't even stoked before. There was no lava!"

Rose presses her lips together. "I guess Echidna made the unilateral decision to skip straight to the end."

The air is vibrating. There's no wind, not even the slightest breeze, but the canopy below is rippling like a dark green ocean. Birds are evacuating their perches in a mass, flapping exodus, some of them breaking off and heading for sea while others simply gather into circling flocks, squawking and confused.

"It's in there," Jade murmurs, a distant quality to her voice. Six eyes turn to the witch. "The tadpole. It's in there."

She points down towards the patch of trees bordering the Forge. No—below the Forge. Inside the Earth.

"She's been keeping the frog in the core of the planet. It's released now."

"The genesis frog?" You aren't sure who asked it first, you or John.

"It's rising on the magma plume," she says, talking faster. "Faster than what should be physically possible."

"But there's no Skaia for it to fertilize," you object. Does it just shoot into space?

"We can intercept it," Jade states, casually talking about catching a living supersonic projectile fired from the barrel of a live volcano like she's commentating a baseball game. "Hold it for safekeeping."

"Jade," Rose warns.

"Come on, Rose," the witch says. There's an unreadable tension in her voice.

The seer shakes her head. "Echidna told us to destroy it."

John intakes a breath as your mind blanks out.

The denizen told them to destroy the genesis frog? Your eyes flick between Jade and Rose, wondering if this is a horrifically tasteless extremely late April Fool's joke, but your ectosister is dead serious as she stares Jade in the eye. Destroy the genesis frog? Bilious Slick? The Speaker of the Vast Croak?

"No," the dog girl says.

"What did Echidna say?" you demand, collecting your marbles. "Verbatim."

"I..." Jade takes a deep breath and closes her eyes. "Burn the cobwebs of the lost. Our progeny rots, inert... stranded from its pond. Destroy it. That's not exact, I—"

"Our progeny," John points out. "As in you and Echidna's, or Echidna and the other denizens'?"

"There are no underlings or consorts left alive in this age," Rose states simply. "There's only one thing that description could possibly refer to. And from the context, the deliberate ignition of the Forge to launch the frog after delivering that message—"

"Fuck Echidna," Jade says. Her voice is furious, but it's a contained, frustrated fury. "I don't care what the old witch says. Weren't all of you saying we have to stop doing everything Sburb tells us to?"

"I don't think any of us but Dave were truly dedicated proponents of the idea," the other girl deflects. Wow. Way to throw your dearest brother to the wolves, Lalonde.

"So why should we give a shit what a snake with boobs from a million years ago says?" Jade continues. "The baby tadpole is cute and also magic and that is all the reason I need to not murder it!"

"What do you propose we do with it if we recover it?" says Rose.

"Give it to whoever plays the game next," Jade offers, spreading her hands. "Start a new game! Break out of this place and seed some other session's Battlefield!"

"I think that session's players might object to that," you note.

"There are infinite null sessions out there," Jade retorts as she spins around and stabs an angry finger at your chest. "Hell, we can raise it by ourselves! We can have a cute pet universe frog! It's still a tadpole, just because it won't be able to become a giant universe frog with billions of galaxies inside doesn't mean it can't grow up like normal! Who knows?"

The perplexed expressions of the three of you say enough about your opinions on that hypothesis. Jade huffs.

"You don't know what to do with it," Rose states firmly. "There is no compelling reason to directly go against the instructions of a denizen. Denizens never perform acts of willful sabotage. They give advice, you take it."

"By that logic, why am I keeping this around, then?" Jade challenges.

Her fingers flick out. Space pulses, and the next moment a tiny planet is spinning languidly above the palm of her left hand. Her other palm comes up. Over it, a roaring green flame erupts to life.

"Burn the cobwebs of the lost, right? Who needs a dusty old Earth? I can throw it in the Sun. No one would even notice."

Holy shit. That went from 0 to 100 in an instant.

You swallow, watching the fire lick dangerously close to the miniature Earth's atmosphere. "Okay. Maybe don't jump to that quite yet."

To be fair, Jade's kind of right on that point: an old deprecated copy of Earth serves basically no purpose except as a neat paperweight. You suppose there's a few dozen years of future culture and media you could appropriate and make a fortune off, though it would be difficult to explain where you got all that media and another carbon copy of the Mona Lisa. Precious non-gristflagged metals you could loot?

You know, vaguely, that at some point in the past, on one of the many sides of the ridiculous showdown you had at the end of the session, there was a plan to use that Earth as a seed for the new universe's civilization. But the only person here who cares that much about going through with a new universe is Jade, so... she isn't really making a convincing point here.

Still—if you got to choose, you would rather her not break a planet to make a point.

"We still need the alchemiters on there," Rose says coolly.

Jade's eyes narrow. A snap of her fingers, and a massive shadow explodes into existence over you, casting you into pitch darkness. When you look up, the rock-crusted metal chassis of the meteor complex floats above you at full scale. You drift back, nervously eying the thin outline of solar green bracing the gigantic structure.

"There," the witch says, triumphant. The fire in her hand swells and spits out a spray of emerald sparks as she waves it around. "Now?"

John floats forward. His hands are raised in a placatory surrender.

"Look, Jade. I know you invested a lot of time in breeding the genesis frog," he says slowly. "And of course you don't want to give up on it! But it's not a good idea to ignore Echidna. You know that too. You're overreacting. Rose is too." He shoots the seer a frown. "We don't need to murder the frog or the Earth yet. We don't have to make a decision about anything! I'm sure Echidna had a reason to tell us to destroy it."

"I haven't heard of those amazing reasons," Jade snorts.

"Maybe when the frog comes out, we'll know why! What if it's mutated? Or it turned into a horrible monster? If you still aren't convinced then, or we don't find out why Echidna needs it to happen, we can revisit this again."

You can see the girl hesitate. Her flaming hand lowers a bit. John takes the chance draws closer.

"So... uh, put the planet down? We can think about your frog later."

You know what? You semi-resent the notion that Jade gets exclusive rights to genesis frog custody. You spent almost as much time on it as she did, especially when you factor in the looping you did doing the frog collection leg work for her, so surely you get to at least timeshare the damn thing.

"We have a volcano eruption to handle," Rose reminds them.

Jade frowns, but doesn't make any more threatening gestures towards the fragile lithosphere of a flooded planet. Why does she care so much anyway? Is it just Sburb nostalgia coming back to bite, or more grimbark priorities trickling through, or is it simply the space player thing about life and the propagation of the universal cycle? Now that you think of it, Kanaya was pretty intense about that woe-is-me, my-species-is-dead thing she had going on.

Though that also might just be the normal reaction to the extinction of your species.

But you don't get a chance to see if Jade folds or doubles down, since that's the moment the island below takes one last deep, sickening shudder, and chokes.

Everything goes quiet, even the birds. The air stills. Your heads turn.

The inside of the crater is barely visible from where you're stationed, but as you cast your gaze far, you glimpse the solidified rock making up its inner curve bulge upwards and start to crack. Glowing white-orange-red glints through the spreading fissures. Second after second trickles past, the Earth strangled in silence, like it's holding its breath, building up to a terrifying, pent-up sneeze.

Until suddenly, with no warning, it erupts.

Jade is the first to react. She vanishes in a blink. You're the next, summoning the only fraymotif you're confident won't backfire in your face and dashing forward in airborne steps of red. The emerging spray of lava crawls through the sky at a snail's crawl as you cross a mile in a split second. In standard reference time it must be blasting upwards at bullet velocities. You throw a glance backwards to find Rose and John frozen mid-reaction, the former's wands trapped mid-deabstractification from her sylladex, the latter's arms twisted in the casting of his own motion battlegram.

Only when you skid to a stop at the rim of the erupting volcano do you quickly come to the realization you have no clue what you're doing here. You redirect your momentum upwards, struggling not to lose your hold on your speed, scanning between the jets of molten rock. Jade is nowhere to be seen.

Until suddenly, she isn't.

Viridescent light sparks from the air a dozen feet away, at the very corner of your eye. You spin around in time to catch the green energy split the air and unfold into a coruscating humanoid shape faster than anything you've ever seen in this accelerated state. The Witch of Space apparates soundlessly into that space, her right arm cast out in a desperate fling.

You trace her fingers to where her outstretched arm is pointing.

In the air well behind a trailing glob of cooling lava, you see it.

The tadpole. It's huge. Well, for a tadpole. Larger than your fist, smaller than your head. The creature is transparent, with only an outline of its body and embossed spirals curling over its body in glowing ethereal yellow, and beady black eyes fixed blankly upwards at the clear sky. As you watch, keeping pace with its ascent while the tadpole races its way ahead of the lava curtain, the yellow fades into red. Then magenta, then deep green, cycling through every colors. For a second you almost lose track of it against the sky as it blends through a cyan phase, and soon you're soaring into the open air, leaving the surging volcanic spray behind.

Then solar green envelops the creature, and it disappears from sight.

Your acceleration bleeds away, your perception returns to normal, the fraymotif slips from your grip, and lava blasts violently past you, singing your nose. You toss yourself back, hurriedly flicking off the drops of molten rock that caught your sleeves. Burns that'll heal in a minute. You ignore them.

Something small and flashing whips past behind you. It's gone before you can spin around, but before you can blink it darts past again. And again. The next you catch it—it's the tadpole, blindingly fast.

And there it goes again. It doesn't stop.

You look down. Jade is two hundred feet below you, her jaw clenched in concentration. Her arms are stretched out, palms facing each other, with green light furiously arcing between them in lightning fast pulses. The genesis frog reappears in front of her and shoots into the sky.

She's teleporting the tadpole, you realize. Every time the green energy surges, the frog gets brought down to her again. She's bleeding off its speed before it goes rocketing out into space. The thing isn't quite going at escape velocity, but it's fast enough to take a long jaunt beyond the safe embrace of the atmosphere, and while hard vacuum isn't going to kill something that survived millions of years in the center of the planet, you can hazard a guess that she would prefer not to lose track of a genesis frog, even temporarily.

John and Rose have braked to a stop next to Jade where you drop down to meet them. Jade doesn't bat an eye at the arrivals, solely focused on keeping the baby universe in grabbing distance.

"Do we need to do something about the volcano?" John asks.

"What?" you shout. The roar of the ongoing eruption is drowning out everyone's voices.

John takes a deep breath. He holds out a hand and closes his eyes. A second later, the sound of volcano subsides, and you can hear again.

"Do we need to do something about the volcano?" he asks.

"The eruption plume is going high," Rose says, angling her head upwards.

Thanks, Rose. Don't mind the unending hot liquid lava showering down on you, or the dense gassy ash spilling over the edge of the crater and tearing swathes of destruction through the mountainside forests at frankly horrifying speed. The smoke cloud is the problem here.

"It's going into the stratosphere," she insists, seeing your dubious look, and you look again.

It is. The column of superheated airborne ash is rolling up into the sky with no sign of slowing, billowing towards the west as it rises and expands. The air is clogging with finer particulates swept into and around you by the winds of heat. John is directing the flow around you, but you still might be swamped in nigh unbreathable air by the end of the minute, and Jade's endeavor isn't showing any visible progress. The frog is still zipping through her homemade teleport loop at sonic speeds.

It doesn't seem like lung cancer Rose's concern, though. Or Jade's.

"This is going to be visible from a lot of Pacific islands," the dog girl says tersely. The strain of keeping the tadpole contained is showing in her voice. "Maybe Hawaii."

Oh. If people come to investigate...

"You can get us out, right?" you ask. Surely she isn't operating exactly at her powers' limit. "We have time. They can't get here that fast."

"Yes," Jade confirms.

"But Bec is here," Rose fills in the blank for you. "And so is a massive stockpile of Sburban tech we already helpfully charged up for the first responders. That's going to blow our... well, not our cover, necessarily, but it will become immediately evident to the wider world that there is real unnatural power in the remnants of ancient Sburb. And any change in the status quo that might alert the trolls to stirrings of the purported human gods is opposite to our goals."

Of course.

"Maybe I can..." John mimes pressing down on the air. "Stop the ash?"

Rose shakes her head. "It's too late for that now. Satellite imagery will have caught the eruption."

"So what do we do?"

Jade twists her hands. Suddenly a blurred ring of epileptogenic color explodes into being in front of her, five feet wide, pouring with sparks. The conversation stops instantly, curious eyes turning to watch the firework display. The ring quavers, expands, screams with energy, all while Jade hems in the runaway vertices with pinpoint tweaks of the spatial loop. Her state of absolute focus breaks as she swears—the top of the loop jerks out at a right angle, showering her in multicolored embers.

The circle shatters. The living projectile spews out of the wreckage, swerves up and vanishes into the sky.

The witch flexes her fingers and reaches out again. The tadpole reappears in front of her and shoots off. And again.

"It's not working," Jade growls. "It's not slowing down. At all. And it's partially resistant to space effects. It's only because the Green Sun is slightly adjacent to Sburb proper that I can even affect it at all."

"Hate to say it, but I have to agree with Rose on this one," you say. "If we can't contain it..."

Jade grits her teeth.

"Jade, it's not viable," Rose says. "The frog, I mean. It wouldn't birth a universe even if it located a Battlefield to seed. I can see into it; it's hollow."

"Hollow?" questions John.

"Visually and metaphysically. It has the organs, but it doesn't have the ontological biomass to support a universe. It'll just shrivel and die if it tries. There's no point in prolonging this."

Jade scowls. "Are you sure?"

"It's impossible," Rose repeats. "For it to bear a new universe would be as close to a violation of conservation of mass in paradox cosmology there is. It doesn't contain the necessary stuff. This is my field, Jade. It's more Void than Light at this point."

"What if we... we could take it out of this place. And refill it somehow."

"I thought you couldn't control it," you point out.

"Yes," Jade growls. "But... there's has to be a way."

"Jade," Rose says gently. "I can see the branching futures. I've been searching, and there's no path in which this plan comes to fruition. Let it go."

"You can't have seen all futures," she pleads.

"Jade. Please."

The girl snarls, shaking her head. For a few seconds, she doesn't speak. She draws in a deep breath, you almost think she's about to lash out again, but just squeezes the air out in a frustrated sigh.

"I'm sorry, but we have to," Rose repeats.

Jade rips her hands away from where they're anchored. The power of the Green Sun fizzles in an instant. The freed genesis frog spears a trajectory of momentary clarity through the smog, vanishing into the blue skies above. Jade tightens her jaw, fists clenching into white, angry balls.

Then she raises an arm, and swings down.

A bright flash of solar green, and then an earth-shaking eruption of brilliant color scores a blast crater into the flank of the Forge. The earth caves, a small mountain of displaced soil and ash sloughs down the face of the volcano, and with it slides her payload. Almost liquid light shines from the little source carried along the flow, hues cascading over each other in evaporating rivulets.

It's bleeding, it hits you with a belated shock.

She just bitchslapped that tadpole into oblivion.

Holy shit. You've already used that exclamation, but holy shit. When this girl changes her mind, she does it fast.

You drop after Jade as she teleports down to where the landslide is settling. The flow of the displaced earth has carried the baby universe all the way down the side of the mountain, past the rolling rivers of ash and out of the shadow of the billowing volcanic plume. When you get there, the girl is staring quietly at the creature she felled.

It's crawling out of the soil. It's got tiny, frail legs, still not fully formed, the edges blurring and wavering like they're about to evaporate. The black lumps it has for eyes are motionless as it grapples for purchase on the shifting material it's buried in. Its back is bent at an odd angle. You can see an amphibian digit crushed, dripping.

Rose was right. You've visited memories from the trolls of when they birthed their young universe, and now it's all coming back to you. Their genesis frog was solid all through, practically blinding with the uncountable trillions of unborn stars packed in its stem cells. This tadpole is empty inside, skin wrapped around void. Like someone forgot and filled the paint ballon with air instead. And the glowing, spiraling lines adorning its skin earlier that traced as the sole fading echo of its magnificent purpose—they're bleeding out.

The tattoo-like swirls are withdrawing along their grooves. The vibrant colors flicker as they retract, and at the shriveling roots, that same color is sluicing out of the frog's transparent skin. There's more leaking out than it looks like there could possibly be in the tiny body. The ink of Skaia dribbles over the mound of rocky soil and pools in the crevices, volatile clouds of color steaming away as it runs, the slick bile that remains too thick and viscous to seep through the earth. And so the waterfall of spilt blood drains.

The half-formed frog lets out a weak, sickly croak.

Jade drops to her knees.

Rose steps forward and rests a hand on her shoulder. "I'm sorry," she mutters.

Jade lets out a small sound that stabs you right in the fucking heart. Rose flinches. You can see the black-haired girl's fingers tighten.

"No," the witch murmurs. "Don't be."

The words are chilled with an air of resigned certainty. Jade's hand reaches out slow and steady. Her fingers graze the wet skin of the shivering frog, four of them slowly working under its fragile body. You don't realize what's about to happen until it does.

Thumb pressed firmly over the creature's back, she crushes it in half.

Technicolor blood gushes over her digits.

The frog stills.

None of you dare to move. Flakes of ash continue to litter from the sky, the summit of the volcano roars and blasts out another explosive spray far above, yet time feels like it's standing still around the kneeling girl. Still, except for the river of swirling color, slowly trickling its way down the altar of dirt.

Rose crouches down and slowly wraps stiff, awkward arms around her friend. It's a miserable attempt at a hug. Jade barely reacts, but she makes no move to throw the seer off either.

"Hey," Rose says softly. You can see Jade shudder at the word. Your sister looks like she wants to add more, but the words seem stuck in her throat. So she settles for just that. "Hey," she repeats.

Jade's hand goes slack. The body drops and tumbles, settling in a pool of its own blood. Her fingers dig into soil, scrubbing the inky stains from her skin like it's poison.

Yet despite the raw revulsion in it, the motions feel mechanical. Vacant.

Then, out of nowhere, she stops.

Jade stands up without warning. Rose stumbles back, catching herself from falling.

"There's power in this blood," the dog-eared girl says. Her voice is sickeningly quiet.

Where is she going with this?

"Y... yes," Rose says, confused. "Yes. A drop's worth could power the whole meteor for millennia."

"Jade, are you okay?" says John. "You're..."

She smiles thinly at him. "I am fine. Really. I shouldn't have been so attached to it. We knew it was coming. It's like... losing a pet. That's all. I'll get over it."

Your eyebrows pinch in concern. "You don't have to act like-"

"Act like I'm not bothered? I know," Jade says, an ears twitching. She's losing patience. "I'm pissed, okay? I'm upset. There, I said it. But we need to deal with this."

"You keep doing this. You're always distract-"

"Rest assured, Dave, that I'm perfectly aware of my own coping mechanisms. But at least this time, there is a real problem that needs our immediate attention."

Jade gestures upwards. The earth below shudders, but it's not the volcano: green erupts in a ring around the four of you, followed by the entire ground under your feet rising into the air. You stumble while John squeaks in surprise.

"Dude," you mutter, but it's not the time to harp about telekinesis etiquette. You're reeling from what happened, and you don't know what's going on. What about the blood?

"I believe I see your point," Rose says, so that makes one of you. "We can't allow the lifeblood of a stillborn genesis frog fall into the wrong hands. I think we've all perused enough cautionary tales of science fiction to understand how that could be a disastrous mistake."

Jade nods sharply. "Exactly."

That... okay, you can see where they're coming from. But this is what they interrupted everything for? You just killed the genesis frog. Jade snapped its neck herself. You're all going to gloss over that? You're not going to stop for a second and appreciate the magnitude of the critical events that transpired only seconds ago?

"We bottle what we can and burn the rest," Rose proposes.

"No," Jade intercepts.

Rose's lips purse. "Surely you're not suggesting that-"

"We don't bottle any," the witch states firmly. "The frog isn't something that we can captchalogue, and neither is the blood. It's resistant to my classic space powers, so we can't bring it to Alternia. There's no way to store it safely. And Echidna told us to destroy it, not harvest it for reagents and then destroy what's left. We burn all of it."

The orange-cloaked girl considers her declaration for a moment while you simply gape at the ruthless machine intelligence that's replaced Jade Harley.

"I can accept that," she concedes.

"How are we burning it?" you raise the question, utterly lost. The two of them are ten steps ahead of you. "Why burning?"

Rose holds up the Quills of Echidna. "The divine light of Echidna has an affinity-scaling type advantage against Genetic-type targets. Something made of pure creation will be destroyed without a trace."

"And why are we up here?" you continue, spreading your arms. "Why the sky fortress?"

Jade points downwards, off the edge of your floating island. You follow her finger just in time.

The roiling flood of gas and ash that's been racing its murderous way down the hillside strikes, crashing over the crater Jade took out of the ground and kicking into the air. Hot air screams past your airborne perch, flush with scraps of flint and tephra. You cough dust from your lungs.

"Fair," you choke.

"Shall I do it?" Rose asks, lifting her wands.

John raises a hand to stop them. His head is dipped in concentration, his eyes closed as he says, "There's someone coming."

The rest of you snap to attention. Your sword is in your hand in a second. Oh, what now.

"Where?" Rose demands.

The boy waves at her. "Still a few hundred miles out. A boat. It's heading here. The Breeze isn't giving me much."

"It's mostly cargo and tankers operating out here," Jade growls. "But the US Pacific Fleet is based in Pearl Harbor, so... and the Australian researcher we dumped in the sea could have raised some heads."

You blink. "Sorry, the Australian what you what? What exactly the hell happened down there?"

"I can make a hurricane to ward them off," John suggests.

Rose nods. "It doesn't have to pass expert meteorological inspection, only pose a sufficiently convincing danger to keep them off our backs while we work."

And that's that, no time to mince words. The boy rockets up into the sky to start working his windy magic, and you turn your attention back to the frog. Your heart is beating out of your chest. It's all moving too fast all of a sudden. They're seriously doing this. You're going to cremate a whole unborn universe. The one thing you worked for so long to bring to fruition, the crux of your playerly purpose, the icon that vests this godhood in you, and it's going up in flames like damning evidence of a politician's lurid extramarital affairs.

"Wait, wait, wait. Do we need to think about this?" you stutter.

"It's already dead. We don't know how much time we have. Do it," states Jade.

Rose steps back. You do too, unconsciously. She takes a deep breath and prepares her wands, but there's a shake in her grip. She looks at Jade again, a searching look in her eyes. In that moment, you're on the same page. You know what's coursing through her mind. You're thinking it too.

This feels wrong.

Jade nods. She wipes at her eyes with the clean side of her left hand.

White light burst forth from the Quills.

The holy fire strikes the base of the mound and ignites the end of one of the trickling rivulets of blood. The multicolored flame spreads like lightning, racing up the trail of liquid like it's gunpowder, and in a second the entire mound is engulfed in a conflagration of song and colors. The shockwave rocks through you and kicks dust and ash into swirling eddies. Even when you close your eyes, the fire burns a hallucinatory specter through your eyelids and into the back of your vision, and the sound—it's not the horrible crackle of charred flesh, it's a harmonic, string-like note that dances to the shifting of the colors.

The pyre burns higher and higher, rising above your heads, its song drowning out the fury of the volcano. Its light blinds out the smog-choked sun. The warm embrace of its blue heat scours the hot, dusty volcanic exhaust from your dry skin. You raise your head and see John look down, his windy manipulations paused as the echo of creation sweeps past. The tiny corpse burns greater and brighter than you've seen anything do in your strangest dreams.

With your aspect holding your hand, you can see the candle burning down on the immature universe, vigintillions of years bleeding away by the second. But despite the terrible majesty of the sight, the surging flames ring disconcertingly hollow. It's back to what Rose said. The eons are evaporating too quick. There's no substance inside the frog—it was an empty skeleton from when it shot out of the Forge, and these are only the cinders of the dried bones. It's a wick shriveling without the wax.

It's the rotting bed of a drained river.

It hits you. The most awful thought. As you sit down on the ash-coated ground, hugging your knees, your mind drifts back to what your future self told John. An old dread is trickling back from the place you thought you had it locked away for good.

What turns a genesis frog into that? What can a baby universe starve of when it feeds on nothing?

Things like these don't just happen. Bilious Slick doesn't just wither up. Something has to go horribly, terribly wrong. Something has to break.

And you have a feeling you know what.

"We're doomed," you mutter.

Jade's head turns to you sharply.

"Non-canon," Rose corrects softly. She must have reached the same conclusion.

It's a trick question. This isn't a genesis frog; it's a shitty photocopy of one. A ghost captcha image. Future you put it short and sweet: doomed timelines only draw enough existence juice to keep the bare essentials running. The trickle you're getting is more than enough to sustain the inhabitants of this universe, but you need more than that to keep a frog alive on top. This place isn't drinking enough to feed two. It's the only explanation there is. Doomed, non-canon, you don't know the difference. You drew the short end of the stick. You're in the bad end. That's what it means.

"We are unique," the seer asserts. Her tone is growing bolder. "The frog's ill health is an indicator of our station in the hierarchy of relevance and truth, but we aren't doomed. This universe is unique. It's an unprecedented case as far as we know. Someone or something designed this, chose us for a particular purpose. Non-canon is an symptom, not a diagnosis, and doomed, with all the intrinsically Sburb-bound connotations it carries, is an outright misclassification. We're outside that now. It's a fallacy to dismiss the importance of our actions solely based on one arbitrary metric."

You watch the flames climb into the sky, no sign of dimming. The ash parts a clear path above the raging bonfire. You don't know if it's the fire itself doing it or John up there lending you a hand from the center of the volcanic storm's eye.

"Maybe," you say neutrally.

Jade sighs.

"We found out more from Echidna," she mutters. "About the universe and the future. She talked about... husks. Hollows. She called this an empty bottle."

"Hollow," you repeat. That term again. It's like the dictionary word of the day.

Rose is right. Your knee-jerk reaction was... well, just that. You knew this was something completely new from the start, not like the doomed timelines that nipped at your heels through your whole session. And even if it were, what does that change? Nothing. Your objectives are the same. You still need to get to Alternia. You still need to get your friends back. You still need to survive, and none of that has anything to do with any of this crap you barely remembered was a thing this morning.

But what's this crushing sense of defeat, then?

"We have to relocate Bec," Jade whispers. "And destroy or take with us everything buried under here."

There's always more to do, isn't there? You never catch a break. Look for the denizen. Get the frog. Get the dog.

"I can do some prognostication for suitable temporary homes," Rose offers.

The witch nods. "Then I need to acquire the Riptide motif."

More problems. Always moving. Always plotting. You never thought you'd miss the days when you had nothing to do but build make-believe towns with used food cans and fight over the best napping spots, but this has done it. You're tired of this. You're burned out, goddammit.

You just want to stop.

"Can we not worry about that yet," you say. You don't even ask what she's talking about. You'll find out. "One thing at a time. Let's just..."

The volcano rumbles in the distance. The final fire of a universe sings. Far away, the dim howl of a gathering sea storm builds.

"Let's just wait. A while."

They stay silent.

You take that as acquiescence.

In the shadow of the Forge, four gods watch the world burn.

Chapter Text

John joins you after the storm hits its peak.

The frog takes its sweet time to burn. The sun dims to the west, the roar of the Forge rumbles and wanes, and through it all, the final glorious hymn of the dead universe sings on. Winds howl far and wide over the open seas, holding the eyes and ears of a curious world at bay. Night falls, the volcano quiets to a slow simmer, and soon you're left standing guard in the darkness, with only the fire's lonely light for company.

It's two hours past sunset, and you've taken to staring woodenly at the soot-stained ground. Looking at the fire only fills you with a wrenching sense of melancholy, so yeah, miss you with that shit. At the very edge of your hearing you still hear in the distance the faint sound of helicopters—or boats, or jet engines, for all you can tell. It might be a figment of your imagination. Whatever it is, the hurricane is keeping them at arm's reach. For now.

Jade is gone, following up on what's left of the buried meteor you accidentally blew up when you first got here. Rose is working on some kind of voodoo magic shit, while John... you don't know if he's helping her with it or fiddling with his sylladex. Might be both.

You, meanwhile, simply sit in the dirt. And stare at the grass.

Jade return is what finally knocks you out of your daze. She abruptly materializes onto the platform, startling you out of your skin. You raise a hand to shield the brilliant flash accompanying her arrival, but words are already pouring out of her mouth before you can say anything.

"Everything in meteor is fried," she declares, "Overloaded. I think the Skaian flux from the fire is too much for what they're rated. I took some of the transportalizers apart to check. None of it is salvageable. At least not any more than the other dead tech they already have in museums."

You shift your eyes at Rose. "Guess you were right."

"Of course," she says simply, but there's not a trace of her typical self-satisfied smugness in her voice. She's intensely focused on sketching out her lines on the stone slab she had you chop out of a boulder.

"Did you check for breakers, or other things like that?" John adds. "Don't they have any safety mechanisms?"

Jade shook her head. "Most of the exotic components are crystallographically denatured. Nothing can guard against that. Do we have a place to hold Bec?"

Rose looks up as she closes a circle, snapping shut the heavy tome in her left hand. You swear that you see the cover read Hedge Magic With Squiddles and Friends, but the book vanishes into her sylladex before you can get a better look. She straightens up, shaking her dress out.

"Let's find out."

The girl gestures at John. He lifts his hands from the spine of the jagged ritual diagram, cracking his neck as he rises to his feet. The Breath-infused chalk settles to a pleasant neon blue.

"Hair?" she says absently, holding out a palm to her right.

Jade flickers green for a moment and then implodes into an human-shaped silhouette of the night sky. There's a sound of barking from the other side of portal as the dogside viewport bounds forward forward and backward, but the witch ignores it as she reaches into herself. Through some convolution of space you can't follow with your eyes, she plucks a snowy white hair out of thin air, eliciting an annoyed yowl from behind the doorway.

"Sorry," she whispers under her breath as she floats the hair over to Rose's open palm.

The seer tosses the hair into the center of the inscribed pentagram. The neat pinches of thyme, rosemary, silver dust, colloidal mercury and refined uranium set at its vertices burst into flame while the goddess chants the flagitious verses of the everblind, casting her wands out in an eldritch sorceldance. The sky thunders in answer, a flash of distant lightning carving a blood red wound through the ashen smog. With a curdling shriek, the silver hair curls and consumes itself in sickly green flame, and at the shuddering flare of the ritual lines, everything goes out.

(Except the frog. That fucker is deathly immune to any forms of extinguishment magical and mundane, apparently.)

Rose opens her eyes. Her violet pupils are dilated and focused as she speaks.

"The Payette National Forest is the optimal bet, as predicted. Once again, I warn you that the efficacy of the prognostication is a function of our heuristic criteria. That is to say, poor."

"I know," Jade says.

And she vanishes again. Probably going to hug her dog. You don't know.

The others come and go. You wait through the night in the cradle of the storm, watching the fire flicker and dim, counting the minutes as they pass. None of you sleep.

As the first rays of sun glimmer over the fogged horizon, Rose rises to her feet. You lift your head. There's a grim look on her face.

In the quiet dawn of a new day, the last of the frog dissolves in the wind.

You return to Washington.

It's not home, not even for John. But it is your only refuge for now.

The volcano is on the news the next day.

They call it a freak event. Abnormally volatile sea storms combined with an unexplainable eruption, considering not a single other volcano in the area so much as stirred. Something about anomalous tephra compositions, about satellite interference, airborne particulates... Jade is the only one that understands enough and cares to take notes. All you do is watch.

The island itself isn't on record. More accurately, it was mentioned briefly in the notes of early Pacific explorers, but never fell under claim of any nation and subsequently dropped off the map, lost to the forgotten annals of institutional memory.

There's people swarming over the island by the end of the day, talk from nations and organizations about handling operations, questions being raised...

It's out of your hands now.

It's not a home, but it is a house. A house that has another resident in it.

John's dad sits in on your debriefing.

"The universe is designed," you say, reclining in the penguin feather sofa you dredged from your bottomless sylladicial pit. "The critical moments of the timeline are mapped out in advance. The lateral breadth of the time stream was deliberately limited. We aren't here by accident."

"Designed," Jade muses. "Echidna said 'three hollows tendered at the altar'. And the 'Whisperer of Worlds'. Is that your mysterious designer?"

"Perhaps more important is the time loop you mentioned," Rose states. Her hands are typing, but her eyes are elsewhere altogether, reading through a copy of your dialoglog. "It's built in?"

"Apparently, yeah. Built into the boundary conditions of the universe." you confirm. "I think you know more about what that means than me."

"Do you think it's a Sburb session?" John asks. "It sounds like the obvious answer."

"That doesn't match with what Echidna said," Jade disagrees. "She said we were trapped. An incipisphere is an open system to paradox space, so why would the denizens starve if we had an open connection to Sburb?"

"Jade, don't you have Strife Ambigram?" John points out, holding out Fear No Anvil. The hammer showed up in his sylladex after Future Dave dumped him back in time, but none of you are sure how exactly that happened. "Maybe you can give the hammer a go?"

The witch shrugs. She floats the hammer over with a wave of a finger and reaches out, letting it settle in her palm before closing fingers around it. The ruby eye jerks and twitches, but there's a staunch sense of reluctance to the motions. Even as she sends a sizzle of the Green Sun's power through it, it refuses to do the whirly opening thing John claims it did for future you. After a few seconds of concentration, Jade shakes her head and tosses the device back.

"Aspect incompatibility," she suggests.

"Can't I grind until I get to Horology Deconstructed again?" you ask. "I can just PvP one of you until it happens."

"That's not how the god tiers work," Rose answers. "You don't get experience for generic actions after you ascend. Usually it's only plot quests, mainline bosses and feats."

"And the guardian I fought in the other timeline is AWOL," you finish for her, filling in the blanks yourself. "There must be something important enough for me to break out there. Of all the museums in the world?"

"It's possible," Rose allows. "But a worldwide robbing spree doesn't sound like a prudent idea until we're more secure in our position, and besides, if fate doesn't want you to ascend the tier, there's likely nothing you can do about it. If you'll hear an alternative, why not try lateral assimilation?"

"You mean I should try to absorb my alt-self memories?"

The girl shrugs. "You said yourself that splinters don't get uniquely ensouled under this paradigm. As I understand the proposed mechanics, there has to be bleed-over you can harness. Or maybe you can crash the timeline enough times that you punch a hole in your memory blocks."

You shiver.

"I think I'll pass on that," you mutter, "For now."

"So, to summarize Dave's report," Rose says, thunking a white board down on the floor and pulling out a marker as she speaks. "We have: the universe designer, strict time travel restrictions, the overarching loop, and also the standing problem of trying to get your alternate's memories back or the functional equivalent. Does that cover it all?"

You glance at John, inviting him to add anything.

He thinks for a second before raising a point. "Maybe this is redundant, but... we don't know what Hephaestus' angle was. If Echidna saw this coming, why wouldn't Hephaestus have? But I don't know why he would go to all of this accidental murder retcon time loop nonsense if it's only to give us that information."

Rose adds that to the list.

"Good point," she says, turning her head to Jade, "But nothing we can do for now. Let's move on to our side."

"Do you have a transcript of what Echidna said to you?" John suggests.

"Denizens don't generate dialoglogs," Rose says.

Jade shakes her head. "Yeah. I remember most of it, but... there's something I want to try."

"Oh?" Rose asks, piqued.

The witch summons an unfamiliar mobile phone from her sylladex. Rose's face breaks into a smile.

"I think I catch your gist," she says as she turns to John's dad, an almost predatory glint in her eye. "Mr. Egbert, would it be acceptable if we borrowed your sound system? Or if we threw in a few upgrades while we were at it?"

His willpower has no chance against the hurricane of mad science the two represent. The moment he accedes, they start emptying inventories of equipment of earthly origin and otherwise onto the living room floor, launching into a heated discussion that sprints past the bounds of your comprehension in seconds.

Rose spins up the transfiguration logic, Jade handles the electrical engineering, and five minutes later, they step back from their Frankenstein creation of Sburban technology and consumer electronics welded together with literal dark sorcery. It's a monstrous assortment of radios and vacuum tubes and other physicsy-looking gizmos of various shapes and sizes, the mystery phone strung up at the center like the helmsman of a ship, with John's dad's audio rig buried somewhere under the whole mess. You eye the man, wondering if he's offended by any of this, but he only seems mildly befuddled at the strange sight.

Once Jade plugs in the last cable with a flick of a finger and checks over the connections one last time, she flashes a thumbs up at Rose.

"Moment of truth," the seer mutters.

She taps the screen of the phone.

A horrendous, downright ear-torturous blend of sounds and vibrations shrieks from the set up, almost knocking the auxiliary magnetic dynamos over with its concussive force before Jade pins them down with a wave of telekinesis. This isn't only sound: your hairs are prickling on end under the onslaught. It's an entire sensory suite playing back in half a dozen media. It's the worst 4D movie screening you've had in your entire life.

John's dad steps out of the room—you have to suppress the urge to clamp your hands over your ears yourself. It's not like you can hear anything useful anyway, but Jade, apparently, can. Her lunchtop is out, her fingers flying over the holographic keyboard at superhuman speeds while she listens with intent focus.

Minutes trickle past. Only when the auditory nightmare fades and the last speaker turns itself off, Jade's hands slow to a halt.

"I sent all of you the transcript," she says while you try to shake the residual ringing out of your head.

You pull the document up on your screen.

You blink.

"Huh," John remarks. "Uh..."

"It's... something," you agree. "Are denizens supposed to talk like a middle-ages fortune teller?"

"I assume the use of 'they' is in the genderless third person singular?" Rose asks.

Jade nods. "Singular, yeah. I don't know if it's something genderless of if Echidna just isn't identifying their gender. Distinctions like that don't really come through in her voice."

"From the void they call: one strangled, one slain, one drowned," John reads. "One slain could be anyone. I don't think we know anyone strangled or drowned, though..."

"...Equius?" you try. You saw his dead body once, and you're not about to forget it any time soon. "Ew," you mutter. "Drowned... could be Jaspers? Jaspersprite?"

You direct the half-question to Rose. She did say she found her cat washed up on the shore, but it's a bit of a stretch. She's not listening, though, deep in her own thought.

"Two spent husks dredged from the hells they bore. One lost tale from those abysses adrift. Three hollows they tender at the altar. Into the circle they cast us," she recites. "Are those separate things, or are they descriptions of the same set of three? Perhaps it's three denizens that are 'hollows', of which two are 'spent husks' and one is a 'lost tale'. Echidna is obviously the drowned one out of the strangled, slain and drowned."

"Does Hephaestus count as slain?" you suggest.

"Or he doesn't count at all," John counters. "Maybe he wasn't one of the active denizens. That would explain why we didn't get a message like this. He was already dead when they were 'cast', so he didn't get to prepare the lair for us?"

"Could be a troll denizen," Jade points out. "They killed most of theirs. 'Slain' implies intent, I think, which can't be the case for any of us."

"No. None of the trolls' denizens are manifest here," Rose says. "Their Sburban records are purely secondary. It could be one of the scratched session's ones. We don't know what the new players did with theirs."

You shake your head. "I don't think it's a good assumption that they're talking about the same things. Like, isn't 'spent husks dredged from the hells they bore' a reference to the human and troll universes after exploding into the Green Sun? Maybe that part is talking about the creation of the circle which the denizens got cast in. So the circle is... this universe?"

"Good call," Rose says, frowning. "So the Whisperer dredged the remains of our old universes from the Green Sun somehow? In that case, 'one lost tale' may be our session. Wordplay on 'losing' the game? And those would be the 'three hollows' they tendered at the altar to combine to make this universe."

"Does that match with 'from the void they call'?" John asks. "So by 'void', they could mean the Furthest Ring. But which of the universes would be strangled, slain and drowned?"

"The glitches," Rose says slowly. "That could count as strangled or drowned."

"Or strangled, slain, drowned could refer to something else completely unrelated again," John points out.

"Please don't let it be Equius," you sigh. "I've seen a hundred and twenty-nine Equiuses already and that's one hundred and twenty-nine more than anyone could fathom any conceivable need for."

"If we're going through the trolls, Vriska is one of the chief contenders for 'slain'. The mode of death stands out, and she has precedent of cropping up in places she doesn't belong."

"'Drowned' could be a fancy reference to any of the aquatic trolls," Jade notes. "Maybe it's Feferi, because of the Glb'golyb connection?"

You snort, a thought occurring to you. "Hey, maybe me and Rose are the two fished out of hell and Echidna's being a bitch with the 'spent husks' part."

"And then the lost tale would be me and Jade coming in from the 'abysses adrift', like a boat adrift," John says thoughtfully. "But it's only one, not two, so that doesn't work."

"Not necessarily," says Jade. "You're from a different timeline, and if we're assuming Typheus had something to do with that, maybe you're the drowned one? That might make sense with Typheus' oil thing."

Rose nods. "That would mean 'slain' and 'strangled' are two more players we're waiting show up. From the scratched session? Or copies, I suppose."

"Davesprite?" John asks. Jade jerks her head in agreement.

Rose taps her chin. "Hang on, let me write this down."

 THEORY 1: PLAYERS                   THEORY 2: GENESIS                     
                                                                         
  strangled  TBD         hellspawn = human universe = slain     (Jack Noir)  
   slain     TBD                x2 = troll universe = strangled (???)    
  drowned    John?       lost tale = null session   = drowned   (glitches) 
                                                                         
  hellspawn  Dave                                                        
         x2  Rose                    THEORY 3: DENIZENS                  
  lost tale  Jade                                                        
                                     drowned = Echidna                   
  3 hollows  maybe us?                 slain = Hephaestus?               
into circle  denizens              strangled = TBD                       

"Maybe we should feel out the edges of the problem first," Rose says, after a few seconds of quiet contemplation. "Something we haven't mentioned is who the Whisperer of Worlds is. Off the top of my head, there's already a number of possibilities. Our late informant from old Alternia. Glb'golyb. Lord English. The legendary ghost of his dead pseudo-sister. The orange guy in the dream bubbles. I'm sure there are others I'm missing."

"Dead pseudo-sister?" John asks.

"Orange guy?" questions Jade doubtfully. "You don't mean Davesprite, do you?"

You and Rose exchange a look of mutual you explain this.

Man, this is going to take a while.

In the end, after all the note swapping and poetry deconstructing and surreptitious back room plotting, it comes down to this:

1. Someone, or something, made this place. Someone took the rotting leftovers of your old worlds and knitted this Frankenstein monstrosity whole cloth, and even now, you haven't escaped their strings.
2. The denizens are in on this, somehow. They knew what's barreling down your way, and they not only condone it, they might as well have given you a pat on the head and told you to shut the fuck up and get on with it. You might have clawed your way out of the game, but the rails of paradox space still have their grubby mitts on you.
3. You have a queue of quests to clear. The first, euthanizing the hopes and dreams of a million prenatal civilizations, is ticked off, but that's only the tip of the iceberg. You have to collect souls, whatever that means, you need to seal the whispers, you need to finish the loop hanging over you.

And yet all of this raises more questions than it solves. How was this place made, and why? What the hell fucked up time into its present state, and how are you going to figure out how to work around said upfuckery? What's going on with Jack Noir and Lord English and the Condesce? What's out there in the Furthest Ring, beyond the confines of this little snow globe world you have going on?

And the ironic thing is that all of it doesn't matter. It's a distraction. In the far future it's going to become relevant, no doubt, but right this moment? You just can't muster any shits to give about any of these supposedly world-shattering answers dredged from the lairs of long-dead denizens.

The only priority now is survival. Not for you—for the trolls, teetering on the precipice of conscription, and for most of them, a one-way trip to the culling pits. That thread has somehow gotten lost amid all of this excitement, but the clock never stopped ticking. What you need to do is get to Alternia before it's too late. You need to take down an omnicidal empress. You need your friends back.

Long story short, fuck Echidna's spooky ghost prophecy. You have an empire to overthrow.

Though, credit to Jade's cranky old planet-mom, she did give you a hand with the regicide plan.

You walk into the Madrid National Archaeological Museum, Rose paying the fees she procured for the group at the entrance. Jade weaves through the sparse crowd and makes a beeline for the Prehistory section as the rest of you push after her. You almost lose her a few times, but before you know it you're bursting into the rear display hall. Jade is already marching towards the glass case in the corner of the room.

When you catch up to her, she's standing in front of a heavy stone plaque that looks like a cross between a gravestone and a chapel window. It's a cracked composite of black and blue minerals, the slivers of color spelling out the symbol of Space. Tiny gibberish lettering fills its weathered face, to small and worn for you to read.

"Is that it?" John asks. His eyes drift to the description on the plate underneath.

Mynkowskian Riptide
Land of Frost and Frogs (Segovian Site)
Excavated 1846
Hardened tachylite and lazurite

The fraymotif was found within a Skaian vault in an Protolofafian sun temple in more than two hundred individual fragments. It was reconstructed and translated by a team from the University of Barcelona, and together with its LOLAR and LOWAS mirrors are colloquially referred to as the "Rosetta Stone of the Lands" for their contributions to our understanding of the Consort languages. Its name is a phonetic translation that predates Hermann Minkowsky and his work, making it one of the most frequently cited and debated examples of Sburbian anachronism.

"Yeah," Jade says. "Rose, can you divert attention?"

The seer nods. Invisible threads of void settle in place around you.

"Done."

Jade teleports the plaque out of its glass case. The blue rock seems to wake at the touch of the green energy gripping it, shivering and surging inside with waves of scintillating light. Carefully, she reaches forward and touches a finger to its surface.

The blue glows and fades to a dull, ugly black.

At a flick of the witch's fingers, the artifact goes back in its box.

"Okay," she breathes. "Let's go."

No one notices the difference until you're long gone.

Space. Light. Breath.

Three players to execute Minkowskian Riptide. It's your ride to Alternia, but even turbocharged with all the god tiers and suspiciously colored stellar bodies your group can muster, it's going to take just under four months. If you want to arrive before Rose's hard deadline—the 6th bilinear perigee of the second dark season—you're going to have to set out within the next two weeks. If you're being safe, the next few days.

And by you, you mean them.

You aren't going.

John's dad nods as they explain the situation, practically oozing disappointment from his featureless expression. You're mostly certain it's disappointment that his pseudo-child is going away for so long, and not about having to put up with a separate and way too sword-happy kid in his house for that same period of time, but you can never be sure.

"We take a 30% hit to speed with an additional passenger," Rose explains. "We can't afford that kind of time, so Dave is going to have to stay down here to hold down the fort, so to speak. He'll join us through Bec once we're at Alternia."

Jade's ability to become a live portal to her dog, instead of to the all-consuming eye of this sector of paradox space, is finally paying dividends. A bit of experimentation showed that the difficulty of forming a connection scales logarithmically with distance, which means while it won't be easy to punch through at transgalactic distances, it's feasible—and instantaneous, once the gate is open.

"So you're going to be flying through the deep space for four months," you state.

"I believe we'll be in an altered mind state during that period, optimized for navigation," Jade chips in. "We won't feel the time pass nearly as vividly."

"Hey, does that mean we won't be able to contact Dave?" John worries.

"Yes," says Rose. "We'll be in functional stasis. And no, taking breaks to check in won't work; it's prohibitively expensive in time."

You frown. "Then what the hell do I do down here? Introduce the sweet, innocent population of New Earth to the fine art of Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff?"

Rose shrugs. "Preferably, research? We are prophecies to dissect. Mysteries to solve. Dungeons to loot, perhaps. Didn't you want to be an archaeologist? Here's a chance to flex your brain muscles, if they haven't yet atrophied beyond physiotherapeutic salvation."

"Paleontologist," you grouse. "And a collection of dead shit in formaldehyde does not a paleontologist make. Come on, Rose, I can't do research. I'm like a bibliographic vampire. I'll literally keel over and die a just death if I exist within a library for more than five minutes at a stretch. Guilty of trespassing on grounds most holy beyond the station of my ilk."

"Didn't you voluntarily offer to help me with my investigation work only recently?" she points out, raising an eyebrow.

You raise a finger, mouth opening.

You close your mouth.

"You can work towards your next god tier," says Jade. "You were talking about doing that. Why not try?"

"And I'll leave Fear No Anvil with you. Maybe you can get something out of it, whether or not you get to the next tier," John suggests.

You sigh glumly.

It has nothing to do with being bored on Earth and they know that. This situation doesn't sit well with anyone. But you don't have a choice.

"Fine," you grunt. Directing your next question towards John's dad, you ask, "Do you mind if I crash here for a while? I can take care of myself. Just need a roof over my head. We can pay you back once we're the new monarchs of a galactic empire."

John's dad agrees without hesitation, which is a shame, since you had a good speech lined up about your shower-based laundry solutions and the sick microwave dinner cooking skills you can bring to this household. And that's with the heating facilities of a burning nest of asbestos magazines: imagine what divine delicacies you could concoct with a real microwave. Open your eyes and be agog, Egbert the First.

He does point out, however, that you could go to school. You're still of schooling age.

"Seventeen," you protest. "I'm seventeen. I don't have to go to school. I've been to school."

Well, your bro's "homeschooling" mainly consisted of hitting each other with swords and throwing you off buildings, and sometimes telling you to pirate a few textbooks from the curriculum he downloaded off some website ten years ago, but it ain't broke, don't fix it, right?

"Actually, colleges might have some valuable resources," Rose says thoughtfully. "Departmental libraries. Experts you can consult essentially on demand as long as you pass as a student. You don't even have to enroll, necessarily."

You groan once again. The concept of opening a book isn't as anathema to the fiber of your being as you make it out to be—you did have to blow through the bare minimum of textbooks to pass standardized tests, and it wasn't that awful—but the whole concept of hanging around random strangers and reading... it's so not you.

"You know what? I'll try and get rich," you decide. "I have godly powers and magic gems that vanish the moment they leave my sight. There's no way I can't get loaded as fucking Bill Gates in four months. Forget the interstellar tyrants; I'll be paying rent in a week."

Yeah, you're just talking out of your ass now.

"You know, Dave... now you have the time... I really think you should work on your time powers," Jade says hesitantly.

"Come on," you protest, looking at Rose and John for support. "Do I have to?"

They aren't backing you up, not that you had high hopes for that. Fuck. Your eyes travel to the ceiling, reluctant to meet Jade's.

You want to reject the whole notion on principle. John said that future you had a bad reaction simply trying to freeze something in time, and his face when he talked about it... you believe him when he says bad. But it's not that which you're afraid of. You're not scared of pain. Your whole life has been a series of picking yourself back up after falling down, both literally and figuratively, and more frequently than not down the forewarned stairs.

You just... don't want to.

On some level, you know that's not enough of a reason. Your friends need you to get your shit together. Everyone else has a handle on their powers: Rose has spun surprising utility from her crippled Sight, John is doing his part of flattening problems with overwhelming power, and even nerfed Jade is the uncontested most powerful being of you all. Getting a mini vacation while the rest are in virtual time-out feels like the invisible hand of Skaia slapping you in the face, telling you to man up and stop being a whiny little bitch.

When even the pedo heavens are prodding you in the ass... well, you never cared much for the pedo heavens, so that's a bit of a moot point. But it doesn't change the fact that this is the right thing.

You lost last time because of your stubbornness. Paradox space is giving you another chance, and you'll be damned if you let it all slip from your hands again. You owe it to everyone to at least try. Future you did and made it work, so it's proof it's possible, but that future is gone now. You have to make it happen here, where it counts.

"Fine," you answer quietly. "I'll see what I can do."

Jade smiles encouragingly at you.

It doesn't make you feel as sick to the gut as you thought it would.

What's left is logistics and planning, mainly. They do more test drives for the portal connection between Jade and Bec, going as far as halfway to Alpha Centauri. It's an hour for the round trip, but with months of time investment, you can't take any chances.

They think Jade might not be able to open the portal alone from her end when she gets there, so you'll have to coordinate something Earthside with Bec to make it happen. With how much of a hair trigger that demon has you don't think it's going to be an issue, so that's your transport sorted. Jade won't have any way back, but with the tin foil hat she's effectively invincible. She's happy to act as the gateway guardian for whatever inter-system operations you'll be running.

Bec gets stashed in the Idahoan forests. You commit the location to memory. Everyone takes the time to alchemize odds and ends, including a variety of purported psychic blockers based on commercial designs of dubious effectiveness, in the hope that at least one of the twenty gadgets they're stacking on like Christmas ornaments on a tree will do its job. Even if it only works against mundane blueblood psychics, that's half of your problems solved.

They take the scratched future-Earth—you really need to come up with a better naming system for all of these different versions—with them, along with the meteor. The reasoning is that they're the ones that will be in hot water the second they land, so rapid access to alchemy could be the difference between life and death. Besides, without any teleporting abilities at your disposal, there's nowhere to store a giant alien meteor that's both safe from discovery and readily accessible to you.

Well, unless you decide to simply live in the meteor on Venus or something stupid like that, which everyone unanimously vetoes.

Also raised is the possibility that if you really critically need an alchemiter, you could break into one of the other meteor sites humans discovered, juice them up by burning any of your powers, and figure something out from there. It's a last resort, but it's good enough.

The preparations drag for days, but they can't last forever. Time is of the essence.

Eventually, it's time to go.

Outer space is cold.

You're quite sure now that it's not a figment of your imagination. There must be some sort of hidden code embedded in Sburb, like if the player in a vacuum, T = player.favoredTemperature - 2, or something. Maybe it's a passive-aggressive design cue to stop fucking around in space and get back to playing.

Right now, you just hate the mechanic for making this worse than it has to be.

"So this is it, huh," you say.

The three others are arrayed in formation, waiting for the planets to come into alignment. You're out of the way of the launch trajectory, soaking in the last time you'll see them for some time.

The last time you were separated like this, it was sudden. Maybe not so much unexpected—you saw yourself die, you counted the seconds down to the moment the bullets struck you in the back—but sudden. There was no time for goodbyes. A one-way trip to Derse, and then an all-expenses-paid-for joyride to the Green Sun.

It was easier that way.

"It's only a few months," says Jade, but there's no smile on her face. "It's nothing compared to three years. We'll be back before you know it."

"Yeah," you mutter.

You don't know what the protocol is for seeing your friends off on a trip across the galaxy, but somehow, a fist bump and a casual "watch out for space pigeons" doesn't seem like the right answer.

"Good luck," you settle for. Your eyes drift leftwards, and you add, "Don't look like Bec pissed on your shoes, Egbert. You're not the one stuck here playing in the dirt all summer."

He fidgets.

You peer closer. "Dude, do you think I'm going to steal your dad from you or something? Chill out. It's only going to be a second from your perspective."

Rose coughs something that sounds suspiciously like "that's not exactly how it works".

"I know," he sighs. "Don't worry about it."

You raise a zoom monocle to your eye, trying to weasel out from his expression what's bothering him.

"Are you still thinking about the timelines stuff? Let it go, man, just let the crippling existential doubt wash over you. It goes away once you stop giving a fuck."

He stifles a snort. "Sorry, sometimes I forget you're not, erm." He forgets what he's saying for a second. "No, I'm... bummed out, I guess. Um, are none of the trolls going to remember us?"

"Most likely," Rose sighs.

"Do you think Karkat will... wait." You narrow your eyes as an awful thought occurs to you. "John. Are you thinking about Vriska?"

He freezes. Rose lets out a choked snicker. Jade doesn't even try to hide her smile.

"No," you say. "No, John. Don't you dream of it. I've heard some shit from Terezi and you don't want to touch that crazy chick with a ten-foot pole. I'm going to have to put you under arrest for your own safety. This quorum has spoken, the restraining order is on the way."

"I'm not going to... pursue her or anything!" he protests. "I don't think we have the time for, er, entanglements of that kind! But I dunno, I was looking forward to seeing her, and Karkat. He was really funny. But if they forgot everything, what if they don't like us?"

Is that what he's worried about? You roll your eyes.

"Not going to happen, dude. Me and Rose are seasoned experts at dream bubble diving, so listen when I say it's genuinely hilarious how easy it is to win Karkats over. Harder to make him stop cursing you by every bit of grotesque alien anatomy under their deadly murdersun, but-"

Rose coughs. "Forgive my interjection, but by 'winning Karkats over', surely you don't mean-"

"Hey!" you object.

"-following them around and calling them increasingly verbose and nonsensical pet names just out of weapon's reach until they gives up on actively trying to gut you with a sickle?"

You point a finger at Rose. "Slander! Who's the Karkat Whisperer here, Rose? Who's officially accredited by the National Association of Vantasography?"

She sighs, cradling her face with the calculated poise of a dejected noblewoman. "Ah, yes. I suppose even I must regrettably concede to the indomitable authority of the Mayor. My apologies, Mr. Chief Vantologist."

"Dr. Chief Vantologist to you, ma'am."

John's laughing as he says, "Okay, okay. You convinced me, Dr. Strider."

There's still something off with him, but you don't have time to push it any further.

"The window's approaching!" Jade calls out. "Ready."

She's on her lunchmuffs, watching the timer count down. She did the math for the launch window and figured out that they could shave a couple of days off the total journey by refracting the luminal trajectory through a Jovian double moonrise to boost them out of Sol's gravity well, which is nothing like any orbital mechanics you've heard of, but you'll cede the floor to the experts.

"Ready," Rose reports. John follows a beat later with his own affirmative.

"Remember to put me back first," you remind her. "I don't want to spend half an hour flying home."

"Of course."

Her eyes stay on the counter. The beginnings of the engine of the fraymotif are falling in place, coalescing from rings and spindles of liquid emerald. Thirty seconds.

Rose turns to you, her eyes glowing a fiery white. "We'll see you in four months. If you can manage to hold out that long in the desolate warscape of twenty-first century Planet Earth. How will you ever cope."

"Harsh. Watch out for space pigeons," you snort back, and you drift closer, holding out your fist to John in an open invitation for bumping.

You know what? Fuck it.

Your other arm snaps out and pulls John in close before he completes his end of the universal ritual of fraternal camaraderie. He squeaks at the sudden invasion of space as you squeeze the breath out of his flaccid torso, and before he can return the gesture, you let go and grab Rose. She stiffens up as you engulf her.

Jade holds you off with an outstretched hand for a moment as she freezes her work, before slamming into you with a hug enthusiasm that, believe it or not, out-enthuses your own. Her hair is thick with the scent of ozone.

"Throw me a message when you hit Alternia," you say as you draw away, breathless. "I'll be waiting."

Rose throws you a thumbs-up. John calls, "Good luck!"

There's more you want to say, but the clock runs out.

"Time to go!" Jade shouts. The matrices swirling around them flare and multiply, exploding into a brilliant cosmic machine. Her hand flicks at you.

The blast of green punches you through space. You thump into hard gray dirt and roll on your ass, feeling your legs and guts protest the sudden presence of this meagre gravity. Your gaze turns upwards just in time to catch the prick marking their departure, blink-and-miss in the sea of stars. When you scramble to your feet, they're long gone.

Just like that.

The die is cast: they're past the outer planets now, accelerating out and beyond. There's no stopping their voyage. And for you... well, you're here.

Your head drops. The little residual oxygen in you evacuates your lungs in a sigh.

You pick yourself up from the ground and dust the dry dust off your clothes. Turning to the horizon, you lay eyes on the blue pearl that you'll be calling home.

You're on your own now.

It's going to be a long few months.

Chapter Text

A wisp of red in the blank cloak of white.

The color flutters on an unseen wind. It draws closer, a dancing butterfly, then a sliver of scrap cloth, changing every second.

You reach out, but you have no body. Yet it seems to sense your thoughts, swooping towards you on an immaterial draft, and as just before it licks over you, it blooms.

The red explodes into an aurora of mist and cloth, thick folds and silk, fraying at the fringes. It billows, forms into a briefly humanoid specter, like a cloak or a cape blasting off an unseen being. There are pits of darkness where its head would be. Abyssal eyes stare through you.

who are you

You don't know who said that, you or it.

You don't think it matters.

The question—you know the answer. It knows the answer. You reach out again, intangible will pushing at the entity, grasping for purchase on something equally formless. The spirit, the phantom, it's dissolving every immeasurable moment you stay here, flaking red away to the blank canvas that engulfs you.

You want it to stop. You don't know why.

You tell it to go. To steal itself away before it evaporates to nothing. It stares emptily at you, starkly uncomprehending. Even if it had the sapience to understand you, it can't. There's no escaping. It's a dissolving droplet in a raging current. The clock is ticking. It always is.

The thing runs into you, drowning you in liquid ruby. You claw at it, trying to shrug the wave of blood off. You don't understand anything. Who are you? What is it? What's happening? Something sharp and cold digs into you, and with it, like a dagger through your ribs, comes a moment of clarity.

You're dreaming.

You relax, let it all take over. You let the red fill everything.

This is how it ends.

It's how it ends every time.

You open your eyes. Check your pulse.

The fact that it's the neutral resting rate is as unsettling as if it weren't.

The bed isn't drenched in sweat. You're not gasping for oxygen. You didn't even draw a sword through all that. You're used to this now. Despite that, you can't drive the image of the specter out of your mind. You can still see it flaking away, being swallowed by the infinite blinding white. Losing itself.

You throw the covers off yourself and swing your legs over the edge of the mattress. The dim crimson glow trickling from under the bed frame is almost comforting these days—you tried sleeping with Fear No Anvil in your hand the first few nights, but you couldn't fall asleep with the ominous thrumming and that goddamned ticking, so now you simply keep it stashed it under the bed.

Does it help? Maybe a little. You haven't exactly done a controlled longitudinal study on the configurational efficacy of magic hammer dreamcatchers.

Your time machines pop into your hands. The room fills with a weak white ambience.

Closing your eyes, you try to remember, to summon the muscle memory from a sideways times.

Feel the current. Follow the beat. Sync the pounding of your blood to the pulse of time. It's like music, like improvising a tune, step out of line for a few bars and the merge back like nothing happened, nobody the wiser. It shouldn't be that hard.

You pluck a string, track your finger along the rippling wavefront at the speed of sound, and set it free.

It's a horrible, grinding sensation. The universe protests with all of its fiber, as if it's trying to tear your soul in half. The cooling fans of the universal machine speed up, the CPU running overdrive on your fucked-up request, throwing warnings like there's no tomorrow.

But it's all over in a fraction of a subjective second.

And then the time is 04:16:27.678.

2.783 seconds late. 0.721 better than yesterday.

Your head thumps backward into the mussed blankets.

It's a shitty hour of the morning, but you're not going to be able to go back to sleep. Not after that. Nothing like a good spook from ghost you beyond the veil to spice your night up, right?

You might as well get some reading done.

"Book," you utter.

A yellow twist deposits Donnell's Aspects in your hand. You flip it open to the page you last left off, bookmarked with that red ribbony thing that came with the hardcover. You gaze at the page, too bleary to parse the ink blotches. Your eyes skip across the lines a few times before you shake your head and gather your focus.

You mutter aloud the name of the chapter, "Blood of Beforus."

The color photograph of an obsidian statue, blunt-horned and mouth twisted in a gritted snarl, fills a quarter of the page. Two familiar symbols sit below it. You barely give the caption a glance. Your eyes are trapped on the statue's face.

It's a good statue. Better than humans made of you. Maybe it's the visions thing they have with Glb'golyb, so the trolls had more to work off than some lizards' crayon drawings. Or they're just better artists.

"Don't die, you asshole," you whisper. "If you get yourself killed, I swear to God, I'll hunt down your ghost and feed you to Lord English myself."

Who knew there was so much to miss about a raging prick whose entire vocabulary consisted entirely of permutations of alien insults? Who knew you cared so much about an obnoxious wannabe lawyer pathologically attracted to smelly clowns? Even Kanaya has begrudgingly wormed her vampiric ways into your stone cold heart. It's nauseating.

Unconsciously, you turn over the page.

Another statue. Silver, same nubbed horns, but with a different design on the robes and an irritatingly beatific smile on its face.

"You can fuck off."

It's weird, living with John's dad. It's confusing. Not a day goes by where you don't wonder if this is what a functional household looks like, or if that's just an Egbert thing.

He makes food. Every day. Thrice a day. You knew, intellectually, that it's something normal parents do, but after three years eking out the barest essentials of nutrition out on a forsaken rock with other equally dietarily irresponsible teens, it's still jarring to have someone knock on your door and inform you that they've procured sustenance for their fledgling young like a wild bear foraging for its cubs. With the horror stories John used to unload on you over Pesterchum, you imagined it would be an unending purgatory of cake and pastry too, but no—he's exercising unexpected restraint with respect to your macronutrient intake ratios, thankfully.

The strange man doesn't make any attempt to socialize with you, which is a relief. Maybe he senses the crushing aura of teenage awkwardness that erupts from you whenever you're reminded of your state of ambiguous custody under the sorta-father of your best human bro, or it's just his natural stoic self. You appreciate him helping you out, you really do, but you don't need a dad. You've had enough of the irreplaceable experience of guardianship to last a lifetime.

He does, however, attempt to procure you a wardrobe that isn't the numerous combinatrices of your god tier outfit. You grudgingly accept.

If there's one aspect in which he's reminds you of your old custodian, it's that he's fucking impossible to read. The few things he say are quiet and clinical. Even the few times when what you say is enough to wring a reaction from him, it's muted surprise. You have no idea if he's only tolerating you because John asked for it, or if he really doesn't mind, or if he thinks you'll turn the seas to blood if he offends you, or what. You never know if he's scared or happy or pleased, so you make it your daily goal to avoid any interaction that could evoke anything other than utter apathy.

Apart from that, if you're being completely honest, John's dad is an excellent host. The best any guest could hope for. He leaves you alone outside of the occasional sprinkle of questions about John and the old world, and at least that much he deserves. You would be hard-pressed to find any fault in the way he's been treating you.

And perhaps that's the problem.

You aren't used to being coddled. You aren't used to being a dependent. You hate relying on a stranger's hospitality, and the longer it goes on, the more it grates. Both of you are still testing the waters, but it's getting harder and harder to decouple yourself from this house and this man, which is the last thing you want. You're a strong independent man that don't need no father figure.

In an attempt to stave off the problem, you start looking into how to amass untold riches through dubiously legitimate means. Maybe chipping in with the finances would make this less of an unbalanced arrangement, is the idea. Tip it more towards a housemates type of relationship than whatever it is now.

It takes only an afternoon to break the problem wide open. The solution was, ironically, sitting in your sylladex all along: the turntop.

You alchemized the ridiculous computer during your original session, when you first kitted out your alchemiter with all the bullshit you could fit and went wild with your newly scavenged grist. The computer had gone into storage, promptly forgotten, only broken out a few times over your years-long journey for the occasional gag. It never crossed your mind to look any further into it.

But it had cost an arm and a leg to alchemize at the time. There was a set of timetables blended in there, for fuck's sake. It was way more than a fancy computer, and a bit of investigation digs up the answer.

The turntop comes with a COBOL library preinstalled, by the uninteresting name of tempo. A 1.58 GB black box that decompiles into gibberish. The first time you sit down in the living room and pull the turntop out of your sylladex, an automatic background process immediately starts decompressing and recompiling a segment of that 1.58 GB, writing a second library to disk: tempo1.1-beta. 678 MB. When you try, the first library no longer works, assuming it ever did.

It takes slightly more time to read through the man pages for both.

They're time libraries. Software that breaks physics inside a virtual box. They create temporal compartments in digital memory that behave like microcosms of physical Sburban space-time, basically letting you break conventional computational complexity theory over your knee like a twig. It's quantum computing on steroids. tempo was supposed to let you branch virtual timelines and perform nigh infinite parallel computations; tempo-1.1 procures stable self-consistent solutions to any timelike recursive system.

The virtual compartments are closed boxes from start to end, so you can't do any actual time shit to real life like sending information back in time, but it does make most purely computational challenges trivial as long as you can frame it the right way.

Like, for example, bitcoin mining.

You didn't mean to crash the crypto market. It just sort of... happened.

John's dad disapproved of that, so you had to put a stop to it and start selling "supercomputer" time to struggling PhDs instead, which turned out much harder than you'd thought, since academics aren't that eager to trust random Internet people advertising frankly implausible computation speeds over sketchy channels. Or that eager to learn COBOL, for that matter. Still, it's either that or blackmailing the NSA with the backable threat to single-handedly obliterate SHA as a trustworthy cryptographic security system.

He accepts the money without objection, to your mild surprise. But it doesn't help. None of it does.

Nothing changes the fact that you don't belong here, not in this idyllic suburbia, with a doting foster father and three square meals a day delivered to your doorstep. You belong in a cramped two-person apartment roasting under the sizzling sun. You belong with metal and cheap blades and cinderblocks. With crab-legged laptop computers and mutant chess monsters dreaming in green goop. With racy troll romance novels and stuffed dragon plushies, shitty coffee from suspicious machines, with can towns ruled by autocratic despots.

He feels it too. He stops calling you for meals, leaving only a quiet knock on your door and the tupperware on the table. Leftovers in the fridge, requests on the post-it on the door. You do the dishes one night when he forgets, then that becomes the routine: he sticks everything in the sink once he's done and retreats to his study; you slink out to refuel and clean up when you feel like leaving the room. It's a relief, having something to occupy your hands with after he spent the first week insisting on handling everything himself. It's still not enough.

Eventually, you come to a decision. It's not an easy one.

This wasn't the plan. It's not, strictly speaking, the most prudent of choices. Nonetheless, the writing is on the wall. It has been for some time.

Less than three weeks into your stay, you leave.

Not without leaving a note, of course. And an emergency contact, in case Imperial goons or the FBI come knocking—John would murder you if his dad got kidnapped and you didn't even notice.

He's a man of few words. A few minutes on the phone to confirm that yes, you're not going to be coming back, and no, you don't need any help getting settled wherever you're going, and that's it. He comes online now and then, as if silently offering for you to call him back, but he doesn't force the issue.

And so you don't.

You feel guilty even thinking it, but the liberty feels like a weight off your shoulders.

You hop states for a while. Museums and archaeological sites are your first targets after staying cooped up with your books for so long, but they don't yield as much as you hope. There are fraymotifs and gear you find, but you aren't going to steal historical relics without good reason, and extra skills don't do much for you at this stage. What you need is information, and all of that is buried in the literature.

So, with palpable reluctance, off to school you go. After skimming a healthy spread of university websites, you settle on the Oregon Institute as your first stop. You never heard of the place on old Earth, but it's a top-ranked university now, which is enough to be interesting by itself. But add the fact that its Sburbology departments are some of the best in the world, and it's pretty much no-brainer.

It's almost September when you disembark your cab at the front of the faculty building, waving the driver off as he tries to ask about change. After the sticky heat of what was apparently an unusually warm Boston summer, the cool breeze of Willamette Valley is a welcome relief on your unprotected skin. Adjusting your collar of your stiff bargain bin shirt as you walk, you make your way over the trimmed grass towards the entrance of the stone building towering in front you.

The Department of Sburbological Sciences is an odd mix of medieval and modern aesthetics. The library it hosts juts out from its side, a three-storey turret with full-height glass windows going all halfway around the sides. If your build had put points into stealth, you could have snuck in through one of the openable panes on the upper floors, but as it stands and without Rose to give you a hand, you have to resort to more conventional methods of subterfuge.

You stroll in the unlocked front doors, giving the room and reception desk a cursory glance. Library entry is gated behind a card scanner, but that's only to be expected. You slip into the washroom, hole up in a stall, and wait. It only takes a few minutes for the sound of footsteps to show up, followed by a soft tinkle in the stall next to you, and then a door swinging shut and the sound of running water.

It's a simple matter to tail the person out. It's a dark-skinned man with brown spectacles who looks like he knows what he's doing. He stalks past reception briskly, pushes his wallet against the sensor, and enters the library without a fuss. Emulating his gait, you casually catch the door with your foot and follow him in.

No one stops you.

You find a corner near the Mesoamerican Horology shelf and set yourself up.

The morning passes in a blink, then the afternoon. At five, a tealblood wearing an orange unsigned cardigan and a staff lanyard kicks you out. Not a soul questions your presence.

The next day, you come back.

This town has its charm.

Not anything that special. It's a university town off-season without much interesting history or anything, as far as you can tell. It grows on you, nonetheless.

But that's not why you decide to stick around.

The reason you haven't moved on to somewhere new is simply that you can't be assed. You have the layout of the city and its relevant buildings committed to memory at this point, and acclimating yourself again is a chore you'd rather not go through without a compelling reason. You went into this reluctant, hoping that you'd be able to find an easy lead quickly and run off to more tangible things, but the more you study, the harder it is to stop.

Not all of it is a newfound appreciation for academic erudition and the pursuit of knowledge. Much of it is the realisation that—to put it simply—you know jack shit.

Wikipedia isn't the font of all human knowledge. It's kind of obvious when you put it that way, but you never realized how much of the informational iceberg is hiding behind every set of square brackets. Every reference you pull off the shelves and crack open is a can of worms that nearly always leaves you more confused than you started. Sburbian literature is a miasma of uncorroborated, disagreeing data spanning more than a hundred years, of interpretations and retractions and refutations ad infinitum, half because none of it makes any fucking sense. They've been calling Sburb an emerging, exciting field for a decade. What that really means is that reproducibility is a myth and consensus is the most hilarious joke they've ever heard.

Your plan, originally, was to get the bottom of this mess before Jade and the others hit Alternia.

You don't think it's possible to do that in the span of a mortal lifetime.

And so this is your home now. The northeastern corner of the Moore library's second floor. The spot behind the microfilm room at the Classics Resource Center. The round table in the Reagan Archives basement level.

Three and a half months isn't enough time. No amount of time will be enough, to be fair, but you're learning so much while you try. A lot of the anthropological stuff is plain rubbish, like how you supposedly banished the eight luck demons of Arachne with a magic sheepskin as a young strapping lad of twenty three, but other things—Land lore, studies of symbolism, alchemical philosophy, radiometric analysis—they're intoxicating. It's the only way to describe the feeling. Maybe none of it is relevant, or all of it is, but it's starting to feel like it doesn't matter.

When the deadline for your decision comes and the jaws of causality start to close, you would like to say that it was a hard decision.

It wasn't.

Only weeks ago, you would have rather strangled yourself than suffer more of this torturous limbo. Now, the additional time you take gratefully.

What decision? It's a simple concept. Before the 2013 Fall Quarter starts and the tidal wave of students traps the flow of time, hit the nuclear button. Turn back time.

The web of relevance around these lands is sparse. With the other three gods off in space and any event of real importance far in the distance, the laws of causality has retracted the stick up its ass a smidge. It's useful to hone your time powers, which you're still grinding at when you can, but it's also made more ambitious endeavors possible.

You think you can pull off one month. More than that is stretching it, but you'll take as many weeks you can buy. It will be the first time you use time travel outside of controlled tests in this new world, but you've improved in leaps and bounds over the last weeks, partly from the dreams, partly the practice. You haven't tried anything quite so dramatic yet, but things in Sburb tend to work out for the first time only when you need them to.

Before you do that, however, there's something that you really need to handle.

You need somewhere to live.

A god tier player doesn't strictly need sleep physiologically, but psychologically, time awake takes a toll. You've been napping in the libraries now and then, but somewhere to actually pass the night in blissful unconsciousness is something you've been putting off forever. If you're going to make a stand here for most of these four months, a more permanent solution is necessary.

Without documents, renting a place could be a problem. Logically it must be possible, since undocumented immigrants aren't universally homeless, and having stacks of cash to throw at problems would probably help, but you can't be bothered to figure it out.

Instead, you go hunting for abandoned places to invade.

Population around here has been in steady decline since the 80s. The Sburb boom in the early 2000s brought in some people—the university was a known name in the field even then—but the bump of growth didn't last. The result is a not negligible number of buildings, residential and otherwise, that aren't precisely abandoned, but perpetually unoccupied.

So why pay for a room when you can squat?

Okay, there are obvious answers. The legality of the matter. The awkward conversation if someone shows up at the door and asks what the hell you're doing. The abandoned building not being as abandoned as it seems. It's a horrible idea, to be honest, and you admit that part of the reason you're hatching this bird-brained scheme is because a filthy rich literal god living in a hole in the wall checks all the boxes on the bizarre eccentric recluse aesthetic and is deliciously ironic on multiple levels. Which isn't a very good reason, now that you think about it.

In your defense, you aren't going into this fully blind.

You browse rental listings and Google street view for candidates, making a shortlist of twelve potential targets. You visit each in turn, noting which ones have door locks taped over with clear packing tape. Only five of them, which is about the ballpark you expected.

Then, giving the finger to the inexorable march of seasons, you wrap yourself in chains of time and wind the clock back.

You land on the first of August, high noon.

The sun is blazing when you crack the storage closet door open and step out. It was only starting to cool down when you left, and now it's the height of summer again, which ticks you off more than you thought it would. You wouldn't have flinched at this three years ago. Hunkering in a space rock for years and then more recently air-conditioned libraries has spoiled you.

You've been trying to use normal person clothes in the last few—future few?—weeks to avoid drawing attention, but you know what? You don't think you can put up with the caprice of the summer weather for what could be months. Who gives a fuck what people think? You don't have to deal with this shit.

You check that no one's around and, with a thought, switch out your Earth-made clothes for a more conservatively tailored remix of your god hood. It's close enough to a T-shirt and jogging pants to not look too outrageous, and while the shoes can't be changed, they're fly as fuck out of the box anyway. The world will just have to deal with it.

It's the work of a few hours to visit each of the twelve original candidates and stealthily tape the locks, but you manage it without getting the cops called on you. After that, you turn your attention to the five that made the cut.

The first one you break in from the side window facing the woods. It's one of those with a simple turning latch on the inside, which you go back in time to open for yourself after entering in order to let you enter in the first place. It's an elementary sleight of hand you pulled dozens of times in Sburb, but never under the new temporal ruleset, so you almost start to feel smug about it... until you remember that you could have done that with the door in the first place, instead of having to wiggle through a tiny window gap.

The interior full of books. Literally, cardboard boxes stacked to the ceiling, each of them packed to the brim with dusty paperbacks. Based on the few containers you open and peer into, it's mostly 20th-century science fiction and fantasy. There's barely any space to squeeze between the boxes, but you persevere and shuffle your way to the end of the room in the name of thoroughness, and it really is all there is: books upon books devouring a solid attic's worth of space. Eventually you locate a thick file folder at the top of one of the stacks. It seems to be some sort of... library checkout book? Looks like someone is twenty years overdue. The cover just says "OISFS".

So that's a bust. Whether or not anyone has been here in the last five years, you can't justify throwing out someone's stuff to make room for yourself.

The second one is farther out from the town center, secluded behind a perimeter wall. You do the same breaking and entering trick, but with the door this time. This one has a few metal racks in it, enough dust to kill a dozen asthmatics, and a rotten dead rat in the corner to crown the visitation experience. It's not that big, but it shouldn't be too difficult to clean up. You keep it on the shortlist for now.

The third one has a table, a few rolled-up banners and an ancient dot matrix printer that's been emptied of its ink cartridges and paper. It's close to your usual hangouts and in a relatively non-sketchy part of town, but it's too clean. Someone's been here in the last year, and if they cared enough to clean things up, someone's probably here regularly. If it's a student society or something that uses this place then that would explain why the lock wasn't touched through August.

The fourth looks like a garden shed, even though there isn't anything to garden in a two-block radius. It's the only one of the five that you can even begin to peg the purpose of at a glance. You break in and discover...

A garden shed.

As with the first one, you can't really dispose all of this equipment easily outside of stealing them via captchalogue, so it's out as well.

Then it's only the last site left. When you open it for yourself, the Dave on the inside slips past you without a word and scuttles off into the street. You blink at your receding self, baffled, before cautiously stepping into the dark room yourself. The thick door swings shut behind you with an heavy slam. It takes a few seconds for your eyes to adjust to the scarce light trickling from the barred window-slits above your head.

Blades, too many of them, line the walls to your sides. Curved scimitars, longswords, sickles, knives, scythes that don't look for a second like they're going to be reaping crops... Half of them seem brand new, straight off the black market racks, and the other half—worn. Used, chipped from edge parrying in a way you're deeply familiar with, some of them stained with odd, dull colors. Browns. Dark, barf-like yellows. Discolored shades of green to teal.

At the end of the room, on a wider, deeper rack, there are guns. They're sleek and reflective even in the dark, like they were pulled right from a gangster movie or one of Jade's home cleaning collages. Oddly enough, the firearms feel like the least overtly menacing thing on display here. In front of the gun rack, on the floor, there are three— four black briefcases.

You close your eyes, count to five and rewind yourself one minute back in time. You turn around, fumble the thick lock mechanism open with gloves you remember to put on only at the last second, and open the door to greet your own earlier face. Without sparing a second, you push past him and stalk down the dirt path.

...Number two it is, then.

As you jog back and slip into what's apparently going to be your new hideout, you decide to never speak of that place again.

It takes a while to deconvolute your modi, but your captchalogue decks hold samples of every home furnishing asset you could ever need. With god tier physiology and the ability to render objects in your hand weightless, it only takes you afternoon to decorate with the barest essentials. You'll have to replace the lock—you know you will, since the rusty piece of shit you're seeing now is different from the one you saw in the future—but you're going to leave that for future Dave. This is enough busywork for day one.

The next day, you go once more unto the breach.

On the second of August of 2013, you step into the Oregon Institute Department of Sburbian Antiquity for the first time, again, but for real this time, you swear.

This time around, you notice your reception being a lot colder and more curious than when you previously showed up/will soon show up later. Their security did strike you as a bit lax at the time, though you never questioned it too much.

With the benefit of hindsight, it's obviously because when you first arrived from your perspective (a week or so in the future worldwise) , you had actually already been bumming around for a while, and now that you've gone back in time, they're meeting you for the first time from their perspective. Thankfully, by now you're already familiar enough with the place that your pretend-I-belong act passes the sniff test.

You won't be able to pull this trick again. The timestream is already saturated; you're already forced to go out of your way to avoid crossing your own past self's physical way as your timelines lap over. Slotting another parallel Dave is just not feasible. One benefit to this bizarre new temporal paradigm is that you can feel it when you're verging on paradox—a Time player's sixth sense is meant to give nudges about that, but here it's a hundred times stronger. More visceral, like a noose tightening around your neck. You don't know whether to be thankful or annoyed at that.

As time passes, you start paying attention to some of the faces around you. You aren't the only one that spends all their waking hours in one library or another, and slowly and surely, you begin to pick up a few faces.

There's the frazzled kid who looks only a little older than you that shows up at nine on the clock every morning in the Archaeology department, with only a personal copy of the Oxford Companion and a computer which she hunches over reading papers and making notes all day. You and her seem to have come to a mutual pact to aggressively ignore each other's existence, which is fine with you.

Antiquity's reference collections are guarded by one sole bastion of residual relevance, a grumpy balding man that doesn't look like he cares much for conversation. It's only thanks to his uncomfortably frequent toilet breaks that you can ever get access to the place, since traffic otherwise is practically nil.

There's the tanned guy with the rimmed glasses and gray waistcoat who you distantly remember following into the Sburboscience library the very first time you visited. He appears fairly frequently, usually popping in and out to check out a book, but sometimes to stay and play slow-motion Jenga with an ever-accumulating mountain of paper. A younger man in casual wear sometimes tags along and rambles away about mineralogy as they scrape the aisles until the librarian on shifts shows up to hiss angrily at them.

Those, you also get to know—the librarians. Most of them are strangely trolls. Teals, specifically. The mystery is cleared up when the one with the gibbous horns mentions it while helping you look for Simmons and Astra's Spectroscoper's Handbook of Nuclear Pararesonance Holography. Allegedly, lawyers on Alternia are expected to memorize their provincial High Court's judiciary collections and reference relevant items by row and shelf on the spot as needed, and those collections accrue entire new rooms of material on a seasonal basis, which makes a "mere" floor of "not even that efficiently packed" bookshelves wiggler grub to them.

The downside for hiring tealbloods is that they tend to be uncomfortably vocal about making the misplacement of library books punishable by dismemberment.

The first time you actually talk to a fellow visitor of your own volition is when you hear the science duo happen to be chatting about the exact same thing you're struggling with. It's a long-term projects that you hope will pay off with actionable intel: the triangulation of a hypothetical common spatial origin for all the primary Sburbian sites.

For something straight from mundane archeological methods, you expected there to be a better consensus, but the literature on dating is scattered. You haven't found a textbook that gives a concise and definitive summary of the state of the science instead of waffling about comparing metrics, so when you hear Mr Mineralogy giving a seminar on Sburbian radioisotopes in the middle of what's supposed to be a quiet reading space, you give in to temptation.

"Excuse me," you utter.

The two stumble and spin around mid-dialogue at the sudden voice from behind. You swallow a snerk at the younger guy's moment of panic before he lays eyes on you and the expression melts into relief. Jumpy much? you want to chuckle, but you control yourself.

"Geez, are you a ninja or something?" he sighs.

The other man pushes his glasses up, giving his blond companion an amused side eye. "Can we help you?" he says politely.

"Um," you stall out, momentarily forgetting what you were here for. "Yeah. Uh, I heard you talking about Sburbian radiodating, and you seem to be spectacularly informed on the topic-"

"I'd hope so," the younger guy coughs.

"-and I've been stuck on this thing, so it would be awesome if you could give me a few pointers. Yeah," you finish lamely. You glance between them, trying to gauge reactions.

"0x3A28213A," the same guy says immediately, before catching himself and waving away your baffled expression. "Sorry, dumb joke. Ask away."

You take a deep breath.

"Are there any good books for generalized paleolocation theory? I mean, later than Larson and Green? Or any comprehensive meta-analysis study will do, I guess. All the big name books kind of..."

You wave your hand vaguely. The blond nods understandingly, tapping his chin, but doesn't answer. You stand there awkwardly, letting the prop book you brought along fall to your side as you wait.

After a pause, he abruptly chuckles.

"That's a big question you're asking."

Your eyes drift to the older man next to him. His genial look has dimmed from what it was earlier.

"Listen," the spectacled man starts. "Mr..."

You fumble to come up with a fake name before you realize that it's completely pointless, since your real name might as well be fake for all the approximately zero institutional databases you exist in.

"Dave."

"Dave, I assume you're a student here?"

You shrug in faux reluctance. This part you prepared for, since it was bound to come up some time or later.

"I was mostly taking core science courses last year. I'm only doing the Sburb route this term."

"I see," he says slowly. "See, dating in Sburb is inherently problematic for a number of reasons, many of them difficult to explain without a deeper base. You're not going to find an master reference like what you're looking for," he says.

The younger guy pipes up, saying, "You'll have a better idea once Sburbian Archaeology 102 gets through you. And if you survive long enough, you might get the lucky chance to listen to me whine about it all in Xenominerals 366."

You frown. That's not what you wanted to hear, but they do sound pretty authoritative on the subject.

"So..." you say slowly.

"You should attend SBA 102 and 103 in Fall. I don't think signups are still open?..." He glances at the older man, who shakes his head. "But it you haven't signed up you can still go to the lectures. That should give you enough of a foundation to appreciate the issues, even if I wouldn't expect to be publishing papers any time soon. Books don't like covering topics like this. The field changes too fast."

"I see," you mutter. "Thank you."

"No problem," he answers happily.

So there's your answer. You didn't get identified as a masquerading miscreant and kicked out, but your spoils of war aren't much to be look at. You were banking on being able to read your way through a facsimile of a university education before, but you've already hit several dead ends because of your level of knowledge. If problems like this keep cropping up, there might be some issues with that plan.

Oh well. You'll deal with it as it goes. You have to remind yourself again that all of this research is secondary to your main quest: hone your powers, prepare for the fight, keep Earth going on business as normal, until everything is in position for the final, decisive checkmate.

The partial success of this first contact emboldens you, however. You're still hesitant to start cozying up to anyone else, but you come to the spectacles guy for a quick query now and then, and the other dude as well whenever he's around. You slip your questions in when he's moving about, usually a simple "what's a good book you recommend on X?", other times one of the more niche types that prompts a roll of the shoulders and an exasperated sigh, but he never seems to mind much.

It's not all one-sided. One time, you see him jotting notes on Lohacsian architecture and puzzling over a particular building that even now, years past the last time you saw it in the flesh, is still engraved in your brain. He's nose deep in a book and scribbling at peak velocity, but you can't help yourself.

"The LOHACSE trading floor is steelplate tile, not goldbrick," you toss out as you pass.

Carten's head snaps around. You asked him for a name at some point. He insists on going by first name, and if he thought you'd argue, he was wrong. "Really?" he asks. "Encyclopedia of the Incipisphere says it's goldbrick."

That stops you in your tracks, because you're most definitely right, but Incipisphere is some good shit too. You drop your book off at your table and stroll over, peering over his shoulder.

"So it does," you mutter. Right there on the page. "I thought you're not supposed to cite tertiary sources," you mumble, dragging a snort of amusement from him. "No, no, I'm sure I'm right. What's that reference? Towler 1991."

You were leafing through the LOHACSE site report only last week. It takes a minute to hunt down the book and bring it over, and once you've found the page, you jab a finger at the line triumphantly.

"There. Incipisphere must have misquoted—" you flip back a few pages "—here, the artifact trading floor."

The man hums, raising an impressed eyebrow at you. There's no denying the mild thrill that the acknowledgment sends through you.

"Nice catch. I think I'll write to the publisher if it hasn't been fixed in a more recent edition. I'll make sure to credit you." There's a smirk in his voice as he says it.

You waggle a finger at him. "Nice try, but no thanks."

He's been trying to get you to give up your last name all week. To be honest, there's not much of a reason to not give it to him except that every bit of information strains the credulity of your studentship just a little bit more, but now that he's started the game, you're sure as hell not losing.

He shrugs. You go back to your work. The next time you see the other dude—Sam—he cocks a knowing eyebrow at you.

Like that, August flies past in a blink. Term is on the horizon again, the city waking up in preparation for the tidal wave of a new year. You're braced to have your space overrun by the actual students paying out of their nose to fund these facilities, you're fully prepared to concoct layers of increasingly ambiguous and convoluted cover stories and smokescreen tactics, and yes—you know that at some point, the jig will be up.

You can't pretend to be a student forever. Not when the real deals start swarming and talking, and they begin to wonder why no one has ever seen you on a class list, or why no one's ever been grouped with you for a project, or why you don't seem to exist anywhere outside of four different departments' libraries and the occasional lecture hall.

You'll hold on for as long as you can, but when you're found out, there will be no choice but to vanish. Everyone will chalk it up as another crazy kid and forget about you in another month. You have pastures—maybe not greener pastures, but ones fresh ones—to move onto. There are leads you've scrounged up that you can follow through and sites which might hold something for their returned hero, though the exact execution of those plans remains in uncertainty.

That was the plan, anyway.

It gets derailed.

You're in the Morrison Center, two whole miles away from your by now most common stomping grounds of Sburbological Sciences.

So it strikes you as odd when you glimpse Carten through the tiny glass window of the entrance, flashing a guest pass at the receptionist outside. It strikes you as even more odd when the automatic door swings open and he meanders in, more lackadaisically than you've ever seen the guy walk for as long as you've coexisted in a department with him. A department which, you'll reiterate, is not the one you're both currently located in.

When he makes a beeline—he tries to make it not look like a beeline, but you know a fucking beeline when you see one—for you, your oddity meter ticks from a mere curious peculiarity to a full-on red flag.

But you can handle one nosy college professor. So you sit yourself down at your claimed table, pretend to read, and wait. Only seconds later, the predictable sound of a clearing throat comes from behind you.

"Would you mind if I sat down?" he asks quietly.

"Oh!" you remark, turning your head. "Fancy seeing you here."

His lips tug up at the corners. He knows you knew he was here, but the sarcasm game is one he knows you play. It doesn't mean anything yet.

"Help yourself," you finally answer his earlier question, kicking a chair out for him.

He takes it, his fingers forming a steeple on the table in front of him as he settles in. The oddity meter breaks through the roof and starts letting of a screaming alarm inside your head. Those are some serious we need a talk moves he's breaking out already. This must be serious business.

Carten cuts straight to the point.

"You're not a student."

Your hand freezes midway through turning the page.

"Uh," you begin, your mind frantically replaying everything you've done in the few days since you last saw him. "Why do you say that?"

You haven't slipped up. You're 90% sure you haven't. You've been doing exactly the same things as you have for weeks and weeks before.

That means he always knew, and just wasn't interested in blowing your cover. But then why now? Is it because term's starting and he can't justify a stranger eating up departmental resources, and he's giving you an out while it's still an option? How did he find out in the first place?

"I'm an admissions officer for the university," he says plainly. "I searched the database."

...Fair. You'll give him that.

"Maybe you mistyped my name?" you suggest. "You don't even know the whole thing."

He shakes his head, giving you a are we really doing this? expression. You shed the innocent look. He's right—the time for games are over.

"Fine," you relent. "I'm not a student. What's it to you?"

He sighs.

"You're a very intelligent young man. Not only that, you're driven. I don't know where you came from or why you're here, or how you're doing this, but there's a good head on your shoulders."

Okay? You were ready to bolt if he started calling campus security, but now you have no clue where he's going with this.

What is he trying to say?

"Yesterday, one of my incoming freshmen emailed in. Family emergency, we're talking about a deferral, but anyway, he's not coming this year. And since as you know our core Sburb track has a separate admissions process and cap, that means we have an open slot to fill. We would really prefer to fill it, since there are parts of the course that hinge on specific student numbers."

Wait.

Is he...

Your head starts to spin. Part of you is racing ahead and pulling apart your plans for the next three months, throwing expendable parts away, fitting things together to see how this could possibly work. Another part is protesting, insisting that surely he can't be saying what I think he's saying.

"I've already called everyone on our waiting list, but it's too close to the start of term. They're all committed to their other choices. And that leaves me with a problem. But maybe also an opportunity."

He smiles.

"As I said. You're not a student. But. Would you like to be?"

Chapter Text

"Dr. Astra! Just who I wanted to see!"

The flap of the tent floated down behind the scientist as she ducked into the canopied space. The man who had spoken launched himself to his feet, laptop computer abandoned in a moment, his arms spread out in enthusiastic greeting. Opposite to him was a troll with antlered horns and black contacts who simply glanced up for a second before returning to her work.

Jade sighed, ducking around the man's encroaching limbs as she moved out of the entrance.

"Dr. Towler. Do you have to make a scene every time we meet?"

He swung around, nonplussed by the chilly reception.

"Do I? No. Will I?" He grinned as if he was making a clever joke, but Jade was in no mood for dramatics.

Only three days after she had her concept of reality overturned, her least favorite American contemporary had sent for her with an urgent request for consultation on xenometrics. The message had been curt and brief: a time and date for pick up, an assurance of the critical importance of the request, and a suggestion to take a week out of her schedule. It read so much like something straight from the script of Hollywood's next CGI disaster that Jade had called the man herself to verify that she wasn't being pranked.

Attempts to dig into what the hell was going on over a series of heated phone calls had yielded only the vague idea that it had to do with the sudden eruption of a Polynesian volcano that had been on the news earlier, but as much as Towler irritated her, she knew that he didn't bullshit where it counted. If he said what she saw would blow her socks off, it would. So she had packed, and she had come, and now she was here.

Now that she actually was on-site with the jackass, she was almost reconsidering her decision.

"Tell me what was so important you couldn't send it over email," she grunted.

"Ah," said Towler with a wide grin. "Now-"

The troll's head snapped up abruptly, nearly clipping Jade with the movement of her antlers. She narrowed her eyes. "Wait, George. You didn't tell her—"

"I wanted to keep it a surprise!"

Jesus fucking Christ.

Jade pinched the bridge of her nose. "So you kept your mouth shut just to be annoying. Got it."

"Plus, at the time we didn't know half the stuff we do now! This island is full of surprises," the man blathered gleefully. "Penetration prospectors think there's a meteor site buried under all the frozen lava, we have some cranes digging that up, but the crazy thing is there are NPR signatures all over the place! Stronger than there's ever been on record!"

"The highest we've caught is ninety sigma," the troll injected. Jade nearly tripped, her head snapping around in disbelief.

"I can't imagine what could event could have left such a mark, and to last through primoarchaic time scales? Unless, the alternative is, it's—"

"It's fresh," Jade muttered.

"—exactly! You read my mind," Towler finished with a broad grin.

The female scientist shook her head, absorbing the information. Ninety sigma? Her skin was crawling—did this have anything to do with what the Witch and the Seer had been messing with? Had they been here?

She should have read through her data before stowing her phone back down in the Catacombs. Even only a skim would have caught something like that, and then she would have a benchmark to compare to. Every day she came with new ways she could have wrangled that whole fiasco better, but by now it was too little, too late. It was maddening.

"Excuse me," she found herself saying to the troll. "I don't believe we've met. The name's Jade Astra, I work in Echidnian geology, Sburbian materials, spectral analysis... and what the kids call 'xenometrics' nowadays, apparently." She shot the man who called her there a scathing look. The man was supposed to be stopping the science journalists from making up stupid words, not spearheading the efforts.

"Pleased," the troll answered, shaking her hand with a practiced grip that didn't do much to mask her crushing strength. "Vismes Talond. Metamolecular dynamics. We actually corresponded briefly on the Omnu project...?"

"Ah." Jade racked her brain. "I'm sorry, I don't remember."

The troll shrugged, not seeming offended.

"So, not that I don't appreciate being brought in on the juicy details, but what precisely am I supposed to be doing here?" asked Jade as she set her briefcase down on the table.

"Resolving our nuclear pararesonance spectra," Towler said.

Jade scowled. "You could get a grad student to do that."

Sure, her name was on the 2002 paper, but they lectured on NPR in undergrad courses these days, for God's sake. It wasn't exactly rocket science. The Spectroscoper's Handbook existed for a reason. Bringing her in was overkill; it couldn't be that simple.

Her answer came quickly.

"The object signature isn't far-time," and her presumptions came crashing down.

Shit, of course—fresh, they'd said. The algorithms they developed way back in the early 2000s were only good for large time-distances, which was supposed to be every normal Sburbian excavation site given their hundred million-year order of age, but if this signature was fresh...

"That's..." she muttered, exhuming through memories that seemed ancient to her now. "You should have called Jack Bragg. He wrote the diffraction kernels, which is what we're going to have to rework."

"Called". It was still confounding, the fact that she had been simply called to a remote dig site like this with barely notice. This couldn't be Towler's doing, even if her name had probably come from his mouth—he was president of the AICSS, but that was miles away from the type of pull necessary to mobilize UN Maritime Resources. There was more to this than met the eye.

Towler shrugged at the mild rebuke. "I didn't know, but now you're here, and he isn't. Can you do it?"

"Hmph."

Jade did a mental review of what she remembered of Jack's notes. She hadn't done that much of what one might call algorithm development over her career, but her work was novel enough that she had to dig into the nuts and bolts of the programming often enough to basically amount to the same thing. That wasn't what she was thinking about, however: no, it was the Witch's words that lingered in her mind. A throwaway line, but it had stuck with her.

Two-phase convection dynamics.

The doctor had gone over the literature on the topic countless times in the days between their meeting and now, trying to understand what insight another her could have found in that alternate history the goddess had strongly implied. She had come up empty. It could be that someone else had made the breakthrough in her place and there was nothing to find anymore, or maybe this her hadn't lived the life and read the books she needed to find that spark of inspiration. Perhaps it was arrogance to think that she could reproduce what might have been years of work in only an afternoon based on one tenuous connection.

But assuming she understood the Witch's words correctly, then another Jade Astra had made a name for herself in computational fluid dynamics. And if that was possible...

"I can," Jade decided. "We do have something bigger than a laptop to run the CHR, right?"

"Alternian biocore," the troll—Talond—answered without looking up. "I can walk you through the interface."

Well. Not like Jade could complain about having some of the galaxy's most premier computing hardware at her disposal, but she had to grimace at the prospect of learning a new system on top of getting back up to scratch on Leicester transformations.

"So what are we waiting for?" she sighed. "Give me the tour. Let's see what you have up your sleeve."

When Jade had first disembarked from the ship at the temporary port they had set up, she'd wondered why the air was so clean less than a hundred hours after a volcano blew up right there. Now, as their newformed party of four trekked over veins of solidified lava and blackened cinders, she voiced the same question out loud.

"Rain," was the answer from the scrawny meteorologist that led the way. "It was raining through the eruption and for two days after. Stripped the ash from the air. See the beds from the lahar?"

He pointed. Her eyes followed to the washed-out gullies marring the side of the mountain.

"This whole face drained into that trench over there and flooded the plain, dumping into the harbor. We think the coastline was much farther back before the eruption."

"Yeah, what's with that huge trench?" Jade asked, craning her head at the gorge he was referring to. It was a huge channel, starting close to the neck of the volcano and carving its way down the side before terminating abruptly at the bottom, like some titan had clawed a groove out of the land.

He shrugged. "It definitely isn't a natural fluvial landform. Leading theory is a particularly large piece of debris from the volcano, though the actual vulcanologists around here don't seem to like that idea very much."

She was inclined to agree. What kind of monstrous boulder would it take to gouge that much matter out of the side of a mountain? She couldn't say it outright, of course, but act of god were the words that jumped to mind. How could they not, after what she'd seen?

Then again, when life had just handed you a shiny new hammer, everything looked like a nail. Evidence of the supernatural wasn't proof against the mundane. No, it was better to assume the absence of divine intervention first.

"Say," huffed Towler, who was trailing a few meters behind them. He was surprisingly out of shape for what he looked like. "Jade, I've heard about some strange things in the Catacombs."

She sighed.

"Oh?" said Talond. The troll leaped, soaring meters through the air to slam down in a crouch next to Jade. She dusted her fingers off, righting herself after the casual display of superhuman physicality. "What's this?"

The meteorologist—whose name Jade had already forgotten—glared at the troll. "Don't do that. Lava tubes can collapse. We're not fishing you out of a hole."

Towler raised an eyebrow at Jade, waiting for her answer.

"Lost an EVISC-61," she answered curtly.

Talond let out a choked laugh. "You broke an EVISC-model vehicle? How? Did you crush it in a converging trench? Or did you finally find your stupid first guardian? Unless you mean you literally lost it?"

"I heard the vehicle was last recorded entering the Catacombs, and then you showed up swimming to the platform without it," faux-whispered Towler. He was catching up to them—wait, why had they stopped?

Jade ignored them and kept walking. She didn't know where the epicenter they were heading for was, but they had been going in the same direction for minutes.

The troll frowned as they started moving again. "Why would you... I thought humans could only survive tens of atmospheres of pressure at most."

"That's correct," the meteorologist said.

"I'm not really able to comment on the issue," Jade stated, silencing them all with a glare, and that put an end to that discussion.

The story at that moment, still working its way up the bureaucratic chain, was that she had observed the apoptosis of Echidna and then subsequently been trapped under falling debris. An unidentified mechanism teleported her to the surface, which based on all available information, was being tentatively pegged as the still poorly documented first guardian of Earth.

It wasn't the most foolproof of stories. Jade didn't know what the gods had done with the remains of the Tomb Raider, but once the investigation teams got there, she would find out if her cover story held up to scrutiny.

The rest of the trip progressed in silence. The troll kept sneaking her strange looks, Towler looked put out but not put out enough by her non-answer, and the other human was doing his utmost best to ignore the brewing atmosphere of discomfort. Whatever, they could deal.

Eventually, they stopped at a small flag hammered through the volcanic rock.

"This is Epicenter 2," said Towler, clapping his hands. "Epicenter 1 is at the base of the trench, but it's less accessible at the moment. Both are buried under the volcanic matter, so they were here before the eruption. Or possibly made during."

"I take we're running on the recent event hypothesis?" the other male asked.

"You got a better alternative?" Towler fired back. Turning back to Jade, he continued, "You've seen the ground-penetrating radar scans."

Jade nodded. "This one is the cone, right?"

The radar scans gave them an idea of what the topography had been like before the volcano slathered everything in lava and pyroclastic material. Both epicenters found so far featured obviously unnatural blocks carved from the rock and soil, almost geometrically perfect within a 5cm tolerance. Some of the people video calling in and out of what they had christened the "war room" were throwing around ideas like diffusion-limited corrosion processes, but to Jade, it was only more evidence of divine action.

"These are the strongest signatures, but there are small traces—again, near-time—dotted on a lot of other places on this island. Also, we think parts of the meteor site come close to the surface below here, but they're digging for access elsewhere so they don't mess up the signature."

"Some common sense around here, at least," Jade sighed.

They went to work.

The team had come prepared. The other three unpacked the sensor sticks and assembled them while Jade scouted the area with a handheld Marshall counter. That gave them enough to sketch out the perimeter of the signature and eyeball the nodes for the resonance sensors, and then most of the work left was hammering the stakes in. Since this was only a rough run to get the lay of the land and calibrate the equipment, precision wasn't that much of a concern.

Fifteen minutes later, they had everything wired up and the data streaming. Jade furrowed her eyebrows at the readouts on her screen. The other three lingered behind her, waiting for her verdict.

...

She checked that the ports were plugged in the right way. They were.

She stared at her screen some more.

Uh.

"You can't tell me you didn't catch this," Jade finally said.

"...you're talking about... the alpha two value?" Towler ventured, uncertain.

She had to suppress the urge to hiss.

"Of course I'm talking about the alpha two! It's two-point-fucking-three!"

"Is that important?" the troll asked."I thought it was just a calibration constant."

"Is it important? That's the normalized resonance product integral! It's not supposed to be anything other than zero!"

"But... when we did the Hephaestus machines there was a nonzero—"

"It's nonzero for an enclosure image. For a directional capture with the source this deep alpha two can't be bigger than point five at most."

Jade took everything back about bringing her in being overkill, because these idiots clearly had no idea what they were doing.

"Huh. Yeah, you're right," Towler muttered, cleaning off his glasses as he thought. "What if the time-distance..."

"No," Jade insisted. She opened a terminal and started typing. It took a few tries to remember some of the commands, but she wasn't that out of touch. nmral config -la... Unless they were all malfunctioning the exact same way, it wasn't an equipment error. Her agitation grew as she checked and double-checked and triple-checked the readings, and they were saying the same thing.

It's the meteorologist that has the first useful insight.

"Do you think... if we're going with the recent event hypothesis, maybe... the NPR nuclei could have dispersed into the environment? In that case the gradient might not be enough to clock on the Marshall apparatus, but it would image fine on, um, th array."

"Enough resonant mass to maintain a detectable concentration after days?" the troll doubted.

Towler frowned, thinking aloud, "There was a storm, remember? If it stuck around that long..."

...No. It was ludicrous. But if it was true—

"Give me a second to check something," she muttered as she pulled up another command window.

This wasn't her device, but her login credentials were memorized for this exact scenario. In a flash, she was sshed into the secondary server back at the platform as admin, and from there the passive downwards monitoring database was all hers. She grabbed the data from the last two weeks, sftped it over to this device, and rigged up a plot—

She leaned away from her screen, at a loss for words. She had been expecting it, but...

The others peered over her shoulder.

Resonance product integral over time. Flat against the axis for the first nine days. Immediately after the date of the eruption, a kink, then a slow, accelerating creep upwards. Normalized, it was up to 0.6 now.

"Where... what is that from?" the meteorologist breathed. Jade could hear Towler turn and step away.

"Echidnian Subsea Research Platform," said Jade. " Tasman Sea. Seven hundred kilometers off the Australian coast."

But this wasn't a good control. A completely separate unprecedented event had taken place just under the platform recently. They needed readings from... Greenwich, or Houston, or something. And places far from any Sburbian sites. It would take time to convince people to send equipment out to the middle of nowhere, but they needed more data. This could be the natural event of the century.

Right on cue, Towler returned to the group, slotting his phone into his pocket—he'd been talking to someone on the phone? His face was clouded with a grave expression.

"Folks over at Cambridge say they have the same thing," he reported. "They thought it was an equipment problem, but..."

"How high were they?" Jade demanded.

"0.2 and steady."

"It has to be airborne, then," suggested the meteorologist. They were all catching on now. "Waterborne particles couldn't travel that quickly. Are there... health risks? To exposure?"

"There shouldn't be," said Jade. "Except maybe bioaccumulation could eventually mess with MRIs? There hasn't been any studies on ecological effects, only acute exposure, and the effects of that is nil as far as we know. The idea of having enough pararesonant activity to constitute even a trace contaminant for a whole ecosystem is inconceivable. Or it used to be."

"If this is real, it's going to be obvious once sites everywhere start comparing notes," Towler muttered. "We have to report this."

"Yes," the troll said with a grimace. "Yes, we do."

The commswindow fritzed before winking out with an zap. A shadow of an hornless figure could be seen clipping in at the edge of the viewport at the very last moment before the feed cut out.

Connection terminated by client, the screen read.

System High Commander Foiblo Prysek snarled as he reclined backwards in his iron throne, squeezing his eyes shut. The urge to fire that grassblooded moron boiled, but he resisted. Vismes was sloppy on military protocol, but he didn't deploy her for the purposes of war. She lay low, she reported. That was all. Her performance was passable.

True, passable was not a word usually taken well in the Alternian Fleet, but as they said, cull too many and you fail to maintain a breeding population of sufficient genetic diversity for long-term survival. Prysek wasn't on the frontiers anymore. He couldn't afford to be picky.

<Ship,> he spoke aloud without opening his eyes. The circuitry embedded in the wall hummed to life expectantly. <Summon Navigator Xigisi. Message: Change of course required. Prime the helm and meet me at the throneblock. End message.>

<Acknowleged,> rang the ship's mechanical voice. <Delivered. Will that be all?>

<That will be all.>

The walls dimmed and fell silent.

Grade 9 Sburbian anomaly—incipient planetary event. Suspected movement of first guardian.

Her message had been short. Delivery lacked precision, but it had been short. Report making was another skill Vismes Talond sorely lacked, but that was a common defect among those of her caste. Certain allowances had to be made for those of less august blood.

Of course, his subordinate hadn't realized what waves those few words could make. Few did. There were Imperial secrets that few on the Glacier were privileged to know, and one of those that did was making his way up at that very moment. Agents all over the planet were instructed for what to watch for, but they didn't know what it meant.

What did it mean? To put it simply—

Trouble.

The door of the throneblock slid open, a stocky figure slipping through. Prysek raised an internal eyebrow as he checked his desktop timepiece: that might be record response time, actually. Xigisi stalked across the floor of the room, arrested himself two meters before the Commander's table, and dispensed a stiff salute.

<Skip the formalities,> Prysek grunted. <We have a problem, Galekh.>

The indigoblood's posture shifted at the informal address. Not exactly relaxed, but something relaxed-adjacent. Warily attentive, perhaps. There were limits to the casualness between the commander and their inferiors, but at least in private, these two were on good terms.

<What, sir?> he questioned. <More problems from the forward base?>

Prysek wished that the problem could be as easy as more complaints from that dressed-up dungheap of a base they had in Corpus Christi. The planetary coalition had been as much of a pushover as the mission briefing had led him to expect from the start. No, this was much worse.

<Nothing that simple,> he said, shaking his head. <Update from Talond.>

Galekh's poker face was flaming hot garbage. Prysek nearly had to wonder if the flash of contempt was intentional, but no—the Navigator had no such capacity for subtle duplicity. This was the same song and dance they went through every time the Sburb projects came up.

Prysek had no patience for the game today.

<Shut the fuck up and listen,> he ordered before the Navigator could fire off his typical snide remark. The troll reared in mild surprise. <Grade 9 event, she said. Planetary.>

<I know what Grade 9 is,> said Galekh sharply. <What is it?>

<A freak volcanic eruption dispersing primordial activematter across Earth. And she also said the first guardian might be on the move.>

<You think it's the Coming,> the other troll said, visibly unimpressed.

<I know your feelings about Sburb, Navigator. Keep them to yourself.>

Galekh cocked his head. <I apologize if I overstep,>

Prysek shook his head. Not a hint of irony in the other troll's voice. Sometimes the Commander wondered how Xigisi had lived to his age without having his head ripped off by a less personable superior officer.

<You haven't seen what I've seen, Galekh,> sighed the troll for the hundredth time.

The indigo looked away—It was common knowledge among the crew, what he was talking about.

The High Commander had been forged in the crucible of apocalypse as a young troll. He was one of what the records now called the Centesimal Culled, one of the few in this day and age who had heard death itself and lived. Many of the lower-blooded on the Glacier were from an Alternia that had all but forgotten those dark ages, but a hundred sweeps had done nothing to temper the monsters of Prysek's mind.

He remembered the day it happened. He dreamed of it. He remembered scrabbling his way to consciousness in a puddle of his own excrement, ruptured cerebral fluid bleeding from his facial orifices, drowning in it, his mind broken and eyes clawed out by his own hand. He remembered how he screamed himself hoarse in blind terror, not from the paralytic acidsnake feasting on the necrotic sinews of his right leg or the pain or darkness, but from what he'd seen. From what had nearly snapped his mind like a twig. From the barest glimpse of what mere trolls could not and were never meant to know.

The song of the Rift's Carbuncle. The Emissary's gift.

All of them had seen. All that survived, that is. Other survivors spoke of towers to the weeping heavens, of serpentine titans at skaian war, of golden cities and chained moons, of phantoms fleeing an armageddon of hells... What had descended on Prysek, in that tortured vision when the Deep opened its maw and sang, was a glimpse of the crawling abyss. The void that teemed with horrors. The darkest reaches of the furthest ring, where minds were rent asunder and the caress of the eldritch robbed of even death's solace.

But in that deepest pit of Tartarus, he had seen a unary speck of light. A mote sailing the darkness lone and bright, shouting through the darkness for the briefest of moments. A shooting star. Hope.

It had been that moment of clarity, of brief refuge from the unending oblivion, which lent him the will to drag himself back from the brink of total obliteration. He had woken, drenched and dying. Peeled the acidsnake off his leg, crawled his way down the stairs, over his lusus' dead body, bashed his way into his neighbour's abode and ripped the prosthetic gander bulbs from the cerulean corpse's blue-soaked sockets. He had stumbled out the door, seeing for the first time with glitching infravision the maddened carnage which painted the streets. He had fended off other survivors, scavenged the ruins of civilization for scraps for sustenance, and when the drones returned from the brooding caverns and a new Heiress took the reins, he had climbed the ranks of their recuperating society. He had survived.

He had risen.

And, in time, ascended.

<I never told you about my cohort's egress freighter, did I? What happened on our conscription.>

Galekh snapped to attention in an instant.

Prysek put the question out casually, like it was just any murder anecdote from his long-past youth, but the truth was anything but. Any information on the Centesimal Culled, and the Death's Chosen that preceded them by eight thousand sweeps, was by default classified to Royal Command save the most carefully curated historical bones. There were rumors abound, ranging from freakish psychic awakenings to horrific experimentation on the afflicted, but whether out of loyalty or fear, leaks directly from the lions' mouth were practically unheard of.

In other words, if the Commander was breaking protocol to tell Galekh about this, it was damn well important.

<Everyone was put through memory transcription of their visions from Glb'golyb,< said Prysek quietly.

Galekh balked.

Everyone? he wanted to ask, but Prysek didn't stop speaking.

<The candidates that topped the Ordeals were slated for total destructive transcription. Twelve mnemosurgeons were driven mad by what they transcribed. Twenty percent of the sweep's graduates didn't survive the process.>

Prysek's eyes stared off into the distance behind the other troll's shoulder. He licked his lips. Galekh remained silent.

<Then, once the transcripts were secured and encrypted, the ship culled the remaining fifty-two mnemosurgeons.>

Galekh swallowed.

The Commander's face was completely devoid of expression. Galekh didn't understand what he was trying to say, but he didn't dare interrupt. When Prysek spoke again, his voice was hard.

<Section 9, Order 7, 88th Revision of the Executive Fleet Master Protocol. Recite it to me.>

The other troll's voice held steady as he answered.

<In the event of any Guardian or Sburbian event of Grade 8 or higher not contained to the Alternian home system, the High Commander is to be immediately alerted. The stationed system warship is to be moved to high alert and repositioned as outlined in Section 6, Order 3b. If no system warship is stationed, a priority request for allocation is to be sent to Central High Command, and during the interim, all system resources must be moved to high alert and repositioned as outlined in—>

<The redacted appendix for High Command perusal,> Prysek interrupted.

Galekh's mouth opened and closed like a fish before he steeled himself and restarted.

<In such an event, High Commander(s) are advised to calibrate evasive maneuvers against SSF-Class piloted entities and SSS-Class piloted entities. Undocumented Technology Warning is in effect at the maximum level. Training Simulation Hyperion is applicable. Training Simulation Siege is applicable. Training Simulation Conditional Immortality is applicable. Training Simulation Collision Course is applicable. Training Simulation Unstoppable Singularity is applicable. Deep Immersion Simulation The Coming is... Commander, surely you can't—>

The troll shut his mouth once the High Commander fixed his eyes on him.

<Those training scenarios weren't penned from Royal Command's fanciful imaginations, Galekh,> snarled Prysek.

What? the troll thought. But—

<They were reconstructed from the memory transcripts.>

Galekh Xigisi's heart froze as he processed his commander's statement.

There were certain telepathic simulations that were universally despised in the Fleet, thought by most to be some sick form of Empire-mandated hazing instated by Royal Command. Few were ever referenced in official handbooks, and those that showed up were typically written off as superstitious nonsense from addled Sburbists in high office. The fidelity of the worst-offending telepathic playbacks was unusual for synthetic experiences, but it was normally dependent on the skill of whoever produced them anyway. Nobody gave it much thought.

But if those were authentic memory images—

Galekh could do the math. The number of graduates per cohort multiplied over the age range of the Centennials, even culling the count with Ordeals passing rates, compared to the number of simulations available... the latter didn't even scratch the surface.

<What... what else was in those transcripts?>

Prysek shook his head. Galekh was thankful that he didn't seem to notice the shake in his voice.

<I don't know. What's in the sims is only a fraction of it. I don't think even anyone in Royal Command knows all of it. Perhaps only Her Imperious Condescension does. And I'm not telling you what I saw,> he said with a grimace.

Was it proof of what was in those simulations? They could be dismissed as hallucinations of dying minds, but considering the source...

Galekh swallowed.

<You really think the gods exist? That they're back? We'll fly down there and there'll be a marble human with... with black holes in his face and a red cape and a pointy stick, and he'll... what? Cut the Glacier in half with a sword?>

<I don't know,> the Commander admitted. <Maybe. I believe enough. It is not our role to question the protocols. We serve the Empire. We do the bidding of Her Imperious Condescension, immortal may she reign, and this is her will. Signed in royal blood. If you will not put your faith in legends, put your faith in the Empress.>

There it was. The Empire card. It marked the end of every uncomfortable discussion between superior and inferior. To protest further was insubordination, to disobey was mutiny. Galekh bowed, stiff and slow.

<Immortal may she reign,> he repeated after the purpleblood.

Prysek nodded. He sank back into his chair, leveling a stare at his subordinate.

<Then you understood what to do.>

Galekh knew that there was no point to pushing anymore. And, to be honest, after what he had been told—he was shaken. He was glad he had a job to fall back to. The rough navigation calculations running through his head were almost a comfort to drown himself in.

<I'll plot a transient solar orbit in rapid mobilization range of Earth. Is five weeks sufficient?> He frowned as a thought occurred to him. <Cryvex will have to tap the stealth engines if we wish to mask the Glacier's presence.>

<Affirmative to both. I want us in position in two hours. If there is nothing more, you are dismissed, Navigator Xigisi.>

Galekh saluted and turned sharply, glad to leave. As he began marching, the High Commander called out one last time.

<Wait. Galekh.>

He turned around. Prysek's face was somber.

<What I just told you is highly classified. It was disclosed at my discretion in my capacity a special category officer, under classification as need-to-know intelligence. Do not breathe a word of it. Not to others from High Command. Not to Central High Command. Not even to the royals unless someone explicitly and specifically demands it.>

The troll gave a shallow nod.

Prysek maintained his glare for several more seconds before letting up.

<Go,> he finally said.

The commander's eyes followed his navigator's back as it receded down the hall and slipped out between the gates of the motorized door. Only when the entrance sealed itself and the lock engaged did Prysek allow himself to sigh and bury his face in his hands.

Indigoes. That troll was going to get himself culled with how he acted.

Of course, it was partly Prysek's fault for letting him get away with everything. There was no room for soft spots in the Fleet, not even in the colonial reserves.

That said, with trouble on the event horizon, these might not stay the reserves for much longer.

The High Commander mulled over his navigator's words again.

Gods. Denizens.

Did he believe in such things?

Maybe. He believed in the vast horrorterrors that whispered through their Emissary's sickening beak. He believed that there were truths not meant for mortal minds. He believed in something. Her Imperious Condescension certainly did. He believed that something terrible, sooner or later, would rise from the catacombs of ancient Lands.

But be it harbingers of death or ones of life, be it creatures of the heavens or the abyss, he knew one thing.

When they came, they would be met with Alternian steel and Alternian fire. They would come, and they would see: that relics of bygone lands were nothing against crown warships borne of the Erebos Ringforges, the finest adamantine from the mines of the Rhapsodian slaveworlds, and an art of death perfected over untold millennia of total war waged across an unrepentant galaxy.

The gods would come. And the gods would die.

After all, he mused, chuckling to himself he remembered what his subordinate had said—

What were they going to do against a siege warship? Cut it in half with a sword?