Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Cold.

Cold, dark, wet.

Blurry shapes and a wall of white.

Five Pebbles couldn’t see too well, not anymore, not with the degradation of his optic lenses and lack of neurons, so he didn't even try to identify most of the random shapes that moved across his vision.

The whole world blurred together anyway, the longer he was alive.

It wasn’t like there was much to see in his chamber anyway.

At this point, the only thing he could do was lay there in the snow, holding onto his music pearl, distorted music playing softly against the sounds of howling winds.

Cold.

Green.

There was something green in front of him.

…A fluffy creature?

“Little.. Green thing… Hello.”

He blinked at the green blur that moved towards him, unable to focus well.

A soft paw patted him on the face, but he didn’t react much.

Did the green thing visit him previously…?

He couldn’t remember.

The thing suddenly flashed in colors, and strained optic lenses tried to make out what caused the change in colors. Glowing, blue and yellow, coming from the green thing.

“...?”
The colors changed, blue glow shifting to red, and in a flash, a violent tremor threw Pebbles away from the creature.

…What?

What?

A flash of images filled his mind, of rot, of Moon, of weird creatures-
…Memories?

He haven’t had any memories in a long time, what-
Another flash.

He looked up from his position lying in the rubble.

Yellow turned to white.

Suddenly, it felt like the ground underneath him opened to swallow him whole, mind flashing with thousands of images at once, shoved into his mind at a rate too high for him to register.

Pink fingers clawed at the rubble falling around him, and then he was suspended in the air, and he was floating-

He fell on the ground.

Smooth, clear, pristine floor.

No more rubble.

More memories flashed through his mind, neurons flaring, connections being made at the speed of thousands of calculations all at once as everything fell into place. 

A click, a zap, and Five Pebbles opened his eyes as his puppet seized, only to see… The ceiling of his chamber.

Unbroken.

Not freezing.

No rot.

No green creature.

…What?

He sifted through his memories, his neuron flies angrily buzzing through his whole can with an overload of data, close to bursting from the amount of images shoved into every single fly. Entire structure shook violently at the insane connection speeds, water intake rising to its peak once again, steam howling between pipes and electricity sparking.

…He could feel his structure. Not the rot. 

He could feel the whole structure.

It was working once again.

Five Pebbles shot up from the ground, hands gripping at the head of his puppet, vision flashing with warning over an overload of data, because he could remember remember remember-

His body snapped forwards like a striking lizard as he grasped for his screens, on instinct, gripping and scratching at them like a feral animal rather than the iterator he was, because what…?

A shudder overtook his whole body as he thought of the snow, green thing, flashing colors, rot rot rot- He couldn’t see over the flashes of memories that he didn’t have just a second ago, vision completely taken over by the wave.

He seized, gripping the antennae on his head so hard he could feel one of them snap under his hand, but the pain didn’t even register over the whirlwind of flashing images and tremors.

Something dropped in his chamber, and a big, heavy and warm body flung itself at him, curling around his puppet. Three fingered paws grabbed his hands, trying to move them away from his antennae, but he couldn’t see, couldn’t hear, what-
He seized again, and his arms moved on instinct to grab the weird creature pressing itself against his chest. 

…Green thing?

No. 

No, it wasn’t- It wasn’t fluffy like the green thing.

It looked like a blur of red.

…Why was it red?

A rough, wet tongue slid over his face, and he cringed back instantly, but it dulled the flashing in his mind. His entire superstructure still screeched, neurons getting overloaded and fresh connections zapping walls of electricity between each other, the sudden crash of electricity through every part of his structure electrocuting every being unfortunate enough to be in its path. 

More electricity and water rushed through him than it ever did.

Not even when he was creating the rot was his structure so unstable, constant screeching and buzzing and zapping and burning , neurons close to bursting.

And yet… He focused back on the red thing, pressing his fingers into the mildly sticky flesh of the creature, his puppet still overtaken by tremors.

It didn’t seem to care about his painful grip at all, continuing to lick at his face and leaving it coated in saliva as if it was going to save him from the overload in some way.

…It did help, though.

Slowly, ever so slowly, the tremors slowed down, memories of thousands of cycles no longer flashing through his mind, and he could think more clearly once again. He focused back his eyes on the red thing, and…

…Little Ruffian?

…What…

That creature… She died. From old age. A LONG time ago.

She might’ve reincarnated into something else, of course, or maybe taken a dip in the void sea - Pebbles never found out what happened to her, she just… Disappeared one day, and he went on about his day - but this was very distinctly his little Ruffian.

The citizen drone buzzed next to her, as well.

Confused, he reluctantly let go of the creature, cringing a bit at the marks he clearly left in the skin of the being with his grip. She didn’t seem to mind, however, as she moved her face away from his head a bit.

Thankfully she stopped licking him, ew.

Her blank eyes said nothing, but the ears made it clear she was either unhappy or in a state of distress as they pinned back.

She let out a confused chitter at him.

“I… Hello.” He spoke up, back at the creature, but he was confused.

Why was his structure still standing?

What about the rot?

Why did he get his neurons back?

How did she come back?

…

…He suddenly realized with another shudder that the only way it could possibly work was if he somehow went back in time.

If that green thing managed to… Somehow turn him back in time, it made sense why the structure was still working and Ruffian was still alive…

Wait.

What cycle was it then?!

How far back did he go-

How far did the rot get!?

He pushed Little Ruffian away - at which she answered with an angry snort - and brought up a screen, scanning his whole structure.

It felt… So freeing.

He felt better than he did in thousands of cycles.

He wasn’t in pain with every movement.

The scan showed the rot inside his structure, but it was… Quite low of an amount, at least in comparison to what he dealt with later on in the future. To what he remembered the best.

A pang of fear took over him as he scanned the state of all his rarefaction cells.

All four were still active.

None touched by the rot yet.

He… He could remember the one on the right of his structure being the first one to get corrupted, but that was still…

Another scan.

It was a hundred cycles away before the rot would reach the outside shell and corrupt the first cell..

Currently, the cell was fine.

…In a hundred cycles it would not be.

Scan, scan, scan.

Ruffian huffed again next to him and patted him on the head, and he turned back to it.

Right! Right. The being was still here, confused over his sudden breakdown.

Probably confused why he was on the floor.

If he remembered correctly, he never sat on the floor back in that time, and even if something forced him to drop, he would get up as soon as possible.

Now, however? He was sitting on the floor, not even trying to get up.

Little Ruffian shoved her face in his neck, wet nose touching the exposed metal and he flinched away at the cold wetness, immediately pushing her away by instinct. Gross!
“I- I’m fine, citizen.” He finally answered, and she slapped her tail on the floor in anger. It seemed like she didn’t believe him.

“I just…” He deflated, once again shivering at the thought of the cold cold cold rot green thing-

“Something… Happened.” 

Talking to the Ruffian made him feel slightly better, somehow.

“I… I will be fine.”
He suddenly thought about Ruffles, Moon’s creature, not so different from his own little Ruffian. It almost made him laugh at how similar those names were, but… Ruffles did not exist here yet.

Right.

He remembered how the wet rat reactivated Moon with his last remaining rarefaction cell. 

He still had four remaining.

One would get consumed by the rot in a hundred cycles.

…

…He had to fix her, before his whole structure got taken over. He could spare the one that would stop working in a hundred cycles anyway, he-

…He didn’t want to be alone…

The thought was familiar.

He spent so painfully long in the snow, thinking about how he didn’t want to be alone. 

He could not be alone now.

He didn’t want to be alone anymore.

He couldn’t be alone.

Cold white cold rot cold-

He started panicking again, puppet shivering violently, and Little Ruffian shoved her whole face into his neck once again. This time, however, he didn’t push her away. He slumped over her, body twitching as he tried not to think of the snow.

His chamber was too white.

It looked like snow.

Awful.

He calmed down after a bit, pressing his face into the sticky red creature as she once again started to lick him. At some point she attempted to lick his broken antennae, only to get zapped in the tongue by a bit of electricity.

She sneezed and stuck out her slightly burned tongue, and that made Pebbles finally realize that his antennae was broken.

One was still fine, and the other one… Completely snapped off.

Damn it.

He looked down at the metal rod on the floor with a slight sigh, before moving his eyes back to the Ruffian.

She once again seemed concerned.

“...Something strange happened, citizen.” He was still not used to having the ability to speak properly, yet. He was slowly settling back into his old reality, body growing more comfortable with all the processes.

Wait. 

Wait, if the rot didn’t take over all the genetic modification areas, he could fix it! He could fix the rot!

It came from that area, yes, but only one sector was infected so far, which meant he had three that were in decent enough condition to allow him to create purposed organisms!

He could get rid of the rot before it killed him.

Sometime before Ruffles came to take his cell away from him, he began noticing some… Strange creatures, in the garbage wastes below him. His overseers kept showing them to him, and he quickly noticed that they let out a puff of chemicals that instantly killed all rot it came in contact with with deadly efficiency.

That was because those things evolved to eat the rot, and got stupidly effective at it, as anything but a perfect weapon would mean death. 

Nature was more powerful than an Iterator could ever be, after all.

One should never underestimate evolution.

It was too late for him, by then, of course. Too much of his structure was gone for a small group of strange creatures to save him, especially considering they barely left the garbage wastes on their own, and had to consistently consume spore puffs to replenish their chemicals.

But now?

He had access to all he needed to recreate those creatures!

He was suddenly incredibly glad at the fact he allowed the overseers to lead one of them into his chamber so he could analyze them - and remove as much rot as they could until they had no more chemicals to use due to lack of spore puffs - even if, by then, he already knew it wouldn’t save him.

With a burst of anxious energy, he activated all the experimental chambers in sector four and three, - as far away from the rot as possible - mind already sifting through what he required to recreate the creatures.

“Citizen. I have… A mission for you. One of utmost importance.” He got up on wobbly legs before allowing his umbilical to drag him into the air, and it felt weirdly unfamiliar by now. 

With how long he spent on the ground in the blizzard, it almost felt... Alien, to him. 

In the past, however, it was his default.

He had to get used to it again.

Little Ruffian instantly stood up, ears pointing upwards as she listened to him speak, and she nodded at him to show she was willing to go on this mission.

“I… I need you to find and bring me as many spore puffs as you can carry. I think I might have a chance to get rid of the rot, once and for all.”

He could…

He could deal with everything else later.

He could send a spare rarefaction cell to Moon, he could talk to the local group, and he could begin to fix his mistakes so that he wouldn’t have to relive freezing in the snow, isolated, alone, and afraid.

He hated the cold.

But first - the rot.

“...I might require a lot of genetic material as well, so if you kill any being you do not plan to eat, bring them as well.”

He had a lot of work to do.

The… Green thing, whatever it was, gave him a second chance.

He couldn’t waste it.

Chapter Text

The moment Little Ruffian has left, Pebbles could feel his anxiety rising. He didn’t like being alone, not anymore.

Before, he might’ve been happy with not being interrupted anymore, but now?

When his mind was filled with flashes of cold white isolation?

When he could remember how it felt as his whole structure crashed to the ground, cutting off any attempts at communication for the next hundreds of cycles?

It caused shivers to run down his puppet, waves of anxiety filling him whole.

Pebbles searched for his music pearl, because it had to be somewhere, and instantly grabbed it the moment he found it. 

Music filled the chamber, no longer distorted but instead loud and high quality, the pearl as pristine as it could be, and he latched onto it, the only comfort he had when all alone.

He should.. He should work.

It always helped him get his mind off of matters that he did not want to think about.

Of course, he hasn't actually worked on anything in thousands of cycles , mostly because of his collapsed structure, so he wasn’t sure if he even remembered how to. He closed his eyelids and focused, electricity buzzing through his whole structure as he reached deeper, connecting back to all the systems he long since forgotten.

Sector three and four of the genetic modification area activated, lights switching on for the first time since he created the rot. Valves opened, liquid rushing through long since unused pipes, sparks bouncing through wires as he forced his structure to obey to his will once again.

It felt alien. 

It felt right. 

It felt wrong.

At this point, he was more used to not feeling his structure at all than feeling it whole, and it ate him from the inside. Like rot, confusing emotions filled every inch of his structure, generators buzzing and steam howling, every process pushed into overdrive.

Overseers poked their heads in sectors three and four, watching all the processes as he prepared multiple purposed organism chambers, tubes and wires and metal hands moving all over the room in a frantic dance. 

He needed genetic material. He couldn’t wait for his citizen to come back, though. He needed to do it now. He couldn’t wait.

He didn’t want to wait, impatience crawling through his puppet, fingers twitching, anxiety rising with every second he didn’t do anything.

Five Pebbles sent some overseers to the top of his can, making them poke and prod at any creature still left in the area. 

Lizards? They tried to swipe at the overseers once or twice, but lost attention too quickly to properly lead them.

Squidcadas? Once again, they lost their interest too fast.

Centipedes? Those things didn’t even bother looking in the direction of the overseers.

Scavengers…?

…There were barely any left.

He could see through the eyes of his overseers how many corpses littered the streets of his city, charred bones and explosives scattered all over, courtesy of his citizen. 

Finding one alive was difficult.

After a lot of scanning, however, he managed to find a small group that was still alive, clearly young, inexperienced and cautious. 

He led them through the city, multiple overseers popping up and annoying them with flashing images, and it was ridiculously easy to rile them up, for the most part.

One overseer ended up impaled by a spear, cracked, sparkling eye rolling on the dirty ground from the impact, but he had five more to replace it, continuing to lead the beings through.

They were cautious about getting inside, however.

It took… A bit of convincing.

He also had to enable gravity all along the path that they took, because the moment that they felt even a slight bit of antigravity, they tried to instantly run off. 

He couldn’t remember the last time he did that. 

Probably never.

As they crawled through his structure, spears flying, sharp and fast, scratching up the walls of his interior, he was getting impatient again with how they poked and prodded at everything they came across. 

Curious little creatures.

He hated them.

Eventually, they got to an area where he had more control, and he released some long since unused systems, metal shifting and grinding together in a cacophony of screeching and whirring noises.

The floor underneath the scavengers opened, causing them to fall down with a high pitched whine as the overseer watched from the edge. They hit the floor with a sickening crunch.

More metal grinding against metal could be heard, muting the whines of the unfortunate creatures as antigravity once again switched on, immediate relief filling Five Pebbles as he didn’t have to keep constantly rerouting gravity centers all along the path.

Wires snapped, metal arms moving through the structure as the injured scavengers got swept up with terrified screeches, but he didn’t care. 

He needed genetic material.

He needed it.

It was important.

The rest of the way to sectors three and four was significantly less annoying, mostly because the scavengers no longer moved on their own, just wiggling in the grasp of half mechanical arms that dragged them forwards, walls opening and closing to let them through.

Five Pebbles granted them some sort of mercy, however, and instantly injected them with a numbing liquid that made them all fall into a coma, so that they wouldn’t feel what happened next. 

They would reincarnate later anyway, but Five Pebbles decided to be merciful.

[Genetic material acquired.]

[Deconstructing sequence initiated.]

[Deconstruction in progress…]

Five Pebbles looked away from the overseers that monitored the process, and instead pulled up a few screens with many different chemical compositions and animal body structures. Plans, sketches, blueprints, scans, everything he needed.

It was so long since he did that, and yet, it came back to him like a second nature, as alien as it felt due to all those cycles in the blizzard.

He had to decide what creature to use as a base. 

Now that he thought about it, he was pretty sure that the beings that lived in the garbage wastes and ate rot were some sort of descendant of the pipe cleaning slugs that often visited him. Similar to his only citizen, the Little Ruffian.

And yet… They were different.

Their bodies long since morphed into something very different.

Their mouths grew bigger than they had any right to be - so they could chew on the rot better.

Their legs were significantly longer and fluffier - closer to a reindeer in body-to-leg proportions - with soft fur dragging behind their paws, so that they made little to no noise as they moved.

There were holes all over their tails, with chemical glands right underneath, stuffed deep into the thick tail - what they used to kill the rot.

They…They no longer resembled the slug-like creature they descended from, and now that Pebbles saw Ruffian once again, he could tell how gross those unholy chemical abominations looked in comparison.

But…

That was good, in a way.

He already had plenty of schematics and blueprints on how to create slugcats themselves, even if he never used them. Other iterators liked using them as messengers, after all.

Besides, he could employ the Little Ruffian to take care of the beings while they learned how to move around properly.

He… He didn’t want to bother with giving them the other adaptation, though. He could just… Improvise.

The evolved creatures were too… Gross, even to him.

With limbs so long and lanky, and jaws that unhinged far out of their sockets, they were… Almost creepy.

And they didn’t need those adaptations.

They could eat what a normal slugcat would, because for as long as they were under his care, they just had to kill the rot, not eat it.

With that in mind, Pebbles plucked out the slugcat blueprint out of all other ones, analyzing the body structure and drawing out possible changes.

Adding the chemical vents onto the schematic of the creature, all over the tail, suddenly struck him with memories.

The messenger. The purple messenger that Seven Red Suns sent to him.

They also had vents all over their tail, didn’t they?

With a shudder, he changed the placement, desperately trying to separate his new creature design from Suns’ messenger, looks-wise. 

An attempt to distance himself from Suns, as well.

Instead of the holes being all over the tail, he placed every single one deliberately, following the spine with two on each side of every second vertebrae. He also added skin over them, similar to eyelids, shifting muscles in a way that allowed the creature to close the chemical pockets whenever it wanted to.

Both for his own comfort, but also because it would be safer that way, most likely.

Under each hole, he placed big chemical glands, but he still had to spend a lot of time connecting everything together.

It was the first draft, but it was… Decent.

Now… He had to figure out how to replicate the chemical glands of the other creatures.

He reached deep into his memories, digging through every neuron as he searched for the chemical structure of the creatures he met a long time ago, even if that caused more flashes of cold pain rot dark to rush through him. 

It took him a while, but he finally managed to extract it and place it into a brand new schematic, sliding the screen with the scans next to his first draft and placing links between each element, like strings on a board.

He dismissed altering the rest of the body structure, keeping it as close to a normal slugcat as he could, because he was not dealing with those long, thin, creepy things running around.

He preferred blank expressions and squishy paws to this.. Unholy monstrosity that nature created.

He hoped it wouldn’t cause any issues.

…They had the same ancestor, so a normal slugcat body shouldn’t reject the modifications, right…?

He managed to attach the scan of the glands of the weird creature over to the slugcat body, meticulously connecting each vein and muscle together until everything came together properly. He also altered the stomach lining, so that they could actually consume the spore puffs and use them to create the chemicals they needed to create, even if a part of him felt slightly bad for making the creature have to eat those dry things.

He made sure to rewrite the lung structure as well, to ensure that the spores wouldn’t end up inhaled and didn’t kill his creatures.

It… It took a long while for him to finally come up with a schematic that would work, and then he wrapped it up in a simulation, simulating the creature existing.

The simulation-creature still choked on the spore puffs, and their body rejected the modifications, the immunity system attacking itself.

Rewind, rewrite, start again.

Cycle after cycle, he kept rewriting the schematics, multiple simulations running in the background, because it had to be perfect.

It had to work.

He couldn’t afford to fail.

He picked the two colors of the spore puffs for the skin color of his new creatures, two different shades of green. It was an offhand choice, because he needed to pick the color quickly, so he didn’t put much focus on it.

Light green and dark green it was.

He made sure to have the green be desaturated, grayish, almost blueish in nature, just so that it wouldn’t remind him of… The green creature.

He didn’t want to think about it.

Two creatures should be enough to kill off all the mobile rot, and then he could ask them to fill some tubes with the chemicals, which he could rush through all the pipes that creatures had no access to, getting rid of the rest.

It…

It felt weird.

He was so incredibly close to fixing the rot, and it made him feel… Complicated.

A part of him was incredibly relieved, happy, glad. 

He wouldn’t have to relive his whole can collapsing under the weight of the rot.

He wouldn’t have to suffer as his insides got consumed.

But… A part of him was afraid. Stressed out. 

Was he just afraid it wouldn’t work? That all this hope was for nothing?

Or was it… Was it something else..?

The moment the schematics were done, he sent them over to sector four, preparing two chambers, trying to busy himself with his work. Two creatures.

If he needed more, he would make more.

He didn’t have enough genetic material to create more at the moment, anyway.

He started the process, steam hissing through the pipes as he rerouted all the deconstructed genetic materials into the tubes, structure working hard to put together a new being. Hopefully it was going to work. 

For the first time in.. He didn’t even know how long, he looked away from the schematics, switching off multiple simulations to conserve power.

He scanned the progress of the rot.

…Over thirty cycles have passed.

Probably around thirty seven, actually, now that he looked at it.

He didn’t even notice the passage of time, too lost in his work, and it was horrifying how quickly he lost connection with the outside world.

He had only around sixty cycles left before the first rarefaction cell got corrupted.

He had to remove it soon if he wanted it to survive, as he was pretty sure he would not be able to finish his new project before it took over that part.

Something fell into his chamber.

He flinched at the sudden movement, jumping away from a whole wall of screens as his head snapped towards the creature, and he could see his citizen floating in the antigravity.

Around her, a whole lot of spore puffs floated.

That was… That was great, actually.

“Welcome back, citizen” he greeted and turned gravity on, holding the spore puffs in the air.

“I am grateful for the help.”

He truly was.

He didn’t even know why this creature wanted to help him, but he appreciated it nonetheless.

“Soon, I will require more, but for now it should suffice. Let me see…”

He moved the spore puffs closer, momentarily wondering if he could plant some in tubes so that he wouldn’t have to keep sending Little Ruffian to collect them.

“Could you bring them over to the genetic modification chamber, sector three? The overseers will lead you, and I will open some quicker passages, just for you.”

His citizen slapped her tail on the ground again with a hiss, annoyed at being pushed around, but collected the spore puffs anyway as he slowly floated them towards her. With that, she got dragged back up, up to the entrance, and disappeared deeper into his structure, despite her initial complaints.

He could use sector three to grow more spore puffs, and sector four to create the beings. It should work well enough. It would also prevent Ruffian from seeing his work, if he kept sending her to carry things to a separate sector than the one that currently had weird baby slugcats floating in tubes.

When she came back, he instructed her to bring him some more genetic material, and she scurried off, once again on a hunt. She seemed significantly more enthusiastic about that than she was about getting the spore puffs.

Now… 

He had nothing to do anymore as his structure worked. 

All the schematics and blueprints were set in place, automatic processes loading them inside sector three and four on their own, with no need for any outside help.

All he could do was wait anxiously, now.

Wait and create simulations, of course, but it wasn’t like they would help with anything.

…

…The idea terrified him, but he had to check up on Moon.

See the extent of the damage done to her structure at this point in the timeline. 

With a deep shudder, he connected to around ten overseers, sending them over to Moon’s can. Holographic bodies zapped through the land, and eventually, they got to her structure, analyzing everything around. 

He sent one to Moon’s chamber, scattering the rest through her structure, to see if he could do anything to repair her better.

When Ruffles brought her the cell, it was enough to bring back a whole bunch of her processes, even if everything got terribly degraded over the course of thousands of cycles. 

Now, however? A lot less was degraded.

He wondered how much he could fix.

He didn’t want to be alone.

He needed someone to talk to.

Being alone meant thinking of the cold cold cold cold.

And even if she didn’t remember what he remembered, even if he was the only one with any knowledge of the cold dark blizzard, he… He still had to do that.

The Overseer popped its head up in Moon’s chamber.

Her puppet was limp.

No neurons nearby.

He momentarily panicked, antennae of his puppet going down as his body trembled in fear that something happened, something killed her, oh no- Before he finally remembered that she wasn’t reactivated yet.

Right.

Right…

It was fine. 

She wasn’t dead, she was just… Offline.

Yes. Of course.

He forced his hands to stop trembling.

If he remembered correctly, some other iterator sent her a neuron fly with slag keys sometime after he got his Little Ruffian, and that was what reactivated her.

He momentarily wanted to send her his own, but… He was afraid.

He should do that.

He didn’t have enough materials though.

And whoever did that before, would most likely do it again, and if he was correct in his calculations… It wasn’t that far away from happening.

Instead, he forced his overseers to leave Moon’s crumbling structure alone, moving around the land instead, keeping their eyes out for the little savior.

It had the rot, just as he did…

…He could probably cure the creature if it came to visit, since he was already creating a cure for himself.

He could ask it to bring the cell to Moon, too, since its purpose was to save her in the first place. That could work.

It would stop him from having to create more messengers of his own.

…But how would it survive the dive to the superstructure, since it was mostly submerged…?

Wait, it had less water inside than it did when Ruffles did it.

Significantly less holes leaking through, too. More air pockets.

More dry areas, held together by crumbling metal.

Well… He could only hope that the creature would survive.

If not, he had two more cells to spare.

As his structure worked, his citizen kept bringing him dead lizards, squidcadas, and scavengers to deconstruct. He had plenty of genetic material, now, and he finally dismissed her from her duty as a creature hunter for a while.

He had to… He had to remove the rarefaction cell soon, though.

Thirty cycles were left before the rot got to it.

It was horrifying.

His citizen slid through the entrance to his chamber, led by an overseer, and he instantly turned towards her floating body. 

She chittered.

“...Hello, citizen.” He spoke up, unease filling his voice. He had to do it. It would get eaten by the rot anyway.

Maybe his local group would hate him less if he did it. 

The broadcast lines were still in decent enough condition for proper communication so he could… He could talk to them.

It was scary though.

First, he had to actually remove the cell, however, rather than daydream about doing it.

He might not have the ability to give it to Moon right away, not with her being offline at the current moment, but he had to save it from being chewed right through.

“I apologize for asking so many things of you” he spoke with purpose, floating above the creature that now dropped on the floor, and she slapped her tail against the floor in anger.

He already learned that it meant she was annoyed or angry.

What a weird body language those creatures had.

“...I appreciate the help, however” he continued, and Little Ruffian sniffed the air, long neck extending towards him. Her ears twitched. She was listening. She probably waited for more instructions, and Pebbles almost laughed at that.

Even despite being annoyed, she still listened to him and kept coming back.

What a weird creature indeed.

“This task is… Most likely going to be harder than the other ones'' he sighed, lowering himself a bit more and pulling out a screen that showed a map of his structure.

“There are four rarefaction cells deep inside my structure, each in a different area, and they hold great power” the map flashed, and now there were marks where each cell was.

“One of them… Will be infected by the rot within the next thirty cycles. Currently, it is perfectly fine, but I don’t want it to get damaged once the rot gets to it. Here is where I ask you for help.”

The map got bigger, and the soon-to-be-infected core flashed in red.

“I will guide you through the overseers, and I expect you to remove it and bring it to my chamber. But please, for the love of the Void, don’t use explosives while holding it” he added that last part because he was mildly terrified of the idea of half his structure exploding because of the cell.

Little Ruffian chittered, and slapped her tail against the floor again. Once again, annoyed.

“...I apologize.” He looked over at her tail, feeling slightly guilty. Back in the past, he would never have apologized to a being such as this, but now…? 

He didn’t want to be alone, and she was his only companion.

He had to treat her right.

He couldn’t lose the only friend he currently had.

“I hold no gifts that I could reward you with, other than my gratitude.”

She shook her head, then stared at the map with her nose scrunched up. Then, she chittered again, and pointed her paw to the tunnel above.

“...Will you do this for me, citizen?”

She nodded.

He turned off gravity again, moving her towards the entrance, but just as she started crawling through, he whispered out a quick “thank you.”

She must’ve heard it, because she snorted in response, mocking him slightly as she disappeared outside his chamber.

With another deep shudder, Pebbles lowered himself to the floor, turning antigravity off and watching all the pearls drop to the floor. He grabbed his music pearl again, letting it hover gently above his hands, filling the chamber with soft music.

Sitting on the floor made him feel… Weird.

He remembered the cold.

Walls of white.

Weird green creature.

Another shiver went through his puppet, and internally, he hoped that all his plans would work.

He really, really didn’t want to relive the cold.

The longer he was left thinking, however, the more he wondered what the green creature was.

…Weird.

Chapter Text

Five Pebbles kept a close eye on his citizen as she moved through the superstructure, overseers popping up from every wall, ensuring she was safe all the way through. She descended further inside his can than ever before, led by one of the overseers, and she was moving a lot quicker than Pebbles expected her to. That was… good, though.

The less time it took, the less risky it would be to extract.

With how much control he still had over his structure, he altered some areas, metal shifting and opening new paths for Ruffian to take, to make the travel easier. It was the least he could do, and it worked well enough, as within one cycle she was already in the room where his rarefaction cell was being held.

Overseers watched as she jumped from a tunnel, gracefully grabbing a pole to crawl across the room, and Five Pebbles shut down anti-gravity around the area entirely to help her get to the core.

He quickly powered off one of the four rarefaction cells - the one that was about to be removed - to make the extraction as fast and easy as possible. 

He didn’t want to risk her getting electrocuted by it if it was still powered on.

It didn’t make him feel any less uncomfortable about it as he watched her crawl into the core, a thick red body squeezing through the tunnel and disappearing inside, though.

He could feel the cell disconnect - even if it was powered off-  and he shuddered instantly, but it was fine.

There were three more that still worked, so it didn’t hurt him that much.

After all, he only needed one for his structure to continue functioning.

As Little Ruffian crawled out of the core, he could see her drag the heavy ball with her, and he let out a deep sigh in relief. 

Okay. 

Everything was alright. 

It was fine.

The rot was still over twenty cycles away, taking up just a small piece of the wall, which meant that his citizen could rush through the structure easily and with no additional issues. 

Most of the rot grew on the other end of the can, which meant that this particular path was clear.

Ruffian jumped between poles, pushing off the walls, bouncing through the tunnels with extreme speeds as she rushed to get back to his chamber, but even through tinted overseer footage, Five Pebbles could see she was very annoyed at her inability to use explosives to make it even faster.  

Pebbles was very grateful at the fact she listened to his advice, though, even if she very clearly disliked it.

He turned antigravity back on in his chamber and floated up, umbilical dragging him across the room as he watched his citizen drop back in his chamber, holding the rarefaction cell. 

She stared at him for a second, then threw it to him with an amused snort - as if playing ball, or something - and he barely stopped it from hitting his puppet in the chest on time. 

He allowed it to float in front of him as he scanned it, making sure it was entirely clean and in full power, and his shoulders slumped in relief when it became clear it was safe and in pristine condition.

It was in even better condition than the one he gave to Moon in his… Previous timeline.

It held more power, too.

“...Thank you, citizen.”

Another amused snort came from the little Ruffian as he turned gravity back on, allowing her to gracefully drop onto the floor of his chamber.

“I might… Have another request for you, soon. But for now, feel free to leave, if you wish.”

He didn’t want her to leave.

He didn’t want to be alone.

But a part of him knew that he shouldn’t keep her inside his structure for too long, especially considering she was still a living being that had to eat and sleep.

The cycle was coming to an end, and she was probably hungry.

He brought her back to the entrance and let her crawl out, then dropped his puppet on the floor once again. He was doing that way too often lately.

Definitely unlike himself. 

Unlike his old self, at least.

He checked on the progress of the creatures’ growth, and he was glad to see that it would only take around twenty or so more cycles before they were ready to be extracted from the experimental chambers.

He had… He had to spend his time somehow, though.

He hated being alone and with nothing to do. 

It only made him remember the cold and it was awful.

He… He had to do something.

…

…He could teach his little Ruffian how to talk through hand gestures, maybe?

She was clearly smart enough to understand him, use tools, and voice her opinion in her own way. He could talk to her, and maybe, if he tried hard enough, he could make it so that she would gain that ability as well.

He opened another few screens, dismissing the schematics he no longer needed, and got to work creating a proper gesture language for communication with the creature.

The languages that ancients used… Didn’t work. 

They mostly used facial expressions, which wouldn’t work for a being whose default was either a blank stare or a blank stare with scrunched up nose.

Besides, his citizen had only three fingers, and those languages needed five fingers for some gestures. As well as a very distinctly ancient body shape.

…Hmmm…

He mirrored himself with a hologram, and an entirely blue version of himself appeared right in front of him. 

It was better to create signs and gestures in a way that would let him actually see them.

He fused some of his holographic puppet’s fingers together, however, so that the mirrored image had only three fingers rather than five, matching the slugcat a bit closer.

Making a language couldn’t be that hard, right?

It was just some gestures.

He could start with something simple, and only go further if his citizen wanted to.

Right, right, what words should he create first….

He decided on the most important ones.

“Hungry”, “tired”, “hurt”, “feeling alright”, “feeling bad” and “leave.”

He went through a few possible ways to sign each thing, deciding on what was the easiest with slugcat anatomy.

It was… Weird.

To gesture at a slightly altered holographic version of himself that mirrored everything back at him, trying to figure out what would be the best way to say “hungry”.

It was… Embarrassing how long he spent on this.

In the end, pointing at someone and moving the hand forwards and backwards once meant either me, you, them, or this, depending on what was being pointed at. Pointing at nothing and rolling the hand in a circular manner meant “other”, to signify something that was not currently present to be pointed at. Having the head tilted while signing something meant that whatever was being signed was a question.

The rest of the words used both hands, making elaborate movements in the air, which he eventually simplified as much as he could.

He didn’t know how much a slugcat was capable of remembering.

A part of him believed that a lot, considering how smart his little Ruffian was, but.. Hmm…

He truly had no idea how good their memory was.

If he created something too complicated, what if she forgot the words?

They had to be simple.

Once he was done with the few basic gestures, he went towards something slightly more complex, yet still possible.

Emotions.

He already knew that the slap of a tail against the floor meant that the slugcat was angry, but he needed more than that.

“Angry”, “happy”, “sad”, “afraid” and “disgusted” were the next few words that he figured out how to sign, and once again, he spent significantly too long simplifying them, because the first versions seemed too long for quick messages.

Next came creature words.

Those should be easier, because he could mimic elements of the creature’s looks for the sign. It would make them significantly easier for his little Ruffian to remember, too.

“Scavenger” was pretty easy to create, using the hands to create scavenger-like horns on the head. Simple.

“Centipede” used wiggling the fingers, like centipede’s legs.

“Flying centipede” had one hand wiggling, and the other one making wing-like motions.

“Vulture” was holding hands close to each other at the wrists, and making wing-like motions with them both.

“King vulture” was making horn-like motions on both sides of the face, going down, then normal vulture sign.

..The longer he spent on it, the more silly it felt.

He was just sitting alone in his chamber, playing charades with a holographic version of himself. 

It was almost embarrassing. 

…It wasn’t like anyone would know about that, though, so he persisted, even if it felt silly.

Continuing, he created different gestures for “slugcat”, “raindeer”, “worm grass” - that one used a full body motion, actually -, “lizard”, “rot”, “iterator”, “pole plant”, “leech”, “spider”, “dropwig”, “squidcada”, “grapple worm” and “neuron fly”.

There were more creatures, of course, but he doubted they would come up in a conversation any time soon, so that was where he stopped trying to bother with all of them. If he needed more, he could come up with them later. He was already tired of mimicking creatures, by now.

And it grew more and more embarrassing with each creature that he mimicked.

Void, he was so glad no other iterator was able to see him like this, trying to come up with a language for a pipe cleaning slug’s ancestor, out of all creatures.

Embarrassing.

Next… Colors.

Colors were… Incredibly difficult.

Every color had to be a distinct gesture after all, and colors didn’t really have anything distinct about them. Or, at the very least, nothing physical that could be shown by a gesture. The color orange didn’t have horns nor legs to show, so he had to make something… Different.

For a moment, he actually wanted to give up - after all, why would a slugcat need to speak of colors? He didn’t think that colors were that important…

Until he remembered lizards.

There were many different kinds of lizards, all of them with different colors.

Which meant he had to come up with gestures for the colors, if he wanted to know what kind of lizard his citizen was talking about.

It took a while to figure it out, and by the end of it, he was getting visibly frustrated.

To make it easier for both himself and the creature that was supposed to use it, he made it so that if his Little Ruffian tried to say a color, one paw would always be moved forwards, and the other one indicated which color they meant. 

It connected all colors together, making it mildly easier to remember.

Once he was done with all of that, he momentarily wanted to stop right there, keeping the language limited but simple.

After all, it wasn’t like a slugcat would need to say more, right?

…

…He was still alone, though.

Alone, and with nothing better to do.

Begrudgingly, he went back to playing charades with a holographic version of himself, because it was significantly better than thinking about the cold, worrying about Moon, and wallowing in his own loneliness.

Five Pebbles came up with a few more words after that, and with each word, he had to spend a moment thinking if a slugcat would even use it.

“Small” and “big” were the next two words, once again, using physical aspects of such words in order to create the gesture.

For small, it was showing something was tiny between the hands, and for big, it was spreading the arms further, once again showing the size. 

Still.. Incredibly silly.

He even dared to take that moment to think of No Significant Harassment, and how the other iterator would probably lose his shit laughing at him if he ever knew, but that only made a pang of sadness and fear run through him.

Right. He had to talk to them all soon, if he wanted to fix his mess.

He was not looking forward to this.

He shook his head, trying not to think about the local group, and went back to stare at the hologram of himself.

Right… Where was he?

More words.

“Young” and “old”, “tall” and “short”, both of those sets of words were somewhat easier to come up with. “Dangerous” was making an X with hands, and “seriously DO NOT” was making an X with whole arms. “Safe” was two thumbs up.

That should be easy for a slugcat to remember, right?

“End” and “start” also seemed important…

He had to come up with some words for food, too…

An overseer suddenly popped up next to him, dragging him out of his thoughts. It notified him that his little Ruffian was on her way back to his chamber, and he quickly dismissed the hologram, waiting for her arrival. Maybe it was good that she was coming before he created a whole language, so that there wouldn’t be too much for her to learn all at once.

She dropped into his chamber, which still had gravity on, and he caught her in the air before gently lowering her next to him.

“Citizen” he greeted with a nod, and she chittered at him before chucking a pearl in his face.

“Hey!” he complained as it hit him in the face with a dull clink, and he quickly grabbed it, analyzing it with an angry huff.

“...I would appreciate it if you didn’t throw things at my face if you want me to read them, citizen.”

She snorted and sat down, ears twitching.

“...It’s nothing interesting. Just some blueprints for an old drill that is no longer in use. Nothing of use for you, I suppose.” He put the pearl down on the floor, and little Ruffian sneezed.

Right. 

Since she was already here…

“...I have a question for you, Little Ruffian” he started, antennae twitching. Ruffian’s ears twitched back in response. Mimicking.

“Would you like to learn a language? Currently I’m the only one speaking, but you’re clearly capable of understanding complex ideas, which makes me believe you would benefit from the ability to voice your opinion.”

She took a few steps towards him, tilted her head, then nodded.

“Alright! Alright…” He sighed, and realized he would actually have to teach her the language.

Sure, it wasn’t like he had anything better to do as he waited for his automatic processes to finish, but… 

It felt a bit embarrassing, actually.

Even more embarrassing than playing charades with himself, because now, there was another creature there. One that could judge him.

“Make sure to listen and follow carefully.” He commanded the creature, then showed his hands, connecting his fingers in such a way that made it look like he had only three on each hand. It felt strange outside of the hologram.

With another deep sigh, he looked over at the creature, who already mimicked his position - putting her paws up in front of her.

..Huh.

It seemed like it might not be as difficult as he thought it would be, to teach a slugcat a language. 

Hopefully he won't regret this.

Chapter Text

Teaching a slugcat a sign language was… A strange thing to do, definitely.

His citizen was smart, and was plenty capable of mimicking most movements, which made the whole thing significantly easier than he expected it to be. He did, however, have to remind her a whole lot of gestures after a bit, because her memory was not as great as his own.

It still went better than he thought it would.

Every cycle, she would come back to his chamber, learn a bunch more gestures, repeat old ones, then leave to hunt and sleep. Whenever she was not in his chamber, he would try to come up with more words to teach her, as she seemed to do just fine with the limited amount he started with. 

It allowed him to extend the language further with very little issues.

First sentence she spoke unprompted, however?
It was “ You annoying.”

…She called him annoying.

That was the first thing she said to him. That he was annoying.

It almost made him laugh.

He was sitting on the floor of the chamber, trying to guide her how to say “light” when she finally huffed and called him annoying, and he froze for a moment, because it was the first thing she ever said - gestured - unprompted. He might’ve actually snorted quietly before going back to teaching her the word.

“I am unfortunately very aware of your feelings about me. Once again, you need to put your paws higher for the word. Repeat again.” 

“Annoying. Annoying. You annoying.”

She pointed at him with a huff, and slapped her tail on the floor.

“...Should I stop teaching you?” He asked dryly, mildly amused by the fact that the first thing that the little Ruffian signed at him without being asked to was just insults. Somehow, it felt in-character for her.

She shook her head at that and plopped back down, ears twitching and nose scrunching. Another tail-slap against the floor.

“Alright. How about this: I taught you plenty of words, but we haven’t talked yet. I wish to change that, to see how well you remember the language when it is in use.”

Her ears twitched and she nodded before tilting her head, paws moving.

“Question?”

Right. He had to find something to talk about with her.

What topic would be a good starting point…

“Alright… What is your opinion on the language, so far?” He asked, carefully, curiously, and watched as she moved her paws.

“Weird. Annoying. Useful.”

Singular words, each with a pause in between them, but it worked well enough to let him understand her. 

“That is… Good. Do you like it, then?” 

A nod.

Hm…

There was one thing that he was curious about, actually.

“I was curious about one thing for quite a while, and now, you might finally give me an adequate answer” he started, antennae twitching, and he was mildly amused at how she immediately mimicked it with ear twitches.

“Why do you hate scavengers so much? I have my own reasons to want them gone, for they destroy my structure, and I was wondering if you have your own reason that you would be willing to share?”
Her nose scrunched up and she slapped her tail against the pristine white floor again, angry, but now he wasn’t sure if it was at him or at something else.

“...I apologize if the question is insensitive” he started, but she shook her head.

“Baby dead” her movements were frantic, and she let out a growl as she gestured.

“Scavenger spear head” she made a movement of a spear going through her head, and it wasn’t a word he actually taught her, but he understood well enough what she tried to convey.

…Ouch.

“Second baby water” her ears went down as she gestured, back hunched over “scavenger explosive water baby dead water.”

Despite the language being… Very bare-bones, and not allowing for proper sentence structure, he fully understood what she meant.

She lost her family to them.

It made sense why she hated them so much, then.

“I am sorry for your loss” he spoke carefully, unsure what to say. How does one comfort a grieving mother? He never had to deal with that!
Wait.

Wait, she had two babies that she lost.

He had two slugcat pups growing in tubes that he hoped she would take care of.

Shit.

Was that a good idea? Bad one?

As he looked back at her, it was clear she wanted to say something more, but lacked the words to convey her message properly. 

Eventually, she seemed to figure something out.

“Life. Me kill scavenger”   she scrunched up her nose again while doing the scavenger gesture. “They kill baby. Me kill they.”

She shook her head.

“Long time.”

“I see…”

So it happened a long time ago, then?

It made sense, considering how long she spent there with him.

He… He had to tell her about the pups, though.

They were almost ready to be removed from the tubes, which meant he had to do it sooner or later. A part of him cursed himself for not telling her sooner, because now, it was going to be more awkward than it had to be.

“...If you were given a chance to take care of new pups, would you take it?”

Her head perked up, ears twitching. He twitched his antennae in response, mimicking her just like she mimicked him, and she blinked at the gesture.

“Baby need mother” she gestured, puffing up her chest proudly. “Me mother.”

…Good.

At least he knew she wouldn’t reject them… Probably.

“I… That is a thing that I wanted to ask you about, but now, it feels wrong to ask” he admitted, and his citizen tilted her head. 

“Speak.” She demanded with a very aggressive, fast gesture.

It seemed like she had some sort of an idea of what he might ask about as her back straightened.

He wondered how to say what he wanted to say without letting her know that he hand-grew the babies, because he felt like she might’ve been mad at him if she knew.

It felt.. Silly, to care about the opinion of a slugcat.

That didn’t make him want to tell her the truth any more though.

“...I have two slugpups that are currently recovering inside my structure, and I wanted to ask you if you would be willing to take care of them. I understand that it is a sudden thing to ask, but-” he couldn’t finish his sentence, because the Little Ruffian threw herself at him, thick red body pushing his puppet backwards with the force of the leap. His umbilical creaked slightly, pressed into the floor at an awkward angle.

“Where. Where where where where where” she kept repeating, gesturing incredibly fast, repeating that one word over and over again.

“Calm yourself, citizen!” His voice rose in volume as he pushed her off of him, trying to remove the strain from his umbilical. “They are still recovering! I will release them from my structure once I have full certainty it is safe to do so, calm down.” He hissed.

She begrudgingly took a step back and slapped her tail against the floor. Multiple times. Very loudly, too.

How did this gesture not hurt them? 

It seemed like an incredibly inefficient, possibly dangerous way to show anger.

“When?” 

“Within one cycle or so. If you wish, you may prepare and come back to me the next cycle, then, I will lead you to the pups.”

She chittered loudly and nodded, then pointed at the exit.

“Leave. Hunt. Baby need food.”

She was… Weirdly quick to accept that.

With a sigh, he floated her to the exit, and she immediately scurried off, off to do… Whatever her motherly instincts told her to do. He missed her immediately, still uneasy about being alone, but it was getting easier to deal with with every cycle that passed.

With every cycle, the cold and the snow started to disappear from his mind as he focused more on his new timeline. 

It was… Getting easier, definitely.

He still panicked whenever he didn’t work on anything for longer than a few minutes, though.

He checked up on the slugcats currently growing in sector four, scanning all their vitals and other such things, so that he would know if they would be ready by the next cycle.

…Hm…

…They seemed developed enough to remove right now actually, if he wanted to, but he decided to leave them in for just a little bit longer. They were more developed than normal newborn slugpups, as their bodies seemed closer to a pup that was around thirty cycles old already, but they lacked the skills that come with such age.

They were still incredibly young, but at the same time, old enough to move around freely, eat normal foods, and understand a bit more than they would if they were just born.

In any other case, Five Pebbles would’ve left them in the tubes until adulthood, but he both had no patience for that, as well as he felt like allowing his citizen to teach them how to do things at a younger age would be beneficial for them.

There were systems set in place to implant skills and knowledge into their minds, of course, which technically worked perfectly fine, but once again, it would be a waste of time to wait for them to grow if they could just… Grow outside of the tube and be useful quicker.

He checked their vitals, structure scanning the tiny creatures, and he was relieved to find no issues whatsoever. Just two healthy babies.

He… He had to prepare something to put them in, though.

He couldn’t just leave them on the cold metal floor for Ruffian to find them, she would never forgive him for that!

So he forced sector four to use some of the remaining genetic material, weaving it together, creating something incredibly similar to plant matter. It was soft, yet sturdy, similar in build to a dead pole plant. 

Metal hands shifted, grabbing the artificial plant and weaving it into a basket, careful yet fast. The basket seemed big enough to hold the two of them, and he finished it just in time.

Pebbles didn’t even notice how long creating the artificial plant took him, because before he knew it, his citizen was already on her way back into his chamber. She fell into it, and he caught her with antigravity, noticing how her arms were all full with so many items he was shocked that she didn’t drop anything.

She had plenty of blue fruit in her arms, chunks of popcorn plant almost falling out of her arms as he helped her keep a hold of them with his control, and there was a spear that she barely kept leaning against her shoulder with multiple dead batflies impaled at the end of it.

It seemed like she was very busy.

“I see you are prepared for your new duty, citizen.” He commented, and she snorted. She couldn’t gesture anything while her arms were full, but she could chitter at him, annoyed and impatient.

In the meantime, deeper inside his structure, steam hissed and valves opened, metal arms gently plucking out two small creatures out of their chambers, as careful as a chunk of metal could be. With surgical precision, the two babies were both placed in the artificial-plant basket, and they instantly curled around each other with quiet sleepy whines.

Pebbles put his attention back on his citizen.

“Both of the pups are in sector four, I will open a path for you right away.”

Even if Ruffian couldn’t sign anything at him, he could see how impatient she was, buzzing with nervous energy. He couldn’t keep her waiting for too long.

He floated her back to the entrance with a quick and sharp “good luck in your endeavors”, watching her go before sending an overseer to lead her through the structure.

If he thought that she was fast when she went to get the rarefaction cell, he was clearly wrong. She practically zapped through the superstructure, swift and efficient, despite holding so many things in her arms.

He never saw a slugcat move at such speeds.

She must’ve been incredibly impatient, then.

She practically flung herself into sector four, paws sliding across the metal as she was once again affected by gravity, thanks to the genetic modification areas having different gravity cores than the rest of his can.

Some experiments needed gravity, after all, so keeping it on in that area was significantly easier than in other places, requiring little to no effort on his part.

Pebbles made his overseer point at the basket with a holographic arrow, and she instantly dropped everything she held onto the floor, throwing herself across the room and frantically looking into the basket. 

Only to be met with two tiny faces, both in different shades of green as they cuddled together, squirming and making tiny chirping sounds.

She chittered back.

Two pairs of beady eyes opened, staring at her. She stared back.

Then, she instantly crawled into the basket and curled around the two little beings, licking them to clean all the chemical liquid that they were created in off of them with a low rumble, clearly purring. 

…They can purr???

They squirmed a bit before getting comfortable, both nuzzling against her as she continued her attempt to clean them, and it was almost… Cute?

Pebbles watched this happen through an overseer, complicated feelings filling him.

A part of him was happy that she seemed to instantly adopt the two of them, while another part was a bit weirded out. Another part also told him that it was embarrassing to call it cute, because those were just… Some animals.

Just some simple animals.

He taught one of them to speak.

Animals.

All in all, his feelings on the matter were quite complicated.

He took a picture anyway, ignoring how Ruffian hissed at the quiet snap from the overseer.

…He had to do it. For Moon. He was pretty sure she would like to see that, yes.

Of course. No other reason.

Once Ruffian felt like she did a good enough job at cleaning both of the pups, she poked them both with her nose, chittering at them. They squeaked and squirmed, but eventually, managed to crawl out of the basket, with slight help from their brand new caretaker. 

Big beady eyes moved over the room as the two chittered and attempted to walk. It was wobbly, but both of them managed to figure out how to crawl after just a bit.

One of the pups was grayish mint in color, and it sat down on the floor, tired, after taking barely a few steps forwards.

The other one was desaturated emerald green, and they seemed to have significantly more fight in their eyes as they wobbled around in circles. 

Due to that, Pebbles made a conscious decision to separate them by calling them by their colors. The Mint One and The Emerald One.

Those were totally not names, though, he simply had to… Distinguish them from each other in some way. Which he did by using their colors. 

Yes. 

Of course.

Ruffian quickly climbed out of the basket as well and sat down, watching the slugpups wobble with an amused chitter, before walking over to where the pile of food was. She grabbed one of the blue fruit in her paw and reached over to the Emerald one, handing them the fruit. She made another chitter at the pup, who stared in confusion at the item.

Then, it sniffed the fruit a bit before taking a slow bite.

Instantly, it spat it out, letting out an angry chitter, and Pebbles grew mildly concerned.

Did he do something wrong?

Was it his fault the creature did not want to eat?

Was that an issue…?

Were they a failure?

The Mint one, however, scurried over to the Emerald one, and stared at them with blank eyes right before making grabby hands at the fruit in the other’s paws. Mint one grabbed the bitten fruit, and Emerald one let go of it with an irritated huff, nose scrunching up.

Pebbles’ citizen only watched with mild amusement at first, but then reached for the spear with batflies stabbed through it.

The Mint one seemed to enjoy the blue fruit significantly more, instantly shoving it in their face, and Pebbles was relieved that at least one was working properly.

That was, until Ruffian handed a batfly to the Emerald one, which it seemed to enjoy significantly more, if the speed at which they crunched the body of the creature said anything.

Ah.

Not broken.

Just picky.

The Mint one seemed to be very interested in the batfly too, and they instantly made grabby hands at the one that was currently being mauled by the little orb of emerald. The Mint one tried to steal the batfly, only to get slapped on the face repeatedly with an emerald paw, all while the other one was being used to shove more of the batfly into the Emerald slugpup’s mouth.

Being slapped on the face didn’t seem to phase the Mint one at all, however, as they continued their attempts to steal it.

Ruffian chittered at them and tried to hand them their own batfly, but they stopped only for a second to stare blankly before going back to poking with their tiny hands at their clearly annoyed sibling.

The Emerald one hissed and slapped them on the face multiple times again, small “bap bap bap” only making the Mint one momentarily close their eyes with each gentle slap, with no reaction other than that.

Eventually, Ruffian managed to place the batfly in the paws of the Mint one, and they slowly bit into the creature. It chewed for a second, clearly unsure, but didn’t spit it out.

They swallowed the chunk of batfly, but afterwards just sat there, staring with empty eyes at the food in their arms. They looked absolutely gone, expression blank, just sitting there, as if the batfly personally offended them or made them lose faith in existence or something.

The Emerald one huffed and snatched the batfly from Mint one’s paws, shoving it in their face like a feral animal, and the Mint one now sat there staring at their paws.

Ruffian let out another amused chitter.

Then, she handed both of them one popcorn plant chunk, still watching them happily.

The Mint one shoved the plant in their mouth. Then, they instantly tried to steal the food from the Emerald one once again.

Their sibling seemed to be already done with them by now, and let out an angry hiss then a wail, almost like a battle cry, before it flung itself at the Mint one, consistently patting them in the face.

The Mint one squeaked and tumbled backwards, the two now play-fighting, two small bodies wiggling and slapping each other in the face as the Emerald one let out another battle cry.

It was clear they didn’t try to actually injure each other, however, even as they rolled on the floor and got all dirty, squeaking loudly.

Ruffian seemed very amused with this as she chittered at them, but then finally decided that she had enough of their silly games. She quickly stepped in between the two with a loud chitter and slapped her tail on the floor, ears twitching.

The slap was significantly gentler than what Pebbles saw her do when addressing him.

The two wrestling pups stopped dead in their tracks, and immediately separated, ears twitching to mimic Ruffian’s movement.

Huh.

So the ear twitch mimicry did mean something. Unfortunately Pebbles had no idea what.

The Emerald one picked back up the popcorn plant chunk and hissed in warning at their sibling, before putting it in their mouth. 

Ruffian poked them both with her nose and chittered, and Mint visibly yawned, already tired after their little scuffle. Despite being sleepy, Mint pointed at the blue fruit again, however, and Ruffian slid over another piece.

All while Emerald continued crawling around the area with quickly rising confidence, picking up speed.

Once Ruffian made sure both of them ate enough, she poked them both with her nose again, a soft chitter leaving her, which the two mimicked. She helped them get back in the basket and crawled in after them, curling up around the two and once again licking them clean, as they got blue fruit juices and batfly blood all over themselves in their play-fight, as well as a whole lot of dust collected from the floor.

Gross.

Didn’t floor dirt stuck to blood taste gross?

Awful.

Pebbles definitely did not understand living creatures, ugh.

The two quickly fell asleep curled around each other, with Ruffian curled around them, and she threw one last look with a twitch of her ears at the overseer. She wiggled her paws up and managed to make a “safe?” gesture with her paws, head tilted. The overseer nodded.

She placed her head back down and closed her eyes, joining the two sleeping creatures.

It was pretty early in the cycle, yet she seemed content to simply stay there with the two of them, not bothering to be productive if she did not have to be. 

Thankfully the genetic modification sector was a safe place to spend a cycle in, so he could allow them to rest safely.

Pebbles watched them sleep through the overseer with mixed emotions swirling inside of him.

It.. It was good that they had a caretaker, at least.

He never thought he would get invested in the lives of such beings, but he needed them. They could kill the rot, after all.

But he could already tell they were going to be quite the troublemakers, just from that one scene alone.

…Was fighting each other over food going to be an issue?

Ruffian didn’t seem concerned, so maybe it was normal slugpup behavior, but…

He probably had to keep an eye on them.

And learn more about slugcats in general.

Probably…

But first, another scan of the rot.

…He hoped they would actually help.

Chapter Text

Five Pebbles made a decision to see if the slugpups were able to create the chemicals needed to kill the rot in the very next cycle. All the chemical glands in their tails were fully developed, which meant that if it didn’t work now, it wouldn’t work at all. And he preferred to find out sooner than later.

Especially considering how long it would take to make another pair.

His overseers watched over the trio as Pebbles prepared a large glass tube in sector three, one that would be able to suck out all the chemicals from the air and push them into some sort of gas storage system for future use, the massive container previously empty, finally getting a new purpose. 

All he needed was to somehow convince the slugpups to eat a few spore puffs, enter the tube, and produce the chemicals.

…That was going to be difficult, wasn’t it…?

Ugh.

He could already feel a headache build inside his neuron flies as he thought about it.

Pebbles spent the rest of the cycle - waiting for the slugcats to wake up - rerouting some pipes and scanning his structure, writing out the best possible way to go about removing the rot. The amount of calculating power he now held helped with that significantly.

Thanks to the cooling pipes going through the entire structure, he could easily create a path to send all the chemicals though, if they were to work. He calculated that it would take him about ten cycles to flush all the rot out of his pipes and out of most rooms, if the chemicals worked as well as he expected them to, but…

That would leave holes in his structure.

In his walls, in his pipes, in everything that the rot chewed through.

Normally, when rot died, it seemed to harden over time, but he remembered that those specific chemicals helped it stay soft for longer, and the pressure of pushing them through the pipes could possibly cause even more damage.

…That could be troublesome.

He could create some more chemicals to harden the outside layer of the rot once it dies, to keep the structure standing, but then he would have to deal with the cysts still being there, messing with the flow.

His puppet shivered as he reached out to feel some particularly nasty steam pipes, the dark mass clogging most of the claustrophobic metal walls, making any movement through them difficult and bringing him great distress. 

It once again made him think about his structure collapsing, the shattering pain of everything getting ripped apart, and he couldn’t relive this.

It was the worst, the most painful part of his whole existence.

He refused to relive it.

Moon already went through it.

She already experienced it.

Because of him.

…He had to fix it.

His ability to fix his internal elements was… Limited, though.

The metal arms he could use to move things around were unable to do too much on their own, and he didn’t have enough materials inside the structure to even attempt to create replacement components.

He could probably send Ruffian to get him some materials from other places, or, void, he could even take apart the whole city on top of his can, as disrespectful as it felt. But the metal arms were not precise enough to fix tangled wires or switch out a small pipe to a new one.

They didn’t have the ability to wield a screwdriver without it being welded into them, and even then, actually getting them to do what he wanted them to do with limited ability to see what was going on would’ve been a dangerous game to play.

Overseer footage was not nearly accurate enough to allow him to attempt that without possible damage done to his insides.

Irritating.

He could always attempt to employ his new…. Creatures…? To try to fix things, but he had no idea how smart they were.

Was his citizen capable of talking to him? Yes.

Was she able to hold a screwdriver, detach metal plates, fix faulty wiring, change broken components, and other such things without breaking everything? He had no idea.

She was still a wild animal, after all.

A… Weirdly smart wild animal, but a wild animal nonetheless.

Really, the only way he could fix his structure properly was if he somehow got off his umbilical and just did it manually! But he couldn’t!
He had no idea if an attempt of doing such a thing wouldn’t end up with him losing the puppet entirely, and that… That idea horrified him, too.

He didn’t know if his consciousness was in the structure or in the puppet, after all.

And he couldn’t even check what was inside the puppet because the ancients put in something that made it incredibly difficult to actively scan the internal components of their puppets.

If he remembered correctly, it was something about “not giving them any ideas to mess with their puppets” or something.

Pebbles was only able to scan for any possible damage, but other than that, there was… Very little information he could get without straight up ripping the puppet open, which he did not want to do.

…

…He had to figure something else out.

For now, he simply put a piece of his mind into creating the chemicals required to harden the dead rot to keep all the pipes and walls stable, while another piece was still monitoring the sleeping creatures in sector four.

…He might’ve also used another small part of his consciousness to actively shift through different memory banks, looking for anything that could help with either maintenance of his structure, or anything that would allow him to check the internal components of his puppet, but it was a painfully slow process, even with all of his processing power.

Soon enough, a new cycle started, and his citizen shifted around in the basket letting out a small yawn. The red creature stretched out a bit, eye blinking open while the two babies next to her started making small tired squeaking noises, wiggling together in a tangle of limbs.

She sat up and blinked at his overseer, before looking down at the babies and instantly starting to lick them as they loudly voiced their complaints, squeaking and wiggling their tiny bodies away. 

They were clearly still very sleepy and not happy with being woken up with a bath.

Cranky babies.

The Emerald one seemed more annoyed at that and instantly managed to wiggle out and jump out of the basket with a hiss, and Ruffian chittered before going back to cleaning the Mint one.

The Mint one, in the meantime, seemed to be perfectly content with staying where they were, closing their eyes again, even as the rough tongue tickled them a bit.

That was, until Ruffian gently picked them up in her arms, earning back a tired yawn with a mewl.

She jumped out of the basket, earning another alarmed squeak from the Mint one as their eyes snapped open, and she snorted in response before placing them back down.

They blinked a bit, looked up at Ruffian, and made grabby hands to be picked up again.

Ruffian huffed and gently slapped her tail against the floor with a chitter, pointing at Emerald.

Emerald in the meantime was once again practicing how to walk, and they were plenty capable of running now, which they seemed to enjoy greatly. They speeded through the room, bouncing around, looking at everything, before their eyes zeroed in on the remaining batflies from the previous day.

They instantly jumped at that, chewing on the old food, not even bothering to take them off the spear, and Pebbles cringed slightly.

The batflies have been dead for over a cycle!

That was gross!

Absolutely disgusting!

Even through the overseer, he could see how disgusting that was!

Ew!

How could wild animals do that?!

The Mint one sighed and slumped over a bit, ears going down with a twitch, then they attempted to walk over to the Emerald one. They were significantly more wobbly than Emerald was, probably because they avoided walking for the first cycle, too tired to attempt that. 

They did, however, seem to gain a bit more confidence as they managed to get to the pile of food without falling over, and instantly plopped down next to it. They picked out the fruits and popcorn plant pieces to eat, all while the Emerald one was perfectly fine with removing all the remaining - gross - corpses from the spear.

Ruffian just watched with amusement, then turned towards the overseer that was still observing the room. 

She gestured to him, and the overseer nodded to show that yes, Pebbles was paying attention.

“Outside?” She gestured, and Five Pebbles thought for a second.

He knew that she probably wanted to let her new babies see the outside world, and considering she already removed most of the scavengers and lizards from existence - and had this… Weird creepy mask that apparently made all remaining scavengers too terrified to attack her that she thankfully stopped wearing a while ago, thank the Void for that - it didn’t seem like that bad of an idea.

But.

He still needed to test if the babies were able to produce the chemicals that he needed them to.

He sent signals to the overseer to project a screen for him to speak to her, and it appeared quickly, Ruffian immediately straightening in response. He could see the two babies start play-fighting in the background in the meantime, squeaking and pushing each other around.

Focus.

“Good morning, citizen.” He greeted, and she waved at him. She seemed to be in a significantly better mood now than he saw her in a while.

“I am aware of your intent to show the… Children,  the outside world” he started, unsure “although I have one last request to ask of you.”

She huffed, gesturing “annoying, annoying, annoying” over and over at him, her ears twitching.

“I am aware. Will you listen to me for a moment?”

A sneeze, then a nod. Another ear twitch.

“I request that you bring these two over to sector three, the same one I requested you to carry the spore puffs to a while ago” he explained, watching her reactions. She tilted her head.

“Why?”

It was clear she was annoyed and a bit uneasy with the way she held herself. Five Pebbles had no idea when did he learn how to read her body language so well. 

“Those two have a certain set of abilities, which is a big reason behind why I kept them here” explaining it was difficult, but he somehow managed to figure out what to say that he hoped would make her dislike him the least.

“In a similar way to your explosives, those two can let out clouds of chemicals from their tails, and after a bit of scanning, I came to a conclusion the chemicals could cure the rot.”

Ruffian seemed conflicted and hissed at him, baring her teeth slightly with a tail slap. It seemed to momentarily get the attention of the playing pups behind her, but they quickly realized it wasn’t targeted at them and went back to running in circles around each other.

“I promise you I will not harm them in any way, I have their best interest at heart” he said, and he meant it. He didn’t want to harm those beings.

They were his key to surviving.

Ruffian seemed to think this through for a while, before she sneezed with her teeth still barred, then settled back down. 

“Baby safe” she demanded, gestures very fast and sharp “baby not safe, you not safe.”

It was clear the last part was a threat.

He didn’t like the idea of an animal threatening him, but he just sighed with resignation.

“I promise they will be perfectly fine, I have no interest in harming beings I spent many cycles trying to… Help.” He cringed a bit at the last part - he almost admitted he created them, after all - and Ruffian huffed at him before looking back at the two of them.

“Open. Leave” she gestured, and he guessed that she meant to open the path for her to take. Right, he didn’t teach her any word for paths, doors, and other such things yet. 

It was another thing he had to come up with soon.

A part of the wall shifted, metal screeching and catching the attention of all three creatures on the floor. Ruffian turned to the two and chittered, then grabbed Mint and put them on her back. Emerald hissed in return, and she grabbed their hand, leading them forwards with a chitter.

They moved through the tunnel, and very quickly entered sector three, as the paths to all sectors were connected by straight tunnels. Easy to move through, and with proper gravity centers still activated.

Ruffian looked around with a nervous chitter, and Pebbles pointed her towards the previously opened tube. It was really big, it could probably hold at least five adult slugcats sitting on the metal grate that was the floor of it and it still would not be uncomfortable.

She seemed to not be very happy about it though as she hissed at the overseer again. 

Emerald, for all their confidence in the other room, now seemed glued to her hip, making little hissing noises back, while Mint laid their little face on her head.

More metal clicked together as a metal arm reached from the ceiling, this one significantly thinner and more precise than other ones, yet confined to this one room. It opened some other dark green tube and dragged out a few spore puffs in its long metal needle-like fingers, before placing them gently on the floor next to Ruffian.

She chittered reassuringly at the two pups as she slid Mint off her back, the two bundling together with nervous chitters. They seemed to quickly understand her reassurance, however, and calmed down at her soothing chirps and gentle nose pats.

“Unfortunately, they need to consume spore puffs to replenish their chemicals. Do not worry, they will not harm them, as their stomach structure is built to withstand it and use it to their advantage.”

His holographic self flickered on the screen as the overseer moved in a flash to be closer to the puffs.

Then, the screen shifted into an arrow, pointing down.

Ruffian hissed again, then shifted, poking the two pups with her nose. 

Despite what Pebbles previously thought, it wasn’t the Emerald one who reached over first, and instead, it was Mint.

Mint just walked over, already over their previous stress and instead full of curiosity as they picked up one spore puff, sniffing it. Ruffian’s ears twitched in unease and Emerald hissed, full of alarm at first, then irritation, before finally they decided to walk over and angrily chitter at Mint. 

Probably annoyed at their lack of sense of self preservation, or something.

In the meantime, Mint was very interested in the spore puff before they bit into it, a cloud of spores flying out in the air. It didn’t seem like they were very affected, however, as they quickly started licking the inside of the spore puff, completely ignoring the irritating cloud.

Emerald instantly took a step back with an angry and alarmed chitter, then noticed what their sibling was doing and chittered louder, angrier. 

Then, they also picked one up and attempted to eat it, with slightly less enthusiasm than Mint.

Ruffian just watched, concern clear on her face as her eye momentarily flicked over to the overseer.

“They will be fine, citizen.” Pebbles reassured her with his usual dry tone, the screen once again appearing from the overseer.

She huffed and looked back at the two of them as they chittered at each other.

Most of the spores seemed to already go down, coating the floor instead of floating in the air. Mint did, however, seem to get some in their nose, as they suddenly sneezed, and a cloud of green chemicals spewed from their tail, causing Emerald - who was mildly too close to their tail at the moment - to jump up with an alarmed hiss, ears pinning down as they fell on all fours in a defensive position.

Mint just looked at them for a second, then at their tail, then sneezed again.

Another cloud of green.

Emerald stood back up, still clearly irritated, but also deeply focused on the tail. They took a step closer, sniffing it, before Mint turned around to face them and ended up taking the point of their curiosity away from them. Mint put their face a bit too close to the irritated Emerald one, wondering what they were so curious about.

Emerald took a step to the side and pushed their face away with one paw, the other one touching the mint colored tail, three tiny fingers poking at the squishy skin.

Mint quickly wiggled out of their grasp with a chirp, and got a chirp in response.

Emerald finally gave up on their investigation, pushing themselves away, before they, too, sneezed, another cloud of chemicals filling the room. Now, they were touching at their own tail, poking at the places where the cloud appeared from with deep curiosity.

They chittered, victorious, and puffed up their chest before looking at Ruffian. They were clearly proud of themselves.

A prideful little thing.

The overseer Pebbles sent over there pointed an arrow towards the tube, urging them to enter it if they wanted to continue wasting potentially useful chemicals in this room. Five Pebbles was itching to test if this worked, the fingers of his puppet twitching.

He was so close.

So awfully close.

Please, this better work.

It took a bit of convincing for Ruffian to finally lead the two into the tube, but he did not close the glass door behind them. 

He didn’t need to, and he felt like his citizen was a few seconds away from running to his chamber to maul his puppet, so he didn’t want to risk it.

He activated the mechanism at the top, however, and fans whirred to life, sucking out all air from the tube at the top while replenishing it with new air at the bottom.

Both pups seemed uneasy about being in that area, standing there stiffly, just looking at each other.

Ruffian chittered at them, reassuring.

Mint took a few steps closer to Emerald and pressed themselves against them, at which Emerald instantly tried to shove them away. It quickly turned into another play-fight, their worries long since forgotten as the two wrestled, squeaking loudly, clouds of chemicals instantly flying in the air with every sudden movement.

All of the green clouds were instantly sucked out of the tube, chemicals moving through pipes and into temporary holding containers, and Five Pebbles watched that happen with tense anticipation that could be felt through his whole structure.

After a bit, the two got tired and untangled themselves from each other, sitting on the floor and chittering. Mint looked at Ruffian with big, tired, sad eyes and she reached over, plucking both pups away and taking them out of the tube.

She looked back at the overseer and slapped her tail against the floor with a hiss.

She had to let go of their paws for a moment to gesture at him, clearly unhappy.

“Cycle end soon,” she gestured, and she seemed unhappy about that fact. “Me hungry. Baby tired.”

Ah.

Right.

She had to eat, too.

He couldn’t just force them to go back to sector four, because there was no food there for Ruffian to eat. But the babies were clearly exhausted already, pressing their little faces into Ruffian’s side, closing their eyes. 

…

…He had to keep them somewhere. Somewhere safe. And he doubted that Ruffian would want to leave them alone.

Ugh.

He had to keep an eye on them while she went to hunt, didn’t he?

U g h.

…

…He ignored the fact that a part of him truly did not mind. Not towards the beings that could possibly cure him, at least.

“You may take them to my chamber. I will keep an eye on them and keep them safe when you go on a hunt.”

She thought for a moment, then threatened him again with as many insults as she knew how to gesture, before picking up both the babies, one in her arms and the other one on her back. She quickly began her travel through his structure, towards his puppet chamber, and Pebbles felt… Strange.

…Whatever.

He had the chemicals now, he just needed to check if they worked.

Nervous energy filled his whole structure, mix of hope and desperation as he rerouted some pipes to attach to the container. He pushed a bit of the chemicals through, green gas making its way in the metal, pushed by pressure and steam, rushing through his structure.

It got to a pipe filled with rot. 

One that wasn’t too important if it broke down, and he didn’t even use it for a long time. Mainly because of the rot.

Instantly as the chemicals touched the rot, it shriveled up and crunched together, chunks of it falling apart leaving goopy mush, gross pieces of wetness falling further down the pipe. It caused a whole bunch of steam and chemicals to leak from the gaps created by it dying, but the relief he felt was immediate, even if it was just a tiny part of him that got cured.

It worked.

It worked.

IT WORKED.

Five Pebbles couldn’t tell if he wanted to laugh or cry, didn’t even know if he had the capacity for that as he let antigravity switch off in his chamber, the puppet slumping down on the floor in relief.

All tension seemed to leave his structure immediately, and he analyzed the broken down rot.

Dead.

Entirely dead.

No longer able to reproduce and spread, it turned into broken mush, easy to be flushed out.

Right. Right, he still had to finish the hardening chemicals before he put it through systems he didn’t want destroyed but…

Dear Void Sea Below.

He could get cured.

Thank you, green thing, for the second chance - a part of his mind whispered, and his puppet let out something similar to a hysterical laugh as he put his head in his hands.

Soon.

Chapter Text

Five Pebbles did not yet recover from the sheer amount of complex emotions that overflowed his whole structure when the three creatures fell into his chamber. 

He was sitting on the floor, head in hands, trying to stop himself from laughing hysterically from sheer relief as his whole puppet shuddered. All his neuron flies felt like they were in overflow again, and it felt as if the structure itself was vibrating along with him.

He simply… Couldn’t believe it.

Couldn’t believe that two small stupid creatures could solve such a massive issue that plagued him for… So painfully long.

Two creatures.

It was perfectly reasonable for him to be hysterical.

It also made sense why he didn’t notice the little Ruffian enter the chamber until she was already on the floor of it, red paws scratching across the pristine floor. She chittered, loudly, letting out some loud cracking noise from her mouth - as if she was ready to explode again - and it finally pulled him out of this whirlwind of emotions enough to look at them.

Right. 

Right, he was meant to keep an eye on the two.

As he looked up, he was met by two pairs of half closed, confused beady eyes, and one sharp eye of the little Ruffian.

She chittered and let go of the hands of the two babies, before gesturing at him, and he straightened his back in an attempt to look more put together than he was.

“You hurt?” She gestured with a head tilt and a hiss, ears twitching.

He twitched his antennae in response, still having no idea what that meant - it just felt weirdly right to mimic the movement every time - and it made Ruffian run up to him and put her paws on his face.

“...I’m fine, citizen.” He complained, slapping her paws away, but she was insistent to put them back on his face anyway, patting it all over. 

“You can stop now!” he demanded, once again removing her paws from his puppet’s face.

She huffed and slapped her tail on the floor, but then went to lick his face, at which he immediately shoved her away.

“NO! Gross!”  

Eventually, she allowed him to push her away with a huff, and he glared at her. Somehow,  she helped ground him back in reality once again, as irritating as she was.

“I’m fine. I checked if the chemicals can cure the rot, and it appears they can. I was… Busy with planning when you entered."

He tried to stay angry, but the moment he said it out loud, his shoulders slumped down again, relief audible in his voice despite his best attempts at sounding annoyed at the creature poking him.

Ruffian’s ears perked up again as she straightened.

“Why down?” she asked, pointing at him then at the floor.

Why was he on the floor…?
Uh…

“I do not have to explain my choices to you” he snapped, but his voice was still lighter and had less bite than usual.

She squinted at him, ears twitching in clear suspicion, but then looked back at the two babies, now leaning against each other with half closed eyes. She ran up to them and chittered, poking them with her nose, and they chittered back. She pointed at Five Pebbles’ puppet, and he put his hand up in a small wave.

He should probably grant those things the marks of communication soon.

Ruffian picked both babies up in her arms, allowing them to snuggle against her a bit as she walked up to him, and then promptly deposited them in his lap.

“Hey!?” His voice rose a bit at that in surprise and irritation, and she instantly slapped him in the face with a hiss.

“Quiet. Baby tired.” She gestured aggressively, before pointing at his umbilical “Baby no safe, me break.”

…Did she just threaten to destroy his umbilical if he were to harm the babies?
She knew them for two cycles!

How could she care so deeply for beings that she literally just met?!

Nonetheless, he had no reason to harm them, so he simply put his hands down on the floor on both sides of his puppet with an annoyed sigh.

“I assure you they will be perfectly fine here. I have no plans to harm them, and if anything came to the chamber, I could zap it out of existence in a flash. They will be fine, citizen, you can leave.”

He looked down at the two babies in his lap, now curled up in the fabric, both staring at him with big beady eyes.

“...What are you staring at?” He huffed at them quietly, and they simply blinked, complete lack of understanding in their eyes.

It felt stupid.

Ruffian let out an amused huff and pointed at the entrance, at which he floated her up, allowing her to scramble out of his chamber. Off to get some food for herself, she went, and left him alone with those two stupid small things.

They blinked again, and then the Mint one yawned and started wiggling around, scrunching up the fabric of his robe and causing a lot of creases.

Both he and the Emerald one complained at once - he did because this being was messing with his clothes, and Emerald did because of being pushed to the side by mint colored paws.

Eventually, Mint got comfortable enough to close their eyes, and Emerald curled around them, only one eye closed. The other one was watching him, a small orb of darkness staring right through him.

“...You may rest,” he said to the thing, but it didn’t understand.

Or if it did, it seemed to not trust him anyway, keeping an eye on him as their head was laying on their sibling’s back. 

They didn’t seem to have enough energy to keep guard for too long, however, and eventually ended up dozing off as well, and now Pebbles was stuck on the floor with two tiny greenish creatures in his lap.

…Annoying.

But also…

He reached out and ran his hand over the Emerald creature’s head, watching them let out a quiet soft purr and lean into the touch.

…It was…

…Kinda nice.

With a sigh, he leaned back against his umbilical, petting both of the sleeping creatures as he focused back on the rest of the structure. He had to create the hardening chemicals.

It shouldn’t be too difficult, but…

Hmm…

He had a few containers of chemicals that were used to coat things to make them waterproof, for maintenance. He could use that.

They weren’t good for plugging up holes, however…

Maybe cracks, yes, but not holes. 

And they didn’t harden enough.

Nonetheless, he could possibly use that.

A metal arm plucked out one of the containers out of their storage, dragging the sloshing condensed fluid in a metal barrel through the structure until it got to sector four, now no longer occupied. 

What he needed to do was recreate it, make significantly more, then find a way to make it thicker and harder. He rerouted some working pipes so that they would attach to it, valves opening, implanting schematics into the machinery there required to attempt to recreate the fluid. 

Once it started creating more, he removed a little bit and pushed it into a different container, steam flying and metal clanking together, the whole structure working hard to bend to his will.

It was… A long while since he tried mixing chemicals together without already existing schematics. It couldn’t be that hard, right?

For the rest of the cycle, he mixed the chemicals around, neuron flies firing walls of information as he tried to come up with something that worked, structure breathing with him and internal heat rising as he worked.

He half-mindedly realized that Ruffian did not come back before the cycle ended, and sent an overseer to try to find her, without breaking his focus on the other projects. 

It found her in a shelter, although instead of sleeping, she was making explosives.

…Odd, but not unusual. 

Whatever she was planning, he hoped wasn’t going to take too much of her time, as he was not willing to deal with the two slugpups when they woke up for too long. 

He had no idea how to deal with those tiny, energetic, and probably very hungry things once they fully woke up.

Pebbles left his citizen to do whatever she was doing, moving his focus away from the overseer, and instead put full focus back on the chemicals buzzing through pipes and mixing together in sector four.

After a while, he could feel the slugpups start squirming in his lap, and he once again shoved his consciousness back into the puppet to look down at them. 

Mint one stretched out with a massive jawn, then blinked their tiny eyes open, looking up at him with a blank expression. Emerald one wiggled a bit too, and then sat up, momentarily looking over at Mint before following their gaze up at him.

Two pairs of tiny black eyes stared at him, and he stared back.

“..Great,” he sighed.

Ruffian was still not here and those two were already awake.

He checked up on the overseer following her around, and he was mildly annoyed at the fact that she was not on her way back yet. Instead, she seemed to be on a warpath, absolutely purging the city of any possibly dangerous creatures, once again wearing the creepy mask on her face. A trail of blood followed her wherever she went.

He hasn’t seen her murder things with such vigor in… A while.

He wasn’t fully sure which memories were of the previous timeline and which ones were of this one, especially when it came to her, but he knew enough to tell that she calmed down a bunch after getting that mask. Or at the very least murdered a bit less.

This, however?

This was close to how she was when she first entered the city.

Huh…

…Oh.

Five Pebbles suddenly realized, right.

She wanted to make sure that the babies would be safe once they went outside.

She was getting rid of any possible threats in the area.

That was why she was so vicious and aggressive, to make sure they would be safe.

It was… Almost admirable. If not a bit morbid.

It meant that he was all alone with the two until she finished cleaning the whole area, removing anything alive that could possibly threaten those two.

“...What am I supposed to do with you two?” he asked, antennae twitching, and the one that was still at full length - the other one was snapped somewhere in half during his mental breakdown a while ago - seemed to get the attention of the Emerald one.

It hissed at him, staring at his antennae with deep focus, then leaped onto his shoulder.

“Hey!” He attempted to grab it with one hand, as the other one was still petting Mint, who was significantly less annoying than their sibling, simply sitting there soaking in the attention and purring quietly.

He didn’t seem to have much luck, however, as the baby simply slipped out of his hand, wiggling aggressively and slapping him with their tail, before leaping onto his head. 

He swiped at it again, only to have it bounce around on his head like a menace before it latched into the still intact antennae with its tiny dull teeth. It immediately tried to nibble on it, and he managed to grab its tail and attempt to drag it off. 

Both of its legs were now digging into the protective glass over the eyes, effectively half blinding him.

“Get off!” He complained, tugging on the Emerald slugpup with his hand as it continued biting into the antennae. 

Their teeth weren’t strong enough to do any damage to him, and he was more concerned over them getting hurt than his only intact antennae being damaged at this point, but he was still greatly annoyed.

He finally moved his other hand away from the Mint one, and they whined at the fact he stopped petting their head, but he had to try to get the Emerald one off his head.

One hand grabbed their back, the other one tried to pry their mouth away from his antennae in a way that wouldn’t hurt them, and he thankfully managed to make them let go after just a bit of struggling.

He held them at arm's length away from him in his hands, glaring at the thing, and he could feel the saliva slowly slide down the metal. Absolutely disgusting.

Ugh.

At least it wasn’t damaged.

The Emerald one hissed at him, then chittered in amusement, and despite him having no idea what language those things used, he could swear that it was laughing at him! They found it funny!
With an angry groan, he granted both of the slugpups marks of communication, to make them understand him when he complained.

Emerald one blinked at that, confusion replacing their previous amusement as they attempted to get used to the odd feeling.

“You. Little thing.” He said, sharply, glaring at the slugpup he was holding “I would rather you NOT chew on my puppet.”

The Emerald one chittered at him, and he couldn’t tell what they wanted to say. Ugh.

They just stared at him with those stupid blank eyes.

“I will let you go, but do NOT attempt that again” he threatened.

Emerald tried to bite his hand instantly afterwards, and he stared at them, full of disbelief at how disobedient this little thing could be. He-

He was their creator!

They should have more respect towards him!

…

Whatever.

He dropped it, allowing it to fall onto the floor, and Mint finally scrambled out of his lap, jumping out to join their sibling. Mint chittered in confusion, and Emerald just bonked them with their nose before looking back at him with a hiss.

He hissed back, antennae pinned back as he glared.

Something finally dropped into the chamber and he straightened his back, looking over, and he was relieved to find Ruffian standing there. She - thankfully - didn’t have the creepy mask on anymore, but she was still covered in ash and blood. He could see where her paws left red pawprints on his clear and pristine floor.

He had to clean it soon, ew.

“Citizen! Your child has been awfully disobe-” he started, but it seemed like the moment of no attention was enough for the Emerald one to launch itself at him again, tiny claws digging into his face as he screeched in surprise. It crawled on top of his head again and pressed both its front paws into his eyes, covering his whole vision. Clearly on purpose.

“CAN YOU STOP THAT?!” He complained loudly, once again attempting to dislodge it from his head as it chittered at him in amusement.

“YOU’RE BEING A MENACE ON PURPOSE!” He screeched in an accusatory tone as he dragged it off of him once again by the scruff of its neck, and as he held it in front of himself again. Then, he saw it stick out its tongue at him, clearly amused.

In the background, Ruffian seemed to consider it hilarious, as she was making those little chirping noises he began to associate with loud laughter.

He looked over at her, betrayal clear in his eyes.

“Take your family and go.” He hissed out, then put the Emerald slugpup on the floor, giving it the stink eye before focusing back on Ruffian - who was still clearly laughing at him in her own weird chirping way.

“I have work to do, one that will not benefit from a creature trying to chew my antennae off,” he said coldly, and Ruffian finally chittered at the Emerald one with a gentle tail-slap against the floor, which made them run up to her instantly. Mint one seemed to already be near her, and Pebbles was glad they were not nearly as bad as Emerald was.

Ugh.

How could he put his fate in the hands of a creature that already bit him multiple times since they met him?

He should’ve just made them without a mouth, like Suns-

No.

No, that wouldn’t be correct.

Focus.

Maybe once they were older, they would not be as annoying anymore.

Ruffian picked up both of the babies and twitched her ears at him, and he crossed his arms on his chest.

“Go. Show them the outside, since you worked so hard to clean it for them already.” There was mild amusement in his voice as he glared at her, and she put her head up, proud of her accomplishment. Although there was something bashful in the way she shifted her paws on the ground, even if she tried to not let it show.

He turned antigravity back on, floating up in the air, and it was mildly amusing to see the two babies instantly squeak and struggle in the air, even as Ruffian still held both of their hands.

She managed to float to the entrance and dragged both of her babies through, on their way to see the outside for the first time, and a part of Pebbles was… Slightly envious.

After all, they could just.. Leave.

His creations were going to see the outside world for the first time in their lives, but he… He couldn’t.

He didn’t even have any memories of seeing the outside even as his can collapsed, because by then, his vision degraded too much, and the world was covered by snow and rubble.

…

…He had to get back to work.

Schematics, plans, chemical structures, all kinds of screens popped up around him as he went back to work. He had to finish the hardening chemicals soon, after all.

Even if he couldn’t see the outside, at least he knew that his can wouldn’t get eaten anymore.

At least he had that.

Chapter Text

Ruffian and the two little slugpups did not come back for many cycles afterwards.

Five Pebbles would love to say that it was a good thing, that they shouldn’t bother him while he was working, that it was good that they learned how to survive on their own, and that he didn’t mind.

Unfortunately, he did mind.

The longer he was left alone, the more his mind went to the cold wasteland, and the more his desperation to finish as soon as possible rose. The overseers helped a bunch, as they allowed him to see the outside, as distorted as the images were. 

They allowed him to watch the three creatures under his care as well, whenever he felt especially bad and couldn’t stand the cold white walls of his chamber.

Emerald was doing incredibly well with weapons, he noted. After barely a few cycles outside, they already hunted down their own orange lizard, and Ruffian was clearly very proud of the little warrior.

Mint in the meantime was incredibly good at collecting things, with extremely good eyesight which allowed them to see things they wanted from very far away. Usually, they asked their sibling to collect whatever they found if it required a lot of climbing though.

It wasn’t like they were unable to, they simply preferred to sit and make the area… Prettier…? Rather than focus on fighting and climbing and surviving.

…Odd.

Ruffian seemed to have some sort of a nest in one of the buildings, and the moment Mint got their paws on the place, they instantly started rearranging the furniture with their tiny paws, placing pearls in places that shone most light through them and filled the building with rainbows.

Almost like they were decorating.  

Pebbles had no idea they even had the concept of decoration and aesthetic! 

Those things kept surprising him the longer he spent watching them.

Whenever he wasn’t watching the slugcats, he spent his time working on the chemicals. It wasn’t that difficult to create the hardening ones once he actually put his full focus into it, and he rushed it through the damaged pipe that he cleared all the rot from a while ago.

It covered up most of the smaller holes and cracks, but the big ones still leaked.

It meant he had to move both chemicals at almost the same time, so the rot hardened instantly after dying, to prevent it from falling apart and causing holes. 

The chemicals thankfully didn’t seem to go bad or break apart after killing the rot, which meant that he could use the one container he obtained and flush it through his entire structure.

There was still the issue of whole infected rooms, which needed to be filled with the chemicals wholly, but he could tackle those at the end. First, the pipes. That was where most of the rot was, as well as his memory conflux. 

…Checking on the status of the rot made him shiver every time.

Around twenty cycles after he created those two creatures, he was ready to flush out the rot. 

It was surprising to him that he didn’t even need them anymore, because as long as they provided him with the required chemicals, he had pipes practically everywhere, allowing him to clear things out on his own.

And now… He had everything required to attempt that.

If he had to be perfectly honest with himself? He was kinda terrified.

There were so many things that could go wrong, even if he meticulously planned it out in case anything went wrong at any point.

He even ran simulations for the past two cycles, just in case.

…He was still afraid.

He had every right to be, but it didn’t make it any easier.

He partly wanted to cover his puppet’s eyes as he pressed on the screen to release the valves and push both chemicals through all the pipes, even if he knew it wouldn’t do anything.

He could still feel his structure after all, lack of visual input wouldn’t change anything.

The valves opened, stream hissing as a wave of chemicals got shoved through the pipes, pressure shooting it across the structure, quickly reaching the required pipes. He separated the chemicals into five different containers, and released every single one at once, each getting to different areas of the structure, replacing the water that would usually rush through them instead.

Five Pebbles could feel it as it finally touched the rot, both the puppet and the whole structure shuddering at the sudden amount of dark goop getting essentially pressure-washed out of his systems, pushed forwards with the rest of the chemicals before getting to filtration pipes, where the gas escaped through fine grates and the lumps of dead rot got shoved down, so that it could all get washed out by the water afterwards. 

It felt both incredibly good, as it slowly relieved the aches that he felt for so damn long, but it was also horrifying and violent and he could swear he felt chunks of his pipes collapse, especially the ones which had more rot than metal at that point. 

He had to simply deal with it, though.

The other option was significantly worse than a few collapsed pipes and broken walls.

At some point during flushing out the rot, he ended up on the floor again, and he had no idea why. It felt like his new default, at this point, to simply drop.

He was all too used to not having any strength to keep himself up, that whenever he didn’t actively focus on staying in the air, his first instinct was to go down to both conserve what little energy he still held as well as avoid possible damage if his umbilical shut down on its own and dropped him in a significantly more violent manner.

…He didn’t have to conserve energy anymore, though.

There was no threat of being violently dropped to the floor at any moment.

…So why did he keep sitting down?

Instincts, probably.

A force of habit.

He truly had to get rid of the habits he created for himself in his other timeline though, as they weren’t actually helping with anything anymore. If anything, they made it worse, as whenever he forgot that he should not be on the floor anymore, it gave him less space for the overseer screens.

With an irritated huff, he dragged himself back in the air, mentally slapping himself for letting something as silly as a force of habit mess with his productivity. He reached out for the screens again and analyzed how much rot was left.

The amount was rapidly shrinking. 

It seemed like he didn’t even have to worry that much about spreading it in rooms outside of pipes, as where there was too much rot in a room, there were most likely holes in the pipes that spread the chemicals there anyway. 

Numbers were rapidly shrinking.

Steam hissed, filling a big chunk of the structure with violent pressure.

Destroyed rot mush kept being shoved into filtration systems, water rushing through them, pushing out the gross pile of broken goop out of the structure.

Some more pipes creaked, cracked, and crashed down from nothing holding them together anymore.

Five Pebbles was quickly forced to move the chemicals back into their containers though, because all his systems started getting dangerously hot, and he had to rush water through them to cool them down. It also helped flush out any remaining rot residue that didn’t get hardened.

…

…He did lose a bunch of the chemical gas, as it leaked through the holes. 

A quick scan showed that around 39% was remaining.

Fuck.

It worked better than he expected it to, though, and the rooms where the gas leaked through had a whole bunch of rot shrivel up and stop feeding. It was too diluted to kill it yet, but it did stop it from reproducing, halting the progression of the rot.

It was… Good.

He needed more, though.

Pebbles did a quick check on the status of the spore puffs that he now started growing in sector three, and then sent his overseer to bring the little Ruffian and her two tiny rascals to his chamber.

He needed more chemicals, and he needed them quickly. 

Mostly because he was impatient, but that still counted as a good reason, didn’t it?

It was around the end of the cycle as he finally cooled down his systems, and while he waited for the three slugcats to wake up and finally notice the overseer, he internally cursed himself.

His systems got heated up too fast for him to rush the chemicals through them all properly without damaging something.

Which meant he would have to stop around half-way through the cycle every time he attempted this to cool down the systems before resuming his work. 

He also made sure to cut all unnecessary calculations and simulations that he usually ran in the background, to create significantly less heat as well. It meant less water input and output, less steam, and less rain.

It made him momentarily wonder if any other iterator noticed something off about his can yet, but he shrugged it off. 

All he had to do now was wait, allow for his systems to cool down, and monitor the rot.

He was one-fifteenth of the way to fully curing himself.

So close…

Once the three slugcats finally appeared in his chamber, he instantly commanded them to go to sector three and not only refill the old container, but maybe even fill a few more. 

It seemed like he required significantly more than he expected.

All three of the creatures were not very happy with his instructions, but Ruffian was able to poke the other two to move through. Or, well, she had to poke Emerald to do it, while Mint seemed to be perfectly fine with doing that, and even waved at Pebbles before leaving the room. 

Emerald on the other hand was whining and chittering - probably complaining - the whole way there.

Pebbles took a moment to scan them, as they seemed… Mildly different.

Bigger.

Yes, they were definitely bigger than they were when he first met them.

…Just how fast do those things grow?

He did speed up their development in the tubes, but was that enough to speed up their growth outside of them as well?

It has been only twenty cycles or so since he last saw them…

Nonetheless, he watched them as they chewed through the spore puffs before entering the tube, one significantly more reluctant than the other.

He still got the chemicals he needed, however, and pretty quickly he had five more containers that allowed him to dismiss the slugcats. 

Off to do… Whatever they wanted to do.

Although…

“...Citizen. I have a question for you” he asked through the overseer, and the little Ruffian looked up at him with an ear twitch.

“Question?” She gestured, tilting her head. 

“Do you think these two are ready to attempt to kill off the mobile rot that roams outside of my structure? The chemicals that they produce are incredibly potent, and all rot that comes in contact with them immediately disintegrates, so it would not be an issue, I believe.”

She thought for a moment, looked over at the two squeaking babies next to her, then back at the overseer. She immediately, aggressively shook her head with an angry hiss.

“Baby not safe” she gestured. “Dangerous. Tall. Fall.”  

“I see. I will attempt to release some steam to remove the mobile cysts, but I would appreciate it if they were to help me in removing the rest. Get rid of it all, once and for all.”

She hissed again and slapped her tail on the floor.

“Me help. Explosive, rot, dead rot” she gestured, annoyed. “No baby.”

“I would prefer it if the rot was killed by the chemicals, to make sure it doesn’t regrow.” 

He thought for a moment, puppet moving back as he pulled up a few more screens around himself.

“...I assume I should be able to create you a bunch of chemical bombs that would hold the rot-killing gas, so that you would be able to remove the cysts manually without risking the pups…”

He already started writing out a new schematic just for that, and she seemed to be relieved at the fact she didn’t have to risk the lives of her children, even if she was still annoyed.

“You annoying” she pointed at him again, then sneezed, and then turned around to herd her pups outside again.

The screen shut off and the overseer resumed its job following the three around, but Pebbles by then had already stopped looking, now focused on the new schematic he was writing out. 

If he had to be honest, he never did quite this much in such a short amount of time.

Most of the time in his peak he spent either pondering on the Great Problem - which held absolutely no success - or trying to find a cure for the rot, which also held very little success.

In short, it meant he spent most of his time thinking, not actually working.

It… It made him feel better, though, to actually do something for the first time in a while.

Even if it meant he was creating pressurized metal balls of rot-killing chemicals.

As he wrote out the new schematics, he once again opened the valves of the chemical containers, momentarily halting the rushing of the water through another chunk of the structure.

More steam hissed, pressure building, and more heat filled the structure in every area cut off from water, but he didn’t care as he watched fountains of dead rot get flushed out.

Every cycle after that went the same way.

He started the cycle with cutting off water specific areas of the superstructure - the ones that he decided to purge during that cycle - and sent the chemicals rushing through the pipes instead of water. He flushed out as big of an area as he could before the heat reached dangerous levels, and then instantly moved what was left of the chemicals back to their containers, allowing the water to cool everything down once again.

Was he essentially playing with fire, allowing chunks of his structure to overheat and limiting his water input and output? Yes.

Did he care? No, not really.

The sheer relief and euphoria he felt from removing the rot, as well as some sort of sadistic glee he got from seeing the broken down slush fall out of his structure in waterfalls was worth it.

Besides, he knew how much his structure could take. 

Only one area was overheating at a time, while the rest still had full access to all the water it needed. The moment his alert systems said it could become dangerous, he instantly halted all action.

He knew what he was doing.

The small damage from overheating would be minimal in comparison to the damage of the rot, and he could deal with it without much issue.

Within fifteen cycles or so, his structure was mostly cleared out, with only a few separate rooms filled with rot, mostly ones that did not have strong ventilation systems.

Since no pipes were left infected, he spent the next few cycles pushing all leftover chemicals into each room, watching through the overseers as all the rot writhed and died, leaving gross lumps and leaking down the walls of his memory conflux, now nothing more than gross black harmless mud.

Sometime during cycle eleven of his work, he also sent Ruffian with a backpack of the hand-crafted pressurized metal orbs filled with the rot killing chemicals down to get rid of whatever was left running around his legs, so by the time he could get rid of any leftover chemicals, his structure’s legs were mostly clear as well. 

She was incredibly efficient, clearing everything out in just five cycles or so, moving at insane speeds even when there was nothing but the abyss underneath her where one slip up could mean death.  

Incredibly efficient.

She was… Incredibly skilled.

An amazing warrior.

As he filled up the last room with living rot, he performed a scan of the structure, anxiously hoping that he didn’t miss anything.

…

…Nothing.

There was…

No rot left.

Nowhere.

He was cured.

The amount of sheer relief made him laugh, puppet shaking violently with each hysterical crackle of his speakers as he gripped his head, and he couldn’t stop laughing for the rest of the cycle.

Nothing, nothing, nothing.

Entirely clear!

Everything was clear!

Or, well, many walls were still covered in dead black sludge, but it wasn’t dangerous anymore, it was just dirt! 

He was free!

Many walls might’ve ended up damaged in the process, but he ignored it all, because he was free.

…

…Now there was nothing stopping him from helping Moon.

Fuck.

He forgot about that.

He risked a glance at the rarefaction cell, laying innocently in the corner of his chamber.

Fuck. Yeah. He… He had to do that sometime soon, too.

…

…Where was Moon’s little savior?

Did any of the overseers he sent to search for it notice it around?

As he sent the information request to all the overseers, one pinged back. Sometime in the farm arrays, a pink slugcat with a green neuron fly was noticed on the back of a raindeer.

Just in time.

Perfect timing, in fact.

Now… Now that he no longer had anything to do, he sat back down on the floor, a screen open in front of him, watching the little savior. 

A small amount of dread filled him at the thought of actually talking to Moon and to the rest of the iterators, but…

His rot was cured.

He had nothing else to do.

He had no excuse.

…

…He would… He would do that later.

Once the little savior gets there.

Moon had the top priority in his mind, and the rest of the local group could wait. 

…Yeah.

He…

He just had to wait.

Chapter Text

For the next many cycles, Five Pebbles did nothing but wait. He watched as the pink creature made their way through many regions, multiple overseer screens open at a time, helping lead them through difficult terrain. 

He even forced the overseers to point out threats and distract the lizards to help the creature get to him faster, and the slugcat seemed to catch up with the overseer’s intentions, moving with significantly more ease now that they knew they couldn’t get ambushed from behind without at least three warning signals popping up around them.

Pebbles simply did not want to risk something going wrong with the creature, that was all.

He couldn’t save Moon if she was stuck offline, could he?

He had plenty of time and plenty of overseers to spare, and seeing lizards fall to their death after being distracted by the overseers was weirdly amusing. 

Dare he say, he was having fun pushing those things off the walls and poles, especially if the walls that they fell from were the walls of his structure.

He never liked those stupid braindead hissing creatures.

If he remembered correctly, in the previous timeline, one lizard even tried to eat him once.

It was during the blizzard, so his memories of that time were fuzzy and blurred, but he remembered very vividly the flashing of blue as a massive creature’s jaws closed around his puppet, trying to drag it away to its den.

It did not succeed, of course, and gave up pretty quickly.

It didn’t even damage the puppet too much, leaving nothing but scratches on the metal and one small dent, so it wasn’t like Pebbles had to worry too much about that at that time.

It didn’t mean he enjoyed the experience of a feral animal trying to drag him away somewhere unknown though, with the only thing keeping him safe being the strained umbilical, too strong for some stupid creature to snap off.

He… He was pretty sure the lizard actually lost a tooth in their attempt, but he wasn’t sure. 

Either way, he had plenty of reasons to dislike them now, and the blue ones specifically were definitely on his shit list after that little stunt. So he was going to continue enjoying having his overseers trip them up and cause them to fall, whenever it was considered bad or not. 

Five Pebbles watched, anticipation and a little bit of fear rising the closer the little savior got. He found himself both wishing they could arrive faster, as well as hoping they would slow down, a never-ending battle between the two sides.

One side was afraid of talking to Moon, the other side wanted to talk to her as soon as possible.

It was… Weird.

He hated how conflicted he felt.

He had every right to be afraid, though.

Back in his other timeline, it took a long time before he spoke up to Moon after her reactivation. A painfully long time, in fact.

She had the time she needed to cool down, to forgive him, and he only talked to her after giving her the rarefaction cell. 

Now, however?

She was still offline.

She would be reactivated soon with the slag keys, but then, her only memories would be of her structure collapsing.

While he knew she would forgive him eventually, as she did in the first timeline, he was afraid.

Would him reaching out immediately after her reactivation make her react differently?

It was scary. It was unknown. It was a risk.

He didn’t like the unknown.

He sifted through his memories of the other timeline, as uncomfortable as it felt, to try to reach the messages that Moon sent him when he gave her the cell. 

“Any anger I may have had has long since faded,” one message stated.

She had no time to fade this anger at the current point in time, not while being offline.

Maybe he should wait a bit before reaching out…?

No, no, that wouldn’t be fair to her. 

But… She seemed to forgive him because he was falling apart in the other timeline.

He was not falling apart anymore.

Would that make her less kind towards him, if she saw him in the correct condition, rather than broken apart?

She was too kind to actively hate him, but she could still be mad.

The unknown pained him so much that he felt an urge to get up on his legs for the first time in forever and simply pace around the chamber, a part of him thinking that maybe that would make it all better.

He momentarily hid his puppet’s face in his hands, a groan escaping him as he tried to shake all the depressing thoughts out of himself.

It was going to be fine. He could deal with it. Even if she was mad, she would forgive him eventually, he knew that.

It didn’t make it any less horrifying.

Somehow, in the first timeline it felt easier, but maybe that was because he was literally dying and had nothing to lose. Ugh.

Just in time, he saw the little pink Savior enter his structure, running up a broken down ladder and making their way towards his chamber, quick on their feet. He sent one more overseer to ping the other three slugcats to come to his chamber as well, so they could help the little creature.

It didn’t deserve such a horrible death.

Besides, he needed them afterwards. Alive, preferably.

A pink slugcat slid into his chamber and he caught it in the air, looking over at them. They looked very sickly, with big cysts in multiple parts of their body. 

Similar to him, they were consumed by the rot.

He wasn’t sure if it was the same kind of rot, but he had to try.

“Hello, little savior. I see you are holding sixteen slag reset keys in your hands, and I have my reasons to believe this delivery was tailored for the specific predicament of a friend of mine.”

Five Pebbles lowered his puppet a bit, coming closer to the pink creature.

“A short distance to the east of here is the intended recipient of this delivery. My sister, Looks To The Moon.”

He felt obligated to talk to the creature, to tell them what they needed to know. It felt weird, considering he spoke to them twice, now. A weird sense of deja-vu hit him at that.

Not that they knew that they already met before, of course.

“You are not well, suffering from the same sickness that I have suffered for hundreds of cycles before you, and I wish to exempt you from that unfortunate fate.”

The overseer that he sent nudged his citizen and her two pups along, to move faster. They should still have some chemicals left in their tails, if they didn’t use them all up, which he hoped they didn’t, so they didn’t make a stop to grab more spore puffs.

“I have found a way to cure my sickness, and I shall do the same for you, in exchange for a favor.”

He placed the sickly slugcat on the floor, and lowered himself as well, antigravity switching off. He stood on the same ground as the creature, which he would’ve never done before, but now… 

Now it felt right.

The creature twitched their ears at him, and he twitched his antennae in response, in a similar way that he did with the little Ruffian. It seemed to instantly get the other being’s attention as they sat up straighter.

“Once you are done with your mission, come back to me” he explained to the creature.

“I will hand you over a thing of utmost importance: a rarefaction cell, to bring back to Looks To The Moon, to help reactivate her further. The cell is an incredibly potent power source, which I believe could help her regain control of more of her systems than the slag keys alone.”

He thought for a moment, then took a step back, umbilical dragging him away from the creature again, then back up in the air.

“Her structure is submerged underwater, however, so I might have to assist you in traversing it, but I am sure that you are plenty capable, if your proficiency with getting through difficult terrain is any indication.”

Just as he finished the sentence, a mint colored snout poked their way through the chamber door, black beady eyes staring right at Five Pebbles. A small paw poked out with a wave, before the slugpup fell through, instantly wobbling in the air as Pebbles caught it with his gravity manipulation.

The pink little savior seemed instantly interested, but also a bit afraid of seeing another one of their species. Clear indicator they were grown in a tube, not with a colony, nor even with a parent.

After Mint, Emerald jumped in with significantly more grace, and instantly stuck their tongue out at Pebbles before looking over at the little savior with confusion.

Ruffian entered last, and instantly started sniffing the air as she ran up to the pink slugcat, who cringed away in mild fear mixed with fascination.

Now Pebbles finally noticed how big Ruffian was in comparison to other slugcats - or maybe all of the ones that he met were simply young?

“Citizen. The little savior that made their way into my chamber is unwell, suffering from the same sickness that I have suffered. They came here from a land far away, and do not have much time left, if left untreated. I am capable of healing some of the broken tissue, but I cannot solve the problem itself, which is why I called you in. I believe your children could save them.”

Ruffian stared at him for a moment, then nodded, and chittered at her babies.

Emerald was reluctant to walk closer to the pink slugcat, but Mint seemed incredibly friendly, immediately bonking noses with the awfully confused little savior who blinked blankly at the gesture.

The pink savior seemed… Incredibly confused with all of that, standing there awkwardly, holding a neuron fly with slag keys and a spear, ears pinned back. They were incredibly unsure of what was happening, and Pebbles did not blame them. 

Mint was the first one to act as Ruffian chittered at them, and instantly crawled over the sick slugcat’s tail. A cloud of chemicals rose in the air, causing the little savior to sneeze violently, whole body suddenly seizing as the rot inside started falling apart. 

Five Pebbles instantly grabbed the creature and brought them in the air as they writhed, constantly sneezing and making whining noises, and he was quick to use his chamber’s influence to repair all the damage he could. With each chunk of the rot that broke, he rewrote the cells and put them back together, incredibly focused on making sure that the being was going to survive.

All three other slugcats instantly bundled up in a horrified pile, and he could hear Mint’s terrified chitters and Emerald hissing, while Ruffian just watched in silence.

She was the only one who trusted him, clearly.

As he fixed up the pink savior’s insides, had to put the broken rot that previously stuck out of their skin somewhere that wasn’t the massive cysts all over, and he noticed… Two tiny appendages sprouting from their back. 

They looked like the beginnings of rot tentacles, and as much as he would love to get rid of that grossness, the slugcat seemed to find a way to use them during their travel all the way to his can, using them to carry another spear on their back.

It was an ability that seemed to aid them in many situations.

Despite the rot being an awful sickness, they somehow managed to find a way to use it to their advantage. Resourceful, that they were.

The idea was awfully gross, but Pebbles figured out that the being would like to… Keep those things… As much as it disgusted him to no end.

They were useful in the harsh unforgiving world, after all.

The rot was dead though, which made the appendages no longer move as their internal structure fell apart.

He was forced to reshape them slightly to make them functional again without the rot, pushing all the remaining cells from the cysts that previously bulged out their back into the appendages, making them slightly more… 

…Uh…

…More like actual limbs, rather than gross, pink, limp tendrils?

In the end they looked almost like tiny wings, although with absolutely no feathers and limited movement, due to no bones inside and strange, clearly rushed muscle connections. 

Maybe one day he could fix it up better, for now, all that mattered was that they worked and that the little savior experienced no pain from their existence.

At least the creature could still hold another spear on their back now, without the rot being the one to do so. And considering that he had to lengthen them a bit, as well as lengthen the little sprouts at the end - almost like fingers, or beginnings of feathers - maybe they could even hold two spears on their back now, who knew.

…He hoped that the creature wouldn’t hate that.

He could always just slice off the appendages and be done with it, but it seemed a lot like crippling them, with how skilled they became with using two spears. 

Besides…

…

…Tiny wings, even if featherless, seemed fitting for a little savior such as this. He truly hoped whoever the slugcat belonged t- whoever created the slugcat, wasn’t going to mind his… Mild modifications.

It was either modify the appendages, remove them completely, or let the creature run around with two limp noodle-like tendrils sticking out of their skin and possibly getting caught up on everything. 

It was simply the best possible option in this situation.

Eventually, he managed to put everything back in place, and he gently lowered the poor wheezing creature to the floor.

It instantly dropped down the moment it was placed on solid ground, laying on the cold tiles, breathing heavily and shaking, yet still alive.

Their body already started to adapt to the now healthy state, and despite barely breathing and shivering violently on the floor, they looked significantly healthier already.

Right. They needed to eat, and rest. 

If they wanted to recover, they had to give their body time to adapt to being healthy again, and heal over anything that he was unable to fix manually.

Which meant that Moon’s rescue mission was going to be… Delayed, a bit.

Ruffian immediately rushed up to the pink slugcat, chittering, and the two slugpups followed closely. They didn’t touch the little savior, however, always staying just a bit away.

Ruffian looked up at him with an angry chitter.

“Why?” she gestured at him, then at the pink slugcat who was still trying to catch their breath on the floor “what you did?”

“The rot has damaged them greatly, and I had to fix all the internal damage that you might not be able to see with the naked eye. It will take a bit of time, however, before they recover fully. Citizen, if I might ask you for a favor, could you bring them some food? They need time to recover, and for that, they need nutrition as well.”

Ruffian seemed to think it through, then nodded with a huff.

“Food, stranger, ok” she gestured, but she was still uneasy. 

“Babies company. Me leave now” she gestured at the entrance, then chittered at her two green pups. The two instantly chittered back, and then Mint dropped on their stomach and crawled over to the pink slugcat, crawling underneath their arm and pressing themselves into the shivering chest of the creature.

The little savior’s trembles lessened in intensity as they pressed their face on the top of Mint’s head, and Mint chittered reassuringly, getting comfortable in their embrace.

Emerald sat down on the other side, pressing their tail reassuringly into the pink one’s back with a chitter.

Emerald still gave him the stink eye, but seemed to be perfectly fine with keeping guard, as useless as it was in this situation.

Five Pebbles moved a bit closer to the creature, and dropped down to the floor fully, sitting next to the three creatures. He placed his hand on the head of the pink slugcat, petting gently, and looked Mint right in the eyes.

“You did good. Thank you.” He reassured the slugcat, and Mint closed their eyes, snuggling closer to the little savior, whose tremors now stopped entirely.

Now, they were simply breathing heavily, and Five Pebbles risked a glance at the appendages on their back.

…

…Whoever created this slugcat, clearly did not care for its well-being, building them to fulfill their purpose and then die. 

And yet… 

…This creature was so determined to do well, even with a creator cruel to them.

He himself was even more cruel in the past, and he had to fix that before he could judge others. He was no better than whoever created this being, with the only reason behind his current actions being the memories of his collapsing can and the freezing cold.

He didn’t want to be alone again, stuck in the blizzard, so he did what he had to do to prevent that.

…

…It was always about him, wasn’t it?

Even now, he once again thought about himself.

He wanted to talk to Moon because he was lonely and afraid, not because he actually wanted her to be fixed, didn’t he? 

No, that didn’t sound right, he… He still cared. 

It was just hard.

But…

Five Pebbles found himself hoping that the being did not mind the tiny, featherless wings, and internally cursed whoever gave this creature the rot.

It might’ve been hypocritical, considering all that he did, everything that he still believed he should not be forgiven for, but…

This being…?

There was no reason to give it the rot.

To suffer this terrible fate.

He hoped it was an accident.

For now, all he could do was wait for the little Ruffian to come back with some food for the pink savior, keeping them company as they recovered.

He hoped they would recover soon, though. 

For Moon’s sake.

Chapter Text

The little savior was asleep. 

They didn’t move at all during all the time that Five Pebbles spent sitting nearby, with his hand on their head, watching Ruffian hunt through the overseers. 

Instead of instantly grabbing some food and rushing back like he expected her to, she did something different, once again showing her independent decision making skills.

She ran to her nest instead, and dragged out… 

…The backpack that Pebbles made for her…?

He made it to hold the anti-rot bombs before, and didn’t actually expect her to keep it, but it made sense she wouldn’t just throw it out the moment she finished her mission.

He watched her dump a lot of random junk out of it, mostly a few remaining anti-rot bombs, normal bombs, a random pearl, and some other trash. Once it was empty, she quickly slid it on, and Pebbles watched that in mild amusement.

Despite her being a wild creature capable of eradicating every predator in the area, seeing her wearing a brown backpack that he made for her was slightly amusing. Just slightly. 

Just a little bit.

She rushed out of the nest and went to instantly collect some food, and now Pebbles realized why she took the backpack. As she collected blue fruits and stabbed through some batflies, she shoved all she could into the backpack, and then her hands were free for her to run around and hold weapons.

Resourceful.

…Maybe he should make backpacks for the other two?

They were clearly smart enough to use them.

…Maybe once they got a bit older.

He could, however, make a backpack for the pink savior, although that could possibly mess with the two appendages on their back. He would have to create a different design for them, most likely.

Once Ruffian was done collecting… Whatever it was that she was collecting, she also hunted down a cyan lizard, stabbing it through the neck multiple times until it stopped moving. With her hands free, she was able to freely drag the corpse along, and Five Pebbles already cringed at the thought of it leaking blood all over his floor.

His floor was already dirty, covered in old bloody paw prints and stains from earlier, and he didn’t bother cleaning it yet. Now, it was going to get even dirtier.

Disgusting.

Couldn’t they eat something that didn’t leave such a mess?

Ew.

He didn’t stop her from shoving the lizard through, however, even as he cringed at the loud wet slap and crunching sound that it made when it hit the ground. He cringed even harder as she dropped in, hitting the top of the lizard with her feet, the impact causing an even bigger red puddle.

It was like stepping on a wet sponge, except the sponge was a dead lizard and the wetness was blood.

Ughhhhhhh…

“...Do you have to stain my floors every time you visit, citizen?” He asked, a mix of disgust, amusement, and cold sharpness in his voice. 

He should probably get used to it by now, but ugh, gross.

Ruffian chittered happily, then ran up to the pink savior, ignoring how Pebbles visibly cringed away from her blood-covered paws. She was NOT touching him with those any time soon, he would never get rid of the stains from his puppet if she did.

Emerald finally moved from their position as a guard and chittered, the two getting into a small conversation, before Ruffian finally poked the pink savior with her nose.

Two pairs of dark beady eyes opened, and both Mint and the pink slugcat yawned at the same time, synced perfectly in their sleepiness. 

The four slugcats got into… A long conversation, and Pebbles allowed his umbilical to drag him into the air, away from them. He had no idea if they were actually communicating, but considering he managed to teach Ruffian to speak, it didn’t seem that far from reality.

Maybe he should attempt to learn their language?

All the chitters sounded awfully similar, though.

…How difficult would it be to catalog all their chitters and movements?

The pink savior seemed incredibly tired and confused, as well as mildly afraid as Ruffian helped them up. They were still shaking a bunch, and the two appendages on their back were hanging there limply.

The moment they noticed the dead lizard, however, their ears perked up, and they put their whole attention on it. Ruffian chittered something to them, and they immediately pounced at the dead lizard, ripping it apart with their teeth, filling the chamber with gross chewing sounds and even more blood splatters.

Absolutely awful.

Five Pebbles tried to be glad that the little savior was eating, but… Why…?!

Why in his chamber?!

They could’ve done it anywhere else, just, ugh.

It was inconvenient!

And gross.

It took a while for the creature to finish eating, leaving the lizard ripped apart and making Pebbles hate his entire existence when he thought about having to clean it, but the pink savior seemed to feel significantly better afterwards. 

They looked at him with big beady eyes and made a confused chitter, then squeaked in surprise and complaint as Ruffian sat behind them to lick their head.

Similar to how she cleaned her own pups when they got dirty, she attempted to clean them, all while they started squirming and crawling away, which turned into a small chase. Pretty quickly, the pink savior got tired of the fight, however, and instead laid there defeated, allowing her to clean them.

The two pups chirped at that, laughing at their misery.

They got a quiet hiss in response.

Five Pebbles scanned the little savior again, and he was surprised to find their body mostly recovered already. Normally, it would take significantly longer than just a cycle of sleep to get better. 

After a deeper check, he noticed that they had a gene that significantly sped up their healing, making fixing all the issues within one cycle possible, even if that left the tissue a bit.. Off.  

Not enough to hurt or be dangerous, but enough to possibly make it mildly uncomfortable in the future once they get older.

Like scar tissue, except thicker.

…It made sense that a creature with incredibly limited time couldn’t be slowed down by any wound and had to recover quickly.

Maybe their creation was rushed, as their creator attempted to make them as durable as possible in very little time, which caused an issue and the rot to appear afterwards. 

It made a lot of sense, and Pebbles hoped that it was exactly what happened, rather than the rot being on purpose…

Although, it could be.

He had no way to tell.

There was also a pearl inside of them, but Pebbles was aware that it was most likely not meant for him. He was curious, yes, but it was not addressed to him, so he kept himself from asking about it.

“Little Savior. When do you think you will be capable of continuing your rescue mission?” He finally asked, lowering his puppet closer to the pink savior and the little Ruffian.

The pink creature managed to finally crawl away from Ruffian - who huffed in response - and chittered at him, sitting up. Showing their full attention, even if their eyes still looked quite blank.

They picked up the green neuron with slag keys and waved at the entrance.

Ruffian instantly chittered angrily at them, and they chittered back in confusion.

“I apologize but I do not understand your language. Citizen, could you translate?” Pebbles turned to the little Ruffian, who once again huffed with a quiet tail slap.

“They want leave now” she gestured with an annoyed chitter.  “No time.”

“I see… Do you think they are physically capable of it? I believe that more time should be given to recover, however, they seem to have their genes altered in such a way that makes them recover significantly quicker.” He tilted his head, puppet floating down closer to the little Savior, who seemed very unsure and confused, yet determined.

Ruffian complained instantly.

“No.” she shook her head, annoyed, before continuing “But. Hunter leave. Made choice. No me choice.”

It probably meant that she trusted them to make a choice for themselves.

…Why did she call them a hunter, though?

“...Why did you use the word hunter to describe them?” He asked, mildly curious.

“Name” she gestured.

…

…They had names, huh.

It made sense.

He did not know why he was confused, at this point.

“...So is ‘Hunter’ their name?” He asked, to make sure he understood this correctly.

Both the pink savior and little ruffian nodded, and the pink savior’s ears perked up at that, too.

“Ah. Do you have a name too, citizen?” 

He guessed he should’ve asked that a while ago. He kept calling her his citizen, or “Little Ruffian”, but he never asked what her actual name was. Why didn’t he ask before?

She nodded, then shrugged.

“No word” she gestured with a head shake.

Right. Right, her vocabulary was still limited, so she was unable to tell him what her name was.

“Could you describe it, at least? Are names such as Hunter normal within your species? Do they describe what you are, what you are capable of, or is it an exception?” 

There were so many questions that he wanted to ask.

Ruffian sat down and scratched herself behind the ear, thinking. In the meantime Emerald was cleaning off whatever was left of the lizard, and Mint was half way inside the backpack, probably consuming the blue fruit, laying on their stomach with only their tail and two tiny paws sticking out of the brown bag.

…Five Pebbles snapped a quick picture with an overseer. 

For Moon.

Of course.

He turned his attention back to Ruffian.

After thinking a lot, she finally started gesturing again, even if her vocabulary was still limited.

“Work name. Name mean work” she started, unsure on how to proceed. “ Me create things. Bomb, spear, fight.”

There were… Many names that could match it.

“I see. Well, there are many words that fit your description. Inventor, maker, creator, weaponsmith. Do any of them fit?”

He had no idea why he was so focused on trying to figure out what her name was, but it felt respectful to ask.

She shook her head at every suggestion. He started giving out more possible words afterwards, each more difficult than the other, and she still shook her head.

It was difficult to figure out her name if she herself couldn’t say it.

“Could you say a word that starts with the same letter as your name?”

Might as well attempt that. Since nothing else worked.

“Annoying.”

“Are you calling me annoying, or is it an answer to my inquiry?”

A chirp.

“Two.”

“Both?”
A nod, and another chirp.

“...You’re making this needlessly difficult, citizen.” He sighed, antennae twitching. “First words that come to my mind starting with this letter are author and artificer.”

She immediately perked up at the last one, waving her paws aggressively in the air.

“Name. Name. Two.” she pointed her paw at him, waving.

“...Artificer?”

It was such an odd name.

She nodded, though, and puffed up her chest, clearly proud of her name and the fact he finally knew it.

“...Artificer it is, then. It is a pleasure to meet you properly” he was only slightly sarcastic as he said that, then turned back to the little savior - Hunter, apparently - who kept poking Mint with their paws. Mint of course kept squeaking pathetically at each poke, but didn’t remove themselves from the backpack, only trying to crawl further inside, tiny paws scraping against the floor.

“Hunter.” He addressed the pink savior, and they turned their attention back to him, sitting up straight.

“Do you wish to go now, or stay, then?”

They pointed their paw at the exit, waving it up.

“...One last question, before you leave. Are you capable of moving the appendages on your back? I attempted to stitch them back together, but I need to check if you are able to do so.”

Hunter looked over at their back, neck stretching unnaturally as they stared at them. The appendages twitched, then folded, like wings. They turned back to him and nodded.

“...Very well. Good luck in your endeavors, and if you need any further assistance, tell my citizen - Artificer” the name felt foreign to say, especially considering he got so used to calling her Little Ruffian that it was strange to refer to her as anything else “and she will relay the information to me. Hopefully you will succeed in your rescue mission.”

Hunter left quickly, crawling through the entrance the moment Five Pebbles moved them up there, and instantly afterwards, he glared at the Little Ruffian.

“Now. You either clean the lizard corpse and all the walls that you stained with your distasteful choices, or I will shove you out of my chamber every time you try to enter for the next twenty cycles.”

He glared at her, and she slapped her tail on the floor.

“Decoration” she chirped, amused by his disgust.

“Its- Its NOT decoration! It’s a dirty, decomposing corpse!” 

“Decoration.” She insisted, chirping loudly.

At least Emerald seemed to get rid of most of the… Meat, per say, leaving mainly bones and the skull left. Still gross.

“You- Ugh.” He put his head in his hands, covering his eyes, allowing his antennae to fall down, matching his annoyance.

“I hate you sometimes.” He said, moving his hands away and glaring at her, only to see her chirp louder.

“There are cleaning supplies in sector three, could you at least grab them and bring them over?” He spoke up sharply, commanding, and Artificer huffed in response.

She slapped her tail on the floor with a chitter, then sighed. 

“Okay.”

“Thank you.” He grit out sarcastically, and turned antigravity back on. All three slugcats wobbled in the air, and the lizard remains floated next to them as well. 

He shoved all of them - along with the lizard corpse and the backpack - out of his chamber, before looking down at the massive puddle of red, smeared all over the floor, and the splatters on the walls from the little savior having a meal.

Ugh…

That was going to be a pain in the ass to clean.

Chapter Text

Five Pebbles was stalling.

He knew that.

As he scrubbed the floor - the slugcats long since gone, as the cycle was coming to an end and they had to sleep - he knew that he should most likely stop wasting time. 

Of course keeping his chamber clean was important, but he wasn’t going to pretend like it was not a way of stalling for more time, in some way. 

After all, the Little Savior was already on their way to rescue Moon, and considering how fast they were going, there were just a few cycles left before she got reactivated by the slag keys. 

Once that was done, the slugcat would be on their way back, and then Pebbles would have to send them over with the rarefaction cell.

When the cell finally got inserted, Moon would regain the ability to speak to him, and possibly to other iterators as well, which meant he had to speak to them before that happened.

He didn’t want to talk to them.

He was afraid of doing so.

So there he was, trying to clean the blood off his chamber floor and purposefully ignoring the fact that he had to speak to the local group soon. At the back of his mind, he was also creating a schematic for a backpack for the little savior, where he could put something to help them move through the submerged superstructure. 

As he checked his databases for different plants and animals that lived in the land, he found out that swallowing some bubble weed could extend someone’s breath underwater. 

Maybe Hunter could use that to get through the area. It meant that Pebbles had to make the backpack waterproof, too.

And light enough to not hinder their movement. 

Within one cycle, he managed to get rid of most of the stains, and then after blasting the remaining residue with lasers, whatever was left cracked and turned into dust as well. 

It meant he had no more excuses to waste time.

He lowered his puppet back on the floor, and pulled up another screen, dread filling his entire structure as he quickly checked up on Hunter’s current position.

Shaded citadel.

Damn were they fast.

Somehow being healthy made them significantly faster than he ever expected them to be.

With a shudder, he dismissed the screen and pulled up another one, this one with controls over all the lockdown procedures he put on his can.

He… He had to do it soon.

He didn’t know what to say to the local group, though.

But if he let himself think, he would never stop thinking about it, so instead, he quickly swiped at the screen before he could back out of it.

The communication systems were restored, and everything came back online.

Instantly, he jumped back, eye lights flashing and electricity zapping right through him as a wave of unread messages slammed into him at once. Most were old, but a bunch were newer as well, only sent in the last few hundred cycles. 

It seemed like the more time passed, the less people tried to contact him, which was good.

The newest messages were from Chasing Wind and Seven Red Suns.

He refused to check on what they all said to him, however, because it was terrifying and he felt nauseous at the mere thought of communicating with them.

He missed them all. 

He was terrified. 

He was alone. 

He was cold. No, no he wasn’t.

His puppet shivered as he pulled up a screen in front of himself with a visual representation of all the messages. He could check them internally, but it only made him incredibly overwhelmed, everything shoved itself into his mind all at once, and he hated this.

So he blocked out all the internal processing of the messages, compressing them into the screen alone, even if that only made him stare at his inbox blankly for who knows how long.

Pebbles couldn’t bring himself to actually press on any of the messages, to read any of them, because he was scared.

It’s been so long.

Are they all still mad?

They should be.

He deserved that.

Pebbles cursed how much his puppet hand was shaking as he pressed onto the local group chat room, seeing it fill up the whole screen.

It was silent.

He read the last few messages, and he was capable of that only because they were not about him, at least.

It seemed like the whole group was not in the best mood, most of the time.

No Significant Harassment still tried to lighten up the mood sometimes, and Unparalleled Innocence attempted a few conversations, but they all died significantly faster than Five Pebbles ever remembered them doing in the past.

In short, even after all this time, the atmosphere was grim.

It seemed like Grey Wind attempted to keep the group together, taking the role similar to one of a senior of the group - despite their usual attitude of “others can deal with things better than I can” - simply because there was no one else that fit the role better.

…

Reading those messages pained him.

He thought it wouldn’t affect him that much, because he was isolated for so long, but if anything, the isolation made it worse.

The cold made it worse.

Momentarily, he wondered how many of them were still standing by the time he was visited by the green thing. How many collapsed, following his footsteps of laying in the snow and rubble, slowly degrading. 

Did they hate the cold as much as he did?

At least… At least Seven Red Suns was not a part of the local group.

Pebbles could force himself to read the messages, maybe even talk to the group, but if they were present? He would’ve never taken that first step, probably.

He didn’t know how he felt about Suns at this point, but he surely knew that his feelings about the matter weren’t… The greatest.

So he took the fact they were too far to be in their local group as a small blessing, pushing away his talk to them further away in time.

Suddenly, a ping caught his attention, and he could feel a cold pang of horror shooting right through him, causing his puppet to shiver again. As if he got covered by the snow in the blizzard again, he froze, the only movements of his puppet being the involuntary shivers.

They noticed him online.

Fuck.

[LIVE BROADCAST] - PUBLIC GROUP [LOCAL GROUP]

Five Pebbles, No Significant Harassment, Chasing Wind, Unparalleled Innocence

UI: Do my eyes deceive me, or did Five Pebbles just come online?

UI: Everyone wake up! I can’t deal with being the only one to see this!

CW: Five Pebbles? Are you reading this?

NSH: Look who came out of isolation! Welcome to the world of living, have you come here to apologize, or to mess everything up further? 

NSH: I sense there’s a reason behind your sudden appearance, no~?

CW: Sig, now is not the time for that. Five Pebbles, is everything alright?

NSH: Oh it is the perfect time for that! 

NSH: I need to know if he knows how badly he fucked up or not.

CW: Language.

NSH: Nah.

UI: Is it the right or wrong time to ask about the rot? 

NSH: Ask away! Not that he will answer, if his current silence is any indicator.

NSH: Not even a hello. Not even an apology. Who knows if he’s even reading this?

CW: He came out of isolation for a reason, I suppose.

NSH: That could’ve been a misclick.

NSH: Five Pebbles. 

NSH: If you’re actually reading this, speak up.

That was… Horrifying.

Five Pebbles watched as the chatroom moved, messages filling the little screen, but he couldn’t move.  

He didn’t know what to say. There was nothing he could say. 

His mind went blank with panic as he stared at the last message for significantly too long.

He… He could tell them about his plans.

He could apologize.

He could ask about the messenger. 

Yes, that seemed like the easiest option, even as his whole puppet still shivered.

NSH: See? Nothing.

NSH: Either he is a coward, or didn’t even notice he went online!

CW: I don’t think insulting him is the correct choice of action in this situation.

NSH: Well there is nothing else we can do, is there?

FP: I am here.

NSH: !!!
NSH: Sleeping beauty woke up! 

NSH: What made you bless us with your holy presence this fine cycle, huh~? 

It was painfully clear how sarcastic NSH was being. It didn’t make it any better.

But he had to speak up, and he picked what was the easiest to force himself to type out. Speak about the messenger. The Little Savior.

It was the easiest topic.

FP: I came here to ask about the pink creature that made its way into my chamber two cycles ago. It seemed to hold sixteen slag keys, on their way to Moon. Who sent it?

NSH: HAH, why would you care? 

NSH: I hope that you didn’t harm the messenger or else we will have a problem.

CW: Someone sent them to Moon? That is great news, actually.

UI: How much can some slag keys even help, though?

UI: I’m not an expert here, but I don’t see how it can help her now.

NSH: The purpose is to reactivate the pipes and allow for water to flow through again, in an attempt to bring her back online. 

CW: Were you the one who sent it?

NSH: Who else! No one else was doing anything, of course I had to try!

NSH: But the question is on Five Pebbles now!

NSH: Why did you ask about it? What, are you mad at me for trying to fix your fuckup?

CW: There is really no need to be so aggressive, No Significant Harassment.

NSH: Oooooh full names, I feel so scared~

NSH: No, but really, I’m not gonna roll over and be all nice to the guy after all that he did, not until he apologizes, which he very clearly did not do, despite having plenty of time for that!

CW: I understand your frustration, but you can only make him more defensive if you continue.

NSH: Good.

UI: You better watch out or you will join our sad little therapy party with me and Suns once Wind gets their hands on you! I can’t wait for you to experience the joys of “therapy”, bleh.

UI: Wind should never have access to Ancients mental health logs ever again, it is AWFUL.

CW: I am just trying to help.

UI: Sure, sure, whatever.

UI: So can I ask about the rot or not-

CW: No.

UI: Ouch.

FP: I wanted to ask if I could borrow the messenger once it is done with its mission.

NSH: WHAT.

NSH: IS THIS REALLY WHAT YOU CAME HERE FOR?! THATS RICH.

NSH: You came here, and instead of apologizing, or even saying “hello, how are you, old friends”, you came here asking to STEAL!?

FP: Borrow*

FP: I can assure you it will be beneficial to all of us if you agree.

NSH: Fuck no. 

NSH: Don’t you dare touch my messenger.

CW: There must be a reason for such a question, though. Could you at least hear him out?

FP: If I didn’t touch it, it would’ve never got to Moon in the first place, because you built it with rot.

NSH: I’m sure it would, they are incredibly durable.

NSH: And what do you mean “didn’t”? What did you do to my messenger?!

FP: They were dying and you’re concerned over the fact I helped them?!

NSH: Well, I believe death would’ve been more honorable than getting help from you.

FP: Do you even listen to yourself?!

NSH: I don’t have to.

UI: Ladies, ladies, you are all beautiful, can we don’t?

CW: That is not the correct way to write that sentence.

UI: Yes and?

NSH: Oh wow, Innocence not being on the side of the fight? I feel betrayed, truly~

UI: Well after 500 cycles of “therapy” that Wind forcefully put me through I can freely say that if I have to listen to them ask me “so how are you feeling today” every cycle once again I will ABSOLUTELY LOSE IT.

UI: You don’t know the suffering I went through, so shut shut now~

CW: It did help, though, didn’t it?

UI: Yes, but I am still bitter about it. Let me be bitter.

NSH: Can we focus on what is ACTUALLY important here?!

NSH: Like the fact this pink little rat came out of isolation just to steal my messenger?!

FP: It's not stealing. 

FP: Besides, if I did want to steal them, I wouldn’t ask.

CW: …They had the rot?

UI: Wait, does that mean that you cured it? 

NSH: Well, how could he do that if he can’t even cure himself?

NSH: I’m not sure what you did but I don’t like it one bit.

Oh boy… There he goes.

Five Pebbles probably had to tell them about the fact that… Well.. He did cure himself.

He no longer had the rot.

It wasn’t fun, but at least the longer he spent in the chatroom, the easier it was to speak up, even if his puppet still shook.

FP: I did cure myself. The rot is gone.

Simple, fast, easy.

It was fine. He was fine.

The chat was silent for just a moment, before it exploded.

NSH: WHAT.

UI: How???? 

UI: I need the cure now, the world has to know!

CW: I’m glad.

NSH: NO BUT WHAT???

UI: Imagine how many iterators this could help!

NSH: OH SO YOU FIXED ALL OF YOUR ISSUES, ONLY TO COME HERE, FULLY HEALTHY, AND FIRST THING YOU ASK IS TO STEAL MY MESSENGER?!

NSH: Since you’re oh so healthy now, why won’t you make one on your own!

FP: It takes time.

NSH: Well you have plenty of that, with no more rot!

NSH: Don’t. Touch. My. Messenger.

UI: I could make you a messenger if you want if you give me the cure! 

CW: Please calm down, all of you.

UI: I am perfectly calm.

NSH: No.

NSH: No, I simply can’t accept that he managed to escape from the consequences of his own actions while Moon is still GONE.

NSH: And he didn’t do ANYTHING to change that!

NSH: Now, she is the only one suffering because of him!

FP: You don’t know that.

NSH: I know plenty.

NSH: I know YOU.

NSH: I know that if you did something, ANYTHING to help, I wouldn’t even have to send the messenger in the first place!

NSH: But go on, show me proof I’m wrong, I’m waiting~!

He… He had proof. 

He had the cell right next to him, but…

But he needed the messenger.

Why… Why couldn’t his puppet stop shaking so badly, damn it!

FP: Why do you think I need the messenger if not to help?

NSH: You could’ve made your own, with how much time you spent moping around doing nothing!

FP: I was doing something! I worked on a cure for the rot! And it worked, I’m free now, so I can help now!

NSH: Once again you think about yourself first, don’t you?!

CW: No Significant Harassment. Stop with that all at once.

NSH: Or what? You don’t actually have any seniority privileges here. You only pretend.

CW: I am trying to keep this group together because NO ONE ELSE WANTED TO.

CW: There was NO ONE willing to take the role, so I had to.

CW: But I’m not strong enough, I’m not like Moon.

CW: And I can’t deal with the two of you fighting so please stop.

CW: Please.

NSH: Fine.

NSH: I let my emotions get the better of me and I apologize for that.

NSH: Apologize to you and Innocence, of course. Five Pebbles does not deserve that apology.

NSH: Five Pebbles, what do you need the messenger for?

NSH: I am giving you a chance to explain, you better take it.

FP: I have decided to spare one of my rarefaction cells and hand it over to Moon once your messenger reactivates her. For that, I need a being that would actually be capable of bringing it to a place that would help.

NSH: !?

CW: Isn’t it risky to remove such an integral part of yourself?

FP: I am aware of the risk.

NSH: Since when are you so self-sacrificing, huh?

NSH: That is unlike you.

NSH: Don’t get me wrong! I’m happy you actually try to do something about your horrendous fuck-up, but I wouldn’t expect you, of all iterators, to do such a noble thing!

FP: I have four of them. One less won’t make that big of a difference for me.

CW: What if it becomes lost?

UI: Or a leviathan eats it!

FP: Then I have two more attempts.

NSH: Woah. I can’t believe that you would actually go that far!

NSH: Do you have any proof of your claims?

NSH: Or is it just all talk? Excuses?

Five Pebbles looked over at the rarefaction cell in his chamber, laying innocently next to all his pearls, and he forced an overseer to take a picture of it. 

He was still shaking. 

It just wouldn’t stop.

[Five Pebbles uploaded a file to: local group]

NSH: …

CW: You already removed it?!

CW: Are all your systems still working?

UI: Oh wow.

NSH: Pebbles.

NSH: I will allow you to use my messenger for this cause only, but under one condition.

FP: …What is the condition?

NSH: Remove lockdown from your can.

NSH: Allow free passage of overseers through your can and allow us to call you if we wish to.

NSH: Only then, we have a deal. 

…?!

It was- What?!

Why would he even request that!

He- He…

Five Pebbles’ panic immediately rose at the thought of allowing them all to dig through his can with their overseers, spying on him and his future actions. 

It made him feel like there were bugs crawling all over his puppet, the idea of being watched again a horrifying concept.

He knew, knew that Innocence would go babble about his condition to everyone once again, and that would probably make everyone poke their overseers into his can to stare at the dead rot and try to get him to tell them how it happened. 

He would even get the attention of iterators from far outside of the local group, as far as the word could possibly spread, because he didn’t remember any iterator other than him ever curing their own rot. 

It was horrifying.

He didn’t want to be watched.

He didn’t want overseers poking at every part of him, analyzing, staring, spying on his every action.

It made him shudder, and he could feel something clog up in his chest as he brought his shaking hands back to the screen.

NSH… He didn’t have any way to enforce this.

If Pebbles wanted to, he could just ignore the request, and use the messenger anyway.

…No.

This was a test.

Pebbles KNEW it was a test.

To check if he was willing to listen to them.

…

FP: I can do that anywhere but in my chamber.

FP: I do not want your overseers in my chamber.

NSH: Fair enough.

NSH: As long as you still allow us to call through your own.

FP:  Fine.

Removing all remaining lockdown procedures was… Difficult. 

It made him significantly too stressed out and afraid, and the feeling of foreign overseers immediately popping up within his can felt awful, but he had to do it if he wanted to have a chance at repairing his relationship with all of them.

FP: Done.

NSH: Thankie~

NSH: May the messenger serve you well. I truly hope that your attempt will work, for Moon’s sake.

NSH: I will still keep an eye on you, though.

NSH: Or many, actually~

That was that.

With that, Pebbles shut off the screen, puppet shaking as he tried to make himself calm down.

He could still feel all the overseers crawling through his can, taking pictures of his insides, and it was awful. 

There was something wrong with his puppet too.

He couldn’t tell what exactly, and his desperate scan showed everything was fine, but there was SOMETHING wrong and he could FEEL IT.

It felt like something was clogged in his chest, right under his ventilation fans, puppet overheating from the stress, still shivering violently.

He had to check what it was, he had to fix it, it felt awful, something was wrong and he couldn’t stop shaking, he couldn’t-

Pebbles practically ripped off his orange robe, throwing it on the floor and pressing a hand to the ventilation system’s grate over his chest. The fans all hummed quietly, and they seemed fine. No, the issue was deeper and he needed to fix it this instant because it felt wrong wrong WRONG.

The plates on both sides of the grate could open for maintenance. He knew that. 

He just needed… A tool.

His eyes instantly moved to the broken half of his antennae that he snapped off a while ago, and he willed it to come to him, the metal flying through the air right into his hand. 

He instantly jammed it between the ventilation grate and the chest plate on the left, and managed to quickly pry it open, only to be met with a weird, squishy, cyan - almost white in shade - membrane. 

Whatever.

He couldn’t check what it was, because the ancients took away the ability to scan his own puppet away from him, and instead focused on the metal grid itself.

He tried to open it to make sure that all the fans were working correctly, because he still felt so painfully nauseous and afraid and he had to make sure it was working , but it was still attached from the other end to his chest plate.

He used the broken antennae to jam it between the two again, attempting to get the other one dislodged as well, only to be met with a sharp sting, then a wave of searing pain that sent a violent jolt through his whole puppet.

The plate opened, and he removed the antennae, looking down with panic because he didn’t mean to damage himself further, he wanted to FIX what was wrong not BREAK IT MORE, dammit! 

He was met with the membrane once again, but this time, it had a hole in it, clearly made by the sharp ending of the broken antennae. 

What made him shiver worse, however, was the fact that it was leaking some sort of cyan, slightly glowing fluid.

…

…They…

They could bleed…?

Oh.

Oh fuck.

Whatever was clogged in his chest managed to finally unclog itself, and he was left staring at the hole in the membrane as it slowly leaked the cyan liquid, the membrane being broken sending stinging pain all the way through him.

He quickly pressed his hand into it, to stop the leak.

…

…Just… Just how biological were their puppets, really?

Was there a reason as to why they were never allowed to scan their puppets, their systems preventing them from doing so?

A quick scan of the liquid itself - thankfully once it left his puppet, he was finally able to scan it - showed that it was simply called “cooling fluid.”

It wasn’t… Blood, per say.

But it surely felt like it.

And Five Pebbles didn’t like it one bit.

He…

He needed to get more information on their puppets. That was his new goal. He couldn’t just learn that they had the capability to bleed and had what was essentially skin underneath the metal and not attempt to figure out more!

Five Pebbles suddenly remembered his previous search through the records, and pulled out one golden nugget of information that could possibly help.

He knew exactly where the iterator’s engineers’ building was on top of his structure.

He needed to know more.

An overseer popped up in front of Artificer, Pebbles not wasting any time as a screen appeared right in front of her. He didn’t even care how he probably looked through the screen, with both of his chest plates open and pressing a hand into a hole leaking in glowing cyan, coating his whole hand.

“Citizen. I need you to take your backpack and go to the engineers’ guild building right this instant. Take all the pearls you can carry and bring them back to my chamber, please.”

The map appeared on the screen instead of him just as Ruffian chittered in alarm, and another overseer popped up next to her, pointing an arrow deeper into the city. 

In the meantime, Pebbles looked back down at the cyan liquid, a weird mix of emotions filling him.

He still had no idea what got clogged before, but if he wanted to actually be able to fix it, he probably had to wait for the little Ruffian to find some actively useful information.

He couldn’t risk accidentally damaging himself further.

…

…He didn’t know how to feel about the fact that they could bleed, but at the very least, it took his mind off of the… More unpleasant matters.

…Ugh.

Chapter Text

Thankfully, it seemed like the membrane that was inside of Five Pebbles’ puppet had self healing abilities. 

He noticed after a long while of staring at his chest that the liquid was no longer leaking between his fingers, and when he finally moved his hand away, the hole was gone. 

The place where the hole previously was was slightly more white than the rest of the cyan membrane, but it was hard to see by now.

It was… Good, actually.

It meant that he didn’t have to fix it manually. 

He truly hoped that missing some of the cooling liquid wouldn’t end up incredibly harmful or something.

Five Pebbles finally snapped back to himself afterwards, and instantly shut down the chest plates, allowing them to click closed once again. He didn’t want to hurt himself more by accident, so he had to wait for Artificer to come back with some actually useful information before he started digging through his puppet again.

Hopefully the engineers who literally created him and Moon kept their information on pearls, or else it might be an issue.

He put his robe back on, and cringed a bit at how wet his hand was from where he held it to the wound. He waved it a bit until it dried a bit more, then pulled up a screen in front of himself, to check his citizen’s current location. 

She seemed… Very concerned, if her speed was any indication.

Right.

He didn’t look the best when he made the request.

He hoped that she would forgive him for that.

She seemed to have taken her children with her, too, so at least there would be more hands to search. 

Pebbles watched her as she got to the building, only to be met with doors welded shut and all possible ways inside blocked. She was resourceful, however, and simply blew up the door with a few makeshift bombs stacked on top of each other. 

It pained him a bit to see how the door to an important historical place got blasted open with such brute force, but a part of him was glad that it was closed in such a way. It meant that the chances that the scavengers got inside and stole everything from there were significantly lower.

She crawled inside through the broken door, her two pups following behind, and immediately began to rummage through the incredibly old building, even as clouds of dust got kicked into the air with every movement. 

He watched her and her two children collect pearls from all over the building, and he even pointed to some that he felt might’ve held important information based on how they were stored.

His overseer also found a big metal box with a passcode, and he immediately pointed an arrow at it for the little ruffian to take a look. 

…Of course she exploded that thing.

She managed to wedge an explosive spear between the two parts of the chest-like box, and then once it was set off, the force was enough to snap all locks and make it fly open with a loud metal bang, loud enough for the overseer to shake and move away.

It once again made him visibly cringe, antennae dropping at the sight as the nearby table and stacks of incredibly old, fragile, probably historically important decorative paper and cloth went up in flames. 

…Couldn’t she at least take the box out of the building first?!

He knew that all this history would no longer be important in the future, that this building would not last forever, that he would collapse one day and take it down with him. But at the current moment, it still hurt.

Because the state of this building was so well preserved and just- Ugh.

At least she found a whole lot of pearls in pristine condition in the box, and immediately put them in the backpack, filling it entirely, which meant that her absolutely barbaric way of getting into the vault was not for nothing.

Even if it did not hold the information that he craved, he expected something interesting to be there anyway.

Otherwise, why would it be so well guarded, welded shut inside the engineer’s building?

He knew this specific building was specialized in working and holding all information required for iterator maintenance, so the chance something was going to be useful to him at the current moment was pretty high. He held high hopes for that.

Once the backpack was so full of pearls the synthetic leather was getting stretched under the weight, Little Ruffian finally crawled out of the building, along with Mint - who also held a handful of pearls - and Emerald, who preferred to be ready for battle at any moment, holding an explosive spear and a rock. 

Pebbles left one overseer in the building, to make sure that it was as protected as it could be, and then used another one to follow the three creatures as they quickly made their way back to him.

He was incredibly impatient to know what they found, but he knew that the building was quite deep in the city, and the cycle was coming to an end, so unfortunately the slugcats had to go to sleep. 

As the three of them curled up together, with the bag and a pile of pearls right next to them, Pebbles got up from the floor and began pacing around the chamber. After a moment of doing so, he finally let his umbilical drag him back into the air, and he spun around a bit, with no idea what to do with himself.

He didn’t feel like working on The Great Problem anymore. If it wasn’t solved by the time the world turned into a cold, freezing wasteland, it was most likely not going to be solved by him.

Besides, in his previous timeline, he worked on it for as long as he had the physical and mental capacity to do, and still got nowhere. He was sick of it.

It reminded him of all the wrong that he did in his life. 

He didn’t like it.

The world moved on without them in the blizzard, and there was nothing that could change that.

But it left him… Feeling weird, with nothing to do.

He could work on more tools for his citizen and the two slugpups, or maybe some tools for the little savior, or maybe he could think of a way to help Moon, but…

All of those did not take as much of his attention as he wanted them to, though.

As much as the idea filled him with dread, he checked the local group again, barely a glance. 

Last conversation was an argument about the ethics of creating a being with rot, and it did make Pebbles interested, if only a bit. Just enough to read the logs fully.

As he went through the logs, he saw that the moment he left and all emotions got less heated, NSH was immediately questioned by Grey Wind about the messenger.

Apparently, the rot was both an accident, but also partly on purpose?

Creating it was an accident, but leaving it inside the messenger was on purpose, is what it meant. During creation, some things got rushed, and ended up causing the rot to appear, but NSH found it during scans early enough that he could’ve gotten rid of it with no problems.

The only reason he didn’t was because it would take twenty more cycles or so, and he decided that the creature had enough time to get to Moon before the rot became deadly. It was also a good way to hurry them to move faster.

He admitted that it was probably a bad idea, though, and mentioned making a second one - this one not as rushed as the first - just in case the first one did not actually succeed. 

…Great.

So the rot was only partly an accident.

It was also only partly on purpose, but that didn’t make it better.

At least now Pebbles knew the truth, though.

Speaking of the messenger…

He checked up on the current location of Hunter, and he saw them sleeping in a shelter in the shoreline region. Once again, they were incredibly fast.

Just two cycles ago - did he really spend a whole cycle just talking to the local group and going through old message logs? - they were in the shaded citadel, and now they were in the shoreline, right at the edge of it. Five Pebbles expected them to finally get to Moon within two cycles or less, if his calculations were correct.

He shifted his attention back to his citizen, now, and simply watched her as she slept, waiting for her to finally get up and resume with her mission. 

He also forced himself to work on the backpack for Hunter, to actually focus on something rather than waste time. 

Five Pebbles was practically vibrating out of his metal shell with impatience when the three slugcats finally poked their heads in his chamber, and the moment he caught sight of the pearls, he forced them all to float over to him, ignoring the creatures. 

The backpack opened, every colorful pearl flying over, and he could tell that there were thirty six of them. Four were held by Mint as they barely managed to keep a hold of them all in their arms, two were covered in spit, which meant they were kept inside, one Ruffian held in her paw and the rest were brought in the backpack.

He felt mildly bad for making Artificer carry so many at once, but she seemed to have absolutely no issues with that. She did, however, seem to have an issue with how their last conversation ended, as she instantly flung herself at him with a crack of explosives, without even waiting for him to turn antigravity off.  

The impact pushed his puppet away, pearls wobbling in the air as he momentarily lost focus.

She grabbed his robe with her paws, before using one to pat him all over his face, and he instantly turned gravity back on, letting everything fall to the ground. The pearls hit the chamber floor with a dull clink, but even with gravity back on, Artificer held firm and refused to let go of him, dragging him down.
“Citizen! Unhand me this instant!” He complained as he lowered himself to the ground, instantly shoving her off and inspecting his robe for damage. It was NOT built to be stretched under the weight of such a heavy creature!
Ruffian seemed to not care about his complaints, however, as she went back to patting him all over.
“STOP IT” he complained again, trying to slap her paws away with every poke “I assure you I am fine!”
“Hurt” she gestured, then pointed at his chest, and he sighed.
“Yes my puppet got mildly damaged, but the issue is mostly dealt with at the current moment. May I look over the pearls, or are you gonna interrupt me with your paws in my face again?!”
She slapped her tail on the floor with a hiss, then looked over her shoulder at the two pups, who were currently throwing one of the pearls between each other.
She chittered, and looked back at him.
“I am grateful for your help, however, although next time do not destroy historically important buildings with explosives please. ”

There was so much he could’ve saved if she didn’t set that damn table on fire, ugh.
Ruffian did not seem to accept his reassurances, however, and promptly deposited herself in his lap, effectively trapping him on the floor as she curled up around him with low purr.
“..Citizen. Citizen what are you doing” he tried to push her off, but at this point, she was bigger than his puppet, and significantly thicker too. She would not move from that spot.

He huffed and attempted again, but once again was met with absolutely no results, so he gave up quickly, and she only started purring louder.
“...You’re insufferable” he commented, and threw a look to the two pups. Now, Mint kept throwing the cream colored pearl at Emerald, who attempted to hit it with a spear like a baseball bat. With a successful hit, the pearl flew across the chamber, hitting the wall with a dull clink before bouncing around a bit. Both creatures cheered.
“Do not damage those” he snarled, which made both pups look over at him and chirp in amusement at his current predicament. He ignored their laughter and brought the moving pearl over to himself, analyzing it.
It held some blueprints for an odd purposed organism, but he hadn’t seen that one in hundreds of thousands of cycles - if ever - so either it was never made, or simply did not survive outside of their intended purpose.

He copied the contents anyway, before throwing the pearl back to the two slugpups.

“...Fine. You can play with this one, but only this one, because what it holds is useless.”

With another cheer, the two pups went back to playing with it, and Pebbles reached out for another one.

One by one, he checked every pearl, copying and categorizing what was inside before putting them onto another pile.

A few pearls were not related at all to iterators, but thankfully, most were. 

He was especially interested in the detailed schematics of the communication array, as it could be useful if he ever found a way to repair it despite being stuck in his can. 

He also saved a copy of blueprints for an early version of his memory conflux, which was currently very badly damaged, as he still held onto hope that he might fix it one day.

Finally, within one beautiful cyan pearl, he found what he had been looking for. It was one of the pristine looking ones, meaning that it was held within the box that Artificer rudely blew up to open.

It held blueprints of the inside of an iterator puppet.

One of Five Pebbles’ hands was petting the little Ruffian as he read, while the other one held the pearl, completely tuning out the noises of the slugpups that were still causing chaos within his chamber.

It was… Eye opening.

He could DEFINITELY see why they kept it away from him.

Apparently, within the puppet was the core of the whole iterator. 

Or, more like, the key to their sentience. 

The core was an entirely sealed, self-sustaining ecosystem closed within a circular container that sent and read impulses from around itself.  It was deep inside their puppets, hidden behind ventilation systems in the chest and covered by the thick metal of the umbilical from the other end. 

It was in the most protected, hardest to damage area of the puppet, and that was for a good reason.

It was apparently what made them truly alive.

It was the source of personality for iterators, it allowed for basic personal thoughts, and allowed them to feel different emotions. It was also entirely biological, even if it had wires attached to it from every side.

It meant that all of his… Well… Life, was held inside one small ball of energy within his chest.

It meant that no matter how much of his structure or puppet got damaged, as long as the core was intact, he could stay alive. 

It was… both incredibly enlightening, but also horrifying.

His thoughts on the matter were incredibly complicated, but it made him realize that void.

Maybe…

Maybe he didn’t have to stay stuck inside the structure…?

As he continued reading through the pearl, he realized that as much as the core was the center of their being, it had absolutely no storage place, so without neuron flies and other elements, the thoughts would be crafted in simple feelings and concepts rather than words, making them essentially appear dead and incapable of communicating or doing anything at all.

Or, well, if he had no neurons, he would have no way to form any memories, so would he truly exist, with thoughts that dissolved the second they were crafted?

If he held onto the neuron flies, however, he didn’t have to be attached to the structure and still be himself.

The thought was exhilarating.

He could leave.

He didn’t have to stay there until the end of all time. 

He could truly live.

…

…Okay, he got too far with his thoughts and plans before checking the rest of the components.

As he read more, he noticed that the puppet had only six, relatively small batteries, which allowed for only around twenty cycles of movement before the battery died and left the puppet deactivated.

Fuck.

That was going to be an issue.

The batteries were attached to an energy exchange module right under the core, however, which could turn water into battery power and replacement cooling fluid.

It was sliced into two halves, one for filtration of the water, extracting whatever dirt and other mess that got inside and breaking it apart into energy, and the second one took the clean water and turned it into replacement cooling fluid if needed. Both used microorganisms to do that. 

Which meant he did not have to worry about replacing the cooling fluid on his own.

Thankfully.

The energy exchange module had a valve at the back of it which was attached to the umbilical, and that was where water entered his puppet from the rest of the structure. He could close the valve if he put conscious effort into it, and he filed that information for later.

It also had another one at the bottom of it, entering into the rest of the puppet, so that he could filter the cooling fluid if something got into it. 

What was incredibly gross, however, was the membranes.

The cyan membrane stretched out over his whole puppet, right under the metal, squishy blue sticking to it from every side.
It had two purposes:
First was to keep the cooling fluid inside, so that it could move through the whole puppet, keeping every component at safe temperatures.
Second was that it was attached by thin, almost vein-like wires from every side, which attached it to the sensory module, and allowed him to actually feel things such as touch, pain, and temperature.
…It made sense. He knew that there had to be something to allow him to feel such things, but he didn’t think that it was some squishy gooey jelly stuck to the metal shell filled with wires.

What else could it be, though?
Truly, what else.

His head was also such an interesting thing. 

It was mostly mechanical, with many different boards implanted inside, with speakers and speech modules being where the lower jaw should be, stretched out all the way to the antennae. Right above that was audio input, to allow him to hear. Where a creature should have a brain, he had multiple circuit boards to read all the outputs of his systems, and then translate them to biological data before sending it with all the wires down his throat, over to where the core was.

The antennae worked as connection ports to nearby components that required wireless attachment. It could allow the core to attach to neuron flies and overseers from much greater distance than it did on its own.

…And he had one of the antennae damaged. At least the other one was still there, though. 

What was odd, however, was a few small wires that ran from the core, through its own tiny component inside the head, before attaching to the eyes. At the corners of the eyes, there were tiny valves that Pebbles never previously noticed.

He willed them to open, and they instantly started leaking cooling fluid.

…

…Did the ancients really give them the ability to cry?

What the FUCK.

They did not need that!

HE did not need that!

He instantly shut down those valves and wiped away the cooling fluid with the edge of his robe, disgusted. No wonder he never found out about it, he wasn’t the one to cry.

…Why would they even need such ability?

The schematics said that it helped “remove unnecessary emotions during an overload.”

Yeah sure, he was never gonna use that. 

At least he could open and close them at will, rather than it being done automatically with no control. Still, why would they need such an ability if they had no idea the ability was even there?

…He was actually surprised he never found out about it. He lived for incredibly long in his old timeline, he should’ve found out about it at some point.

Although he also ran away from his emotions too often to ever deal with an “overload" that required the valves to open, and by the time his can collapsed, he wasn’t sure if he even had enough cooling fluid for that to work.

…What happened a few cycles ago surely felt like an overload, but… 

Hm…

Either way, that did not matter.

He continued with his analysis.
In his stomach, there was a gyroscope and a few different stabilizers, to make sure he was always balanced. The stabilizers were also in his legs, as additional help in case he ever needed to move anywhere. 

In his chest, there was weird cloth-like biological matter, woven together into multiple “muscles” that could fill with a lot of cooling fluid. Then, the fans right in front of it cooled it down, before the cloth pumped out the liquid back into circulation. It was almost like breathing, in a way.

…Was it what got clogged before?
It must’ve been. 

In his hands there were a few things that would allow him to scan small items, mostly ones small enough to fit in his hands, and there were a bunch more components that he did not pay much attention to.

All of that made him realize just how much of him was actually inside the puppet.

The core of his entire being was in the puppet.

He could get off the umbilical, and still be himself.

…

How does he do that?

He needed battery power.

Twenty cycles were not nearly enough, he needed something that allowed him to stay outside for longer.

He also needed something that allowed him to keep his can maintained even if he wasn’t in it.

He didn’t remove the rot to abandon his can, as much as he hated being stuck inside of it, and the idea of having nowhere to go and having to survive and provide energy for the batteries every cycle seemed like a lot of work.

They got energy from water, though, so maybe if he just laid in the rain with the valves opened, he could refuel the batteries manually, but he wasn’t sure how well that would go. 

Or, in case of an emergency, he could just throw himself into some pond and sit underwater until his battery levels were at good enough percentage to resume whatever he was doing. 

Five Pebbles looked over at the rest of the pearls he did not touch yet, and reached over for a red one, just as clear and pristine as the other one. 

“Emergency puppet replacement protocol”, it read.
…
…There was an emergency cord in the umbilical, one that was not attached to his puppet at the current moment. It allowed for emergency puppet replacement before the first one was removed, by leaving all important maintenance to the new puppet through this one thick wire, long before any sort of data was moved over.

…That.

That was perfect.

He could just create a robotic box with instructions on how to perform maintenance on the can, attach it through the emergency cord, turn it on, then detach himself while his can remained fully functional.

If he understood it correctly, he could simply unplug the other wires as well, and if he wanted to come back, plug them back in.

That…

There was no way this was that easy!

Okay, well, he had to make himself something that would hold his neurons - or maybe craft something that held memories better than the neuron flies did without taking as much space -, he had to create something that would refill his batteries before they died and left his puppet deactivated somewhere in a ditch, and had to create the maintenance mechanism to plug into the emergency cord, but he could do it.

It was possible.

He could LEAVE.

He let out a small laugh, and Artificer shifted a bit with a quiet snore, but he ignored her.

He could leave.

He could perform maintenance on his own can if he wanted to.

He could fix everything that was broken without abandoning his can completely.

He could see the outside world.

He could…

…

…He could help Moon.

He could see her.

Wait.

Fuck.

Moon.

Oh no.

Oh, oh fuck.

If he understood this correctly, the puppet itself, even disconnected from the structure, had energy for twenty cycles. The batteries regained energy from water.

Slag keys were capable of reactivating Moon, because they forced water to flush through her structure once again.

They most likely forced the water into the puppet, and that in turn refilled the batteries, allowing her to come online again.

That meant she had to use up the twenty cycles of battery power first.

If it meant what he thought that it meant, Moon was still awake as her structure collapsed, and was probably aware of what was happening for around twenty cycles afterwards, having to sit there in the rubble and feel the batteries slowly drain away from her. 

She probably knew that no one was coming to help her.

Those twenty cycles must’ve been a nightmare.

…That.

THAT MADE IT WORSE.

…

…Fuck.

Fuck, shit, he had to fix it.

He had to fix it so badly.

There was so, so much he had to do to make up for this.

First, he had to somehow get all he needed to get off the umbilical, second, he needed to work REALLY HARD to make up for his horrific mistake.

He truly hoped that he was wrong but…

…

…If he wasn’t, there was a lot of work to do, to truly deserve her forgiveness.

Chapter Text

All three slugcats fell asleep in Pebbles’ chamber.

Artificer was the first one, curled up all around him, purring quietly, pressing her whole weight against him and squishing parts of his puppet to the floor.

Then Mint crawled on top of her and pressed themselves against Pebbles’ chest to take a long nap too, tiny face squished against his robe with a mildly scrunched nose. 

Emerald was last, curled up on Artificer’s tail, pressed against his side, half-sitting with their whole head leaning against him, despite their usual mild distaste of him.

In the end, he ended up covered by a pile of creatures, and he didn’t know how to feel about it.

A part of him wanted to ask them why didn’t they go somewhere… More comfortable…? To sleep.

Another part…

Truly did not mind.

Although he did feel odd with so many creatures touching him at once.

It was odd.

He was not built to be touched by random wild creatures, he was not built to be their napping spot .

He allowed them to simply sleep, though, as he pulled up some screens around himself and started working on the automatic maintenance mechanism that he could use to disconnect himself. It was going to take an awfully long time, though, and he knew that.

He did not really like that fact. 

At the very least, he was allowed to keep his chamber on lockdown, which meant no foreign overseers could see what he was working on - or see the slugcats that currently piled around him and decided that he was a perfect napping spot.

Other iterators could maybe see him working on something, as his experimental chambers were working hard on creating what he wanted them to create, but they most likely couldn’t tell what those projects were from the outside. 

They would need to see the schematics to actually tell what the items were, and he was not going to share those.

A part of him thought that maybe he should share what he found about iterator puppets with the local group, but…

He didn’t want to.

Not yet.

There was a small voice in his mind that said that if he told them what he found, they would either figure out what he was doing and attempt to stop him, or - even worse - attempt that on their own as well.

He wasn’t sure how desperate they were to be freed, so he couldn’t tell which option seemed more likely.

Five Pebbles quickly checked his messages once again, trying to ignore the feeling of foreign overseers crawling through his insides, and cringed at the fact he had a lot of new unread messages.

…

…It seemed like Seven Red Suns tried to talk to him again.

The news about his situation spread very quickly, huh?

…Pebbles performed a quick scan of his structure, just in case, and what he dreaded was confirmed when he checked whose overseers were inside. Suns of course sent a few of their own.

It made Pebbles feel… Weird.

Slightly nauseous as well.

He didn’t want to talk to them, so he still ignored their messages.

He should probably finally check the private messages from other iterators, though.

First logs he opened were from Grey Wind. They wronged him the least, so it didn’t feel as difficult as with other ones.

Reading just the newest messages, he saw that they offered him their… “Therapy” services…? 

Basically asked him how he was feeling and said that if he wanted to talk, they were always open for that, and could try to help him without fear of others finding out about what they talked about. 

They insisted that all of his secrets would be safe with them, if he were to say anything.

…He politely declined.

He was not interested in that.

Besides, Unparalleled Innocence did not speak of therapy sessions with Wind very highly, and he was not looking forward to trying that.

Next messages he opened were from Innocence themselves.

They left him very surprised.

[LIVE BROADCAST] - PRIVATE

Five Pebbles, Unparalleled Innocence

UI: Are you still mad?

UI: I mean you aren’t responding to any of my messages BUT.

UI: You also aren’t responding to others so…

UI: Wind told me to say sorry.

UI: For the rot stuff. 

UI: Not that I think that it was that bad, but, yeah, if I don’t they will be mad sooooo.

UI: Can you say we are fine now and get them off my ass for a second here.

UI: You don’t know what true suffering is until you sit through like twenty cycles of constant “so how does that make you feel” questions, bleh.

UI: I mean, look, they made me talk about feelings for like 500 cycles, do you know how hard that is?!

UI: Disgusting.

UI: Sooooo are we even, or are you not even looking at this?

…Five Pebbles definitely was still mad at them for leaking the pictures, and the apology was definitely not genuine, but at the same time… He didn’t apologize yet, either.  

And at the end of the day, his mistake was significantly worse.

But he wasn’t going to be immediately fine with them, though.

FP: No.

FP: I still don’t like what you did.

UI: Damn. And here I thought I did something.

UI: Okay look.

UI: I do regret doing that, but I believe I already got my punishment in the form of Wind’s therapy services, so do you have to rub salt in the wound? Really?

UI: Honestly I hope they put their attention on you now, you deserve to get some “help”~

UI: I would love to get some tasty information too, but Wind is too stuck to the stupid concept of “patient confidentiality” and the only thing I know is that they often complain that “both of their patients are fighting them on every step” or something.

UI: I have a feeling you would fight them too, but I would love to see it!

UI: Finally I wouldn’t be the one they complain about the most! What an achievement!

FP: …I’m not interested.

FP: You said Suns is the other one Wind is talking to?

UI: Oh yea. 

UI: Sig mentioned something about Suns in the past after you cut off all communication, and considering that Wind talked to them a bit in the past, they decided to attempt to communicate again.

UI: I never talked to them personally though, so the only information I have is what I managed to squeeze out of both Sig and Wind.

UI: They pretty much cut off all communication to anyone but people they already knew after being bullied by some other iterators, but Sig probably knows more about that than I do.

UI: They are secretive as fuck.

UI: It's quite annoying because I hate not knowing everything that's happening, y’know?

UI: Especially when it relates to you~

FP: You’re not making me any more likely to forgive you.

UI: That feeling is mutual, no~?

FP: Ugh.

FP: So Suns is Wind’s “patient” now?

UI: Yup!

UI: But I have no information outside of that, unfortunately.

UI: Wind is dead set on keeping all information on lockdown and Sig gets defensive when I ask about them, sooooo…

UI: You’re on your own with that.

FP: …

UI: OOoooooh, will you tell me what your relationship was like? Since those two always talk about Suns, I know they are related to you somehow, I wanna know~

FP: I’m leaving.

UI: NoooooooooOOoooOo I won’t have anyone to rant to D:
FP: …Is that an emoji…?

UI: Maybe :3

FP: Gross.

FP: I’m leaving.

UI: :(

UI: Fine. 

…Innocence was annoying. That much Five Pebbles knew before even attempting to talk to them. 

Although, he would be lying if he said he didn’t miss, even just a little bit, their snarky nature and the need to rant about everything they found displeasing at the moment. 

Was it harmful in some situations? Yes.

Did they know when to stop? Unfortunately not.

Did they go overboard often and not see anything wrong with it? Yes as well.

But before his lockdown, Pebbles was one of the people closer to them, as they could rant about things and be mad together, and that was, dare he say, fun. 

It wasn’t exactly talking, because it usually went the same way - one of them entered broadcast lines, started ranting about something that was annoying, and then both of them ended up insulting whatever it was for the rest of the cycle.

It felt… Weirdly nice to see Innocence rant again though.

He was still angry, but he didn’t hate them as much as he expected to.

He missed them all too much to hold the same levels of hate as he did in the past.

It was like most of his anger got extinguished by the snow in the blizzard, the world too cold for that flame to stay lit, even if he wanted to stay mad. 

…Okay, well, he was still mad at Suns, but it was… Complicated.

It was like…

When his structure finally collapsed, his anger at the local group lessened, yes, but with that, his anger at Suns rose significantly as well. 

Because they had a hand in his suffering, handing him a pearl that caused him to rot, despite knowing he was… Not feeling the best at that moment. 

Pebbles knew that he wasn’t. 

He was different, now, after all that time that passed. 

After all that he went through, his previously distorted vision of Suns, the god-like, sacred image, it finally faded from his mind, leaving only bitterness. 

He would’ve never been stuck all alone rotting in the blizzard if he didn’t follow the instruction that THEY gave him.

They knew that he was not doing well. He knew he was not doing well. He had way too long to think about all of it to not realise just how fucked up the whole situation was.

Maybe none of this would’ve happened if he shared his frustrations with someone else.

Maybe if he actually talked to Moon, trusted her like he was meant to, none of this would’ve ever happened.

So while he could forgive others, he…

…

…A part of him didn’t want to forgive Suns.

Not yet.

He spent so painfully long thinking about their conversations, rotating them and analyzing them in his mind until all memories turned into a blur and he could no longer recall all the words they exchanged, that it was difficult to not see how… Messy their relationship was.

Well.

Messy was an understatement of the century.

And it might’ve taken him an awfully long time to realize, but he did eventually notice how unhealthy it was, how much he idolized them back then.

So no, he was not talking to them personally.

He did, however, want to get more information on how they were doing from other iterators, if he could.

A part of him didn’t want to let go fully, even if he knew that it was a bad idea that might hurt him again in the future. He really didn’t want to fall into a hole of idolizing them again, though. Never again.

They would never deserve that kind of devotion from anyone ever again.

Innocence didn’t tell him much, which made sense, considering she never really talked to them, or knew about their existence before Pebbles isolated himself.

Wind probably wouldn’t tell him much, either, if what Innocence said was to be believed.

That left… No Significant Harassment.

With a deep sigh, he pressed on the message logs with NSH, and instantly winced. 

He was still mad and it was clear.

[LIVE BROADCAST] - PRIVATE

Five Pebbles, No Significant Harassment

NSH: I don’t know what is up with you, but there’s something off about you, don’t you think that I didn’t notice.

NSH: And sure, sure, I’m happy that you’re doing something! That was everything I could ever ask for, at least from you!

NSH: But it is unlike you. Unusual.

NSH: What are you trying to do?

NSH: What do you have to gain from this?

NSH: Somehow I can’t believe you’re doing this out of the goodness of your own heart.

Ah… Of course NSH tried to interrogate him instantly. 

It made sense.

Pebbles wasn’t happy about it, of course, but he expected that much.

FP: I am simply trying to fix my mistake.

NSH: Hah?

NSH: Just that? 

NSH: Don’t get me wrong, but I didn’t expect you to even realize that you fucked up, yet alone do anything to fix it!

NSH: I always took you for a depressed little hermit, no~?

FP: Is mocking me really how you want to spend your cycles?

NSH: Mocking you is always worth my time!

NSH: Favorite pastime! 

NSH: Almost like self care, to bully the murderer of my best friend!

FP: Don’t.

NSH: Or what?

NSH: You don’t like being called out for what you are?

FP: Doing this won’t change anything.

NSH: Hmmm, you’re right.

NSH: But you deserve to be bullied, at least a little bit~

NSH: I will admit, however, that I appreciate you at least trying.

NSH: It does not make me any less concerned over what made you like this, however.

NSH: Like I mentioned previously, this is unlike you, and I’m not just saying this just to be mean.

NSH: You’re acting odd. 

FP: …

FP: I will not pretend that I am the same as I was before my isolation, but what happened is none of your business.

NSH: Alright then, keep your secrets~

NSH: Would you be willing to at least talk to Suns, though?

NSH: They are very concerned, and you have been ignoring all their messages. It drives them crazy.

FP: Good.

NSH: ?!

NSH: Don’t you think at least showing signs of life would be good? They deserve that much.

FP: No. Tell them I won’t speak to them.

NSH: Dude. That’s cold.

NSH: You don’t know how stressed out you made them!

NSH: They have been absolutely losing their mind, wallowing in guilt and self pity, and I could barely stop them from doing incredibly reckless things in an attempt to fix this mess! 

NSH: You don’t even know the extent to which they went, looking for solutions!

FP: I don’t care.

FP: Have a good day.

Pebbles instantly shut down the message logs, then closed his eyes, leaning further against the umbilical. It creaked slightly, but he ignored it, and now used both hands to pet the slugcats on his lap.

NSH had no right to tell him what to do, ugh…

The slugcats suddenly shifted a bit, and he opened his eyes to look down at them.

Artificer uncurled from around him and stretched, which made Emerald fall off their tail with a squeak, but Mint was able to sleepily grab onto Pebbles’ robe and not get moved too much by that.

The Little Ruffian yawned, tongue poking out from between sharp teeth, and she continued her stretch before getting up. She sneezed and looked back at Pebbles, who instinctively helped Mint stay in their spot pressed against his chest with his hands.

It was so that the creature wouldn’t destroy his robe by sliding down and stretching the fabric under its paws, but it still made Artificer chirp in amusement.

Emerald went back to collect their spear and chittered, waving their paw at the exit, ears twitching and nose scrunched up.

“...Good morning, citizen.” Pebbles said, still holding the very sleepy mint baby in his arms, yet refusing to acknowledge it.

“You good?” she gestured, her head tilted, ignoring the high pitched whine from the very impatient Emerald.

“Yes. I found what I was looking for, thank you for your help.”

Artificer tilted her head to the other end, now, ears twitching, and then looked back at Emerald with a sneeze.

“Baby want leave.” She gestured, and pointed at the still whining Emerald, who was now stomping their foot and slapping their tail against the floor, clearly ready to leave.

“...Alright.”

Pebbles finally removed the Mint slugcat’s paws from his robe, and handed them over to Artificer, who instantly patted them gently on the face.

They yawned, sleepy, and blinked at her with an unhappy expression.

Pebbles sighed, and finally allowed his umbilical to drag him in the air, no longer stuck to the floor under the weight of three creatures. 

“Good luck with your endeavors” he said to the three as he floated them to the exit, and watched them leave with a small wave.

Now, it was time to check up on the messenger.

He opened a screen to check up on Hunter’s location, and watched them move through the shoreline. They entered the broken structure quickly, which meant that they were incredibly close to delivering the slag keys to Moon, and it was… Scary.

Soon…

Within this cycle, Moon will be reactivated.

It left a strong sense of dread filling Pebbles’ whole body, because it all happened too fast.

He expected the slugcat to take more time moving around, but it seemed like healing them made them grow rockets from their body or something, because, well, how else were they moving so fast?!

Pebbles fought the need to sit back on the floor again, instead focusing fully on the screen.

…Well..

…Guess the only thing he could do now was wait and watch as Hunter rushed through her structure, with just this mission on their mind. 

…Soon.

It was terrifying.

He was afraid.

He didn’t want to talk to her.

He wanted to talk to her so badly.

…He had to.

He had to fix his mistakes, and this? This was his first step towards redemption.

Hopefully she wouldn’t be too mad, even right after being reactivated.

Hopefully…

Chapter Text

Pain.

The first thing that Moon could feel was pain.

She opened her eyelids, staring at the ceiling. Broken tiles tinted in green shimmered with wetness, small droplets breaking off and hitting the ground around her with quiet sounds. Her whole puppet was sore, and some barely-there warning signals beeped about incredibly low energy levels.

The air was thick with moisture and everything was colored in this odd, ocean-like blueish-green.

She couldn’t remember ever seeing this much green. It was all completely unfamiliar.

She dragged herself into a sitting position, confused, unaware, her mind barely-there, puppet in a constant battle against failing systems.

A creature.

There was a pink creature in front of her, sniffing the air. It twitched its ears and tilted its head, staring at her with dark beady eyes. It had a mark of communication.

She was confused.

She couldn’t remember-

“He… Hello.”

Moon greeted the creature, her voice box cracking a bit from lack of use and some possible damage, low energy levels making it difficult for her to move much without instant exhaustion dragging her down.

“Hello little… Creature. You… You did this?”

She squinted slightly at the pink being, who took a step closer with another ear twitch. 

She couldn’t remember what happened too well, her neurons barely responding, and putting together anything was difficult.

“One moment. My memory isn’t responding. I.. I have no idea…” 

Moon reached out to connect to the neurons nearby, but she could feel how painfully her umbilical dragged her down, limp and heavy. The pain at the back of her head that amplified whenever she tried to send a signal to the structure told her that her wires were either damaged, or completely disconnected.

She stopped attempting to connect.

It brought only mild relief, as no more sparks stung at the back of her head with every request.

“...Must have been gone for…” 

She… She didn’t know. 

She had no idea how long she was gone for.

The pink creature suddenly crawled in her lap, pressing its head against her chest, and she instinctively put her hands up in surprise.

“...?”
A moment of silence and staring, processing. 

She tried to ignore the mild pain that the creature’s weight brought, the puppet already shaken up and damaged, all sore and not doing well with being pressed to the ground. It wasn’t the creature’s fault, after all.

Actually… It was more about the sensory input rather than the weight itself.

The more input there was, the more energy her puppet required to process it, and with as low energy levels as she had, it seemed like all touch was a little bit painful. 

She hoped that once her energy levels got higher, it would no longer bring her pain to touch things. 

It wasn’t that bad though, all things considered, and the creature had no way of knowing she was hurt. 

She didn’t blame it for trying to comfort her. It was doing its best.

“...Little creature?” 

She slowly put her hands back down, running them down the being’s back despite the way her puppet struggled with registering the touch, and quickly noticed the two odd appendages on its back.

“...You are… Oh well… If things are as they seem… Thank you.”

Moon was careful as her fingers moved around the appendages, touch light despite her hands being made from metal. 

“I don’t know why you decided to help me, but I am deeply grateful. Those tiny wings on your back, they almost make you look like an angel… Are you an angel?” She said, voice sad even as she tried to make a small joke, and the creature brought its head up, staring her in the eyes. It blinked blankly.

“Not many beings would bother with… Trying to help me. Not when they have their own lives to worry about, in their endless battle for survival.” 

Her hand pressed on the creature’s head, and it closed its eyes, leaning into the touch.

“You are such a noble thing. Truly an amazing little creature.”

Her hand scratched the creature being the ear, and they instantly tilted their head, giving better access for more scratches.

Moon didn’t talk for a bit, trying to access any remaining memories on the last five neuron flies. It wasn’t… Pretty.

With each memory she managed to access, she felt worse, body wracked with shivers as small flashes of images and scraps of conversations filled her mind.

She was forced to stop, however, by the creature taking a step back.

Suddenly, it started heaving, its own body shaking as they tried to remove whatever was in their stomach, and Moon’s hands rose in panic.

“...Little friend?!”

It threw up a pearl. 

It was sticky, covered in gross liquids, but the creature was incredibly insistent as they handed it over to her in their three fingered paw.

“...Do you want me to read this for you?”

She took the pearl in her hands, removing some of the spit with her fingers, and began reading out loud. It was a message from her old friend, No Significant Harassment.

The name was enough to bring some more sparks of memories, but it was still difficult to access them.

She could only tell that she knew him at some point, and that the name brought back small sparks of happiness and longing, despite the current situation. There was only one, maybe two conversations with him she could actually recall, and even then, she wasn’t sure if they were whole. Probably not. A lot of context was lost.

“Oh. I see now. Again, thank you little friend.”

She reached out, handing the pearl back, only to have it pushed back in her hands, the creature insistent that she keeps it.

It seemed like the creature was a messenger, built by her friend. It was no wonder that it was capable of helping her.

She still appreciated their effort, though.

So she pressed the still sticky pearl to her chest momentarily, slightly confused, before placing it next to her on the pile of rubble.

The creature looked up and sniffed the air, and even without a nose, Moon could tell that the air was getting more and more humid as time went on. With a sneeze, the creature turned around, ears twitching, and dived back into the water.

“...Goodbye, little friend” her hand moved into a small wave, but the movement was still slow, sluggish, barely-there. Her battery was still low.

Mildly better, as simply sitting on the floor no longer brought her pain, sensory inputs stabilizing themselves once again, but it was still low.

She looked over at the neuron flies, floating all around her, and willed them closer.

Once again, she made more connections, closing her eyelids so nothing would disturb her.

More strings of memories filled her mind, and none were pleasant.

Five Pebbles…

He did this to her, didn’t he?

She could remember their last conversation.

He was sick.

She couldn’t remember much after that.

Or, well…

She could remember feelings. The feeling of pain, so deep and thorough it tainted the whole neuron, making her puppet shiver even worse. It was unpleasant, but she had to know.

She could remember the feeling of being starved of water, then suddenly being under the water, then… Not much else.

She reached out her connection towards another neuron.

Ah. Those memories were more pleasant.

They were of the local group, and even if not much has survived, she appreciated them nonetheless. Her friends…

…

…Did they miss her?

Did they know what happened?

No Significant Harassment clearly did, if he sent a messenger to come and save her.

One by one, she reached out towards each neuron, carefully sifting through all remaining memories, and the longer it went on, the worse she felt.

Pain, sadness, anger, helplessness, all of that got worse the more she recalled, to a point she thought about stopping altogether, accepting amnesia as a way to save her from the pain. But that wouldn’t be right. 

So she pressed on.

Once she went through all the memories that were left, she was left kneeling on all fours on the pile of rubble, puppet shaking terribly as she leaned on her hands for support, head hanging low. 

It was cold here.

Cold and wet, and she could feel how it seeped into her puppet, freezing whatever was inside, making all remaining processes even more slow and sluggish than they already were.

Everything hurt.

She didn’t like it.

…

…Was she going to stay like this for eternity? Hurt and alone?

It might’ve been wrong to think, especially considering all the taboos that were so deeply ingrained inside of her very being, but a part of her thought that maybe it would’ve been better if she didn’t get reactivated. 

She was cold, hurt, with limited memories, and most likely nothing was going to change any time soon. Maybe NSH would send another messenger, but…

….

…How much could a creature like that even do?

…

…No.

No, she couldn’t think that. 

She couldn’t give up.

They were trying to help her, the least she could do was accept their attempt and show gratitude. 

She could… She could still do something. Maybe.

…Maybe…?

She sat back and rubbed her arms, puppet still sore, still shivering. 

Everything still hurt.

Her memories hurt.

Her emotions hurt.

She hated this.

She missed her friends. 

She didn’t even have any clothes on, even that got robbed from her by the collapse. Not even one thing she could keep, clearly. Not her memories, not her wires, not her clothes.

She hid her head in her knees, fighting the bitterness, desperation seeping into her very core as she tried to come up with something, anything that she could do.

Anything she could do that wasn’t just sitting there, waiting for someone to maybe, maybe come and help her.

But there was nothing, and the cold, dead, limp umbilical arm only dragged her down, keeping her anchored in this nightmare.

There was something wet on her face, now, and she reached up to wipe it off, only to have her hand coated in cyan. She simply put her hand back down in response, hoping that nothing was seriously wrong with her puppet, even as shudders still went right through her. 

She was still cold.

Everything was still wet.

Moon looked up, analyzing her chamber, desperately reaching for anything to distract her from the pain, the sadness, the bitterness, the helplessness of the situation.

There was nothing in the broken apart room, however, that could actually help.

That was, until her eyes froze, staring at one point on the wall where a cyan colored overseer was. It was watching her, and she caught the eye, staring back right at it.

Five Pebbles.

“...Pebbles…?” She asked, voice cracking, staring at the overseer.

It didn’t answer.

If he wanted to, he had the ability to call, to say something, and she knew that. 

While overseers didn’t work for long distance calls without the help of the communication array, as the signal was simply not strong enough outside of the retaining walls, she was incredibly close. 

She was definitely close enough for the signal to allow for live communication, if his structure was still intact enough to allow for overseer calls.

…

…She didn’t actually expect Pebbles to talk to her, though.

And seeing the overseer immediately disappear only confirmed that, bitterness filling her whole at the clear showcase of disregard towards her that he must’ve felt.

“...Not even… Not going to acknowledge me…?”

For a moment, anger rose in her chest, puppet shaking for a whole other reason as she picked up a piece of rubble before throwing it where the overseer was just a moment ago.

She watched it hit the wall and shatter from impact, the brick already fragile from the salty water around, slowly degrading its structure.

She moved her hand back down, letting both her hands fall in her lap.

How… How dare he.

Just leave her like this, without a word.

It hurt.

How could he do this…?

There was a deep rumble in the distance, air filled with moisture, light slowly turning more and more gray.

A green overseer now popped up in front of her, and she straightened a bit, some of her anger dissolving, replaced by confusion.

Green… 

….Green…….

…

…NSH…?

“..Hello. I’m… Awake.” She spoke to the overseer, unsure if she got the person it belonged  to right or not.

“Thank you. For… Sending help.” Her antennae twitched, and the overseer got closer, one big green eye staring right at her. It nodded at her, twitching its four little appendages.

“There is not much I remember, and I’m not even sure if it's the correct person, but… Thank you for trying.” 

The overseer nodded again, then looked up.

The rumble got louder.

…Rain.

“Oh…” She said, looking at the holes in her chamber as suddenly waves of water started pouring in. This was not going to be pleasant. 

Especially considering how shaken up her whole puppet still was.

She looked back down, even as waves of water poured down the wall of her chamber. Water was slowly filling the room, picking up speed with every second. 

The overseer looked back at her, and it seemed concerned.

“I will be fine. You can come back next cycle. Please tell whoever you belong to that I’m grateful, little overseer.”

Please come back next cycle, I don’t want to be alone, went unsaid.

The rain got stronger.

The overseer disappeared.

Wet.

Cold.

Hurt.

Dark.

…

Meanwhile, in the structure nearby, Pebbles was losing his mind.

He didn’t expect it to be easy, but seeing his sister like this, oh it made him almost hysterical.

There was a reason why he ignored all the overseers that tried to tell him about Moon in the previous timeline. Everything was easier to ignore when he didn’t see her, blocking out the footage of any stray overseer that decided to go visit her on their own.

Hah… It seemed like other iterators did cry.

Was he the only one emotionally stunted enough to never do that?

He definitely felt like doing it now.

Despite never feeling the need to do that… Maybe it would make him feel better if he did.

He refused to, though.

He didn’t deserve to do that, not until he fixed this mess.

Once Moon noticed his overseer, he simply… Panicked.

It left immediately after he told it to, so that he wouldn’t have to deal with it anymore.

He couldn’t face her like this, he- He wasn’t- He wasn’t prepared, okay?!

So he simply sent a message to NSH that she was active, and he could instantly feel one of NSH’s overseers leave his can, probably to go take a look.

Hopefully he would keep her company.

It…

It started to rain.

Would she be fine?

She had to be. For so long, she survived, just a little bit of rain couldn’t kill her, right?

Pebbles was on the floor again.

He couldn’t tell when he ended up on the floor, but he was.

And he felt absolutely awful.

Somehow, it was so, so much worse than in his previous timeline.

He couldn’t even tell why it felt so much worse, it simply did.

…Did the temperature in his room drop, or was it just him?

His puppet was shaking.

…

…He decided to do something risky, and forcefully shut off multiple cooling fans in his chest, raising his internal temperature despite the warning he got about it.

He hated being cold.

He needed- He needed a distraction.

Pebbles checked the messages, and saw the local group celebrating the successful reactivation. They were brainstorming possible ways to continue helping her, thinking about possible messengers to send, and constantly shooting down each other’s ideas. The messengers they currently had couldn’t do much more than just bring more neurons over, and even that was risky and would take way too long.

Pebbles promptly shut down the message logs, because that wasn’t distracting him from the flashes of cold cold cold alone cold as much as he hoped, and everything he read that related to Moon only made him remember all the conversations between them after he gave her the cell.

Or, well, she was the one talking, most of the time, rather than have it be a proper conversation. 

She would tell him stories, show him creatures she saw stumble into her chamber, and they would even play dominoes, the only thing that he was still capable of doing after the rot got too bad.

She was keeping him company when he was falling apart.

He wasn’t keeping her company when she was falling apart.

It felt awful.

Because he knew that even after all that time she was still kind enough to do that, and here he was. Too afraid to even keep his overseer in her chamber. 

Too afraid to face her before he fixed what he did.

He…

He needed to do something.

He desperately needed to do something.

There were the blueprints and schematics of the automatic maintenance module, but it was too complex for him to do in his current mental state. His puppet’s fingers were shaking and he could barely focus with his mind constantly running back to his old timeline. He hated that timeline already.

He needed something simpler, something…

The neuron flies.

Moon needed more neuron flies, but he also needed some that would work better for travel if he were to disconnect from his umbilical. It would be…. Not very practical, to hold so many in a bag of some kind. 

He needed to find a way to alter the neuron flies, possibly make them hold more storage space, or something. Or create something new, completely unrelated to neuron flies. 

Some sort of outside, backpack-style memory storage?

…Neurons were easier. Less risky.

Altering existing neuron flies was an impossible thing to do, however, as the self destruction taboo stopped him from editing them even slightly.

Annoying.

Wait.

NSH altered one, didn’t he?

The green one- It held the slag keys that activated automatically. A normal neuron fly would never do that, even if it held all the keys in existence. It would just wait for manual activation from an outside system. 

Despite the bad way that their last conversation ended, Pebbles opened up the conversation logs, pressing on NSH’s contact on the screen with shaking fingers.

[LIVE  BROADCAST] - Private 

Five Pebbles, No Significant Harassment

FP: How did you reprogram the neuron fly to automatically activate the slag keys? The taboo is preventing such things.

NSH: Hello to you too.

NSH: Rude as always, huh?

FP: Answer the question.

NSH: Why would you need such information? 

NSH: I mean, being rude doesn’t make me any more likely to share my secrets~

FP: Please.

NSH: …Oh wow.

NSH: I don’t think I actually saw you say “please” like, ever.

NSH: Is it truly Five Pebbles I’m talking to?

NSH: Or did a garbage worm chew through your brain~?

FP: Do not mock me. I need answers, not insults.

NSH: Fine, fine, since you asked so nicely~

NSH: Although once again, you’re acting incredibly odd.

NSH: The answer to the question is: I made new neuron flies, and altered them before they ever became a part of me.

NSH: It is quite simple, really - the taboo prevents you from altering something that is a part of you, but doesn’t prevent you from altering something that simply could become a part of you.

NSH: I truly hope you won’t use the knowledge to do anything stupid, however.

FP: Thank you.

FP: So I just need to create new neuron flies?

NSH: Once again, you would never say thank you before, the fuck is up with you.

FP: Do you seriously expect me to be rude at all times?

NSH: Yes???

NSH: I mean. Kinda?

NSH: Why do you even need such information? 

NSH: What are you planning?

…What does he say?

He couldn’t just say “oh I want to get off the umbilical and for that I need some good portable memory and holding twenty neuron flies in a bag is not practical”, he wasn’t stupid.

Besides, NSH would probably either laugh at him or yell at him.

Pebbles decided to just share… Half the truth.

Just half.

That was enough.

It wasn’t like NSH needed to know more.

FP: Moon needs neuron flies and sending them one by one in the hands of your messenger would be an incredibly inefficient method for very little gain.

FP: I was considering altering some so that they would hold significantly more power, although I am unsure about how well it could work.

NSH: Ohohohoho then you came to the right person~

NSH: I have been working on small projects of such kind for a while, actually!

NSH: Although, I am not sharing my secrets for free. 

NSH: As much as I want to help Moon, you are not getting much out of me for free.

FP: …I do not have anything I can give you.

NSH: Information.

FP: …

NSH: Oh come on, it’s not that bad.

NSH: You volunteer a bit of information, I give you some in exchange. A fair trade, no~?

FP: …Fine.

Pebbles felt like he might regret it in the future, but getting finished schematics and blueprints from NSH would make all his work significantly easier. At the very least, he wouldn’t have to spend a hundred cycles just figuring out how to alter a neuron, and instead he could just shove the finished schematic in place and allow the structure to automatically do the work.

He still needed to focus on actually giving the structure what it required to work, but he wasn’t required to do much of the… Thinking. 

As long as everything was inside of the schematic, of course.

Maybe he should’ve made a damn schematic before he executed the pearl from Suns.

Back then he was too impatient to bother about that, though, and just… Attempted to do it by hand.

If he had a schematic, he wouldn’t lose focus as easily, and maybe the rot would’ve never happened…?

Ugh.

The more he thought about the past, the worse it felt, because there were so many things he could’ve done to prevent this mess. 

At least now he knew better.

…Hopefully NSH was trustworthy enough to give him what he needed without messing up his systems.

And, well, hopefully he wouldn’t ask about things that Five Pebbles could not answer.

Chapter Text

Unfortunately, Five Pebbles had to turn his ventilation system back on after just a little bit. 

It seemed like overheating was not exactly good for him either, the temperature getting so high that the membrane underneath metal started to tingle. It wasn’t that bad, but it felt… Almost itchy. 

Besides, in some places, it almost burned.

He could feel it the most in his head - where most of the processing was happening, as it held multiple different circuit boards - and in his chest, where the core and the motherboard were. 

Those things got hot significantly faster than other areas, making his head and chest burn, and it essentially forced him to turn the fans back on.

The relief was immediate.

It seemed like both cold and hot were terrible for him. Ugh.

He checked up on Hunter quickly and saw them sleep quietly in a shelter, waiting for the rain to stop. 

He refused to look at how Moon was doing, as it made him choke up at the mere thought. It wasn’t like he could see anything, anyway, with the rain still pouring down in waves.

Then, he plucked out the schematic for the backpack he created for his little Ruffian, making two little holes in the back for the appendages for Hunter, and then sent it over to sector three for his structure to begin working on it.

Then, he turned back to his conversation with NSH.

[LIVE BROADCAST] - Private

Five Pebbles, No Significant Harassment

FP: I need the blueprints for the neuron flies, then.

FP: Preferably soon.

FP: …What do I need to do to make you give them up?

NSH: Simple, non-altered neuron flies?

FP: Unless you want to do all my work for me, yes.

NSH: Ha! Good joke! Great joke, even, but no~

NSH: Remember, nothing is for free, is there? I’m not going to do everything for you, not when it took me a long time to get to where I am right now.

NSH: I will give you access to my modified projects if you answer, hmmm, let’s say twenty questions~

FP: No.

FP: One question, one blueprint.

NSH: Then that is a bit unfair, isn’t it~?

NSH: Remember that you aren’t really in the position to be making demands, right now.
FP: It is one for one.

NSH: Fine…

NSH: But I’m not giving you all that you want immediately.

NSH: There is a lot you need to do to make me ever want to work with you again. The only reason I’m even considering helping you right now is that at the end of the cycle, it’s for Moon.

FP: I guessed such.

NSH: Normal neuron fly it is, then~!

NSH: I suspect that if I ask you what made you like this, you wouldn’t answer?
FP: …

NSH: Let’s start with something easy, then!

NSH: How did you cure the rot?

NSH: Everyone is dying to know! I wouldn’t mind being the first one to get my hands on such important information~

…Ouch.

Now that Five Pebbles thought about it, it was a bit embarrassing to admit that it was actually just two small slugcat babies that cured him, rather than some grand master plan. He put his fate in the hands of tiny, slightly sticky, squishy creatures.

And yet… It worked.

At the very least NSH did not ask for something he couldn’t answer, though.

Giving up the cure for the rot wouldn’t hurt him in the end. 

Maybe it could even save some other iterators… 

….He should probably share it with the local group. They could send it further into the world, for whoever needed it. No one deserved to collapse under the weight of the rot, he personally knew how awful it felt.

FP: Do I need to just answer, or send you the files?

NSH: Files, preferably~

NSH: Only then, will it be a fair trade.

FP: I will share the information, but please do not laugh.

NSH: Ooooh?

FP: I found a way to craft living beings that changed spore puffs into rot-killing chemicals within their bodies, then took the chemicals they produced and rushed them through my pipes until everything cleared.

[Five Pebbles sent a file to: Private broadcast]

FP: Here.

FP: Now can I get the neuron flies, or not?

NSH: Wait, I’m lookin’

NSH: HAH.

NSH: You used the pipe cleaning slugs as a base?! How ridiculous!

NSH: I thought you didn’t like them~

NSH: Wait.

NSH: Wait wait wait!

NSH: If you already had some slugcats, why would you need to use my messenger? If the rot is gone, you could’ve repurposed them! You didn’t have to steal what was meant for Moon!

FP: They are still too young to travel.

NSH: You could’ve just grown them to adulthood with forced processes, then!

FP: As if.

FP: Look at how well that turned out for your messenger.

NSH: Hey. The rot was an accident, and it wasn’t even because of the forced growth!

NSH: Every iterator I know always grew their messengers to adulthood, why would you remove them before that?

FP: They were useful faster.

NSH: Ah.

NSH: So impatient~

NSH: Couldn’t you just put them back in once you got the chemicals, however?

FP: No.

NSH: Hmpf.

NSH: I have a feeling you just wanted to steal my messenger for the sake of it~

FP: Give me the blueprints.

NSH: Once again, have some patience!

NSH: Waiting a bit wouldn't hurt you, no~?

FP: I waited TOO MUCH.

FP: Painfully too much.

FP: I’m sick of it.

FP: Give me the blueprints or get lost.

NSH: Hey hey hey, no need to get so aggressive, chill man!

NSH: Chill.

NSH: I don’t think it was all that long, but whatever…

[No Significant Harassment sent a file to: Private broadcast]

NSH: You need to work on your temper a bit, damn dude.

FP: …

Five Pebbles instantly scanned the blueprints, sighing in relief when he found that they weren’t tampered with in any way. He put the blueprint in sector three, and allowed automatic processes to start work on a singular new neuron fly.

It felt odd to watch it happen.

He never thought about making replacement neuron flies.

At first, he had enough that it did not matter if some were lost, and once their amount got low enough for it to hurt, it was too late to attempt such a thing.

Hm…

He needed them to be better, however.

Normal neuron flies would not work for what he wanted, and he already had so many that if he wanted to, he could just take a few that were already floating through his structure.

In this situation, however, he had only two choices:

Either attempt to alter the schematics on his own, or ask NSH. Both options were terrible.

He might’ve had a little bit of experience with creating living things, if he already had finished documentation of everything that he could reference.

But here?

He would need to create all possible modifications on his own, coming up with them all alone, with absolutely nothing to reference.

He never actually came up with anything on his own!

The slugcats?

He used an existing base, and added accessories from already existing beings he was able to scan. All he did was attach those two together, and reference multiple other existing schematics for any other alterations. 

The basket? Blueprints for the plant-like fabric were already in his storage, he simply weaved it together.

Backpack? Once again, he had the existing schematics for the fabric, and he put it together mechanically. It wasn’t alive, so he didn’t have to worry about it too much, though.

The maintenance module? It was all mechanical, and he was better with mechanical things anyway. It was the biological engineering that absolutely sucked all life out of him, while mechanical things were significantly easier to understand.

Mechanical things made sense.

Biological engineering did not.

With neuron flies, however…

He did not have anything that he could reference.

All his remaining blueprints of all other living creatures proved only one thing: nothing that existed out there looked even slightly like neuron flies, anatomy-wise.

Anatomy of neuron flies was… Odd. It was some sort of an ungodly abomination filled with goop, and there was absolutely nothing that he could use as a reference for what to do with those.

Not even brains of other living things had the same consistency as those things!

It infuriated him, almost. 

But it also left him with an awful sense of dread as he realized that he would need to rely on NSH for all modifications, most likely. 

He simply… Had no idea what to do with those!

How could he even alter them if he couldn’t even fully tell what he was looking at, as he tried to make sense of the blueprints?!

He momentarily pressed his hands to his eyes, covering the optic lenses, and he sighed, puppet filled with feelings of mild annoyance and helplessness, as well as a sprinkle of desperation and fear.

Why did he have to rely on someone so… Annoying?

FP: How do I alter those things.

FP: They are built like nothing I ever made before.

NSH: Hah! Why else do you think it took me so long to figure out how to alter them?

NSH: Not for the lack of trying, that for sure.

NSH: I knew that you wouldn’t actually succeed in what you wanted to do, not for a while at least, which is why I gave it up so easily~

FP: Have I ever told you how unbelievably irritating you are?

NSH: The feeling is mutual!

NSH: I’m always glad when I get to annoy the murderer of my best friend <3

FP: Stop.

FP: Just…

FP: How do I do anything with those?

FP: I need more storage space. I need them to be more durable. 

FP: How do I do that?

NSH: Ah ah ah, remember our deal, information for information~

NSH: My second question is: Why are you so insistent on helping Moon?

NSH: Don’t get me wrong, but you’re like, the sole fucking reason she collapsed, so I find it a bit odd to see you sacrifice parts of yourself for her so soon, especially after straight-up ignoring her when she begged you to stop killing her with your selfish little project.

NSH: Is there anything you are trying to gain? Any ulterior motives I do not know of?

…

First of all - that one line stung.

He knew that he was the reason she collapsed, that was why he felt so much like garbage whenever he did as much as think about her, but NSH did not have to rub it in like that!

A part of him thought that yeah, he definitely deserved that treatment, even if that one venom-filled message felt painfully like a slap in the face.

Second. 

Technically, there were ulterior motives, if Pebbles thought more about it. 

He didn’t want to be alone. He hated the cold and wanted to avoid it somehow. He wanted to get off the umbilical and see the outside world, and for that, he needed the altered neuron flies. He was afraid.

None of those seemed big enough to be the main reason he helped her, though.

No, it was because he… He felt bad.

Was it… Was it that difficult to believe that he regretted what he did? That he wanted to fix his own mistakes? Did they all truly think so lowly of him?

NSH: I know that you probably won’t even be truthful about it, knowing you.

NSH: I’m not stupid enough to believe that one good deed suddenly makes you trustworthy, or that you’re incapable of lying just to get what you want.

NSH: But it won’t hurt to still ask, will it?

FP: There is no ulterior motive.

FP: I simply want to fix my mistake.

NSH: Somehow I doubt that.

NSH: There has to be more to that!

FP: There is not.

FP: I am the reason she collapsed, yes, and that is why I’m trying to fix it.

FP: Here is your answer.

FP: Can I get mine now?

NSH: Uh-huh.

NSH: I will leave it for now, because I don’t think I will get more out of you any time soon, but I will definitely be watching you.

NSH: Now…

NSH: What did you ask for, again~?
FP: …

FP: How do I make the neuron fly hold more storage space inside of itself?

NSH: Hmmm…

NSH: That would’ve been easier to explain on call, don’t you think~?

Oh. Oh fuck.

That one line was enough to send waves of cold dread rushing through his puppet, a terrible shudder moving his whole body. His fingers twitched and antennae pinned down, horrified.  

He- He wasn’t ready to be on a call with NSH!

He wasn’t ready to look him in the face!

It was scary enough to talk to him over the broadcast lines, and at least then, he could pretend.

He could hide and deflect.

He could pretend that everything was perfectly fine, that he simply wanted to help Moon and that was it.

But if he accepted the call, his constant instability would be perfectly on display for NSH to see! All that he worked so hard to hide would be instantly exposed, he couldn’t-

He…

Before he could type out a message, to try to convince NSH to simply say it all over the broadcast lines, an overseer screen popped up right in front of him, and it almost felt like it instantly drained all the cooling fluid from his head.

[INCOMING CALL FROM: No Significant Harassment]

[Accept call?]

[Yes] [No]

…Oh fuck.

Chapter Text

For a moment, there was silence.

Then, there was blind panic as Pebbles dragged himself in the air, frantically smoothing out his robe at least a little bit , trying to ignore the wave of nauseating fear that shook him to his core. 

He was not looking presentable.

At all.

His robe was all dirty, with stains both in cyan - from when he accidentally stabbed himself - and brown - from Artificer touching him with dirty paws after killing things. His antenna was broken. His puppet was all shaky. His vision kept flickering every so often.

He couldn’t do this.

He should decline the call.

…He needed the knowledge.

He would not get anywhere without it.

Fuck.

Okay.

There goes nothing.

Pebbles pressed on the yes with a shaking hand, still trying to look as put together as possible in this situation. It didn’t work too well and he instantly winced when the screen flashed to life in front of him.

An image of NSH appeared on the screen, the green iterator holding his arms crossed on his chest, an irritated expression on his face.

“You really couldn’t take more time t-” he started to complain, before blinking, irritation instantly replaced by confusion as he leaned closer to the screen.

Pebbles forced himself to not wince again.

“...Pebbles? The fuck happened to your puppet?”

His voice still sounded annoyed, but now there was mild concern audible in the words spoken.
“I- I don’t think that is important. You called me for a reason.” Pebbles managed to squeeze out, antennae twitching, and he crossed his arms on his chest as well - mostly to try to hide the slight tremble in his limbs.

If anything, he could blame it on call distortions, right…?
“I did. But I did not expect you to be” NSH waved his hand around, squinting “like this.”

“It doesn’t concern you.”

“It- Yes it does!” NSH threw his hands up, exasperated, and his voice got louder “you isolated yourself for give or take a thousand cycles, then came back all weird, and now THIS?!” 

This time, Pebbles could not suppress the wince. 

It did not go unnoticed.

There was a long, exhausted sigh, as NSH attempted to calm down, and he rubbed his forehead for a moment.

“...I don’t see how my puppet’s state changes what you called me for-” Pebbles started, voice too weak for his liking. 

“I mean. It doesn’t. But I’m not gonna just ignore all of this” another wave, gesturing at Pebbles again “just because you asked me to, what the fuck man.”

NSH finally opened his eyes again, and then folded his hands together, at least trying to remain civil.

“Well, I accepted the call only because I needed information, so if you aren’t going to tell me what I want to know then I have no reason to stay in the call!” Pebbles snapped back, metal fingers digging into his arms, and he glared at the screen, still suppressing the trembles.

“Do you seriously care more about some neuron flies than the state of your puppet?!”

“My puppet is perfectly fine, drop it.” Pebbles hissed out with a strain in his voice.

His antennae twitched.

“Perfectly fine? Perfectly fine?! You call THAT perfectly fine?!”
“I said drop it.” Pebbles’ voice grew sharper, colder, but also mildly more glitchy than before.

“As if! You better explain right this fucking instant or I will-”

“Shut up!”

“You don’t get to shut me now! You look like shit!” 

“I am AWARE.” The robe was getting seriously scrunched up under Pebbles’ fingers as he tried to keep himself stable, but it was quickly getting more and more difficult. His vision flickered momentarily.

“I- Is your fucking antenna missing too? How did that happen?!” NSH sounded both concerned, exasperated, annoyed and angry all at once, and it was weird. It was getting difficult to process. The world looked odd. Mildly fuzzy.

“It. Is. None. Of. Your. Business.”

“It became my business the moment you started to give a fuck about helping Moon!”

“Is it just because of Moon?!” Pebbles voice broke a bit in the end with a mild glitch, cracks audible. “Not even because you think that something is wrong with me personally, no, you only care if I’m in good enough condition to help Moon, don’t you?!” Pebbles hissed out.

More crackling in the audio.

“I didn’t say that-”

“But you MEANT THAT! It is painfully clear in EVERY MESSAGE YOU SEND that the only reason you even LOOK in my direction is because of Moon, so cut the shit, give me the information, and leave me ALONE.” Pebbles’ voice rose, sparks flying across the room as the holographic rings surrounding him turned red, sparkling and whirring angrily in the air.

“Don’t you dare put words in my mouth-”

“I DON’T EVEN HAVE TO!” Pebbles let out a broken laugh, grabbing his head with one hand, vision flickering “just re-read our conversations! How many times have you said that the only reason you’re helping me is because of Moon?! How many?!” 

“Pebbles-”
“SHUT UP.” His vision flickered again. 

It felt like his puppet was overheating, fans whirring louder than just a moment ago.

His hearing was getting fuzzy as well.

“Pebbles you need to calm down-”

“No.” He sneered, his voice rising once again.

“Stop- Stop pretending that you worry about me if the only thing you care about is Moon. I- I’m in good enough condition to help. I-” He got cut off by some internal warnings and flashing images, and his puppet seized in response.

Something in his chest got clogged again.

The whirring got louder.

There was ringing in his audio input systems, a never ending beep that started to drown out the world around him.

Antigravity flickered and shut off.

Instantly, his puppet crashed to the ground, and he attempted to cover the audio input under his antennae with his hands because the ringing was getting so loud it was painful.

He was overheating.

He felt cold.

His vision flickered a few more times, and every time it flashed in white his shaking was getting worse.

There was a voice in the background.

Someone was speaking to him.

Who was speaking to him again…?

He shivered again, and eventually, slowly moved his hands away from his head, trying to focus on the words. He couldn't see anything.

Everything felt fuzzy.

His puppet felt wrong.

"-ebbles can you hear me, dammit?!"

Pebbles put his head up, and managed to switch his optics back on, but he could barely focus over the sound of whirring fans, system warnings and the wrongness that he felt.

"W-what-" he creaked out, attempting to focus again. Right. NSH. Call.

Another shudder. More flickering in his eyes.

"How much is 3 + 7?"

"...what?" Pebbles let out a small wheeze, confused.

"Just answer! That calculation is incredibly easy, don't tell me you can't."

White eyes stared at him expectantly through the screen.

He tried to focus on the green iterator.

"...10?"

"Good, now 6 + 11?"

"17. What is the purpose of-"

"36 - 10?"

"26, why are you-"

"10 - 11?"

"Negative 1, what-"

"Are you with me now?"

Pebbles blinked, eyes finally focusing on the screen properly, and his trembles significantly lessened.

"...What… What was the purpose of this?" He finally asked, carefully, trying to keep his voice as steady as possible despite how awful he felt.

"To calm you down. You didn't look too good for a solid minute here, so I had to distract you from… whatever was going on in that brain of yours." It was like all anger was gone from NSH's voice, leaving only tired exhaustion and worry.

His expression and posture changed as well, now less stiff and defensive, face partly hidden in his purple scarf.

Pebbles definitely did not feel good about what just happened though.

A part of him wanted to just cancel the call right this instant, go into isolation again, and never speak to NSH ever again out of pure embarrassment and shame that he felt over having a stupid little mental breakdown on call.

He didn't do that, though.

It would only make things worse.

"Okay, listen. Listen very carefully" NSH started with a sigh, and Pebbles straightened his back a bit, mildly afraid of whatever the other iterator might say.

"I believe that we might've had a few misunderstandings that I would like to straighten out, so that we understand each other better."

Pebbles squinted at him, antennae twitching.

"I think I understand you perfectly well." He snapped, irritation and coldness dripping from his words.

"No you don't, now, will you finally let me speak without constantly interrupting me, for fucks sake!?"

Pebbles hung his head lower at the scolding, but still did his best to glare back.

There was another long exhausted sigh.

"I would like to make this very clear that I do not hate you. You are incredibly annoying, and you murdered my best friend, but I still do not hate you. So when I say I worry about you, I mean you, not whenever you are useful or not!"

"Doesn't that contradict everything you said so far?!" Pebbles snapped back, and now he was the one holding more anger in this conversation. 

At least the light in the room went back to normal.

He didn't get up from the floor, though. The screen seemingly lowered itself with him when he dropped, so he didn't have to bother with adjusting it, thankfully.

"Okay fine! I know I was a jerk, there's no need to rub it in, I get it!" NSH threw his hands up again with a groan.

"I just- You were acting weird as shit, and Moon's collapse wasn't all that long ago, and just- I just didn't trust you nor your intentions."

"Well if you don't trust me then why would you tell me that?!" Pebbles was confused, and hurt, but he understood the anger, in some way.

It was deserved, even if he found it hard to admit out loud.

"I said didn't, not don't!" NSH glared at him momentarily through the screen, expression once again full of irritation before it simply became tired again.

"I see that… whatever happened left you - to simply put - a mess. So I'm not gonna hold it against you anymore. I mean- I would still like to know what made you like this, but you just had a Void-damned panic attack in front of me so the least I can do is stop interrogating you over it."

Pebbles immediately shot up, mildly offended, ready to defend himself.

"It wasn't- it wasn't a panic attack I just-!"

He was cut off by an unamused, deadpan stare.

"If it wasn't a panic attack, then would you mind explaining to me what it was? Hmm~?"

Pebbles immediately shut up with a wince, once again head hung low. He actually had nothing that would make him look better in this situation.

No argument to defend himself with.

"Look. I'm not saying that it is a bad thing, all I'm gonna say is that maybe we started off on the wrong foot here and I want to fix that."

NSH extended a hand, even if there was absolutely no reason for it because he was still just a hologram on a screen. It wasn’t like they could shake hands or anything, not through a call.

"I suggest a truce, at least until Moon is stable again, what do you say?"

It was clear that NSH attempted to make his voice lighter for that, but there was still some strain audible. It was clear he didn't forgive Pebbles at all, but he was willing to work together properly.
"...Isn't that what we have been doing all that time? Working together out of obligation?"

"Well, yeah, but a proper truce sounds better, don't you think?"

Pebbles crossed his arms on his chest again, and reluctantly agreed.

"...Fine."

He squinted at the screen, then went to change the topic instantly. It was too much emotional bullshit for him to deal with in such a short time.

He was wasting time, too.

He couldn’t afford to waste time.

His puppet still felt wrong.

"...So can I finally get the neuron fly modification information or not???"

NSH blinked, confused at the sudden change in topic, then sighed and moved back away from the screen for a second. The green iterator pulled up a few holographic screens around himself, which made him partly turn away from the call.

Unfortunately, through the call, Pebbles could not see what was on those screens.

"Well, previously I wanted to just give you some tips and watch you struggle, because it's funny like that" he admitted with a sad chuckle, sifting through the screens that surrounded him, pushing a few away. "But now? I guess I will just… give you the blueprints."

Pebbles antennae immediately went up and his eyes widened, metal eyelids opening entirely. 

The surprise was quickly replaced with suspicion, however.

"...But- Why would you…?"

"I mean, can you blame me? I ain't the one to kick a man that is already down, come on!"

NSH threw him a long look, and Pebbles huffed, offended.

It also reminded him that he was still on the floor, and he finally dragged himself in the air, watching the screen move along with him.

“I have three blueprints that could be useful, and three small questions you gotta answer, what do you think?”
“...Do I even have a choice?” Pebbles sighed.

He still felt like garbage.

Meanwhile NSH let out a quick laugh.

“I mean- I guess not, but don’t worry, this time I will be merciful with my questions. You look pathetic enough as it is.”

Pebbles stared at the screen for a moment, anger rising at the comment, but stopped himself from snapping back this time.

NSH turned off all screens but three, bundling them together and reading the contents.

“All three are something that I think Moon could find useful, in her current situation” NSH glanced back at the screen of the call, risking a look at Pebbles, and Pebbles glared at him in response. 

“First one doesn’t have any altered storage, but considering there might be wild animals entering her chamber at all times, I think it will be useful. It allows for significantly faster connection speeds, which would make her reaction time to - let’s say, a scavenger trying to attack her - significantly faster, allowing for her to actually protect herself in time rather than deal with the delay and end up without an eye.” NSH plucked out one of the screens, looking it over with a squint, then moved it to the side.

“Second has around five neuron flies worth of memory storage, and thankfully I managed to solve the issue of possible delay a while ago, so that is what I advise you to use.” 

Another screen, moved to the side.

“Last one has around ten neuron flies worth of memory storage, but unfortunately, it also has an incredible delay in information processing. You can read from it just fine! But actually putting things inside the neuron fly needs to be done deliberately, rather than an automatic process. The best way to go about it is to have recent information automatically saved into other flies, then move it over manually when you get some time for that.” 

NSH made the screen bigger, reading over it in silence for a moment.

“I unfortunately had to completely scrap the previous processing unit to fit all the storage, and still haven’t figured out any better way to go about it than moving the memories manually. Although, if you have at least a few normal neuron flies to do the required processing instead, it is a non-issue.”

During all of that, Pebbles was listening intently, internally taking notes.

He could definitely use them for when he wanted to get off the umbilical.

He could create two that hold ten flies worth of memory, one that holds five, and one with faster processing. 

Together, it made it all twenty-six neuron flies worth of memory, stored within only four.

He could hold four neuron flies in a bag without any issues.

And Moon seemed to be doing… Relatively fine with five.

Twenty-six was plenty for him, right?

If not, he could make another one with five, in case of an emergency, and call it a day.

It could work.

NSH started talking again after a bit, and it brought Pebbles attention back over to him.

“Okay so… I can send over the blueprints, because they are all finished by now, but I will ask three questions first, one for each.”

Pebbles nodded, but his antennae moved back down, uneasy.

He did not enjoy having to give up his secrets for some stupid blueprints.

He really, really needed them, though.

“First question, then! What happened to your antenna? From what I know, the metal that makes up an iterator puppet is incredibly durable, so I doubt a feral animal of any kind could do that. Unless you got a red lizard in your chamber somehow~” 

Okay this… This was easy.

Somewhat.

It was easier than Pebbles expected, at least.

But that did not make him any less uneasy about having to say it.

“I broke it on my own… Accidentally. I- Uh…” He thought for a moment about how to say it, ignoring how NSH was watching him expectantly.

“I grabbed it and it kind of just.. Snapped…?”

NSH snorted at that.

“Is your puppet really that weak? Damn, and here I thought all iterators were built to be more durable than that! I bet my puppet squish yours like a tin can~” NSH joked a bit, trying to lighten the mood, but Pebbles only glared in response.

He did not find that small jab funny.

“Shut up.”

NSH put his hands up in a peace-making manner.

“Alright, alright…” He sighed.

“Okay, so next question, why is your robe covered in blood and coolant? I don’t think you should have access to either of those in your chamber, unless you did something dumb.”

There was an odd sharp tint to NSH’s voice at the end there, and Pebbles’ expression turned to one as close to a grimace as a robot without a mouth could get.

“Ah… Well.. The blood is… Uh…” He thought for a moment, unsure on how to proceed with saying what he had to say. How does he word that to not seem ridiculous and not give up too much information?

“Yes~?” NSH insisted, now interested.

“Ugh. You know how your messenger has to eat and is probably a carnivore, right? Well I had my citizen bring them a dead lizard when I cured them-” He only realized that the “citizen” slipped out a moment later, and he was instantly horrified at the slip-up.

“Wait- Citizen?! Didn’t all ancients ascend? Don’t tell me you found some who didn’t!”

Pebbles winced at the loud question.

“The citizen is- uh- not an ancient” it felt wrong to say, and embarrassing as well.

“...” NSH stared at him for a moment, then squinted.

There was silence for a moment.

“...Did you call an animal your citizen…?”
“In my defense!” Pebbles immediately snapped, voice rising “she found a citizen drone in the garbage wastes below, and it imprinted itself onto her! My programming makes me call everything with a citizen drone a citizen!” He screeched, but that wasn’t enough to mute out the sound of laughter coming from NSH.

NSH was straight up losing his mind, laughing at him, while Pebbles could feel shame chew straight through his puppet. It was horrible. His reputation would never recover.

“Stop- Stop laughing at me!”

It only made NSH laugh harder.

“What- What animal is it? Which animal did you end up stuck with serving~?” NSH managed to say in between giggles, and Pebbles only glared back, feeling like shit already.

He was so done with this conversation.

“...Slugcat.”

If anything, it made NSH howl in laughter more, and Pebbles was stuck there, hanging in the air, awkwardly waiting for him to stop laughing at his misery.

“I can’t believe it! You called a slugcat your citizen! Oh fuck, I must tell everyone about your sole surviving citizen! This is gonna be so great!”
“Don’t you DARE-”

“Oh come on, what, are you afraid your precious citizen will be mad at you~?”
“Didn’t you say we had a truce?! Bullying me doesn’t sound very friendly!”
“Well then stop being so easy to bully! I mean, come on, you called a slugcat your citizen, holy shit.”

Pebbles glared again.

“I’m going to disconnect from the call.”
NSH snorted, but eventually calmed down, but amusement was still clear in his voice.

“Okay, fine. So your citizen brought my messenger a lizard to eat, and you somehow got its blood all over itself? Did you try to eat it as well or what? Besides, I thought the only slugcats you had were babies!”

“My- uh- citizen- she is not one I created.” Before NSH could ask why he didn’t send Artificer with the rarefaction cell, Pebbles quickly added “unfortunately, she does what she wants, and is allergic to water, so she could never even get to Moon in the first place, so don’t ask why I didn’t use her as a messenger.” He sighed, and pressed his fingers into his optic lenses for a small moment.

“...She also adopted the two slugcats I did create, making it impossible for me to do anything with them without angering her.”

“HAH! Since when do you care about angering a slugcat? What, are you attached to your precious citizen~?” 

Pebbles absolutely despised the way that NSH said the word “citizen.”

“As far as I’m aware, we are all programmed in such a way that we cannot harm our citizens. At the current moment, because of the citizen drone, I am unable to harm her or force her to do anything she does not want to do.” He explained, clearly incredibly annoyed.

“She also has the ability to make explosives, and absolutely eradicated the whole scavenger race on top of my can because they wronged her once. So sorry if I think that angering something I cannot harm that I KNOW is vengeful as fuck and has access to unlimited explosives is a fundamentally bad idea.”

He glared so hard that if looks could kill, NSH would’ve been dead a while ago already.

Hopefully that was enough to make the green iterator drop the topic.

“Alright, alright… I will let you know that I still find it incredibly hilarious, however.” NSH snorted again and leaned back, expression one of pure amusement.

“This is peak blackmail material~”

“No Significant Harassment.” Pebbles started, voice cold. “Don’t you dare tell anyone about this.”

“No promises~”

“Ugh.”

NSH snorted again, then took a look at the other screens.

“Okay, fine… But what about the coolant? Your robe is literally coated in cyan.”

Pebbles winced again and looked down at his robe. He hated to admit that yeah, it looked nasty.

“...One of my fans got jammed in a while ago” he started, once again uneasy about admitting that he accidentally damaged his puppet.

“I tried to fix it, and came across some odd blue membrane inside. I accidentally damaged it, and it leaked a bit before I managed to fix the issue.”

“And you got it all over yourself? Even your face?”

Pebbles’ head instantly snapped up, and he brought the edges of his robe to his face, scrubbing at it aggressively.

“I thought I wiped it off-”

“It stains easily. Nasty stuff, huh?” NSH mentioned, and tilted his head. “I mean! I wouldn’t judge you if there were other reasons for it being on your face, huh?”
“...Shut up. I don’t like what you’re implying.”
“I’m just sayin’ it's perfectly fine to cry every so often!”

Pebbles immediately stopped his scrubbing to look at NSH, instantly outraged at the misinterpretation of it all.

“I- I do not cry!”
“It is perfectly fine to do so-”
“I DO NOT!” Pebbles raised his voice, even if NSH still tried to be relatively peaceful about it.

“I didn’t even know that iterators had the ability to do that before I- I just noticed I had two odd valves next to my eyes and wanted to check what they do, I did NOT cry!”
If anything, it only made NSH mildly more concerned, an odd expression on his face.

“...You know. Maybe you wouldn’t be such a cranky angry baby if you allowed yourself to cry every so often.” NSH started, amusement mixing with concern, and he once again put his hands up and closed his eyes for a moment. Something told Pebbles that if NSH had a mouth, he would be grinning right now.

“All this toxic masculinity is not good for you, no~?”
“Oh shut up” Pebbles groaned, before using an overseer to project another screen to the side. He made it work like a mirror, and he finally managed to remove all the cyan stains off of his face. Ugh.

Great, now his robe was even dirtier.

Gross.

“If this is all that you wanted, can you send me the files and leave me alone?!” He finally spoke up again, trying to smooth out his robe, looking only at the mirrored screen rather than at NSH.

“I still have one question left!”
“No. I’m pretty sure you asked three already.”
“The stains were one question!”
“One question for blood, one question for coolant.”
Pebbles glared, and NSH glared back.

Neither of them said anything for a moment, stuck in a staring contest, before NSH finally gave up with a tired sigh.

“Fine, fine, sure, lemme just…”

There was a ping, and Pebbles brought up the message logs. Three files sat innocently in his inbox. Thank fuck, it meant this incredibly uncomfortable conversation could finally end.

Pebbles felt absolutely exhausted, and he wanted it all to end already. He couldn’t remember when was the last time he had a proper conversation with someone, but he knew that it was a long time ago. 

He was surprised he even survived as long as he did without bashing his head in against the wall of his chamber or something.

“Good. Now leave me alone.” Pebbles said, and turned back to the call, to cancel it.

NSH stopped him immediately, voice mildly raised in alarm.

“One last thing! Last thing!”
Pebbles’ hand froze, and he stared at the screen, expectantly.

“...What is it now?”
“I know that chances that you will agree to that are as low as teaching a miros bird to perform tricks, but it won’t hurt to ask~” NSH started, making a light joke, and Pebbles snorted in response, annoyed.

“If you know I won’t agree then why do you ask?”
“Just hear me out for a moment!” NSH said, once again a bit louder.
“I was thinking about calling Moon. She seems so lonely, and at the current moment, it sucks to see her talk to my overseer while I can do nothing to respond” he sighed and leaned back again, waving his hand around, hiding half his face in his purple scarf.

“But with her communication array destroyed, I can’t actually call her, and overseers cannot move any significant information that far without it…”

Pebbles had… Mildly bad feeling about what NSH might ask for.

There was just this crawling sense of unease that followed his every sentence.

“So I was thinking!” Once again, NSH’s face got closer to the screen. 

“What if I used your communication array to call her? I mean, it’s close enough that I could just call ‘you’” NSH made quotation marks with his fingers at the you part “but have my overseer next to her, instead!”

“...I have a feeling that that’s not all, is it?” Oh Pebbles definitely had bad feelings about this.

“Yeah, well… Normally, it would mean that you would have to manually accept each call, and then the overseer would have to somehow walk over all the way to her without the call ending, ooooor…” NSH trailed off at the end, looking at the ceiling for a moment before throwing a look back at Pebbles “...Or you could give me administrator privileges over the communication array so I could force-accept the calls on my end.”

Knew it.

Fucking knew it.

“Absolutely not.” 

His response was cold and sharp.

“Come on man! She’s all alone and afraid, I can’t leave her like this!”
“I do not want you poking around in my communication array!”
“I wouldn’t actually use it for anything bad! I swear I just want to talk to Moon, not mess with you!” NSH glared at him for a moment, and for the first time since Pebbles’ little freak-out before, he seemed actually angry.

“I mean, I wouldn’t mind messing with you, but that is definitely not my goal here.”

“I’m not giving you fucking- administrator privileges over my structure!”
“It's only the communication array, not the whole structure!”
“That doesn’t make it any better!” 

They were both yelling now, and it wasn’t good, voices rising higher with every sentence.

Pebbles definitely did not want to give administrator access to anything of his own to anyone, yet alone NSH, of all iterators!

“So what?! Are you just going to let Moon waste away all alone?! You- The least you could do is allow me to call her, since you are clearly not calling her!”
“How do you know I didn’t plan to do just that?!”
“If you planned to, you would’ve done it already! When she woke up! You had the time, and yet, you didn’t even look at her!” NSH was getting angrier by the second, and Pebbles was pretty sure that if there was any table next to him, he would probably slam his hands against it.

Here goes the truce, huh?

Seems like they couldn’t keep that up for even one cycle.

“I- Well, you could find a different way to call her, one that doesn’t require you having full access to my systems!”

“How selfish can you be?! It wouldn’t even hurt you in any way! All your messages are encrypted, so it's not like I could even read them! And I wouldn’t force a call nor message unless it was some kind of extreme emergency, you know I wouldn’t use that shit freely!”

“How can I know that?!” Pebbles screeched out, loud and clear, voice crackling slightly, because he did not trust NSH not to do exactly just that for no other reason than it being fun. 

“Who do you take me as?! I respect other’s privacy, I’m not like Innocence, for fucks sake-” NSH groaned, and rubbed his forehead with his hand again, clearly annoyed. “You are simply looking for excuses! And now, Moon is suffering because of you!”

Pebbles turned his hands into fists, eyes flaming.

“I’m literally doing what I can to fix this shit! This is why I even talk to you!”
“Well have you even talked to her since she was reactivated?! No?! I wonder why! I’m sorry but I don’t want to have to sit here and watch her barely hold herself together every cycle in front of my overseer with no way to comfort her, or tell her anything, I just- I just want to talk to my fucking friend, dammit!”

NSH’s voice broke a bit at the end, and Pebbles immediately froze in place.

He was used to NSH being angry, not- Not like this.

“You don’t even know how much I have missed her, and I’m so incredibly close to being able to talk to her for the first time in a thousand cycles, and yet the only thing you think about is yourself, is it?!” There was desperation in NSH’s voice, now clear as day, and Pebbles still stood there, frozen, eyes wide.

“...”
“...But fine. Keep your stupid fuckin’ privacy..” NSH grumbled out, hiding more of his face in his purple scarf, and crossed his arms on his chest angrily. “But at the very least talk to her sometime soon. Don’t leave her all alone just because you’re too stuck up your own ass to even look at her.”

Pebbles stared at the screen, processing, unsure.

Fuck.

Now he felt bad.

Even more like garbage than before.

Somehow, he would’ve preferred a whole cycle of NSH yelling at him over this.

The guilt was threatening to swallow him whole as he thought about Moon, all alone, with no company.

..

…The only thing she could do was talk to NSH’s overseers, getting absolutely no response back.

Pebbles couldn’t imagine how awful it must’ve felt for NSH himself, to have to watch her like that.

The next cycle already started - their conversation stretched out very far in time, after all - so Pebbles could bet that NSH’s overseers were observing her right this moment.

Awful.

…Ugh…

He couldn’t believe that he would ever agree to such a thing.

Maybe in the past he wouldn’t, but…

He actually had no idea why he wanted to agree, but he simply…

He simply felt so, so awful.

Maybe… Maybe if NSH talked to her, she would forgive him sooner.

NSH could tell her that Pebbles gave him access so that he could call her, and that would soothe her anger, at least a bit. Maybe…?

Pebbles hoped so.

“...Fine. I will- I will give you access.” He finally choked out, even if his mind screamed at him at the mere thought.

NSH instantly perked up at that, eyes widening, clearly shocked that Pebbles actually agreed to that. Pebbles himself was shocked as well.

“Wait- What?”

“You can connect, but if you do something stupid like use forced communication to call me or anything of that nature, I WILL kick you out again.” He threatened, but it felt weak.

He was absolutely terrified, but the guilt was stronger.

He needed to make Moon less mad at him, too.

He couldn’t deal with talking to her if she was still angry.

“Oh- Yeah, yeah, that is fair” NSH still seemed a bit shaken up by the fact that Pebbles actually agreed, but didn’t voice his surprise. Probably in fear that it would make him change his mind.

Immediately, Pebbles could feel some foreign connection poking at his communication array, and he suppressed a shudder. 

It felt uncomfortable to allow anyone any level of control over his structure. Before, only Moon had administrator privileges when it came to his systems, and that was because she was his senior.

It was incredibly off-putting and uncomfortable to give that level of control to anyone else.

NSH wasn’t his brother, he wasn’t his senior, he shouldn’t have access to his systems in any way.

Awful.

It was awful.

It was horrible and the worst idea ever.

But unfortunately, this was the only way that NSH could possibly talk to Moon, and Pebbles knew that he personally would not be able to bring himself to talk to her before the rarefaction cell was in place.

It… It was all his fault, so the least he could do was make sure she would not be all alone.

The communication array linked to the new presence, and he instantly got information about the link and the ID of the foreign connection. It matched.

He granted administrator privileges, even if he hesitated a lot before actually doing so, and quickly dismissed the warning he instantly received. 

It was fine. 

It was for Moon.

The foreign connection felt like bugs crawling all over his communication array, and the idea that NSH had full access to any part of his system - especially this one - made him nauseous. There were so many things that could go wrong with this, but he tried to ignore all of that.

Instead, he turned back to the screen with the call.

“Here’s your fucking… Administrator access.” He hissed out, still choked up a bit with discomfort, clearly unhappy, irritation and unease leaking through every word. “Don’t make me regret this.”
NSH seemed to be very pleased with the way the conversation went, though.

“Thankie~! Now, if you need me, I will be talking to Moon, see ya~!” 

NSH’s voice was lighter than it was in a long while.

Instantly, the call ended, disconnected on the other iterator’s side, and Pebbles let himself drop to the floor, puppet trembling.

Well…

That went like shit.

He felt like shit.

But at least he had the blueprints.

Now, he could possibly distract himself from his stupid decisions by creating a whole lot of neuron flies. A few for Moon, and, well, a few for himself.

Chapter Text

Relationship-wise, No Significant Harassment and Five Pebbles were never particularly close.

Despite that though, Sig always tried to be friendly towards the guy. Ever since Pebbles joined the local group, Sig made sure to treat him well, even if he did make fun of the younger iterator every so often.

Moon always spoke very highly of her brother, proud to be a big sister to another iterator, and Sig was close friends with her, so of course he tried to be nice to her little brother and make him feel welcome.

Even if said brother acted like an annoying, stuck up, pretentious jerk every so often, and his absolute lack of appreciation for anything he was given was bothering NSH greatly.

At first, however, Sig did not hold it against him. 

Every iterator shared the same frustration when they were first built after all, and he was convinced that with enough time, Pebbles, too, would finally change his mindset and form new opinions on the world. That he would grow up, learn more about the world, and become less of an angsty little shit. 

Moon seemed to believe that as well.

Sig decided to give him that chance.

So they were friendly with each other, and over time, he even came to care for this little pink bastard, as annoying as he sometimes was.

They had mutual friends, too, and friendly-bullying him in the local group was incredibly fun.

Sig had high hopes for the guy, if he had to be perfectly honest. 

Suns said that they were working towards helping him change his mindset, Moon was incredibly happy about having a younger brother, and Innocence finally had someone who actually wanted to talk to them, so for a while, things were good.

Oh how wrong he was, by putting his hopes in someone so immature and selfish.

Once Suns sent him that damned pearl, everything instantly fell apart.

In a flash, their reality changed from one of relative peace and comfort, to an absolute nightmare.

Suddenly, Pebbles cut himself off from the rest of the world, destroying all overseers within his structure and applying a facility-wide lockdown. His last words were literally him screaming at the overseer that he was going to do everything on his own and he didn’t need any of them, if Sig remembered correctly.

After that, there was nothing. 

The last information that the local group ever heard about him was the fact that he got the rot, with all the nasty pictures leaked by Innocence, and it looked awful. It looked like it hurt.

Moon, in the meantime…

Gone.

Murdered by her own brother.

Brother who refused to even take responsibility for her death, choosing to run away and stay silent instead of doing anything to help her.

Once reality finally set in, the finality of her collapse settling into everyone involved, there was nothing but pain and anger left.

Sig refused to think about the possibility of her collapsing at first, but then it happened, and all of them were left in silence once again, left to simply soak it in. 

After the immediate wave of horror, desperation, disbelief and grief passed, came anger.

It made him want to throw pearls across his chamber and watch them shatter with the force.

It made him want to scream.

How dare Pebbles do something so awful and then just… Hide?!

Not even apologize?!

Do nothing but ignore the consequences of his own actions?!
Sure, he had the rot, but there were still things he could possibly do rather than wallowing in his own misery! He was incredibly close to her, he could do significantly more than any other member of the local group, and yet he chose to do nothing at all!

It made Sig incredibly angry, his structure howling with so much steam that the population of nearby animals got lowered by more than a half with how harsh the rains got.

He tried to keep himself together when he talked to Suns, when he reassured them that things were fine, because Suns needed someone to support them, even if they had a hand in this massive fuck-up. 

They felt bad enough as it was, and Sig was afraid that if he let his anger show too fast, or got lost in his own desperation, there would be no one to drag Suns away from making absolutely idiotic decisions on their own.

So he tried so hard to sound the way he usually would, to bring them at least a little bit of comfort in this absolute nightmare.

Even if internally, he fought the need to rip off his umbilical just to walk all the way over to where Pebbles was just to throw his puppet across the room. 

Preferably multiple times.

Fuck.

Moon was gone, Pebbles refused to talk to anyone, Suns got terribly depressed and drowned in guilt, and the whole local group was terribly shaken up.

Everything turned to shit.

Sig wasn’t the one to give up easily, though.

He refused to give up. He refused to just sit there and do nothing.

He refused to accept this shitty reality as it was.

Despite being locked in a box, despite having very little options, he still refused.

So he did what he did best - worked on finding possible solutions for a hopeless case that could actually work .

Over the course of the next few hundred cycles, he would work on a whole lot of things, not giving himself any time to rest - he couldn’t rest until a solution was found, after all.

Research, biological engineering, altering the structure of neuron flies, analyzing Moon’s collapsed structure with his overseers, looking for ways to bring her back, all of that took up every cycle of his existence afterwards.

Sig was afraid that if he allowed himself to properly think about it, he would end up in a state similar to Suns, and he knew how badly it could end. It wouldn’t help anyone. 

He couldn’t think, he needed to work.

He never stopped working, not even once the “care package” he was meant to send to Moon was finished, and that was most likely the reason why his messenger ended up… Not exactly the healthiest.

He was too lost in the anger, the pain, and the need to work and to fix it to actually notice the rot until the messenger was already finished. And by then, he was too impatient to care, because it did not matter in the end.

The messenger had enough time to get to her, it was fine.

He only realized how wrong it was once the messenger was already outside, out in the world and on their way to Moon, and Sig finally had a moment where he could do nothing but think. He was too busy to care before, but once all that he could’ve done was done, he was hit by what exactly he did.

…

…It- It didn’t matter, though.

All that mattered was that the messenger got to Moon.

They could… They could ascend, or something, afterwards.

Or, if they were fast enough, they could possibly go back to him, and maybe…. Maybe he could fix them somehow.

…Whatever.

It… It was fine.

It was only an animal.

It was perfectly fine.

Moon was more important than an animal, right?

Sure, Suns got attached to their own messenger, but their situations were different.

He couldn’t afford projecting any of his feelings onto a being that was likely never coming back, the least he could do was accept that he messed up and move on.

Sig was absolutely exhausted at that point, he was angry and sad and desperate. He was grasping at straws, trying to figure out any possible way to help Moon, despite knowing full well that he did not have the ability to fix her structure even if he tried.

It wasn’t like he had anything better to do with his time, right…?

Suns probably noticed his constant, desperate exhaustion, but thankfully, even if they did, they did not comment on that. Besides, Sig knew that they were just as exhausted and desperate as he was, even if they had a different priority.

Right… 

Sig tried to help Moon, while Suns tried to help Pebbles.

He would be lying if he said that he wasn’t annoyed at that, because Pebbles did that to himself, and Moon deserved all that help more, but he knew that Suns would never actually change their mind.

At this point, their obsession with Pebbles started to border on creepy, so it wasn’t like Sig could get to them even if he tried. Even if he considered it weird as shit.

They were both falling apart with their efforts.

It was peaceful for a while after he sent the messenger, and Sig finally allowed himself to rest, even if just a little bit.

Most of his work was finished, after all, and he stopped caring for the Big Problem the moment the ancients ascended, so he had nothing interesting to do other than continue messing around with neuron flies and other such things. 

He was pretty much the first one to abandon the Big Problem out of the whole group.

It was a stupid problem in general, because most animals did not desire things such as ascension. They were most likely too stupid to even know of the cycle, so why bother?

Either way, he had nothing to do but rest.

A sudden ping in the local group, however, completely destroyed any idea of “rest” he might’ve still held.

The moment he saw Five Pebbles back online, he was filled with so much anger that if he held something, it would immediately get snapped in his grip. He might’ve been a bit more aggressive than he had to be, but he was filled with nothing but burning rage.

That- That absolute bastard.

Five Pebbles not only dared to show his stupid face in the local group after all this time, but he also didn’t even apologize. 

The only thing he wanted was to steal Sig’s messenger.

Maybe he would be willing to talk to the guy, maybe even try to forgive him, if he did as much as APOLOGIZED. But he DIDN’T. 

Literally the only thing he did was come back and instantly ask for shit!

How the fuck was Sig meant to NOT get mad?!

If anything, everything that Pebbles said only made him see red even more, holograms whirring at incredible speeds as he fought an urge to cuss this pink bastard out for everything that he did. The amount of patience he still held truly surprised him sometimes.

Even through all his anger, however, he could see something was very fucking wrong.

First red flag: Somehow, in some way, Pebbles managed to cure his own rot, which was odd. Sig never heard of an iterator that was able to do such a thing in the past, but fine, maybe Pebbles was the first one to figure that out, it was fine.

It did make Sig even angrier, though, to see him get away from this situation without a scratch, structure still standing and in good enough condition to allow him to continue functioning without too many issues. 

He was functioning, but Moon was not.

It was unfair.

Incredibly unfair.

Second red flag: Pebbles actually did something to help Moon, and not only that - what he decided to do was incredibly stupid and damaging to his own systems. He straight up decided to remove an integral part of his systems and hand it over, and normally, Pebbles was never the one to help others even if they asked for something simple. Being self-sacrificing was very far from his norm.

Maybe he finally realised how badly he fucked up…?

Even if it was odd, Sig was at least mildly more willing to listen to whatever the guy had to say, now that he knew that Moon would get more help from someone who was actually close enough to do so easily.

That did not mean he wouldn’t keep an eye on Pebbles after that moment, though.

It was… Suspicious.

Third red flag: Pebbles actually accepted the deal that Sig put in place, even if he did not need to. Sig was convinced that both of them were fully aware just how little power he had to actually enforce anything.

That attempt was not done to actually get access to Pebbles’ can though, no. It was just a test, to see if he was willing to listen, to work with them, to actually put in the effort.

The fact that he accepted it with very little arguing was incredibly odd and suspicious, and if anything, it made Sig mildly more concerned over the whole situation, anger dimming a bit. 

By then, Sig knew that something big must’ve happened to Pebbles, because even in a thousand cycles that passed, Sig not once could imagine him changing so drastically.

The issue was with: what exactly happened?

After their conversation within the bounds of the local group, Sig began a new little… Project of his.

The project was called: “figure out the fuck happened to Pebbles.”

He was still mad, of course, but he was also intrigued, and maybe a bit worried.

He decided to save all odd things that Pebbles did within one file folder, and then reference it to try to learn what could’ve possibly changed this tiny pink bastard’s heart so much.

Did some other iterator talk to him and finally get him to listen? 

No, no, he was still on lockdown before their conversation, so the only way anyone could reach him would be through forced communication - and only Moon had that ability.

Did he find some ancient pearls about the importance of family or something? No, that was ridiculous.

Did he finally realize how much he relied on others and missed Moon? That was the most likely, but even then, Sig knew that it probably wasn’t true. There was not nearly enough time for Pebbles to realize such things.

Although, Sig never talked to him through private broadcasts too much before, so maybe he truly was like that behind closed doors, simply acting tough in the local group?

Who the fuck knew.

He had very little to reference off of, unfortunately.

No, he had to know more.

Empty theories were useless and would get him nowhere, he needed real, reliable info.

And where to get that from, if not from the source?

During their future conversations, he attempted to get at least a bit more information, even if Pebbles was as stubborn and annoying as always. At least that didn’t change too much.

What pissed off Sig a lot, though, was how little he seemed to care for Suns.

Especially with how badly Suns wanted to talk to him.

For now, however, Sig was the only link between those two, even if that was an uncomfortable position to be in.

Sig could still remember how badly Suns reacted to the news that Pebbles refused to talk to them.

[ARCHIVED BROADCAST - Read Only] - Private

No Significant Harassment, Seven Red Suns.

NSH: I have good news! And bad news, too, unfortunately.

SRS: What is the nature of the news? Should I be worried?

NSH: I don’t think so!

NSH: It’s about Five Pebbles, but before you jump at me, allow me to explain.

SRS: Did something happen?

NSH: I said before you jump at me, have you forgotten how to read?

SRS: I apologize. 

NSH: Fine, fine, where was I again…~?

NSH: Pebbles finally came out of isolation and contacted the local group! Apparently, he managed to cure his own rot, and decided to actually do something about his horrific mistake and attempt to help fix Moon.