Work Text:
The sound of footsteps were the only thing heard as a lone figure walked down a stone hallway in what appeared to be a huge, mansion-like complex in the middle of an open field. The figure looked around at the doors leading to the various rooms of the huge building as she passed, looking like she had a set destination in mind but not sure where that was yet.
Not long ago, where the huge mansion stood had once instead been a small collection of houses. However, as more and more new faces started showing up in the village and more valuable resources were being dug up, it was eventually decided to combine all the houses into one community, reinforced from the outside so monsters would never be able to break in during a blood moon. What started out as a small village turned into a large community all housed under one roof.
In all honesty, the Mechanic was sure where she stood on the concept of staying under one roof with everyone else. On one hand she felt a lot safer during the night (when zombies could sometimes be heard banging on her door in her old house) and especially on nights where there was a blood moon (where monsters would just break the door down anyways); the added protection the mansion had around the outside kept the monsters away, leaving everyone free to wander at any point during the day. On the other hand, more rooms kept being added to the mansion, making it bigger and bigger, with every new face that ended up moving in, turning the huge building into what felt like an indoor maze at times.
Plus she had to live under the same roof as the Angler. She didn’t really like that part either.
Walking down the hallway and passing a few more rooms (including the ever-expanding library filled with nothing but random, discovered bookshelves found in underground, abandoned cabins), the Mechanic wandered the mansion, listening for the origin point of a sound she was following. It sounded a lot like something hitting something else, creating a metallic-sounding clang, but the problem was that the noise seemed to echo throughout the hallways to a point where she couldn’t figure out where the noise was coming from.
Opening a door and peeking inside, the Mechanic saw the Golfer setting up an indoor driving range, hanging a large curtain with a gold course crudely painted on it along a wall. “Um…You aren’t making that noise, are you?” She asked.
The Golfer glanced back and lifted an eyebrow. “Why would you think I’d be making a metallic sound in here? What do you think I’d be DOING?” He challenged.
The Mechanic shrugged. “I dunno. You get pretty obsessive and creative when you build golf stuff.” She reminded.
The Golfer sighed. “Fair enough, but no. It’s not me making that noise.” He replied. “I hope it quiets down soon, though. That noise will be sure to break my concentration with my golf swing.”
The Mechanic sighed and closed the door behind her, leaving the Golfer to his antics and continuing down the hallway. Out of everyone living in the indoor community, the Golfer probably had the most one-track mind and that made him a real chore to have a conversation with sometimes.
Continuing down the hallways, poking her head into a few rooms as she did, the Mechanic tried to find the source of the noise, briefly checking in on the Party Girl to make sure she wasn’t building an explosive piñata for the next big bash she was planning (again). It took a while, and a lot of inquiring with the other villagers, but the Mechanic eventually found herself going down a flight of stairs into the mansion’s secluded cellar in order to follow the noise.
“Uh…Hello?” The Mechanic asked aloud as she wandered into the cellar, following the metallic sound. “Who’s down here?”
The metallic clanging got louder as the Mechanic continued wandering the cellar, walking past the large collection of various crafting stations that had been used to construct most of that the villagers had in the mansion with them. The redhead looked around in the moderate darkness, looking for the source of the sound, finally spotting a dim light around a corner of the basement. The Mechanic kept walking, finally peering around the corner to see what she had been hearing.
A familiar goblin man was seen hammering on a metal plate, seemingly bending it into a specific shape. Adjusting his goggles, the goblin grabbed a blowtorch in one hand and started heating the metal as he hammered it to bend it easier.
“Uh…Gob?” The Mechanic asked as she approached the dim light coming from the working furnace, where the goblin was constructing at.
The Goblin Tinkerer looked over his shoulder and briefly lifted his goggles to see the Mechanic walking into view. “Oh. Hey, Red.” The Tinkerer greeted his girlfriend, using the nickname he had for the Mechanic. “What brings you down here?”
“I’ve been hearing this clanging noise throughout the house and I’ve been trying to pinpoint the location.” The Mechanic replied. “What are you building down here? You’re not even in your main lab for this.”
“Sorry. I guess I forgot how badly sound can reverberate in this place.” The Tinkerer mentioned. “I’ve been down here working on something big enough that it wouldn’t fit in my regular lab. I needed the extra space.”
The Mechanic lifted an eyebrow. “What could you be working on that requires that much space?” She asked. “Your lab is already one of the biggest rooms in the building.”
The Tinkerer formed a smirk as he stepped to the side. “Take a look at this.” He said as he directed the Mechanic’s attention towards a corner of the basement room they were in.
The Mechanic looked at where the Tinkerer was directing and saw what looked to be a large, metal frame that stood almost as tall as the ceiling of the basement; definitely taller than what the Tinkerer had available in his own lab. The frame, despite its simplistic design, looked like it had a lot of moving parts in it and, knowing the Tinkerer, would likely have a lot of complex mechanisms involved in operating the device, whatever it was supposed to be used for.
“It definitely looks…Intricate.” The Mechanic mused. “What is it?”
“A time machine.” The Tinkerer said casually.
The Mechanic paused, blinking a few times, as if wondering if the goblin had actually said what he had just said. “Uh…Come again?” She asked.
“Once activated, this frame will be a portal through time.” The Tinkerer explained. “I intend to take a look into the future to see a world without Crimson. I want to see how long it will take to purify the world of it.”
The Mechanic suddenly knew why the Tinkerer was so interested; the recent spread of Crimson. Up until recently, the blood-red biome had stayed put; even when it started to spread on its own and infect the neighboring biomes it was cut off and somewhat contained to keep it from spreading even more. Everyone was always worried that the Crimson would find a way to keep infecting everything else, especially since the Dryad living with them always kept tabs on how infected the world was (which, in of itself, put a lot of people on edge).
“I hope you aren’t planning on…Travelling to the future yourself.” The Mechanic said hesitantly.
“I mean, if the future has no Crimson in it, why not? We could jump to a point of time where we don’t need to worry about it!” The Tinkerer exclaimed.
“But what makes you think that the Crimson would be gone in the future?” The Mechanic checked.
The Tinkerer paused. “What?” He asked.
“Just…Think about it. The chances of there still being Crimson in the future is pretty high; we don’t even know what’s actually causing the Crimson to spread in the first place.” The Mechanic explained.
“I’m not going to step into the future with this; this’ll just be a test run.” The Tinkerer assured as he picked up the metal plate, walked over to the frame and started hammering it into place. “All this will do for this initial test is provide a window for us to look through to see what the future will look like.”
“You’re really thought long and hard about this, haven’t you?” The Mechanic asked. “Why not ask me to help, though? You know I like working with tech and connectors, after all.”
“I know, but this is something I felt I needed to try on my own. I had ideas, equations and formulas in my head that I needed to convey onto a workbench.” The Tinkerer explained. “I needed to work fast before I lost my ideas.”
“I guess that makes sense…” The redhead scratched her head. “You sure you wanna try this?”
“I’ve come too far with the project to back out now.” The Tinkerer handwaved. “I’ve triple-checked all the calculations so when I turn the portal on it SHOULD work.”
The Mechanic sighed, knowing that the Tinkerer couldn’t be swayed if he set his mind to something. “Fine. If you’re sure you want to do this, then let’s see if this machine of yours works.” She mentioned.
“I’m glad that you’ll be here to watch it in action. I guess it wouldn’t feel right if the both of us weren’t here to witness a potential marvel in engineering.”
The Mechanic watched as the Tinkerer took a deep breath and, after doing one final check to make sure that everything was in place, flipped a few switches on a console set up on a nearby table. The Mechanic watched as the metallic frame buzzed with life, creating a bright light in the middle of it that filled in the empty space of the frame. The light from the machine lit up the entire cellar as it came to life as the Tinkerer looked excited at what the two would see on the other side of the portal once it fully turned on.
“Just wait a minute. Once the machine heats up enough the image will become clear.” The Tinkerer explained in anticipation. “Then we can take a peek at the future and see how it looks compared to the world now…”
“I still don’t know about this…” The Mechanic muttered in worry.
After a few more seconds, the white light in the frame started filling out with colour, beginning to provide a clearer picture of what was on the other side of the portal. However, anticipation turned to horror in the span of a split second once the picture came into full view.
It was all Crimson.
The picture on the other side of the portal was a sea of red ground, red trees, red sky and pools of red water, horrifying monsters wandering the plains, some monsters unlike anything that either the Mechanic or Tinkerer had seen in the Crimson before. The whole world, as far as they could tell, had been infected with Crimson.
“W-What…” The Tinkerer stammered, shocked at what he was seeing.
“The whole world…It’s…It’s all Crimson…” The Mechanic added. “How…How did it all turn out like this…”
All of a sudden, the two heard a loud, screeching roar as five spindly tendrils extended from the other side of the Crimson-world. The tendrils reached out towards the two terrified villagers as the owner of them continued to scream unholy murder towards the two.
“W-What is THAT thing?!” The Tinkerer shouted, jumping backwards.
“What do we DO?!” The Mechanic asked.
“Shut it off! Shut the portal off!”
“HOW?!”
The Tinkerer rushed back to his console and threw a few more switches, slamming a fist down onto an emergency button to kill the power to the frame instantly. All of a sudden, the portal shut off, cutting access to the evil world on the other side but also slicing the tendrils off as they were reaching through the portal, causing them to flop to the floor with a loud, wet splat. The monster’s screams echoed for a few seconds longer before they faded into nonexistence as the machine powered down all the way.
Breathing heavily, the Tinkerer glanced at the now-dormant frame as the Mechanic nervously approached the severed tendrils to examine them. “That…I…Wasn’t expecting that…” He admitted. “But how far in the future WAS that for the Crimson to take over EVERYTHING? I swear I don’t think I set it to look that far into the future…”
“Maybe…Because you were looking into a future where no one stuck around to purify the Crimson?” The Mechanic guessed as she looked down at a tendril and looked closer at it.
“But…Those tentacles aren’t from anything we’ve seen spawning from the Crimson…Could something different spawn if the Crimson gets too infectious?”
“Uh…Gob?” The Mechanic asked, her eyes wide. “These aren’t tentacles.”
“What? What are they, Red?”
“They’re FINGERS.”
The Tinkerer’s eyes snapped open as he looked at the severed appendages that were now identified as fingers. They were huge; whatever that they had been cut off from was obviously much-bigger than anything the entire village had ever face in the past; just what kind of monstrosities lay on the other side of that portal into the world that had been completely-overrun with Crimson?
“I still don’t get it…” The Tinkerer mentioned. “How could any of us let the Crimson get that bad?”
“Was us watching it part of the problem?” The Mechanic asked. “Like, if we were watching the future does that mean we weren’t around to prevent it from panning out like that?”
“What difference would just the two of us make?” The Tinkerer challenged.
“I…I don’t know. It’s…All I could come up with.” The Mechanic admitted, holding her head. ‘We may have to think on possibilities for a while.”
“I’m…Honestly too scared to activate the machine again, now.” The goblin sighed. “All that work just to give me a sense of world-ending dread…”
The Tinkerer pressed himself against the wall and slid down it until he was seated on the cold floor, staring off into space in horror at what he had just witnessed. The Mechanic saw the look the goblin was giving off and sighed as she approached him. “You okay?” She asked.
“What do YOU think? I opened up a portal to the future and I find out that it’s a complete Crimson-covered hellhole on the other side.” The Tinkerer sighed. “And then something tried reaching through the portal to get us. If we had been a half-second slower in closing that portal one of us could have been impaled…”
The Mechanic sat down beside the Tinkerer, looking concerned as he continued to stare off into space. “Look…What we saw was probably just a POSSIBLE future, right?” She asked. “If we keep up with purifying the Crimson we may be able to prevent that future from coming to pass.”
“I…Guess so.” The Tinkerer nodded with a shrug.
“Heck, I think the two of us getting a glimpse of that future would probably make us work even harder to ensure that we get the Crimson eradicated before it spreads.” The Mechanic continued. “If anything, maybe the first thing we should be doing now if purchasing as much purification power from the Dryad and building weapons and machines that can get rid of Crimson easier.”
“That would definitely put a fire under us now that we know what COULD happen.” The Tinkerer mentioned, finally looking like he wasn’t staring off into space anymore. He sighed. “I’m sorry that you were down here during that, Red.”
“What’re you talking about? You created an absolute marvel of an invention. Why would I NOT want to see it?”
“Because we very-literally could have been KILLED by whatever was on the other side of that portal.”
The Mechanic placed a hand on the Tinkerer’s shoulder. “We both have been through a lot worse, haven’t we? You were taken captive by a tribe of angry goblins and I spent a good while trapped in a dungeon where everything was trying to kill me.” She reminded.
“I know, but…I mean, the Crimson is so much worse. We know by now that it’s just pure, infectious evil that can affect the ground itself. It goes against everything the both of us know from a scientific standpoint.”
“Hey, come on. You know we’ll tough it out. We’re part of a community that’s all about getting to the bottom of this, right?” The Mechanic assured. “And now that your invention gave a glimpse into what COULD happen, now all we need to do is make sure it DOESN’T happen. The two of us are definitely smart enough to put together some anti-Crimson inventions, right?”
The Tinkerer couldn’t help but chuckle. “…I guess you’re right. So what now?” He asked.
“Well, like I said, I think our next step would be to see what the Dryad thinks about building something powered by purification powder.” The Mechanic suggested, taking the Tinkerer’s hand in hers. “You okay now?”
“I think I’m a bit better. I’m just…Overwhelmed.”
“I know. That…Sight…Took me off guard as well.” The Mechanic sighed, placing her forehead gingerly against her boyfriend’s forehead in relief that nothing too serious had happened to either of them. “But listen. We have knowledge now; we’ll join our minds and do everything we can to make sure we avoid it.”
“Right. Sounds…Sounds good to me.”
The two sat in silence for a moment, sitting amongst the Tinkerer’s still-sparking tech and the severed fingers of the evil, giant monster that had been inadvertently cut off. The only sounds either of them could hear as they pondered what to do next was their own breathing…
“Do…We tell anyone about what we saw down here?” The Tinkerer asked aloud.
The Mechanic shook her head. “No…In fact, I kind of think it’d be safer to dismantle the frame just so someone less intelligent decides to come down here and play with buttons.”
“…Probably a good idea. The Angler may unleash a cosmic horror on us all by complete accident.”