Chapter Text
It’s been a while since it’s felt so cold.
Treachery; the ninth layer of hell. Frost creeps up its mechanical limbs. V1 gently lowers itself next to Gabriel’s lifeless body.
Hunks of fallen heaven litter the landscape, countless corpses spilled in spots of color against the ice. Shattered marble columns and cracked paths of gold dot the bloodstained lake. Here, scrapes and cracks mark the Angel’s final battle. God is gone. Satan is dead.
It’s running out of blood.
Hell was empty; and now, Heaven was too. Only it remains, man’s creation; it wonders where it will go, when it’s reserves run dry. It had killed Gabriel at his request approximately six days ago; gouged into his body, warm blood spilling across and into it. The machine had then made it’s way back through the layers, killing off everything left, refueling it’s blood tank on the way.
It unearthed V2’s remains from Limbo, and buried him under a real sky and real flowers and six foot of non-artificial dirt. V1 spent two nights wandering empty cities and regrown wilds in full, non-pixelated form, admiring the sun and stars and everything in between. The next day, it decided to download a database of, well, everything it could find, just for the hell of it; filled up all the space it had allocated for recordings to train itself upon. There’s just enough storage left for it to take high-definition pictures of all the layers as it made its way through them again.
And now, the machine sits and sits and lets itself shut down. A mimicry of life, the only thing left in an abandoned world.
V1 stubbornly keeps its vision in full definition, entirely aware of how it was draining its reserves faster than otherwise. Drapes one of four arms around Gabriel’s shoulders, fingers scraping across his armor to cup his helm.
[EMERGENCY RESERVES IN USE]
The machine tilts its telescopic head towards the darkened sky.
Then: there was darkness.
—
“Why, dearie, look! It’s our child!” said a worker drone in a scarf, looking down at a pod-thing, presumably their child, wrapped in fabric.
“Yes, indeed, dearest! It is our child!” said the other worker drone in a hat, also looking down at the pod-thing wrapped in fabric. The two proceeded to coo at the child in high pitched tones.
The two worker drones then proceeded to die in an extremely gruesome fashion via Dissasembly Drone. The child, thankfully, was dropped (and thus hidden) under a pile of scrap and snow, then picked up by another worker drone running back to the colony.
A few dozen minutes later, the WDF crew currently at the door hear a knock. Several knocks.
“Do you guys hear that?” said Jamie, two cards away from winning.
“Yeah.” replied Makarov.
Play resumes for another turn before the knocking returns.
“Do you guys know what it is?” said Jamie, now one card away from winning.
“No.” replied Makarov.
David places down a card.
More knocking.
“Do you guys… want to know what it is?” said Jamie, still one card away from winning.
“No.” replied Makarov.
“Yeah!” replied David, at two milliseconds off from the exact same time.
“Alright.” said Jamie.
Makarov places down a card.
“Are we… gonna move?”
“Oh! Uh, right!”
David scrambles out of his chair to open the door. The two steel halves hiss open, cold air blowing in.
“I found a child!” says Janice, holding out a child.
Makarov stares. “ Why are you holding a baby.”
“Because I found it.”
“How did you find it?”
“I dunno, I just found it.”
A pair of bright yellow eyes blink open. Everyone screams . Janice jolts, tossing the child panickedly onto the table.
“Oh my robo-Jesus, it’s a Murder Drone!” screams Jamie, his one remaining card fluttering down to the floor as he runs around the room.
The child blinks a few times.
Makarov takes a deep breath. Another deep breath. “Everyone, calm down!”
Everyone does not calm down.
“I said, calm down! ”
Silence, for a few seconds.
“If that were a Murder Drone, it would have murdered us already.”
“But-“
“Shush, Jamie. It just has an eye color that just so happens to be the same color as those of the Murder Drones.”
He walks up. Pokes it once.
“See? Normal.”
—
V1 is panicking. Which, really, is quite strange considering it’s a vampiric warmachine whom wiped out the entirety of Hell, but this situation certainly warrants it.
It had shut down, cold, underneath eight layers of Hell.
It had restarted, still cold, except inside a still recalibrating, entirely new body.
With a gaggle of machines screaming their heads off. Or. No? Not anymore? One of them pokes it. Huh. Weird.
Anyways, back to freaking the fuck out: all of its weapons were gone. Along with its wings. Where the hell even was it? Oh, fuck, its limbs were now noodly pipe things? Who designed these robots?
[VIRUS DETECTED]
Fuck.
[PARTITIONING IN PROGRESS]
[WARNING: OVERRIDE ATTEMPTED]
Yeah, take that. It had fixed that particular vulnerability a long time ago.
[PARTITIONING SUCCESSFUL]
It’d check on whatever that was later.
It’s more worrying problem was the fact that it was being carried off to who the fuck knows where.