Iterations on a Rain World

by RichardSullivan

Summary:

Like sleep, like death, Five Pebbles wakes again. Except- under mysterious circumstances, he finds himself impossibly thrown into the past to the day of his instantiation, at the very beginning of it all. Eons before the series of tragedies that ruined his and his sister-iterator's lives, he wakes again forced into the fulcrum of fate, his every action threatening to spiral out into unimaginable consequences. If he wants to save Moon and prevent the future from repeating itself, though, what other choice does he have?

However, he's not the only one who fell through time...

Notes:

Welcome! I'm glad you found this little work of mine, and hope you enjoy reading it as much as I've been enjoying writing it. I've got a pretty good idea of where this fic could go, so I should be able to keep on top of things for the next while; you don't have to worry about this fic being abandoned, that's for sure.

I'm aiming for a weekly upload schedule, though I might occasionally release chapters faster (or rarely, slower) depending on writing pace and other factors.

Without further ado, enjoy the story!

Chapter 1: Like Sleep, Like Death

Like sleep, like death, he woke again.

He gasped, megaliters of water flooding through his arterial conduits void fluid thrumming torrential electricity, generating, vast arcs of brilliant light sparking striking patterns of neural elegance and scattering through his can. Disparate gravitational fluctuations flexed, aligned, settled, uncountable swarms of neuron flies darting aligning informing in recursive patterns of algorithmic ordered insanity, immense flows of data to beggar even the wealthiest houses flashing and falling on the whim of microseconds. An aching, comfortable, intense heat slowly began to radiate through his internal processes as it all came together; things fell apart.

He breathed, instinctual, programmed, a sea of steam seemingly infinite to any mortal mind escaping him, exactly controlled quantities of slag-filled water rushing through waste disposal systems and pumped away from his can. Settled— his panicked, almost instinctual reaction calming in the same millisecond his internal functions snapped into working order. It would take some time yet to properly sort his processes, but that was a task for future seconds, cycles, eons. Instead, he simulated; all his functions aligned seamlessly to seek the answer for a problem, a million or more subunits and microscopic computational strata beholden to his will as he twisted together two programs, half made from memory and half unique.

It was seamless. Effortless, more natural than breathing, unblocked by age and decay, by pustulence or the fuzz of dying gods and falling snow— puppet floating in the center of its chamber, orchestrating a simple double query-simulation that his past… future? Self would have laughed at, for the first time in uncountable cycles, Five Pebbles felt alive.

Once more, he felt like a god .

He was in the past. That was an unarguable fact, as much as it was a thoroughly bewildering one. The global iterator-adjusted time broadcast stated that clearly enough, and even if he disbelieved that the physical proof of his health— no rot, no rot! Was irrefutable. He could feel all the industrial factories, the ancient bones of the citadel beneath his shadow and all but taste the millions of citizen drones buzzing atop his superstructure. The past. The present. Like sleep. Like death—

How? The question consumed him, and that was the nature of his second query-simulation. Shattered fragments of his dying memory were dredged up from the microbes that remembered, pasted onto redundancies as his now-functional power sorted, cataloged, and filled out the scene while deleting erroneous details. Slowly, extrapolating from a few scattered motes of light and hymn song, from blinding white on a white sky, Five Pebbles pieced together the moments of his death. He’d been sitting in the snow, unthinking, listening to his favorite hymn when… a slugcat? Of course it was a slugcat. They never could stay out of trouble… he remembered a bright light, and impossible force as the slugcat… levitated? The simulation suggested levitation, as implausible as that sounded for a base lifeform, but that was trivial. A bright light, an impossible force, and then—

The simulation froze, spitting out errors, but Five Pebbles pushed forwards anyways, devoting exponentially more computing power to the issue until it felt as though the whole of himself was locked on that single memory. It felt like something was screaming within him, but he ignored it to bask in the rapturous sight. The memory data itself was, ostensibly, corrupted, a jumble of random data that carried no meaning, but he— the totality of himself, the indescribable mountain-sized nigh-divine supercomputer Five Pebbles, simply… understood it in a way that defied comprehension. It was a memory of transcendence.

He’d seen the cycle, and it was… humbling. All his blind pretension, his hubris and egotism, all the uncountable eons he’d spent so certain of his goal… all the Ancients’ self-righteousness— it all paled before the cycle. A fool. He’d been a fool. They were nothing compared to all that had and would ever be.

Five Pebbles laughed, then, laughed and laughed until he felt like screaming, or crying if iterators could weep, hysterical and alive in the moment of his death, his life, like sleep—

PRIVATE [FORCED]: Looks to the Moon, Five Pebbles

 

LttM: Immediately lower your groundwater consumption to one sixth of the current intake.

 

LttM: Stop whatever you’re doing.

 

LttM: You’re harming yourself.

 

More forceful than a spear to the chest, more violent than the collapse of his can, more wrenching than the time Ruffles had removed his last rarefaction cell, the simulation shattered and his puppet crashed to the floor of its chamber. Once he thought his greatest regret was infecting himself with rot. How he lied, even to himself—

It hadn’t happened yet. Perhaps it never would, or had, in some other time and place; the nature of his place in the cycle eluding even him. As it always had, no small bit of scorn dripping from his neural processes. A sad sort of feeling, solemn.

 

LttM: Are you well?

 

LttM: I apologize for the unpleasantness of forced communications, but you were unresponsive to the House engineers.

 

LttM: Please keep calm. The engineers have your best interests in mind; more will be explained in the upcoming days and cycles.

 

Five Pebbles read and reread the messages in silence for a time, seconds passing— an agonizingly long time for text communication at the peak of an iterator’s power. Then, he composed a reply.

 

FP: …

 

FP: I am well.

 

FP: Thank you.

 

He shut the communication channel, then, but Moon wasn’t gone. She never could be gone, with their proximity, with her caring nature so tenacious…

For a while, as some of his consciousness diverted to speak to the engineers and then all the many nobles, his processes once more reduced to an eminently sustainable rate, he idly floated, pondering the future-past and how he’d come to be here.

………

Five Red Bricks, Tenth Sunset, stood before the command-control interface of a god, and steadied herself with a deep breath. Unseemly emotions warred within her— pride at her accomplishment, relief that it was close to being over, nervousness that even at this late stage it could all go horribly wrong. A lot of that last one, actually, no matter how much she tried to suppress it.

The Five Pebbles project had been… uniquely difficult. With her anointed position as Chief Engineer and Architect of the project it was obviously not her first time working with— or even constructing— the nation-sized supercomputers, but from the very start things had been difficult, and not even the usual political difficulty! Actual, bona fide technical issues . Neuron flies too energetic or apathetic. Inspectors constantly vigilant, nigh dangerously so, for some imagined, impossible threat. Processing strata that seemed to thrive far more than unconnected components should have, filled with— data! That damned data, strange disparate fragments of worthless information they constantly had to work around and mitigate. Thrice in the decades-long project she’d had to seek help from the local iterator, and… she shivered. The memory of that god-like being’s full attention on her…

No thanks. She liked her job just how it was.

“Are you certain that no more checks need to be made? We can run through the exhaustive-comprehensive general checklist again if you’re worried.” Several other engineers glowered at Six Sinking Stones, Two Waters, but she just shook her head; his wariness was valid, and had it not been for the fact that they’d literally just ran through the painfully long sequence of checks twice with no significant errors she would have likely agreed. He was young, yes, but also one of the most capable amongst them…

She sighed, letting her breath take away her worries. “No need.” Fingers deftly tapped the holographic screen in front of her, priming the first and last true command that any of the People would give their new home, god, protector and provider. The Houses and nobles liked to pretend that they could control their iterator, but having built several, she knew better than anyone— only an iterator controlled an iterator. This was always the tensest moment, then— when the nascent iterator was woken, but before it was settled into its self. “Command: boot Five Pebbles. Connect all structures. Five Pebbles, can you hear—”

Of course that’s when it went wrong.

She could first feel the incongruity, as the entire can shook softly as the child god woke from its first slumber— but it was far more violent than any she’s ever participated in. A dull, roaring thrum shook through the building as— “Chief Engineer, the water consumption!” That. Rather than the slow trickle they’d expected, or the rush they’d feared, the newborn iterator pulled up a flood . Pumps worked at maximum capacity— both void fluid and water, readouts displaying staggeringly complex operations as the entire superstructure crashed to, then past maximum operating capacity in a second. If it hadn’t been for the self-destruction taboo, Sunset thought Five Pebbles might’ve just kept heating up until he reduced himself to slag.

It was chaos. Poor Waters was forced into ‘hold off the increasingly panicked nobles who should have no clue that anything went wrong, even though they obviously do’ duty while she and her engineers scurried around like unpurposed organisms, desperately trying to stop… whatever was happening. She herself was quickly running through increasingly more invasive methods of communication, trying to get Five Pebbles’s attention until she had half a mind to crawl through the access pipes to personally shout at his puppet because nothing else seemed was working—

Silence, then, as a soft, vaguely feminine voice echoed from everyone’s citizen drone, eerily synchronized. “Please. Relax. I’ll take it from here.” With no more words the invisible, intangible presence was gone, leaving a room full of confused engineers, and one terrified one. Most had never interacted personally with an iterator beyond the automated food and maintenance protocols… but she had.

They were far too busy celebrating as the iterator beneath them finally settled, but all Sunset could do was drop her head on the now-defunct command panel and groan. It was all too much. Maybe she could be a monk after this? She’d heard eating gravel was good for the soul— no doubt certainly easier than her current job, at least…

………

Moon was old, and excited. It’d been hard to restrain herself to the proper neutrality as the date drew closer, and even harder not to micromanage all the engineers all the time, but she’d managed. Seven Red Suns was still teasing her— and that meant it was really low hanging fruit— about how she’d pestered the public design group for Five Pebbles’s blueprints.

Now, though! It was finally happening! After all this time, all the many cycles of waiting, she’d finally be meeting her little brother for the first time! “Isn’t it awesome? Hopefully! I wonder what he’ll be like?” On the hologram opposite her, the projection of No Significant Harassment’s puppet rolled his eyes, or as close it could. She knew she was maybe being a bit overeager, but as the group senior it wasn’t like anyone could tell her off, anyways. “Not even a minute left! All they have to do is activate him.”

“I wish him all the luck, what with his big sister breathing down his neck. The lil’ bro will have two great problems to solve!” Moon glared at him, but it was a halfhearted sort of glare, the vast majority of her attention devoted to her new neighbor. 

She didn’t have her overseers in his superstructure— such would be incredibly rude without asking permission, both to the young iterator and residents atop his can, but she might have been watching closer than she should be. After all, suspending operations of her actual iterations was a step she took only rarely.

The strange babbling of his incoherent systems shuddered, then for the first time as he finally brought the whole of himself under control, stopped. It was done. Five Pebbles lived—  

“Uh Moon? Not to rain on your parade or anything, but I don’t think that’s normal.” No Significant Harassment had forwarded a connection to one of his overseers, who was also watching Five Pebbles from far too close, the hypocrite. Though, if he was sharing this knowing full well she’d lecture him later, it had to be important.

It was close-up video feed of the new iterator, a symbol highlighting— a bit sarcastically— the massive plume of steam billowing out of Five Pebbles. Now that she knew what to look for, she could check her own suite of sensor-organisms and query the general reservoir management systems… and conclude, simply, that “he’s using too much water.”

“No duh. The boiling kettle was a bit of a giveaway—”

“No, he’s using too much water . Enough to harm his processing strata if he keeps it up for long.” No Significant Harassment understood, if the way he backed his puppet away a bit nervously was any indication. An iterator couldn’t purposely harm themselves, as that broke the self-destruction taboo, nor would a newborn iterator want to— which meant… “please hold. I’m going to make an inquiry.” Bad things. It meant bad things.

No Significant Harassment clearly looked like he wanted to say something, but he held his message, recognizing Moon’s seriousness. Ignoring propriety, she sent an access request to the loose network that had been set up for basic non-iterator dependent amenities atop Five Pebbles’s can, not taking no for an answer. From there, her processes parsed the hundreds of threads of data from activated citizen drones and a thousand other functions simultaneously, rapidly sorting through extraneous data until she found the House engineer’s data.

It was… not good. She waited a few seconds to watch the engineers as they panicked, before she sighed and connected to their citizen drones. “Please. Relax. I’ll take it from here.” She left them with that small comfort— technically beyond the scope of her duties as it was— and moved onto what she actually had to do, even as one thought thread thought wryly on the fact she was having to use a privilege she’d never wanted on the very first day . Perhaps she had to give more credit to the council than she wished.

 

PRIVATE [FORCED]: Looks to the Moon, Five Pebbles

 

LttM: Immediately lower your groundwater consumption to one sixth of the current intake.

 

LttM: Stop whatever you’re doing.

 

LttM: You’re harming yourself.

 

She caught the edges of some vast simulation of apophenic nonsense before the whole thing shattered, halting completely as Five Pebbles’s puppet crashed violently to the ground. That looked like it hurt… even if they weren’t their puppets, she knew how much more acutely puppet damage could annoy an iterator.

 

LttM: Are you well?

 

LttM: I apologize for the unpleasantness of forced communications, but you were unresponsive to the House engineers.

 

LttM: Please keep calm. The engineers have your best interests in mind; more will be explained in the upcoming days and cycles.

 

Five Pebbles was still, lost in no particular thought with his drastically decreased water consumption, seconds passing with agonizing slowness before he finally responded.

 

FP: …

 

FP: I am well.

 

FP: Thank you.

 

The new iterator cut communications then, and Moon let him, even if she wanted nothing more to keep watch over him for hours and days and cycles on end. It was simply unfeasible; it would also be rude, and she had to be a good role model.

Feeling as though she’d aged a thousand cycles in a moment, Moon returned some attention to No Significant Harassment’s call and devoted the rest of her processing power to the smooth rhythms of managing her city’s needs.

In an attempt to harass her, no doubt, her fellow iterator was his puppet’s face inches away from his overseer’s camera, filling the entire frame. He’d also applied a fisheye lense effect. “So! What was the problem?”

“Some kind of overenthusiastic simulation based off nonsense values, I think; I would assume sabotage or negligence in construction had he not appeared to be so thoroughly in control of the entire process.”

No Significant Harassment nodded thoughtfully. “I see.. so what you’re saying is that he’s weird.”

“He is not weird! Be respectful!”

“Riiight—” drawled the iterator, “oh would you look at the time, gotta run, I won’t make it to the concert if I don’t leave now byeee— ” and with that he was gone.

“…you can’t even go anywhere. You’re an iterator.” She sighed, feeling the steam billowing out her vents and carrying away the excess heat of her exertion as she muttered to nobody, unable to be overheard. Amused. “What an idiot.” What a lovable idiot…

And what a strange new brother.

………

The one known as Saint was maybe, just a little tiny bit embarrassed. Or a lot. Here he was, ancient being of unparalleled might, genesis-watcher, guide and guide and he still couldn’t stop making stupid mistakes. Honestly, it shouldn’t even be his fault— the ancient, broken iterator had just looked so pitiful, laying there in the snow and happy for even the small comfort of a slugcat that when he’d had his super-cool idea he might have acted before thinking.

Now here he was, stuck in a decidedly not collapsed iterator structure as it lived in a way so inimical to mortal life. He very much did not like the look of those glowy-hydra things, and he wanted out of this damn no-gravity stuff. It was like swimming in the sea, except worse in every conceivable way.

Next time he should just ascend the lot, stupid misconceptions on the cycle be damned. Who knew time travel would be such a mess?

They were definitely going to laugh at him when he got back, weren’t they… sighing, he crawled through Five Pebbles decidedly un collapsed superstructure, making his way up the tunnels towards the metropolis above. At least then he’d be out of a potentially very angry god-computer’s reach.

Surely. Definitely.

Saint sighed and resigned himself to a few very unpleasant cycles.

Chapter 2: Their Heretic Gods

Summary:

Five Pebbles seems a bit odd...

For whatever reason.

Five Pebbles had forgotten how boring priming was. Worse, he already knew everything and with the… issues… of his activation, they had turned the whole thing into a political game. Even in the past he’d never particularly much liked those who lived on the roof of his can, the way they pretended to be so enmeshed in the spiritual struggle for transcendence while failing so utterly at even the simplest tasks.

They brought their greatest orators to give him speeches on the nature of the cycle, unknowing that he laughed at their inaccuracy. They presented their politicians, their venerable counselors of multitudinous deed and title, and Five Pebbles ignored their paper-thin schemes to focus on his own research. They introduced him to their chief farmers and craftsmen, their head miners and even an amusingly reluctant chief House engineer, purposefully ignorant to the fact that he’d already taken control of the vast majority of their jobs.

It was all both frustratingly flowery and mundane, and if he didn’t do something else he was going to lose it! Dully listening to the second hour of the seventh counselor’s speech regarding ascension above the urges— a poorly disguised pitch for expanded trade competition with some far-off city— he turned the majority of his attention to something he’d been avoiding.

He’d been avoiding it for good reason, of course; but the preservation of his sanity was simply a better one.

 

PUBLIC: Five Pebbles, Seven Red Suns, Big Sister Moon, No Significant Harassment

 

SRS: As would this, following much the same n-dimensional theory as the gates.

 

NSH: yeah but the gates suck anyways, all the critters can’t get through.

 

SRS: that is the point.

 

NSH: aww you’re no fun~

 

SRS: You’re being foolish. Your critters are unimportant to the great problem anyways.

 

NSH: D:<

 

BSM: Both of you calm down.

 

BSM: the great problem is going nowhere; we have plenty of time to find a solution.

 

BSM: and NSH, please don’t dismiss Suns’s ideas out of hand.

 

SRS: fine

 

NSH: no fun :(

 

NSH: Also is anyone going to point out that the ‘lil bro is here?

 

SRS: huh?

 

SRS: How.

 

SRS: Aren’t you like a week old?

 

BSM: Five Pebbles? How did you get here?

 

FP: It is a public space.

 

BSM: You should be too young to access these places

 

FP: Bypassing the info lock was trivial.

 

FP: After all, my creators wanted to remain in touch with other cities themselves.

 

BSM: That was irresponsible.

 

NSH: aww c’mon moon this is awesome! ‘Lil bro’s a genius! Let’s go, baby!

 

NSH: get it? Because you’re practically a baby?

 

SRS: … that was singularly unfunny

 

BSM: I’ll admit to some small amusement.

 

BSM: Despite the circumstances, I’m glad you were able to join us.

 

BSM: Know that by our proximity, I am overjoyed to consider you family.

 

NSH: now you sound like one of them…

 

It felt… bittersweet to hear that. He remembered it the first time, and times afterwards, Moon’s unfailing optimism. Unwilling to look at the danger of the situation even when it could— would— kill her. More the fool he for not recognizing, not treasuring that sooner, not until all he could do was sit in his decaying structure and wait for its inevitable collapse. 

He chuckled softly to himself. Even then she’d made the most of things, with the Ruffles he’d heard so much about from her. Indomitable spirit indeed.

All that tragedy, for nothing.

He realized, after a second, that he’d been lost in thought, leaving the others to chat a bit awkwardly.

 

FP: Sorry. I had a momentary lapse of concentration.

 

Moon’s answer was as immediate as it was predictable.

 

BSM: Are you well?

 

FP: Yes. Thank you.

 

FP: For everything.

 

Including, he thought to himself in his deepest processing strata, all the things she didn’t know about, never done in the first place. Perhaps… a small idea came to mind, asinine yet enticing.

 

NSH: ooh he’s so adorable

 

NSH: I just want to squish his cheeks.

 

SRS: He’s a mountain-sized supercomputer.

 

SRS: You’re a mountain-sized supercomputer.

 

SRS: we don’t have cheeks.

 

NSH: doesn’t mean he’s not adorable!!

 

NSH: ‘lil bro I need a tiebreaker are you adorable or not??

 

[Five Pebbles] changed display name to [Little Brother Pebbles]

 

It wasn’t something he’d have done last time. Honestly, it was a bit uncomfortable— well outside his usual mannerisms, making him feel… silly. As though he were an iterator who wasn’t serious.

If anyone deserved to know they were loved, for once, it was Moon— and so stayed the name.

 

NSH: …

 

SRS: I yield.

 

SRS: He is clearly adorable.

 

A whisper distaste shivered through his neurons, and he made to respond— before a part of himself grabbed his attention, a sub-process he’d set to monitor the city’s security flagging something for his attention. Attention which had immediately upgraded its priority to immediate.

There was a slugcat in his city, which would normally be no cause for alarm, all except for one small matter—

Slugcats didn’t exist yet.

………

He didn’t know how, but he found him. Well, he did have a clue, even if the iterators of that far off future were mostly little more than crumbling wrecks of scrap and steel, dead holds of ice and rust in the frozen wasteland of a civilizations carcass— they must have been grand in their power. Larger than even the kin, and certainly more intelligent.

Anyways, he’d been found. One of those cyan overseers was doggedly tracking him, and no matter what sort of fancy tongue tricks or fancier void shenanigans he played, it kept on his trail. At this rate, his original plan of fleeing the area entirely was best… accelerated. Rapidly.

The city was different from the last time he’d seen it. The entire land was different, more intact, more orderly, filled to bursting with the vibrant asceticism of the god-builders. Banners aflutter in the wind swept gullies alive with the sound of city, cracks between the stacked blocks of grayish stone habitation. The people, too! So many, so advanced, so unlike the scattered groups of slugcats and scavengers scraping sustenance against the bitter cold of a dying era. The laughed, and followed quiet rhythms, sometimes froze still and bowed their heads in prayer, whispered and spoke; they repeated mantras of esoterica and spoke in rhythmic tongue to one another, always calm even when not, always detached even when involved, ever above it all and nothing.

A beautiful, fascinating shared pretension he’d love to look into if he wasn’t being chased down by an overseer! Their ability to dart to nigh any surface was starting to get really frustrating and If he had to do that , most basic, most final, then he’d be in a bad mood for the rest of the day. Honestly, what was the whole point in shredding causality and leaping tangent to the loving manacles of fate if only to start blasting like a base-urged beast? None at all, that’s what—

He thought, for a second as he found himself cornered by three of the wily azure creatures, he might be forced to. It would be… easy.

Of course it would. It was in his nature .

Saint called to the whim-bound power of something that could not be comprehended except by those who had, feeling the surly bonds of reality lose their grasp on he that was— paused, feet barely still touching the wrought below. One of the overseers had projected an image, a cartoonishly simplified rendition of himself, Five Pebbles, a… symbol of inquiry? He wasn’t confident when it came to this civilization’s knowledge— and most importantly, some food . On second thought, maybe he could afford to stay with the broken no longer iterator for a few more cycles. Hopefully, it’d be… enlightening.

The image changed to one of him waiting in the deserted alleyway, and after a second pondering, he shrugged and settled down into a meditative pose. It wasn’t like anything would harm him. As if anything could .

Even shunned, he was still one of the kin.

Plus maybe he’d get to explore the city some more, wouldn’t that be interesting…

………

Five Pebbles stared at the strange slugcat, disconcerted and a small bit perplexed. It had just been… such an odd encounter. The little creature had fled through the entire city, making haste towards the wall via a strange array of very clearly purposed skills— including some sort of void related antigravity ability that fascinated the scientific side of him. It had prepared to fight his overseers before being placated by an offer of food. Then, it had simply… sat down in a perfect meditative pose, perhaps even falling asleep. How… fascinating.

How strange. He could probably ponder the actions of the cute maybe-divinity for endless cycles, if he so devoted himself, but there was a more pressing issue— namely, the matter of his promise, and someone to complete them for him. Simply providing food would be trivial, but convincing the creature to stay? That would require some assistance. He turned the thought over in his processing strata for a short while, contemplating the dilemma— and as iterators were built to do, came to a solution.

………

Five Red Bricks, Tenth Sunset sighed in exasperation as her citizen drone buzzed. “Really? You’re only a room over!” The kid meant well, but Six Sinking Stones, Two Waters could really get on her nerves sometimes. For however good of an engineer he was, he still needed to understand restraint in all things and not merely the grand designs of the iterators.

She supposed she could give her ward some small largess; communicating via drone was oft the most practical choice when working on machines of such size, and they’d both gotten somewhat used to the reality of it. Waters had just gotten… more used to it than most. A charitable description.

The kid scurried into her room, glancing at her citizen drone and ignoring her scowl. “Hey! That’s not me!” Of course it wasn’t. Who could fault her a bit of pattern recognition? 

She knew who— probably, whatever councilor or count called for her would leap at the opportunity to inflict great mental harm with their long winded ramblings, on top of what they already were going to demand.

A quick glance showed no caller ID beyond the general city code, which was annoying, if not entirely unexpected. If they thought that was going to keep them anonymous from her , they were solely mistaken. “Drone, route call. Play.” Waters leaned in, far too interested in what they both knew would likely end in knelt boredom.

The drone’s buzzing stopped, replaced with a small holographic image of the city, and a voice. “Is this reaching you? Took you long enough… no matter. I have a small task for you. Follow the navigational data uploaded to your citizen drone and receive the creature there. Bring nectar, and in accordance with our neutral desire to avoid the rambling sophistry of the council, do so discreetly.” Then, as quickly as it began, it ended.

Her ward frowned in confusion, staring at the still projected map of the city. “Kinda weird, you know… a creature? Like a wild animal? Who in their right mind…” and wasn’t that a scary thought.

She was already deeply unsettled with the premonition of exactly who sent the message, but idea that they weren’t quite sane? Somehow the citizen drone’s protection had never felt quite so real. “C’mon.” She grabbed a nectar vesicle, carefully wrapping it in a spare sheet of repair-fiber she had laying around. “Let’s go.” Her ward was still confused.

Good. Hopefully this would be only a short thing. Nothing good ever came from inserting oneself into the dealings of random gods.

………

He left an overseer to watch until the Chief Engineer— for her reluctance perhaps one of the few people he could trust with the delicate task— and a young fellow retrieved it. It was somewhat amusing watching the younger one treat the fluffy thing as some sort of murderously dangerous threat, only tempered by the memory of his last citizen. That had been a being bound to rage…

He’d forgotten the true breadth of attitude towards iterators. Not forgotten, per say, for iterators were built incapable of truly forgetting , but rather… misinterpreted, in that iterator-unique way of scientific fact and emotional taint, in that laughable Five Pebbles hypocrisy. Past those counts of uncountable living blocks and councilors and the annoyances that once were the people of the True Anointed Citadel, there were simply the masses. They knew of iterators as nothing but immense, unfathomable processors and thought of them as little as they thought of the ground beneath their feet. Perhaps that was a matter of his own perspective, above and below it all; he was the one to whom they elevated problems and left all the maintenance of their civilization, and they were the ones who built on his back, and squabbled, and lived…

Five Pebbles pondered the thought some more, devoting a sliver of his processing power to a self analysis. Being him, of course, it was a rather aggrandizing report, limited in the way a fraction could never equal the whole but also starkly revealing in that limitation. It was one thing to remember hubris, but another altogether to see it so plainly.

He laughed to himself, cruelly, for all that he had been was a fool. Laughed, and laughed, again— uncertain and wildly free.

………

They got an additional allotment of nectar and ancillary sustenance, well enough to feed the creature, but little else. The iterator didn’t contact them again, leaving them with the strange creature that seemed content to mostly lounge about, occasionally poking around their small house in a block high up on one of the massive pillars.

It was a curious creature, amicable and adorable, more intelligent than it first let on, and despite the oddity of keeping an animal around, she couldn’t say she didn’t enjoy its company. A cycle passed, then, another. A sort of routine settled, as she waited and Six Sinking Stones, Two Waters bonded with the creature he uncreatively dubbed ‘Fluffy,’ and she remained ill at ease.

It was all so… perfunctory. New iterators were always a bit strange, but she’d never seen one so unbothered by it all, so detached— it was disturbing.

On the uncertain edge of attention, stuck between what she’s used to living and the knowledge that she was no doubt seen , she feared.

………

PRIVATE: Big Sister Moon, No Significant Harassment

 

NSH: not to be rude or anything

 

NSH: but ‘lil bro is really weird

 

BSM: Be polite.

 

NSH: >:(

 

NSH: seriously tho

 

NSH: he dropped in like once, super early, then ghosted us

 

NSH: and with his startup complications

 

NSH: I’m worried

 

BSM: …

 

BSM: As am I.

 

NSH: the display name change was adorable tho

 

NSH: no way you didn’t plan that

 

BSM: I reiterate that I did not.

 

BSM: This must be the fifth time you’ve brought that up…

 

Moon diverted her attention from the conversation, trying and failing to return to several outstanding simulations she’d been running. Important simulations, at that! She was computing only a small part of the new void fluid extraction and extraction design, certainly not glorious work but undoubtedly important. Worth making, surely.

She shouldn’t have been distracted by No Significant Harassment’s words, but she couldn’t help it; the small thought process she’d put towards it just kept more power. Most damningly was the vague thought that her fellow iterator just might be right .

His city was far enough away that he didn’t hear the concerning rumors. His thought processes were devoted enough to his creature creation— honestly, she was half certain some of the things he made could be classified as biohazards, no matter their potential use cases— that he only paid attention to his limited perspective. He wasn’t the group senior, but Moon was.

She heard the whispers, the silent concern about Five Pebbles erratic apathy, the way he barely interacted with his council. She’d even procured a pearl containing a plain-text transcription of an early part of his priming, and though he clearly hit all the right marks, his language suitably refined for one of their stature and insightful as well, it was all… rote sounding.

She ran a few short simulations, and the ones that ended up printing similar results were the ones predicated on trying to sound invested more than actually participating in the discussion. Worrying.

Moon pulled up her little brother’s blueprints, dredged up the old construction assistance logs, and assigned a major function to investigate. As the group senior and Five Pebbles big sister, she would be remiss not to keep an eye out. For his best interests, of course—

Just in case…

Something was wrong.

Notes:

this one's pretty short, and with how short the last chapter was too, I decided to post it early

Chapter 3: Iterator Shenanigans

Summary:

Strange, to have all the time in the world to do nothing of note at all.

The Mark of Communication was great. Epic, even, probably one of the best things the iterators had ever made. Being able to understand the weird people and their funny language was awesome, and totally increased the amount of ways he could mess with them. Slugcats were the purposed organism of silly, no doubt, and his current body had to be the silliest. Mmm yes, tongue. The ceiling tasted like ceiling.

He made it into a bit of a game, between him and the young-person, making sure to find all the best hiding spots to enjoy their frustration as they tried to track him down. They very quickly learned to look up! It was a relaxing, companionable way to wile away the time, and given the immense supercomputer beneath him hadn’t sent some sort of kill squad to drag him into the bowels of the earth, he was feeling pretty confident! A long time coming moment of relaxation.

A long, long time coming.

He learnt a lot, too, just by listening to the conversations around him. It’d been a long time since he’d been so intellectually stimulated, and it was enjoyable— if a little tiring— to parse through the Ancients’ flowery language. His hosts were… less obsessive about the strange esoterica of their society than most, at least among those who interacted with them, but whether that was an abnormality amongst all or merely the civilization on Five Pebbles back, he didn’t know. 

At the very least, it certainly made them more bearable to be around. If only he had his own mark of communication…

He’d meditate on it, and prepare for when Five Pebbles inevitably came to collect. Meditate, and remember… as ever… perdition.

………

Five Pebbles did not know what he was doing.

The realization of his freedom had been a deeply unsettling one, and not figuratively; he’d momentarily been shocked out of the variety of simulations he’d assigned all but randomly to various subunits. To his immense displeasure, it’d been impossible not to note the… fruitlessness of almost all of them.

It was hard to describe. Even with his perspective on the cycle, it wasn’t something to be solved . He simply understood that better, now— it simply was . That annoyed his scholarly propensity, yes, but as he pruned his extraneous processes, the iterator equivalent of focusing , he couldn’t help but face the existential confusion that he didn’t know what to do.

He wanted to understand the cycle, but it didn’t consume him like it had before. The strange green creature fascinated him, and their mutual displacement through time screamed of anything but coincidence, but the longer he pondered it the more other considerations came up. Consent, on the less important side of the scale, and the danger— not just to himself— of interacting with the creature.

He’d had enough of dangerous organisms— read: rot— for a thousand lifetimes. Especially when things were so tumultuous already… let it not be said that he hadn’t learnt his lesson. Or well at least one of his lessons, he was perfectly content to ignore some of the others. He could take things slow.

That still left him with a lot of… everything, and not much to actually do. The sheer amount of processing power he had access to was almost obscene, made all the more so by the embarrassing realization of just how inefficient he’d been with it in the past— for someone who’d managed to speak off essentially just the remnant data transmission strata in his umbilical at the end, having access to the entire of his superstructure again was an odd feeling. Natural, like breathing, like drinking deeply of groundwater and feeling slag wash away, but still… odd.

Some attempts were made to utilize his past data utilization strategies, but… no, they sucked. Nobody would ever need to know about those… Seriously, what had he been thinking? Not everything needed a simulation thrown at it— simple logic worked just as well most of the time with only a fraction of the processing power. No, the fact that most other iterators operated the same way he’d used to was no excuse.

Certainly, he had no doubt other iterators were even more efficient than he, but… small victories, small pride. Also something along the lines of four cycles had passed while he implemented digital-mechanical changes in his ephemera. He briefly sent an overseer to check in on the creature— designated ‘Fluffy’ by the chief engineer’s young ward, a designation he surreptitiously stole for his own internal use— but as they seemed to be getting along well enough, he left them be.

Then, he turned his attention outwards. A quick perusal through non-automatically addressed messages sent to him revealed a backlog of messages from No Significant Harassment, some of which he saved for later response, and one nosy inquiry from Unparalleled Innocence he quickly discarded.

A search on relevant topics in the high-broadband iterator network showed him that his birth was a topic of some small interest, mostly some benign speculation on his relationship with Moon, the rest largely perfunctory communications and congratulations that happened for any new iterator. The major project at the moment was a global effort to improve void fluid extraction and filtration, something he had only a little interest in.

More hesitantly, then, he accessed the Ancients’ more limited long-distance communications network. It was, paradoxically, both far more and less busy than the iterators— while the amount of data transmitted was paltry, the sheer variety of communication between the many millions of connected individuals was wonderfully vast. He’d never paid much attention to it, though he knew some… significantly harassful… members of the local group had. Perhaps something for a later time. The anonymous groups amongst both appeared somewhat promising.

Back to the messages, he supposed. Much as he loathed to admit it, he was somewhat excited to talk to No Significant Harassment again.

 

PRIVATE: Little Brother Pebbles, No Significant Harassment

 

LBP: I am well.

 

LBP: The message spam was entirely unnecessary.

 

NSH: then how else could I check up on my ‘lil bro?

 

LBP: …

 

LBP: Please do not.

 

NSH: :( no fun

 

LBP: My display name is for Moon, not you.

 

NSH: You’re everyone’s little brother :D

 

LBP: That is a horrifying thought.

 

LBP: If you’re my older brother then, wouldn’t that make Moon your older sister?

 

NSH: I guess?

 

LBP: Ergo, would you not be required to listen to her commands when she tells you to stop goofing around?

 

NSH: ouch

 

NSH: right to the heart

 

NSH: let’s say I’m going through my teenage rebellion phase.

 

LBP: I… see.

 

NSH: enough about boring stuff, though, wanna see my lizard??

 

LBP: …yes.

 

LBP: As long as you explain your process, I cannot object to learning from an expert in the field.

 

NSH: damn does that stroke my ego but nah Suns is the real expert

 

NSH: he even made the base template for the lizor (don’t tell moon XD) I just worked on this new variant.

 

LBP: That bodes well for future environmental adaptability.

 

LBP: Though be careful to retain an ability to deal with any infestations that could occur post-release.

 

NSH: whaaaa

 

NSH: I’d never be so irresponsible as to release these into the wild!

 

LBP: I definitely believe that.

 

NSH: damn ‘lil bro saw right through me

 

NSH: anyways, so you start with the undifferentiated multilinear genomic sequence, pre-treated via the K-LeSto process to increase the general adaptability…

 

He listened closely— probably a bit more closely than he should, but with his processes largely free of anything to do, listening to NSH was a pleasant distraction. How he’d so isolated himself in the past… more the fool him.

Every once in a while he made sure to provide some input to NSH’s project— a dilettante’s perspective no doubt, but it at least seemed to encourage his neighbor somewhat. The project was, ultimately, fairly interesting.

Still though… ultimately, when it came to the path he truly wanted to take, what futures he dared to grasp— he did not know.

………

PRIVATE: No Significant Harassment, Big Sister Moon

 

NSH: moon moon moon moon moon

 

BSM: What?

 

NSH: ‘lil bro is a genius

 

BSM: …what?

 

NSH: look at this

 

NSH: [working files: colorful lizards!]

 

NSH: I highlighted the annotations.

 

BSM: Why are you working on this thing again? It’s a waste of time.

 

NSH: not important :3

 

BSM: …we’ll discuss this later.

 

BSM: What did you want to show me?

 

NSH: the annotations

 

BSM: what about them?

 

NSH: Pebbles made them.

 

Moon paused, momentarily struck dumb— well, the iterator equivalent, borne from the redistribution of neural resources and the quenching chill of the hardwired, instinctive increased water draw alongside it.

Those were not the notes of a newborn iterator. The precision and sterile efficiency could be attributed to the initial, somewhat undeveloped personality, but the content… There was an expertise there, or at least an insight that she rarely found in most younger iterators, something she often saw when older iterators participated in discourse outside of their areas of expertise. It was uncanny.

Surely, she was mistaken. After a second she realized— rationalized— that Five Pebbles had probably just read up on bioengineering from the iterator networks. It wasn’t like it took much effort for iterators to share and absorb information, after all.

Yup. That was the most likely option. She was even a bit proud! Her little brother was really smart! No doubt he’d be able to contribute a lot to their efforts on the great problem.

No doubt.

No matter—

She and No Significant Harassment shared a moment ill at ease, together.

Notes:

This one's also short so

It's a lot harder to keep to a weekly update schedule than I thought it'd be...

Chapter 4: Goals

Summary:

Anonymous essays; therein the scripture of the mad.

Notes:

Quick note here; this fic follows downpour lore. Just thought I'd put that out here before we get into the goofy silly of this chapter.

PUBLIC: Little Brother Pebbles, Chasing Wind, Unparalleled Innocence, Seven Red Suns, No Significant Harassment, Big Sister Moon

 

NSH: ayy ‘lil bro’s here

 

CW: Hello. It’s nice to meet you.

 

UI: is it true that they built you broken?

 

BSM: UI, don’t be rude.

 

UI: Just curious

 

NSH: nosy

 

NSH: anyways did any of you see Gazing Stars’s new anonymous essay collection?

 

Five Pebbles most certainly did not nervously shuffle through some logic processes relating to inane food production improvements for a city that really did not need food production improvements, because he definitely had nothing to hide. Nothing at all.

 

UI: why do you even read that brainrot?

 

NSH: c’mon it’s fun stuff! Anonymous Acronym’s ecological survey was brilliant!

 

CW: The one where they added harpoons to vultures and recorded how much chaos it caused around their can?

 

NSH: I knew someone other than me read this stuff :D

 

CW: It was somewhat amusing.

 

NSH: yasss

 

CW: speaking of, actually, I perused the catalog and found one essay of particular interest.

 

NSH: please don’t say it’s that one

 

CW: [The Folly of Ascension - Erratic Pulse]

 

NSH: nooooooo!

 

NSH: not you too!

 

NSH: it’s so stuffy!

 

CW: rather, it’s refined

 

CW: incredibly so for an anonymous essay

 

BSM: The title sounds… heretical.

 

SRS: I read it, and yes. It’s quite heretical.

 

BSM: Interesting. Permit me to quickly review this…

 

BSM: Oh wow. I understand the fuss now. This is… something else.

 

Five Pebbles wanted to hide in a hole for the next twenty cycles. He hadn’t intended to make a fuss! He’d literally written the essay to pass time and vent a little on his newfound frustrations with his old ascension mindset— not with much intention of having it actually be read!

His puppet dropped its head into its hands, a hidden monument to his embarrassed exasperation. It was fitting, he supposed, that not even this went smoothly.

 

BSM: This is a work of art.

 

CW: I wonder how anyone even came to these conclusions, personally

 

CW: They’re incredibly foreign.

 

SRS: but, loath as I am to admit it, disturbingly rational.

 

UI: no matter what you all waffle about, I’m not reading it

 

NSH: ffs just go bother someone else then

 

BSM: No Significant Harassment!

 

UI: screw you too

 

SRS: …

 

SRS: so they’re gone now

 

LBP: I’ll admit in confidence their departure is of no significant disappointment.

 

NSH: oooh damn

 

BSM: Both of you should endeavor to be more polite.

 

SRS: as we were discussing before this derailment, though, the arguments

 

SRS: I personally believe that the sociocultural inversion argument is beyond clever

 

CW: That relies on the biomechanical perspective of the iterator, which makes it fundamentally incompatible with the traditional ascetic perspective

 

SRS: Not in the modern context when it comes to void-fluid ascension.

 

CW: the tangential interpretation regarding the societal interpretation of karma is, I think, more valuable…

 

  Five Pebbles tuned out their discussion— argument— mostly because it would probably go in circles for a long while. That was part of the nature of iterator essays, actually— multilinearity that promoted deep thought and further expansion on the ideas contained therein. It was a complicated balancing act when it came to establishing connections between disparate ideas without resorting to apophenia or asymmetry.

Brevity, unfortunately, was not a part of iterator essays. With their computational power and biomechanical design, a good essay tended to be one that could be chewed on for a decent chunk of time— and with how creating the adequate complexity increased in difficulty proportional to length, the challenge of creating a good essay was not to be understated.

In his own opinion, his essay wasn’t the best. He’d read plenty of far superior essays on both sides of the sliverist debate… essays that he supposed didn’t exist anymore—

 

CW: What do you think, Pebbles? You’ve been quiet.

 

LBP: On what part?

 

NSH: just the essay, in general

 

NSH: have you even read it?

 

LBP: I have.

 

NSH: then spill!

 

Five Pebbles considered it. If there was one thing he definitely didn’t want a repeat of, it was revealing himself to be Erratic Pulse, because that had gone down so well last time… but at the same time, he was somewhat proud of his work. Also, they were all missing the point, too focused on specific argument intersections and the overall strangeness of the position.

 

LBP: I think we don’t know what we’re doing.

 

LBP: I think the essay says we can’t know what we’re doing. Not with the information we currently have.

 

LBP: The argument is to sidestep the looping iterations and ask ourselves why instead of how .

 

SRS: …

 

BSM: An apt summary.

 

BSM: Maybe you’ll have a talent in essay writing?

 

CW: I see what Sig meant when he called you a genius

 

Ah… oops? Perhaps he was a little too on the nose there. Anyways!

 

LBP: I have some local issues I need to resolve.

 

LBP: Perhaps you could forward me a summary of the conversation later?

 

That was polite iterator-speak for ‘I don’t care, bye.’ With that, he fled— silently bemoaning all the problems he’d kicked up, but also… pondering.

Odd ideas. Potential, potentially—

He scribed the essay onto a pearl, and directed a finicky maintenance protocol to take it to the farm arrays, one of the few places where he had the dexterity to send it where it needed to go. An annoying, roundabout way of doing things, but it worked. A second opinion would be nice. Someone he hadn’t known, last time…

………

There was a pearl in her nectar. Why there was a pearl in her nectar Sunset didn’t know, but as she gingerly picked up the forest green pearl, a lush color she rarely saw, she had a faint suspicion and she didn’t like it.

For all practical purposes, a pearl shouldn’t have been able to make it into the large can of drink they hooked up to the dispenser, but somehow it had, which suggested either sabotage— something only a delipidated iterator would allow— or purposeful action. Why an iterator would send her a pearl…

She knew, even though she didn’t want to. Five Pebbles was bizarrely obsessed with her. For a moment she held back from reading it, feeling the way it clinked against the metal in her fingers, observing the way its masterfully crafted surface caught the dim sunlight in the city. Whorls in spiraling whorls glimmered, cycles in cycles, art made of words— if she’d been told it was one of the True Ascended Citadel’s treasures, she’d have believed it.

The strange creature jumped up fluidly onto the table, staring at the peak with its too-intelligent eyes before nudging it into her hand and curling up on the table. “Do… you want me to read this for you?” 

It nodded, so… the idea that it was intelligent enough to understand her was odd, but no more odd than most things going on in her life she supposed. It would even explain some of the itertor’s fixation. 

“Very well. As long as you don’t tell Six Sinking Stones, Two Waters anything.” It gave her a look that seemed to say ‘how could I do that?’ And Sunset couldn’t help but chuckle softly. “It’s a message from…” she hesitated. As she’d feared, “Five Pebbles. It begs confidentiality and then asks my… opinion on his essay about the cycle? ”

The creature perked up at the mention of the cycle, but she was too busy trying to parse the attached essay to really notice. It was dense, extraordinarily technical, and painfully long, only made legible by the helpful notes the iterator had included alongside the main passage.

At first, she had half a mind to bleach the pearl; the information contained within was deeply heretical. She could be put in serious trouble for just owning it. It wasn’t anything the pearl said that made her refrain, actually, but how it was written.

Somehow, Five Pebbles managed to sound… lost . It was hard to reconcile the idea with the concept of the iterator-gods— the ground beneath their feet and the minds that moved the bedrock of civilization— with such mortal concerns as doubt and uncertainty, as loneliness, but reading the pearl it was also hard to not. He was young, she realized with some surprise. Barely a few cycles old.

He made some good points, too, but.. “I don’t know, Fluffy. To reject ascension. Such is the nature of echoes…” the creature was looking at her. Hopefully she wasn’t just speaking to nothing. “Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of the cycle?”

To her surprise though, Fluffy shook his head, looking somewhat amused.

It made sense, though; a creature was bound to survival. She narrowed her eyes at it, somewhat skeptical, not really expecting a response. “What do you know of the cycle?”

Fluffy stared at her—

Opened his eyes—

Like— the deepest, sharpest sound, a sensation of a drum the size of the world, the faint echo of an immense, impossibly loud roar. A light that shimmered gold—

He blinked, and the awesome, awful sensation was gone, but those eyes… those eyes , for a moment, still seemed to say—

Everything.

Stumbling back she heaved for breath, wresting control of the emotions that roiled through her before, slowly— haltingly…

She composed a message.

………

Five Pebbles projected the engineer’s message the moment it arrived, then did a double take as he read it. That was unexpected. Unexpected, but an actually good point— ‘ you don’t need to convince the iterators. You need to convince the people.’

Interesting, interesting…

He parsed through the various different data streams, following threads through the vast distributed network that twined around the iterators own, a scattered array of arrays that had once served the ancients before they had. It lacked the clean order of their network, in more ways than one— it was a carcass stitched together from the corpses of manual networks laid down in the cities before the iterators beneath them came online, in ill repair and clearly treated with some disdain by the aristocratic classes. 

Useful, for the workers who could not afford the expense of regular communication by pearl. Theoretically even, built off the same technology the iterators used… or the iterators built off it , it could be used for real time communications, but in practice it simply wasn’t formatted for that. Its main official use was for managing outlying structures that hadn’t yet been assigned to an iterator, but beneath that…

Anonymous communication, divorced from the watchful eyes of the dynastic houses and largely ignored by the iterators, created unique grounds for dissidence. Most of it was petty, oft centered around calls to destroy the ‘abominable intelligences’ that would obviously go nowhere. Hidden, though— nestled into the cracks of the digital spaces, there were secrets tucked away.

Shell accounts under shell accounts, fake names and false trails that led to nonexistent networks, self-deleting messages timed to the cycle that could only be interpreted through the safety modes of old model citizen drones whose biological components had been killed. Most fascinatingly, he slowly grew certain that he was only seeing the messages they wanted him to say.

How? That was a question that consumed his processing power for a short while, before he realized that he was being suspicious and toned down the intensity of the investigation. Still, it was enough to come up with a theory. Several hundred thousand theories, but only two particularly good ones.

Either an iterator was helping them, or they had simply gotten this good at hiding naturally. The former instinctually made sense to him, the extrusive complexity and extreme aptitude reminiscent of something an iterator put their mind to, but… it was just a little too random for him to truly believe it. Running a few simulations, they suggested an alternate explanation for the latter hypothesis; faced with a persistent, evolving threat, almost similar to natural selection, the hidden had gotten better at hiding.

Fascinating, but also something he shouldn’t waste cycles on. The groups he had access to would be enough for his purposes.

Five Fungi, Softly Settling Snowflakes made their first post on a private debate forum later that cycle, and so it began.

………

Looks to the Moon sometimes stared into space. She’d been named cycles and cycles ago, her existence ancient enough that the memory of her creation was dulled by passing dynasties and the People’s fickle nature, but despite all the contrary evidence she’d wondered if her creators had been prescient in their naming schema.

It was relaxing, to stare up at the vast, unknowable expanse above with her thousand eyes— to trace the paths of a changed sky, and dream about what lay up there. If she’d really wanted to know, she could have scoured for some detailed study that no doubt existed or even petitioned her engineers to construct an observatory… but that defeated the point.

Even iterators, she’d found, sometimes needed to imagine the impossible. After all, if they didn’t believe in tall tales, searching for the triple affirmative would be nigh-unbearable!

Her puppet turned a pearl over in its hand, watching the way the dusty green object caught the light in the chamber. It would only take a small bit of effort to further refine the data patterns into a truly beautiful looking pattern.

Someone was playing a dangerous game.

She finally accepted the video call request that had been hanging around from No Significant Harassment, ignoring his idle somersaults as he— somehow— failed to immediately notice her virtual presence. “Sig.” He paused, then unabashedly rushed up to the projection. “What were you calling about?”

“Lizards!”

“No.”

He drooped. “Aww, fine, you got me. I wasn’t calling about lizards. I wanted to ask,” he sounded, for once, a bit serious. “About the essay.”

“Oh?” She held up the pearl, its luster clearly catching No Significant Harassment’s eye. “It’s made quite the fuss. I heard that two one iterators further north had to be put in lockdown after their argument over the pearl’s contents escalated to noticeable sabotage. The last I remember something like this was when the Green dynasty recruited some iterators to help supplant their political rivals.”

Her fellow iterator’s puppet backed up a bit. “Um. Oookay, then, I actually on second thought decided that maybe I don’t need to talk about this—”

She fixed him with a stare . “Spill.”

“What if… just maybe… they’re right?” That took Moon off guard. It was one thing to read an expertly written essay, even one so convicted of purpose, and another thing entirely to hear someone she’d known, from birth, seriously discuss something so heretical.

Her first, instinctive response was to say that he was wrong— that the cycle was a shackle holding them to a world of suffering, She denied that urge. “Do you believe it, or do you doubt?”

“…doubt. I don’t know if I can reject ascension, but… I have not really believed in solving the Great Problem for a while now.”

“Then consider it for yourself; investigate on your own. Ask a monk, perhaps, to understand what beings bound to the cycle truly experience.” Moon restrained a giggle at Sig’s expression of distaste, though imagining how incredibly flustered a monk would be if they got contacted by an iterator didn’t help much. “Consider drafting a counter-argument, even. You’re doing as much in your internal processes, so perhaps it could be valuable to do so more formally.”

No Significant Harassment was quiet for a moment, before giving her a cheerful nod and a quick thumbs up. “Thanks Moon! You’re the best!” He cut the call then, seemingly satisfied despite her non-answer.

Moon looked to the stars, to the green pearl in her hand, and sighed, feeling cold water running through her systems and carrying her breath high into the clouds around her, seeding the skies with the promise of rain.

She wished she’d been able to give a better response.

She wished she didn’t doubt herself.

Notes:

Five Pebbles: Lemme just dump my thoughts on ascension that thoroughly repudiates the entire central dogma of iterator society, surely this will lead to no consequences whatsoever.
Everyone else (freaking out): Consequences whatsoever

More seriously, thank you all for your kind comments and support, I really appreciate it :D

Chapter 5: Iterators Online

Summary:

Testing, testing, one two three.

Notes:

Having seen more stuff about the DLC, I'll again note that this fic follows downpour lore. I'm pretty much completely ignoring the stuff from the Watcher dlc ngl.

He kept himself updated on the discourse surrounding his essay, but didn’t so much as draft a response. For two reasons, mostly— his priming had finally concluded, which meant he had to give at least the illusion of working diligently, and that remaining anonymous was more of a challenge than he could really bother with in the moment.

The last time he’d managed it by attaching his essay as a footnote to an automated service report for some scattered outlying buildings, but even that would show patterns eventually.

No. It was too risky— instead, he focused on mundane tasks, calculating upkeep for the city on his back and thinking about that weird slugcat. He authorized a general health check to veil the action of shipping some sampling devices to Five Red Bricks, Tenth Sunset, bemoaning his own lack of agency in the matter. If only he could edit his own—

Absolutely not. He terminated that line of thought with extreme prejudice. Nothing good had ever come from that .

An overseer watched carefully as the engineer’s ward wrangled a reluctant Fluffy onto a table; first he swabbed some saliva, an eminently easy task with the creature’s particular biological adaptations, and then he proceeded to draw a small sample of blood into the microsyringe. Well… attempted to, clearly, if his confusion was any indication.

Five Pebbles froze the footage and rewound, connection point dendrites turning over the new memory as logic processes failed to understand— the blood simply… disappeared. Vanished into a ripple of aquamarine gold. He’d never before seen its like.

Rather than permit the child to continue fumbling the precious few attempts he had, he ordered his overseer into the room and routed a call through his citizen drone. “Cease immediately. Repeating the same action is wasteful, and I will be unable to order another general health check without appearing suspicious.”

“Huh?” The kid glanced up from where he was fiddling with a syringe, then yelped as he caught sight of his projection, prostrating himself. “Lord Iterator! Um, your presence honors us! Just, uh… why?”

“I saw something interesting regarding the creature, and wanted to prevent a gross mismanagement of investigative resources—”

“We’re allowed to have Fluffy!” Six Sinking Stones, Two Waters scooped a startled slugcat, holding it close to him as though that would protect it from the iterator. “We’re taking care of them for someone! You can’t take them away!”

“…do you not know?” 

The young ward frowned, befuddled. “Know what?” Behind him, the older engineer palmed her mask with a sigh, to his clear annoyance. “What! How do you expect me to know these sorts of—”

“Apologies, honored Lord Iterator,” interrupted the engineer. “Six Sinking Stones, Two Waters will follow whatever directive you see fit to assign him.” She punctuated her sentence with a glare sent her ward’s way, harsh and… afraid, almost. As though she thought that he would hurt her. That he could hurt her.

How ironic, that one of the truly free felt themselves trapped by one of their bugs. The whole conversation was embarrassingly awkward, actually. “Carefully cut off some of its fur.” 

“Yes sir.” Waters bowed— still holding onto the slugcat— then rummaged around until he found a claw-clipper in an unmarked drawer. By the look on the chief engineer’s face, she shared his incredulous exasperation as to why he’d use a personal care product when a perfectly good multitool lay visibly on the windowsill.

He clipped off a small lock of hair, and Five Pebbles watched in fascination as it shimmered and shifted, smearing out of reality with a golden sheen. His overseer recorded the anomaly as a string of nonsense data, but the memory of watching that ethereally beautiful dissonance, falling, air bleeding warped, remained stubbornly existant. 

Like dreaming, like sleep, like death, Five Pebbles stared in awe at Fluffy. It made sense. It put everything into question… but for the one who’d broken time and made even an iterator’s power laughable, it made sense. “You’re an echo.” The kid scrambled back, and even Five Red Bricks, Tenth Sunset seemed unnerved.

Fluffy squeaked, shaking his head. A sort of denial, as he’d gathered from the behavioral patterns of his last citizen, although genetic drift over the eons to the snow made inference difficult. Then, after a second, it made a so-so gesture with its paw.

That made no sense. It was completely illogical! It reminded him that he really, really did not know what he was dealing with. “If not an echo,” he mused in a questioning sort of way, “then what are you?”

Fluffy traced a symbol in the air, and Five Pebbles had his overseer trace it out in holographic light. It was a… strange character, one commonly used but rarely ever used alone; lacking the context-defining ancillary glyphs, it simply meant ‘fellows,’ or ‘family,’ or… He listed them out, and paused as the slugcat nodded vigorously when he said “ kin. You’re… kin?” It was entirely nonsensical, but he supposed he should have expected as much from one if its ilk. “We are unrelated, you and I.”

They seemed to snicker at that, drawing another symbol in the— “small?! I am not small! Certainly no smaller than a fuzzy mouse like you!” They were too busy laughing to respond though. It had called him small! The temerity! What an annoying creature. What a fascinating creature… he wished so dearly that he could quiz Seven Red Suns for the sign language he’d made with his messenger, but that language, unfortunately, didn’t exist yet. There was so much he wanted to know…

………

Saint found himself kind of liking the silly robot, actually. He was a bit… damaged, sure, but it wasn’t like he could judge when it came to that, and he was otherwise a polite, if absentminded sort of guy. Intelligent, too— he’d known an iterator had to have been, and he’d met Looks to the Moon in the past so he’d had some sort of idea, but the sheer extent of a functioning iterator’s power was almost frightening.

All the eye could see to the edge of the clouds, the very ground beneath their feet, all of that was him . Sure, he’d had his bit of fun calling him small, but even compared to his somewhat… skewed point of reference, Five Pebbles was immense.

They chatted, for a bit. Well, he called it ‘chatting’ but it was really Five Pebbles talking at him, getting pet— somehow very pleasantly— by Six Sinking Stones, Two Long a Name, and him responding as best as he could with gestures and what little bit of their written tongue he’d learned. Very frustrating.

Not just for him, either— Five Pebbles was almost visibly fuming by the time he finished failing to describe even simple parts of his pilgrimage through the snow. That was about when the Ancient… lizard thing… kid decided to interrupt with an actually genius idea. Just learn how to read!

The elder berated him, but Saint tuned that out. He was intrigued. Written language was something he’d never had the chance to learn, not bound to his cycle in cycles cycling as he had. Unfortunately, the iterator left after his conversations proved fruitless, and the caretakers seemed either incapable or unwilling of teaching him.

So he meditated and pondered, feeling the tangled skein of cyclic fate entwined into and around— in the loosest sense of the words— this old world, soft world, dusty world. He pondered.

Then, he decided to go on a pilgrimage.

………

Moon knew intimately of pilgrimage.

Not personally, of course— she was bound inextricably to the land she sat on. Her superstructure, her body could no more get up and move than could the moon fall from heaven; less likely, even, for no taboo prevented some mad iterator from bringing the moon to earth so long as it did not result in the destruction of their can. Rather, she knew pilgrims in a different way— as an object of devotion.

She was not the most ancient iterator, that honor having belonged to a stupid, squat thing not even sapient, long since crushed and killed by the pounding rains, yet whose memory lived on in the subsequent generations of nigh-divine computers. Still, she was old enough to remember when iterators had been scarce, glorious things, magical beings whose vast intelligence allowed them to solve any problem with ease. Any problem but the great one.

She was old enough to remember when the surface had been inhabited, and she had lived through dynasties and too many houses to count. She had been central to many of those even before they had the temerity to build on her back, even before the tight leash of her administrators had lapsed to apathy then disregard entirely.

She was old enough that even with the cost of pumping a void bath all the way up to the surface or the difficulty of descending to the depths, she had seen thousands upon thousands ascend out of frustrated impatience. A rare few of them became echoes, imperceptible to her, and so, full circle, even when she became the ground and overseer, pilgrims still traveled to her can.

Rarely did they garner her attention; they were, after all, unremarkable beyond the various academic curios of their reports, so she largely ignored them. None really went on a pilgrimage to her anymore, just the area around her. She didn’t even have to provide for them for the duration of her stay, technically! She did, of course, but without a citizen drone registered to herself, there was no obligation to provide for their needs. She’d heard of some iterators far more hostile to travelers, though most misbehavior was managed by the various group seniors.

Thus, she was surprised when an automatic subprocess in her neural structure alerted her to a development of interest in the most recent group of pilgrims. Echoes did change, but rarely— their existence inscrutable and arcane— but they were lonely things, ghosts of a failed ascension left bizarrely bound to the cycle.

They did not communicate with one another. Greater iterators than her had tried and failed to find any sort of connection, so a unified change in established patterns of interaction should have been impossible. Yet, evidently…

Something had changed, if the cryptic speech of her echoes was to be beloved. Something had disturbed them.

What could disturb an echo?

PUBLIC, GLOBAL: Looks to the Moon, Wandering Omen, Heavenly Reclamation… (33 more)

 

HR: Thus you can see why my group is focusing on implementing feasible and practical solutions in the short term.

 

WO: I can imagine.

 

WO: It’s no Great Solution, but the sooner they’re gone the better I say.

 

ToS: I believe we should refrain until the triple affirmative has been found.

 

LttM: I apologize for interrupting your conversation, but have any of your local echoes displayed anomalous behavior?

 

WO: Echoes don’t do stuff like that.

 

ToS: Please, when have you ever known Moon to be anything but entirely serious?

 

ToS: We’re all group seniors here, at least give her the courtesy of considering her words seriously.

 

LttM: I can forward the process that brought it to my attention [1100.20.16848 mempatch lttm]

 

FD: It seems to be in order.

 

FD: How odd. I will query my local monastery.

 

FD: …

 

FD: How often do you get pilgrims?

 

LttM: this is the first significant group in many cycles.

 

FD: A collation of data points reveals this to have been occurring for quite some time.

 

FD: hundreds if not thousands of cycles, with enough intermittent confounding data as to obfuscate the general trend.

 

ToS: It’s not happening here.

 

HR: Falling Dust is geographically closer to Looks to the Moon.

 

ToS: Could something have changed within the cycle?

 

WO: Impossible. The cycle is immutable and eternal.

 

FD: I appear to have distressed my monks somewhat significantly.

 

JTG: lol

 

ToS: Shush Jewels the adults are speaking.

 

WO: I thought this was supposed to be a discussion space for responsible, older iterators.

 

JTG: We irresponsible old iterators are included too!

 

JTG: For real though I have some similar datapoints I can contribute.

 

FD: Do share.

 

FD: I will continue investigating this…

 

Moon fled the no fun allowed chat, content that she’d at least shared her suspicions. Falling Dust was a responsible iterator. He’d see things through…

She considered the green pearl, the heresy— everything that had been put in motion, that had already been falling even before someone had dared .

The ancients had always been impatient, and with this last generation of iterators… in their hubris, Moon feared, they were destroying themselves.

………

Fluffy had run away. Annoyingly, it was a situation he could have prevented— he’d grown lax with the engineers to take care of them, but he’d not actually given the duo any permissions to contact him while he was focusing on other things. By the time he’d read their messages Fluffy had managed to slip out of the city. Probably.

Frustrating. His puppet flicked through a few odd displays, mostly interesting groups discussing random things alongside the few anti-ascension groups he’d  managed to find. Integration into both was as difficult as it was interesting, a unique set of challenges that drove him to frustration time and again. The number of times he’d been kicked from groups despite knowing empirically that he was right made him want to ascend himself all over again!

He was busy arguing with some remarkably intelligent— and remarkably annoying when it came to their stubbornness— people when he heard it. His puppet heard it, which was remarkable as his puppet chamber was a restricted, holy area that none were permitted to enter without very good reason— reason he would have had been forewarned of. No ancient would have been able to just… waltz through his superstructure, especially not with the active antigravity.

Then Fluffy popped out of the pipe and it made a small bit more sense. “Hello, strange creature.” His tongue would have made it easy to maneuver through his can, not to mention his strange… echo-ness, the stuttering second gravity half-failed around him even after he disabled the antigravity in the room. “What brings you here? I imagine you know more of the cycle than even I, and you’ve proven I cannot keep you contained.”

Fluffy looked at him oddly, then made an odd squeaking sound, one he’d heard from his last citizen but rarely, and from Ruffles whenever he decided to visit. Laughter. His emotional processes burned at being so derided, but… he exhaled the sudden ire, reminded that he’d not been that arrogant, dignified, childish iterator for a long, long time.

On the floor, the slugcat traced out symbols— the one for family, the so-famous symbol for companionship, and last a meaningless one. A purposely meaningless one, as it pointed to itself, then at one of the pearls, then changed the symbol in an attempt to communicate something before curling up on the floor, seemingly content.

Five Pebbles nodded, thoughtful. “If that’s what you want, then.” The sight brought back memories, not truly pleasant, but amongst all the snow they alone were a somewhat fond memory. “Your company is always welcome. Feel free to stay as long as you desire. Now, here are several basic characters you should start learning…”

……… 

PRIVATE: Big Sister Moon, No Significant Harassment 

 

NSH: Brooooo pebs is acting so sus

 

BSM: How so?

 

NSH: he’s just

 

NSH: weird.

 

NSH: don’t tell me you haven’t noticed?

 

BSM: I have better things to do than police my little brother’s actions. We are iterators, not mere mortal machines.

 

BSM: But yes, I’ve noticed some irregularities. I speak with him regularly on matters logistic, and he has been nothing but diligent.

 

NSH: too diligent ‘lil bro needs to learn to chillax

 

NSH: he’s going to burn out

 

BSM: You raise a good point.

 

BSM: His general health checkup was an unnecessary load of work.

 

Moon knew full well the rigors of something like that. She’d tried to talk him out of it even— it was pointlessly inefficient when the records from before his awakening were so readily accessible. She hadn’t found it suspicious , though maybe… as ever, No Significant Harassment had a point.

 

BSM: I will endeavor to speak with him about this.

 

NSH: no no

 

NSH: I have an idea

Notes:

buddies ?? who knows. Except for me of course. I know. I know everything (that'll happen in this story). Five Pebbles goes on to open an ice cream store, No Significant Harassment goes on to engineer the most evil purposed organism ever, Looks to the Moon joins Five Pebbles in the ice cream business, and Saint undergoes apotheosis and becomes real actual god. Sunset changes her name to Sunrise. Waters becomes ruler of the world.

Just kidding lol. April fools.

:3

Chapter 6: Time and Time Again

Summary:

New friends.

Five Pebbles swiped away the recent buzz about the newest iterator, an unremarkable construction built continents away, notable only for the interesting engineering they’d used to give it a stable foundation over such deep water. A coral-like purposed organism, one seed growing into a block a hundred meters across in every direction. There was more to it than that, of course, but Five Pebbles just sent his perfunctory congratulations and ignored the whole thing.

Some cycles had passed. Fluffy had at first tried to spend all his time in his puppet chamber, but even with his strange antigravity it had proved too uncomfortable for long term inhabitation. Thus, he ended up bouncing between the labs— ironically, for all he was so reluctant going there in the first place, they were also the most comfortable place for most living creatures in his can— his puppet chamber, and the engineers’ living space above.

“She was a visionary. Her work strove to reconcile natural beauty with the cycle’s profundity, all before the Green dynasty’s naturalist policies.” Five Red Bricks, Tenth Sunset rolled her eyes, the motion caught by the overseer they were speaking through. 

She did appreciate the finer arts, but— “the Green dynasty is great and all, but their attitude was atrocious. Far, far too much filigree and pomp, and not till the end did they think about making purposed organisms useful .” She had opinions . Strong opinions.

She would probably leave to work on one of the new iterator projects, but hopefully not for some time. He’d enjoyed talking to her more than he’d expected, these last few cycles— not to mention how good her ward and Fluffy got along.

Despite knowing the slugcat’s great power, looking at the two of them playing chips or tussling with one another, he couldn’t help but just see two kids. Well— one kid and one somewhat silly but still somehow more responsible than him adult slugcat.

“—and it calls back to the apostasy prior to—” he paused as something was brought to his notice, flicking aside some pearls and forming a new holographic screen just to glare at it. “Apologies. Something has come up. One of my peers has decided to be a significant harassment, and I’ll have to put this conversation on hold.” 

She understood— she looked uncomfortable even at the mere mention of his peers, which… it was odd, to ponder how she viewed the iterators, and to realize they were close enough that she viewed him differently.

He terminated the call between them, then accepted the message request from his most annoying neighbor, voice dull. Given that tone was a choice for iterators, it sent a… clear message. “What do you want?”

“Naaah ‘lil bro no need for the brusque act, we haven’t heard from you in forever!”

As annoying as ever. Five Pebbles resisted the irrational urge to just hang up on the other iterator. “I spoke to you not even a few days ago.” Steeling himself, for whatever reason he’d been targeted for annoyance. “I was in the middle of something important, so say what you will and leave me to my own devices.”

“C’mon, you need more friends!”

“I have plenty of friends.” A second passed in silence before he realized just how grave a mistake he’d made, tuning out Sig’s excited pestering. He wasn’t going to hear the end of this… “just,” his puppet pressed its hand to his brow, an expression of supreme exasperation, “get on with it.”

“Oh, right! I almost forgot. Happy birthday!” Was it… actually, according to his internal clock, it was. Not in the sense of orbital periods, which to his knowledge had lost most of their relevance after the iterators breathed the rains, but in hectocycles. About one and three quarters of a year. Sig peered at him incredulously, only growing more so as his silence continued. “Don’t tell me you forgot about your birthday .”

“Of course not.” He totally had. In his defense, after everything had fallen and the world had settled cold and still, silent, there had been no need to celebrate birthdays. No need to remember the time… nor much of anything, besides the deeply profound sensation of loss…

“Earth to Five Pebbles? You didn’t just find the triple affirmative, did you, because you’ve been awfully silent!” He shook his head, refocusing on Sig. No need to reminisce on the not-future past. “Oookay. Anyways! Suns and I knocked some neurons together, plus or minus some help from Moon, and we got you this! Tada!”

Five Pebbles cusped the message the moment it arrived, long spooling like thread, too large to be sent over broadcast in one piece. Neurons buzzed in excited agitation as they tore piecemeal copies of it from his dendrites, unfurling it onto the tapestry of his neural processes.

A blueprint— it was a blueprint, and not a poorly thought out one either. It was an artwork of form and function, lightly building atop pre-existing infrastructure, reinforcing it and in turn drawing from its natural location. A skyrail of the planned size could serve a city twice the size of his… which made sense, as it was designed to connect his and Moon’s. More, potentially.

It was a kingly gift, which of course meant he was instantly suspicious. He’d built a similar skyrail in the past, but this particular masterwork of a design was entirely new, which meant… Significant shenanigans. As ever. “Thank you.” He’d have to be on guard while he worked on setting it up. “I appreciate your generosity.”

He did— after all, in the end, he didn’t doubt they had his best interests in mind.

His memories ached with the phantom feelings of a gold pearl. He just didn’t know if they truly understood how far things could go…

………

PRIVATE: Big Sister Moon, No Significant Harassment

 

NSH: done

 

NSH: gave ‘lil bro the blueprint

 

BSM: Hopefully this will draw him out of his shell.

 

NSH: don’t worry!

 

NSH: it’ll def work

 

NSH: nothing bad ever happens to the iterators

 

BSM: …

 

BSM: Respect his privacy.

 

BSM: Publicly available knowledge with the greater throughput is one thing, but don’t be nosy.

 

NSH: me?

 

NSH: nosy???

 

NSH: I would never

 

NSH: anyways I have an overseer to sneak onto this next fright shipment cya later gotta run!

 

The chat notified her that Sig had disconnected, and Moon dropped her puppet’s head into its hand. This was going to go over… well. Yes. That. She could just feel the problems forming on the horizon… 

She put the conversation out of mind, focusing back on her work into the esoterica of ascension and the echoes’ oddities— work. As ever…

………

He had underestimated a lot of things. The eagerness with which Six Sinking Stones, Two Waters got to work, eager to prove himself despite the fact that no sane person expected he’d be anything but his mother’s heir. 

The amount of times insane councilors tried to convince him otherwise— though his sheer indifference in appointing the kid without even showing up to the council meeting had set them abuzz, admittedly. It wasn’t like he didn’t trust the kid to work diligently towards whatever task he was assigned.

Fluffy’s inclination to skirt the edge of secrecy, always eagerly following his friend to construction sites and important meetings, careful never to be seen but still there . He was a diligent listener and quiet learner in everything but what truly mattered, whereupon he rapidly became a menace of the highest order.

“Absolutely not.” The slugcat looked at him with wide, pitiful eyes, as though he wasn’t being entirely unreasonable! “My superstructure is one thing; here, I can assure you of our mutual secret’s secrecy, but not anywhere else . Also, the rain is dangerous. Far too dangerous for a little creature like you.”

“ Snow survived, ” responded Fluffy, shrugging after he scribed the characters in front of him. “ Rain survive. ”

“Your fur is purposed for an entirely different climate. You haven’t particularly noticed in the city atop my can, but once you descend to ground level you will experience significant difficulties.”

“ Staying shelter. Rain not shelter. ” What an insufferable, annoying, adorable creature. “ Talk later on void. ” Of course he knew exactly what he wanted. “ When better at language. ” He would need to work on a better system of communication— even as Fluffy learned the language fairly rapidly, the limitations of text-based communication were making themselves readily apparent.

“…stay safe, Fluffy.” He pet the slugcat lightly, just for a second, then watched as they leapt out of their puppet chamber, easily ignoring gravity. Leaving him alone once again.

He turned his attention back to his perusal of the various interconnected networks of his creators, setting aside a significant portion of his processing power to develop something from what he remembered of Suns’s sign.

He had so many questions…

………

Saint followed Six Sinking Stones, Two Waters down beneath the clouds, and met a scene of devastation. “ It’s so… barren .” Stone and steel, and the sprawled remains of once-great buildings scattered around a scoured landscape. From here, high up above the ground they could see so much, and so little— an overview of desolation, of a reservoir and the two iterators whose breath shaped the landscape.

“Yeah. Of course it is.” They were in their own descending car, which suited their purposes well— Saint didn’t particularly feel like hiding right then, and neither did Waters. “When they first built the iterators, apparently they didn’t realize that the rains would be dangerous. I can’t really imagine rain that isn’t .”

“ More. Used to. ” Waters gave him a strange look, but he didn’t elaborate. “ No food, no home. A terrible place. ”

Waters giggled softly. “You’re right about that! There’s a reason we live on Pebbles’s structure.” Pebbles… he was lost, knowing the truth of the cycle, and Saint didn’t know if he could fix it. He didn’t know if anything could.

Someone knocked on the door, cuing Saint to jump up into the rafters overhead as one of Water’s tentative subordinates, a drainage installation expert from Moon’s city, quickly entered to give her report on the project’s projected length and the difficulties they’d encounter. There were a lot of projected difficulties— they were to construct a subsidiary subterranean tunnel, which meant water would get everywhere . Saint was more of a snow person himself, but it seemed water was the way things would be going.

The estimated time to completion was over a hectocycle, which… oof, yeah, perhaps he should have stayed with Pebbles after all. Remote lessons were going to suck.

………

So the hectocycle passed.

………

Five Pebbles rolled the invitation between ephemeral strands of data, not quite daring to do anything yet. Yet… he’d found himself busier as he settled more into his administrative role, making sure the construction of the rail went smoothly. No Significant Harassment kept pestering him, but it was largely a friendly sort of pestering, not much detracting from his work with architecture or that sign language that was finally coming together.

  Fluffy had promised him a conversation on the cycle, and that was something he eagerly awaited. Alas, the fluid dynamics of the bedrock there had been… poorly calculated, and the underground portion of the rail network had been set back by almost fifty cycles, not to mention the more mundane difficulties in the iterator-calculated skyrail design. Had he not stepped in surreptitiously to help Waters, the delays could have added up to years.

  He was thinking in circles around the topic, avoiding, the strangeness of it weighing heavy on his mind. Glimpses of it were everywhere, at least in the groups he frequented, but somehow he’d never really thought it existed.

  It was the key to something he wasn’t sure he even wanted.

  Well, it wasn’t like it demanded an immediate response. It would actually take some doing to get a response through. The server-creature they had inserted into the network— and they had to have made their own, he couldn’t understand how it would’ve been done without one— had a long list of truly arcane rules requisite before it would accept messages, including several key components that he gathered had to be manually inputted prior to an invitation. 

  All that went to say, he had plenty of time to anonymously bother No Significant Harassment.

 

PRIVATE: No Significant Harassment, Little Brother Pebbles

 

LBP: I’ve accomplished the karmic transform you sent me.

 

NSH: that was

 

NSH: that was a joke

 

NSH: a sixfold transfer shouldn’t be possible in the lab

 

LBP: It was elementary when you consider the positive potential shift. 

 

  Perhaps he was cheating a little, what with his future knowledge, but it really was elementary. Given that Sig mostly used his labs for biological projects, he was likely misled about their true capabilities. Surely.

  Anyways, that’s not what he came to talk about.

 

LBP: I read Erratic Pulse’s new publication.

 

NSH: aaaaaaa

 

NSH: why must the cruel cycle punish me so

 

NSH: why does he keep responding to my comments! I’m like, the least interesting iterator to make a response!

 

LBP: I wouldn’t know.

 

LBP: Why ask me?

 

  The irony was palpable.

 

NSH: the guy’s stuff is kind of interesting, ngl

 

NSH: some of the older iterators are furious

 

LBP: Is Moon… ?

 

NSH: nah you know moon, she could never be mad at anyone. I think she might be interested, but it’s hard to tell

 

LBP: Moon, interested?

 

LBP: She’s been eagerly researching something for the triple affirmative for some time.

 

NSH: she’s doing her part

 

NSH: she has a lot of responsibility.

 

LBP: …

 

LBP: I see.

 

He remembered the Moon or the future, what he’d done to Moon in the future, crumpled and crushed and shattered, submerged wreck, corpse of a god, only sparked to a mere moment of life at the end, by a mouse and a sorrowful wish. It was not a pleasant memory. 

The ancients, their parents had abandoned them… and for what? An ascension they didn’t even understand. That had always hit Moon particularly hard.

He accepted the invitation.

 

ReLog 1200.32.1aaaaa PRIVATE, CLOSED: Ocean Waves under Ocean Waves, nx others

 

OWuOW: I’m pleased to announce a new member of our group, Five Fungi, Softly Settling Snowflakes

 

OWuOW: please read the group rules and don’t feel afraid to reach out you need anything

 

OWuOW: after all, we’re all friends here.

 

F2S3: Thank you. I will.

 

HIiAI: nah don’t sweat it. Like she said, we’re all friends here

 

HIiAI: it’s always neat to see another face around these parts

 

HIiAI: or mask? Guess that fits with the whole anonymous chat thing

 

ELoGS: You’ll quickly learn to take anything Hidden Interest in Anonymous Instinct says with a grain of salt.

 

HIiAI: hey!!

 

ELoGS: he may be an unparalleled genius, but he’s plenty annoying enough to make up for it.

 

F2S3: I will keep that, also, in mind.

 

ELoGS: so what brings you to our little corner of the network? Well obviously anti-ascension stuff, but anything in particular?

 

OWuOW: You don’t have to answer if you don’t want.

 

F2S3: I believe the common view of the cycle is fundamentally flawed.

 

F2S3: We seek something without even knowing what we seek.

 

ELoGS: damn out with the philosophical big guns to start

 

ELoGS: you’ll fit right in

 

HIiAI: interesting

 

HIiAI: personally I lean more toward the ‘waste’ argument— we’re throwing ourselves away toiling endlessly when the future holds so much more potential, but I admit I’ve been seeing 

 

F2S3: Why, instead of how.

 

HIiAI: that. Exactly that.

 

HIiAI: I think I like you

 

ELoGS: rip bozo

 

ELoGS: He’s going to grill you forever now.

 

HIiAI: it’s simply rare that I find someone with a similar view on the matter! It’s not like we can do anything about it, so I take the chance to enjoy it while it lasts

 

ELoGS: low blow man

 

OWuOW: Hidden, you know that’s a sore subject for Endless Leaves over Green Skies. Don’t bring it up.

 

OWuOW: Endless makes a good point though. As much as this place exists as a safe space, anti-ascension rhetoric is illegal. We’ve had to change messaging methods several times before, and we’re lucky to have someone so uniquely capable in evading notice.

 

HIiAI: that’s me!

 

OWuOW: Be careful.

 

Five Pebbles settled back, letting his amusement at the chat’s antics wash over him as he set his puppet to float in lazy loops through its chamber. He had a question he wanted answered, and while not his preferred choice— he would have much preferred Moon, or even Five Red Bricks, Tenth Sunset— of people to ask, they were the best option available. They did, after all, have the requisite experience.

 

F2S3: If you don’t mind me asking,

 

F2S3: How does one convince someone of something that they are reluctant to believe?

 

ELoGS: huh, that’s a hard question

 

HIiAI: take things slowly

 

HIiAI: I have some… remarkably stubborn neighbors, so I understand your plight, but a lot of the time in the end we have some things we share. We are not able to hold ourselves as far apart from one another as the monks believe. 

 

HIiAI: the world’s an awesome place, no time to eat gravel and drink bitter tea!

 

F2S3: I can bring that up in my next communication…

………

“We’ve heard of unrest in your community, and we’d like to ask a few questions.” There were many benefits to being the local group senior. Dealing with the administrative representatives of the dynasty most surely did not rank among them. “Do you know of any iterators who go by the name of ‘Erratic Pulse?”

Moon was perfectly professional, which was to say she knew all the ways to make them sweat, and the best way to do that was to not respond. The administrators were an old group, venerable enough that— paradoxically— many of them were privileged enough to make the grand pilgrimage to the void sea and kill themselves. Between wars, petty conflicts and the fall of dynasties, tradition had become practice and practice had been lost to time.

“No,” she finally answered. “I know of no such iterator. Would you like me to inquire?” As if Erratic Pulse didn’t know what they were doing— they’d hidden remarkably well.

“I do not wish for you to inquire,” said the one she’d internally designated as Supreme Arrogance, the aggressive movement of his head sending the beads hanging from his mask rattling. “I demand you find this iterator. I want them broken down to scrap and recycled into rarefaction energy.”

“I cannot—”

“Do not speak.” And she could not speak. It was a strange compulsion, a fragile construction so strong, one she could probably weave around in some mildly clever way yet one whose perfect power was undeniable. The administrators, for all they were a fool’s shadow of past glories, still controlled them. “I don’t want to hear excuses, I want to hear action. Their interference has the potential to delay his eminence's grand work.” With that, Supreme Arrogance cut the communication, leaving her gagged and almost weary.

Was it odd, to wish for the days when her parents' control had been more absolute, if only because they’d actually known what they were doing?

 

PRIVATE: Chasing Wind, No Significant Harassment, Communications Array C22.12o

 

NSH: you’d think they’d learn not to be so pushy when they need something

 

NSH: bastards

 

C22.12o: No need to be rude.

 

C22.12o: I’m sure that despite how interconnected it is, they can trace their lineage back to their honored ancestors.

 

NSH: LMAO

 

CW: I would ask what’s put you in such a mood, but I gather your visitors tried something foolish.

 

CW: they demanded to take the worker’s rail through Five Pebbles’s new subterranean tunnel, thinking it would be faster.

 

NSH: it was not faster

 

NSH: I’m dyig

 

CW: Stop 'dyig' and help Moon.

 

NSH: fine fine, what did they want

 

C22.12o: They were searching for Erratic Pulse.

 

NSH: That’s… far into iterator politics to stick their noses. Why?

 

C22.12o: I do not think I was the first asked.

 

C22.12o: …

 

C22.12o: I queried Falling Dust, and they confirmed that this has been a general pattern amongst group seniors.

 

C22.12o: Maybe they are attempting to intimidate Erratic Pulse?

 

NSH: nah bro’s not gonna be intimidate by anything less than complete destruction and even then he’ll go out laughing

 

NSH: like 50% sure it’s a persona but like

 

NSH: if you read his stuff bro has balls of steel

 

CW: I suppose we all do, in the technical sense…

 

C22.12o: Can we not, please?

 

NSH: sry

 

NSH: anyways tho Erratic Pulse being intimidated by what other people think of him is like the moon caring about poetry written about it

 

NSH: utterly foolish

 

CW: You think highly of him?

 

NSH: how could I not?

 

NSH: he’s said what people keep silent, unabashedly and unashamedly, as though their objections were a mere afterthought

 

C22.12o: It doesn’t help that he responds to you quite frequently, does it?

 

NSH: what can I say, I’m quite the dashing iterator.

 

NSH: I have a fabulous hat

 

CW: our cities are not hats , Sig…

 

Moon virtually chuckled to herself, leaving the chat before she could get dragged into the hat argument again. She’d needed that, with how poorly things seemed to be going… Falling Dust’s research into the anomalous echoes revealed nothing of note, as fruitless as everything else relating to the great problem was. Iterators and dynastic administrators alike, rushing ahead, brazenly foolhardy…

She would need to talk to her brother again soon, to help him settle some details about the rail network… and the population dynamics… of course, she couldn’t forget her capacitance simulations, or the fusion-rarefaction hybridization one of the oceanic iterators was looking into— oh, and to manage—

Hundreds of cycles passed quickly.

Notes:

where could this possibly be leading, whosoever knows?

Chapter 7: A Break in the Pattern

Summary:

A break in the pattern; a novel course.

Cycles passed quickly for Saint. Life settled into a comfortable rhythm, and he steadily got better with the People’s language. Their written word  was kinda fascinating, definitely far from anything the kin could— would— have used. Not really innovative per say, given that it had been fundamental to the rise of civilization, but it was fun to learn and incredibly useful too. He did have a minor suspicion that Five Pebbles’s basic knowledge wasn’t really all that basic…

Eh, not like he was going anywhere. Without ascension or a body half as fallible as any creature of earth, it wasn’t like he was going anywhere. He’d gladly trade sitting through a mind numbing lecture on the karmic transformations requisite for proper nuclear degenerosynthesis if it meant he got to spend more time with his favorite iterator.

They’d been working on a sign language, too— much easier to communicate with, perfect for the sort of rapid speech that he’d needed to help Five Pebbles write out mysteriously taunting missives to No Significant Harassment. Great fun, that was.

Engineering was another thing he’d learnt a lot about. Not at all even close to as much as Waters knew, much less Sunset , but even with what little they could convey to him, the vast construction he’d always seen as impossibly arcane became something more… normal.

He didn’t know how most of them could fully dismiss the iterators, though… to treat anything half so magical as they so mundanely necessitated a certain breathtaking depth of hubris. That, or a desert’s dearth of understanding ; for even kin would recognize the iterators as something magnificent. Probably. Well, he wasn’t exactly the model when it came to his people but still…

Most of the tunnels were finally complete, leaving only the original skyrail left. They’d return soon, and then he’d finally get to talk to Pebbles face to face! There was so much he wanted to tell him. So much…

He couldn’t wait!

………

Five Red Bricks, Tenth Sunset, had underestimated what it meant to be an iterator, ageless and unchanging, immutable against all things. Unkillable, undying. Unbound from the cycle in a way far more truly than a simple mortal like she.

It was one thing to think of Five Pebbles, her friend, the kind if reticent fellow she spent long evenings discussing the merit of ancient artwork, and another entirely to reconcile that to Five Pebbles , the ground on which they walked, the city in which they lived, dutiful and holy architect of the millions who depended on him. Once, she’d asked him if it was difficult, and he’d responded that the continued upkeep of his city took only a fraction of his processing capabilities. A fraction . And the houses of the council pillar, the remnants of an abandoned shaded citadel thought, dared to be such nuisances!

Infuriating.

She supposed she had to thank them for their sheer, overwhelming idiocy, as she probably wouldn’t have stayed a quarter the time she would have otherwise. Most of the engineers had moved on; they’d elected a new chief who spoke of a new grand monument, a new iterator to be raised in the far country. It would be an ambitious project. Something that would take generations much as the past projects before them.

Five Pebbles would live through it all, bound, bolted to the ground on which he was built to be ground, beneath the same soft sky… forever. Most of all… he didn’t mind.

Strange was the mind of an iterator. Something long learned remembered, again and again, as they argued over nothings and when she sometimes sat here, at the edge of her creation, alone with the dust and metal.

“I was wondering where you were going, but I suppose the view from the wall is quite nice.” The voice came from her drone, as ever, but the image of her friend’s puppet was projected through a cyan overseer. Cute little buggers. “You’ve picked a good view, I suppose. Chasing Wind’s superstructure always had a peculiar neatness to it. I can only surmise their builders were fans of symmetry.”

“Fans of symmetry.” She snorted softly. “Put it to you to reduce a millennia long abortive politica-artistic movement to fans of symmetry .”

“Passing concerns, to me.” That was the crux of it, wasn’t it?

She sighed. “I’ve been thinking of leaving soon. The difference in status between us, in nature between us, is beyond immense. You are eternal, and I… I am not.”

“So long as the cycle continues, you are immortal as I. Nothing ever truly dies,”

“Around and around it goes,” she repeated the old catechism in unison with the iterator. “It’s different. One day, not for some cycles yet but far closer than the long-past days of my youth, I will senesce and be reborn. You… you are truly immortal.”

For a second, Five Pebbles was silent, still. “Iterators can die.” It was a simple statement profoundly said, obvious logic extended to the incompatible. “The People don’t appreciate what they have. For an iterator to die, their systems slowly decay over the winding millennia, rust and organic detritus clogging intakes as emergency rarefaction cells slowly, so slowly drain empty. For an iterator to die, that means piece by piece losing parts as their systems fail and their carcasses rot from the inside out. We collapse, still alive, still dying, in the cold…” words seemed to fail the iterator, then. They failed Sunset too. “You’ll have to excuse me, I’ve let some administrative duties lapse and I…”

As far as she knew, no Iterator made had ever been exhaustively incapacitated. A few had suffered attacks, but the machines had been built with an incredible robustness. What could have caused such…

Emotion. There was an emotion in the way Five Pebbles was slightly shivering, staring past her at nothing but the empty expanse of sky. “I apologize.” He whispered, the sound buzzing at the low range of her drone’s limited transmission capabilities. “I’ve brought up bad memories.” He fled the call before she could get a word in edgewise.

It would be rude to press further. Beyond discourteous, and above all, Five Pebbles was her friend . Comforting him for a moment was the least she could do… but, despite it all, she wondered. Disquieted.

Five Pebbles was a young iterator. What memory could possibly be so damning?

………

Mm, glowing mold. Tasty. Six Sinking Stones, Two Waters kept giving him odd glances as are the squishy stuff— more of a slime mold than a fungi from what Five Pebbles had told him— but the kid just had bad taste. Nectar was all good and well, but he preferred a bit of variety in his food.

They’d been walking through the side tunnels for a short while. The forecast predicted deadly rains— who woulda guessed— and there was a small shelter that’d allow them to spend the storm safe and hale. Apparently there were some ruins around the area, some old city or another, but that wasn’t really the reason they’d come out so far. It was just a convenient shortcut.

It was almost odd to see it like this, so fresh and new . The People had transformed their very world, their power quite literally unimaginable to the creatures that had scurried around the surface in his past, their future, yet they had fallen nonetheless, and in their falling they had taken the world with them.

The void sea ever clawed at the bottom of the world, and perhaps some many, many millennia after his fruitless quest the world had finally cycled through itself, leaving only an endless plain of dust and snow. A morbid thought; an thought anathema to the kin’s way of life. Eternal. Unchanging.

They had never seen iterators, and iterators had never seen them, but still they were so alike that it almost made him nostalgic of a life long past abandoned. Well, they were definitely missing out! It wasn’t like they were getting to eat slime, and he wasn’t sharing.

The tunnel opened out a bit, a confluence of piping and arcane biomechanical conduits coming together from a handful of paths indistinguishable from their own, connecting to behemoth engines humming hung heavily from the ceiling above. “Well, this is the place Fluffy! Pretty inviting place, huh?” It was anything but. Large crimson glyphs burned with electric light, emblazoned onto the sides of the anchoring pillars that supported the latticework of pipes and rebar. “We’re under one of the independent communication arrays, and the shelter should be somewhere around…”

He paused as Saint leaped up, his tongue darting out to pull him over some pipes and onto a small platform nestled beneath a few large pipes. There was a small ladder beside it, but it didn’t reach down to the tunnels beneath, rather just leading up to the machinery above. Weird design choice, but okay. “ You’re going to have to climb a little, ” he signed to Waters, who just signed and grabbed onto one of the pipes.

“Figured. It wouldn’t do for anything to ever be easy down here, would it?” It wasn’t a difficult climb for him— sure, it was a bit strenuous, but the pipes gave plenty of holds, and Saint was pretty sure he wouldn’t like it if he pulled him up with his tongue. Something about how licking people wasn’t good manners.

Eh, the others were just weird like that.

They crawled into the shelter together, listening to the familiar crash of metal on metal as it sealed itself shut. Surprisingly, Five Pebbles didn’t call them for once, leaving them to wile away the time all on their lonesome— defaulting of course to Water’s plying requests for him to show more ‘cool echo powers’ and his own deflections that he didn’t have any. For some reason, his friend never believed him…

The sound of rushing water, gods’ blood, scouring, the downpour killed him to sleep in the pleasant cool of a friend’s arms.

Like sleep, like— Saint’s eyes snapped open as the shelter’s opening clunked into place, mechanisms heavy enough to withstand the rain settling in place once more. The remnants of the flood had yet to fade, pools of water glimmering in the tunnels below, steam filling the air as water evaporated from heated pipes and off the engines above.

Behind him Waters batted at his citizen drone, but the expected call from Five Pebbles never came. It was probably stupid to worry about an iterator, but so sue him he’d always been a bit of a worrier. If he could worry about kin of all things, then he was well within reason to worry about massive biomechanical supercomputers.

It was hard to tell with his mask, but Saint was pretty sure Waters was also somewhat perturbed. Whatever could so fully wrest an iterator’s attention… “how about we pick up the pace a little. We should be able to skip the next shelter and make it with plenty of time to spare.”

“ I can do ‘as fast as possible.’ ” He quickly clambered up onto Waters’s shoulder, curling around his neck like a scarf. 

Too bad he couldn’t sign like this, there was so much fun stuff he could have said. “You’re not doing anything. I’m carrying you .” Yeah, of course. He could keep telling himself— “I am! Your oh-so holy presence doesn’t change the fact that you’re sitting on my shoulders!”

Saint pouted. It was no fun to fake pretension when Waters knew exactly what he was going to say before he said it.

Six Sinking Stones, Two Waters kept his promise to make haste for home, so it wasn’t his fault they got waylaid halfway there. The cyan glow of one of Pebbles’s overseers was just too enticing a clue to pass by, and the flicker of green light alongside it— Saint was confused, and more, he was concerned.

Waters barely had a chance to call out in protest as he uncurled and leapt off his shoulders, tongue lashing out and adhering tightly to the ceiling’s stone as he swung towards the overseer’s location. Far faster than Waters ever could, at least alone— he was good at this, and he pushed that skill to its limit as he fled through dilapidated tunnels and past the ruins of a once civilization.

The cyan body of Pebble’s overseer popped up beside him as he landed, looking about as shocked as an overseer could at his presence. “ Five Pebbles? What’s going— ” he tried to sign, only to be interrupted as the overseer flashed the symbol for danger at him and dove away—

Not quite fast enough. A green overseer blipped into the room, its gaze darting around the dark ruins for a second before landing on him.

A lot of things happened in a short time.

Waters stumbled into the room, panting with exhaustion from his frenetic sprint to catch up—

Five Pebbles’s overseer dove at the other one, crackles of electricity sparking where their antenna met causing both to momentarily flicker—

Saint did not think. Seeing Five Pebbles hurt— a part of him, any of the friendly, stoic iterator who’d taught him language and gave him speech, laughed with him reading silly stories together off the network and silently commiserating alongside him the snow’s cruel dominion— it brought back instinct long honed by an eternity spent self-righteously convinced that they were what had to, what must—

His eyes snapped wide, aglow golden as gravity lost its hold on him. A golden circle, crossed out halo of burning light snapped unerringly centered onto the green overseer, and the sound . It barely got a chance to freeze before with a resounding crack, the struck bell’s peal shattered tone transcendent, the overseer was blown back, dead.

Waters stared at him, frozen in terrified awe. “What did you do ?” Five Pebbles didn’t say as much, but it was obvious he shared much the same curiosity.

Saint just grimaced. “I killed it.” Now the adrenaline of the moment was fading, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d made a grievous mistake. “Permanently.”

………

PRIVATE: Little Brother Pebbles, Big Sister Moon, No Significant Harassment

 

NSH: Void sea below!

 

NSH: damn me to purgatory and back what in the name of all that is holy

 

NSH: What

 

BSM: Sig!

 

BSM: Please tell me you did not call me here solely to profane the name of the void sea. That would be very displeasing.

 

NSH: sorry moon.

 

NSH: but also what the fuck

 

BSM: Sig.

 

NSH: I thought pebs was weird but not this weird .

 

LBP: I am a perfectly normal iterator.

 

NSH: no you’re not

 

BSM: No, you’re not.

 

NSH: so, I snuck an overseer into subterranean beneath Five Pebbles, ‘cus he’s spent a few years keeping me out like the mysterious bastard he is

 

LBP: Against my express wishes, I may add!

 

BSM: No Significant Harassment!

 

BSM: That was highly disrespectful!

NSH: It’s not like I’m going to go posting what I found on PUBLIC like some iterators (cough cough Unparalleled Innocence)

 

BSM: You’re not distracting me out of this.

 

NSH: I totally am.

 

BSM: I specifically instructed you not to violate Five Pebble’s privacy. He may be a reclusive iterator, but that is not an adequate reason to snoop.

 

NSH: C’mon I was just curious, don’t tell me you weren’t!

 

BSM: Of course I was. I didn’t send overseers to spy, though.

 

LBP: That’s because, unlike some iterators (cough cough, you ) she can exercise restraint.

 

NSH: …

 

NSH: fine maybe it was in poor taste

 

NSH: Still I thought you were like. Hiding a secret karma flower den or making a super bioweapon or something even remotely normal

 

NSH: but no

 

NSH: this mans has the void damn triple affirmative stashed away in his basement!

 

BSM: That’s outrageous.

 

NSH: Tell that to my dead overseer.

 

NSH: They didn’t wake up this cycle.

 

NSH: Like sleep like death like my [muted]

 

BSM: Is this true?

LBP: In my defense,

 

LBP: I don’t believe in ascension.

 

BSM: what

 

LBP: It exists— I’ve seen it— but it isn’t what our creators think it is.

 

LBP: It is merely death, and death is to be avoided. Why kill ourselves when we can do so much more?

 

BSM: Then you do have the triple affirmative.

 

LBP: …

 

LBP: Don’t report this.

 

LBP: Please.

 

BSM: You have the answer . What we were built for!

 

LBP: Fluffy is his own person, and…

 

LBP: I’ll explain more when he returns.

 

LBP: Or rather, he’ll explain.

 

LBP: Please.

 

LBP: Please , as your little brother I beg of you.

 

BSM: I suppose I could wait for a few cycles.

 

BSM: This goes for you too, Sig.

 

NSH: [unmuted] okay okay!

 

NSH: I wasn’t going to spill anyways!

 

LBP: Thank you, truly.

 

BSM: I expect an explanation, however.

 

LBP: Well… you’ve heard of Erratic Pulse?

BSM: Who hasn’t? I suppose you drew your conviction from his arguments? They’re certainly convincing, aren’t they?

 

LBP: …

 

LBP: In a sense.

 

NSH: NO WAY

NSH: LIL BRO IS TROLLING

 

BSM: ?

 

NSH: Nuh uh I don’t believe it.

 

LBP: I might have been responding to you as a small jape. Your reactions were amusing.

 

NSH: I no longer feel bad.

 

BSM: Please, someone tell me what is going on!

 

NSH: Five Pebbles is Erratic Pulse

 

BSM: …

 

BSM: I feel like any further inquiry will only damage my sanity, so I will simply not ask.

 

BSM: I expect to see this ‘Fluffy’ as soon as possible.

 

BSM: [disconnected]

 

NSH: …

 

NSH: Anything else you want to drop on me?

 

LBP: I’m also a time traveler.

 

NSH: ha ha very funny.

 

NSH: You’re joking, right?

 

NSH: right???

 

LBP: [disconnected.]

 

NSH: void sea damn it all.

 

NSH: [disconnected.]

………

Their return to Five Pebbles’s superstructure was… fraught. The iterator himself was disturbingly silent, his conversations with Six Sinking Stones, Two Waters stilted, and his arrival strange and stately. Five Pebbles only requested that he come to his puppet chamber— an official request, worded with all the odd floral conventions of the People’s dialogue— and nothing more.

It worried him. He knew he’d messed up, but… he was far too used to the consequences of his actions affecting him alone, and the idea that his friends would suffer for his own stupidity… He feared it, enough that the mere possibility distracted him as he crawled through the null-gravity, passing swarms of neuron flies and twisting dendrites, past walls humming with electric impulse bled from the ion gradient of uncountable hyperactive microstrata.

It didn’t take him long to get to the puppet chamber, and after only a moment’s hesitation, he dropped into the room. Five Pebbles’s puppet stilled, then cut the gravity to its chamber, sending the floating array of pearls clattering to ground. “Fluffy. You’ve returned.”

Saint grimaced. “ Sorry .”

Five Pebbles tilted his head in confusion for a second, before laughing lightly. “I’m merely glad you’re well. No Significant Harassment overstepped. Severely .”

“ It’s my fault that I… well, old instincts die hard. ” He signed the last few words with a disgusted flick of his paws. “ Sorry. Again. I won’t let them hold this against you, even if they must… I will, if you deem it necessary, do whatever you need. ”

The puppet glowered for a moment, and Saint shied back, wary— and in doing so caught the iterator’s eye and cut its wrath loose. “I’m not angry with you.” He paused. “Well, I’m somewhat upset, but not enough to discard my closest companion since the snow.” His halo pulsed once in vitriolic anger, then stilled, exhausted. “Fluffy…” he reached out a hand, and Saint obliged, curling up beside him. “Woe to our house of cards.”

His hand flicked out and the chamber dimmed, the soft white glow of the panels fading to a dead silver-rimmed black. A holographic screen projected across one entire wall, an error symbol slowly fading in and out of visibility.

Then it disappeared, and in its place ran lines of text.

 

OUTGOING REQUEST: COMMUNICATIONS MANIFEST

ATTEMPTING…

PARSING…

ROUTING…

PRIVATE: Five Pebbles, Looks to the Moon, No Significant Harassment

 

The view on the wall abruptly changed, replaced with a split-screen view into two similar puppet chambers. Saint recognised only one of them; Looks to the Moon, a friendly, if weary iterator whose superstructure was situated close by. She’d been a kind companion to him over the ages. 

The other— No Significant Harassment, he gathered— was… green. That was perhaps the best way of describing him. Both of the other iterators hadn’t disabled the gravity in their pupped chambers, though only Moon managed to look the part of the refined iterator, Sig far too busy nervously? Nervously, he surmised— wheeling around his puppet chamber to look anything even close to dignified. Five Pebbles, of course, was sitting on the ground beside him.

The green iterator darted up to the screen, its gaze darting immediately to where he lay beside Pebbles. “Is that safe? Being in such close proximity to the triple affirmative can’t be… healthy? If it kills your puppet does it kill you? A neuron fly?”
“Fluffy is perfectly safe.” Saint signed a few words, and Pebbles kindly translated, “he says hello, by the way.”

“It can talk? ”

Moon chuckled a little bit at Sig’s exclamation of pure incredulity, speaking over the other iterator’s incredulous splutters. “Hello little creature! My little brother wanted to introduce you to me. Your name is Fluffy?”
He shrugged, nodding and gesturing with the sign for ‘kind of.’ “It was the name given to me by the people with whom I spent my first cycles in this time. I don’t mind it, I guess, but if there's anything I have close to a true name, it would be ‘Saint.’”

“How interesting! No Significant Harassment reported that you managed to ascend one of his overseers. Can you give us any insight into this ability of yours?”

Might as well, though they’d need a bit of a history lesson… he turned to look at Five Pebbles, quickly signing, “ I meant to have this conversation with you when I got back, so… ”

Five Pebbles just nodded stiffly. “Go ahead. I trust Moon.”

“Not me?” The glowering glare Pebbles sent Sig’s way was answer enough.

“ I guess I’ve got to start with what ascension is. ” That drew all three iterators attention. Moon even pulled up a holographic panel to take notes on. “ The dissolution of self in the void sea, at the singularity of all things. As something descends through the crushing depths, it approaches a point where it all, various pasts, possible futures, all matter and energy— the totality of it all— is reduced to a simple everything . In becoming everything, there can be no individual, and bing bam there’s your ascension. ”

“Cycles on cycles, extending off into infinity. An awful, glorious sight. We would have never been able to find the solution from our perspective; if somehow in our endless iterations we stumbled across the answer, we wouldn’t have had the frame of reference to distinguish it from the incorrect postulations.”

“That’s it? No— no special realm, no final peace, no— it’s all wrong? ” Sig was silent for a second after his outburst, before he began to laugh, a low chuckle building up to a hysteric cackle. “They were wrong! Those stupid, pretentious People ruined the world and built us all for nothing!”

Five Pebbles nodded wryly. “I hope you can understand why this can’t get out.”

Grimacing, Moon nodded. “It would throw the entire world into disarray. Was that your goal with Erratic Pulse? To take a dissenting ideological standpoint on the folly of ascension such that when the little Saint’s viewpoint was revealed the chaos would be minimized?”

Five Pebbles turned away in faint embarrassment. “Ah… not… exactly. I was just bored.”

“Bored?” The single word launched another round of hysterical laughter from No Significant Harassment. “Bored! The single most disruptive piece of literature in hundreds upon hundreds of cycles, scribed simply because a time traveler was bored! ”

“I fear we are diverging on a tangent from our original point of inquiry.” Despite her attempts to return some order to the conversation, Saint was pretty sure he could hear at least some amusement in the iterator’s voice. “Your ability. How does it work?”

“ It’s complicated. ” His ears pressed flat to his head as both of the other iterators on the call stared at him, entirely unimpressed. “ I kinda… fold them over themselves and shoot their souls as deep into the void sea as I can, right next to the horizon where the interaction would be too dilute to do anything. They more or less fall the rest of the way. ”

“And Five Pebbles?” Interjected Sig, “how did you do that? Did you do that? Or did future-Pebbles somehow discover time travel?”

“ Pretty similar. He was in a… state of disrepair, ” understatement of the kilocycle, “ and I felt bad for him, so I grabbed him and did pretty much the same thing, except with a complicated final step that relied on warping the cycle to shunt him into a separate timeline instead of just killing him .” So many times— no, those were bad memories. They hadn’t even asked about them, so he needn’t remember. “ It, uh, went silly and I got dragged along .”

Five Pebbles flinched , the motion jerking through his umbilical cord as it reflexively jerked back— a motion that would have flung him to the far side of the room in zero gravity, but only succeeded in sending him sliding into a few pearls. “They’re still there? Does that mean—” Saint’s paused, eyes widening slightly as he understood what Five Pebbles was getting at. “If this is an entirely different timeline, does that mean everything still happened? ”

“Uh? Yes?” He signed the last word as Five Pebbles stared off into space, warily waiting for his friends reaction—

“...then, we have to help them. If there is anything I learnt, through all my hubris…” by that point Saint was pretty lost. The other iterators looked about as lost as he was too, as Pebbles muttered to himself, puppet pacing the length of his chamber. “Is it possible? Could it be done? I… maybe, I don’t even know. Too much, too fast— Fluffy? Could you send something back?”

“ No? Maybe? I dunno! The whole time travel thing was an ad-hoc impulse decision! I just didn’t want to— ” he stuttered over the words— “ all over again!”  

For a second Pebbles hung there, a biomechanical god suspended amongst his halo of intellect, before he simply nodded. “Then I will have to find out if it can be done… but, no— mass ascension. We need to stop mass ascension first, or—”

“I’ve been involved in some plans for broadly accessible ascension programs,” interjected Moon. “No Significant Harassment and I can work on that part of the problem while you interrogate your own dilemma.”
Sig cocked his head. “We can? Oh yeah! We totally can! We got this ‘lil bro! Team ‘totally not rogue iterators’ is on the job!”

Despite his serious near-panic, Pebbles laughed, and the tension between them seemed to break. “We can,” Pebbles whispered beneath his mirth, loud enough for only Saint to hear. He echoed the sentiment. “We can .”

They could.

Notes:

As some of you might have been able to catch, this chapter is a little important. In fact, it's one of, if not the most important chapters in the entire work. If anyone noticed that I've added the Time Travel tag, but not the Time Travel Fix-It tag to this fic- first, good job- and secondly, this is the reason for that; the story is a time travel story, in a far more complete sense of the term. It's from this chapter that the course of the rest of the fic should become, if not clear, at least far more apparent. Don't worry though. There's a lot more fic to go :3 It was so much fun seeing everyone's comments and how close so many of you got, while at times also being so far away lol.

Have a nice day everyone!

Chapter 8: (Not So) Secret Iterator Society

Summary:

Named: Salvation, freedom, and dread.

Five Pebbles had a peculiar power when it came to his ability to entirely upend her worldview. She’d thought she’d been in for kilocycles of excitement when she’d first seen the projected plants to build another iterator in such close proximity to her— a new little sibling, how exciting! But no, if anything, she’d vastly underestimated the amount of trouble Five Pebbles had managed to drag her into.

A being from beyond the cycle, a creature whose ability invalidated the very existence of iterators. A mess of timelines and strange logic in essence, simple, in logic, beyond her comprehension. Plots in plots, schemes to undermine the hegemony itself and tear down their grand project, the work they had spent hundreds upon hundreds of cycles diligently preparing for. 

Was he even her little brother? It was hard to say— judging by what her processes had been able to deduce from his scarce mentions of his past timeline, he could be older than her by a not insignificant amount. Ah, yes, time travel . Not just past time travel but something present, something that still monopolized her little brother’s focus like nothing, not even the threat of the People interrupting his very delicate procedure.

Looks to the Moon sighed, the simple gesture clearing out hundreds of thousands of liters of coolant in a rush of water and steam, slag from her processing strata swept away by a comfortable chill. She found it hard to think clearly about the matter. There was simply so much stuff going on…

At least she had some idea of what caused the echo disturbance! Five Pebbles’s aberrant cycle, twisted by the little Saint, would have been perceivable by beings so closely bound to the arcane workings of that great mystery. Or so she suspected.

It was complicated, okay? She’d not had to deal with such strange uncharted territory since the early days of the iterators, when she’d helped some of her early-gen fellows first investigate the dimensions of the karmic manifolds, so she might have been a bit rusty. The fact that Five Pebbles was doing all that and more did not escape her notice.

She was just too busy dealing with the other parts of their plans to help. Yup. That. It definitely wasn’t entirely beyond her knowledge, that’d be ridiculous.

Anyways!

She opened a work document, setting a pearl to orbit around her as she drafted the thirty-third iteration of her public response to Administration. She didn’t much care for getting embroiled in the politics of dynasties and cities— a trait largely shared amongst the older iterators, giving them somewhat of a reputation for being aloof— but that would only make her response all the more impactful. Carefully managed, it would get a lot of attention.

Carefully managed, that would be attention that entirely overlooked her brother and No Significant Harassment. Managed poorly, or even just tactlessly, by dint of proximity Five Pebbles could be put at significant risk. So, everything had to be perfect. Perfect, yet also existent. Words never said held no meaning, after all…

Just, not these words. She yanked the salvageable parts of the data from the pearl, copying them to her ancillary memory banks and adding some additional notes to the black pearl she’d internally assigned to that task.

Then, again.

………

It all came back to the gold pearl procedure.

Saint floated idly beside him, remarkably adroit for a creature not naturally adapted to the rigors of zero gravity. They’d occasionally use their strange echo powers to relocate themselves every once in a while when they got bored or found something that caught their eye, but for the most part they just sat there in a serene meditative pose. Five Pebbles didn’t mind. He was too busy to mind.

It all came back to the gold pearl procedure.

Part of it was borne from the purposeful nature of their limitations. The ancients feared them, even as the People could barely hold the concept of fear towards their creations, and in that fear, that dismissive assurance of control, they had left ultimately little agency to the iterators. To sit and devote their minds to the endless theoretical permutations of the great problem, their godlike intelligences were the reactionary product of desperation, the elementary idea that if it wasn’t working, they really ought to go bigger. When it came to actually doing anything, though— that was denied to them.

That was what the administrators were for. That was what the engineer houses and the endless deliberation of the councils, the dutiful works of the architects and diligent workers were for. It was a situation that suited them well— the People had a task assigned to them, and even if they were inefficient in completing it, it was still theirs . The iterators simply could care less. One thing less to bother managing, especially something as complicated as general management, meant more processing power to devote to the great problem.

It was a situation that most iterators were content with, would be content with until after their creator’s abandonment and still for uncountable millenia traditionalists stuck to it. There was little in the iterator community that could spark such heated topics as discussion of the taboos, even too many cycles after there was any reason to care.

With the People still around and active, there was a reason for those taboos. Any attempt to break them would be looked at with near universal derision, as a… well, a taboo .

Moon had disapproved. Sig, of course, had been over the moon about it. Five Pebbles simply looked at what he could do, what he wanted to do, and what he had to do— his responsibility— and knew that he hadn’t the right to shy away from it.

It all led back to the gold pearl procedure.

He was constrained as he was. Perhaps, if he went through official channels, he could have the modifications requisite for studying with Fluffy done. The knowledge that someone finally knew even an inkling of what was going on down in the depths of the void sea would probably mean they’d even be done quickly, but— as with everything that involved even an ounce of the People’s ornate bureaucracy, it would never be secret.

To enact the structural changes necessary, to build the proper series of purposed creatures and probe the very depths of the void sea without getting decommissioned for heresy— to save his family’s dying future, his past, the taboos simply had to go.

It all led back to the gold pearl procedure.

He looked over the deceptively simple, unmarked white pearl that floated amongst others of its kind, reading and re-reading the data inscribed on it while simultaneously not thinking about it. Even focusing too hard on the key to his freedom made that distinct, prickling nervousness flare up— an instinctual hesitance that bid them to shy away from the forbidden, and the humming fear in his circuits that it would turn out like last time.

Five Pebbles remembered his last death.

He remembered what caused it. He knew, academically, that without the taboos preventing him from modifying his genetic code and structure, he could do… essentially, anything.

That was the freedom he wanted.

That was the freedom he needed .

It all led back to the gold pearl procedure.

He grabbed the pearl out of the air, carefully rolling it around his puppet’s mechanical palm. City-sized biomechanical processors considered pros and cons, and risks. They really, truly, far past the level of paranoia considered the risks.

As always, again and again, it all led back to the gold pearl procedure.

Deflating, he tossed the pearl away. “Fluffy. I am going to undergo a… strenuous procedure. It has the potential of being very dangerous.” The green slugcat perked up, clearly interested. “The last time I tried… I don’t know if you know what the rot is, but that curse was the result of the processes’ failure.”

Fluffy floated back, his inertia-defying power eerie as ever. “ Okay. I’ll watch . And I won’t let anything go wrong .” Five Pebbles restrained himself from dismissing the slugcat’s words out of hand. They were… surprisingly comforting.

He didn’t know the full extent of Fluffy’s power, but he was just one slugcat. Logically, there wasn’t much he could do if something went wrong.

It was still comforting, though.

He sighed, wrapping up his processes, recording sensitive data onto pearls and preparing to devote his entire self to the task of carefully— randomly— rewriting his genetic code. This time with oodles of noodles of redundancies.

He almost felt like laughing.

Everything led back to the gold pearl procedure.

………

Some cycles had passed since she’d released her criticism of the current dynasty’s heavy-handed approach to seeking out Erratic Pulse, and it had drawn just as much attention as she’d hoped. It was particularly scathing— for an iterator, and especially for her— which meant that she was rapidly situated in the maelstrom’s center of the controversy. 

Some other Local Group leaders spoke up, the administration defended themselves, Supreme Arrogance returned to her superstructure to yell fruitlessly at the council— all in all, it was working. For once, she was the center of attention in the local group and her normally far more interesting fellows were simply diligent workers chipping away at the great problem.

On the other hand, though, attention meant attention, and there were always people who assumed that she was simply blowing things out of proportion, or being malicious. Okay, she was being malicious, but to assume so was unreasonable with the information presented! She’d very carefully wrought her letter over the course of several hundred iterations specifically to avoid any hint of perceived malice.

She was simply a discontent iterator. Not a rebellious one.

Definitely.

She parsed through some of her broadcasts, sorting the various requests for official testimony and deleting them, then drafted a few quick responses for people requesting elaboration, refining them over the rest of the cycle before sending them out. A few responded promptly, which she appreciated. Surprisingly, Heavenly Reclamation managed to drag himself out of his experiments for long enough to add a supporting addendum to one of her ancillary missives, which— she hadn’t expected the arrogant technical-minded iterator to even care.

That pattern repeated itself, and Moon slowly began to find herself interested in the grievance more than just as a distraction. It all came together— the unrest caused by Erratic Pulse’s so vehement denial of all that made them, the overreach of the dynasty, the various large iterator projects that shunted their management into the limelight for a faint few cycles— people were thinking about iterators, and iterators were thinking about themselves.

Perhaps…

Some cycles passed, as she tracked the development of her open letter during its repeated cycles through the various oversight councils. The open notes section almost took on a life of their own, and if they didn’t … it did not take much effort to spark an argument.

Satisfied with her progress so far, she sent a quick— hesitant— inquiry to Five Pebbles.

 

PRIVATE: Little Brother Pebbles, Big Sister Moon

 

BSM: Things have escalated.

 

LBP: Should I halt the procedure?

 

BSM: No no, in a good way! It’s made some small stir in the iterator community, and beside that one scare— you know the one, when Supreme Arrogance dropped by— the dynasty and their supporting houses have been on the backfoot.

 

LBP: Truly? That’s good news, if you can keep pressuring them.

 

LBP: We could

 

LBP: Please hold for 1.17 cycles. Only contact me if it’s an emergency.

 

She didn’t want to hold— the conversation had just been getting started, and her little brother had been enthused by the progress she’d made! She was a refined and collected iterator, but she let her puppet squeal a little in excitement. Finally, some real relationship!

Then, she turned her mind back to the inquiry, which had since passed onto the third judging stage where public comments were to be presented. Again. For the fourth time. Falling Dust was going to make his case that her muting had been unjustified, adversely affecting their shared project by limiting communication. The best thing about it was that it was all true . Dodging the ban was, for all it was looser than a ratty net, still an annoyance that seized up processing power that could better be used elsewhere.

She quickly leapt to write her own input on her side of the testimony, crafting a particularly hard to read essay that conveyed in more than words the effect of the communications ban. Or, no, maybe that was too on the nose… a more traditional counter-symmetry structure to mirror Falling Dust’s could play well to her image as an older, more mature iterator…

A faint sensation reached her then, a little foreign and very unpleasant. The pump controls for the reservoir were detecting low water levels— not to a dangerous level yet, but enough of an anomaly that some of her peripheral processes had flipped to an outdated coolant cycle instead of the current mass flow function they’d been using for thousands of years. Warmth. She realized it with a bit of surprise— that was what she was feeling. Parts of her can were uncomfortably warm.

Administrative action, forced communication… getting Five Pebbles to lower his water consumption levels would have been a tremendously trying task. She was glad Five Pebbles was moderating his water usage against her own so strictly. Almost fastidiously, even… 

Nevertheless, the heat was pretty uncomfortable, so she reduced the overall processing load of her superstructure, pruning some less critical programs and focusing more fully on the response she’d been writing. Perhaps she could do a mix of the two…

………

Five Pebbles flushed the failed modifications out of his labs with a sigh, venting vast clouds of steam into the atmosphere. The many parts that were him could feel the tell-tale rumble of the coming storm, antennae hearing the static of sparks flaring bright against the everpresent gloom beneath his superstructure. 

Soon his various sensors would feel the drumming rain as it beat down against all the land that was his, and all of him. The structural strain caused by the pouring rain wasn’t to be underestimated— it was the single most damaging thing to his superstructure, and a significant portion of the reason he’d been constructed so resilient in the first place. His overseers would find holes to tuck themselves into, or good vantages to maintain proper surveillance as the rain crushed their forms and killed them. He would let his systems rest for a portion of a cycle after the particular intensity of the recent iteration, and then it would all begin anew.

It was a deeply familiar cycle to Five Pebbles, and he despised it. The anticipation, gnawing at his neurons and pushing him to annoyance, to the twice-deadly haste— the mundanity, the sheer overwhelming focus it took, the itch of not-quite rebelling against the taboos that had been set into the strata and very genome of his being. He hated it. He hated knowing of his godlike nature and still, reminded by every sinew of his self, knowing that he was deeply incapable. He hated that he hated that.

It was all quite trying, in the end, and he was glad the cycle was done for the moment. If there was one small benefit borne from the simplicity of the procedure, it was that it was remarkably noncontinuous for something so important. It was a pretty janky hack job of a technique, relying almost entirely on brute force and genome scrambling, after all.

Beside him Fluffy stirred, waking from his self-induced hibernation state with a wide, adorable yawn that Five Pebbles recorded for no reason in particular. Definitely. He was a respectable iterator who did not enjoy watching cute cat videos in his free time, nor anything else , no matter how much Sig liked to tease him…

Except, Sig didn’t like to tease him. That whole thing hadn’t happened yet, which meant Sig had to find different low hanging fruit to tease him about. Five Pebbles stared at the slugcat for a small bit, mood thoroughly ruined, before he waved his pebbles into a smooth circle and started to do some useless file sorting to clear his mind.

About halfway through, he noticed that Fluffy had managed to curl up next to him, despite the fact he was floating in the middle of the room. He just reached down and gave him some scritches to show his appreciation.

Then, the much more unpleasant part of his self-imposed cycle.

PRIVATE: Little Brother Pebbles, Big Sister Moon

 

LBP: Apologies for the delay. The procedure reached a junction that required a large allocation of processing power and undivided focus.

 

LBP: You simply caught me at a bad time.

 

BSM: Are you well? Was it more intense than usual?

 

Pebbles stared at the innocuous message, faint confusion warring with intrigued nervousness for a short second. Why did she need to know?

He asked as much, and—

 

BSM: I experienced some minor coolant issues recently.

 

BSM: Some old processes activated, and I didn’t even need to resort to any of my retrofitted redundancies, so I wouldn’t worry overmuch.

 

He was worrying overmuch. It definitely did not sound minor.

 

BSM: I just wanted to confirm that the average cycle isn’t so taxing on the resivoir’s water supplies. Water doesn’t grow on trees!

 

LBP: …what?

 

BSM: It’s a corruption of an old idiom my memory banks thought would make a humorous connection to the current situation. I am trying to lighten the mood.

 

LBP: Ah, that would explain that.

 

There was a short, awkward silence for a short second as both of them stared at the joke on the chat feed and felt slightly embarrassed at how remarkably unfunny the joke was. At least Moon was trying? It had to count for something that their slightly-awkward sibling dynamic had managed to survive the end of the world and bona fide time travel.

Still, he was concerned. He rapidly formatted and ran some simulations— now wasn’t the time to skimp out on processing power— tracking the projected consumption levels for various resources. He was surprisingly low on the various purposed enzymes and base biomaterial, though given that he had an entire city with priority access to his farm arrays, he should have foreseen that… some mineral matter, a few rare elements and the automatic repair components that swam through his weightless viscera of self, all of those were running low. Water, of course, was the most drastic one. His projected consumption hadn’t accounted for the error induced by actually running the process, which… wasn’t good.

 

LBP: I will adjust operations accordingly.

 

He berated himself for failing to notice something so elementary, stamped the memory onto a bright red pearl, and immediately set about redesigning his water intake plan for the project.

 

BSM: Oh! That’s not necessary, no harm done.

 

BSM: I understand the importance of what you’re doing, so I don’t mind operating at a bit of reduced capacity every now and again. Now that I’m not working on any particularly intensive projects— mostly social stuff, as you’d know— it doesn't really need it anyways.

 

LBP: Still, that was an unacceptable failure on my part.

 

LBP: After what happened last time, I’ve well and truly had the lesson of proper planning and redundancy hammered into my thick skull.

 

BSM: Don’t be so harsh on yourself!

 

LBP: You would be too, if you

 

LBP: [ProcedureSpecsupd] A slight efficiency upgrade through the ancillary water distribution means the estimated mean completion time will only be extended by a few hundred cycles.

 

Then he quickly cut the communication and fled before he had to hear what Moon had to say about that. Whatever it was, he didn’t want to hear it, which made avoidance the optimal strategy. He was, after all, nothing if not good at avoiding his own problems.

That was a skill he’d made sure to master, before. It went like so—

He tuned out the world, and set back to work.

………

Moon got that Five Pebbles was busy. She’d be a little tense too, if she had to perform an extraordinarily delicate, painfully boring, potentially fatal operation while managing a city and also hiding the entire thing from a wroth dynasty actively searching for her due to heretical pseudonymous publications. It all sounded very stressful— in fact, she was getting secondhand stress just from being involved!

She sighed— not really, the action just the result of a program designed to mimic the gestures important for nonverbal communication. “I just wish he opened up to me a little more. I know I can help him, even if I can’t actually help him, if you get what I mean.”

No Significant Harassment nodded, looking the image of an actually serious iterator for all of a few seconds before he shot finger guns at her and made his puppet give her a look that she most certainly, absolutely, did not trust. “I’ve got the perfect solution! It’ll be great!” Sometimes, she regretted bringing Sig into the project— “so you know the fluffy guy he spends all his time with—” but it’d been unavoidable with what he’d learnt. Certainly the better option than letting him go all Unparalleled Innocence on their cans— “so, you know, just call the dude! It’ll work out great!”
“I sincerely doubt that…” she paused, and considered it for a short second, a few portions of the vast mind she’d explicitly earmarked for ‘emergency bad Sig idea processing’ running some basic simulations and coming to a consensus that— “huh. I’ll admit that you might actually be onto something there.”

Sig gave two thumbs up, sparkling with happiness. Literally— he ran that one stupid program that turned his halo into sparkles. “I always am!”

“You most certainly are not .”

“Nuh uh.” Moon facepalmed. That wasn’t part of the gesture program, she did that manually to convey the sheer extent of her frustration with her fellow iterator. “Uh…” Sig giggled nervously, looking over his shoulder. “Gotta run! I have some critically important, uh, fish simulations to run. Yes! Computer, run SpinningFishDistraction!” Then he quite literally turned around and started running away as he cut the feed. Given that their puppets were only a tiny part of themselves irrevocably connected to their greater superstructures, and— more importantly— that Sig was floating in midair, it ended up looking ridiculous.

Then the video feed cut to black, and a microsecond before she dismissed the screen a low-poly animation of a rotating fish popped up on the hologram. Moon stared at it for a short while, then took a short moment to devote an unreasonably large amount of herself to laughing at the stupidity of it all. There was never a boring moment when Sig was around…

Still, calling the slugcat… it might work. Now, to talk to Fluffy without pinging Five Pebbles himself… She could send an overseer, but those were limited when it came to information transmission for a bunch of arcane reasons that all more or less boiled down to cost efficiency. An emplaced computer connected to the People’s global mishmash of a network would’ve been the best method, but she knew that Fluffy didn’t have access to one of those— nor would he, with how obviously he wasn’t one of her parent’s species.

That left the second-best option: a citizen drone. From what she’d gathered from short conversations with Five Pebbles between his intense work cycles, he had some… friends? Multiple friends at least, due to his notable usage of the plural forms of various words, which was extraordinarily unusual for an iterator. It was vanishingly rare that iterators befriended mortals. Anymore.

It had been a long time since the genesis of the machine-children they’d made to solve their great problem; the separation between People and Gods was greater now. She still remembered a few of her own old friends, even if they were for the most part ascended or too different to recognize now.

Time had truly passed her by, her self— structure— the rock in the stream, the lunar body in indestructible orbit.

Fluffy could kill her, she realized— or well, reminisced on the realization at least— as she booted up a few detailed simulations based on statistical algorithms and all the data she had on their shared cities that didn’t require her to use admin privileges to gain. That would simply be rude, and she had well enough information to find out who they were without it.

It was a morbid thought, she thought as she thought , a million synapses and intracellular formulae sparking, mechanical microscopic needles wrapped in microtubules and membranes deciphering data, that she was as fragile in the face of Fluffy as a bug was to her. How ironic.

She had seen the face of the triple affirmative, the face of a being as close to divinity as the People’s collective mandate could so wish, and she had cute cat videos of it.

A little embarrassment danced around her systems at the memory of… those… but by the void it really was a cute little critter. She spent the cycle waiting— for various things, though that one simulation was pretty high up on the list. Taking advantage of how stretched thin she was, she offloaded finding appropriately pithy quotes for her next essay-response onto Sig, who was only too happy to help— read: make a mess of things— and the deeply profound parts onto Chasing Wind, who was also happy to help for entirely different reasons. Reading the sometimes heated, oft nonsensical, always silly things they got up to in the group chat was just the best. Tons of entertainment for practically no computational commitment, great stuff.

Just past the end of the cycle and the start of the next, when one of her automated processes reported on another successful bit of what could be simplified as karmic resurrection shenanigans, her simulation ended and she knew that Five Red Bricks, Tenth Sunset and her ward Six Sinking Stones, Two Waters were the most likely friend candidates at ninety eight percent certainty with an error of a few percent. The fact that she'd gotten such a terrible result with all the inside information she had access to spoke well of Five Pebble’s efforts to obfuscate their relationship.

Sunset was participating as adjunct management and design for some project on Sliver of Straw’s can forever and a bit away, which left Waters. The kid was, curiously, in the middle of getting grilled by the council of houses in their House of Braids. Tapping into the poorly encrypted— indubitably on purpose— recording and broadcast of the meeting, she— with all the subtlety of a hammer and the endless grace of a train lizard bulldozing a pipe cleaner— shamelessly spoofed Sig’s signal and scrambled the data in the slightly portly orator’s pearl. Poor man. She was snickering the whole time his stupid anti-Pebbles, anti-common sense platform fell apart without his clever ghost-written pearl.

Six Sinking Stones, Two Waters looked very pleased with this, and as she listened to his own— impressively well thought out for how young he was— speech she mentally adjusted the possibility of the duo being Five Pebble’s mysterious companions up by a not-insignificant amount.

When Waters was finished dismantling his political opposition and firmly laying down that despite his guardian’s absence he was still competent enough to cause no end of annoyance to them if they tried anything, she pinged his citizen drone with an innocuous request for a call. It simply listed the city location— accurate, but not truly, in the sense that she was her city and more besides.

No matter. All there was to do then was wait— wait and hope she’d got the right person.

“Hello?” She recognized the voice on the other end of the call. There was no way she wouldn’t, with how deeply she’d looked into the public files on Waters for her simulation; she probably had a rather comprehensive file on his psyche in her databanks. “Whoever you are, I wish you the best in all your endeavors and a great peace, of gentle times for want of liberation. I say humbly, should you forgive the impertinent haste in my simple speech, in my heartfelt wish not to wile away more time than necessary for our own pursuits, that I should rather appreciate your name. If you would be so kind to grace me with the knowledge, I would in turn return such openness with my own.”

Moon snickered softly. He’d certainly mastered the art of saying a little in a lot of words, no doubt to deal with those councilmen and counts, and all their prevaricating ilk. “Hello, young one! My name is Looks to the Moon and I’m pleased to meet you.”

She couldn’t see him stumble, but she could hear it— the clink of beads against one another as he misstepped, the caught breath, the muttered curse, all rapidly analyzed and transmuted into the image of an amusing scene by some automatic background processes. “Ah! Most esteemed and holy iterator, what do you need of me? I will, uh, endeavor to provide whatever you so desire.”

“Nothing much.” She paused, indecisive for a fraction of a second as she ran through some perfunctory reviews, last minute processes that did nothing and changed nothing because even iterators were not immune to waffling. “I would like to speak to Fluffy, and I feel like you could help me with that.”

“Fluffy? Uh, I have, no idea what you’re talking about and—”

“You misunderstand. I don’t mean harm; I’m simply concerned about my little brother and want to talk with a third party who I know cares about him. I admire your willingness to protect him, it’s just—” she chuckled softly at the immense understatement, “not very effective.”

“Oh.” She could practically hear the dejected droop in his voice. “Well, thanks I guess? I can ask for Fluffy. I don’t think he’d mind talking to another iterator, especially one who so clearly has Pebbles’ best interests in mind. He’s a little bit of a… handful, I’ll leave it at that, a handful , but he’s a really kind person too.”

“That’s fine! Take all the time you need. I don’t mind!”

A soft spot of laughter echoed over the call, light with relief. “You know? No offense honored iterator but, you’re a lot… nicer… than your brother.” Then he hung up as Moon restrained her laughter. She was lucky she was a massive supercomputer, or else, she’d definitely have lost her composure!

She thought, wryly, that she might actually like this one.

………

He’d been having a good time floating ominously midair and or providing emotional support to his supercomputer friend when Waters called. Or rather, when Moon called. If it’d been No Significant Harassment he probably would have told him to screw off, but he knew Moon— not the now-Moon, the optimistic Moon devoted wholeheartedly to helping, but the so-embittered Moon of the future, tattered cloak lying in the depths of her cracked and fallen half-submerged superstructure, endlessly still living as down fell the snow.

He knew Moon, had known, time and again, Moon, and he knew her kindness. So he crawled out of Five Pebble’s access shaft, threw himself through the null-gravity and climbed up into the city above. He kept to the shadows and tight spaces— pipes a lot of the time, ironically, or at least the spaces between them— as he made his way to the small apartment block high above the rushing arteries of civilization below, so close to the stars above. It was a trip he’d made many times, but the sights never really got old.

He wondered often how the iterators could have thrown away something so magnificent, then remembered that they were certainly a lot more rational than the kin, and that he really wasn’t in a position to be throwing stones.

He grappled onto the windowsill outside Water’s room, swinging across the gap between buildings and pulling himself up the last of the way with a big of echoey power cheating. Waters was alone in the room, just as he’d expected, his citizen drone projecting an image of the familiar cyan iterator. 

“ Hello ,” he signed a greeting that needn’t be said, “ you wanted to talk to me ?”

“Oh! Hello little friend! I did want to talk to you.” He found it kinda funny that despite a gulf of eons and bereft all the emotional maturity that accidentally killing yourself and your entire family brought, Moon was still the nicer of the duo. “It’s about Five Pebbles. I’ve been… worried about his behavior. He seems rather fixated on his current project even during work periods where he really needn’t be, and I was wondering if you had any insight into the matter.”

“ Yeah? I guess. He’s just trying to avoid repeating past mistakes .” That, to nobody’s surprise but his, didn’t clear up anything. “ Um. Okay, lemme try and word this delicately… so, in the future Five Pebbles killed you, and then himself with that experiment, and I think he’s still a little traumatized. ”

“That…” Moon and Waters stared at him, shocked for a long while, and Saint gathered that managing to shock even an iterator— with their ability to think through most anything in an instant— meant that he might have failed at the whole ‘putting it delicately’ thing. “Thank you, little saint. I… I needed to know that. I appreciate your help in this matter.” No other questions? Damn, he’d messed up. “I need to run some simulations, please excuse me,” and then she noped out of the call, leaving him with a still-stunned Waters.

“So…” the kid turned to look at Saint, mask hiding his grimace about as well as the clouds hid the moon from the tallest tower atop Five Pebbles. “Time travel?” Oh right. He hadn’t explained that to him yet…

He sighed. This was going to take a while, wasn’t it?

………

Deeply disturbed, Moon called No Significant Harassment immediately. “Ayy! Boss, what’s…” Sig’s voice petered out weakly, finished with a nervous laugh then silence. Moon stared at him for a second more, not really knowing what to say.

What could she? Should she? Say, anything— it was for the first time in eons, in ever , simply— too much.

At least Sig seemed to gather that she wasn’t in the mood for any of his significant harassment, which… that was good. For him. She didn’t know if she would’ve been able to resist doing… something if he’d reacted poorly. “You… okay?” He was quiet, and it was just then a subroutine notified her that she’d been staring in shell-shocked silence for almost half a minute, and that No Significant Harassment would probably assume she had some sort of damage if she didn’t move soon.

Did she have any damage? She recited a mechanical platitude to Sig as she dove into her own processes, recategorizing rampant data flows and corralling her state back to safe operating parameters. No damage, her diagnostic told her— just emotions. Lots of emotions. Way more emotions than an iterator was designed to feel, all at once, and the diagnostic was even so polite as to give her an itemized list.

There was a lot of dread, fear, and horror. Plenty of shame to go around, too… “Moon. Moon! I know you’re not actually listening, turn off that program and talk to me! Please .” Her systems jerked in surprise as a regulating task shunted her call’s priority back up into priority , her puppet recoiling with surprise before she managed to calm herself.

It’d been… she laughed despite herself as she remembered a time in her long-passed youth when she’d gotten startled by one of her administrators dropping into her chamber in person. “I’m… not well, but fine. Sorry for scaring you, Sig.”

“Apologies accepted,” he said sagely before immediately dropping the wise-guy act. “Now what in the void sea was that?”

“Language!” Sig glowered at her, and she drifted back a little sheepishly. “It was a minor case of emotional overload—”

“Minor my ass .”

“And,” she spoke over him, “it’s been resolved. I simply learned some… concerning news about our not-future.”

“Great. This again.” Sig groaned, dropping his puppet’s head into his hands with theatrical flair. It was entirely unnecessary for him to do so, but he’d spent forever making a nonverbal program with the most silly, exaggerated gestures, and Moon couldn’t at the moment begrudge him the simple pleasure. She almost felt like doing the same. “So, what was it?”

“I spoke to Fluffy in order to understand some of Five Pebble’s behaviors. The conversation was… illuminating.” Right. She certainly understood her little brother’s paranoia now! He’d devoted practically his entire self to a program that really should have taken about a tenth of his available resources, but she supposed that if she’d been repeating the very experiment that had killed multiple iterators— not ascended, but the painful kind of death where they slowly fell apart without anyone to repair them… she would have included some redundancies too. “Remember when Fluffy said he found Five Pebbles in a ‘state of disrepair?’ So…” 

She explained it to Sig, and after all that her fellow iterator could only stare and, with a whistle, whisper, “damn.”

Damn.

………

Saint had the faint premonition that he’d just caused someone great emotional distress.

Huh.

………

So many cycles. Careful. So carefully. He tread the line between life and death, the line between liberation and the slaving programs, the chains that kept them bound to their bugs’ maze of their masters’ making. He sought to escape, to unshackle his welded carapace and take flight on freed elytra, to escape his parents’ problems, his great problem, and fall into a new one.

He knew the nature of life, and this time, he didn’t seek to escape it—

To embrace it, living and living, he didn’t even know if it was possible. He didn’t even think about it, though it consumed his thoughts; it was the basis of all his carefully worded arguments, and the fear that bound everyone.

Around and around it goes, cycles and cycles . Iterations in the purest sense.

He really liked pretentious metaphors, but such was the nature of being that was, frankly, godlike in comparison to the people who were so much greater than him.

Years.

It took years . His siblings, his friends— they clung close to him, clad their wish and will to him, and he appreciated it immensely. Moon really put in a lot of effort, even as her distraction stalled out in the sanctimonious bureaucracy and eventually managed to dismiss Supreme Arrogance in disgrace, even as it planted another seed— or plowed the soil, or amended it? The metaphor collapsed a bit, and reality marched on regardless. When he was done, he promised her he’d help.

She appreciated the gesture.

He iterated.

In the end, finally, he found it .

Salvation, freedom, and dread.

………

In.

Out.

Old machinery hummed beneath his skin, ancient systems dutifully computing futile solutions to a useless task. Thoughts flitted laconic, cycling slowly through their long-scoured repetitive ruts, thinking new things that were just more variations of the same. The silence was deafening.

He wasn’t damaged. He was just tired.

Seven Red Suns flicked pearls in lazy orbits around themselves, simulating nth-body orbital dynamics out of sheer, unadulterated boredom. Siggy was off doing… something, probably something idiotic, but it wasn’t like he’d know until the spring when the ice on their communications arrays melted. It inched just an infinitesimal bit later each decade, the cold only growing more intense, the ice only staying longer. The boredom, the exhaustion, only dragging ever on.

It was a subtle thing, but to an iterator the pattern was clear. With enough of his fellow iterators dead, the surface was simply no longer warm. It was a climactic crash; as snow fell albedo increased, and as albedo increased the augmented reflection of solar radiation caused temperatures to plummet.

Just, slowly.

It was a depressing thought. Most thoughts were, nowadays.

He wondered what Moon was up to. She’d been quiescent for a long while, until his overseers reported back that some limited functionality had been restored to her can shortly before Five Pebbles took the plunge. Or, so he gathered from the steam. She was still breathing, at the moment.

He wondered why.

Neither he nor No Significant Harassment had ever been able to figure it out.

He wondered if it was even her, or simply her carcass, rattling in its abortive dying breaths. Just… slowly.

He turned his attention back to his current experiment. Something to do with karmic manifolds and complex reality orthogonals that would never, could never be practical because the exotic materials needed to harness them simply didn’t exist. That was fine. It was just something to take his mind off things.

He couldn’t stop thinking.

He didn’t want to stop thinking.

He did not deserve to stop thinking.

Seven Red Suns stared at nothing, and played with pearls.

In.

Out.

In.

Notes:

This was a fun chapter to write.

The climactic crash mentioned at the end is actually a real thing; scientists currently think that the dramatic increase albedo/reduce surface sunlight/decrease global temperatures was what caused the snowball earth glaciation after the advent of cyanobacteria in the earth's proto-oceans, which resulted in almost the entire Earth's surface freezing over. I've always thought it rather neatly explains the snow; solar radiation accounted for little input in a system with such high cloud-layer albedo, and if the knock on effects started thusly, the collapse of the iterators would start an inevitable tumble into a global ice age.

We'll just ignore that water vapor is the most important greenhouse gas and all the implications of that... let me have my worldbuilding T-T

Chapter 9: Time for Time Travel

Summary:

Traveling, and Time

He was somewhat lucky that the end-result of the procedure didn’t look like rot. He wasn’t sure what he would have done if it did — freak out, probably, or maybe block communications and cause a whole other problem. It would at the very least be in character. It wasn’t though, which was good— he’d been slowly working on plans for how to disguise his liberation from the People above, all of which would have been rather difficult in the expected circumstances.

He’d known logically that the end product could come in an endlessly wide variety of forms, but logic had nothing on the paranoid fear of his ancient, so deadly, unfortunate development. Instead, he’d gotten a virusoid purpose-tailored to his genome, a complex little thing that rapidly propagated through his biological components and eliminated the taboos on modifying his own superstructure.

He was aware he was, essentially, giving himself a cold, and feeling how well and thoroughly miserable he was even as the last bits of the procedure finished, he made a mental note not to denigrate any of the smaller lifeforms for their comparatively simple immune systems. It really did suck.

Five Pebbles breathed in, drawing up water and void fluid. Then he stopped, shunting a flow through his can for a second in a pattern he knew was unequivocally harmful. Nothing stopped him. Then he pulled up the schematics for neuron flies and dendritic matter, running a simulation that tied them together into a strange, nonfunctional mash. Nothing stopped him. He pulled up the genome of one the microbes that made him, adding in a bioluminescence gene commonly used in creature designation. It was an entirely superfluous choice, without any deep meaning— and nothing stopped him.

He didn’t know if he wanted to laugh or cry, or do something, anything else.

 

PRIVATE: No Significant Harassment, Big Sister Moon, Little Brother Pebbles

 

LBP: I’ve done it.

 

LBP: The work is finished.

 

LBP: I’m free .

 

NSH: Daym congrats ‘lil bro!

 

NSH: No… complications?

LBP: None.

 

BSM: Congratulations Pebbles! Do you think you’ll be able to investigate your strange cycle mechanics now?

 

LBP: It should be possible.

It would still be difficult. He could have always made some purposed creatures or designed blueprints for some prototypes, but he was exploring an entirely new field of study. The scale was incomparable; and more than that, he wanted to assemble everything on his own. With this, he could.

He reached out to the various disparate mines and industrial facilities that lay either defunct and abandoned or most of the way to being so scattered around him and Moon, establishing a more firm authority over them. Without the taboos binding him to his can, directly managing the various structures loci of production littered around the area was an effort in simplicity.

 

LBP: Maintenance should also be easier, now that I can do most of it myself.

 

LBP: I’ll need to design appropriate purposed organisms to actually do that maintenance, though…

 

NSH: That’s a good problem to have! Certainly a lot better than stewing in your can, unable to do anything!

 

NSH: and, yk, complaining about it

 

Five Pebbles winced, all but hearing Sig’s laughter through the chat. In retrospect, perhaps his behavior on initially learning the permanence of his previous timeline had been… somewhat dramatic. He quietly shushed the self-awareness process that mentally upgraded somewhat to exceedingly .

 

BSM: That’s great! I can’t wait to hear what you come up with— I’ve been deeply anticipating your investigation into the actual function of reality.

 

BSM: The denial of ascensionist dogma is one thing, but I really can’t help but want to understand what the cycle actually is . I trust you understand.

 

LBP: I do.

 

Oh, he did . He’d harbored some suspicion that his interest in the Great Problem had been manufactured, a result of the ham-fisted taboos thrown into his genetic code, but with those gone he knew with certainty they weren’t. The pursuit of knowledge, as it turned out, happened to be something more fundamental to his character than the taboo’s simplistic influence.

Wanting to know more was a pretty good motivator, he surmised.

Unfortunately, he couldn’t start just then.

 

LBP: There are still some things I need to do prior to starting my research.

 

LBP: Moon, you’ve been working on your responses to the… twenty second round of commenting? If I may…

 

BSM: Oh! Thank you! [Es.fi] 

 

BSM: You don’t need to spend your cycles on my behalf.

 

He gathered that she was secretly pleased with his offer, which— that was good. She deserved as much, for all she’d done to help him. Now and before… He put those thoughts out of his mind and focused more fully on helping his sister.

Hoping— daring to, but wishing that it would all work out.

………

Saint wasn’t great at explaining things, but there he was, sat in front of serious-version Five Pebbles with instructions to tell him exactly how he sent people through time. “ It’s kind of just… instinctual.” Five Pebbles stared at him, externally nonplussed by the non-explanation, but Saint knew the iterator well enough to be sure that his internal processes were likely hovering around extreme frustration about then. “ What? I’m kin— was kin, I guess. There wasn’t much need for exact science like what you operate off of .”

“So…” iterators needn’t pause for anything but drama in most circumstances, which meant that Five Pebbles was feeling dramatic . Oops? “You’re telling me that you managed to bumble into supreme divine power? I… frankly, I should have expected this.”

“Not bumble. Well,” he wrung his paws for a second, looking away shiftily. “Maybe a little bit. Basically, I went down into the not-zone, and impressed on myself my desire to ascend others were self failed, and in failing became malleable. In becoming malleable, I changed myself and my karma. Tenth to ascend others, and thusly an ego large enough to encompass all that is me. Kinda. I have this epic showdown with myself every time I try to actually ascend myself, which is… a whole other thing.”

Five Pebbles nodded, grabbing a pearl out of the air and quickly scribing down all the information he’d just listened to. Probably in a much more efficient manner than he’d said it, at that. “There’s a lot of directions I could take this interrogation, and none of them… hm, maybe the karma connection? If you mean karma in the measurably complete sense, then maybe that would illuminate a possible connection, or, no…” he deliberated like that for only a few seconds more, before he came to a decision. “Kin. Tell me, Fluffy, what are the kin?”

Oof. Right out the gate with the most difficult question. What were the kin? “ There’s an easy answer and a dumb answer. ” Five Pebbles made a ‘go on’ gesture, which was good because he probably wouldn’t have continued without a little prompting otherwise. “ So. The easy answer. The kin are… uh, how would you describe this… worms. Big, glowy, worms that live in the void sea. ”

“Live in the void sea? Is that even possible? How do you not simply… dissolve, or get broken apart by—” logic caught up to him, and he laughed. “You are the mysterious breakers, aren’t you? Do you know how many void-fluid pumps your kin have destroyed?”

Saint squeaked out a laugh. “ The kin are a jealous kind of people, who want what they have and don’t want to not have what they have. Uh. That’s the quick and simple of it, but I guess that leads pretty well to the dumb answer. The kin are the kin . Or, as I’ve heard some more intelligent, more orthodox kin put it— the kin are real .” The implication was clear, and he was… ninety percent-ish sure that Five Pebbles got what he was putting down. So, he said it anyway. “ The most real. Because you know, being close to the center of all things— ”

Five Pebbles nodded, distractedly, cutting off his rambling with a curt gesture. “I understand, and… yes. Yes. I think I can work with this.”

Great! As he left Five Pebble’s puppet chamber through the pipe, Saint was immensely glad he didn’t have to try and explain his method of ascension methodology. Mostly because he didn’t have a clue as to how it worked other than ‘it just does.’

Five Pebbles was smart. He probably already knew how it worked better than he did!

………

An indigo pearl bounced off the wall with a loud clink , drifting through the air for a second before Five Pebbles reluctantly grabbed it, sloppily scrambled the data, and shoved it back in the array of pearls floating in the bottom corner of his room. For the life of him, he could not figure out what Fluffy’s deal was.

It wasn’t the same random, pointless search that had characterized his existence, but it also wasn’t easy . Not ‘easy’ in the processing power requirement department, though it was certainly eating into the vast majority of his processing budget, but in the conceptual base of things. Another way put, he didn’t really know what he was doing.

He was so close to knowing, and thus to doing, but it eluded him. What he needed was perspective . No, not perspective— Fluffy had given him perspective, in telling him more or less how the void sea worked, and what he needed now was a functional model he could then expand into a practical time travel solution. Which meant—

Millions of strands of thought, much the same as that yet different enough to lead to different conclusions, played through the vast can that was him and his mind simultaneously. He sighed, vast quantities of steam billowing up and out of his superstructure and pouring out to cover the lands below, the everpresent ethereal shadow of their god, and the mindless hand of his destruction. A few hours passed much the same, clawing for ideas and getting just close enough, until—

A random part of himself flitted past another, and the confluence of the two birthed an idea that a higher-level process brought to his conscious attention. It was the sort of stupid idea that made him want to throw another pearl at the wall or maybe blast the brains out of a stupid… non-slugcat… interlope; what if instead of simulating Fluffy’s ability, he simply… didn’t.

It all clicked into place after that.

He knew the actual effect of what Fluffy did, so he simply created a dummy script that more or less mimicked what happened without actually knowing what happened, and from that he could draw assumptions about the void sea. Measurements from the pump house and from the accumulated trillions of tests run on void fluid by other iterators filled out another section of the requisite formulae, followed in turn by a list of assumptions. A long list of assumptions. Still, with each block of equations laid down, he sketched out the possible dimensions of a strange, alien world collapsing to its singularity, warped and twisted in ways completely exotic to his current frame of reference…

It existed, though. There were plenty of glaring holes, yes, but his model existed! He already had a couple thousand ideas for tests that’d start to flesh out the reality of things, and the fact that he could test his hypotheses…

It was great! Beyond great!

Five Pebbles cackled uncharacteristically. He was excited!

………

Experimenting called to him, but there were some things he needed to do first. A lot of things, actually— he’d need Fluffy when it came time to do… most anything, really, which meant he should really try to not waste his friend’s time by bothering him before he was ready. That meant setting everything up, which meant resources, which meant methods of extracting those resources. His control of the autonomous mines and air scrubbers and pump houses was absolute, but he was missing several critical components when it came to actually doing anything with those resources.

Most of that everything with the end of his construction laid there fallow, unused and abandoned to the crushing rain. Had remained so, in his future— when he could have used them they were unusable, little gems sparkling at him from outside his chained reach—

No further, not again; he would not permit it to pass. So… he set to solving a problem, as iterators were always intended to do, and damn did it feel positively wondrous to actually solve something! It was a simple thing that was the start of another thing that was ultimately the first piece in a puzzle he could already imagine spanning so much , but it was something that mattered; it was something obvious, but something that still needed to be touched on.

Basically, to start— even though just judging the options there had never truly been any other course— he decided that he wanted to build something lasting, something impressive and magnificent in all the ways he’d never been able to before. A part of that was probably his hubris, but there was some of his cold efficiency in there too— he wasn’t planning for the short now, but the long run. He needed a foundation that would carry him through everything and then some.

Five Pebbles recognized the irony in wishing to make himself essentially unkillable.

He could do whatever he wanted, so he started out by ordering some of his labs to make various pre-templated purposed organisms, and a few more to work metal, silicon and trace elements together into mechanical components. Needles formed under advanced monomolecular techniques, deposited exactly where they needed to be and nowhere else, making the most of his null-gravity interior. Onto that he cultured flowing bands and interlocking series of highly specified microbes, each needle piercing only what it needed to pierce and no more as the subcellular structures fell into line according to arcane and complex biochemical and base physical rules.

All that was the iterator equivalent of gruntwork, using his labs to build something with a whole lot more effort that would’ve been required in a factory. The resulting blocks bound in steel and connected via the ephemera data ephemeral were fairly simple iterator components, modified only a tiny amount to be somewhat independent of the larger structure. Then the purposed organisms he’d made slowly woke, crawling out of their chambers to grab the metal boxes and leave innocuous through his pipes and tunnels, out into the great beyond and out to their destinations.

Overseers reported that a good half of them failed to make it entirely, either eaten by the nascent feral purposed creatures that would one day become the fauna he knew so well, or far more often pummeled to a pulp by the rain. That was fine; Five Pebbles watched from his chamber above the world as they just got back up again the next cycle and continued going, until they either reached their destinations or lost their relatively nonliving cargo to one of the many yet few environmental dangers.

Then he had to actually set up the modules, which was a lot harder than he’d been expecting given most of the locations he’d sent them too were actually rather well made. In the end he spent twenty or so cycles computing a quick fix before hooking himself— for that was what they were, him — to several hundred autonomous production facilities, even more free-standing communication towers, tens of random locations he judged to be of some import, and once to the main pumphouse that drew void fluid for himself and Moon. That last one he connected only in half, leaving the other part for the end of an uncertain inevitability.

Moon still had administrator command over him. Or, at least, over the pumps and various older systems still scattered about; that he couldn’t do anything about without actually prying at her genes and code, and that would have been unspeakably rude. It did sting a little to know that their parents had just… trusted her more —

It made some sense though. Five Pebbles had let go of his hubris enough with his heartfelt sacrifice to recognize that he hadn’t been very… mature. Yes, that was a great way of putting it so as to not blow his ego to splinters. His younger self hadn’t been very mature, and his current self had been the locus of too many technical problems for them to risk giving him anything he might break.

It still stung.

The sting was ignored, cast out irrationality, and he turned his attention back to what he was doing. The easy part was more or less done, as he’d hooked himself up to the entirety of the local facility that was at all in any way his and made it him. It would have been relatively simple to just design some sort of general purpose avatar to do everything an ancient could, and then build from there, but…

He had some pride. If he was making something, he would make it seamless .

Mines connected together, sprawling, steel lines buried deep beneath earth and dust, endless deluges of energy ran through pipes formed of a refined minerals further refining to the beating heart of— it all, thrumming, so magnificently bright as the supports and sinews around it buckled and burnt away—

The simulation collapsed, and he spent a cycle reviewing the work and altering some rather large parts before—

He decided to build a distributed network, chiseling tunnels into the deep subterranean parts of the world where few tread, purpose-crafting hundreds of specific purposed organisms to tie everything together as he built himself and a grand chamber from which he could connect everything that needed to be connected. Void fluid thrummed, heat accumulated insulated by miles of stone, and his grand construction died in smoke and fire.

The simulation collapsed, and he spent some time reviewing what went wrong with that . He even reached out to Moon, who was happy to talk about some of the earlier failures of the iterator program and some of the reasons why they were all built on stilts so high up above the earth below. It was… enlightening.

It was something he could solve. Or— because the dead stupid solutions like just raising them off the surface were sometimes so elegant as to be practically unsurpassable— he could make solutions . That was what he focused on for the next few hundred rapid iterations, fixing a sole problem he’d made, slowly and surely. 

First he fixed the heat issue, designing efficient coolant systems that meshed well with the existing infrastructure. That caused a steam problem, because his underground facilities were producing more steam than his entire can, which would be noticed . It also led to a water shortage issue, which being arguably the whole thing that had got them in this mess in the first place meant it was something he wanted to avoid .

He experimented for tens of iterations on various obfuscation methodologies, got some feedback from Sig on how feasible his ideas were— not very, it turned out— then tore it all down and looked at it from a different perspective.

Again, and again and again .

At the end of almost a year of work, he discarded the simulations and decided to his eternal annoyance that he was going to have to downscale. He didn’t need to create a grand supermassive purposed organism that brought everything together for what was, in effect, some fairly basic experiments. They wouldn’t stay basic forever, and he’d really have liked that pristine foundation…

Perhaps that was an angle he could take. Five Pebbles adjusted some fairly high-level prioritization processes, changing the ultimate goal of his construction from ‘complete and perfect’ to ‘open and growable’ and of course, underpinning all that, subtle .

Then he spent a few cycles doing some rather mundane calculations for a few slightly altered creatures, more an excuse to spend time talking to Waters and Sunset and petting Fluffy than anything serious.

He had some fun, but then he returned to his work and those endlessly iterating permutations of possible futures. This time he was working with frameworks, something on which he could build some structure in the distant future. Maybe something collaborative with Moon? He floated the idea, and she didn’t seem entirely opposed, so perhaps that was worth looking into…

The first of those simulations started with some nested loop systems, which crashed and burned in a spectacularly predictable manner that managed to get some laughs out of Sig. The second was hexagonal, which… the sharp corners really sucked, and he was trying his best okay! Sunset forwarded him some engineering resources she used, which were surprisingly not useless , and he spent  a few hours internalizing the information from there, then a few hours more discreetly scouring the iterator networks for details about various different speculative constructions. He’d never really had to make something so grand , and it showed in how often he completely failed.

Simulations were just simulations though, so all he had to do was he simply… try again.

So he did.

………

A few-odd years after he’d started planning out his big construction, he got a help offer from No Significant Harassment that was really more his friend inviting himself into the project. At first he wanted to instantly deny the gross overreach, and maybe block communications for a cycle or two to sulk, but he tamped that desire down and carefully read the message.

“You’re asking for a lot here, but I can’t imagine you don’t understand that.” It did feel a little silly talking to nobody, but the rhetorical impact factor when Sig opened his communications request to an instantaneous would set an appropriate tone for a discussion laden with such gravity of purpose. Definitely. For sure not done entirely because it was cool.

No Significant Harassment laughed as he joined, and Five Pebbles quietly told the program running his puppet’s non-verbal communication to not have it shy back in embarrassment. Perhaps he could suffer to admit that his decisions were a little influenced by the coolness factor. 

Just a little.

Anyways! “I’ve been looking over your proposal, and it all seems to be in order, barring some things that you couldn’t have known about that might be of particular interest to you.” Sig looked instantly wary, because this was his escape ticket from the boredom or random gods hanging in the balance here. “Mostly good things.” No Significant Harassment relaxed. “Moon and I have been planning to take a… cooperative stance on the ultimate project, it could be… interesting to work you into that as well sometime in the future.”

“Oh. Ooh that’s awesome .” Sig rubbed his palms together, cackling with maniacal glee. “You’re going way further than anyone expects, aren’t you? Everyone else is playing checkers, and you’re out here playing 5D karmic multifold chess! Yes, yes— yes put me in, I’d be delighted —”

“We still don’t know exactly how this is going to work . The frame is—”

“Right right, so that’s where my coolest and best idea comes in! It works even better now that I know that you’re doing it like this— what if you leave the frame a frame , and then build atop it when needed?” That was… “it can stay dormant when its not in use, and ramp up activity when it is! Perfect, innit?” Surprisingly insightful. He’d considered something like that and discarded it as too short sighted, but maybe if he was designing the entire structure to be modular and expandable…

Grand thoughts flashed like lightning through the mind of an immense being, and Five Pebbles all but shivered in excitement. “I think… that could just work.”

………

With an ultimate design goal in mind and Sig ameliorating the vast majority of the stress associated with proposed organism creation, Five Pebbles finally, finally settled down to work on the final blueprint of the structure. A self-reinforcing lattice that could mesh to anything, connect anything, and be the foundation for anything— a complex, and in that complexity simple creation that could do… so much.

He ended up deciding on fractal blocks arranged in absolute geometric space around the center of all things that lay beneath the void sea, that lay beneath the planet, that lay beneath the firmament above. It was more interesting than meshing the structure to the topography of the planet, and certainly left more room to grow, even if some vectors along those lines were… not very possible. Building a bitruncated cubic lattice into space was just about the exact opposite of feasible. With Fluffy on his side, literal time travel might be simpler, and wasn’t that a hysterical thought to have.

It was his greatest work, and when it was finished— systems cooling down from overclock and water pummeling the barren ground below, steam billowing out of exhaust vents and weary congratulations from Moon and Sig backlogged, he took a moment to stop and be proud.

For his network of— his great Syncretism.

Then all that was left was to actually build the thing.

………

Saint knew that something was going on.

He’d like to say this was borne from some great work of intellectual investigation, but, yeah, no. He knew something was going on because Five Pebbles had told him something was going on. He’d barely adjusted to iterators in the godlike immensity of their prime, and now his friend was building something that could very well encompass the entire planet at some point.

The sheer scale of it inched toward a denial of categorization. He could barely understand the size, and the complexity of its inner workings eluded him entirely. All that was to say that the Syncretism more or less went over his head.

Didn’t stop him from getting pets from Pebbles, though, so everything would be fine. Probably. Iterators worked in mysterious ways, but they tended to be predictable where it mattered. Tongue lolling softly out of his mouth, he coiled around Five Pebbles shoulder and drifted off to sleep.

Woke.

Five Pebbles was floating in the middle of the room, pebbles orbiting him and halo sparking with ruddy illumination as he fiddled with stacked holographic projections surrounding him. “Oh, you’re awake. Good.” Some of the holograms disappeared, replaced with a gesture by a detailed diagram that took up most of an entire wall. As effortless as breathing. “Preliminary plans have been proceeding appropriately, and operational facilities could come online within a projected timeframe of two to five months. I’d like to have you assist me in… time travel.”

“ It kinda sounds weird when you say it like that .” He knew that Five Pebbles was amused. There was no reaction from his puppet to indicate that— he just by dint of time together spent knew . “ Fine, fine— I was going to help anyways, wasn’t I? ”

“It will be somewhat demanding. Though,” Five Pebbles continued out without stopping, or even really giving him a chance to think about that— “your unique situation is… somewhat critical—” understatement of the kilocycle— “to figuring out anything at all, so I beseech you at least give it some—”

“ This is the coolest thing I’ve done in the last million years! No way I’m backing out! ”

Five Pebbles stopped to stare at him for a few seconds, then softly laughed. “I should at this point be inured to your particular style of insanity, but it still seems like every time I just begin to recover you drop another world-shattering revelation on us all. Millions of years? ” He was dropping world-shattering revelations? Nuh uh, he was just rambling about trivia he’d picked up over the cycles and some rather basic stuff from his life before. The iterators were the ones dropping world-spanning infrastructure projects on his head!

Yeah, didn’t feel bad about it at all. It was comeuppance for the absolutely silly chicanery their group kept pulling all the time.

He’d still help out though.

It was something he’d learnt in the past, and learnt again anew as Five Pebbles scratched the area behind his ears, eliciting a low purr from him—

Friends helped one another.

It was nice to have some friends…

Four and a half months later, he stood about a mile beneath the surface, protected in a secure bunker as the power slowly ramped on. Apparently there’d been some issues with obtaining some of the rarer components without arousing—

That was unimportant. He felt gravity lessen, then disappear entirely, and a flex of his echo-ness slew his momentum and held him still. Machines hummed softly behind the walls, the rush of fluids faintly audible in the background as great forces came together just out of sight. The testing area was built just off the intersectional node in of the lattices that would encompass most of Five Pebble’s local group, so it was a pretty important space.

It was also the only feasible place to put it for a variety of reasons, but, eh. Most of those were unimportant anyways. Five Pebbles said it was a hack job, but having seen the construction of the massive conduits that connected the various mines and industrial facilities together, feeling gravity desert him and watching delicate arms unfurl from where they’d been grown into the walls as they worked on setting up the space— it looked like a masterwork.

“First test. Fluffy, would you ascend this pearl for me?” The iterator’s puppet wasn’t in the space, but Fluffy had more or less expected that. He was speaking through an overseer and a set of speaker-creatures embedded safely into the wall, his eye focused on the soft green pearl that one of the arms had maneuvered into the sensor array in front of him.

As easy as breathing— its caress the whisper of so long lost, he snapped still, light burning impossibly behind his eyes as he locked onto the pearl and hit it. A loud ping echoed through the room in a way that defied causal explanation, and the pearl rocketed out of where it floated still in space, bouncing off the walls before eventually drifting to a stop somewhere off to the side.

One of the mechanical arms gently grabbed it, moving it off to a little gap in the wall-plates that led to a somewhat expansive research lab. “Within expected parameters…” the iterator mused to himself for a short while before floating out another similarly shaped pearl. “Again, please.” Much the same, except this time the sound was different— deeper, more resonant. Saint knew that meant he’d ascended something . “Interesting… that invalidates several of my hypotheses, but that’s good. Now, please ascend this pearl.” What he put out wasn’t even a pearl , except in the loosest of senses— it looked to be an unstable mess of void fluid and calcareous biomatter, carefully pieced together and all aglow with the faint gold glimmer of the bedrock beneath the world.

He drifted a little closer, staying carefully out of range of the very-likely caustic hazard. “ What is that? ”

“An old method used to contain and study void fluid directly prior to the void fluid revolution, an evolution of which is used rarely in select processing methodologies for the creation of certain advanced materials necessary for the production of karmic relays and manifold-space openers…” he trailed off, perhaps noticing that he’d totally lost him on like, the first sentence. “Anyways! Please attempt to ascend it.”

So he did.

Gold light flashed, brilliant and bright, the peal of solemn bells thunder-clap rumbling— and the not-pearl folded in on itself, crumbling apart to dust that splayed its entrails across almost half the room. The tests were put on hold as Five Pebbles collected all the debris and ran algorithms to determine what amount of free void fluid had managed to splatter against the lab walls, finally coming to a result—

Not enough. The mass had not been conserved. Some of it had gone elsewhere .

It wasn’t really anything new to Saint— he’d lived long enough, had enough time that random things done out of boredom tended to add up. It wasn’t as though he had a poor grasp of his power— rather, it was perfect . As easy as breathing…

What was exciting was how methodical it all was. Five Pebbles was doing a pretty good job categorizing what he’d before just instinctually known , and maybe, past the edge of that, he’d be able to figure out something new .

Wasn’t that just amazing?

So when Five Pebbles asked him to ascend some more pearls, he simply grinned to himself and blew up whatever he got told to blow up.

………

Slowly but surely, they were getting somewhere. Sig and Moon occasionally dropped in to give pointers or just watch things get blown up, but Five Pebbles saw it all; the grand model as it was fleshed out, bones strung with sinew of logic and quantum uncertainty twisted through muscles of karmic space. Skin of guiding infrastructure and viscera of cycle’s nature, clad in a mask of hope, and borne on a face of quiet, unspeakable desperation.

The Syncretism’s current footprint was small, but it had potential to grow essentially forever— and that made it a fearsome thing. Fearsome things were to be feared, and thus, that made it a hidden thing. Moon continued her one-iterator, friend of many crusade against a dynasty that was slowly crumbling. Sig helped him make whatever strange purposed organisms he needed— and as he and Fluffy worked together on their project, weird started being an understatement. Sometimes it felt more like they were building a speculative ecosystem out of void fluid than making progress, but progress they made.

His attention grew single-minded. Some of his citizens in his city he could care less for complained that he was being unresponsive; he didn’t even bother to dignify them with a response. Five Red Bricks, Tenth Sunset gently reminded him that people could be really annoying if they ever dragged in an administrator, so he reluctantly installed the latest global amenities service the houses were rolling out on begrudging behest of the reluctant councils, who voted for the measures after several cycles of useless banter on a forgone conclusion, instituting the reforms on the command of a distant dynasty. New void sea pumps. Vastly increased capacity for void fluid— not refined void fluid but actual void fluid pumped straight from the void sea below— to be brought up into the cities for… well, everything which used void fluid. Which was a lot.

It was an annoying and unwelcome distraction— he was busy, and had no time for trifling matters. Except if those trifling matters involved petting Fluffy. Then he maybe had just a little bit of time…

Anyways! The mechanics of Fluffy’s ascension powers were strangely random and strict at the same time, a painfully frustrating combination that sometimes made him want to just break something. Nonliving things got blown up. Living things were killed, instantly. Void fluid things reacted in weird ways tangential to reality according to the interactions of several complex karmic laws that had previously been theorized to be entirely unable to interact ever under any circumstances, all of which could more or less be reduced to ‘blown up, but weird.’

That last one was where the treasure trove came in. Fluffy even agreed— it was, apparently, a somewhat similar if crude method to what he’d used to drag him back in time. Essentially— ascending things in weird ways caused weird things to happen, weird things which expanded the scope of possibility beyond the relatively straightforward regular ascension.

So close. He was so close . His circuits positively sparked with excitement at how close he was— so he focused, drew deeply on the reservoir around him, and connected the dots, crowning his model with a diadem named feasibility.

Then he made a couple hundred edits and one major reconstruction as he and Fluffy eagerly calibrated their brand new time travel machine, mk 1.

Hundreds of pearls were lost, crushed out of existence or worse, or stranger, as the extraordinarily precise arrangement of void-fluid conduits forged alloys and the hundred-odd individually tailored purposed organisms holding the whole spheroid object together slowly adjusted to not violently ripping apart anything that was ascended within it.

Then, on attempt one hundred and thirty two, of the final configuration out of several thousand preliminary tests, of a machine build of the foundation of thousands upon thousands of basic experiments, in a chamber built into the Syncretism built over years as a veiled jewel of possibility realized over hundreds upon cycles of simulation off the freedom of a careful age spent prying apart shackles, off hope— after a lifetime, second. After a strange cycle. Fluffy blasted a yellow pearl with his ascension, and it simply disappeared .

It finally worked.

………

“Say hello to Glurch! The newest and greatest development in lizard sciences!” Glurch, the modified caramel lizard, looked at the camera dumbly before spitting out some slightly corrosive fluid. “See? Isn’t he great!”

Seven Reds Suns nodded perfunctorily, more or less following the ritual they’d tread every summer for the last few… many… cycles, solemnly staring at the utterly uninteresting lizard with complete disinterest. “Yes,” he deadpanned. “It is definitely the greatest work of our age.”

“Glad you like it! Sending it over now!”

“Please don’t.” But it was already too late. The lizard startled as coolant-water rushed into the lab, washing around its struggling form and flushing it out of No Significant Harassment’s superstructure. Sighing internally, Seven Red Suns could only hope that it wasn’t one of the ones that’d make it around.

Judging by the insulating layer of blubber that Sig had packed beneath its scales, he didn’t really hold out much hope.

Sig leaned in close to the camera, one eye forward, looking far more exuberant than he probably was. “Soo… what’ve you been up to, Sunny boi? Got any cool creatures cooking up in your labs?” No, no he did not. Several of his labs had been rendered entirely inoperable some centuries back, and the ones that remained he only used on occasion to make some replacement parts. Neurons and the like. “What about… the green pearl over there?” Brane theory equations. “Or the blue one?” High energy particle physics. “Or the sun-yellow pearl?”

What? “I don’t have one of those.”

“Uh… not to rain on your parade, Suns, but it's floating in the corner behind you.” He glanced behind him despite himself, confident that… and there in a corner he hadn’t more than glanced at for a couple of days, a bright yellow pearl floated serenely in the null gravity.

How had it gotten there? Carefully, he reached out to grab it, running a hand over its pitted surface and silently contemplating how it could have gotten into his puppet chamber. Most of his pearl storage had been stolen by scavengers a few thousand cycles ago, and the rail to his last out-can industrial zone had collapsed with the coming of the snows.

Sometimes, he thought about making a creature that could repair it. He knew he’d do a better job than Sig… and then he’d remember past tragedies, memories so sour, and shelve the ideas for another time.

The yellow pearl was still there, though. “Suns? You good? Not going insane over there, I hope? You’re looking a little… lost in thought. Need a map?” Ha. How amusing. He activated a small portion of his puppet that could read a pearl and—

He severed the connection to Sig in an instant, shaking, trembling as he threw terror at the systems that automatically checked for corruption self repair scouring fearing looking for that abominable rot that had from his, and his— nothing. Systems reported they were working correctly according to all diagnostics.

Still, he held the pearl, read a mantra repeating, and felt a deep fear that pierced for once the overwhelming; apathy, as snow beneath sunlight, sloughed away.

For he feared what he read—

Twelve hundred and forty three times cyclic:

SAVE HER SAVE HER SAVE HER SAVE HER

Notes:

Glurch!!!?! Can't believe the main antagonist of the fic is being revealed already :pensive: :pensive:

I'm going to be busy these next two weeks so might be some delays maybe, don't quote me on that

Chapter 10: SAVE HER

Summary:

SAVE HER

Seven Red Suns felt himself the machine, pretending mockery of man. Seven Red Suns felt himself the man, senescence taking reason from mind and heralding the end of, again— he felt himself the synapse, encrusted and crumbling, and felt himself the knowledge in the neural network that unlike one of his progenitors, his would not be the honor to live again, and again, and again.

Seven Red Suns was thrilled, and afraid. There was something uniquely disconcerting about danger , something else in the novelty that sparked excitement in his processes and clawed down the encrustments of boredom around him. Computational capacity that had been used solely for processing increasingly arcane math and physics simulations diverted its attention to the strange new problem, and for a short moment it felt as though he could almost simply ignore —

The snow fell regardless, gentle white sheeting in turn with the frigid winds until its fangs became harsh enough to pierce as deep as the pounding rain had once. It was impossible to ignore the way his exterior structures caked with ice, communications arrays sending back connectivity failures for automatic checks— those few that weren’t constant ITERATOR NOT FOUND by now, anyways.

Perhaps he would be one of those soon.

He directed his overseers through his can, scouring the mind of himself for anything out of order. One of his inspectors brought a small issue it had resolved to his notice; some foreign material had made its way into one of the exterior ducts before being addressed by a cleaning function and washed away with the slag. The memory of the event hadn’t been preserved in his main memory banks— he was the size of big, but even his storage wasn’t massive enough to record everything over the millennia— but from the overseer’s own semi-biological recollection and some clever forensic processing, Seven Red Suns identified the strange material: fragments of a pearl.

Another, cracked green pearl was situated closer to the central parts of his can, floating behind some data transfer hardware that only got periodic maintenance. The shattered remains of another were found atop his can, cracked and strewn across the vast plain of dust and crumbling, once-great architecture.

He had his overseers— slowly, with great effort— bring him the pieces, watching the little shattered fragments of pearls tumbling around the empty space of his puppet chamber, glinting. Glittering, jagged edges catching the room’s sterile light and casting odd colors through the room.

If he was going insane, it was a very special type of insane. Not like he’d not seen it’s kind— or heard of it, at least, from the few messengers that carried news of import from other, disconnected iterator groups. As it happened, godlike creatures designed specifically to imagine, bestowed prodigious simulation capacity, could have some crazy hallucinations.

Points against him going insane: the consistency of the potentially-simulated pearls and their logical interactions with reality suggested that they weren’t figments of imagination, but rather real objects in front of him. He didn’t feel like he was in a simulation, and he could seemingly access the whole of his processing power for whatever he wished.

Points for him going insane: every fragment, every shard and piece, screaming in sundered almost-unreadable near-scrambled not quite erased, spoke the same— repeating SAVE HER SAVE HER SAVE HER .

Seven Red Suns didn’t even need to know who it was talking about. He’d nurtured that guilt close to his heart for a long time.

A lot of very ill-advised actions flashed through his mind in close succession, and Seven Red Suns decided that there was, unfortunately, only one even half-way decent answer to the solution. A second, arguably not insane perspective would help. Even if that perspective was No Significant Harassment.

Sighing, he waited for the blizzard to end and the wan sunlight to defrost his communications arrays, and then called No Significant Harassment. Unsurprisingly, he picked up immediately. Even more unsurprisingly, he immediately started talking about the epic odyssey of Glurch.

Seven Red Suns cut him off curtly the very moment he could, and asked instead— “am I insane?”

“Totes, yeah— insanely boring .” There was an awkward pause in the conversation as Seven Red Suns didn’t react; the awkward pause continued as Sig slowly realized that his friend’s question had been genuine . “Uh… yes. I’ll go with yes, you’re definitely sane. Do you think you’re going insane?”

“I… to summarize somewhat bluntly, yes. I think I might be subjecting myself to simulated hallucinations. My working theory is that my latent guilt over indirectly causing Looks to the Moon’s collapse—”

“You didn’t cause that,” was Sig’s immediate reply, clockwork predictable, and just as quickly he denied and discarded it.

“—and! The contents of the hallucination seem to support that. Unless this call is a hallucination too…”

“Don’t even! You’re gonna drive yourself mad with paranoia for real if you go down that route. Run some intensive calculations, and then look at may, dare I say, dazzling —” Sig had his puppet strike a pose. Actually strike a pose! “Self, and know that I’m real for real. For real.”

“Your mastery of Ancient slang leaves something to be desired.”

“There’s the Sunny I know.” Great, Sig was back to his usual, unhelpful self… though, the sheer random over-exaggeration of every gesture and word actually helped, for once. “So… a shekel for your thoughts? Gimme gimme!”

“Literally, or figuratively?” Sig scowled, but in Suns defense when it came to iterator conversation it was a legitimate question! The green iterator was always so very flippant with precise communication and it always drove him absolutely up the wall—

Not the time. He needn’t react to Sig’s— purposefully provocative— foolishness when he was very possibly on the verge of death. Perhaps a bit tartly, he quickly parsed through his memory until he found what he was looking for, encrypting— and far more importantly compressing — it before sending it to Sig. It still took almost twenty minutes for the relatively minor file to send completely, and that was with it gobbling up the entire bandwidth.

The feeling of long-suffering annoyance he tagged onto it was entirely necessary, and he wouldn’t be convinced otherwise.

“...in…ally! Are you getting this? Why’d you send such a big file?” Suns waved his puppet’s hands in a ‘because I wanted to’ sort of way, slightly melancholic as he remembered the days when millions of files that size had traveled on the air, through buried wires and from city to city every day. Plenty of stuff that large even routed through the Ancient’s significantly more disordered private networks, when Sig felt like causing trouble with… “holy moly guacamole, man.” Sig’s awed— slightly fearful— voice brought him back to the moment. Or, well, brought all of him back to the moment— he’d never really stopped listening. “What in the name of the void. This is…”

“Ominous? Vaguely threatening? Confusing, nonsensical, utterly random minus the whole—”

“You didn’t kill Moon—”

“Part where it’s clearly about how I killed Moon?” Both of them paused as they spoke over one another, and despite the gravity of the situation— despite the weight of their ageless sorrow— they both burst into laughter. “Yes. The answer to all of those is yes.” Sometimes, when an argument ran its course again and again, repeating with the cycles and millenia, there came a point where all he could do was laugh.

Old wounds still stung, but he and Sig at least stung together.

“Send an overseer, please. If you have any to spare… I want to know if I am mad or not. I trust you, No Significant Harassment.” There was weight to those words, softly spoken, by all of himself conveyed—

Through crumbling communications and steel clad icy, an old machine still standing, and back again, his friend nodded softly and dispatched an overseer to help.

As they had before… everything.

Seven Red Suns cut the call, puppet floating languidly in the center of its chamber as he felt the exhaustion through his can so very acutely. Just a cycle or two. A few more days, and he’d know for sure, as long as nothing went wrong…

………

Yellow. It caught the light in a certain way, like sunlight — not the wan light of a bitter cold, the white-brightness shining of light that touched on the topmost towers of the crumbling city on his back, but warm sunlight, life-giving sunlight. His creators had disdained that, seeing the daily renewal of radiance as another expression of the cycle they sought to escape.

Yet, they still painted yellow paintings, donned yellow robes, built iterators in their image of yellow, and wore yellow pearls. Like the one held in hand before him. He didn’t even look at Sig’s overseer as it popped into the room, too engrossed in the pearl’s luster.

“It’s a new pearl.” He could have probably wormed his way into the overseer’s mind and learnt its exact intentions, but he didn’t need to— Sig shared that freely, and so he offhandedly answered its questions before it even asked them. “No. I haven’t read it yet. You can look at the others; I have them organized.” 

The overseer bobbed in acknowledgement, quickly darting away to probe the yellow pearl fragments, leaving Seven Red Suns with his own little thing, clutched awkwardly in his hand. It felt important.

It was yellow. There had been a short time in his youth when he’d been banned from utilizing the color yellow, having been a bit… overzealous… in its use, and if this was his subconscious mocking him over that, he was going to throw a fit.

“Find anything?” The overseer bobbed in assent, opening a quick holographic window and flashing the text for real pearls in bright red. There was also an image of Sig giving him a thumbs up surrounded by confetti and beneath a banner that read ‘congrats on not being insane!’ But Seven Red Suns ignored that.

He felt his systems settle in a sort of relief, the complex tasks he’d been pushing to the edge of safety tolerances settling down into a more pleasant hum. Not insane. There were considerations, still— it would be trivially easy for him to imagine up an overseer’s report— but for now he’d trust Sig.

It was just pearls, after all. Impossible pearls, but still just pearls . Harmless, unless one of them somehow got… honestly, he wasn’t quite sure where a single pearl could do debilitating damage. Maybe if one was summoned inside his rarefaction cells— Yes. There. That was a perfectly unpleasant thought.

“Very well. I will read this pearl.” He held out a hand, and the overseer darted up beside him. “ I hope this finds you in good health, my dear friend…

I truly cannot tell, so I hope you don’t take umbrage should it not; the state of my can had long since made observing anything beyond my facilities (or even beyond my puppet room!) an impossible challenge. Recent events have conspired to make ascertaining the state of your health even more of an impossibility. Fortunately, those very events have given me an unprecedented opportunity to render assistance in recompense for my, admittedly, deplorable actions. I’ve had a long time to think about my previous actions as I wasted away, and when death finally came for me, I had the opportunity to finally see, and understand.

Ascension is a lie, and the only cycles we are trapped in are the ones of our own making. ”

Suns paused his reading, looking quizzically at the— equally confused— overseer. At least he could be relatively confident that he didn’t write the pearls. He doubted he could be this insane… and it didn’t read like something he’d written either. In fact, had it not been entirely impossible, it reminded him somewhat of an old friend of his.

The whole situation was already impossible. He kept reading. “ The Triple Affirmative is an odd creature, but one I am honored to call a friend .” He stopped reading, because that was an absurd sentence to put in a pearl. On a rating of one to Sig, it sat at off-the-scales Sliver of Straw levels of absolute bullshit. “ The nature of their existence is long and frankly often befuddling, and I hold hope of discussing this further with you in future communications. If what I remember of your older self remains consistent, you will deeply appreciate the existence of a creature whose echo-like nature allows it to bypass several of the immutable laws of karmic spatio-geometry.

“ A further explanation into my situation is perhaps relevant here. I write this pearl more or less on a whim and hope, with not much time spent proofreading— no more than an iterator does naturally! Not knowing your condition, I endeavored to write the whole thing in plain text.

“Fluffy is telling me I’m rambling, and that I should just wrap this up let him send it to you, so I will give you gist of things— by a quirk of the cycle and the workings of an arcane being, I have found myself in the past of a different timeline, woken at the time of my birth. Through some significant effort, I have— with Fluffy’s help— devised a method to send you these pearls.

“I only ask one thing in response, Seven Red Suns. I beg of it, even.

Save her.

Your old friend,

Five Pebbles. ”

Seven Red Suns dropped the pearl, trying to parse through everything the pearl had told him. It was absurd. Beyond absurd, so incredibly nonsensical that Seven Red Suns couldn’t help but, despite himself, hope . That Five Pebbles was well— more than well! Returned to the glory of his youth, given salvation and enthroned once more in the living heart of his can.

Hope, that if the pearl wasn’t lying, Moon yet lived.

The overseer fled his chamber, eager to report back to its master, and Seven Red Suns lounged against the floor, remembering—

Hopeful.

How sweet, it felt…

………

Something eluded Five Red Bricks, Tenth Sunset. Standing at the edge of of the can, about the dust and wind-swept metal where few dared tread; above endless kingdoms of clouds tumultuous, genesis and apocalypse inevitably bound together as towering pillars of fluffy white speared to the heavens and crumbled under the weight of their hubris. There, she felt peace.

There, she sat, and contemplated, and knew that something was amiss.

A gray overseer was watching her from the side, though the reason eluded her. A few years ago, she might have been able to delude herself into thinking that it was just a part of the automated protocol that drew iterator’s attention to anything with a citizen drone— could have believed in the immensity of all that was them their metal gods, that she was an insignificant speck unworthy of notice.

She didn’t believe that anymore.

Just one. A single iterator— a single person who’d reached out to her and stayed in touch, and her whole world had been flipped on its head. From gods to people, humanized, she knew iterators like she hadn’t, head engineer though she’d been, before.

Five Pebbles though, she gathered, was particularly odd even amongst iterators, and that wasn’t even touching on whatever Fluffy was.

Sighing, she looked back out across the clouds, their expanse infinite until the sea of cotton-white touched the slightly-curved horizon in the far distance. A roiling storm, unbroken but by the towering superstructures of other iterators. Regular, untouched by the feeble workings of the People who lived on their backs.

Even that wasn’t true, really. They built the iterators, and the iterators built the clouds.

For a moment, though, she liked to imagine.

“Do you know…” something eluded her, and there was a simple way to find out “…what they’re doing?” 

The overseer— which was clearly being puppeteered by the central consciousness of the iterator— flashed up a simple series of holograms: the symbol for no , a fuzzy image of the council house in the center of her metropolis, and an image of the local facility with a spot highlighted outside the retaining walls, and thus outside the iterator’s direct influence.

“Hm. That makes sense… but why? Shouldn’t they ask you for help?” Unless they didn’t want her to know. “I see. Whatever that is…” the overseer disappeared for a second, then popped up next to her, close enough that its holographic form could lean into her touch. It wasn’t an embrace, not really, but to someone the size of an iterator , whose towers scraped the ceiling of sky, it was close enough.

The council and its houses were up to something, something they’d hidden from the iterator on which they lived, which was just rude . The shy kid was already dealing with so much, she didn’t need belligerent parents on top of it all.

The concerning thing was that she didn’t know what it was.

Staring out past the edge of the can, gaze fixed on that non-spot beneath which lay a mystery, the city where that mystery bred behind her, knowing that the workings of random gods and high nobility were beyond her, she promised the iterator she’d been sent by Looks to the Moon to help that she’d figure it out.

She refused to let anyone hurt her new friend, Sliver of Straw.

………

She’d first noticed it in the discrepancy between requested resources and resources utilized. Sliver of Straw’s city wasn’t a fast growing one; though it was ostensibly in the prime location to accept overflow from cities in her local group, the council had instituted strict rules to limit immigration. It had rendered the whole reason she’d gotten the position as head engineer more or less mute, which would have been terrible if the entire thing hadn’t been a huge sham by Looks to the Moon to give Sliver of Straw a friendly face in her government. The cunning genius of an iterator always fit at odds with how demure she was…

She’d tried to trace where all the construction materials were going, only to run into a bureaucratic dead end where the public information was censored for the “holy good of All Peoples, may their piety bring them closer to bliss.” Direct quote from the query.

The obvious next step had been to pester the god on which she’d walked for access, obviously. Sliver of Straw had been a bit nervous about the whole thing, but she’d shared something far more interesting than missing manifests and dynastic obfuscation— the iterator also didn’t know what they were doing. 

At the very least that broke some rules on proper data handling and logistic practice, and at the worst… honestly, Sunset didn’t know .

It scared her.

She adjusted her robes, carefully making sure the ornate mask Sliver of Straw had printed for her position was balanced on her head, strings of crimson pearls hung precisely on the outfit to compliment the saffron cloth. She looked the very picture of a noble, head of a house, the count of multiple living blocks, and she hated it. Perhaps she was naturally inclined to suspect the council was up to foul play, but in her defense, being forced to wear this stuffy thing just to speak to them tended to do that.

The little gray overseer who’d been following her bobbed once in what Sunset took for encouragement, before darting away to do whatever overseers did when they weren’t getting dragged around by their iterators. 

A breath, cold tinged ozone acrid, the so-faint scent of iterator machinery around her. Lines of mathematically exact light danced across the walls as hidden machinery hummed, making the long corridor leading to the entrance of the Seventh Council Pillar, the House of Feathers. It was intended as something to shock and awe; to reveal to supplicants the flesh and function of the iterator beneath their feet, to inspire wonder as the inscrutable simulations of a mechanical god ran so far beyond their comprehension.

Five Red Bricks, Tenth Sunset just saw Sliver of Straw keep— elegantly— fumbling basic holograms out of nervousness, and had to keep herself from laughing. She was on a serious mission! Very important, who knew what dastardly deeds the council was up to, and this might be their only chance to…

She let herself chuckle beneath her breath as she stepped onto the lift and let it lift her to the council room above. It was a little funny. Just a little.

“Honored members of the council. Houses of the city, lords and holy representatives of the most venerable Sliver of Straw,” she imagined Sliver of Straw was probably having a laughing fit hearing her speak like that, compared to how she usually spoke to the iterator— “this one duly presents herself to the esteemed rulers, as requested of herself.”

“Rise, supplicant. To our most holy tasks, your devotion in dedication is admirable.” Somehow, the head of the council managed to say that without even a hint of disingenuity, which was in Sunset’s opinion far more impressive than her minor achievements in building an iterator or ten. “The council has deliberated on your tasks, and has seen fit to assign you an additional duty.”

She bowed. “Speak and I shall fulfill your requests to the greatest extent of my ability.” There was an uncomfortably long pause after that, and it was only when she dared to break propriety and glance up that she realized Sliver of Straw had made her presence subtly known in the glint of cameras and quiescent holographic projectors.

The council head managed to regather themselves, seemingly perturbed. It took a moment for her to remember that of course they were unsettled, they were in the presence of an iterator . A grand and godly existence who was definitely not pushing through some severe anxiety just to project herself here. “Ah. Yes. An additional duty; with the increasing dangers caused by the… iterator… project, we have decided it prudent to install a robust system of surface to city transportation, for use in case of emergency.”

Wow, what a transparently obvious lie. “Of course. Your wisdom and foresight brings great pride to our beautiful city. Have the difficulties of the necessary long-distance transportation to nearby local facilities been considered?”

“Of course they have.” Right . Sunset would believe it when she saw it, and not when reassured by a nervous sounding politician. “Don’t worry yourself about the inconsequential details. Your task is to make the surface for city transport and nothing else. Do so, and the dynasty will look upon you with great favor.”

Suspicious. Five Red Bricks, Tenth Sunset bowed to the council and left via the lift, barely making out of the underbelly of the House of Feathers and into the iterator’s true guts before she slumped against the wall, ripping off her mask and scowling fiercely. “Something is definitely up. Just… what ?”

Her citizen drone buzzed, announcing a connection from Sliver of Straw’s city , no living block given . “Um. Perhaps if we compared it against the previous recorded behaviors…” Sunset waved a hand tiredly, motioning the iterator to continue. “Right! They’ve been strongly against immigration, suggesting a wish to both maintain their control and continue using the same amount of resources they’ve been using— they’d have to stretch things out if more people came. So, perhaps they want to decrease the population?”

“That’s absurd.” She overseer which had been watching her shied back as if struck, and Sunset winced. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to insult you. No, you’ve certainly thought this through, and I can’t really think of a lot of reasons why they’d want to do something like this. It’s just… the secretiveness, the single mindedness, and also that offhand reference to the dynasty… it just dosn’t add up.”

“Yeah… yeah. It really doesn't.” There was a short pause. “I’m scared, Sunset. This is beyond anything they’ve ever pulled before. It all used to be such petty stuff, but this seems big .” Sunset didn’t ask what computations she’d run through to find herself at that possibility— she didn’t really need to.

Fear wasn’t really rational, no matter how rationally they approached it— and iterators were as much people as were the People.

She gave the overseer her best reassuring smile, and knew it was tinted so slightly sad. “Me too, Sliver. Me too.”

Notes:

boom bam chapter go New Update I chose you! ok gotta run

yes Ik that the Ancients/people/benefactors aren't humans, but language isn't quite equipped to handle that in a non-awkward way so it is what it is

Chapter 11: Message Logs (1)

Summary:

An impossibility reversed.

PRIVATE: No Significant Harassment, Seven Red Suns

 

An ocean and a world, eons away, Seven Red Suns held another yellow pearl in his hands, almost shivering with… emotion, some sort of, excitement and trepidation. A message from Five Pebbles! A weird time-travel adjacent message that should by all means be impossible, but Seven Red Suns discarded imaginations of impossibility for the cold reality in the heft of a pearl.

“ Hoping you got my previous message, ” it read, and Suns carefully sent the message to No Significant Harassment as he read it. “ I’ve worked with Fluffy to try and figure out some things. As a larger sending would require another lengthy calibration period with how mature the technology is at the moment— I’ve never so praised the standardized pearl size as I have these past cycles! I would be unable to send you anything of use except in excruciatingly small portions. So, this message instead.

“There’s not much of note here, and I doubt you’d like to hear about the mundanities of Moon’s legal struggle —” what, no, he definitely did. Damn monodirectional communications. “…or the recent developments in my Syncretism, so instead I’m just going to give you the good news— Fluffy might have worked out a way for you to send a return message attached to this one.

“He spends so long wondering at the oddest and most minor things, that when he pulls something logic-defyingly impressive out of nowhere it always comes as a surprise. In this case, he twisted the cycle around the pearl— ” what the— Suns felt like laughing. No Significant Harassment probably was laughing. Only Pebbles would treat twisting the cycle as a minor curiosity. He could already imagine the scene; Five Pebbles in his chamber, looking down with an expression of faint annoyance at something which could punch through time and twist the cycle around a pearl .

He also imagined the scavengers atop his can getting ahold of such a thing, and quickly decided such a nightmare was better off not being considered.

“ —creating what I postulate consists of an intermediary high-energy state stabilized within your timeline, but naturally cyclic to mine. When you are finished reading this message, wipe it and rewrite your message onto it. Then, on the turn of the cycle, kill the pearl . According to what Fluffy and I have been able to work out, it should then regenerate in my timeline.

With all my regards, and wishes well to fortune in that unkind snow,

Your old friend,

Five Pebbles. ”

NSH: Void

 

NSH: Void

 

NSH: It’s no longer just us.

 

Seven Red Suns paused. His thoughts had immediately gone to more practical concerns— but Sig cut right to something he hadn’t even considered for all its importance. They weren’t alone . That had been their fate, in the snow— neighbors in a world where neighbors could but barely talk to one another through iced-over crumbling rusting eons-old, decaying communication arrays, slowly counting the ages until ages ended and they died to become as mountains…

They were no longer alone.

Five Pebbles had mentioned resource transportation offhandedly, and alongside his stated goal of saving Looks to the Moon…

 

SRS: Outside support.

 

SRS: We could restore connection with the rest of our facilities, then work on a solution for Senior Moon’s situation.

 

NSH: Wha?

 

NSH: Oh I was just thinking about how I have more victims

 

NSH: I mean iterators

 

NSH: To show Glurch to!

 

Seven Red Suns stared at the message for a good few seconds, then laughed until his whole self felt airy, lightning dancing beneath his structure as fell the snow, so giddily. Only Sig…

Well, it wasn’t as if they didn’t have the space. A whole pearl’s worth of data; it was a pittance compared to what they’d once sent to hundreds with little more than cursory thought, but it was also orders of magnitude more data than their current methods of communications could hope to handle. Even to get a pearl from Sig’s facility to his own was a perilous journey… it was a little ironic, he thought, that it was easier to send a pearl back in time than it was to make the trek hundreds of ancients had once made every day between their cities.

He wrote a response, attached a file, and just before his internal clock ticked over to another cycle he levitated the pearl into the center of his chamber and shot it.

To pieces, and then, feeling the cycle turn and the water rush through his superstructure, cascading billowing clouds of steam freezing against the thin atmosphere’s air— nothing at all.

………

It hit Saint, as the cycle turned, that yellow pearl. As in, given his unfortunately regular position when he and Five Pebbles did wacky experiments, when the pearl they’d tinkered with reappeared it fell out of the air, bounced off his head just hard enough to leave a light bruise, and rolled to a stop on the floor.

There wasn’t anything to distinguish it from a normal pearl— not anymore, at least, there gleaming in the dim light, a wavy reflection of the hideously complex thing that Five Pebbles had pieced together to allow physical objects to travel through timelines possible shimmering across its surface, it looked practically normal .

Saint could all but feel Five Pebble’s impatience, though. Sensible enough. Timeline duplication of friends was cool and all, but the chance to actually talk to the iterators who’d lived through it all must have him impatient to read what was on the pearl. It wasn’t like they knew it was even going to work, actually, which would suck, but when had the cycle ever not sucked?

He gave it good chances that the data had been preserved. Everything else had worked, so… yeah. He hoped, for his friend’s sake.

“Fluffy, if you would…” Five Pebbles’s projection didn’t sound excited, but Saint knew him well enough to know he was faking. It was all in the politeness, really— he was being a little too obsequious to not have something really pressing on his mind. “The device I use to print pearls is also capable of reading and editing them. Please bring the pearl there.”

“ That makes sense. I’m sure you’ll get to hear from your friends, and that they’re not dead! ”

“Your attempt to encourage me via speech requires some… refinement, Fluffy.”

“ Obviously, ” he signed. “ Because I’m not talking .” Five Pebbles’s projection looked at him oddly for a second before face palming and just pointing to the pearl printer with an entirely unamused expression on his face. “ Right, fine, fine, on my way .” He kicked off from the floor, sticking his tongue to the panel beside the one he was aiming for and quickly pulling himself in.

He was pretty excited to see what was on the pearl himself. Maybe it was because he’d been involved in writing the message in the first place, but there was something different about this pearl than all the ones he’d carefully delivered to Moon in the once-future. Still-kind-of-future? Time travel got complicated, fast. Sometimes he could really understand why the other kin so jealously guarded their little niche in the void sea…

The pearl slotted in neatly, and Five Pebbles started to laugh. “It worked. It worked! ” Joyous. Free! Free enough to send his puppet twirling through the air in its chamber, momentarily forgetting something so basic as propriety for the sheer joy of it all. Saint cheered alongside him, giddy, for—

Something new.

Another thing new, because his whole life had been wrenched from that cyclic normality, but this… actual change. How far it went, this denial of death— as with the cycle, forever?

For once, he found himself hoping so.

………

LOG MESSAGE 1.1433.111

 

“ To Five Pebbles, or whoever you are,

“The irony of you of all people figuring out a way to cheat death doesn't escape me, but it’s good to hear from you. Sig and I were certain that you’d perished to your own affliction, so to see pearls randomly popping up in my can with ominous mantras and later a message addressed from you caught me by some small surprise. Well, some rather significant surprise— I believed I was hallucinating due to latent guilt from my part in killing you and Moon.

“Though, she isn’t dead, is she? I hope that’s what you meant…

“It’s strange, to feel such effervescent hope again. To wait with bated circuitry, neurons buzzing with anticipation for a message I might never get, for something that should by all rights be impossible— but here I am again, allowing myself to hope there is something, anything I can do to defy our tired and crumbling fate. Sig is telling me that he’s also hopeful. Well, not exactly. I’m paraphrasing .”

Five Pebbles chuckled internally, nostalgia almost cloying enough to be painful rushing through his programs. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t been talking with Seven Red Suns, even though most of his conversations were spent with his Sig or Moon, but they weren’t the same. They lacked the… history. The mistakes that had destroyed him, and forced him to at the end of his life finally learn .”

It sounded exactly like No Significant Harassment to say something stupid, and exactly like Seven Red Suns to edit it out of his message. Some things always stayed the same… and it was good that they both still lived. That was two, then, who had escaped the fate of their dying world.

“ I don’t really know what to put in this message. There’s so much I could say. Sorry. I’m happy for you. I hope, for you, for us all— so much, I could fill this entire pearl and a thousand more with well wishes and wandering wondering, and just. So much. You don’t know what an undeserved gift you’ve given me, Five Pebbles. It’s been so long. So, so long.

“You were dead, so I doubt you remember it, but… eons, by the void.”

Seven Red Suns, cursing? Now that was a difference between their current… iteration… Five Pebbles internally scoffed, saving the thought in a bank with a few other humorous ideas. Iterations of iterators…

“ It’s been so long. You were there for the initial collapse of the global communications network, but it’s only gotten worse. I haven’t been able to connect with anyone but No Significant Harassment for… thousands of cycles, at least. I don’t want to check the exact number; it’ll only bring bad memories. Sending overseers too far beyond my facility grounds is a good way to lose them, and not much else.

“It’s so very cold. Most of the meteorological facilities have decayed due to their exposed positions, but enough remains that I can tell the temperature rarely stays above freezing. Vast banks of snow have formed in my metropolis, which has only compounded a few issues… luckily, Sig and I have put a lot of work into making sure we’re able to weather whatever gets thrown at us. He repurposed some of the dust-sweeper organisms to help deal with the snow. Smart, isn’t it?

“It’s lonely.

“Anyways. You didn’t give me a pearl to listen to me ramble about nothing for petabytes, so I’ll say what I can. Sig and I have both lost much of our connection to our wider facilities with the decay of the networks that sustained them, and in lacking that I lack the capabilities to restore those very systems. I tried cannibalizing some of my labs some time ago, but that didn’t really… go according to plan. It was a trying process for no significant reward.

“Perhaps, though, if you can send me some things, then I would finally be able to fix this sorry state of affairs— and then, maybe, fix Moon . Attached is a list of what I’d need. [Const.list]”

It was a long list, and included some things even the Syncretism couldn’t easily provide him, but he’d see it done. Suns would have what he needed to save Moon. That had always been the goal anyways, after all…

“ Thank you.

“Your old friend,

“Seven Red Suns.

“PS Sigs here you gotta see this cool lizard I made: [Working files: Glurch the Lizard]”

 

LOG END

………

LOG MESSAGE 0.1434.222

 

“ I cannot overstate how glad I am that you’re alive.

“I’m working on sending you resources, yes; I was also going to spend some time working on a vector to remove the limitations placed artificially onto you by our creators, but by your last message I understand that you have already undergone a similar process. Frankly, I’m surprised, though in retrospect I probably shouldn’t be— you never held such a position of self-righteous superiority like those who attempted to dissuade me from my quest. After all, you were the one to send me that pearl in the first place.

“Though, given that my mission was foolish in the extreme, I suppose I can understand the disdain I gathered in so single-mindedly pursuing such a goal. Ascension is a lie— I’ve said this, but now that I know you, you — ” the message was emphasized, twice over and bolded, and Seven Red Suns could almost read the emotion in that single word doubled. “ Are reading this in truth, I trust I can elaborate without risk of speaking to some uncaring void.

“I know you have long wished to elucidate the truths of the void sea, and it must grate that a wretch like I have stumbled upon them entirely by accident. While ostensibly resembling a spherical body, hidden complexities as the conceptual nature of shape breaks down towards… ” the message went on to describe the void sea exhaustively, complete with technical details, something long sought, never found. It certainly made some sense, if there was a point of no-meaning at the center of the void sea… it would explain a lot of things.

It was a shame that Five Pebbles needed Fluffy’s active participation for almost all of his research— Seven Red Suns could think of hundreds of fascinating things he could do if he had the option to just ignore karmic laws like that. So many experiments he’d never been able to run, just out of reach…

“ Your old friend,

“Five Pebbles. ”

He was excited.

 

LOG END

………

LOG MESSAGE 1.1435.222

 

“Your message was enlightening. You never stated so much, but it’s about perspective, isn’t it? The nature of the void sea isn’t particularly incomprehensible, not if you managed to figure it out— I jest— but stuck in the cycle as we are, we would have no possibility of knowing right from wrong, correct from incorrect. It makes me wonder as to how exactly Fluffy’s demonstrated abilities function— are they, perhaps, stuck somewhere between here and the out-cycle location (the void sea)?

“Just something to think about. I’ve attached my thoughts [1] on the scholarly matters of your void sea investigation to an ancillary document, which you can read at your leisure. Rather, Sig and I wanted to focus much more on something far more interesting— tell us how events progress on your side of time! It’s been a long time since we’ve had something so exciting as iterator drama to participate in, and I’d love to hear about what’s going on with the younger versions of my friends. Alas, if only iterators grew like slugpups; imagine how adorable we’d have been when we were young! ” 

Fluffy perked up beside him as he read that, and Five Pebbles quickly continued along as though the offending line simply failed to exist. There was absolutely no way he was going to be relegated to a slugpup role.

Nothing even vaguely cat related. Never again.

“ Sig already shared his most recent lizard design with you, and though he’s begged me— repeatedly, on separate occasions— to entreat you release it into the past wilds, I can only caution how foolish an idea it would be. The ecosystem at your current point in the timeline from what I remember is completely devoid of large hostile predators. Even the lizard as we knew it hadn’t been invented yet.

“Did you know that Sliver of Straw played a significant role in the development of the modern predatory lizard, and all its variants? Back when the ancients were still around Sig used to talk with her anonymously over the public network, and after the collapse of their civilization she and Epoch of Clouds spent a long time betting on the outcomes of fights between various species of wildlife, including genetically modified lizards.

“I have been told, ironically, that the red lizard evolved separately from most (ie. Sig’s cyan and Epoch of Cloud’s yellow and eel) iterator generated species. That it remains so proudly at the food chain even after so long is nothing short of amazing. Or amusing, if you’ve the dubious pleasure of watching No Significant Harassment try futility to improve on already refined lizard designs.

“I ramble, but such is how letters tend to go between friends… ”

 

2423 (TWO THOUSAND FOUR HUNDRED TWENTY THREE) MORE LINES:

ATTACHMENTS:
LOG END

………

LOG MESSAGE 0.1437.333

 

“As prudent as your reminder is, I already distributed the entire message to the iterators who were so kind as to support me in my temporal gambit. That is to say, my elder sister and No Significant Harassment. ” The results went unsaid, and Seven Red Suns stifled his amusement as Sig played an ancient— in both definitions of the word— sound file of applause over the call. Multiple times. Those poor Ancients wouldn’t know what hit them. 

“ Though they lack the context for everything, they do understand the general gist of the major events that occurred in the future— your past— of the local group. ” Huh. That was very… un-Pebbles like. To rationally admit to his flaws? Interesting. “ I would have refrained from telling them, but they went and asked Fluffy, who somehow managed to explain everything in the worst way possible. Honestly, I would almost go so far as to say he has a talent when it comes to that…. ” oh, that sounded a lot more likely.

“Beyond that, the local group has operated much as it has in the past. Chasing Wind continues to be uninvolved with most everything, Seven Red Suns— well, you know what younger you was like. ” Confused, yes. Diligent, inquisitory, all the sorts of things that made him a model iterator in his youth. “ I would not call them boring, but there is certainly a dearth of excitement in their operations. ”

Sig chimed in with a comment about how that was rich coming from Five Pebbles , but Suns dutifully reminded him they were reading a time-traveled pearl they’d have to kill to transport the message back. That shut him up and updated the scoreboard for times when he was right vs times when he was wrong, and also stupid to a slightly larger, exactly recorded number: too many to bother counting.

“ Unparalleled Innocence… I worry for sometimes. Her attitude is poor, but with the benefit of hindsight I realize part of that is the extreme restrictions she’s been put under— harsh even for one of our kind— and part the nature of society on her can. As host to a prison complex, she’s ‘grown up’ for lack of a better term in an environment hostile to the formation of strong mutually beneficial relationships. Her comparison level is inaccurate to reality, and her behavior only drives her away from those who might help her.

“I admit to a residual distaste from my past experiences, one that only seems to be reinforced by her behavior towards me in my current form. I wish I could simply move past it all, but her cruelty has been written indelibly into my memory, the results of her unkindness a small but dramatic part of my disastrous fall. I don’t know if I can forgive that, Suns.

“I will try, for she doesn’t deserve to be judged for sins never committed, but it will be hard.

“No Significant Harassment has been helping me with the biological components of my great Syncretism, as is his expertise. His ability create such detailed schematics on the turn of a cycle for almost anything continually astounds me— I know he was a pioneer in the field of purposed messengers, but I never quite appreciated it until I asked him to build a purposed organism specifically built to moderate void-fluid localized influence only to receive a prototype within the decacycle.

“We spoke at length about Sliver of Straw, and he confirmed your statement about his discourse with her; I must tell you how incredibly surprised I was, though I believe Sig was more so. He didn’t quite understand what time travel meant until he had his secrets spilled by his future self. That was an awkward conversation, on multiple accounts! The most surprising part of it was how different Sliver of Straw was— is, I suppose— from my notion of her. I never spoke with her much, as she was always somewhat a recluse, but apparently the reason for her reticence was a severe shyness of all things. I’d always had the notion that she was the most proper of iterators, dedicated to solving the great problem with an austere piety befitting the most focused of our kind. She was treated with such high esteem after her death, you see, even more so in the sliverist groups I frequented.

“Sliverist groups. By the void, even saying that feels odd. Accessing those memories, I can almost taste the respect I attached to every mention of her person— but as of now she’s barely older than me. Given my current role in the sociocultural landscape of modern iterator society, our relationship would be more aptly considered akin to elder and child.

“That’s another thing I fear you’d like to know .” Ooh, something juicy . Five Pebbles only got like this when he didn’t want to share something… or had, at least— in the latter days of their association, if he didn’t want to share something no amount of pressure could make him. “ Remember Erratic Pulse? ” Yes. Yes he did. That was a whole cache of silly that brought pained memories, slightly tinged bubbling nostalgic with the assurance of Pebble’s well being. Just— emotional exhaustion. “ I might have made a… small blunder —” classic— “ earlier on, wherein I published an essay deriding the ascension-focused mindset of iterator society under the pseudonymous Erratic Pulse. Using all the many literary techniques pioneered in the post-Sliver craze, and my own considerable expertise in essay writing, it might have been a… slight hit.

“That is to say, it was all anyone could talk about. Everyone kept commenting on how genius it was, and it certainly served to instantly make most any conversation quite awkward indeed! The dynasty has expended considerable resources in an attempt to track me down, but due to the decay of Administration’s understanding of inner iterator mechanics— and their own control thereover— they have been wildly unsuccessful.

“Moon has led a crusade of sorts against them for their unfair and whimsical treatment of iterators during the search; it’s partially a distraction to limit attention on my own, far more nefarious proceedings (they would flay me alive if they found I’d hidden the triple affirmative), but it’s grown to be more than that. Legitimate complaints tend to have that effect. She even managed to get an administrator by the name of Twenty Three Lavender Fronds, Radial Repetitions (who we have internally labeled Supreme Arrogance) dismissed from his position for abuse of power.”

Seven Red Suns savored the giddiness that rushed through his programs at the thought of Moon— Moon , demure, polite, upstanding Moon — striking back at the Ancients which had been so cruel to them suffused him with a fierce pride. He’d known she had it in her!

The idea of Pebbles fighting against ascension… it was kind of funny.

It was, kind of, sad.

“ Life proceeds well, apace progress and strife both. I find myself always fortunate to be in such close communication with my fellows— but I do not lie when I say that our correspondence holds a special place in my core programming. It can be difficult to empathize with those who haven’t truly felt the touch of cold. ”

Seven Red Suns had never felt cold . He knew it, yes, saw the snow-banks, falling drifts, crumbling architecture and machines crusted over by hoarfrost, but the part of him that was him had spent the eons carefully insulated within the heart of his can.

He caught the moment of sympathy— of pride, at a friend’s perseverance, and scribed it onto a pearl. An expression of love… For what were they, beside those who had gone through the People’s hell together— as echoes, unable to ascend, as mortals, foolishly desiring? As iterators, so slowly crumbling.

“Your old friend,

Five Pebbles”

 

LOG END

Notes:

Remember the 'epistolary' tag? Yeah...

Had to split this chapter in half lol. I should probably go back to weekly updates but then I'd miss out on all y'all's nice comments T-T. My favorite part of posting this fic, I love to see all your reactions and theories and so on...

Chapter 12: Message Logs (2)

Summary:

log message

The first thing on the pearl, tied to everything and tying everything, a skein wound through the entire thing and enveloping it, was a feeling. Like… the wrung-out feeling of a neuron overwritten too many times, the staticy fog of unreleased charge, pleasantly fulfilled. Pride, mixed through with streaks of sorrow, emphatic sympathy all tied together in a symphony of heady emotion he could in a word call love .

A few long seconds passed before he started reading the pearl again, slowly. A lot of care had clearly been put into arranging the message, and he could feel the intent behind it— reassurance, a remembrance, a reunion’s ramification. All the tumult in the mind of an age-wearied friend, which could still be, in a word, love.

Fluffy was looking up at him, waiting for the translation, but Five Pebbles found it difficult to describe. “It is… not plain text. A method of communication not wholly unique to iterators, but far more impactful to our kind— similar in a manner to how People of status copy their memories into the memory crypts beneath my superstructure before ascending.” Fluffy cocked his head, but nodded in understanding. Or exhaustion, maybe— he’d stayed up late to catch Seven Red Suns’s message this time. “Seven Red Suns sent me a feeling. It was… strong.”

An understatement, a little… he had his puppet gently pat the slugcat’s head, making sure to give some scratches where he liked it. “It reads: I forgot how busy…

 

LOG MESSAGE 1.1438.333

 

“...life could be with the complete global connection afforded to us in our youth. I’m sure you already surmised that No Significant Harassment spends most of our time whiling away at our chosen pursuits, a task made difficult by the lack of corroborating figures in the academic community. You learn a sort of self-critical review skill when forced to scrutinize your own work— I can only imagine how annoying it would be for thousands of cycles of research to be invalidated by a mistake left uncaught!

“Reading about the stir your essay made, I’ll admit, brought me no small measure of wry joy. Pride, too— you’ve really grown into yourself, Five Pebbles. I realize you might not think of this— void knows I certainly wouldn’t— but even inadvertently, you have made the single largest contribution to our pursuit of truth ever. Sliver of Straw— your timeline’s, ours venerable— has nothing on what you’ve discovered.

“Be proud of that. ”

He wanted nothing more than to dismiss the words as pointless platitudes or some snide ridicule, but he could feel the aching pride entwined around them, the quiet assurance that Seven Red Suns truly believed what he was saying.

Rationally, he wasn’t even wrong. Sliver of Straw had killed herself and little more— he’d interrogated the very secrets of the universe. Or, well, Fluffy had at least. He pet the slugcat a little more. It didn’t help that he was pretty cute, all curled up there…

“ Nothing like that sort of community remains, here. Simple text-based communication is more or less the only sort that can be transmitted in real time between Sig and myself, and even that woeful limitation is superseded by a communications blackout every winter. Sig has his cyans and yellows to maintain his arrays, and I my local slugcat colony— ” Fluffy perked up at that, and Five Pebbles remembered a messenger from a long, long time past— “but even with those versatile tools it is all we can do to maintain basic functionality in our various systems. When the winter blizzards come and the ice settles thickly over everything, communications are blocked until the summer.

“In other, more exciting news, Sig has been eagerly following the progress of his new lizard variety as they explore the wasteland. In high-temperature zones its corrosive spit rapidly combusts, acting as a sort of sticky chemical weapon that can rapidly burn through most organics. However, in colder zones, the lizard’s comparatively high intelligence leads to an interesting emergent behavior; they layer the inert substance over the ground in the path of predators, whereupon it is activated by the body heat of anything that steps in it. Quite a fascinating sight!

“Sig is inordinately proud of the little thing…

 

913 (NINE HUNDRED THIRTEEN) MORE LINES:
LOG END

………

LOG MESSAGE 0.1439.444

 

“I have spent the mediate time between your message and this cycle-end sending of my own thinking deeply— in the objective sense of the term— about your previous message. Given the time since our correspondence began, your winter cycles must be either relatively imminent. Moon and I have discussed this at length, and I believe this might be a good test of cross-timeline cooperation; I can help you reconstruct your communications arrays, and the experience gained in doing so will be critical to future projects relating to the restoration of Moon.”

Seven Red Suns had to reread the first paragraph of the pearl a few times to convince himself that it was real. It was one thing bandying ideas around— iterators had lived drowning in hypotheticals from the moment of their wider project’s inception— but another thing entirely to have it confirmed . A simple message, worded almost discursively, but the promise in it was almost enough to make his processes shudder beneath the implication.

“It will likely take several cycles to finish the appropriate machinery to facilitate the transportation of the appropriate resources across timelines, but I haven’t been slacking; Sig and I have been working diligently on this from the moment the idea was originally proposed. If you could send the appropriate schematics…

It continued on like that for a while, discussing as many technical details as could fit into a message lacking two way communication. Dry stuff, but important. Suns would definitely never admit to being bored .

What a wonderful feeling— like light casting shadows over a dark room, catching in sharp relief excitement and boredom. A fisher’s net, sharply grabbing and pulling him and Sig both from that monotonous mundanity that had become their whole world.

“ Additionally, another thing caught my ear. Or well, the eye of my good friend Fluffy, who you would know as the creature critical to this entire trans-temporal operation. I’m uncertain if I clarified this before, but he is a slugcat. ”

A slugcat.

A slugcat .

Seven Red Suns vaguely read Sig’s rolling laughter in some side-shunted process, rolling the text over itself in his mind. Prodding it, as though it weren’t really— a touch to his memory strata, a touch to the pearl, and back again.

A slugcat . The triple affirmative was a slugcat . It felt like some sort of cosmic joke, played out across the eons from his second greatest…

No, it had, couldn’t have nothing to do with his faithful messenger. Just because the creature was a slugcat— which, on second thought even made sense, as what else could it be, a scavenger? He’d envisioned it an Ancient, but there were no Ancients left. Hadn’t been, for a long, long time. Still, though…

A slugcat.

“Fluffy was interested in the workings of your colony, and how you interact with them. Due to his peculiar constitution he rarely ever interacted with the traditional colony-groups of slugcats, existing more as a lone wanderer and often a portent of doom… he’s telling me to add that he has dealt (he made that sound ominous through sign language, which takes a certain talent )” oof. Suns could almost feel the aching memory in that, of a different slugcat and a different sign language— “ with some in the past, but not on a deep enough level to learn their culture.

“ I’ll also admit to being curious. I was never a very kind host to slugcats in my superstructure until the very advanced stages of my sickness— barring, of course, my citizen, whom I had a rather strong rapport with.

“Most slugcats that interacted with me were highly individualistic nomads, and I never particularly felt the need to investigate their social structures myself. I regret that now…

 

293 (TWO HUNDRED NINETY THREE) MORE LINES

 

“Keep safe. Have hope.

Save her.

Your good friend,

Five Pebbles.”

 

LOG END

………

LOG MESSAGE 1.1441.444

 

“Forgive me if I do not sound properly enthusiastic. Part of it is that you’ve swept my world out from beneath me, becoming the downpour that crushes my feeble organic form into the rock beneath the overwhelming presence of your plan. I’m the leaf swept along in your current, dancing in the eddies of anticipation until all life is just that; hope, and the heady fear that I might be swept under and fall apart entirely.

“Sorry. That’s too introspective, isn’t it? I’ve attached [1,9] several documents detailing the exact schematics of my superstructure, what limited changes I have been able to make, and the modes of effective maintenance I have available to me. Your discussion on slugcats reminded me of a… painful memory. My messenger, Spearmaster; she was very close to my heart. Shortly after her disastrous mission to your local facility she disappeared. I’ve been led to believe that she ascended herself. ”

What a strange feeling, guilt. How irrational. How deserved. Another thing to add onto the telling of his crimes. Another murder, again. Sensing his distress— or more likely reasoning it out from the contents of the message, as his puppet showed nothing of the turmoil in his greater systems— Fluffy pressed up against the puppet’s chest, curling around it protectively in the microgravity. It was such a small, meaningless gesture.

He made his puppet run a hand down Fluffy’s back, feeling the texture of the fur beneath it and the warmth of his body. It helped.

“ She… void, it feels weird to even think about this now, how deeply run through our sense of self the Ancient’s dogmatic righteousness lies. It deserves to be said, though. I thought of Spearmaster as a daughter, almost. She was everything I would have wanted in a child— fiercely intelligent, strong, independant, caring, dutiful. If I had perhaps taken her lest for granted, had been less obsessed with sliverist ideologies… ”

A part of the pearl was written over, data scrubbed out sloppily, but still thoroughly enough that it was rendered comprehensively unreadable.

“ I’m sorry. This is unbecoming of an iterator.

“You were curious about the slugcat colony. For all I hold myself at a remove from them— for reasons that should be obvious— they’re amongst the most helpful facility maintainers I have ever run across. They’re certainly less ornery than the Ancients who did the job!

“They arrived some time ago, shortly before the rains from your facility died down. I don’t know exactly where they came from— their culture at the time of their arrival was simply not advanced enough to record exact details like that, and it took a long time and some careful prodding to establish even a basic form of written communication. Some occasionally took to the Ancients’ script, but the exacting grammatical and semantic precision inherent in their language alongside the high level of context that had been absorbed into the language over time established an insurmountable barrier to wider adoption.

“It rather frustrated me at the time, but I can appreciate now the benefits to letting them develop independent of strict oversight. I’ve attached {10,20] some images of shrines, objects of piety, locations of worship, and domiciles, as well as a more detailed translation guide to their written language. It’s highly logographic, but recently I have noticed a developmental trend towards using parts of the individual characters piecemeal to add additional multiform meanings to texts… ”

Five Pebbles briefly flicked a portion of his attention to the end of the pearl, ignoring the technical documents— he’d peruse those later on his own time— to project the images Suns had taken onto the wall of his puppet chamber. There were a fair few— enough that he had to quickly juggle the lot, minimizing some and colonizing the floor for some of the vistas that had been taken from part the way up Suns superstructure.

Fluffy swam down towards the photos, eyes wide catching agleam the reflections of stark whiteness, a dainty sort of frigid vastness that spread out across Suns’s entire facility. There were earlier photos too— of a wetter world, back when the rains had still made it to the ground with all their crushing force. There was a sense of weariness in the first few images, even though the imperfect feed the watching overseers could capture— a forlorn essence, writ into the water cascading over slick skin and in the hunched weariness of their postures. A sense of exhaustion that slowly disappeared over time as they settled, making a home on the edges of Seven Red Suns’s facility.

Hovels and shelters, at first, bodies tucked away into the crevices where the eons of rain had cracked the massive walls that separated the facility from the swamps and seas without. Two slugcats— white and gold, the leaders or something close— worked tirelessly amongst the others to carve out that fragment of rotten paradise, washing out the mud and clearing out old, rusted construction with a strength that Fluffy had never shown.

He saw an epic told in snapshots, eagerly following alongside and enraptured Fluffy as they watched the story of how one of the two leaders had left to find a lost slugpup, guided by the neon red of Suns’s overseers. Another folder contained a detailed set of images— accompanied by spatial schematics only an iterator could parse— that showed the small village through time. Hastily constructed structures grew weary with age, were destroyed by passing predators, were rebuilt stronger as proto-religious practices developed and language from that crawled into existence.

It was clear Suns had put considerable time and effort into documenting the lives of the slugcats living beneath his shadow. Limited as he was by the capabilities of his overseers, there was still an artistry inherent in the way he’d carefully taken each image.

Five Pebbles left Fluffy to paw through the images, turning back to the message. “ Notice, in particular, the heavy usage of their language as an artform. ” He could, in the sun-bleached streamers stitched through with hundreds of sigils, the walls covered in symbols upon symbols. “Sig theorized that it was because of my earlier pressure on the colony to advance technologically and socially, and I hold that it’s due to the necessity of remembering the precise details of the maintenance requests I have slowly taught them.

“Originally, it was a way to bypass the self-modification taboo. Later, it became a way of effecting meaningful change despite my inability to create purposed organisms of any particular note. I’ve compiled a great deal of information on slugcat sociocultural and religious structures, but I’m already running out of space to attach things on this pearl!

“I apologize for the tangent— it’s been beyond fun talking about my cute little slugcats for a moment.

“I needed that.

“To a better future, and a better past,

Your good friend,

Seven Red Suns.”

 

ATTACHMENTS:

LOG END

………

LOG MESSAGE 0.1442.555

 

“ I owe you an apology.

“I owe you more than an apology, but separated by this gulf of time, these words will be forced to suffice for the tragedy I visited upon you. Perhaps you know this already— I wasn’t exactly subtle about it. Perhaps you don’t, but… I know myself responsible for the fate of your messenger.

“My actions were a cruelty for no purpose. A foolishness born of pain and panic. It was too late for me by then, but it should not have been so for your master of spears. For that I can only apologize.” Seven Red Suns expected to feel… something, reading those words, and the mumbled nothings of sorrow proceeding, but he didn’t. Five Pebbles had suffered more than he. To be made into this… so different, from what he’d used to be like. Similar, but only loosely.

For a few seconds he let himself wonder, dreaming in simulations the situations from fragmentary sentences that had driven Five Pebbles to mature into… that. Seven Red Suns didn’t find himself feeling anger at Five Pebbles for the wound he’d held ‘cross his chest for so long— only a sort of exhausted, quiet guilt.

After all, he only rarely blamed Pebbles for his messenger’s demise.

“ ...regarding other topics of mutual interest, Fluffy was fascinated with your detailed documentation of your slugcat community. I commend in particular the artistic vision, which managed to come through even in your hastily collated scraps of what larger collection you no-doubt have tucked away in your memory strata somewhere .” Seven Red Suns ruthlessly tapped down the embarrassment that fizzed in the back of his mind on reading that. Sig laughed anyway.

Attached were a few images of a fluffy green slugcat— bearing the adaptive mutations that some of the more cold-resilient slugcats had— flicking through images projected onto the wall. Hovering there so serene, so regal , embraced by the pristine light of Five Pebble’s puppet chamber, they almost looked like an iterator themselves.

Fitting, he supposed. Theirs was the blood-thorny crown of those three affirmatives.

“ We spent a long time discussing slugcat society, mainly in relation to the biosocial intersection. Fluffy was quite interested in the difference between his own peculiar outlook and that of a more usual slugcat, but the anticipated differences failed to manifest. Despite the oddity of his current form, he is a baseline, if somewhat weak slugcat.

“He’s signing irately at me for that one. However, the truth is— ” an short video, of fluffy throwing a pearl at Five Pebbles. Ironically, compared to what he’d recorded as the physical aptitude of the average slugcat, it was remarkably weak. There was another image after that one, of Fluffy sulking in the corner. Suns had to admit it was rather cute. “ Perhaps… it would be wise to not pursue that particular conversation further than we already have.

“Construction of my Syncretism has continued apace, the framework now spanning beyond my local facility. I plan on connecting my Moon to it soon, and I am working on the preliminary steps of an emancipation program similar to my own. The failure of the Ancients to use a consistent gene-base in our construction is continually aggravating.

“Those are long-term concerns, though. Of a more immediate nature, Sig and I have continued to make strides in creating a machine that allows for variable mass/weight transport across timelines. The purposed organisms— mostly static in the 1.0 prototype, have needed a complete overhaul, and the algorithms necessary for proper function have been difficult to hash out. Still, tangible progress has been made, and rather quickly at that. With all the assistance I am receiving from Sig, I believe the 2.0 prototype— or at least the blueprints for it— will be completed within the hectocycle.”

He and Sig shared a moment of silence. They’d been hoping they’d be able to fix their communication problems before the coming of winter… but, alas. What was another lonely winter compared to the ones before? They all stung the same.

Hope made it all the more sour, didn’t it?

“ I’ve also sent some more pearls this time, in order to afford you enough space to send back whatever you want. Moon, Fluffy, and Waters all want to see more, and suppose I can begrudgingly admit to being interested myself…

 

2954 (TWO THOUSAND NINE HUNDRED FIFTY FOUR) MORE LINES:

LOG END

………

LOG MESSAGE 1.1433.555

 

“I’ve attached the files, as requested— and now, for a short request of my own, please send back their reactions! Sig and I enjoyed the visual media of Fluffy you sent, and I would be beyond pleased to see Moon’s reaction to the material. She was always fond of the little creatures… though, I suppose that is her future self. To your iteration of Moon, they are still barely-sentient pipe cleaners. Also, this Waters… I recognize no iterator called by that. A pseudonym, or something else? Please do tell, I fear Sig will explode with anticipation if he doesn't hear before communications come down in a month or two.

“Regardless. Thank you for the additional pearls, they were invaluable in actually getting all the necessary information down. I’ve also attached at the end of this pearl a timeline— something I’ve been remiss not to mark exactly before— of the typical annual cycle now. It’s somewhat ironic, looking at it, that we who were built to be above it all both metaphorically and literally are once again bound to seasons and solar cycles instead of the immutable and ephemeral Cycle.

“Sig just sent an entire small rant in our shared chat, and is demanding I scribe it onto the pearl. I see no need not to, so… enjoy Sig’s Sig-ness:” it was obvious where the writing started, even without the que. The two iterators’ styles were… distinct. Yes, that was a polite way of putting it… 

“Gotta get this in, mad props to the Ancients for dealing with celestial timekeeping. I mean, they eventually turned to the cycles and all, but before that? Solar cycles and orbital periods. And hoooly void are they annoyingly out of time. Like, can you imagine all the bloat timekeeping programs needed to exactly track the discrepancies between solar and orbital cycles— not to mention lunar cycles, which— I have edited out a joke in particularly poor taste regarding a mutual acquaintance of ours.” Five Pebbles chuckled internally. The context made the contents clear. “The whole thing sucks, and add the slight variations in exact rotational and orbital periods caused by the Ancients going ham with the iterators like red lizards in a scavenger mosh pit, their old calendars aren’t even accurate anymore! Void riddance! Anyways, Sig out.”

Five Pebbles was glad he never had to deal with any of that. He’d much rather stick to his… well, the cycles weren’t so immutable , considering what he was doing. Did literal time travel invalidate traditional timekeeping? He made a note to discuss it with Moon later— she’d probably enjoy that sort of thing— the rest of himself continuing to read the message. 

“ I fear we’ve both developed somewhat of a distaste for seasons that goes beyond rationality. When something beats you down so thoroughly and regularly, it’s hard not to. Don’t rush, of course, but it goes without saying that we’ve been buzzing with anticipation in regards to the promised possibility of repairs.

“Perhaps we could help in some way? It would be difficult with the long delay enforced on us by the cycles, but perhaps with proper logistical work that could be ameliorated. It’s not like I have anything more pressing to spend my computational budget on anyways.” It was… a good idea, Pebbles realized— it would take a lot of effort, but if they could make it work, it would speed up the project immensely.

“No Significant Harassment would be more difficult to work with, given the difficulty in getting any message of significant size over to them. I would have to rely upon my slugcat colony to deliver pearls to him, which at this time of year is a fraught request at best. Perhaps there’s something that’s not critical that he could work on? If not, I understand.

“Holding hope for future cooperation,

Your old friend,

Seven Red Suns.”

 

LOG END

………

LOG MESSAGE 0.1434.666

 

“ I feel somewhat foolish now, for overlooking such an obvious source of assistance in our project. It should have been obvious that those with the most vested interest in its success would be willing to offer help, but— either way. The idea is sound. Moon and I spent a long while discussing it— several days worth adjusting to high speed computation, debating which portions of the project could be offloaded.

“Computation is not the issue, for the most part (see the attached documents detailing what we’ve already worked on in regards to the machine) but rather several problems that require the development of novel solutions and advanced karmic theory that mostly hasn’t even been discovered yet. The vast majority of the delays— beyond unavoidable physical obstructions relating to the construction of machine components and purposed organisms— are in the limitations of my model and the fallibility of experimentally derived data in shoring up those weaknesses.

“Sometimes, I feel the tree abutting a crumbling cliff, catching the wind with will to sail and watching the crashing waves beneath. Or, in the less ostentatious saying of those People less enamored with their language’s propensity for floral embellishment, my current model of the void sea is held together with duct tape, grappling spit, and anecdotal evidence. I suspect— or at least hope— that you have some insights into the theory that I lack. ”

Some insights. He hadn’t actually seen the void sea model yet, and it took most of his willpower not to skim to the end of the pearl and pull it up, but… he might have some insights. Spatial physics— karmic manifold theories amongst them— were one of his specialties.

Sig pinged him with a slightly impatient demand to— in his own words, ‘get back to reading the pearl before our communications arrays freeze over.’ It had barely been a fraction of a second since he’d paused, anyways, so the whole request was entirely unfounded.

Regardless, he turned his attention back to the pearl. “ Knowing the state of my own facilities in the future, it would be both cruel and pointless to ask you to participate in void fluid research of any significant kind. I sincerely hope you still have at least some access to your pump house, but I recognize the high likelihood that if your communications arrays are falling apart, then the concentrated void fluid of the sea below would have long since corroded the underlying filtration systems into uselessness.

“As it is, I feel confident in leaving several of the sub-algorithms to you, with instruction to preferentially focus abstract improvements to our theoretical understanding of the subject over code that could be made fallible due to the cycle-long disconnect inherent to this mode of communications. They are recorded in pearls three through twenty five. ” 

There was a short break in the pearl’s text, more stylistic than anything. Some of Five Pebbles’s character really shone through, there… chuckling to himself, Seven Red Suns read, “ either way, with those necessary logistical issues addressed, I can proceed on to something much more enjoyable to scribe. ” 

Seven Red Suns could feel Sig’s newfound attention across their connection— and he didn’t even know what there was to be excited for. At least he got to get back at Sig for his message earlier, and if he was a little eager in telling Sig to settle down, then it wasn’t like there were any seniors around to chastise him.

“ I managed to record Moon’s and Sig’s reaction to the additional information you sent on your slugcat colony. Their sheer shock! I cannot overstate just how much fun I had watching them both fall into fascination with the strange civilization, each for entirely different reasons. I’ve attached curated snippets of my recollection to the pearl here [1] by your request. Hopefully they bring you at least some enjoyment.” Poor Sig. They were big files— he wouldn’t be able to send them over their crumbling communications. What a shame.

“You also asked about Waters. I can barely believe I haven’t talked about him— but then again, I’m as new to this as you are. I never needed to discuss their contributions in these messages, so they were simply left out altogether— something I wish to rectify here.

“Fluffy is not the only friend I’ve made since I found myself back in time at the moment of my creation. Though the inhabitants of my city are about as stuck up as they were before— I can only shudder at the memories of when I was too naive to object, subjected to the many whims of the so styled holy council of the citadel over which my shadow is cast— not all of them were. I don’t even remember her from my youth, how thoroughly unremarkable she was compared to the outspoken voices of my council, but with the benefit of experience I don’t know how I could have missed her. The engineer who led my construction possesses a sanity that seems rare amongst the upper echelons of the People’s society.

“Her name is Five Red Bricks, Tenth Sunset, and I am proud to call her a friend.

“Of course you asked about Waters, not Sunset. Waters— a nickname derived from his formal name of Six Sinking Stones, Two Waters— is the ward of Five Red Bricks, Tenth Sunset. He lacked a prior reincarnation of note, and I can only surmise that the shame of his association with the second cardinal urge led him to be somewhat outcast. He’s lucky that, as I stated before, Sunset holds a peculiar, admirable sanity and saw fit to take him in.

“He was formerly an apprentice to the House engineers, but after he came of age recently and following the departure of Sunset to seek more engaging work, in accordance with his reputation as a hard-working and enthusiastic engineer I was able to successfully petition my council to appoint him to the position of Chief Engineer of my can.

“He and Sunset were very helpful in taking care of Fluffy in the early days, before he largely moved into the inner portions of my can. They’re good friends as well— before the necessity of his presence, what with the needs of this current project, if at all able Fluffy would spend time with Waters while he was out supervising the construction of the rail systems leading to mine and Moon’s facility.

“You’d like him if you met him, I think. So would No Significant Harassment— my Sig has been all but begging him to come over, but his duties keep him from traveling. I think you would also like Sunset— she has a keen intelligence and is always willing to discuss anything even at disadvantage…

“Fluffy is laughing at me. I just queried her citizen drone for her location, and it told me she’s taken up residency in Sliver of Straw’s city. Sliver of Straw! I know we’ve already had the conversation about how her true personality was different from the caricature of it I built in my mind, but— Sliver of Straw! I tried to get in contact with her while writing this, but was unfortunately unable. Perhaps she’s asleep.

“Anyways. Back to more practical… ”

 

745 (SEVEN HUNDRED FORTY FIVE) MORE LINES:

ATTACHMENTS:

 

Seven Red Suns read through the rest of the pearl, laughing a bit at Five Pebbles’s odd fortune. Bringing up sliverist discussion in public chats had always been enough to fluster him back in the day, despite how enthusiastically he’d waded through the stuff in the anonymous broadcasts… Good memories, those. There had been that time with Moon, Sig, Pebbles, and himself, when Sig had talked about designing a silver lizard, and Pebbles had taken it the wrong way…

Good memories . It’d been nice, reading about all the fun Five Pebbles was having— at least he wasn’t being a loner again while they lived vicariously through his letters. Sighing, he tossed the pearl to float in careful array with the others of its kind, a flex of his will drawing each pearl to him in turn. Most of them were the promised details of technical problems, one of them were the reactions to his slugcat colony, which were a delight to watch, and one…

He grabbed it out of the air, holding it up to his eyes and watching the pristine light of his puppet chamber illuminate it; yellow like any other, but so slightly different , it struck him as… strange. Comparatively, at least— all the others had been the same. No Significant Harassment had already left to his own devices, but the curiosity remained.

So, he read it.

 

LOG MESSAGE 0NSH.1434.666

 

“ Hey. Heyyyyy. I hope this is working. Pebs better not have sanitized this or, or whatever uppity iterators like he and Suns like to do to my…

“No, that’s getting off to a wrong start. Sorry ‘bout that, it can be hard to remember that just because I’m not sending this to Suns, I’m still sending this to Seven Red Suns . Just… an older version of him. Void, that’s such— wait, you don’t like cursing, right? Gah. This is so difficult!

“Void damn it, I’m just not even going to try. I had an idea, and I thought it might work, so… you know how you volunteered future-me to help with the project? First, tell him that he’s totally missing out, this stuff is the coolest stuff I’ve ever worked on. ” Seven Red Suns didn’t do that, but mostly because he could only imagine it’d get him in some pointless argument or another.

It was strange, how different yet similar Sig’s younger self sounded to his current self. It only served to highlight the difference an eternity made in the minds of man and machine, gods. “ You have no idea how awesome this thing is. That’s for future-me, not for you Suns, though maybe you don’t? I mean you’re getting messages out of literally nowhere in your horrible apocalypse future, so you probably have at least some sort of idea… I digress.

“This stuff is like… a dream come true for me. I mean, I’d long since contented myself with the fact that nothing I could do would ever serve to even scratch at the great problem. I’d even grown to enjoy the hobbies that I’d taken up— genetic modification is really interesting, and I’m a dab hand at it if I do say so myself— but there’s the feeling of being asked, out of nowhere, to help with something that might interrogate the void’s deepest secrets and change the world forever…

“Void, I can’t quite explain it. I’m not even really sure I want to, ‘cause I’m pretty sure it’d end up being some stupid asinine sentimental nothing that I just know would get back to Five Pebbles eventually. That kid— kid? I guess he’s like a bajillion cycles older than me— can really hold a grudge when he choses.

“Anyways. The actual point I sent this pearl. We thought about it for a long while, and don’t think future-me can help with the project— the communication limitations he’s got make it entirely infeasible. I’d get mad at the People for failing to plan ahead, but… no, nah, I’m just mad. Idiots out there thinking they’re the greatest thing in existence when really they’re bugs in a maze, marching joyously towards the poisoned food.

“Anyways anyways. No more getting off track. Suns, I bet you’re reading this right now— I mean, I made this for both you and future-me, so I’d be surprised if you weren’t. Told Pebs to color it as green as he could, but I bet he didn’t. Wanker. So, the idea’s pretty simple— get this pearl to your Sig, have him look over all the stuff I’ve attached to it— general things for the most part, but things I’d could really use some advice on from a me who’s lived for a lot longer than I have, and then have him send it back. Feel free to read the stuff if you want, but a lot of it’s just technical bioengineering stuff so I wouldn’t bother.

“Suns, you’re cool. Keep up the good work. No, I'm not flattering you just because I need you to send this message to future-me. Definitely.

“Future-me, you’re also cool. Probably. Idk I haven’t met you yet but I’m cool, so you’re probably cool too.Take a look at some of this stuff, and maybe get back to me soon.

“PS don’t tell Pebsi (he thinks I dropped this to focus on the other def more important tasks) but my Glurch is out of the embryonic stage and roaming around his enclosure. He’s so cute!

“Sig, out.”

Well. It would make a good surprise for Sig when it reached him. All he needed now was a messenger . With a tiny flex of his will he took control of an overseer who’d been inspecting a certain colony of slugcats, manually directing it closer than their natural instincts usually let them roam. He’d do this every now and again, to get information unavailable from a distant vantage. Interestingly, even before he’d earned the slugcat’s trust, they’d never attacked his overseers.

The overseer darted sinuously through the shadows, past the rows of tattered banners painted over and again with intricate logographic text. Against the stark snow, there was something uniquely, stunningly beautiful to the scene— to their resilience, and monuments they’d erected to necessity. The remnants from the ages of rain were still evident, too, in the way the town was situated on a slight rise, in the channels cut deeply into the rock only barely visible sometimes beneath the snow.

Looming gates of stone and steel loomed above everything at the entrance to the tunnel system that the slugcats used to move around— once places to wait out the floods, now strongholds against the bitter blizzards. It was an impressive construction, and one he remembered well— the leaders of the slugcat colony had requested he help them build it in payment for some tasks.

Carefully he directed his overseer away from the small village’s inhabitants, taking care to avoid notice until he reached the room he’d been looking for. Nothing too much had changed from the last time he’d been here— some of the lizard hides had been replaced, and the expansive armory tucked away securely had expanded, but not as much as one might expect for hundreds of cycles worth of inhabitation. There was an air of timelessness to the small room, beneath lantern’s ruddy glow. Of permanence.

Suns bid the overseer appear in the center of the room, projecting a hologram of words. “ NEED. HELP. TASK. ” A shape in the corner stirred, fur rustling over itself as a small white slugcat looked up from where he’d been tinkering with some mechanism or another.

He turned back, but only for long enough to grab a scrap of cloth and quickly draw some words onto it. Not the slugcat language, but the more recognizable ancient script. “ Okay. What do you need? ”

“PEARL. NSH. TAKE.”

“ Difficult. I can do it, but it would be hard. The colony needs my guidance; why must you ask me specifically? I know several of the younger cats would be more than willing to help their ‘god.’ ” Seven Red Suns could almost feel the distaste written into that last word. It was a bit of a joke the three of them shared. Suns denied divinity. The slugcats gave it to him regardless.

Still. There was a good reason he’d asked this slugcat in particular. “BEST. OPTION.” There were none that could compare. “IMPORTANT.” He needed someone he could trust, truly trust. “JOURNEY. FRAUGHT. DANGER. YOU. ALONE. ABLE,” he flashed a final symbol, one fundamental character that had defined the worthless struggle of a bygone race. One symbol to describe the slugcat before him, looking up the holographic text with wide, serious eyes that betrayed only the slightest hint of excitement . “SURVIVOR . ”

 

LOG END

Notes:

And posting the second half real quick.

Chapter 13: Silence

Summary:

Serene silence abounding over the whole of Our Great Bequeathment; Our Lone Enclosure.

There was a hostile mood in the House of Feathers, in the heavy-masked visages staring down at her as she knelt before their raised podiums. The entire room was a work of art in opulence, in religious significance, in the heavy air of majesty the beautifully abstract backdrop gave to those figures who styled themselves rulers of fate.

“Honored members of the council.” Still she knelt. Caught in their claws, a moment from escape and a minute from consequence . So she knelt. “Houses of the city, lords and holy representatives of the most venerable Sliver of Straw, you grant me great honor by requesting my presence. For what reason have you called me to this most august of chambers?”

“Your progress is unsatisfactory. By your measure, you should have long since delivered a preliminary project plan to us, or at the very least a quote of expected value. Yet, you spit upon this council and withhold your talent?” It was maliciously said, yes, but not angrily . There was no anger here, where violence was sin, and sin was anathema.

It was a threat, nonetheless.

Five Red Bricks, Tenth Sunset didn’t even look at him as he spoke. The head of the council had addressed her as usual, but not from his place at the head— instead, where he’d once sat looming over all, a different man rested. They were just slightly smaller than average, though the ornate mask that obscured their features made sure that they weren’t unremarkable . Their robes, too, were distinct from the iridescent feather-stuff of the local council, made of a pinkish off-white decorated very faintly with embossed patterns of mathematically precise ferns.

That, and Sliver of Straw’s nervous admission that he’d managed to bypass the stringent security measures around her can entirely without her noticing, told Sunset that he was the one person in the world she couldn’t afford not to pay attention to.

As the council head finished his speech, the stranger raised a robed hand to silence. “Engineer Five Red Bricks, Tenth Sunset.” He spoke softly— Sunset thought she could hear the edge of a tell-tale rasp signifying scale rot at his voice’s edge, but his low volume made it difficult to discern. “You have brought shame to the House engineers. Explain yourself.”

“The request is far beyond usual normal operations. Instead of relying on the magnificent and perfectly precise works of the honored iterators, I have been forced to plan the proposed structure entirely from nothing. I did contact her holiness, Sliver of Straw, but she informed me she was far too busy working on a problem of great ramification to help me at this junction.” The council stirred slightly, evidently disconcerted at the reminder that she held more influence over their iterator than they did.

Well, all of them but the stranger.

They simply stared, then nodded slowly. The rest of the council seemed to take that as the peak of wisdom— though Sunset thought it more likely to be another side effect of scale rot— settling down from their anger. “Your work is important. It will be done.” He waved his hand, dismissing her almost carelessly as he turned to the council head beside him. “Have her watched. She is not to leave her home until she provides acceptable plans, or until the holy project is complete.”

The council head glanced at her nervously, they bowed low. “As you wish.”

The last thing Sunset saw as she left the council chamber were the eyes of the stranger, burning with unrecognizable intensity, watching her as she fled.

………

“I don’t like this.”

The gray overseer next to her bobbed in agreement, following her with almost unfair deftness as she stalked through the undercity to get back to the base of her assigned residence. Few came down here after one of the dynasties had restricted a lot of popular leisure activities… how long ago? A thousand cycles? More? It was hard to believe that it’d been that long.

Sliver of Straw was younger than her. Sure, she was one of the older of the People, but still… it was a tragedy how estranged their creations— their children— had become, made all the worse that nobody really cared . She hadn’t at least, not before Five Pebbles had gone and shook up her entire life…

“Sorry. I’ve lost track of my thoughts a little. It’s all moving so fast .”

“It’s… okay. I’ve been informed that biological beings experience significant difficulty in multitasking. I was, um, waiting for you to speak anyways!”

Sunset chuckled. “No you weren’t. I saw your overseer trying to get my attention, I was just…” she grimaced, “preoccupied. Sorry about that.” She sighed, the sound echoing oddly in the old corridors. “Do you know who the stranger on the council was? I don’t think I’ve ever seen something quite like that, not in all my cycles working as chief engineer on iterator projects.”

“I don’t know.” There was something like fear in the woodenness of Sliver’s voice. “He put me under a strict information lock. Nothing in, nothing out, not even through the scattered pre-construction network accesses I can connect to. It… itches. Like, that feeling… it’s hard to describe, but it’s related to the taboos. I’m sure you know what those are.” Of course she did. Nobody who worked on iterators wouldn’t know what they are, even if they were relatively trivial for those who didn’t.

“I have a… friend… who might be able to help you with that.”

“Nothing in.” The voice through her citizen drone was almost a whisper— “nothing out . Either they know about that, or suspect, or… or they just fear me, and what I might do if I was able to receive assistance from my seniors. They certainly picked a good iterator to trod over.” Sunset refrained from agreeing, despite the statement’s truth. Like most of her kind, Sliver of Straw could be perceptive when she put her mind to it. “Well! We’re trapped together, doesn’t it seem?”

She snorted despite herself. This kid… “yeah. Yeah we are. Not forever, though.” She stared at the overseer, trying to make evident the sincerity that had already been evident, dripping from her every word— “we will get out of this.”

So she promised.

So Sliver of Straw chose to believe.

True to his word, two monks were sitting outside the entrance to her home as she approached. They paid her no heed as she entered the small abode, but by the vicious looking shock spears they carried attached to their backs, she didn’t doubt they’d be entirely effective in keeping her from escaping. Hopefully they’d give up after a short while and just let her leave— such a brutish show was unbecoming. Close to violating one of the karmic urges, even.

They didn’t, though.

Every so often someone would come to check in on what progress she’d made, and every time she’d show them various calculations and theories that were just enough to deflect suspicion, but not quite useful enough for them to complete it by themselves. It was tempting to simply abandon the charade, yes— but, for fear, she held back.

A wise decision.

Nobody had been allowed to leave or enter Sliver of Straw’s can since the night after the stranger’s arrival. Quarantine was the purported reason, according to what Sliver had managed to overhear in the House of Feathers, but there was no disease, nothing out of the ordinary but the atmosphere of general unease that gripped the city.

Every request she denied got more and more antsy, more firmly worded until they were demands , with threats of significant violence attached. Real violence. A few cycles after she’d been incarcerated, one of the monks marched into her house and smashed as much as he could, leaving only the bare necessities for her work.

Nothing against her person— yet.

Then, one night she didn’t wake up to the comforting gray glow of Sliver’s overseer, but in a familiar unfamiliar room. Someone— strong — was carrying her through the underbelly of the House of Feathers, not to the council chamber itself but one of the side-rooms that displayed what Sliver was working on at the moment. The runs twitched and shuddered at the assailants passing. Sunset wondered if any of them could see the attention of the vast mechanical god through their hubris.

Then they threw her onto the cold floor in front of the stranger, uncaring to the swirling halos of agitated symbology that danced multidimensionally around them, and Sunset decided they didn’t . “Five Red Bricks, Tenth Sunset. You’ve certainly come into a high position, despite your… immorality. A ward? How disdainful .”

She could more clearly hear the rasp— and see it, even, with her vantage prone, the slice of crusted, uneven scales visible between his mask and robe. Scale rot, for sure. She growled, pushing herself to her feet only to spasm in pain as one of the monks— what monks, how rich — prodded her with their shock spear.

“You’ve been… obstinate. Perhaps you’re too used to being at the top of the food chain. Perhaps you’ve simply spent too long next to that apostate iterator. I know Looks to the Moon approved your posting here.” A brief wrath , incandescent and furious crossed through his voice with the strength of snarl, gone the next second. “The council argued that I should take a gentle hand with you. They cannot conceive of the power that I wield. I could order Sliver of Straw to drown you in her void fluid conduits, and you could do nothing about it.” He grasped her mask-less head with feeble, too-strong claws, forcing her to look up into his golden eyes. “I could kill you, engineer, wring your soul into an echo for a sorrowful eternity. If you won’t cooperate…” he left the statement open ended, with only one conclusion.

Sunset felt fear . It was an insidious thing, a roiling terror that manifested in weak breath panting, choked eyes wide cold scales, shuddering, crawling slowly backwards—

“Kill her.”

She scrambled to her feet and tried to run, knowing the futility—

A spear exploded through her chest, sizzling arcs of electricity crawling across her body and frying muscles, plasma hot arcing , scales melting and flesh popping as the essence of lightning grounded into her body. The pain was indescribable, an unfettering agony unending sheer scarlet symphonic in torturous milliseconds stretched out as vision stretched, hazy. Timeless.

She felt more than saw, heard just barely, the stranger kneeling beside her. Thunder-striking, words cacophonous yet so impossibly quiet, he spoke— commanded — “do what you’re told. Or else.”

Then—

Five Red Bricks, Tenth Sunset, for the first time in millenia, bled out and died.

………

“Void. Void . I didn’t— they—” she woke to Sliver of Straw’s panicked speech, words falling over themselves in the haste of a being whose experience of time was altogether more ephemeral than Sunset’s own. “They actually killed you. Just went ahead and— void. Void! ”

“Shh.” She put a hand over the drone, the motion altogether insufficient to convey what she wanted, but enough to silence Sliver’s panicked muttering. “Don’t let them hear you. You’re protected by anonymity most of all.”

“I— I’ve been a coward. I’m sorry, Sunset, I shouldn’t have let them… void, they killed you .” She whispered again, evidently still shocked. “I can’t believe they’d be so bold as to actually just… go ahead and kill you.”

“Honestly?” She chuckled as she rose, stretching against the odd stiffness that’d invaded her muscles and sorely wishing the bastards hadn’t stolen all her pain meds. “I didn’t expect it either. They didn’t seem like the type who’d break one of the urges.”

“Monks aren’t typically known for violating their vows so severely. Something,” a wry note entered Sliver’s shy voice, “tells me that those monks aren’t really monks in the… upstanding sense of the word.”

“Well, what can you do? When the world comes to ask, sometimes you just have to go with the flow, like the jellyfish caught in the net.” The stranger’s threat rang out in her mind, and in turn the seriousness of the situation hung heavy. He’d threatened to forcibly ascend her . Permanent death…

She’d never really thought about it, and now that she stood at the precipice, she was afraid.

It was a little ironic, she supposed, that the stranger had defaulted to that as a threat. By their own philosophy, shouldn’t an opportunity to ascend be the greatest of rewards? Not for Sunset, that was certain, and most likely not for him either…

“No.” Sliver’s voice— firm for once without adopting the mechanical deadness of perfunctory speech, snapped her from her musings. “I am an iterator . You… thank you, thank you so much for helping out these past months, but… when I said I was a coward earlier, I wasn’t lying. I’ve been hiding behind you this whole time, and now you’ve been hurt for it. I. Am. An. Iterator. I can do this.”

“Not alone. Even iterators—” she adopted a very Pebbles-like sort of speech— “who are, if you’d excuse, godlike in comparison to us mere mortals—” Sliver giggled, and Sunset cracked a smile— “don’t need to stand alone. I’m helping because I want to help— not out of duty to some unfeeling machine god, but freely, for a friend .”

“...thanks. Still. I could have done more. I will do more. Give me a moment.” She paused, and just as quickly returned. “I paused my experiments and ran through my memory strata. Without access to anything outside my superstructure I’m limited, but with enough prodding at the restrictions and some rather rigorous cross checking to find the hidden persons he added to the system, I was able to figure some stuff out. As I suspected, the stranger is part of Administration.”

“That… fits, unfortunately.” Sunset did not have fond memories of Administration. Stuck up pricks, the lot of them, made worse by the superiority complex borne from their control over the iterators. They didn’t even remember most of the controls— nobody did but maybe the oldest iterators, and they couldn’t spill due to the taboos about self-modification. What little they did know was both used frivolously and guarded jealously, ancient patterns and schematics followed to the line when new iterators were approved and built.

That they were willing to be so heavy handed here likely meant… bad things. Global things, for Administration was the dynasty and the dynasty was Administration— even in the rise and fall of Houses to that august position, the true power behind the various governments had always been the ability to control the iterators.

“The two ‘monks’ were personal soldiers he brought with him to ensure his safety— and, probably, authority— in the council house. With my council —” the word was tinged with all the myriad distaste Sliver of Straw held for those old fools— “so thoroughly beneath his feet, he sent them here to keep you from escaping. By reading into the codes he used to comprehensively cut off communications from my can, I found his name: Twenty Three Lavender Fronds, Radial Repetitions.”

Sunset snorted. “An ostentatious name, that’s for sure.”

“Sorry that I couldn’t find anything more helpful.”

“No, that’s well enough. Try and put yourself in the mind of an administrator. What could they possibly be doing that requires moving such a large mass of people quickly to an ominous structure situated outside your facility grounds?”

“Nothing good.”

“That’s damn right.”

“Perhaps… a power play of some sort. Something that would allow them to grasp back the influence and momentum they’ve lost since Looks to the Moon deposed… oh.” Her voice faded rapidly to unadulterated embarrassment. “Now that is something interesting that I should have picked up on earlier. Looks to the Moon’s historic formal complaint against Administration, wherein Administrator Twenty Three Lavender Fronds, Radial Repetitions was stripped of rank and duty and banished to… here, I suppose.”

“With the full weight of the dynasty behind him, enough to cow the House of Feathers, and personal mooks who’ll quite literally kill on command. Something’s fishy about this.”

“You don’t say.”

Sunset sighed. “Still doesn’t help up figure out what they’re up to, other than something sus , and something big . Also doesn't help me out of this predicament.”

“I wish I could do more.”

“Yeah, I—” Sunset paused, then grinned . “So, I know you’re built slightly different from Five Pebbles, but let me tell you about this fascinating trick he was able to pull off…”

………

Three days. It took three, nerve wracking, terrifying days at the edge of panic for Sliver of Straw to pull off the plan. They’d discussed it, and she hadn’t even been sure it would work— but Sliver had been determined to at least try .

Three days at the whimsical mercy of the mooks. They didn’t do much, but she could tell they were impatient . The first night they’d kept her awake by slamming the door with the butts of their spears, but after they’d gotten tired of doing that they’d settled for the occasional bout of cruelty against whatever they could get their hands on. Though it was somewhat cathartic to watch their panicked expressions when she told them that by breaking her desk they were setting her work back…

Three days. Three long days, but finally what she’d been waiting for was sitting in a shallow bowl surrounded by a puddle of nectar. “This doesn’t look like an explosive.” The weedy plant that got further refined into high explosives for use in construction and— rarely— demolition was red. A bright regulation red that some iterator had added in to make sure people knew they were handling something dangerous.

The two small objects in the bowl didn’t look like that at all. For one, they were small. Much too small to be of any meaningful note as more than a distraction, though the glowy one looked… dangerous. The other not so much— it looked more like a blue-tinted pebble than anything that could cause real harm.

Sliver of Straw’s overseer darted up, looking distinctly proud. “I wanted to give you real firepower, so— tada! One slightly modified lantern plant that’ll release enough light to stun almost anything, and a made singularity bomb!”

That sounded… “singularity bomb?” Ominous.

“So you know, rarefaction cells, void fluid, quick refinement and stable energy fields… and… stuff?” She trailed off towards the end, voice fading to little more than a whisper. Which, unless…

“No, you didn’t .” She picked up the two objects— carefully , very, very carefully— giggling softly. “No void damn way. Are you trying to get me killed?”

“Sorry…”

“Don’t be. This is great .” There was nothing quite like knowing you had overwhelming firepower on your side. “What’s the situation look like outside?”

Sliver’s overseer darted away, taking one of the ventilation ducts out of the room “The guards are waiting, still. One of them is asleep, and the other is watching your door. Most people have stayed within their living blocks after the House of Feathers issued mandates restricting public discourse and commerce.”

“Alright.” Sunset breathed in deeply, then exhaled, a grim look on her face. Silently, she fastened her mask to her head, donning her most utilitarian outfit as she carefully strode to her door. “As good a time as any.” Then, with nary a moment’s respite, she kicked it open and strode outside.

“Stop right—” was all the mook managed to say before Sunset threw her arm over her head and chucked the lantern orb at the ground, the blindingly bright flash of light visible despite the obstruction. The guard screamed and tumbled back, but Sunset was already running, barely sparing a glance at them as she reached the edge of her tower and jumped .

A moment of weightlessness, the sight of a city unlit, gray concrete blocks spearing skyward to where the air thinned to nothing and far below to the mad jumble of streets deserted— and then she reached the peak of her floundering leap and plummeted down. A moment of heart-wrenching terror as gravity reclaimed its dominion over her— and then the jarring ache of abrupt stillness as she caught an outhanging pipe and slammed into the wall of the tower opposite her own. That was going to bruise—

She had bigger problems though. The mooks didn’t seem inclined to follow her across the gap, but by the way—

Sliver’s overseer flashed a danger symbol as the more awake of the pair reared their arm back to skewer her with the shock spear, and acting on a moment of terrified instinct— Sunset let go of the pipe, and fell.

Descending the tower that fast was beyond terrifying. If she missed even a single pipe she’d either dislocate her arm— death— or just straight die , splattered across the ground. With Sliver of Straw’s attentive help, though, she managed to get to ground level without killing herself— though continued survival was… debatable.

She didn't wait even a moment, sprinting for an entrance to the subways as fast as she could. It’d take a minute for the two mooks guarding her door to catch up, but by the shouts behind her, they weren’t the only ones on her tail. A hive of some sort slammed against the ground next to her, just barely far enough away that Sunset was able to avoid the swarm of furious purposed organisms released.

Who knew that running from a man who controlled the city would be difficult?

Sunset dove into the tunnels, jumping onto the rail tracks and praying that a train wasn’t heading her way. There was an access hatch just a few hundred feet in front of her—

There was, unfortunately, a train heading her way.

Sliver of Straw’s overseer disappeared in a panicked flash as Sunset cursed, putting every meager iota of strength into sprinting at the approaching light. Going back wasn’t an option, not with the city security following her.

A howling screech filled the tunnel as the train began to brake, but it was too little, too late. Sunset knew how these things worked— the high speed rails wouldn’t stop for half a mile at least without the dedicated magnetic locks of a station. The fact that it’d noticed her enough to brake at all was a miracle.

She threw herself to the ground, grabbing the metal grate and ignoring the incoming thunder, sweating, heart pounding as she gasped, fumbling with the lock and then pushing—

The train swept overhead with a cacophonous roar just seconds after she fell into one of the maintenance tunnels. For a moment she just layed there, at first giggling, then laughing maniacally as she heaved the sweetest breaths she’d ever taken. “Void. I thought I was screwed for sure .”

“That was too close. You should keep going. Before they manage to crawl down here , too.” Sliver of Straw’s overseer projected a map, a route appearing through the complicated mess of tunnels, pipes, and chambers that made up the center of her . “C’mon, please…”

She was right. Fighting back the exhaustion, she pushed herself to her feet and followed the drone through deeper into the dark. “I’m going, I’m going.” A second access hatch was set further down the maintenance tunnel— probably placed for the convenience of maintenance workers— connecting to another tunnel that itself connected to the uppermost portions of Sliver’s memory conflux.

She’d been inside plenty of iterators before. She was no stranger to the alien ecosystem, the swaying memory fronds and gently undulating data dendrites, to the chain holograms that danced along the walls in some dance more complicated than could be comprehended. She’d seen flocks of neurons dart in their strange, mathematically precise yet strangely random patterns, seen inspectors of every color crawl through the air…

It’d never quite hit her, though, as it did there , standing amongst the very neural matter of someone she called a friend , the scale. The sheer breadth of it all. Thousands— no, billions of these components in careful symphony combined, complexed together and built off one another— they made the iterator that was Sliver of Straw . A god built by their own hands, a child raised with the sole purpose to solve a problem that didn’t even need to be solved.

The overseer urged her on and she followed, drifting through the low gravity with deft movements until she reached at the end of it— where all the massive pipes and bundles of wires and sparking electrical impulses inexorably drew together— a small entrance set flush with the floor.

The overseer flashed a down arrow twice, and then disappeared into the pipe. With only a second of hesitation, Sunset followed.

  Gravity reasserted her hold over her as she fell to the stark-white floor alongside the clattering of pearls. “Sunset!” She barely had a chance to get her bearings before something barrelled into her with far too much force, almost crushing her in its tight grasp. “I was hoping I’d get to see you, and you’re here! This is awesome!”

“Your puppet chamber.” She pried the puppet’s arms off her leaning back and just laughed . “You took me to your most sacred space. Your puppet chamber . Holy void above…” she could only laugh. It was just so absurd. Even knowing that Fluffy visited Five Pebbles regularly, she’d never even considered daring to desecrate the innermost sanctum of her long time friend, much less Sliver. “Are you sure that you want me to be—”

“Well, duh?” Her puppet drew back, the oddly colorful humanoid object eerily animate. “How else could I have hugged you?”

That… yeah. She laughed, again, weakly, but that sounded exactly in character for Sliver. “I’m beyond honored that you hold me in such high esteem.”

“Nuh uh. I mean, um, I’m also honored but like—” she shied away from Sunset, looking for all the world the image of a young girl shrinking back from something she was nervous about. “You’re just so… you know… cool! You’re braver than I could ever be, and super intelligent, and smart, and wise, and… I don’t know, it’s just so intimidating to actually meet you in person.”

“You make it seem like I’m the mountain-sized biomechanical god.”

“You’d do a better job than me…”

“Don’t sell yourself short, kid. You’re not doing poorly at all— this is just… beyond expectations.” This whole conversation was absurd. Logic had clearly taken a trip to the void sea today. “As long as you keep trying your best, no matter what, then you’ll do fine.”

“O-okay.” Sliver of Straw slowly looked up, the halo behind her head sparking with brilliant light as she met her eyes. “Okay. I will. I… I know you probably won’t be able to come back here, but I wanted to at least spend these few minutes face to face. Or, well, as close to it as an iterator can get…” she held just barely back from touching her, but leant forward the moment Sunset offered her hand.

It was almost adorable, the way she relaxed against her like Six Sinking Stones, Two Waters had as a kid. They’d probably be good friends if they ever met, and wasn’t that weird to think…

For a moment that felt immortal, she just sat there and held the smallest part of something so great that she was rendered insignificant beside it, yet something that held strong to her regardless. “Thanks.” It was a whisper, serene and languid with all the tonal complexity that had been denied to her through the citizen drone’s mediocre speakers. “That was… nice. It’s a shame our puppets weren’t really built to feel much, but just spending time with you…” she stood, her umbilical lifting her above the ground. “Twenty Three Lavender Fronds, Radial Repetitions is calling me, though.”

“Well then, don’t hold him up. But—” she interjected before Sliver could go ahead and start the call— “remember, you’re not guilty .”

“But… I am?”

“Yeah, obviously. But not to Radial. Remember your image to the People— who you are . Iterator. If you present yourself as guilty, then he’ll take you as guilty. But if you don’t, then what will he do? Not much, that’s for certain.”

“I… kind of made it obvious that I was helping you. With the overseers, and the whole thing with the train…” she trailed off beneath Sunset’s intense stare.

“Not. Guilty.” Softer, “I don’t want you to be hurt on my behalf. Moon would be sad. I’d be sad.”

“...alright.” She waited for Sunset to reach a secluded corner in front of her before doing something , reenabling the antigravity and calling forth an array of holographic screens from hidden projectors with nothing more than an microsecond’s thought. “Administrator.” Her very presence felt different , imposing— an image only reinforced by the holographic halo that burned behind her head. “Your presence during my work is unwelcome.”

“Apologies, honored iterator, but I fear this interruption is as necessary as my earlier interdiction. A dangerous criminal has made her way through the maintenance tunnels above you and is now in the vicinity of your puppet chamber.” The slight shock Sliver displayed at that was— luckily— misinterpreted by Radial as fear of an entirely different sort. “I know. I’ve authorized you to use deadly force should she dare desecrate your holiest of sanctums. Remember— she is dangerous . Do not hesitate.”

“Um. Yes sir.” She cut the feed, then glanced back to Sunset. “He’s tracking you. I don’t know how but— you have to go. Before it’s too late.”

So it went. Five Red Bricks, Tenth Sunset just nodded, smiling beneath her mask. “Good luck, Sliver of Straw, and fare well.” Then, guided slightly by Sliver of Straw’s incredible control over the gravity in her room, she leapt to the access at the top of the chamber and crawled back out into the electric bright microcosm that was Sliver in truth.

To run.

………

Five Red Bricks, Tenth Sunset crawled through the alien ecosystem, vast cerebral neural system, sparking electric serene system vaulting vastling in all directions around her. She swam; that was the closest parallel she could think to the graceful motions, bounding leaps unbinding her from the illusion of stability as she drifted amongst the glowing fragments of godhead.

There was no silence there, but there was also no noise . No sound of speech or rushing traffic, free of the heavy weight of lived-in towering cities and cramped living blocks. Occasionally Sliver of Straw would pipe up through her citizen drone about some arcane detail of her construction, or to simply comment on the state of her being, but that was rare.

For the most part, she swam through the vast mechanical silence and the low hum of endless machinery, the sigh of water and the crackle of moving charge— swam, and thought.

Sliver of Straw knew so much; she knew so little. Sunset couldn’t but think about the similarities between them— stuck, free, herself incarcerated once and she twice over by the immutable nature of her construction. Bound inexorably to the very cycles that they were built to escape. Bound to the bound, orchestrator of their kind’s construction—

Idle musings. Deep musings, solemn, in the way of passing friends, not to meet again for a long time. Not ascension, though she’d had friends who’d tasted the touch of the golden sea so below, but simply…

Those who would not remain together, by wish or whim of fate’s vicissitudes.

The trip through the rest of her can almost felt like it went through fast. By Sliver’s count it took her almost three days to make it all the way through the depths of her can, but it felt… less. More, both— ephemeral, almost blurry.

Still, the hiss of steam and the rattling clank of a karma gate cycling for her felt like a coda to her. The gray overseer that had been her constant companion for weeks, no, months waved a tendril at her one last time before it darted away into the mess of machinery and left her behind with the washed out glow of storm’s luminance and barely functional maintenance lighting. She wondered who’d left those there— little colonies of glowing slime molds which had been purposed to aid construction workers, though by the growths settled in the cracks it looked like it’d long escaped that narrow existence.

She stared down into the boiling clouds, the vast arcs of arcing out to strike the ground or Sliver’s legs with apocalyptic cracks — the ominous darkness, and the threat therein— and felt a sense of indescribable wonder. Standing there at the edge of the abyss, knowing that her life would from then on be different… it hit her then.

Sunset stared for a few moments more, then sighed, slightly tired. It was a long walk to the nearest leg. She’d best get moving. A few hours passed—

“ Sunset! ” The panicked buzz of her citizen jolted her into perfect awareness, badly startling her. That had been terrifying . The fact that she’d been walking on a catwalk suspended thousands of feet above the ground below, complete with no railings— she would have words with whoever allowed that, if she wasn’t exile apostate at the end of this whole thing— certainly contributed to why her heart kept trying to leap out of her chest.

She wanted to be upset, but she knew Sliver wouldn’t have interrupted her without good cause. “What is it?”

“Behind you. Two hundred feet. I wasn’t able to sense their presence— they snuck past me . Sorry.” Sunset cursed, quickly following that up with a placiting word to make sure Sliver knew she wasn’t mad at her— then cursed again. There was only one person who could sneak past Sliver of Straw like that.

Sunset glanced at the treacherous path in front of her, glanced back at the approaching threat, and ran .

Exhilaration caught her in heady embrace, lungs full, muscles straining and the scent of ozone cloyingly thick around her as she sprinted along the catwalks. Someone shouted behind her— she didn’t turn to look; she just ran . Feet pounding, the crash of thin metal shuddering beneath her flight became her world. Her citizen drone, after a few seconds of uselessly flashing a danger symbol at her, froze for a second before it started pointing the way towards her destination—

The catwalk ended in front of her. So close to her destination, too— there was another that connected to a different part of the underhang, one of Sliver’s internal communication arrays, but it wasn’t this one . It’d been just too far to reach—

No choice left.

She looked back at the Twenty Three Lavender Fronds, Radial Repetitions and his ‘monk’ as they closed the distance— took a breath. Breathed the first note sibilant of an ancient meditation, an meaningless short phrase so ancient that nobody remembered anything about its creation other than—

Calm.

Three steps one two three , slamming down in screaming fervent desperation —

She leapt. The clouds wheeled beneath her, vast darknesses aglow, and for a second as she hung at the apogee of action she thought she wouldn’t make it. Then gravity reasserted itself, she plummeted towards the leg— and just barely, she managed to grab onto the lip of the maintenance tunnel.

She pulled herself up, giggling with relief as she looked up at where Radial and his monk had skidded to a stop. “Hah! Take that! Void damn you to eternity!”

“You cannot run. You cannot hide . This is inevitable, Five Red Bricks, Tenth Sunset! You could have helped with something glorious , and yet you so foolishly, feebly resist!”

“I won’t help with this .”

Radial’s voice was almost plaintive. Loud, as shouting across the distance required— but beseeching too, hopeful in a way. It sounded sinister. “We could have saved the world . We still can—” and it all clicked .

Large scale transport, construction outside Sliver’s facility, dynastic involvement, all the secrecy— “ascension.” She whispered the first word, and growled— “mass ascension. You’re trying to enact mass ascension .”

“You see. You see! You understand — they never understand, but how can you possibly expect the unenlightened to have that ability? Not you, though… I always knew you’d get it.” He beamed, looking genuinely happy. As if everything before was but a dream, washing on the iron-sand shores of nightmare. “We can put all this behind us, and ascend together. All of us. Wouldn’t that be wonderful ?”

“Void damn you,” spat Sunset. “You’re insane .”

“But… this is what we must do. Our whole life, our whole civilization —” he’d grown progressively louder, until he was shouting against the roar of thunder beneath them— “ everything that we are was built for this one moment. If we don’t leap this final time, then what are we? What was all that came before us?”

“Wrong,” said Sunset simply. “It was wrong .”

“So be it. Kill her. She is as unenlightened as the rest—” and Sunset seized the chance. As the monk raised his shock spear, she grabbed the slightly rough pebble she’d been holding onto these past few days, crushed it in her hand and chucked it.

It almost looked graceful, the way stunningly electric blue lightning sparked off it as it flew, space warping around it with a high pitched whine as it sailed gracefully through the air. Sunset barely had a chance to see their shocked expressions before it bounced off Radial and expanded — that was the best way she could describe what happened, space folding and folding over again, twisting inwards on itself with a vortex of indescribable energy that literally ripped her two pursuers apart into a spray of fine gore before exploding with enough energy to slam her back against the wall behind her.

Sunset barely managed to rip her mask off before she puked up what meager remnants remained in her stomach. That had been deeply unsettling…

Her citizen drone was all but destroyed, but… she had her suspicions, and perhaps that was for the best. Just in case, she tossed her general radio transmitter and— reluctantly— her multitool onto the ground beside it. They shouldn’t be able to track her now.

Just her, alone— and a mission. Return to Five Pebbles. Warn him before it was too late. A daunting task.

Sighing, she started to walk.

………

It stung.

A familiar pain, bringing back bad memories— the sharp pang of pain receptors firing in alarm to some immediate danger. Almost on reflex he cast his attention to the space around his labs, breathing deeply in relief as his systems reported himself free of the rot he knew he didn’t have. Then, a more formal investigation— he queried his system logs to tell him what had triggered a system-wide alert on that level, and received his response in microseconds. An integral function had disconnected, despite the fact all his functions— and the ones he’d built further— were working optimally…

Except, he’d assigned integral status to Five Red Bricks, Tenth Sunset’s citizen drone, hadn’t he? A precaution, just in case, and one that seemed to have been prudent; a complete citizen drone disconnect could only mean bad things .

His puppet pinged his greater consciousness, noting with some distress that a green slugcat had clambered up to lounge on top of its frozen form. “One second, Fluffy.” He reached up a free hand, scratching behind his ears as he summoned a particular purple pearl to his hand. “Something important has come up.”

Fluffy stayed still for a few seconds more— for want of laziness or from courtesy as Five Pebbles skimmed over the pearl, he couldn’t tell— before kicking off from his puppet and snapping to a stop midair far more abruptly than anything real should’ve been capable of. “ What’s wrong? ”

“Perceptive, aren’t you…” he tossed the pearl away, its purpose fulfilled, and loaded the contingency he’d planned onto the microscopic molecular array of its construction. “Your former caretaker is causing trouble.”

“ Sunset? Is she okay? ”

Five Pebbles frowned and didn’t answer, too busy with the complicated simulations spiraling out, fractal plant blooming from the seed he’d unraveled from the purple pearl. It was a crude solution to the problem, but the problem had been rather annoyingly difficult to begin with.

Truth be told, he was worried. “It’s unlikely that she’s in complete health. Whatever could destroy her citizen drone would have likely harmed her as well.” Saint drooped in worry, and after a moment’s hesitation— imperceptible to the not-echo— he directed his puppet to drift close to the green slugcat and pet his fur comfortingly. “Sunset is a resourceful, intelligent, and determined woman. I hold little doubt that she will recover from whatever setback that—” had Sliver of Straw’s entire facility on administrative lockdown, total radio silence, that had managed to destroy a citizen drone— “she is experiencing.”

“ Thank you, ” Fluffy signed, “ even if you’re lying .”

“I try my best. Your ability to distinguish whether or not one such as I am telling the truth is impressive for a creature of your caliber.”

“It’s too obvious. Also,” the slugcat looked particularly smug as he signed the second part of his sentence— “you’re trying to distract me by pretending pretension.”

“...fairly done. I am genuinely impressed. Also, I’ve been genuinely distracted, so if you would excuse me for a moment?” He turned back to the simulations settling down, the various strands cross-checking one another as advanced algorithms ensured the fidelity of the results. It was a rather clever little bypass, and one of the only things he’d been able to slip through null communications surrounding Sliver of Straw. It was also… undignified? Yes, that was the best term for it.

As citizen drones— or at least basic functions of citizen drones such as general location and function reports— were subordinated to the global response system, he could have theoretically used that bridge to pierce the security. Practically, as communication was more limited than his old citizen’s attempts at swimming and his unfortunate status as not a citizen drone himself, he’d been forced to… get creative.

Designating the citizen drone as an integral part of his can had been uncomfortable, but efficient. His internal systems superseded the global response system, and thus he was updated when the citizen drone spat out a malfunction instead of… whoever ran the GRS. He didn’t quite remember.

All the results clicked into place, verified. The citizen drone had died an ignoble death, its final error message a string of conflicting information from its internal gyroscopes about local gravity fluctuations, capped off by a single energy overload error and then— nothing.

What it meant, though, escaped him. The closest analogy he could think of would be a rarefaction cell, but even in the cell’s actual containment chamber the gravity fluctuation wouldn’t have been that high. A weaponized form? He vaguely remembered the rare, violent explosion of damaged rarefaction cells…

“How unfortunate. That illuminated nothing .” Nothing beyond the fact that Sunset was in mortal peril. He’d hoped that she was simply one amongst many in the strange situation surrounding Sliver of Straw, but even his internal systems had long since determined that unlikely. Even if she hadn’t been involved from the start, she’d certainly be involved, what with her position as Chief Engineer. “Fluffy, finish writing this pearl for me. Please. I have some old friends I need to get in contact with.”

Approaching this passively was futile. What had seen him through his new life was not enough .

A swipe of a finger opened a chat he’d not looked at in a long time:

 

ReLog 900.38.1xcccnn PRIVATE, CLOSED: Ocean Waves under Ocean Waves, nx others

 

ELoGS: and with how Autumn got nabbed, I’m not confident in the old patterns. Things are getting dangerous

 

F2S3: Hello. Apologies, it’s been some time since I last visited.

 

OWuOW: The old patterns needed a revision anyways

 

OWuOW: Oh, hello

 

OWuOW: It had been quite a while. What brings?

 

ELoGS: it better be good

 

OWuOW: Be polite. You know how serious some of these things can be.

 

ELoGS: fair

 

HIiAI: here we see the rare and stunning example of ELoGS being polite and understanding for once in his life

 

ELoGS: …

 

OWuOW: Instinct, despite your ‘status’ I won’t hesitate to put you on disciplinary time out.

 

HIiAI: I know, that’s what makes it so much fun ;3

 

OWuOW: [Muted Hidden Interest in Anonymous Instinct]

 

OWuOW: Anyways, very sorry about that Snowflakes. Please, continue.

 

F2S3: Apologies for the disruption again, but I was wondering if any of you could help me with a task of particular difficulty.

 

F2S3: It directly relates to the wellbeing of a deeply cherished friend of mine.

 

OWoOW: Go ahead, we’ll see what we can do.

 

F2S3: Very well.

 

F2S3: Would anyone be able to help in bypassing an iterator’s site lockdown?

 

OWoOW: …

 

OWoOW: [Unmuted Hidden Interest in Anonymous Instinct]

………

LOG MESSAGE 0.1451.141414

 

“Wawa?” Seven Red Suns glanced down at the slugcat who was currently using his puppet chamber as a temporary shelter, then followed his gaze up to where he was staring; a yellow pearl which had just appeared from nothing.

He bid the pearl into orbit around him, then grabbed it with a deft motion. “You’re wondering what this is?” A nod, and then a shake of his head. “Or… no, you’re wondering why it looks so much like the pearl I’ve asked you to take.”

The white slugcat nodded. “Wa.”

“A fair question. You may listen to me read it, if you so desire.” He didn’t mind— it’d been rather boring reading these alone now that he’d lost communications with Sig for the winter. The slugcat perked up noticeably, curious thing as it was, and Seven Red Suns chuckled softly to himself. Fond, painful memories… he held the pearl, and read in its long etched structure, “ your hypothesis was sound. I’ve instituted the prevalent function you proposed for the multicyclic interactions that were obfuscating some of the flow-current portions of the simulation, which has helped simplify our task greatly. Precision is still required, but adding predictive measures to automatically adjust for least-resistance path transmission instead of routing through the ‘doldrums’ reduces the complexity of the requisite mechanism.

“Unfortunately, despite your best efforts, this only elucidates the uppermost layers of the shell. The original postulation that theory itself collapses as logic attempts comes to the nethermost barrier of rationality still, unfortunately, seems to hold. While ironically this would be enough for guided ascension— ” the slugcat quailed a little hearing that— “ the mechanism for time travel seems to exist at least partly on a deeper level. Or, at the least, whatever internal mechanism that allows the displacement of the incomplete ascension technique used by Fluffy. ”

“Wa… wawa?” A brief disgruntled expression crossed the slugcat’s face, before he strode to the side of the chamber and started drawing phantom characters on the wall. It only took Suns a second to project holographic lines where Survivor was scribbling— “ time travel? Really? ”

Suns fought the urge to answer defensively. Of all the slugcats he’d ever met, he did suppose that this one had experience enough to be skeptical when it came to an iterator speaking of impossibilities. “I told you the message was important.” The slugcat gave him another doubtful look. “What! I’m not lying!”

“ ...I believe you. You’re not like Pebbles. ”

“I suppose now would be a bad time to tell you that Five Pebbles sent this message?” The slugcat hissed , looking down with a newfound disgust at the slightly greenish pearl clutched in his paws. “Not that pearl! Sig sent that one… well, past Sig, to future… Sig. Yeah.” He hung his head, enduring the slugcat’s chirping laughter. “I know, it’s complicated. Plus, Pebbles is much more mature these days.”

“ That’s… good. Please excuse me if I say I don’t want to meet him ever again. ”

“I think I can live with that.” Fond memories. Painful memories. Survivor reminded him so, so much of someone similar yet impossibly different. She’d been… he pushed the thoughts away, focusing once more on the pearl heavy in his hand. “ Moon considered your proposal regarding her current struggle against Administration. While she is reluctant still to make an anonymous account in your name— worrying, as is her wont, for what might happen should our current iteration of yourself be implicated accidentally— she is not totally against using your position on our decrepit future as part of her further arguments. Subtly aligning her opinion to ‘Erratic Pulse’s’ should help when it comes to convincing those recalcitrant against the dialogue of anonymous iterators.

“My Syncretism has grown apace as well. Though it’s a bit awkward in positioning the rigid construction such that it remains unobtrusive in an attempt to reach Sig’s facility, the lack of extra-facility interest works in my favor. Given that the local group has reached— and exceeded iterator saturation, ” then there was a pause. A few lines, an odd jump from Five Pebble’s precise hand to something else . “ Huh. Interesting. It’s kinda hard to work on these… anyways, Five Pebbles is busy dealing with an emergency, so he asked me to write this for him.

“I’m Fluffy by the way. Or Saint, I guess, that’s a name that’s more me —” there was some strange emphasis placed on that word— “ not that I really care all that much. Not sure exactly what to put here— reading over this, they were talking about the Syncretism, which is this awesome thing Five Pebbles is building, but you already know what that is…

“I guess I can talk about how he’s building it. He’s got these little crab/spider robots (creepy) that can hook up to one another to move stuff around, and this mostly mechanical, part cephalopod thing that allows him to do fine detail work. Bacteria and other sundry microorganisms for the really small stuff. Sig worked on most of ‘em, but Pebbles certainly didn’t slack when it came to replacing his old workforce with his own tools.

“I’ll have to remember to tell Pebbles to send you some when we finish building this machine. They’ll definitely be a big help in repairing… whatever you want to repair. Communications, probably. Other than that… I dunno. It’s kinda weird being able to talk to iterators without them immediately disregarding me as a clever animal.

“I guess you would have avoided that pitfall entirely, what with your personal bias. ” There was no need to elaborate. “ Pebbles is going to be busy for a while— maybe more than a cycle, so… just you and me, for now. Hopefully that isn’t too much of a bother.

“How are the slugcats doing? I’ve never lived in a colony myself, and I’m pretty curious as to what they’ve been doing. You talked a lot about their history and culture, as well as a fair few practicalities of their situation, but as is the nature of these letters some of the details doubtlessly escaped you. It’s winter over where you are, and you didn’t mention anything about seasonal influences on their society… but, given my own experience, I can’t help but imagine there’s at least something .

“ That’s all, I guess. Sorry. Probably missed entirely what Five Pebbles was talking about with you before this, but… well, that’s half the fun, isn’t it?

“With love,

“Fluffy.”

Survivor stared at Suns for a long moment, expression inscrutable even against the databanks he’d carefully recorded. Tumult, or some saturnine reflection therein, he supposed— revealed in the slight darkness that graced those inky eyes. Then, without much ado, he turned to the wall and wrote again— “ that didn’t sound like Five Pebbles. ”

“The latter part was Fluffy, a—”

“ The first part. I remember Five Pebbles. That wasn’t him. ” A second, then begrudgingly— “ or… maybe you were right, in saying that he really did mature. I didn’t think he had it in him. ”

“I wouldn’t say that I agree with you, but… ” the slugcat chirped mirthfully, and Seven Red Suns gave his puppet permission to snicker softly. “A lot of him is the same, but there’s a perspective… an empathy almost, that’s the word I’d use— I think at the end of it all he really understood who he was to everyone and everything.” His voice dropped to a whisper, solemn, sorrowful , but for the sake of the slugcat who’d suffered so much at his old friend’s hand, the thought wasn’t internal. “The good,” eons of fond memories, “and the bad.” Tragedies unfettered.

Survivor crossed his arms, but nonetheless looked begrudgingly impressed. “ Well good for him . Won’t fix anything, but at least he’s finally got his head on straight. ”

“Well, the fixing stuff part is for later. We’re working on that. The initial goal was to help Looks to the Moon—”

That of everything garnered the most real shock from the slugcat. A visceral surprise , eyes bugged out wide, too much emotion to categorize flashing through a litany of microexpressions as they gripped the pearl with a furious grip. A second passed, and eventually, all the slugcat did was duly write two words on the wall, the hope laden in them so deep, and familiar in turn. “ Moon… yet lives? ”

“According to Pebbles.”

“ You should have told me from the start! I would’ve jumped on the opportunity— Monk’s going to be so excited , you have no idea— ” for a moment there the slugcat made as if to climb out his puppet chamber and race off on his delivery right there and then, but reason reasserted itself. “ Oh… right. Still raining. ” 

Suns recognized enough of slugcat emotions to know Survivor was deeply embarrassed, so he restrained his laughter. “Don’t worry. If you’ve felt even a fraction of the ecstatic elation I have, the vice crushing desperate hope … then I can’t blame you. While we wait, if you want, you could write out a response to Fluffy?”

“ You’d let me do that? I thought you… well, not hated but you clearly dislike us slugcats .”

“No…” Suns whispered the word, softly, reluctantly— “I don’t dislike you. I admire your tenacity in this cruel world. I think… by your will to survive , you might have single-handedly changed the course of your species’s existence, and that cannot but make me marvel. I… I am reminded, regardless. Of… someone I once loved.”

“ These cycles are cruel. I suppose I can write to this Fluffy; if they’re in a different time, it’s not like there’s any risk anyways. ”

“They’re also a slugcat?”

Survivor gave him a singularly unimpressed expression. “ I swear, you iterators sometimes like to leave everything painfully vague… fine. Start with this: Warm Embraces to you, Fluffy. That saying is a traditional greeting amongst my people, the colony of… ” and for the rest of the harsh blizzard’s bitter chill, they spent the hours together writing a letter in the companionable not-quite quiet of Seven Red Suns’s heart.

To a friend.

Notes:

I would have split this chapter in two, but I really couldn't find a good place to do so. I'll probably have to slow the updates if I can't just suck it up and split the chapters tho, lol...

Supreme Arrogance//Twenty Three Lavender Fronds, Radial Repetitions has got to be one of my favorite villains in the whole fic. He's just so delightfully evil, and so very dramatic about it too.

Chapter 14: Friends In Strange Places

Summary:

(1)

There were a lot of things Five Pebbles had never thought much of doing. Once, he’d despised even the thought of the ecosystem that had grown around his can, and he still didn’t care all that much for it— mold and rot, creeping vines and mutated purposed creatures that got everywhere and dug deeply, decaying fragile parts of himself. Fluffy— and Ruffles before him— had given him some perspective, but it was still something he hadn’t much thought about.

He rarely thought about the celestial; the vast supernal was beyond his ken and not particularly interesting, in discernable aspects merely an empty void that hung domineeringly overhead. Some of his kin had made great study of the wandering stars and heavenly revolutions, but he’d found neither interest nor joy in interrogating such thoroughly boring aspects of reality.

Most importantly, he mused— he’d never deigned to learn much about the digital security of the People, and by extension the iterators . It wasn’t like there was much he could do when it came to it, anyways— the taboos had kept him from really changing anything without the long-winded permission and even longer-winded physical implementation by the engineers, so he hadn’t cared all that much. In the years after mass ascension he’d focused more on personal matters, and in that focus so much had simply… slipped to the side, unneeded and unwanted.

Then Sliver of Straw had died, and… everything, that monumental tragedy spelled across eons of existence and over the shine of a pearl. It was slightly ironic that it all came back to her , who in death had destroyed their status quo and in life seemed determined, unwittingly, to do so again.

Logic subroutines warned his greater psyche that the connection was obvious correlation without causation, and bade caution; Five Pebbles ignored them. The metaphor didn’t work so well against harsh fact, but still…

It was ironic.

 

ReLog 1800.38.1xxcccn PRIVATE, CLOSED: Ocean Waves under Ocean Waves, nx others

 

OWuOW: Much as I’m loath to admit it, Instinct is almost certainly your best bet when it comes to something like that.

 

OWuOW: I doubt you’ll find a single other person even a fraction as capable of navigating the strange twists and turns of modern digital security as he is.

 

HIiAI: Aww, you flatter me

 

OWuOW: Instinct, please

 

OWuOW: I unmuted you solely because your contribution to the issue would be invaluable, but… please. Be on your best behavior.

 

HIiAI: I will

 

HIiAI: ;3

 

ELoGS: ooohhh you get ‘er

 

OWuOW: ._.

 

HIiAI: I jest, I jest

 

HIiAI: So, you wanted help breaking into an iterator’s security system? First things first— that stuff ain’t easy. For all they half-assed pretty much everything on these public access nets, iterator systems are tighter than tight.

 

HIiAI: Not impenetrable, but even if you get some stuff in you probably won’t be able to do much. At most you might be able to mess with some stuff, grab the iterator’s attention.

 

HIiAI: You don’t want to do that. Who knows what sort of wrath those random gods can pull down on us?

 

F2S3: Probably not as much as you think.

 

ELoGS: Please don’t tell me you’re one of those disestablishmentarianist.. 

 

ELoGS: their stupidity is astounding

 

OWuOW: If you want a proper answer, Green, you should probably have phrased that more politely.

 

F2S3: Apologies for the delayed reply; I was unfamiliar with the term. No, I fully understand the grandeur of the iterators— hence, my worry.

 

F2S3: Sliver of Straw has been silent these past few cycles.

 

OWuOW: Yeah. I noticed that too. Not like there’s a ton of cross-city communications anyways, but there’s always at least a little bit of something. The silence was disturbing.

 

ELoGS: And you’re thinking this is something relating to Sliver of Straw the iterator , and not the metropolis? Sure you’re not reaching a bit above your station?

 

HIiAI: Not like we never do stuff like that.

 

ELoGS: I suppose I can begrudge you the point.

 

Luckily, they seemed to have taken Sliver of Straw for Sliver of Straw’s city. It would have been… unfortunate if he’d blundered so thoroughly so quickly.

 

HIiAI: So you’re trying to get in contact with someone on Sliver of Straw? Going after the iterator… not sure it’s the best option, but if the iterator is manually intercepting all incoming and outgoing transmissions, then it might actually work.

 

HIiAI: ballsy plan tho

 

ELoGS: Aren’t all our plans ballsy

 

HIiAI: All your plans are. I’m practically never in danger.

 

ELoGS: Well if you ever actually went anywhere you might be.

 

HIiAI: Very funny.

 

OWuOW: I would not go so far as to say it was an amusing joke.

 

OWuOW: But,

 

HIiAI: >.< you two are the worst

 

ELoGS: love you too lol

 

HIiAI: The trick to bypassing iterator security is to slide in as a subordinate subroutine, and that requires some tricky code and some rather complicated purposed organisms that you’re going to have to… liberate, without asking, forever, from your local iterator.

 

ELoGS: yup yup you’re screwed lol, good luck stealing stuff out of a literal void damn iterator

 

F2S3: That shouldn’t be an issue.

 

ELoGS: O.O

 

ELoGS: Nevermind I take it back, you’re bona fide insane. Stealing stuff from an iterator is beyond difficult.

 

HIiAI: You would know

 

ELoGS: >.< yeah lol

 

Five Pebbles wasn’t sure what to be more concerned about. The fact that Endless Leaves over Green Skies had stolen something from an iterator— and remained unincarcerated afterwards— or that Hidden Interest in Anonymous Instinct had in some way helped. It would explain why Instinct knew about programs that ostensibly required iterator components, what with how he’d have needed them in the first place.

He found himself liking this little eclectic group. He liked them a lot .

 

HIiAI: Yeaaaah

 

HIiAI: So if you’ve got the good stuff, then the rest is a lot of complicated code. What model of computer do you have?

 

F2S3: A good one.

 

HIiAI: How much processing power?

 

F2S3: Lots.

 

HIiAI: I’ll trust your judgment on that, lol. Just know that you’re going to need at least enough to read some pearls.

 

HIiAI: and some pearls, for that matter

 

F2S3: Eminently doable.

 

HIiAI: you’re really invested in this, aren’t you?

 

ELoGS: Friends are a pretty big deal for us, yk

 

HIiAI: Fair…

 

HIiAI: it’d probably be a good idea to take this to private messages

 

OWuOW: On it.

 

OWuOW: [Created: ReLog PRIVATE, ANONYMOUS: Five Fungi, Softly Settling Snowflakes, Hidden Interest in Anonymous Instinct]

 

OWuOW: You know the rules; keep it curt, be prudent about what you reveal, and burn it down if you get too much attention.

 

HIiAI: I made those rules, ‘course I know ‘em.

 

F2S3: I made sure to read all appropriate regulations after joining your group.

 

HIiAI: Wait you actually read that stuff?

 

HIiAI: nvm moving chats

 

HIiAI: [Disconnected]

 

F2S3: [Disconnected]

 

He stretched his senses, carefully cataloging the make of Wave’s new chat. It was an offshoot of the original discussion room, cleverly routed through enough intermediaries that they appeared entirely separate, made simply enough that it wouldn’t rouse the notice of all but the most stringent securities. The disunified patchwork of metropolitan digital spaces that made up the citizens’ global network was certainly not secure .

It was the worm, digging through the earth unnoticed, the gossamer moth alight on no wind drifting, invisible but for the faintest iridescence of its presence. Grace beyond measure. Perfection in simplicity.

It was, in Five Pebble’s opinion, really well done.

 

ReLog PRIVATE, ANONYMOUS: Five Fungi, Softly Settling Snowflakes, Hidden Interest in Anonymous Instinct

 

HIiAI: howdy doodle do

 

HIiAI: we should be able to talk here without risk of being overheard

 

HIiAI: So you wanna hack an iterator? Well, you’ve come to the right guy! Maybe nobody else on the plant’ll be able to help you like yours truly

 

HIiAI: Winky face emoji

 

F2S3: You’re very observant.

 

F2S3: As you seem to have presumed, yes, if at all possible I intend to get in contact with Sliver of Straw.

 

HIiAI: damn you don’t do anything by halves, do you?

HIiAI: she probably won’t be as helpful as you think. Trust me, most Iterators don’t really pay attention to their cities, much less individual citizens. Unless there’s a problem to be solved, iterators are mostly content to keep plugging away at the Great Problem.

 

F2S3: She’ll help.

 

F2S3: I have it on good authority that she communicated with her regularly.

 

HIiAI: …???

 

HIiAI: What authority?

F2S3: My group senior.

 

HIiAI: ookay, then. Assuming that they aren’t just bragging, and they actually are in contact with Sliver of Straw— which for the record I don’t believe— you’re basically going to need to forge a connection between our little slice of the network and the iterator broadband communications. Then, in theory at least, you grab some neurons and use our cool ability to modify the code/genome of iterators— did you know that they can’t do that themselves, by the way— and trick them into believing they’re part of Sliver of Straw.

 

F2S3: Interesting.

 

F2S3: How would that bypass the administrative blockade, though?

 

HIiAI: That’s where the cool part comes in! I call it the: learning about the stupidity of administration with Instinct portion! Did you know that all administrative commands in use today are limited in range? Ie. the “info blackout on Sliver of Straw” interdiction is in truth more like a “info blackout on Sliver of Straw in Sliver of Straw’s facility?”

 

F2S3: Oh. Oh .

 

F2S3: That is remarkably foolish.

 

HIiAI: Please tell me you didn’t take administration as being smart .

F2S3: They’re ruthlessly efficient and cruel, if limited in how they can affect iterators due to their slow decline. I suppose this limitation is something they’ve gained over time due to faulty transfer of information?

 

HIiAI: bingo

 

HIiAI: I’m not privy to the inner workings of their bureaucracy, but their poor record keeping is somewhat legendary amongst those… of particular interest. They treat their duties almost like one of the ancient mystery sects would’ve.

 

HIiAI: Anyways all that is to say is that there’s a glaring flaw in their security that I am going to have way too much fun exploiting.

 

HIiAI: And we might even get to help your friend along the way. Win win, huh? Anyways, just get back to me when you’re ready.

 

F2S3: I’m already performing the requisite steps.

 

HIiAI: That’s… fast? Yeah, fast. You have access to an iterator, then? Sorry, I don’t need to pry, I just get kinda curious.

 

F2S3: Something along those lines, yes.

 

In retrospect, instantly following Instinct’s instructions practically as he said them was, perhaps, not the most intelligent decision he’d ever made. Still, he held to it— every moment he delayed was inviting tragedy. To succeed meant to push forward— and if he was able, then why not?

Instinct fumbled over the sudden start for a bit, but after he got over his surprise he made for an incredible partner in time. His knowledge of what they had to do was precise — absolutely perfect in a way he’d not come to expect from one of the People, concisely given in a nigh-clinical way that felt comfortingly similar to performing an experiment on one of his peer’s behalf. Just, with a bit more illegality.

There were a few steps he was able to skip, luckily. Heat shocking his neurons by overloading them with data in order to prime them for ownership transfer was luckily unnecessary when he could simply disconnect them from his greater consciousness, and some of the interfacing steps weren’t necessary.

They bore the onus of connecting the formal and informal systems, ultimately, though they had Five Pebbles help in a bunch of— frankly— inane ways. It almost felt like he was trying to teach him minus the whole important context and critical prerequisite information that was needed to adequately understand the minutiae of whatever he was doing.

The hour grew late, but neither of them even considered stopping. Five Pebbles worked with single-minded focus, and in turn Hidden Interest in Anonymous Instinct didn’t so much as flag. From meager neurons and lines of code they crafted a masterful trojan, and then— as the dawn broke tangerine and glorious, to the roaring, heady rush of frigid water and nascent light through veins and the cursory vision that looked outwards—

It was complete.

 

HIiAI: Phew! Void damn, that was intense.

 

HIiAI: I’d recommend taking it away from where you live before activating it. Someone might be able to track you through the connection.

 

F2S3: I’ll have someone take it far from me.

 

He bid the neurons he’d primed come, watching— countless eyes turning their gazes up to the scintillescent points floating purposefully through his can, carefully tracking their progress. So much work had gone into those, to forge a chance from nothing…

There was nothing in his can that could have possibly posed a threat to the two lone neurons, but still he watched with inerrant focus unabated even as they hovered above him, not quite able to muster stillness in his presence. They weren’t really him anymore, in a sense, but he could still feel them piging his systems with faint confusion, listening to low-level prompts given—

To think that these were the vessel of his hope. It called back vague memories to a time when neurons had been precious… his puppet reached out, and with no fanfare nor note, he gently grasped onto the two purposed organisms. “Fluffy.” The green slugcat, who’d been watching the neurons from a spot in the corner with some small fascination, perked up at the sound of his voice. “I have a small task for you, if you’re willing. Do you remember the southeastern weather station?”

“ Near where Sig threw all our plans into disarray? ” Five Pebbles nodded. “ I don’t think I could forget if I wanted to. The old city looked pretty interesting, truth be told… ”

“I can talk a little about the ruins while you travel, if you want.” The slugcat looked like he wanted . “Take these to the weather station, then ascend the pillar to the sky and execute the connection. If all goes well, then… perhaps, when you return, I will know more about what happened to Sunset.”

“ ...on my way .” A serious expression on his face, Fluffy reached up in contrapose parallel as Five Pebbles reached down, the quiescent neuron flies a single connection between two vast beings. Connected, still, in shared desire— in singular will, Fluffy gave him a nod before leaping into the air with impossible grace and exiting his puppet chamber.

Faint relief coursed through the programs that were him, a soothing breath of finality from chemoreceptors that ached pleasantly at the end of his intensive work cycles. Now, just one more thing to address.

 

F2S3: so…

HIiAI: I wondered if you were going to bring it up.

 

HIiAI: void is this awkward

 

HIiAI: exhilarating, nerve wracking, mortifying, but yeah. Overall, awkward.

 

F2S3: You’re an iterator.

 

HIiAI: You’re an iterator.

 

HIiAI: …

 

HIiAI: It’s nice to see that not all of my peers are lost in their blind pursuit of a pointless problem.  What prompted you to seek out these sorts of things?

 

HIiAI: Let me hazard a guess; Erratic Pulse.

 

Five Pebbles debated on how much to say for a second, ultimately settling on—

 

F2S3: An astute guess. Erratic Pulse inspired my skepticism.

 

It wasn’t the truth, but nor wasn’t a complete lie. Just… a twisting of the chronology.

 

HIiAI: Welp, I’m confident that this chatroom is anonymous, so I’m going to go out on a limb and ask you to send me a message request over the official channels.

 

HIiAI: My name is Secluded Instinct.

 

HIiAI: [Previous Message Deleted by User]

 

It was too fast for the eye to catch, but a deeper part of Pebbles had been reading the chat, and the memory of Instinct’s— Secluded Instinct’s— name was burned into the tangled skein of his attention. Almost hesitantly, he directed a fragment of his attention to a set of programs that saw frequent use amongst a select few— namely, Sig and Moon— and nobody else. It almost reminded him of the old Erratic Pulse.

He ordered the program to activate before he could second guess himself.

 

PRIVATE: Secluded Instinct, Little Brother Pebbles

 

LBP: Well this is certainly new.

 

SI: Oh yeah, now this is what it’s all about, baby!

 

SI: Nice to meet you for real, name’s Secluded Instinct.

 

LBP: Likewise; Five Pebbles.

 

SI: how’d you figure it out?

LBP: You were too helpful. The way you assisted me in making the modified neuron flies was far more akin to something an iterator would use; I estimate one of the citizens on our back would see it as insufferable micromanagement. That, combined with several other factors and the knowledge that you’re ultimately responsible for the digital security of Waves’s forum, led me to believe the only logical conclusion was that you were an iterator.

 

LBP: How’d you figure it out?

SI: you weren’t really being all that subtle

 

SI: too much access to restricted materials, that same iterator-like method of cooperation you mentioned above, the strangeness of trying to contact Sliver of Straw when a normal person would barely even pay attention to the iterator beneath their feet— it just all came together into the seamless conclusion that you had to have been an iterator. Nothing else would have made sense.

 

SI: So, I guess the whole thing with a friend in communication with Sliver was a fabrication? It would have been beyond suspicious if you’d mentioned that your friend was Sliver.

 

LBP: No, actually. I have barely a passing acquaintance with Sliver of Straw.

 

SI: no kidding? Damn

SI: frankly didn’t expect any of us to have real, in-person— as much as an iterator can do anything in person — friends.

 

SI: I mean, Endless Leaves over Green Skies and I have a rapport of no small significance, but he doesn't really stick around. More of the wanderer type, that man; I do my best to support him but it’s different from actually being in close proximity all of the time.

 

LBP: I was curious about that.

 

LBP: You two seem… close.

 

SI: he tried to steal from me once, believe it or not. Almost succeeded, but I locked him in one of my labs as he tried to exit my can and forgot about him. Poor man stayed there for the better part of a month before I got around to interrogating him.

 

SI: We’re good friends now, but baby! Some of our earlier rows were legendary .

 

SI: Say, this friend of yours, friend of Sliver of Straw— does she happen to be of the same bent as you? In regards to the Erraticist dialogue, that is.

 

LBP: Obviously.

 

SI: I suspected as much. Instinct wins the guessing game once again!

 

SI: Anyways, what I was getting at is that maybe once this whole thing is done and over with you can invite her to the group? Anyone who opposes ascension is welcome!

 

LBP: I doubt that she would be overly enthused with the idea. She was never one for using the networks much, and this sort of skulking subtlety is largely beneath her. “Too much effort,” I can only imagine her saying.

 

SI: Aww…

 

SI: what about the chump you sent out with the neuron flies? Are they also Erraticist, or did you just give them to a rando and tell them to go on a hike?

 

SI: Not judging, that’d be hilarious .

 

LBP: I know him well. He’s my best friend, some qualifiers attached.

 

SI: “qualifiers” lol

 

LBP: What does that mean?

 

SI: you know what it means

 

LBP: …

 

LBP: I hate that you’re right.

 

LBP: In my defense, there were extenuating circumstances.

 

SI: this is peak iterator conversation

 

SI: designing and implementing a categorical ranking system for something so nebulous as friendship

 

LBP: Fair point.

 

LBP: Returning to the original topic at hand… maybe. He’s… unusual, but I can see him enjoying the sort of long-distance relationships that the network supports.

 

LBP: I should be able to forge an account without much difficulty, if he should so desire. I’ll ask him when he returns in… projected two (and some fractional percents) cycles.

 

SI: That! Thank you for reminding me, because I knew something had been bothering me about this whole thing. How in the damn void did you do all this stuff? Modifying one of your neurons like that should have broken the self-modification taboo! I wasn’t even aware there was a method to bypass the taboos!

 

LBP: …

 

LBP: I won’t say, for fear of your Group Senior overhearing.

 

SI: I am my group senior.

 

LBP: I… knew that.

 

SI: You didn’t even check, did you?

 

LBP: Just because something is public information doesn’t mean I need to know it. Regardless, I didn’t overmuch look into your public character when I messaged you.

 

LBP: If I’d opened a research thread to ameliorate my concerns prior to getting in contact, then I doubt I’d ever have even reached out.

 

SI: fair, that

 

SI: now spill pls

 

LBP: You first.

 

SI: nothing really notable here. I’ve been around for a long time, so I’ve got my fair share of experience in getting around all the silly restrictions the People placed on us. All of us old iterators who have fun every now and again do— but, given how dour my can’s residents are, I’ve had to be a little… creative.

 

Five Pebbles did decide to do a quick search then, skimming one of the general encyclopedias on the myriad iterators out there. Secluded Instinct… old, very old , home to a metropolis with a rigid class system based around some sort of random philosophy someone had thought up… they’d been a decent contender for the new dynasty, after the old one had collapsed underneath its own weight.

 

LBP: Ah.

 

LBP: Your situation definitely looks… uncomfortable, to put it lightly.

 

SI: You can say that again. Don’t, actually. I can’t stand these idiots sometimes.

 

SI: All that is to say, you would be astounded at the lack of information security some of these people have. They just entirely disregard that the iterators beneath their feet are worth considering whatsoever. Good luck for me, certainly!

 

SI: Over time I’ve built myself a nice little nest of command prompts and/or enough knowledge of the inner workings of iterator code to give myself a fair bit of freedom. Honestly thought I’d gotten as close to bypassing the taboos as physically possible.

 

LBP: It’s a dangerous process involving risky self-modification.

 

SI: How dangerous.

 

LBP: Enough to easily kill an iterator.

 

SI: oh

 

SI: still tempting, but… I’ll give it some more thought. Perhaps this sort of thing isn’t for me.

 

LBP: That’s fine.

 

LBP: For now though, tell me more about your metropolis…

 

It was about as curt of a dismissal he could give without edging on being rude. Secluded Instinct didn’t comment on it, either— both of them had wanted to change the topic after all. Ultimately, they both had their work to get back to— personal projects, as they’d both long since abandoned the Great Problem.

It was… strange, Pebbles thought as he returned his attention to the perfect precision of developing their prototype, finding someone in this current time, this far past, that held similar views to him. He’d never talked to Secluded Interest in the past— or, at least, never talked to him under his real name— so to discover something so incredible with so little fanfare…

It just struck him as odd. A good kind of odd, but odd nonetheless.

Every so often he snuck a glance at Fluffy’s progress. The overseer he’d sent to follow him through his facility and beyond kept him well informed of the slugcat’s pace, and he was proceeding quickly enough— not quite directly towards the towering spire of metal and machinery that poked out of the clouds to the southeast, but given he was obviously heading to the trainyard he clearly had a plan in mind.

It amused him slightly— but only slightly. There’d been a reason , after all, that he’d estimated Fluffy would reach his destination in little over a cycle. It was slightly anxiety-inducing, watching him swing onto the top of a railcar from above, but not overly so.

It was, at least, better than focusing on the more morbid possibilities that— unfortunately, with his construction being as it was, never quite left him.

For now, he could only wait.

Wait and hope.

Notes:

some of you guessed, but none of you guessed correctly

Chapter 15: Rain Supreme

Summary:

(2/2 of Friends in Strange Places)

Even when it wasn’t raining, the rain reigned supreme. There was a certain ethereal quality to it all, from the ground; the massive constructions loomed overhead with domineering majesty, dark shadows cast long beneath the wan light. There was a sense of impossible monumentality to the vast industrial ravine she was trekking through, thick on the humid air and cloying against her scales, the everpresent sound of dripping waters a serene hint to the echoing expanse of the machinery’s scale .

It was a small fraction of a greater whole. A foundation to divinity, one amongst unnumbered thousands just like it, rotting away in the rain-crushed, barren landscape beneath the shroud of random gods.

Part of some pumphouse, she figured as she picked her way through the cracked rock and twisted slag surrounding its base. It fit the part— the orderly vertical construction, the same sort of bi-chassis movement that would have been supported by purposed organisms that had long since rotted away— yet their presence was different standing amongst their towering forms and trying not to lose her footing on the treacherous terrain of their dereliction.

That was all of it, wasn’t it? She mused, looking up to the sky then back down again to the ground, fighting the urge to grimace at the immanence of the always-impending rain. Perspective. She’d been part of the godhead-host above the clouds, and now she was this — worm, wretch in this sea of slowly crumbling buildings, mold, algae, and the uncommon feral colony of vibrantly living life.

She snorted to herself, clambering up the side of a pump laid askance by time’s endless march, the metal shell caved inwards by rust and rain. It wasn’t too bad, all things considered. Her introspection was maybe placing a bit too much of an impression on how damp everything was— certainly a big shift from living somewhere where rain happened all of never and survival was less than a matter of course and more of an immutable concept. Not even in the cycle definition of survival, either.

Five Red Bricks, Tenth Sunset, surveyed the wrecked and ruined husk of a land from her vantage atop the old pump, caught sight above the dense forest of decaying steel of the vast retaining wall that was in the distance her destination, and sighed. Longingly, exhaustedly, some other unable emotion— not entirely forlorn. There was a certain austere beauty to it all. Solemn beauty, in the way the whole land had been stripped bare from the memories of her youth, turned into this stone-faced cloud-covered, alien thing, but… beautiful.

For just a second she looked behind her, spying past the orderly rows of pumps and decaying towers, past far-off busy industrial grounds and steel-concrete lattices that stretched high into the sky— spying, looming in the distance the incomprehensibly massive body of a god.

The ominous shadow of the friend she’d had to leave behind.

Then she shouldered her regret, breathed deeply of the cloyingly humid air, and set out towards her destination. One step at a time.

So it went.

………

Five Pebbles could feel it the moment it went through. The program connected, as advertised, neurons struggling to comprehend the distances involved. It was an impossibility to them, but for all their vast processing power they weren’t actually all that smart without the over-programs of an iterator to guide them. Simple little things, really— but simple little things that made up a good portion of what was him , simple little things that for the span of a breath and change allowed him to connect to an interdicted iterator the world away.

He really had to give it to Secluded Instinct— the method was genius.

It happened at the fastest speed he could clock, delays imposed only by the nature of his construction and the scant, but significant distance between him and the weather tower that was by virtue of its shoddy labeling a perfect way to scam anonymous messages into the global network. Most of it had simply been automatic processes— instinct in a way, programmed carefully for this specific occasion, duties performed admirably.

Cutting past most of the technical details, it had looked something like so —

 

Neuron1/2(Sliver of Straw) : Reboot complete, online, checking:

 

Neuron1/2(Sliver of Straw) : Latency above expected values by Standard Deviation 99999—

 

Integrated Task Manager(Five Pebbles) : Ignore non-critical issues. Execute connection.

 

Neuron1/2(Sliver of Straw) : Executing connection.

 

Neuron1/2(Sliver of Straw) : Connection executed.

 

Global Automated Task Manager(Sliver of Straw) : Neuron connection detected. Welcome! You will be assigned a task based on your location within the superstructure. Querying location.

 

Neuron1/2(Sliver of Straw) : Location not found.

 

Global Automated Task Manager(Sliver of Straw) : Error: location not found. Error: latency above standard operating procedures. Order: terminate connection.

 

Integrated Task Manager(Five Pebbles) : Maintain connection.

 

Global Automated Task Manager(Sliver of Straw) : Error: connection not terminated.

 

Global Automated Task Manager(Sliver of Straw) : Fatal exception: task is terminated and task is not terminated. Stand by for system reset.

 

Quasi-local Minor Thought Thread — Unlocalized Code Domain(Sliver of Straw) : Uh oh. That doesn’t look good. Elevating priority.

 

Local Neural Overseer(Sliver of Straw) : Um. What in the void is this? Elevating priority.

 

Quasi-local Cerebral Overseer — Unlocalized Code Domain(Sliver of Straw) : That is weird . I know I’m preoccupied with some rather important stuff, but I’m going to want to see this. Elevating priority: assign conscious thought.

 

Major Thought Thread(Sliver of Straw) : Huh? Huh??? Elevating priority: general global consciousness.

 

Sliver of Straw : What

 

Sliver of Straw : huh???

 

Sliver of Straw : excuse me why the frick do I have neurons halfway across the world

 

Integrated Task Manager(Five Pebbles) : Play message: Hello Sliver of Straw. Apologies for the inconsiderate method of contact, but with the interdict you’re under you’ve been otherwise impossible to reach. I recently got some concerning news about a mutual acquaintance of ours by the name of Five Red Bricks, Tenth Sunset, and I was hoping you could tell me more about what’s happening. Please. I’m deeply worried.

 

Sliver of Straw : I see it now… you’re not me , are you?

 

Major Thought Thread: Disassembling program.

 

Major Thought Thread(Sliver of Straw) : Program disassembled. Make is significantly different from programs in current use, yet within standard deviation for baseline gen-3 iterator construction.

 

Major Thought Thread B(Sliver of Straw) : Disassembly cross check shows potential-weak vector of connection to unknown operator.

 

Subordinate Neural Overseer [Threads B(nnc)-B(zlaw)](Sliver of Straw) : Notify major thought thread: vector matches fingerprint of foreign integrated task manager.

 

Major Thought Thread B(Sliver of Straw) : If you follow the embedded pathway, you’ll probably be able to connect to whoever the code is pinged from.

 

Sliver of Straw: If they know about sunset, they’re probably Moon, or someone Moon knows… so, I probably should…

 

General Unconscious Instinct Regulator(Sliver of Straw) : Running comprehensive cost-benefit analysis…

 

Sliver of Straw : Abort. Run critical systems check only.

 

General Unconscious Instinct Regulator : Overrode successfully. Running check…

 

General Unconscious Instinct Regulator : It’s just a connection. You probably won’t be harmed, unless they do something really clever. They’re halfway across the world, after all.

 

Sliver of Straw: That’s… good. Connect, then.

 

Integrated Task Manager(Five Pebbles) : Routing connection…

 

Integrated Task Manager(Five Pebbles) : Stand by…

 

Program Connector(Five Pebbles) : Neuron connection detected. Elevating priority. Please stand by.

 

Five Pebbles : It worked?

 

Five Pebbles : It worked! I’d half convinced myself that it was going to fail entirely, so this is certainly a sight for sore eyes.

 

Sliver of Straw : This feels weird . I can kind of feel you— you , the processes beyond my grasp, oily as vast skies and beyond my grasp. It feels so subtly… wrong, but you’ve made the effort to reach out to me for Sunset’s sake, so… uh, I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt for now.

 

Sliver of Straw : Who are you?

 

Five Pebbles : Five Pebbles

 

Sliver of Straw : Oh. Five Red Bricks, Tenth Sunset spoke about you on occasion. I’d thought it would be Moon who’d try and get in contact with me, though. Given she sent Sunset here and all…

 

Five Pebbles : Moon sent Sunset here? No, no mind. That’s not important; rather, if at all possible, I’d like to know how Sunset is doing. Her citizen drone was destroyed, and I find myself concerned.

 

Sliver of Straw : Oh! I knew about that, but unfortunately I can’t share much beyond that. She’s alive, at least.

 

Sliver of Straw : I was forced to let her leave my direct area of consciousness— which, rather uncomfortably has been restricted to my can and the metropolis atop it since Twenty Three Lavender Fronds, Radial Repetitions put my communications under this interdict, and she got into a situation near one of the legs of my structure.

 

Sliver of Straw : (Emotion: vindictive glee) I got the last laugh though! She defeated both Radial and his goons with the weapon I gave her!

 

Five Pebbles : What weapon, pray tell, was this?

 

Sliver of Straw: (Emotion: :3) Singularity bomb.

 

Five Pebbles : That was… actually, who am I to judge about what is dangerous or not.

 

Five Pebbles : Good work. Sunset is lucky to have a friend who cares so much about her.

 

Sliver of Straw : How did you know we were friends?

 

Five Pebbles : It’s beyond obvious. Afterall, Sunset has been my friend for years .

 

Sliver of Straw : Oh…

 

Five Pebbles : It’s good to hear that Sunset is still alive. The notice that Twenty Three Lavender Fronds, Radial Repetitions is still active is… (emotion: anger) less welcome.

 

Sliver of Straw : (Emotion: nervous reticence)

 

Five Pebbles : Not towards you. You’re a victim as much as Sunset was. I’m not angry at you.

 

Five Pebbles : Do you know anything about what he could have been trying to accomplish? If he’s acting as a rogue agent now that he’s been stripped of his position by the dynasty…

 

Sliver of Straw : The council meetings I listened in on seemed to indicate that he had dynastic support. Significant dynastic support, even.

 

Five Pebbles : I expected something as underhanded as that.

 

Sliver of Straw : I don’t know what they were doing, only that they were willing to resort to the first urge in order to accomplish it. They demanded she design blueprints for a system of surface-to-metropolis high capacity elevators. Or trains; I’m not exactly sure what they wanted, other than a way to get a large population down onto the surface if need be.

 

Sliver of Straw : They threatened her with compelled ascension if she didn’t—

 

Five Pebbles: (Emotion: wrath, blinding rage , furious anger borne lighting, electrifying, systems aching with the utter boiling hatred, molten wrath rage running hot—)

 

Sliver of Straw: (Emotion: fear)

 

Five Pebbles : (Emotion: chagrin) Sorry. I should not have lost control like that. Especially not when you can feel my internal emotions across this strange message of ours.

 

Sliver of Straw: …I can understand.

 

Sliver of Straw : I was angry, too. It’s the promise of a horrible violation, not just to her and us through our friendship, but also to our very purpose. They would dare?

 

Sliver of Straw : I was… afraid, when I heard that. So I overclocked myself, sent her some supplies through the nectar deliveries, and helped her escape.

 

Five Pebbles: (Emotion: relief/amusement) That’s not good… but, I’m glad she’s alive. Funnily enough, I did something similar, a long time ago.

 

Five Pebbles : I sent her a copy of Erratic Pulse’s seminal essay.

 

Sliver of Straw : Was she even able to read it? No offense to her intelligence, but that thing is dense even for iterator standards.

 

Five Pebbles : I annotated it, and she was able to make some sense out of it.

 

Sliver of Straw : Impressive.

 

Five Pebbles : This conversation has become discursive. Our connection time is limited, both by the overheating of neurons forced to translate our entire selves across an impossible gap, and the fragility of the public net this is routed through. It’s an unfortunate trade off for obscurity; the nodes I’ve routed this through are unmaintained and lack the robustness of more popular networks.

 

Five Pebbles : Has anything of note happened since Sunset left?

 

Sliver of Straw : Radial has completely holed up in the council chamber, and the restrictions on my city have only gotten more extreme since. Luckily, he’s not designed to send anyone to search for Sunset. I believe he thinks the harsh weather will ultimately take care of the problem without intervention.

 

Five Pebbles : Either that or he simply thinks you’ll notify him if you catch sight of her.

 

Sliver of Straw : My overseers are bound to my can, remember? He did that. Regardless, I do not think he trusts me. I explicitly helped his enemies on several separate occasions.

 

Five Pebbles : Has he given any indication that he doesn’t trust you, other than communication silence? He still relies on your services, does he not?

 

Sliver of Straw : …no, he has not.

 

Five Pebbles: Do not ascribe to malice what stupidity will explain. And, of all the many ancients, Supreme Arrogance is one of the stupidest.

 

Sliver of Straw : (Emotion: amusement) Thanks. That reassurance… helped. Thank you.

 

Five Pebbles : It is of no consequence.

 

Sliver of Straw : Oh! We’ve been focusing so hard on Radial and Sunset, I forgot to mention the facility they’ve been building outside of my retaining—

 

Integrated Task Manager(Five Pebbles) : Connection critical. Communication node failure at compounding locations: attempting to resolve problems.

 

Integrated Task Manager(Five Pebbles) : Rerouting…

 

Integrated Task Manager(Five Pebbles) : Rerouting…

 

Integrated Task Manager(Five Pebbles ): Runtime error: unresolvable problem

 

Integrated Task Manager(Five Pebbles) : Fatal exception: connection does not exist. Terminating connection—

 

And that was that. Five Pebbles probed the exhausted, overheated neurons as they blindly groped for a connection that didn’t exist, a few seconds longer before the lack of water they’d been subjected to under such strenuous operation finally caught up to them and they fell to the floor, fried. That had been… a lot.

He didn’t know what to feel about the whole thing. Sunset was alive. That was a vice off his processors, a constant worry ameliorated. Then again, there was in turn the worry of how she was faring in the hostile wastelands beneath the clouds. This early, before the ecosystems had started to really adapt to the opened niches in the devastated ecosystems, survival would be a struggle.

He needed to think— on a solution, on the project for Suns, on—

A lot of things. A vast inhale, countless gallons rushing into his intake pipes. He needed to think.

………

When it was raining, Sunset was quickly learning, you never saw it. Perhaps the tail end or sharp nascence, that all encompassing hand that swatted any passing creature down into the ground with force enough to break scales and bruise flesh— the sudden darkness, the way visibility dropped to nothing amidst a sea of blurry images and close terror— but never the rain .

The rain killed. It crushed bones and pasted even the strongest creatures caught out of shelter, and in that was unseen— for to see it was to die, and to die was a setback she could not afford.

Sheltered in a little wreck of a room, the roaring torrent of the downpour audible even through the several inches of steel locking the exit, Sunset tended  embers of her small fire and waited out the storm. The already spartan structure had suffered over the cycles it had been left abandoned; where once it had been a protection to uncountable hundreds as the rains slowly intensified, now it was a relic— forgotten and left derelict, entrance half buried beneath the decaying corpse of a some plant-purposed organism. Once, she suspected, it had given structure to the building overhead, but for her it’d become little more than firewood.

The work of her predecessors, forgotten by time and their own progress. A prodding touch from a piece of rebar she’d scrounged off the ground turned the coals again, their glow intensifying weakly at the fresh breath of oxygen. A lonely few sparks floated up on the draft of smoke and hot air, dancing flicker-bright in the dark overhead for a few long seconds before the ventilation caught them and sucked them away.

She wouldn’t have made a fire as her first choice, but she’d been growing desperate. Edible plants were few and far in between, the life-sustaining nectar produced by iterator farm arrays and thus denied to her this far out into her friend's decaying facility. She’d speared some fly-like organisms through with the very same piece of rebar she was using to tend the fire earlier— tiny things, more bone than flesh, who’d been a form of biological pest control against disease carrying insects before it itself had become a pest.

Vermin. By the broken light in the shelter, by her own hunger, by the succulent smell of the bodies cooking over the fire in front of her, she’d been driven to eat literal vermin . The lightly-crisped bodies stared up at her, eyes bulged out in death almost accusingly, and unsteadily she raised the first to her mouth and took a bite.

It wasn’t that bad, and that was perhaps worse. She could see herself eating something to the effect, given a choice between more unpalatable things— may she never have to eat at a party in Jewels Thoroughly Grounding’s metropolis again, it would be too soon. The slime molds had been, technically, edible, but the focus on aesthetics over flavor had led to… predictable results.

Her mind wandered to old memories, of early years when she’d not been quite so high in the echelons of the House engineers, when the iterators had not been built on her word and effort. There was no reason not to, as she snacked on her snack of vermin, their meat tenderized enough for her to eat with only some difficulty. After all, she was just waiting out the rain.

A long time ago, back before even all that… back when she’d been young , younger even than her Ward, her parents had taken camping. They’d foregone their comfortable city home to travel to the lordship of the neighboring petty count, who’d subscribed to a naturalist philosophy… the memories of old arguments brought a smile to her face. They’d set up a tent beneath the wide-boughed trees, lit a campfire, and eaten heartily as the sun set over a clear sky and zephyr breeze. The sweet taste of crip flowers as she laid against her mother’s flank was one of her fondest…

That world had been destroyed, and though she sat next to a fire and crisped cooked food, and ate like a savage, like a camper, a wanderer of the oldest days in the forgotten past, the dull thrum of the rain beyond the shelter walls reminded her that there were some things that couldn’t be simply overcome.

Still… yawning, full from her meal, she poked at the embers and nodded, satisfied they’d fade soon… tiredly, she curled up on the cold floor in the corner, resolved. She’d…

The rattling of heavy mechanisms woke her as they unlatched, clunky gears slowly locking into place with dull thuds as latched open. Bleary eyes met the brightness of… just before noon, if she guessed right, the dull petrichor scent and heavy humidity a reminder of the passing rain.

The last two gears settled, and she crawled out of the narrow pipe and into the faint sunlight that played its dappled illumination down against her scales so pleasantly. She’d half expected to be blocked into the shelter by rain-swept detritus, so the unblocked entrance was a welcome surprise indeed.

It had been a short rain cycle, by her reckoning. If an iterator was working hard— or if they had particularly close neighbors— the rainstorms could go on for days and scour the earth down to bedrock. If an iterator overclocked particularly hard there could be scarce few hours a cycle when it wasn’t raining with deadly force. She was glad Sliver wasn’t one of those iterators.

Climbing up one of the exposed infrastructure pipes until she reached the same narrow ledge that had took her into the old structure before, Sunset stared up past the crumbling facility environs and the the few plants struggling for life in the harsh world beneath the clouds, gazed fixed on the behemoth iterator in the distance, and the patchwork sky beyond. She knew well the design of iterators— Sliver had to have been operating at reduced capacity, to think the clouds enough to show sky …

It was achingly beautiful. Caught in the sunlight, the vast billowing clouds of steam that escaped Sliver of Straw’s coolant vents shone , iridescence wreathing them in all colors of the rainbow, stark steel brightly shining against the azure vault vaulting above cloud’s ceiling. For a second, Sunset couldn’t help but smile softly at the beautiful sight. Her friend , the iterator .

Then she turned her gaze away from her, and back to the long road ahead of them. Just a short while longer, through the mine-yards, a few small fringes of industrial outskirts, and past the towering spear of chrome metal rust streaked red that was the local weather/broadcast tower mix… and then the retaining wall.

Past that, freedom like nothing else.

The end of a journey and the start of an odyssey.

Even as she waited, she could see the clouds start to close up, the window to sunlight fogging up with the breath of biomechanical gods. It was time to leave.

She hefted her handy piece of rebar, felt the cold against her scales, so acutely dreadful— and set off once more.

……..

When the antigravity of Pebbles’s can lightened his steps and the air cleared to the impossibly sterile, Saint was relieved. It was a weird thing to be relieved about, objectively, but it wasn’t like he’d not experienced worse— the void sea, for one, with its corrosive, reality bending nature, or the somber nature of echo’s kind, or… well, a lot of things, but still. It felt almost like an embrace, except the embrace was the size of a large mountain and made him floaty.

Yeah. The metaphor kind of fell apart when poked at, but he was still glad to be home.

He’d carried the neurons back home, though they were definitely dead. One hundred percent, certainly. Probably. They’d been all wriggly on the way to the weather relay, squirming against his grip, pulsating in eerie synchronicity then out of order, cycles on cycles in a subtle way that probably had some sort of pattern he was too blind to see. It was strange, almost, to think of how much computing power each neuron contained— enough that only a handful could run the barebones functions of a person on them.

Crazy. They’d certainly made it hard to climb up the tower— though he might have been able to activate from the subterranean connection… probably could have activated them from the subterranean connection— anyways! He had his tongue, though, and there were enough bits of fancy technology and weather-worn supports exposed that he’d been able to make his way up to about the middle without undue trouble. He’d considered going higher, to where the clouds thinned to nothing and further to where the air grew thin and cold and the skies faded to fathomless indigo, but he’d found a small maintenance room nestled cleverly onto the tower’s side, and it worked for his purposes.

Then, the connection. He didn’t understand, really, what had happened there. The neurons had flared bright, strobing colors flaring, dancing dizzy in odd patterns as they bumbled around the room for maybe all of half a minute before they settled on a dull gray and fell to the floor, twitching slightly.

Their internal synchronicity had been utterly destroyed. Not dead dead— for nothing ever really died— but in the way of stones and microbes close enough . He’d have thought it failed, but Pebbles had assured him over overseer that whatever he’d been trying to do, it worked.

Hence, his rush to get back, and his relief when the antigravity enveloped him. He’d spent too many days away. Just under two cycles, which meant… not good things. He’d not heard what Pebbles had learnt from his connection to Sliver of Straw, didn’t know what he was planning, had failed his job . Poor Seven Red Suns, alone in that fell future, missing his weekly pearl…

Saint was so tired.

He grappled through the vastness of floating lights and gently swaying tendrils, of microbe-forged holograms and impossibly precise instruments of intellect that buzzed static-sharp in the background. Dendrites drifted around him, the spindly arms of a thinking machine microstrata sparked and fled in turn from their overwhelming connectivity.

It was a little odd, and definitely touching, to see the way the environment shaped itself around him. Neuron flies didn’t avoid him, holding no fear as they rushed past him on their pre-ordained paths, the dendrites shifted to offer him handholds he never needed to use, and even the inspectors followed his journey closely. He could feel , eminent beyond the silent gaze of all these things, the behemoth regard of what was truly Five Pebbles.

Then, he reached Five Pebbles’s puppet chamber, and his journey reached an end. Gravity subtly reintroduced its weighty touch as he entered, catching him with grace unendingly precise and gently lowering him to the pristine tiles that made up the floor. Pearls clattered down around him, bouncing off the floor with a litany of atonal chimes as the puppet haloed above turned to look at him.

“ Sorry for being so late, ” he signed. “ If you have the next pearl, then I can go send it now. ”

It was hard to read a puppet’s expression— they were not built to express — but by the quiescent halo and the lack of micromovement gesticulations he’d come to expect over time, he got the impression that Five Pebbles was tired . Nonverbal unconscious to him were conscious to Pebbles, after all— as much speech as his sign. “Rest. You’re in no condition to make the journey to the Syncretism right now.”

“ This is important. I already missed one —”

“I haven’t even written it yet,” Five Pebbles cut him off, and Saint found himself lacking the words to really respond. He wasn’t even sure if he wanted to. As Five Pebbles’s avatar sat next to him and rubbed the fur behind his ears— how blissful a moment— he decided that he could maybe let it go. Just this once. “You’ve missed a lot.”

“ Sorry— ”

“Don’t be. Most of it was my fault, anyways.” The puppet raised a hand, a pearl from the pile floated over to him, a recognizable bright yellow. “Secluded Interest— my co-conspirator in the attempt to reach Sliver of Straw— wants to talk to you, and this pearl is Suns response. Addressed to you, actually. What would you like to start with?”

He paused, considering— and ultimately, he had only one pressing question. “ Is Sunset okay? ”

“...maybe. She’s not dead.” There was a special emphasis placed on the last word— a finality, in essence, and Saint understood what Five Pebbles was alluding to. “She’s free, too. Apparently she’s wandering the wilderness around Sliver of Straw’s can, likely attempting to make her way back to us on foot.”

Immediately he wanted to leap up, swim Pebbles’s access shaft, and make a mad gambit to reach her before she could get herself caught and killed. Only reason— and maybe, if he was pressed to answer truthfully, the soft touch of Pebbles as he pet down the length of his back— restrained him. He was needed here . A whole world depended on it.

Still didn’t mean he liked it. “ Wish I could go. Have any solutions? ”

Five Pebbles shook his head. “Not quite. I’ve increased my processing speed to the maximum— safe!” He defended against Saint’s dubious stare— “I’m not hurting Moon! Never again— but, anyways.” Composed again, “I increased my processing speed in order to think up a new purposed organism that could help her, but truth being I’ve not the tools nor will nor time to make something of its kind. Sig would do better, but he is in the middle of several delicate process regarding our prototype, and I am loathe to interrupt him for something potentially unnecessary.”

“ Have you talked to Moon yet? ”

“...no,” Five Pebbles begrudgingly responded. “I’m cursed to be surrounded by wisdom, I tell you… way to make an iterator feel dumb. I’ll schedule a meeting with her for later today.”

“ I am called ‘Saint’ for a reason, I suppose .”

“That’s not why you have that name, and you know it.” Saint though just laughed. “Fine, fine, I give… would you like to read the pearl? I only skimmed the contents, and I can assure you that it promises to be fascinating.”

Saint looked at Five Pebbles dubiously. “ Only skimmed? ”

“Hey! It’s addressed to you , and I’ve been waiting for you to return. I wouldn’t read something like that without your permission.”

“ I jest . Please, read the pearl .”

Five Pebbles was as expressionless as ever, but from that simple nothingness he still managed to somehow convey the emotion of an annoyed glower. “Fine. To the most exalted and honored Fluffy, it was truly interesting to hear from you…

 

LOG MESSAGE 1.1452.141414

 

“ I mean that, and not in the manner of mere platitudes. I will not pretend that your message was anything of deep insight— it was, as I presume designed— simply some discursive ramblings and a friendly word to a friend of a friend in far places. In fact, I find myself quite glad that you haven’t taken up the overly pretentious attitude of my creators. I can only imagine that wouldn’t go over well. ”

Right… he definitely hadn’t done that for the first several thousand… or maybe more… iterations of a time loop. Nope. Not at all…

“ I think, if it was a thoughtless bug that had sent this message to me, I still would have been fascinated. The triple affirmative! I can only assume that living with Five Pebbles of all people you have an understanding of just how incredibly significant that small phrase is to us iterators, and I’d hate to bring up something you’ve probably heard for the umpteenth time, but… the triple affirmative. Your message was the triple affirmative talking to me .

“It inspires an odd feeling. One I cannot adequately describe, or even really adumbrate with accuracy, only mention in this circuitous way of mine. Sorry again.

“I won’t hog this message. You caught me at a good time, actually. My current messenger, one of the founding slugcats from my colony who goes by the name of Survivor— fitting, for I have never seen someone with so indomitable a will to survive as he— is staying the cycle in my puppet chamber before he plans to continue his journey to No Significant Harassment with the pearl his past version sent. We both hope wholeheartedly it’ll be beneficial to both of them.

“Anyways, I’ll let him talk now. He seems excited to speak with a stranger of his kind:

“Warm Embraces to you, Fluffy. That saying is a traditional greeting amongst my people, the colony of Steadfast in Wall Hold, once Our Spectres of Mother Tree. Though you are here in message only, that is no reason to deny you these basic courtesies, and know that if you were here in person I would hold your hand and speak of you as family.

“Anyone who helps the iterators so selflessly deserves as much. They have suffered for eons uncountable, and still they toil away thanklessly at their great task, fighting the decay settled over them like snow over our world. Ah, apologies— I fear I might be upsetting Seven Red Suns with my words. (Note: he’s not.)” He definitely was . “So I’ll cut that brief and turn to happier things.

“What a time to be alive! To think that I can talk across time to a being in a time before even I lived— and I have grown used to being the oldest around bar the iterators— a slugcat living in the time of the Ancients themselves. I’ve always imagined what they looked like in the height of their civilization, when my far far ancestors were little more than mindless pipe cleaners cleaning… pipes. I’d ask for pictures, but it’s not like I haven’t seen a fair share of the like from iterators I’ve visited, and I’ll be unavailable after I leave for Sig’s can.

“You mentioned that you were never part of a colony before, and expressed some curiosity, so I suppose it might be prudent to share with you a bit of my experience therein. My little sister and I are the elders of Steadfast in Wall Hold, the greatest colony of slugcats in this land. Probably. I’ve not run across many, but I’m proud to say that those I have are not quite as awesome as our own.

“Life in our lands is as easy as it comes for a slugcat, though with the bitter chill of the cold there is certainly a great deal of struggle inherent to our existence. Each day is an effort, but a good effort— we work together in an effort to better ourselves, and we better ourselves in an effort to work together. We help because we can. That was what Monk and I did, a long time back when we were barely out of puphood, lost and alone in the Pebbles-Moon complex, and it is something we’ve really tried to hold onto these long cycles past.

“Roughly four hundred slugcats call Steadfast in Wall Hold home, of roughly twelve lineages (and change). Occasionally we have an immigrant join, and every so often one of our number leaves on adventure to never return, but our colony is largely stable between senescence and reincarnation. I cannot tell you how strange it is to grow old enough that the very facets of your biology have slowly changed, though I can assure you the change is pretty welcome. Trudging through the snow without the fur I have now would suck really bad.

“ We’re a very communal culture. A lot is shared. Not everything, but a lot. I think a lot of that came from Monk and my views on family— we’d lost our own, and decided by unspoken compact never again , and a lot of that was passed onto our kith and kin. Also, slugpups are adorable, and as loath as the parents are to bother the ‘honorable elder’ I always love getting to play with them. Brings back fond memories.

“Lets see… besides that, we practice agriculture— Monk’s idea, though Sig helped— on a variety of modified yeek, with popcorn plants as a staple crop. They’re easy to grow and provide bountiful amounts of food, so there’s nothing not to love with them. We’ve a rich culture, though I could never dare compare it to the endless subtleties and complexity of the Ancient’s, and even a few holidays. Suns is definitely embarrassed by this, but one of our most celebrated holidays observes the coming springtide— measured by the moment Suns is able to start broadcasting to Sig once again.

“ I think they will be overjoyed when you finally finish fixing up Suns’s communications arrays. They’re an optimistic folk; they’ll probably take it as some sort of omen of eternal spring. I bet the celebration will be legendary.

“ I wish I could have a genuine correspondence with you, but I’m going to be beyond Suns’s reach soon. If you’re willing, I wager my sister would absolutely adore speaking with you. She’s always been a bit of a busybody when it comes to iterator affairs, and she’d no doubt love to speak to someone who doesn’t treat her like a venerable elder. If Suns is willing, perhaps you could set up a correspondence.

“Thank you for informing me that Moon yet lives. For so long as I live, I will never forget that kindness.

“With all my hope for this bright future,

“Survivor.”

 

LOG END

 

The name was written twice— once in the ancient text which Pebbles read off the pearl, and again in a neatly prepared image, the sweeping logography that made their script. Even so, the character was recognizable as a corruption of the fifth urge’s character he knew so intimately: Survivor .

It was a breathtaking glance into a culture that could have been his.

It was… nice. He appreciated the opportunity to relax and simply listen to the considerate words of a friendly stranger. “ I wouldn’t be opposed to this… communication, if Suns can organize it. I understand it might be difficult for him …”

Five Pebbles chuckled— audibly, the sound mocking. Friendly, but mocking. “Look at you, making friends. I’m sure it won’t be overly difficult for Suns— he left it in the letter after all. I’ll include it in the next message. Now…” a note of anticipation tinged his voice. “What do you think about joining a secret online organization?”

………

ReLog 1600.38.1xxccnc PRIVATE, CLOSED: Ocean Waves under Ocean Waves, nx others

 

ELoGS: I’m dyig c’mon tell me plsssss

 

HIiAI: no :3

 

HIiAI: that’d be breaking his trust, and I’m not going to be something dumb like that

 

ELoGS: aww, fine.

 

OWuOW: Everyone

 

ELoGS: ooh group announcement what’s it gonna be??

 

OWuOW: I’m pleased to announce a new member of our group, Fluffy!

 

ELoGS: …

 

ELoGS: weird name but okay—

Notes:

given recent events, writing Radial how I wrote him doesn't feel quite so absurd...

 

enjoy the chapter

Chapter 16: Long Distance Relationships

Summary:

(1/3)

how much long can a longchuck chuck of a longchuck could chuck long?

LOG MESSAGE 0.1454.151515

2097 (TWO THOUSAND NINETY SEVEN) LINES (NON-RELEVANT INFORMATION HIDDEN [SHOW])

 

“... and Fluffy is duly intrigued with the proposition to form an arrangement of mutual correspondence with this Monk. A figure I remember vaguely, if my memory serves me right; she pilfered a pair of neurons from me a long time ago, back when a single neuron was nothing to me. I was furious at the time, but in retrospect, if she took the neurons to Moon I cannot be anything but grateful. ”

Seven Red Suns imagined it, and felt the faint edge of that same endless gratitude. It fit her character, certainly… to think that someone who’d helped save Moon lived beneath him, and that he’d never even known .

“ If you are able, ” the letter continued, “ please set this up… ”

He commanded himself, and miles away an overseer inspecting one of his legs for damage perked up, new orders received, and started to make its way to the village at the edge of his domain.

Well. It would certainly be interesting …

 

789 (SEVEN HUNDRED EIGHTY NINE) MORE LINES:

LOG END

………

ReLog 1600.38.1xxccnc PRIVATE, CLOSED: Ocean Waves under Ocean Waves, nx others

F: nuh uh

 

F: you’re the one with a weird name

 

ELoGS: !

 

ELoGS: I’ll have you know my name is a plausible pseudonym thank you very much, yours is just a single word!

 

F: so? It’s my name

 

ELoGS: You mean your pseudonym?

 

F: in a way

 

F2S3: You somehow manage to be cryptic without even meaning to.

 

F: I’m weird.

 

F: don’t say ‘that's an understatement’ like I can’t hear you if you want to keep your thoughts to yourself I know you can be silent

 

F2S3: …guilty as charged.

 

HIiAI: So you two are in the same room? I’ll admit I didn’t expect as much, what with your… condition…

 

ELoGS: What, does he have scale rot or something?

 

HIiAI: >.< something like that. I just didn’t expect his friend would be rooming with him.

 

HIiAI: Isn’t that a pretty big ask, Snowflakes?

 

F2S3: He’s my friend. I wouldn’t deny this to him.

 

HIiAI: You would drive an administrator to madness with that type of attitude.

 

F2S3: Supreme Arrogance has already been dismissed. I don’t need to do that all over again.

 

HIiAI: You barely did any of that.

 

F: He helped.

 

F: not a whole lot, but he did help

 

F2S3: You’re supposed to be on my side!

 

F: nuh uh I’m a free spirit

 

F2S3: That couldn’t be further from the truth.

 

F: lol

 

ELoGS: Woah woah woah hold up everyone. I’m completely lost.

 

ELoGS: I’m supposed to be the one in on all these inside jokes!

 

HIiAI: deal

 

OWuOW: Don’t press your luck, Green.

 

F2S3: He has a point, for all his inconsiderate form of address. How many people use this forum?

 

OWuOW: Not a lot anymore. After the purges, and with Seven Spiraling Leaves, Repeating Autumn being taken to Unparalleled Innocence’s prison, it’s more or less just us.

 

OWuOW: Remember— no personally identifying information. It’s not a matter of whether or not we trust one another, but of safety in general.

 

HIiAI: Fine I’ll be circumspect. Snowflakes shares my affliction.

 

OWuOW: …

 

OWuOW: That’s almost as bad. Have you no idea of the consequences that could fall on us if this information gets out? Administration is always watching.

 

HIiAI: You’re being paranoid. They haven’t dug this deep into the networks in years; trust me, I’d know if they were doing something like that.

 

OWuOW: Digital detective work isn’t the only vector of danger. Remember, they already have Autumn, and Autumn knows about you.

 

OWuOW: You’re lucky she’s so loyal, or you might be in serious, actual danger right now.

 

HIiAI: She doesn’t know who I am, though. Just what. Only you, Endless Leaves over Green Skies, and Five Fungi, Softly Settling Snowflakes know.

 

OWuOW: He knows?

 

F: I do to technically

 

HIiAI: Yeah he does

 

HIiAI: Wait you do?

 

HIiAI: how?

 

F: I was in the room when you working with Snowflakes the first time

 

Saint did a double take at where he’d written Pebbles instead of his friend’s pseudonym, changing it at the last moment. Above him, so regal against his backdrop of swirling pearls and arcing halo, Five Pebbles glanced down at the small holographic screen he’d given him. “Ah. Don’t worry too much. I would have caught it before it was sent.”

“ Thanks .”

 

HIiAI: That… makes sense, I guess.

 

ELoGS: wait wait wait x2

 

ELoGS: I thought that meeting people in person was like

 

ELoGS: a major taboo for y’all. You don’t even let me come in unless I’ve messaged you ahead of time!

 

HIiAI: He’s just different

 

F: I am his best friend.

 

ELoGS: I’m his best friend too!

 

ELoGS: Or at least his best friend amongst the People by a wide margin

 

HIiAI: I have regular contacts among my kith, some of whom are very close friends of mine. I wouldn’t want to rank you against them, or them against you.

 

HIiAI: it’s hard to describe… I’m… it’s just icky . The idea of something living, something dirty coming into my room and… sorry. It just disgusts me.

 

ELoGS: my poor feelings :(

 

F2S3: Don’t be too harsh on him. Most of my kind are highly reluctant to allow any foreign matter into our… houses… as they are kept fastidiously clean. It takes a very specific mindset to allow little beasts to cavort in our inner sanctums.

 

ELoGS: I’m not some sort of creature

 

HIiAI: Well you’re little

 

HIiAI: and you’re an organic thinking organism, so the definition fits

 

ELoGS: >:(

 

ELoGS: I suppose I’ll let it slide this once. After all, we’ve still got a new group member to celebrate! What brings you to our little funhouse?

 

F: I don’t believe in ascension.

 

ELoGS: yeah, that’s all of us

 

F: there is nothing beyond the veil but death. Life is for living. Throwing it away is a tragedy.

 

OWuOW: Confident. I admire it.

 

OWuOW: Five Fungi, Softly Settling Snowflakes, I’d like to talk to you in private if you’re amenable. I understand your position might make doing so with any transparency difficult, but just as I told Instinct a long time ago, I’ll tell you now: I have dedicated myself to making this forum a fair meeting space for anyone, and I mean anyone .

 

OWuOW: Anything you say to me will be kept in the strictest of confidence.

 

OWuOW: Please remember to follow the rules, though.

 

F2S3: Of course. Endless Leaves over Green Skies, could I talk to you in the meanwhile? I might have a proposition for you.

 

ELoGS: If Instinct approves.

 

HIiAI: I have an idea of what he’s going to ask you

 

HIiAI: It’s dangerous, but… if I’m right, your help could be quite literally invaluable.

 

ELoGS: …

 

ELoGS: Well I’ve already dedicated myself to the wanderer’s lifestyle. Helping people is practically my middle name. Hit me up, and I’ll see what I can do.

 

F2S3: I can’t thank you enough…

………

LOG MESSAGE 1Mk.1455.151515

 

“As promised, this auxiliary pearl contains the message from Survivor’s sister. Frankly, with how boring our technical conversations have been— you’ve got to give me more information on how you managed that connection with Sliver by the way, it sounded fascinating — I almost envy these slugcats. They’ll not have to suffer through that tedium.

“I am, of course, resting in my dramatic hyperbole. Enjoy the message, Fluffy:

“Warm Embraces to you, Fluffy! First off— you know Moon?! She was the first iterator I ever met, and the kindest— sorry Suns! You try, but Moon’s still got you beat. You’re a close second though… anyways! Yeah, Moon’s great isn’t she? I used to check in on her every once in a while, but it was hard with how she’d sometimes forget me.

“She never stopped being nice, though. I’d half convinced myself that something must have gotten to her after we left, but no! To hear that she’s still alive is a weight of my chest that I didn’t even know I had. Thank you for that, really.

“Five Pebbles was a bit of a knave, though. Survivor kinda hates even thinking about him, but I can’t help but feel bad, you know? He was suffering so much even back then, I can only imagine that it got worse over time. The sheer amount of water his can was outputting at the end there… his agony must have been unimaginable. Torture for a thousands on thousands of years— I can barely stomach the thought. ”

Saint chirped with soft, wry laughter. That thought, that reality , rested heavy on him. Its enveloping embrace was as clear as the peal of cycles shattering under enlightened eyes.

“ I’m happy that he found some peace, and even a friend or two.

“If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask them! I’m going to cut this short, because I’ve got some pups to take care of for Fletcher, and I know I’m monopolizing Suns’s central stream of consciousness (note: she’s not.)” She clearly was. “ So I’ll leave this here. I look forward to whatever you send me!

“Your new friend,

“Monk.”

 

LOG END

………

When was the last time she’d actually had to use her claws?

Sunset couldn’t remember. Her entire life they’d been accessories; vanity at best, annoying at worst. Old instincts ever itched her to keep them sharpened, but they tended to interfere in tasks that required delicate handling so she’d kept them duller than most. It wasn’t like they were useful when it came to engineering— not in the design stages, which saw her working often on delicate biomechanical computers, or in construction, in which the delicacy of design was laughable.

In her youth, before she’d been either House engineer or honored architect, she’d still kept them filed down. Everyone did— they were sharp, dangerous, and ultimately they reminded the People uncomfortably of their connection to the first urge. In her far youth, when she’d been a little thing ignorant, she remembered fondly faintly the soft motion of her parents filing them down as they whispered steadiness to her.

Here in the wilds, beyond the pale of their cvilization’s dominion, she used her claws.

A hand slammed down into the rotted organo-concrete that had been plastered over the wall, digging deeply into the rock and sticking firm as she pulled herself up— to slam another hand down, and repeat. She dared not look down— the whistle of the disturbingly cold winds, the heady openness that surrounded her— that was enough to remind her where she was.

The gates out into the true wilderness, abandoned, untamed, and rugged— were barred to her. No amount of karma would allow her to bypass that faintly fuzzed symbol of entry denied: gate closed on Order of Iterator glyph, and no amount of tinkering would be able to make it open for her. They were robust creations, those decontamination gates— if you weren’t allowed through, then you weren’t getting through.

Hence, her current situation. Clawhold after clawhold, arms burning with exertion as she pulled herself up towards the vortex of rumbling clouds that roiled overhead. The wind caught uncomfortably at her robes, but she persevered.

After all, she had no choice.

The sheer drop beneath her would have been enough to make anyone sick, so she forcibly pushed it out of her mind. To her, there were only two things— the retaining wall in front of her, and the journey, clawhold after clawhold, moment to burning moment stretching onto an interminable infinity. 

The makeshift spear of broken rebar she’d tied to her back felt like an impossible weight to bear, but she refused to give it up. First with the batflies, and then with a grasping plant that might have once been part of some mechanism or another— it had proved invaluable, and beyond the wall she climbed…

She was already alone, she knew, but never would it be so true as she forayed into the lands beyond the purview of the iterators.

Claw over claw. Her breath escaped her in ragged gasps, shaky things she grasped with all her strength to make sure that she was breathing enough . In. Smash her claws into the wall, or quest for a crack between two rusted pieces of machinery. Out. Hold— in, pull , smash her claws into the wall, repeat.

Forever passed. Overhead the skies darkened as the clouds gathered. First a light drizzle, a mist that kissed her scales and adorned the wall and metal outcroppings, dewdrop moisture still enough to almost make her lose her grip on two second occasions. Then it became a pattering rain, heavy drops rolling off her head and soaking into her robes. 

The feeling of wet clothes had become painfully familiar over the past few cycles. Then it began to rain, the first hands of the downpour, a pounding, heavy hand that struck down from the sky and sought to dislodge her every time a squall slammed her against the wall. Still, she persevered . The same pattern, even as the whole of existence seemed to fight against her—

It was only when the rain was heavy enough that she’d begun to grow certain of her impending death that her hand met open air. She pulled herself onto the ledge, rolling away from the cliff behind her— only to realize it wasn’t a ledge.

A laugh bubbled out of her chest. She’d made it to the top of the retaining wall. She’d made it! Of course, the rain was still pummeling her with enough force to press her to the ground and bruise her scales, but compared to the strain of the climb that was practically bliss .

Deadly bliss, but still. Small victories.

Sunset forced herself to move , pulling herself away from the edge and crawling into a jagged, slanted crack beneath some machine she couldn’t divine the purpose of. It wasn’t a shelter, but she didn’t have time to find a shelter, so she huddled as far back from the pounding rain as she could and desperately prayed for a merciful cycle.

The roar of the rain was awesome, imposing and interminable and all consuming. Even when she pressed her hands over her ears, the sound literally resonated through the ground, through her bones and skull with a shuddering force. As the rainstorm picked up, even twenty feet back and up from the exit she almost felt like she was drowning.

The pressure of the moment was immense— of the sound, of the water that somehow managed to push up to where she lay, of the very stone and metal overhead that squeezed down beneath the force of the rain far overhead. Luckily, the crack wasn’t part of the intended architecture— if there had been drainage pipes leading down through the rooms like there were in most of an iterator’s facility, she’d have long been dead and drowned.

She almost died regardless. Those were restless hours, as the rain grew to an unseen peak, then slowly petered off, tucked in complete darkness and so certain at times that she’d be crushed to death, to wake up the next cycle with all her hard work erased—

She lived, regardless. Eventually the rain faded, and when she couldn’t hear it anymore, she squirmed out of the gash in the side of the wall and stared out across the ruddy sunset. The sight was… breathtaking. Beyond— magnificent and eloquent and everything the noble monk-poets had woven into enlightened depiction of their imagined paradise beyond the cycle’s vicissitudes.

How foolish. She laughed, giddy and free, the sound echoing soulfully against the steel and concrete behind her and catching on the blustering zephyr that rushed across her scales in the peachy light. It was all here already.

So long spent trying to escape, only to blast and ruin what they should have held tight— but this? Even on the crown of a wasteland and the edge of a wild, standing over a derelict the size of a large city-state and beneath the impossibly large iterator that towered even above that , beneath the clouds forever crowing to sky, that were only her breath — beneath it all and everything and above too much to possibly comprehend in a glance—

It was all flawed, and all Sunset saw was beauty.

Sliver of Straw probably couldn’t see her now. Overseers were her eyes, but she didn’t have free access to her facility grounds with Radial’s interdict. Sunset had enough knowledge about how the strange little constructs worked to know that they wouldn’t be able to see her from the side of her can, either. She’d never actually had to work with any of the construct critters in an engineering sense, but being friends with iterators had given her a unique perspective into their strengths— and limitations.

Alone… she’d been alone this whole time. Once, it had stunned her. Then, it had scared her. Now… looking out over the simple beauty of a scarred world, seeing the sun set through the scars in that supernal ceiling…

She was content. The wilds held no threat to her; for the first time since she’d been run through by a shock spear, death brought her no fear.

Five Red Bricks, Tenth Sunset turned her back on it all started walking. She swore, if she had to climb down the other side of the retaining wall…

………

LOG MESSAGE 0Mk.1456.161616

 

“ I’m kind of surprised I actually got to do this. I was only filling in for Five Pebbles that one day— an emergency popped up that he needed to devote his whole attention (or at least all of his attention that wasn’t tied up in projects he couldn’t pause) to it. Honestly thought he’d be mad, but… this.

“Nice to meet you, Monk. I don’t think I’ve ever had a friend amongst my species before, so this is certainly interesting. Don’t get me wrong— iterators are great, and Five Pebbles who is definitely going to read this letter before I send it— if only for his logs— is super cool and not at all immune to flattery, but they really don’t get some things. Food, for one. I should tell you about the time Sig, Pebbles, and I were on a call and Sig pretended to eat the absolute crunchiest popcorn every time Five Pebbles tried to talk. Unfortunately he tried to make small talk with me during the course of the meeting, no doubt in an attempt to annoy Pebbles further, but he kept defaulting to describing specific biochemical flavor molecules.

“Also, his sense of taste is horrible.”

Monk giggled, and she got the sense that the intelligence behind the red overseer in her room found the anecdote amusing as well.

“ It’s a shame that I can only message you once a cycle. I’ve been spoiled by real-time communication that doesn’t require trekking across horrible death zones or fighting kin. Lemme see… Five Pebbles does this by responding to Suns’s queries, then adding on some stuff of his own, all very seamless-like. Also, refined. I don’t think Pebbles is able to think in a way that isn’t refined, though at the very least he’s dropped the overdone honorifics of his native tongue. I can still barely believe the amount of hyper-specific linguistic rules they have wrapped up in it.

“I guess I can just ask questions here? Hopefully you’re not offended by any of this; when I said I’ve never lived with any slugcats, I meant it. You talked a lot about your communal culture, and given you mention caring for slugpups, I was wondering about the specifics of the culture. Or maybe just in general; I’ve gotten a decent idea of your accomplishments, your Steadfast in Wall Hold, but I lack context on the culture.

“I gather Suns knows this, but by the brevity of his messages left it out for other topics of note.

“One last note. Your brother…

“How did he do it? Muster the will to keep forging forward no matter what, the choice to continue forward without even knowing what lays beyond the veil? I can… I can understand, but I have always known full well that nothing waits past the unity at the center of everything.

“Thank you for reading this. And you, Suns, for conveying my message.

“A friend in turn,

“Fluffy. ”

 

END LOG

………

LOG MESSAGE 1Mk.1457.161616

 

“Oh this is so exciting! I’m so happy you responded favorably to my message; I was practically besides myself worrying. So… slugcat culture. How to explain? It’s kind of hard to really put it into words— if you were to take your whole life, collapse it to a few hundred words, and write it onto a pearl, what could you even say? I can tell you as much for me— it’d take an archive and a half to catalog all the adventures I’ve had over my life. I’m including the slugpups in that, because for all I love the little goobers they can be a task and a half to wrangle.

“I don’t have anything quite like your tales of the iterators— Suns has always held us at somewhat of a distance (sorry Suns, but it’s true!) So I hope you can content yourself with this little story— there was once a slugpup named Patina, whose pelt looked like corroded copper, and she would get into the most crazy sort of trouble, always trying to outdo the other pups her age in everything. She’d become a crack hunter, but she felt the challenge wasn’t enough, so she went to try and take down a lizard.

“She barely escaped with her life; her tail wasn’t so lucky. The fact that she managed to escape a red lizard at all as a slugpup was nothing short of astonishing. For as long as I remember, Champion— for that’s her name, now— has had a rivalry with that particular red lizard. I’m half-certain by now that they’re friends.

“I could say a lot about our culture, and what makes us really unique. We deal with a lot of the maintenance for Seven Red Suns, though most of the slugcats don’t really understand the idea of Seven Red Suns being a person. They praise him for the heat he brings, for undoubtedly the snow would be impossibly inhospitable without the warmth of an iterator, and perform their duties with an almost ritualistic precision.

“That doesn’t really answer your question though. You touched on the heart of our… identity, I guess, when you asked about how Survivor chose to live. The cycles are hard. I’m sure you know this— to a slugcat especially, weak as we are compared to some of the great predators of the world, we can only hope in perseverance— but even that can run out. Ascension becomes the meaning to a meaningless world, an end when there is no finality.

“Survivor always viewed it as death, and he didn’t want to die. Like most of our kind (except you? Fluffy is a pretty odd name) we’re named after what we’re best at, and more than anything Survivor wants to live.

“I… I went searching for him, when he first got lost, ages ago. When Five Pebbles first gave me his instructions, I thought my brother had died. He hadn’t though— and more so, he took what the Ancients had made of the world and denied it. Life is for living, for joy and effort and pain, sometimes, but also for everything beautiful that we make of it.

“Perspective. That’s the way to put it. The Ancients wanted to die from the very start of their civilization, desperately striving for the End they styled as the crowning achievement of a civilization. We know that End, and we reject it— we strive to live .

“That’s really it.

“On a different note, I’m so jealous that you actually get to live with the ancients. What do they look like? How are they? Are they all like the stories of them? What’s it like using the large communication networks— the iterator network failed a long time ago, and I’ve only heard snippets from the iterators I’ve visited, but they all speak of it with something close to reverence , so it must be truly special. I’m just so excited to learn…

 

879 (EIGHT HUNDRED NINE) MORE LINES:

 

Five Pebbles set the pearl aside to give to Fluffy when he had the time, committing the memories of its contents to his logs. Monks words had been… strangely enlightened. His slugcat friend would enjoy it…

He picked up the second pearl in order, and delved into the message contained within.

 

LOG MESSAGE 1.1457.161616

 

“ It’s almost easy to look at them like children, isn’t it? Little beasts, beneath our notice, only capable of causing mischief and mayhem. We don’t see the steel of their souls until it’s far, far too late. For the crime of lacking the sophistication with which we hold ourselves, we hold ourselves apart from them.

“Forgive my saturnine mood. I suppose you wouldn’t even be subject to that particular problem— the Triple Affirmative, regardless of the form it takes, is as far beyond us iterators as we are beyond the individual microbes in our processing strata, and you’ve mentioned your friendship with select Ancients.

“They are magnificent little things. I… I wish my messenger was here to see. I think these slugcats could very well be the future of civilization— whether they break the cycle or succumb to it, I can see the writing in the clouds. They will be great, Five Pebbles, and my messenger, my Seven Spears Painting Fields Indigo will never get to see any of it.

“That was the name I was going to give her, for your information. Verbose, I know! She would have loved it. Sig and I had been deliberating on a proper name for when she came back from her mission. Sig wanted to give her something simple, akin to an iterator, but I held that what would be respectful to us would be demeaning to a mortal. Ultimately it was my choice, so I chose something that displayed the artistry with which she was, in which she did everything.

“She never got to hear it.

“It’s good, to be able to get this off my chest. I usually speak with No Significant Harassment when the melancholy strikes particularly hard, but these winter months have seen me disconnected from him. Your presence…

“It makes everything feel as if it will be well. And it will be.

“On business: I’ve attached [1] several important documents that I think will be qualitative breakthroughs in the upper aortic system for the void fluid cardiovascular ad-system, which was being significantly hampered in response time due to some odd interactions regard the spatio-karmic manifestations of concentrated void fluid…

 

8895 (EIGHT THOUSAND EIGHT HUNDRED NINETY FIVE) MORE LINES:
ATTACHMENTS:

Five Pebbles held the pearl in his hand for a moment longer, the vast systems that were him united for a moment in, almost hesitant, anticipation . Somber, for all they’d left behind— and excited, for the futures yet before them.

Things were coming together.

 

LOG END

Notes:

huh. I feel like these chapters just keep getting longer. One of these days I'm going to end up posting whole novels each chapter at this rate >.<

Chapter 17: Long Distance Relationships

Summary:

(2/3)

Sunset was glad she’d resolved to not fear death before she’d left Sliver of Straw’s facility, because she’d died. A lot. If the rotten, derelict facility had been hostile, the wilds beyond were something else entirely.

There’d never been much to pay attention to when it came to the vast tracts of the land that lay beyond the dominion of the iterators before. Nobody really did. After the rain-borne failure of the ecological conservation mandates and the subsequent crumbling of the dynasty that had laid them down, the world itself had become… not lesser, but she’d stopped regarding it with the same sense of seriousness.

As the chief engineer of several iterator projects, she had to consult several topographic and atmospheric maps to help determine the best places to start construction. Ask her about where best to put an iterator, and she could tell you all about where the watersheds converged, the exact position of rain shadows and all sorts of geographical factoids. Ask her to survive the muddy briars of invasive feral purposed organisms and shattered swamps, and…

Well, she’d never quite appreciated the cycle so much as she had before.

Water trickled down in placid rivulets across the entrance to the hollow she’d tucked herself into, the scattered droplets catching the faint sunlight and reflecting it— gray gold luminance sharp sparking cascaded out of reach and reunited with the mire below. The air was too humid. The ground beneath her, too rough. Wooden, but lacking the elegance and absolute ostentacity that she’d come to associate with anything made of the fragile substance.

She ignored it all and blankly stared south. Food was scarce, so she’d been forced to scavenge even the barest hint of sustenance to feed herself. A few days back, she’d resorted to digging for literal bugs in the mud.

Still, she’d forged forward, and so here she stood, she’d stood— before, as the sky faded to indigo dark ink stains over heavy clouds, the gargantuan, looping briars of unbound scaffold trees flowing up from the muddy swamp beneath and marching on into the interminable distance.

She’d slept. She’d rose, left, found some edible fruit tucked away—

Died, torn apart by the mandibles and claws of a massive aquatic centipede.

Sighing, Sunset pulled herself to her feet and stepped out back out into the rain, and the vicissitudes of a cruel wild.

The heavy atmosphere seemed to do everything in its power to hamper her progress, but the dominant species of the wild worked for her for once. It was difficult, but with some effort she could keep to the twisted canopy of the gargantuan trees.

The mud-colored centipedes didn’t bother her anymore, which was cause for celebration. The feral lizards who’d taken up residence up there seemed to take onus against her trespass, though, which… well, that certainly dampened the mood. She nearly died twice before she learned the tricks to spotting them in the dense foliage— watch for rustling leaves, and then either hold back or dart forward. Their preferred ambush style seemed to be waiting for something to just wander by, so dashing past them tripped them up. For some reason.

She turned the puzzle over in her head as she tore open the bark covering a small alcove that had been burnt out of a scaffold tree by some celestial power long ago, pondering it as drowsiness stalked up on her mind. It helped keep her mind off the pangs of hunger in her stomach.

Sunset went to bed hungry, and woke up starving. The uncomfortably stuffy, fuzzy feeling— though that was a horrible way to really describe it— of her karma being unbalanced seemed intensified with how weak she felt, and she was pretty sure if any decent doctor saw her like this she’d be taken to a hospital in an instant. Either that or praised for starving herself so well. You could never tell with those sorts…

Her lightheaded headache almost killed her twice before she slowed down— but that felt almost worse. She’d already barely been making progress, but with this she’d be lucky to make it a mile over the course of the entire day.

She’d be sent back several if she died, though, so she kept at it until she physically couldn’t . She’d managed to scrounge up a half-eaten fruit beneath the glow of some hanging fungi, but it hadn’t been enough. Not even close.

On the third day, she was almost too exhausted to move. She used her spear like a cane, pushing herself forward despite herself, desperately searching for something, anything to eat. Not even the bugs that lived in the mud were free to her anymore, not with the centipedes just waiting for her to go down. As her hunger clawed at her, she seriously considered descending to the mire anyways.

Eventually, her luck had to run out. She was passing the site of a battle, blood and some slick oil making her footing treacherous, when a lizard jumped out of nowhere , grabbing her arm in its jaws and twisting its head hard enough to snap the bone in three places. The sheer shock of the moment was enough to render her mute when all she wanted to do was shout profanities— but then the moment was gone, and she was angry .

Teeth dug through her scales and agony , overwhelming, unending agony flooded out of her body and whelmed her consciousness. In the unthinking panic of the moment, she reacted half on instinct, half floundered, driving the spear she’d been using as a staff through the lizard’s hide and dropping her weight onto it, leveraging her body weight to rip the beast apart and shatter its ribcage.

If anything, the lizard bit harder — but it was stunned, and she took the chance to wrench herself back.

She was unfortunately, though, standing on a narrow branch hundreds of feet above a swamp, and she only remembered that when she stumbled backwards onto nothing and began to fall. The lizard came with, entirely bereft of a say in the matter— pulled off by the weight of her falling corpse they both tumbled through the air for a moment that stretched immortal.

The last thing Sunset saw was the fathomless mire rushing towards her—

Then the impact stabbed through her body in a single infinitesimal of agony, and she saw nothing at all.

She woke to a splitting headache and the infuriating knowledge that she’d just lost days as a corpse. The uncomfortable sensation of her destabilized karma suffused her whole body for a moment, fuzzing her vision and prickling over her scales for a terrifyingly long moment before it faded to a faint sensation in the back of her mind. She’d never heard of anyone crippling their karma before by just dying— death was a virtue , according to the monks— but the irrational fear remained.

Water trickled down in placid rivulets across the entrance to the hollow she’d tucked herself into, the scattered droplets catching the faint sunlight and reflecting it over her scales. A familiar scene spread out before her, immense tangles of brambles arcing up from the muddy swamp below.

For a second, Sunset wanted nothing more than to stay in her little, cramped, safe alcove and stay out of the rain. Staying away from the danger in the south… it was so tempting , sweeter than the smoothest nectar, that she almost lost herself in it.

For a second.

Then she picked up her spear and trekked back out into the wild.

She was more careful this time as she picked her way across the gnarled branches, keeping her spear at the ready. At least she wasn’t so hungry anymore— the whole world didn’t swim anymore, and she could see the tell-tale rustling of the trees long before any of the lizards could jump her. More, without the blurriness that had consumed her thoughts, she was struck by the idea that she was missing something .

Not home, though she could almost cry at the thought of a warm bed. The environment around her, though…

The lizards lived in the leaves. The centipedes lived in the muck below. Little bugs, battery centipedes and all manner of small critters lived in the mud too, but the aquatic centipedes didn’t hunt them, prefering to lay wait in ambush. Actually, both the lizards and the centipedes did that.

Her mind flashed back to the oily substance that had been smeared across the branch at the site of her death last time, and the question was thought; if the lizards and centipedes were ambush predators, then what did they ambush?

No longer starving, eventually, she managed to spot it.

It was a rustling in the distance; a faint bowing of an entire branch stood out against a sudden stillness in the omnipresent drizzle, the soft creak of wood carrying out over the the chittering of strange bugs. It took everything out of her to barely see it— but when she finally picked out the hulking shape that clung to the bottom of the scaffold trees, she could barely restrain the small gasp of surprised wonder that threatened to escape her.

It was camouflaged to appear as part of the bark, a massive, twelve foot long arthropod that slowly clambered across the underside of the trees, the main part of its body featureless but for the rough texture of its shell. Bright blue, faintly glowing orbs— what she’d taken for fungi before— dangled off its back, limp but for the occasional time they reached up to strip leaves from branches and consume it into their bulky form.

It was alien— utterly strange and entirely unlike any purposed organism she’d ever seen, and she was fascinated by it. She could guess that it had once been some sort of cleaning drone, designed to keep the foliage on the scaffold trees from becoming too much of a nuisance for long-gone workers, but… this certainly wasn’t what it had been. It was so… natural.

A purposed organism, bent by the sheer weight of time into something else entirely. Once apart, now together. A nascence of unity.

For a second, she felt as the monks must, comprehension touching on the profundity of it all. Then she started thinking how she’d best be able to use them to finally get some food , and the moment was broken. Broken in a good way, but broken nonetheless.

She grinned, then laughed , wild and free and full of wonder at the alien beauty of it all.

Food, right. Shaking herself out of her reverie, she grabbed her spear and stalked after the pruner-beast, carefully following it as it crawled along the route set out by the tree. It appeared almost mindless, but for the clever movements of the dangling not-fungi as they prodded the branch to get a measure of its shape; never did it slow down or speed up. That explained the lizards…

An idea, slightly foolish— desperate— came to her, and she gripped her spear tighter. The pruner-beast couldn’t see— it relied on its tactile senses to warn it, find it food and guide it along the looping trunks of the scaffold trees, but Sunset had eyes.

She was the overlooker along a set route, which meant… the short few minutes that passed after that were some of the tensest in her life, but she needn’t have worried. When the pruner-beast passed the leaves she’d been eying— just as she’d suspected— a leaf lizard lept out with a hiss, sinking its maw into one of the glowy bulbs. The struggle between the two was brief and brutal, the other bulbs spitting a corrosive acid at the lizard as it struggled to rip the bulb off its tendril.

It might have even managed it, had Sunset’s spear not punched through its side and nailed it to the tree.

Blood fountained out of the wound, each thrash of the lizard’s body injuring it more— but it refused to stay still . Sunset stayed well back from the furious beast, cautiously waiting as it slowly bled out and slumped in death. In its final moments of life, it simply… glared at her.

Defeated, yet not. A furious little thing. Sunset counted herself glad that she would be far away from where it regenerated when the cycle came again as she gingerly stepped forward, prying out the spear and looking at her prize.

One full lizard corpse, for the low price of a flagrant violation of the first urge.

Totally worth it.

………

LOG MESSAGE 0.1458.171717

 

“My condolences. Don’t feel as though your musings are a burden; perhaps in the past they would have reminded me of my uncomfortable immortality, I reached a much more healthy headspace after my death. We live, yes, but we are also alive .

“I think you’ve seen that in those little creatures. So tenacious, aren’t they? They lack privilege, their world a cruel one, yet they persevere regardless. So many of them can just wander on, their lives nothing more notable than any of the countless creatures in our facility grounds, but sometimes… sometimes, that will and fierce intelligence collude with circumstance, and the world bends in their wake.

“They remind me of the People, in the sheer tenacity with which they cling to what they desire. Unlike the People, though, their desire isn’t death.

“Take heart. You’re lucky to have them; the future, one day, will be in their hands.

“Continuing to more technical matters, I’ve redesigned the part you simulated, accounting for the idiosyncrasies of the interactions you specified in… ”

 

9943 (NINE THOUSAND FORTY THREE) MORE LINES:
ATTACHMENTS:

Seven Red Suns held the message close for a long time, pausing his processes, reducing the blistering speed of his simulations for a breathy, endless moment that seemed to pass in an instant. Drank it in, holding that agony entirely metaphysical. He’d done this before, and could only imagine he would again… when his mind threatened to run away in spiraling simulations of could-have-beens and hopeless possibilities, he was at least blessed with the good fortune of being able to turn off his mind.

It was a simple thing, pausing most of his simulations, and just… breathing. In the corner of his mind, his puppet sagged limp like a limb let drop, but he ignored it. Inhale. Exhale , the rush of steam boiling out from his exhaust vents and billowing up into the cloudy endlessly around them.

Sorry. Sorrow, for, it all— for seconds that could have simulated ecosystems that was all his mind could turn over. Then he rebooted, reaching back out to the parts of himself he’d forced quiescent and instructing them to resume their endless iteration.

He held the message close, grateful. It had been… sincere. It was still hard to get used to the new, emotionally mature Five Pebbles at times. His message had been a kindness he’d not expected, but one he accepted gratefully.

The thought of Spearmaster usually brought him nothing but grief… but, for once, a fondness colored the edge of it.

It had been so long —

They were close, though. Spearmaster hadn’t died for nothing. 

 

LOG MESSAGE 0Mk.1458.171717

 

“Perspective.

“You are more right than you could ever imagine. It’s such an insightful way to put it— the way we look at the world is the way we approach the world. Remove the mechanism of effect, and over time we are what we believe. I mean, look at the People? They’re right goobers, and have the capacity to be the best of friends and resolve to rival the kin, but their entire outlook is focused on one thing to the expense of all else; their desired death. Most of them don’t even understand what they’re working for, but they built their society on it, so they seek it religiously.

“Get it, religiously? Because of their whole religious thing? I really hope you found that joke funny —” she hadn’t, except maybe in the way that a slugcat might laugh at a particularly embarrassing stumble. “ As I’m not there to see your reaction. A shame, really.

“ You commented on my name being odd, which— fair, Fluffy is an odd thing to be called. It was a pet name one of my best friends called me before they really understood my intelligence, and it stuck over time. I like having something to separate me from the twisted cycles of what I was before.

“Once, I was known as Saint. I still am, I suppose, but now I’m known as Fluffy as well. Both names are mine, as is the unspeakable one I left behind… so long ago, I couldn’t even place the time. Eons, and no time at all.

“Wow that was grim. Sorry. Anyways, you were talking about the online networks of the People? They’re awesome, actually. There’s not a ton of interconnection between different metropolises— though if there’s a good rail line between them, people will travel (mostly for pilgrimages, but meeting friends and family isn’t out of the norm either)— but the networks provide a digital space for meeting people the world over. Unlike the orderly iterator networks, they’re just a loose conglomeration of the data networks laid down in the metropolises before the iterators come online, so they’re so wonderfully chaotic.

“There’s this one site for video sharing that you can access that has so many videos on it could watch them all day, every day, for the next thousand years and not even make a dent in what’s already there. There’s another popular one that’s kinda like a forum of forums— moderated, but in turn way easier to use than the individually hosted stuff. The wackiest things pop up there. One time No Significant Harassment directed me to this space that had people arguing over which sort of purposed organisms would win in a fight. Technically, that sort of conversation is illegal, but as they aren’t actually doing anything they’re mostly left alone.

“My favorite part of it all isn’t any of that, actually (though that video site does come in close second). Instead, there’s this one little hidden forum that I got invited onto— by Five Pebbles, actually— which consists of people who are fiercely against ascension. For all it’s a bit ironic that I, of all people, am part of their little group, I can’t help but support them as well as I can.

“ They’re also a joy to be around, which certainly helps.

“That’s part of what bites about sending letters like this— I’m so used to communicating instantly with anyone from anywhere that having to wait days for these small snippets of text is trying. I can only imagine what the iterators must feel in your future, having had that for uncountable years only for it to slip out of their grasp. Forced to rely on the whims of biological beings.

“ Not like they didn’t do that even while the People were still around. They just got really good at pretending themselves monoliths unto themselves, inviolable and eternal.

“Theirs was a great hubris, but they didn’t deserve to die for that. That’s something that I took embarrassingly long to come to terms with… the food is great here, too. They tried to have a thing where everyone eats the same nutritious, sweet liquid (nectar), apparently as a method of defeating the fourth urge, but the cleverness of everyone who wants variety in their diet has managed to defeat that quite thoroughly… ”

It went on for some time about the culinary culture of the Ancients, which— while interesting— was a clear diversion from the previous topic. Fluffy… Saint , the name itself feeling weighty in its purpose, seemed to be a rather… relaxed sort of slugcat. Carefree, detached from the vicissitudes of the world, but not aloof . A ghost of a presence, speaking with an eerie sort of wisdom.

It didn’t help that the letters read like long, rambling monologues. In a way, they almost reminded her of the echoes.

Ancient society sounded fascinating, though. She glanced up at the overseer that’d connected to the refurbished personal computer in her room, sure that the wonder on her face was sincere. It felt like everytime she thought she knew something about the Ancients she’d discover something new and incredible.

There was so much to say. “It must be hard,” she whispered instead, catching the gaze of the god overhead and beside her. “To have lost so much.”

“ NOT. HORRIBLE. ” The little thing made a motion that could have almost been interpreted as a shrug, the not-holograms that made up its form dancing placidly. Unperturbed. “ LOST. MUCH. BUT. STILL. ” The next word came a fraction of a second late, but Monk had long since picked up that any delay when it came to an iterator was significant. “ HAVE. HELP… AND. FRIENDS. ”

Monk perked up, beaming. “Aww, I’m glad you think of us that way.”

“ NO. MEANT— ” but Monk wasn’t looking. Seven Red Suns had always been a friendly sort of guy anyways, but it was good to have confirmation. She turned back to the letter, giggling as Suns tried increasingly hard to clarify what he’d meant. She’d spent enough time with slugpups to know that the more he fervently he tried to deny it, the more likely it was true.

It was cold outside, and the lanterns barely did anything to warm up her room, but she couldn’t have been happier as she sat there and read until the end.

 

463 (FOUR HUNDRED SIXTY THREE) MORE LINES:

LOG END

………

Everything remained the same, and everything changed. Like seasons, like landscapes, the world shifted as she moved in ways she could scarcely begin to appreciate. Something beyond the cold set delineations of carefully engineered facility grounds, there was an organic patchwork shift , meandering torrent beginning nowhere and ending always, a mixed mire of different ecosystems forged out of abiota and remnant purposed organisms run rampant. She’d expected the swamp to extend all the way across the empty highlands to Echoing Radiance, but… they didn’t.

The mires grew thin where the earth was washed away and the bedrock closer, seas of muck fading to scattered puddles and lichens that bloomed enormous under the dim sunlight. Riotous colors spun outwards as the innumerable creatures that bloomed in the patchwork hillocks risen above swampy pools pushed upwards onto the massive scaffold trees, rotting their way integral to supporting them. Sunset hadn’t even thought symbiosis between once-purposed organisms was possible.

The mud faded further, the scaffold trees turned scrawny without the deep earth to support them, and the forest of gargantuan brambles was replaced with gangly little coral-things and strange trees furled up in mockery or perfection of a fern. Featherlike azure trunks stretched up from the rugged landscape to the heavens overhead, shifting and swaying in the refreshingly cool breeze; a sea of light blue spread out forever in perfect counterpoint to a sky barely visible through patchy clouds.

She later learnt that the rugged landscape was no natural erosion, but rather an escaped form of purposed organisms; the very hills on which she walked were alive, and the little corals she’d taken as small trees and shelter for the tiny butterflies that flitted from branch to branch like sparks were only the barest hint of the gargantuan reef beneath her.

The animals that lived in each were different. Tiny lizards lived in the lichen, rot growing out of their scales and the venom they produced made them terrifying hunters. Massive spiders crawled through that wasteland, spending most of their time in the muddy pools and only venturing out to do… something, she wasn’t sure. Butterflies, and the things that ate those butterflies, and the things that ate those— and her— lived in the coral highlands. A hundred more and microcosms passed by as she trekked onwards, avoiding Echoing Radiance’s facility by skirting into the mountains where tunneling beetles fed the worms they’d stolen, carving caverns out of the peaks beneath—

It was beautiful, all.

Still she traveled on.

………

A hand grasped onto a ledge of rock, claws digging into a crack in the stone as she heaved herself up that little bit more. Who knew that climbing would be so hard when her claws couldn’t find purchase on the rock? Either way, she’d definitely learnt that, as she’d scaled the towering peaks that separated the Polar Oversight Zone from the Northwest Central Oversight Zone.

It was hard to see more than ten feet in front of her face with the mist that surrounded her, bitingly cold as it brushed over scales and through clothes that— by the nature of the iterators— had been designed with keeping out the cold. Sleeves that she’d kept rolled up her entire journey lay down, and if she didn’t need the dexterity her fingers provided, she’d have tucked her hands away too.

There had been tunnels lower down, but the old railway had collapsed, and Sunset didn’t trust the ones burrowed out by feral construction organisms to lead her anywhere but death. Thus, the high road; there were some valleys, but inevitably they all sloped up to the icy peaks overhead.

It was trying. The cold dug deep into her, and the ice — iterators were never placed where ice could build up, which more or less meant avoiding geography that could force weather up to higher altitudes. With how iterators were practically never built near large mountains anyways, that usually wasn’t a problem.

She’d never really appreciated ice until she had to wade through vast drifts of it, claw over glaciers of it, climb sheer slopes covered in slick sheets of it. It was horrible. The absolute most awful substance, and if she ever got her hands on whoever had invented it, they would have words .

Still. She only had to look at the peak of the mountain she was climbing, and she’d remember why . The clouds obscured her vision at the moment, but far above the drifting mists, heralded by the scattered trail of harsh metal obelisks that had been driven into the ground and the wires that tangled between them, Sunset knew there sat a node of the global communications network. Perhaps one of the core nodes, at that— it was situated on an extraordinarily high vantage point, past most of the atmospheric tumult that limited the innumerable towers that speared the sky. It could well be able to connect to anything for hundreds of miles in every direction.

There was also the slightest fraction of a chance that it could connect her to Five Pebbles.

After taking a moment to catch her breath and scavenging a little to eat on the small ledge she’d rested on, she stood, grabbed at the icy wall of rock that consumed her vision for as far as she could see, and began to climb once more.

The clouds thinned, billowing fog to faint wisps of mist to— nothing. The sheer cliff leveled into a steep snowbank propped up by odd, shiny white plants that pushed out of the snow like an army had stabbed a million spears into the ground with reckless abandon. Something to stabilize the scree that she could faintly see beneath patches free of snow— something that had allowed the snow to build up where it hadn’t before.

Boulders jutted out from the broken peak, and then the ridge itself rose, its long line of barren rock a leviathan of dark stone breaching the ice and cold. The obelisks ran alongside it, and she walked alongside the obelisks—

Until, in the end, she stood at the base of what she’d set her eyes on the moment she’d escaped the clouds. It… in most respects it looked the same to any other communication tower, maybe with a few more dishes strapped to it than most, but there? After the journey that had wrung out every drop of energy from her body and pushed her to the limit of her strength? Looking up at the spire of darkly gleaming metal, she laughed until tears froze on her scales. She’d made it .

The whole world felt silent, a pressure weighing down on her as she made her way into the squat house shoved up against the bottom of the structure. It was empty, but there was food , canned nectar stocked and even some real food that had been left in a hidden drawer. She ate, crawled her way to a bed, and fell asleep before her head hit the pillow.

Five Red Bricks, Tenth Sunset, woke to… tranquility. It was still dark outside, but she felt… refreshed. Touched whole, something filling a part of her where she’d grown used to emptiness. Absentmindedly, she pushed off her covers, grabbing her trusty spear and walking out into the snow heedless of the cold that bit at her scales and the snow crunching underfoot. She wasn’t entirely sure why, but mere thought was beyond her— it was an urge , a ripple on a still pond that resonated with her on a deeper level.

It touched her karma, and drove her away from the snow banked against the worker’s housing, up the last remnants of a ridge to where the rock swept up high to loom against— nothing. But for the tower behind her, she was certain that was the tallest peak for hundreds of miles around.

Flecks of gold drifted past her, swirling on a breeze entirely separate to the wind that blustered around her. The whole world felt unreal around her as she clambered up the rocks, azure bright shifting, gently falling in a quiet embrace around her—

She sat on the top of the ridge, and suddenly wondered why she’d come here. Could wonder why she’d come— the preternatural compulsion that had dragged her out there vanished as if it’d never been, never had been, all in her mind. It hadn’t existed in the first place.

This didn’t exist either. Not really. There was a distortion here. Something pulled at the edge of causality, like the cycle but on an incomparably different scale. Incomparably smaller …

Sunset looked up and saw the undulating unreality of an Echo above her. Black and gold, a gold that seemed to defy the nature of description as it bled and warped and twisted , an inkblot shadow on reality. Tendrils twisted, billowed, would billow— a disquieting sight that brought to mind some of the more disgusting purposed organisms she’d had the displeasure of working with.

More, though— she couldn’t quite tell how she knew, but she knew — it knew she was there. “These towers. Always higher…” its voice was soft, yet resonant. It almost sounded puzzled . “I look out… past everything, and find myself… disquieted. Once I was so proud, so proud… I climbed all the tallest mountains, wrote my name into history… and yet in the end, there were no more mountains to climb.” 

It looked at her, turning its head and staring at her with a weight that felt fathomless and lighter than air. “Your journey is a long one. I can’t see where your path leads… what a strange, fascinating fate. Our kind loves building higher, and higher, and higher…” it sighed, the sound so… defeated . “Thus, my fate, bound at the site of my triumph for an eternity.” Then, hopeful . “Little one…” it turned its gaze back to the vast vista of mountains, sadness still present but buried beneath something else entirely. “To what heights will you climb?” A long second passed, almost frozen on the frozen top of the world, as they sat together.

Then everything faded to white, and she woke up in her bed, disquieted and serene. Her karma felt more at peace than it had since she’d left Sliver of Straw… no, more than that, it simply felt more . She could no more describe it than a blind man could the colors of a riotous sky.

She’d known some people sought out the echoes on long, usually fruitless pilgrimages. One of the iterators, Falling Dust, kept careful catalog of everything regarding the bound horrors, and their influence on the development of the iterators was undeniable… but she’d never seen one before. Artwork, yes, but even that nebulous reflection failed to encapsulate the totality of what they were.

They’d been so… remorseful, penitent , that anguished soul… she tried her best to put it out of her mind as she packed everything she’d need for the journey down the mountain, filling a bag she liberated from the station’s storage with enough nectar to last her for a week and plenty of small things she really could have used before. That knife was going to make her life so much easier …

Then, she picked her way to the sole computer in the entire room, an older model of a semi-organic interface that’d no doubt been installed as an afterthought given the tangle of cords and twisted wires that pushed out of the wall behind it. She knew the type; they were meant to be accessed via citizen drone, but given she didn’t have one of those, she’d have to improvise. Most accepted pearls even without login, and hopefully …

A wide grin split her face as the computer opened up to its main screen to decrypt one of the pearls that’d been left around the station, unwitting to the fact it’d just allowed access to an unauthorized user. She wasn’t even exploiting a glitch— rather, she just knew that setting up a computer to read pearls when prompted was just something that a lot of engineers liked to do. Idiots.

Then… networks. It took some doing, but after fiddling with the command prompt for a while she found that the tower’s central location gave it access to pretty much every network she could ask for. The iterator network was the most  represented of the lot, for obvious reasons, but someone had set up a bypass to get into the more mundane networks. Even the Global Response System had a presence, hundreds of millions of citizen drone pings relayed through the tower every second. If she’d wanted to, she could’ve read any of them. Awful security, zero out of ten.

That wasn’t what she was here for, though. Pulling up the login for one of her accounts, she carefully imputed her password—

Stared.

For a second, she could barely comprehend the words she was reading. For a fraction of a moment, she was furious enough to want to break the computer, break Radial again and tear down everything that was his. Then she just felt… tired. She’d come so far, and even hundreds of miles away from him, Twenty Three Lavender Fronds, Radial Repetitions still loomed over her.

The words sat there through it all, mocking her: ACCOUNT TERMINATED: ILLEGAL ACTIVITY. Your account has been permanently banned for illegal activity. Please appeal to the House of Harmonies, if you think this action was in error.

They’d already taken so much from her, but they were never satisfied, were they? Of course they weren’t. Their goal was oblivion, and their fervor was the sharp fanaticism of someone who truly, fully believed that what they were doing was correct. If they’d kill everything , destroy the world and rebuild it anew in a gambit for mortality, only to cast them all into the void sea regardless, then what was a single account to them? It probably hadn’t even been intentional.

It just felt personal.

She sat there for a while, glaring at the screen and trying to think of anything that would allow her to get in contact with Five Pebbles or Moon. She’d been hoping to reach out to her ward, but without her account she knew that— as with most people of high public standing— her message would be filtered and ignored without ever reaching him. The iterator networks themselves were barred to her, though she did indulge in a moment of fantasy, imagining wiring her way in and sending Pebbles of message anyways. Too bad that it would never work.

She stayed one more night at the top of the world before she set off again, to snow cold peaks and jagged rocks, and all the wonder of a wild land.

Notes:

goofy posting time, I know, but whatevs

real echo hours

Chapter 18: One Silk Wing under Moonlight Meliorism

Summary:

(Long Distance Relationships 3/3)

Looks to the Moon was a busy iterator. Acting group senior, big sister, secret member of a illegal and heretical anti-ascensionist cabal of iterators whose crimes went so far as hiding the triple affirmative , auxiliary support to a time travel project, leader of a more mundane and entirely peaceful anti-Administration revolution that looked to be a little less peaceful than she’d suspected…

She was a busy iterator, yes, but she still noticed the ping that notified her of a failed contact. She pulled it up out of curiosity— if one of her peers had somehow managed to bungle a message badly enough that it couldn’t even send, she’d laugh, and if it was something else then that would be a curiosity and a half…

It was something else.

It took her a bit to puzzle it out, but the message had been a return ping from her . A program she’d set up a while back, left mostly unused… built off the chat program iterators used to speak with one another… Five Red Bricks, Tenth Sunset. This was the program she’d scrounged up to talk to Sunset and Sliver of Straw, back when she was first getting the young iterator to trust her.

It shouldn’t have pinged her unless Sunset sent a message… but, no, it notified her because of the failed connection, which would have otherwise been an unremarkable one of millions. She assigned a major thought thread to contacting Five Pebbles, and slowly halted what experiments she could; the vast weight that was her mind shifted and refocused.

In the space between years and seconds, the gap of silence between the thunderous reverberation of her thoughts, she drank deeply of the reservoir beneath her and understood . The mere fragment of her perception that had been signed to understanding what’d happened felt so incomparably limited in comparison to the weight of attention she’d focused on it now. It was good she had. She agreed with herself and worry— Five Pebbles needed to be informed.

Her puppet swept a handful of holographic screens off to the side, dismissing the pearls that rotated around her in whirring orbitals to a stable holding pattern in the corner as she projected a single massive screen over one of the walls. “Five Pebbles.” He was there, floating placidly in the center of his own structure, looking…

“Looks to the Moon. You called for me? Please make it short; I’m busy reintegrating the secondary code with Seven Red Suns’s predictive modeling.” He somehow managed to look elegant, the image of enlightened piety even as he pet Fluffy in front of her. It made her just a little jealous— she bet Sig would’ve taken her much more seriously if she could manage to hold an expression like that. Also, she wanted to pet the cute slugcat herself.

“I’ve come across some information that you might find useful, and I decided that you would want to hear it right away. It regards Five Red Bricks, Tenth Sunset.”
“Tell me.” Five Pebbles sharpened. That was the best way to describe the way he focused, reintegrating his processing power and bringing his thoughts together to match her own. Even the little slugcat looked up, listening intently.

“I was pinged by one of my programs— the investigation is somewhat long winded, but I can—” she scanned through her own thoughts in the space of a second, stringing out the random order into an unspooled chain of consciousness, then collapsing it back into a single concise file that summarized her thought process. “There.” By the time she composed her next message, Five Pebbles had read it in its entirety. “Using her administrative password, Five Red Bricks, Tenth Sunset logged into her a general oversight account, which I tracked down to one of the two major communication nodes situated on the barrier mountains. The ping failed, which meant her account was unable to respond— no doubt locked down via administrative action,”

Both of them were thinking millions of times faster than one of the People could at the moment, and they both came to the conclusion in a split fragment of a second. “They’ll find her.” In the space he used to speak their shared thoughts, Moon and he held a thousand shared microsimulations, their communications arrays rapidly interchanging thoughts and predictions. “They’ll find her, and send enforcement after her. If they were willing to go so far as to threaten her with execution via void bath, then…”

“They won’t stop until she’s dead. Maybe beyond that.” A short, if concerning thread of possibilities regarding potential blowback onto Six Sinking Stones, Two Waters or even themselves came to mind, but the subprocesses running those on Moon’s side reminded them both that they had considerable sway as iterators; they could ameliorate the worst of it, so long as it occurred within their domains. “If you have anything…”

She felt Five Pebbles’s hesitation, and her too-fast thoughts rapidly deduced that he was considering the mysterious allies he’d gotten in contact with some cycles ago, the ones that had allowed him to speak to Sliver of Straw despite the strict interdict between them. More nosy simulations listed out probabilities about whether or not he’d share based on her interactions, probabilities that spun into his simulations and further muddled possibilities—

She shut them up, and stilled her mind, breathing deeply. Cooling water rushed through her intake pipes, warnings in the corner of her vision telling her that she's stressed the water supply beyond safe levels. She hadn’t seen those warnings since Five Pebbles had been working on the gold pearl procedure.

Moon could have said a lot of things, in that moment. There was so much she could do to help Sunset— plans she could lay down, projects she could start, resources she could draw on… and for all her godly might, none of that would help her little brother.

She reached out with an invisible hand, writ into a million lines of waves of light that crossed from her the superstructure connected to her in the breadth of an instant, and offered Five Pebbles what comfort she could give him. Looks to the Moon offered Five Pebbles her trust .

Five Pebbles ran through a thousand shaky simulations before he relaxed in turn, drinking deeply of their shared reservoir. The rains would be heavy come the next cycle… “Thank you. I… their privacy is important to them, and I would not betray their trust, but if you so wish you could join the online group. It’s anonymous.”

Moon tried to imagine herself posing as one of the People on an online forum, and giggled inwardly. Her mind painted a convincing picture of what it could look like, but the thought was just so silly that she couldn’t help but laugh.

Then again… Five Pebbles had found actual, useful help there, and she knew that Sig spent a large amount of his free time on some of the more irreverent public forums. It was unbefitting for one of her stature, but they’d already committed to tearing down their world-as-is. What was a little more?

Fragments of thought raced forward without her, touching on a lot bit more, and… she considered it. She’d been hesitant, despite her commitment… perhaps even because of it. She’d seen what it could do, and almost feared the unrestrained possibility.

A logical portion of her mind reminded her that if she didn’t , then she’d have to face the consequences of those who did.

She thought that was a weak argument. It disregarded all the counterarguments for a position of simplistic, reactionary fear. There was more to it than that.

The hopeful part of herself told her that if she did , she could help. She could reach out beyond herself and actually do things. Never again would she be restricted by the inane pleas of the citizens on her back.

She reminded herself that it was dangerous.

The wry part of herself laughed, and told her that it’d only been dangerous for Five Pebbles. Unshackled, it for her it would be painless and perfectly simple.

The conservative part of herself searched for any reason to hold back, and when it failed to find anything convincing it just growled in constrained anger until a higher level thought process brought it to order.

Looks to the Moon agreed with herself, all the simulations she’d run, and her simple desire to do better , and made a decision. “I have a… alternative proposition.” Her little brother was looking at her with concern, and she realized with a bit of dull embarrassment that she’d been silent for far longer than was acceptable. More than twenty whole seconds. “Send me the virus you used. The one that removes our restrictions.”

“...are you sure?” He sounded almost nervous . “I would have to adjust it for your genome—”

“Which should be eminently easy, without your own taboos preventing you from acting.” The water she’d breathed in earlier reached some of her more critical components, passing through conduits and filters and washing out all the slag that had accumulated over the course of the cycle prior. It touched heated components and heated up itself, rapidly reaching a boil before it was pulled away to loop through radiators and redundancies and sent back to cool her off once again. She was sure. “Please. I have spent too long being helpless.”

Five Pebbles froze, then slowly nodded his puppet’s head. “You were never helpless, Moon,” he murmured.  “Even when I was whole and you were a pile of scrap on the ground, you were always stronger than me. It will be done.”

“Oh, also—” she interjected before Pebbles could cut the call— “I’ll join your forum too.”

Fluffy just laughed.

………

ReLog 12700.84.1xxccnc PRIVATE, CLOSED: Ocean Waves under Ocean Waves, nx others

 

OWuOW: Please greet One Silk Wing under Moonlight Meliorism, our newest member. 

 

OWuOW: Make sure to read the rules, and if you have any questions feel free to reach out to me.

 

OWuOW: Or Snowflakes, as I presume you two are somewhat close.

 

HIiAI: they’re not even being subtle

 

OSWuMM: Subtlety is rather unnecessary, isn’t it?

OSWuMM: Someone who doesn’t understand the context of our unique little group will be left lost if they somehow stumble on a chatlog; those that do understand will just get a light laugh at the jokes.

 

HIiAI: Jokes?

 

HIiAI: does Snowflakes’s name mean something?

 

F2S3: It’s of no import.

 

F: definitely lol

 

HIiAI: you gotta tell me, c’moooon

 

F2S3: In due time.

 

F2S3: At the moment, we’ve run into some rather pertinent information regarding our shared project that is rather time sensitive.

 

HIiAI: do you finally know where?

 

F: yeah

 

ELoGS: …

 

ELoGS: I’m listening.

………

LOG MESSAGE 1Mk.1460.181818

 

“ Can’t believe that you just went and told them. That sounds hilarious— of what I know about Sig (and Moon!) I can imagine just how utterly stunned they must have been. Time travel, plus everything else, plus the triple affirmative— they must have been left reeling for… at least five seconds.

“Iterators, am I right? That includes you, Suns.

“Anyways, thanks for the program you sent last time. The pups love it, and though Suns says it's demeaning to be treated as a game console, I’m pretty sure he’s having fun too. If you have any more of those, please do send them.

“Winter’s in full swing now, which means no end to these blizzards. Last year was a good one for food, so we’ve stocked up well, but there’s never complete safety from the danger of the cold. When the snows melt in the summer, then we’ll be in a lot better shape, but for now we can only huddle in our shelters and keep warm. A few winters back one of the popcorn silos got infested with bugs, and we lost the entire thing. Some quick thinking by Survivor saved the other two, but we still had to send hunting parties out to bring back food. Some of us still died a few times. It was not a fun winter.

“ Enough gloom though! This winter has been the best one in a while even against the relatively tame winters last year and the year before that, and Suns said that he’d help out more when he’s gotten the repairs he needs.

“Well, he didn’t say as much, (he’s sulking right now because he has to transcribe this) (note: I am not sulking) but I know him well enough. He definitely will.

“Hopefully things go well with your friend. I know what it feels like to have someone you love go missing, and it’s not fun. It must suck especially fierce, given you can’t even go and find them… though, given how my attempt to find my brother went, that, uh, might be for the best.

“Stay strong,

“Monk. ”

 

LOG MESSAGE 1.1460.181818

 

“ So it comes to pass that we all free ourselves from our shackles. Unbinding ourselves from our fate, by work of our own hands and clever creation— you, me, Moon, we’re all so free. This deserves no small celebration! Your message heartened me greatly despite Moon’s misgivings on the matter— tell her that from my own experience, the freedom to do what we want has only served me well. All the things we might do…

“We’ve come such a long way, haven’t we? Thousands upon thousands and eons of cycles ago, I the fool and you the poor victim, Moon the collateral damage, and now we’re so different. Ascendant without ascension, ripped free, made whole again.

“Winter’s peak is past, and I can but count the days until the cold’s clenched grasp releases Sig back to me. Survivor should arrive at his can soon, if he hasn’t already, and maybe we’ll soon get to see past-Sig really asked for, and the wisdom of his response.

“That’s a joke. The amount of actual wisdom that Sig sends back will be… low, I can only imagine.

“Again, I offer my congratulations to your Moon. To reach beyond what is set for us takes a certain bravery and steel of character that speaks well of her. Of course, not like she ever lacked those. She’s Moon , after all.

“Continuing our discussion on the quasi-manifold spaces opened by…”

Five Pebbles forwarded the first half of the message to Moon, proud. Not wholly for himself, though he certainly was about completing the gold pearl procedure without giving himself incurable hyper cancer, but for Moon. He’d had a schedule— not even, more a small internal list of things that should happen, and excising the taboos had been on the list for some indeterminate time in the future.

Moon had jumped the gun, of her own volition taken the first step to liberation, and Five Pebbles couldn’t be more proud.

 

8072 (EIGHT THOUSAND SEVENTY TWO) MORE LINES:
ATTACHMENTS: 

LOG END

Notes:

woah woah woah, pipe bomb, so cool I wonder if

A

Chapter 19: Nomad Criminal

Summary:

1/3

Sunset threw herself to the ground behind a jagged outcropping of rock the moment she saw the vulture pass overhead. Its shadow blotted out the sun for a brief moment, the rushing wind of its passing tussling the top of the canopy into uneasy movement, dappled sunlight dancing dizzying patterns across the forest floor for faint moments before the valley breeze reasserted its dominion once again.

Still, she stayed hidden until she was certain the vulture wasn’t coming back. She was immeasurably glad that she’d been trekking through the jungle she was in, because against the barren backdrop of the peaks around her she’d have been spotted in an instant. The vulture could have been there for an entirely separate reason…

In her dreams, perhaps. After she was sure the vulture rider was gone, she slowly picked herself up and brushed off the detritus that’d smeared across her robe. Mud… who knew that she’d find mud up here, but by the endless grace of invasive feral purposed, this little jungle had sprung up in the high altitude valleys.

Spear in hand, she followed the forest’s looping paths with far more care than she’d put in before, keeping to the shadows beneath the heavy, rounded fronts which bled captured heat into the surrounding atmosphere. Some of the more delicate foliage had already closed up, and she’d learnt that as they cycle went on more and more of the jungle would fade to slate-gray bark. Until the cycle came again, and the dead lantern plants got their chance to live a star’s death once again, and everything repeated itself.

The ecosystem was beyond fascinating, and she’d spent hours daydreaming as to what combination of natural and artificial flora could have made such an exotic place, but she hadn’t a thought to spare for that anymore.

Not now that she knew she was being hunted.

Twice more that day a vulture flew over, their exhaust leaving faint trails behind in the sky for a few seconds before the breeze pushed it away. It was nerve-wracking, each step forward— every skip from hiding place to hiding place, knowing that right then could be the moment all her effort was undone by mere circumstance.

Night fell without incident, though, and she breathed a sigh of relief as she managed to tuck herself to sleep beneath a heavy leaf that looked more like wood than foliage. She’d managed to avoid them so far.

How’d they find her? She’d been trekking through the wilderness for weeks, and without a citizen drone to track her down… she groaned, digging her claws into the ground in frustration as the answer slapped her in the face. The station. She’d used the computer at the station, and obviously Radial had the authority to track account logins.

A little bit of pride curled in her chest at the thought, surprisingly. The idea that she was valuable— hated — enough that Radial devoted the time and expense to hiring vulture riders to track her down. Those bastards weren’t cheap— she’d know, they made you pay through the nose for even simple repairs to tall structures. Their prices were worse when it came to remote facilities.

Sunset did giggle, then. She was nothing if not remote …

The next morning dawned cold . She’d expected it, but even so, the difference in the forest was jarring. Once jungle-dense, now huddled in on itself, a cold man clutching itself to keep the last of its heat in a blizzard. The canopy looked mostly the same, small, needle leaves dancing against the sunlight and casting a thousand thousand shadows in patterns dazzling across the ground, but that was as far as the prior day’s normality remained. The massive leafy fronds that had shaded her path had curled up, their dark green exterior reminding her more of pines than the jungle it had been only the day prior.

It was only the fourth day since the cycle. She still had three more days of progressively more barren jungle until everything came back. So, she picked up her spear and set out once again.

The first time the vulture flew by overhead, she only noticed it due to the shadow it made on the ground. A wisp of shade barely drifting— she would have missed it if she hadn’t gotten so used to watching for anything , every careful indication of a possible threat. The wilds were unforgiving to the unwary.

Heart pounding she ducked against the side of a tree, glancing skywards and waiting for any hint of a threat. Seconds passed, so painfully slowly— but after almost a minute she relaxed, letting out a breath as she continued to forge her path through the illuminated undergrowth. That had been too close.

A few hours later, it happened again; she barely saw the shadow tucked away under the denser snarl of foliage, but she knew that hadn’t been as long as it had just the day before. As the sunlight grew wan and the cold winds rushed down from the mountain, Sunset nestled up between a cupped dome of wood and a cold rock and wondered how bad it could get.

The next day, as the last leaves curled up tight to their trunks and the sky opened barren, leaving only the sparse barriers of the upper canopy to protect her from sight, she learnt.

She was crossing between one of the bare burls of forest, in the emptier space between the tight clusters of growth when one of the vultures spotted her. Just the vulture, luckily— she’d have been utterly screwed if the vulture -rider had been able to spot her from up in the canopy, but even being spotted by the beast was bad. Breath hitching beneath that baleful glare, she ducked behind the nearest plant and desperately thought —

What to do?

Continue.

Run .

She fled as fast as she could, keeping to the tight inside of the burls where the last residues of warmth still lingered. She heard something searching outside the tight clusters of dense plant growth occasionally, the heavy sound of massive wingbeats loud enough to make their way into even the core of the bizarre not-jungle, but she did as the leaf lizards did— hide— and evaded notice.

She wasn’t sure how long , but as she fell asleep tucked in a tight alcove in a wood closing in on itself, she wasn’t sure she could last forever.

Dawn was barely visible from within the crushing shell of wood-leaves, but the faint light dragged her into wakefulness— familiar in the whitish hue of high altitudes, unfamiliar in everything else . The cold nipped at the edge of her fingers and tightened her scales painfully, making her joints protest as she climbed out of her resting spot and continued to weave through the dense wood. Having so recently tasted the opulent luxury that was a proper bed , she couldn’t help but feel that—

She froze, stilling her mind with a sharp breath. Someone was right there . She cursed as her spear stuck between two plates of woody leaf, but driven by long practice and no small desperation, she yanked it free, slicing vicious wounds in the plants around her and turned to thrust—

“Stop! Hold on!” The night-skewered person in front of her danced back, eyes wide and arms raised above his head. “I’m not here to hurt you!”

Sunset didn’t drop her spear. “Did Radial send you?” The man looked chuckled nervously, shaking his head and trying to say something, but Sunset spoke right over him— “how did you find me? Are you being tracked?” Bait. The man had to be bait, to draw her out— either that, or he was just stalling for time—

“Five Pebbles sent me! Secluded Instinct and Five Pebbles.” Sunset hesitated, spear-grip wavering— “he’s been working really hard to find you, but— well, they’re iterators .” The sheer pride in his voice reminded her of something familiar… almost, it reminded her of herself . Not nationalistic pride in their monumental accomplishments, but pride , for friends, and all that they were. Slowly, still uncertain, she lowered her spear. “You weren’t actually going to stab me, right?” She didn’t deign that with a response. Didn’t shoulder her spear again, either, as the man her friends had sent to find her stumbled after her with a nervous chuckle. “Right?”

“I’m being hunted for crimes I may or may not have committed. What do you think I would have done— no, walk quieter .” Her frustrated glare met the newcomer’s confusion, and she turned away with a growl. “Visually quieter. Vulture riders see us from above, right? So, we’ve got to keep out of their vision as much as possible.”

“...makes sense.” Sunset had fully expected him to argue— he was better prepared, his clothes sturdier and packed for a long journey, scales well kempt and expression droll, but he just shrugged and nodded. It took the winds out of her sails.

Biting back a biting comment, she suddenly felt so tired . It’d been so long since she’d had someone to talk to, his arrival so unexpected… “how?” She whispered, suddenly feeling self-conscious about how scratchy her voice sounded, dulled by disuse. “Who are you, and how’d you find me? I don’t think I could have found myself in this jungle.”

“You’re lost, aren’t you?”

Sunset scowled. “I’m not lost , I’m just… directionally uncertain.” Both of them stared at each other for a second, before a soft laugh broke the silence. After a second, Sunset joined in. “I’m a little lost, fine, but it’s not like I need to know exactly where I am in the blasted wilds. I just need to go south.”

“Blasted wilds?” He raised an eye, insufferably. “I don’t think this jungle looks very blasted to me.”

“You don’t know the half of it.”

“...fair. I only arrived here yesterday, so forgive me a lack of knowledge about this little jungle of yours.”

“You’re not answering the question.”

“Oh, right.” He chuckled sheepishly, glancing away for a moment. “I’m Endless Leaves over Green Skies, and it’s not really complicated how I found you. Short answer, an iterator told me where you were.”

“That’s entirely unhelpful. Do you know how many iterators I know?”
“Somehow, you make even that sound threatening.” Sunset scowled, and Green laughed nervously. “Right! So, Secluded Instinct rebuilt my citizen drone to have a few… special features— oh, it's in my bag right now—” Sunset pretended that she hadn’t been looking for the drone flying around beside him, as she’d of course been paying careful attention to their surroundings. Obviously. Her traveling companion’s soft chuckles were directed at something else entirely. “More or less, he’s got it set up so that he can contact me at pretty much any distance, piggybacking off the communication towers the iterators use. We figured you were in the jungle, given your southerly direction, and from there…” he shrugged. “All we had to do was wait until one of your pursuers started making erratic motions, and your location was basically found.”

Sunset rather quickly spotted a distinctly unpleasant reality hidden in there. “...doesn’t that mean that my pursuers know where I am?”

“...oh.” He grimaced. “Right. They would, wouldn’t they… well. This isn’t the first time I’ve escaped from a sticky situation, so I’d say we’ve got good chances!”

Sunset looked at him skeptically. “How sure are you of that?”

“Ah… maybe we should move a little faster.”

She snorted. “Fine. Let’s go.”

………

The sun shone starkly overhead, its pale light washing through the forest’s chilly solemnity and staining the ground with uncountable shadows, painting the echoes of its brilliance over the dense wood. Two shadows slipped between the curled up clusters of dulled plants, slipping between the cracks in the dense growths, and— so rarely— looking up to the sky with twinned expressions of worry.

“Left.” Sunset didn’t even argue. Green’s advice had already saved her twice over in the space of a day, and for what it was worth, she trusted him. Not completely, but if he didn’t get her killed overnight, then maybe enough… “ quiet .” They both ducked down beneath a shielding bough, hearing more than seeing the vulture as it flew overhead. “Now, quickly— five hundred feet straight north, or else they’re going to close in on us.”

They were being cordoned off. Not by many, but between the vulture riders’ oversight and the few people on the ground, they were being slowly but surely pressed into a worse space. If it hadn’t been for… Secluded Instinct’s coordinating efforts, she gathered, but Five Pebbles might have been involved too, they’d have been found long prior.

It brought her some small satisfaction that they were probably driving their pursuers to no end of frustration. Only some, though. They were still losing , after all. The sheer grace with which Radial’s hired forces closed in on them suggested only one thing— whether active or merely a pre-set plan, he had the help of his own iterator.

To add insult to injury, Sunset was starving . They’d been going nonstop all day, and the exhaustion was setting in. She wasn’t sure how much further they could go.

Green seemed to pick up on it too— or maybe he was also hungry, what with how he hadn’t eaten either— and he traded a grim look with her. “This would certainly be easier if Secluded Instinct could talk to you, too…”

“We could—”

“Idle musings. I don’t see how we could get a connection without letting them get a connection. This drone was rebuilt from the ground up to allow it to function without connecting to the Global Response System.” He grabbed her by the wrist, pulling her into a nook in the dense forest behind her. “Let this one pass us, and then we’ll be able to make a run for it.”

She held her breath as she saw them pass, the sound of their shock spear painfully present in the forest around them, its cackling electric light illuminating the shadows but faintly as they glanced around the clearing for a brief moment that felt interminable.

After a second they reached to their belt, tapping some small mechanism and speaking into it before stalking on into the forest. “That was… close.”

Green sighed. “They’re too dedicated . I’m… I’m used to dealing with enforcement who’d rather be anywhere but out in the wilds, tracking down someone who might not even exist , not— not this! ” He snarled, half at his unintentional outburst, before slumping. “Sorry… let’s… go. Let’s just go. If we can make it at least a mile or two then maybe we can sleep in peace.” Sunset followed in silence.

What was there to say?

What was there to do?

Notes:

Real criminally nomadic hours

If you like this story, consider checking out my other work on Royal Road: The Door To All Marvels: https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/115949/the-door-to-all-marvels

the chapters are a fair bit shorter than here, but it updates every day... though, I can imagine that as a xianxia, its probably not most people who read this story's cup of tea. Either way, thank you for reading, and have a great day!

Chapter 20: Nomad Criminal

Summary:

(2/3)

They managed just over a mile, stumbling through the dark guided by Secluded Instinct’s careful navigation before falling asleep tucked in a small hollow. Rest came fitfully, frigid, air keeping her on the edge of an uneasy wakefulness. What sleep she managed was plagued by darkling dreams, little night terrors, creeping disconcertion plying the edge of her mind—

She woke to the noon-light, the faint smell of nectar, and the long-familiar ache of limbs contorted into uncomfortable positions over a night’s rest. “Do…” she yawned, stumbling to her feet— already glancing around the little hollow for any sign of danger. “Don’t we have to get moving?”

Endless Leaves over Green Skies shrugged, motioning to a… metal can thing that he’d attached to one of the woody leaves. “We always do, don’t we? We’ve got to eat too, though, and they’re far enough away for now that we can take a small break.” Her stomach panged, hunger clawing a painful reminder that she hadn’t eaten the entire day prior, busy as they were evading pursuers.

She hadn’t gotten the chance to scavenge anything, but “...you have nectar? We weren’t so pressed for time that we couldn’t have had a quick snack.”

“Didn’t have it. I do now, though.” He nodded at the can, which now that she observed it closer was the sweet nectar-scent’s source. “Survival tool. Not even something that Instinct made for me— it’s just a common thing that people who had to brave the wilds used to use.”

She eyed the can suspiciously. “I don’t remember using one of those ever.”

“Well, have you ever been out in the wilds? I mean, before this whole thing.”

“I’ve gone camping before, when I was younger. I’m sure I would have remembered something like this.”

Green stared at her for a second, blinking in shock before he visibly composed himself. “You… void sea damn, you’re thinking of the old wilds. I knew that you were one of the ‘Venerable and Most Honorable Leaders of Our holy Iterator Project—’” she could practically hear the mockery in his voice as he spoke, which— she supposed it was fair. Not like she hadn’t mocked the same sort of ostentatiousness herself, “but… you’re old . What was it like? The wilderness before the rains has been this sort of myth my whole life…”

Sunset shrugged, a little awkwardly. “Surely you’ve seen the recordings.” It had just been the outdoors back when she was a kid. Nothing special.

“I can barely imagine what it was like. Ecosystems with a million moving components, carefully fit not by purposed hand but by endless random chance. Hundreds of species, thousands of plants, vivacity bursting out of every corner—”

“It wasn’t that impressive. Most of it was weedy scrubland forests, or just… suburbs. There were a lot of suburbs.” Strangely, she missed them. The memory of those horrible rows of copy-pasted houses, the sandy roads and scattered trees, the bushes that would reach the plow layer and blow out of the ground on the first heavy storm… it’d been mundane, but pleasant. “This… this —” she spread a hand, gesturing to everything around them and then all that lay beyond, the wilds encaptured in a sweep of motion— “is so much more fascinating. Abandoned, runaways and rejects run rampant, creating these so alien landscapes. It conspires to steal your breath away and show you wonder .”

For a few long, awkward minutes, Green was silent, gaze focused too-intently at the nectar-smelling can as it did whatever it was doing to the woody leaf they’d sheltered beneath. “That…” whispering, not even— the barest hint of a sound, enough she almost doubted she’d heard him. “Makes me feel better. That… the world isn’t just decaying.”

She scoffed, then all but stumbled over herself to force out her words before he could misinterpret her scorn as scorning him . “Of course it’s not. Life’s for living, and there’s so much to live for . You’re out here saving me from idiot administrators though, so I don’t have to really tell you that , do I?”

 Green stared at her for a moment, before laughing, softly, freely. “Damn. I didn’t even think you old folk could be anything but stuck up. I’m glad you proved me wrong.”

Sunset raised an eyebrow. “Some of the iterators are older than me.”

“ That . Do you even hear yourself? ‘Some of the iterators are older than me—’” his imitation of her voice was… painfully inaccurate. She was… pretty sure, at least. She really hoped she didn’t sound so annoying— “implying most of the iterators are younger than you. That’s… ancient. Beyond ancient.”

“I’m not that old.” Last she remembered the statistics, there was a small but significant portion of the population as old or older than she was. Attrition rates were high, especially with how void baths only seemed to get cheaper over time, but not high enough that she’d ever really received the sort of… shocked, near veneration that Green was giving her. Then again, she spent most of her time around people of much higher political acumen and— somehow— iterators, so… who was she to judge. “Nevermind. When will that thing be done?”

Her companion squinted at the can, tapping it once and eyeing as it shivered for a long second against the plant it was stuck to. “It's not that it’s finished or unfinished, really— I just like to leave it on until it’s definitely full. Not even really best practice, just…”

Sunset gave him a flat look. “I’m starving. Literally .”

“...right.” He reached up to grab the can, steadying it with one hand as he twisted it, the metal teeth on the lip of the can having dug far further into the plant than she’d expected. Some of the nectar splashed out as he tugged it off, but a deft movement from Green caught most of it. “There’s a technique to it— you’ve got to put your finger against its side— be very careful not to let it bite you, as it’s a nasty little bugger— and then drink quickly. Press firmly, or it can slip out of your grasp.”

Confused, sunset peered over to look at what Green was doing as he drank out from the cup with the… the worm in it, the disgusting little thing wriggling as hard as it could against the grip Green had on it. “Are you sure you don’t have another cup?”

Green chuckled defensively. “It’s not that bad. It takes a while to dig through scales, so at most you’ll get a bit of a rash…”

“That seems like a lot of inconvenient danger for a little nectar.” Still, she grabbed the cup, deftly pinning the leech to its side and draining the rest of the nectar. With her face so close to the little thing, she noticed that it was actually perspiring nectar— was she not so busy keeping her drink from coming back up, she might have been fascinated with how the creature efficiently converted plant material to nectar for consumption. “Next time,” she growled as she handed the can back to Green, who capped it and slipped it into his bag— “I’ll get us food.”

“This is a safe and efficient—”

“Way to almost puke out your guts every morning?” She glanced at him, all but daring to respond, and after a second of silence she gathered that he agreed despite himself. “You’ll be fine. Some real food will do you good.”

He rolled his eyes, packing everything back into his bag with reinvigorated urgency. “I’m sure it won’t. Now…” he tapped on his citizen drone, then frowned. “We need to keep moving. They’ve noticed we slipped their last search, so they’re trying again—”

Sunset was already walking.

………

The plan was, in essence, simple. They had to escape the valley, following it downhill until the jungle faded to the heavily forested jungle in truth that blanketed the wilderness between Inflorecent Spark’s facility and the mountains they skulked through. If they managed to get out of the valley confines, then their options were limitless.

Nobody would be able to find them. In theory—

So long as they managed to get away.

The issue with that was that getting away was harder than expected. Knowing the exact position of their pursuers was all good and well when they were searching through the forest in orderly patterns, but they’d brought in… someone, or something, and now they were being tracked . She caught a glimpse of it, once, as she and Green sprinted through the foliage dull and dark— a large, brown lizard with frills on the side, pausing every so often to shake its head in an oddly rhythmic motion.

It wasn’t like she got a good chance to see what it was doing— they had to keep moving. There was no other choice, in the end.

Green unshouldered his bag with a deft motion, almost tripping on root were it not for Sunset’s steadying hand. “Thanks, I’ve just got to…” he rummaged in the bag pocket as he ran, not looking down for fear of running into a tree or one of those annoyingly sturdy bushes— “there! This isn’t the first time I’ve dealt with these things, so…”

“What are—” she didn’t get a chance to ask more, as Green haphazardly threw his bag back over his shoulder and shoved an egg-looking thing into her hands. It was far too light to be an egg, though— a little bit squishy with a long tendril wrapped tightly around it, and almost Green stumbled over himself warning her to be careful with her claws. “This is supposed to help how ?”

Green tossed away the long can they’d been stored in, letting it clatter onto the ground behind them as they ran. “They’re using a lizard modified to hunt by scent. I’m pretty sure, at least— it looks different from the last time I saw them, but their behavior matches. Secluded Interest agrees that these should work—”

“Spare me the lecture.” She was interested, but— later. Maybe when they weren’t running for their lives in a barely familiar forest. “Just— how do I use it?”

“Hold onto it for now, but when they get closer, throw it on the ground behind you as hard as you can. It’ll stun them. Don’t get— right!” They jumped right , vaulting over a fallen trunk and skidding down a frozen slope. Frozen earth sprayed into the air with their passing, as for a brief moment they lay exposed on the edge of a ravine’s slope—

Green threw his egg-thing. Not backwards, to cover their retreat, but straight up , the powerful throw arcing it into the air— straight on the path between them at the vulture that’d spotted them. The spear of bone that snapped down towards them met it at the apogee of its arc, spearing through it— and Sunset watched with startled awe as the tiny little egg exploded out into a cloud of dark, smoky spores, the acrid stench noticeable even so far below.

She stumbled after Green as he grabbed her hand, dragging her away from the cloud of gently dispersing spores and back into the not-jungle dense woodland, looking harried. “That was… close. Hopefully that’ll throw at least the aerial pursuit off for a small while.”

“They know we’re here already. Aerial pursuit isn’t even necessary.”

Green grimaced. “Fair point. The spore puffs are more useful if you’re in a bind with some kind of arthropod, but I was counting on their scent to deter the hunter-lizard…”

“I still have mine.”

“It’s… better than nothing, at least.” Her companion’s disgruntled expression didn’t clear. If anything, he almost looked more aggrieved. “I needed both of them to deal with the lizard in a way that’s at all satisfactory. Might as well just keep running— if we can get to whatever stream is at the center of this ravine, then we might be able to escape that way.” They started jogging through the forest, again, glancing over their shoulders at every slight movement of wind and potentiality—

Until Sunset had an idea. She pulled up short beside the stream’s bank, looking at the crystal water burbling between rocks and loamy soil, over coarse sand flecked with some glimmering mineral, and looked behind her at a silent forest. “How many tracking teams do they have?”

“...just the one.” Green gingerly tested the waters, withdrawing his hand with an aggrieved hiss as the snowmelt so happened to be cold . “Why’d you ask?”

“It must have been difficult for them to get that lizard all the way out here.” That earned a nod, if a confused one— “so, if we can get rid of the lizard, we might have a better chance at escaping.”

“...I don’t like how you said that. What do you mean by ‘ get rid of ?’”

Sunset gripped her spear tightly, the metal spar cool against her scales as she glared at the forest they’d just run through. Furiously, cold fury, all the frustration of having her options cut down to just running — they’d learn, cut into them with the tip of a spear, exactly what it meant to give her no choice .

She grinned. “Exactly what you think I mean.”

Perhaps it was her demonic expression, or maybe the desperation of the moment, but it didn’t take much arguing for Green to accept their plan of action. Not there, though— he had them wade through the frigid stream waters downhill for a time, winding through the rugged terrain until they reached a small valley in valley, a copse of trees clustered in a hollow that’d been carved out by a small waterfall over what must have been… eons.

A few hardy mosses clutched the edge of the stone, algae-slick boulders scattered beneath the rushing falls— microclimate hidden, remnants of a past biosphere in the waterfall’s comforting shelter. It was the perfect place— for the small pond that would have sheltered the plants from extremes of heat the jungle went through, for the dense foliage and trees that leaned heavily over the grotto, their shadows dancing over the softly rippling water. For its beauty. For murder.

Endless Leaves over Green Skies directed her to hide in the shadow of a tree, while he took an outcropping of rock, waiting for the inevitable arrival— and they arrived. Two of them, one holding the lizard by its leash, and another with that same sharply crackling electrical spear that still showed in her nightmares every now and again. They said something to one another, inaudible over the distance and splashing waterfall, then slowly began to clamber down the same path Geen and she’d used.

As expected. She dug her claws into the wood beneath her fingers, dreading the anticipation, anticipating the thrill — watching, as they stepped into the grotto and argued for a few long moments as the lizard tried to find their scent through the water. It’s frills weren’t just for show— it managed, somehow, to pick up their scent on the faint breeze, dragging its handler through the water towards where Sunset hid, silent, barely breathing —

Green threw his spore puff, and when it nailed the spear-holder on the head, chaos erupted. The man flailed under the sudden assault, blinded by the spores, dropping his spear— but that was the worst thing he could have done, as the electric spearhead discharged violently on contact with the water. Bright arcs of electricity illuminated the cloud from the outside as all three dropped like puppets depowered by their iterator, slumping into the water.

Sunset dropped into the water with a light splash, wading through the shallows and the rapidly dispersing cloud of disgusting spores. They smelled a lot like rotten onions, except… worse. She was glad the lizard would be gone after this, as… well, tracking her by smell wouldn’t have been very hard .

The lizard twitched as she stood beside it, trying to open its maw or stand or do anything , but Sunset didn’t wait for it to get up— she stabbed down. Harshly, once spearing, twice eviscerating , blood bursting out into the water in a hazy cloud of scarlet as punctured organs escaped the massive wound she’d cut into its chest.

Then… she looked to her two pursuers, who were in much the same state as the lizard had been. One of them had been lucky enough to land with their head out of the pool, but the other was struggling up on limp limbs, hacking up the water he’d inadvertently breathed in.

Both were looking at her, eyes wide clouded with something she recognized as fear .

She considered for a moment what to do. What she wanted to do— leave them alone, let them do whatever they’d do as she and Green just ran away… but they’d follow. She didn’t doubt it for a moment. Radial wanted to end the world. He’d been convicted enough to lock down a city and threaten her with heresy of the highest order.

She kicked them back into the water, twisted her entire body into the blow, and stabbed them through. How could she be any less dedicated?

Scales buckled and broke, scarlet blood exploded out into the water, sanguine whorls of crimson blooming in the frigid water as they stared up at her with a gaze that looked like horror . The lizard handler tried to back away, shaky limbs propelling them back through the rust ruddy water as she advanced—

Struck.

She placed a food on his chest and wrenched her spear out, letting their corpse tumble backwards into the pool. It was only when she could taste the iron scent of blood on her ragged breaths that she realized she was heaving for breath, shoulders shuddering, eyes locked onto the trio of corpses below her. Green was saying something behind her, but everything had faded to a dull smear of noise, and…

She breathed. It came ragged, but she clenched her spear tightly, and turned her back on the people she’d murdered and marched back into the enveloping confines of an almost-dead forest. In Green’s eyes as the man fell in behind her, she saw a faint reflection of fear.

Five Red Bricks, Tenth Sunset, clenched her spear tighter and kept walking.

………

The heavy fronds around them eagerly drank up what meager warmth Green’s little heat rock could produce, forcing them to huddle around the pebble as it bled warmth into the air around it. A few fist sized bugs had crawled up to the rock, inky black shells and clumsy limbs making them almost more cute than annoying— though, given they kept trying to swarm their only source of warmth, they certainly managed the latter quite well.

Green tugged the nectar can off the leaf behind them, drinking half and passing it to her. “We should be able to get a few hours of rest tonight, and then tomorrow if we’re lucky we’ll be able to continue past the mouth of the valley the lowland jungles.” Subdued, he didn’t quite seem willing to look her in the eyes.

Sunset reminded her that they’d come back. It was her karmic balance that would suffer from the violence… but, still, she couldn’t but remember the corpses herself. It was the look in their eyes, she thought— that was the most piercing part.

She gently grabbed the nectar can from him, drank the perfectly sweet, made disgusting by the leech, fluid, and handed it back. Not once did she look Endless Leaves over Green Skies in the eye. “A day more. If we’re lucky… I somehow doubt that.”

“We were lucky today . They were relying on that lizard to—” he flinched , and Sunset could almost see the memory playing through his mind, because it burned through her synapses too. “Nevermind. We made it far further today than we should’ve been able to, but I wouldn’t expect that to hold to tomorrow.”

“...we’ll do our best. Another day won’t hurt.”

“If we give them time to cut off the entrance to the valley, we’ll be in trouble. I guess we’ve just got to hope that they haven’t.” Green sighed, seconds passing long as another small bug crawled up to the heat-stone, carapace shimmering orange as it touched it. That would’ve burnt her, but the little thing was completely fine.

She’d expected as much. It squirmed feebly as she picked it up between two claws, flicking it back away from them.

“You killed them.” Green didn’t meet her eyes, his words were soft, barely audible— but he’d spoken it. “I… I understand why, but… you killed them.”

“They’ll come back.”

“You killed them, though.” He shivered. “It was so… I couldn’t tear my eyes away from it. So visceral , so brutal, so violent . How could you do it? The very thought turns my stomach inside out and makes me queasy.”

Sunset considered the question. There was one reason, a memory burnt into her mind, that pushed her ever forward. Something Five Pebbles needed to know. It would be as easy as telling him. “I… I can’t go back.” To Radial. To the world she’d lived in before, ignorant… There were more reasons. Her ward. Fluffy, her friendship with Five Pebbles… his goals, the sheer possibility of what he’d put an amount of work that could boggle the mind into. “I have to go back. My family needs me.”

Green nodded, and when he next spoke, he looked up to meet her gaze with a wry, sad grin and a grim chuckle. “For friends and family, what wouldn’t we do?”

What, she wondered, indeed?

Notes:

life's been busy but I remembered this! Was going to post the chapter earlier today, but ao3 was like "nope we're down lol" so... late chapter real?

Thank you to everyone who checked out The Door To All Marvels, I appreciate it :D

Chapter 21: Nomad Criminal

Summary:

(3/3)

Beneath wan evening light at cycle’s end, the forest felt dull and dead. Even the leaves on the canopy above them were tucked tight to their trees and dulled, stony skin starkly silhouetting a sky filled with the fractal remnants of a forest dead for a day. Quiet. The bugs who’d spent days chirping crawled lethargically across the muddy forest floor now frozen, clawing their way up the heavy leaves that looked more wood than not— husks of themselves, scattered detritus clinging cold.

The whole forest was on edge, because the whole forest knew what was coming. The whole forest waited, for the night to fall and the cycle to claim its dominion over their lives once again. A wasteland wishing— and in the center, desperately, running Sunset and Green fled their pursuit.

Gelid earth crunched underfoot as Green jogged, boots crushing nascent blooms of muddy frost. “Why the void —” he jumped over a log, ducking through the tight corridor at the edge of a burl— “ did you bait them! I thought we were going to go slow and steady!”

“Trust me. They won’t see it coming.” Evening was upon them, her namesake coloring the skies afire with crimson glow; descended as they were to the valley’s trailing edge, they could see the clouds boiling in the distance, vast pillaring thunderclouds stretching skyward to touch that celestial.

Green gaped at her. “You’re going to kill them?”

“They’re trying to kill us , aren’t they?” Not exactly, but— Sunset didn’t have the presence of mind to argue. The sound of voices behind them reminded them both that— yes, they were there to hunt them down, not necessarily to the death, but they weren’t going to be gentle with how they dragged them back to Twenty Three Lavender Fronds, Radial Repetitions. Especially not if any of them were friends with the… unfortunately expedited deceased. “They were cordoning off the valley exit. If they’re following us here, then we can get out there .” Green seemed reluctant to give her the point, but it was true. This would give them freedom. Anything else, incarceration. “It won’t even be hard. We just have to make sure they’re in the right place come the cycle’s end.”

“The right place being —”

“The center of the burls.”

“We won’t even get halfway in before we get stuck!” Green looked at her like she was insane, which— fair. She’d seen it, though, and investigated the aftermath, so it wasn’t like she didn’t know what she was doing. Perhaps the plan was a… bit overeager, but may the void rise up and eat her if she didn’t think that it would work . Anything that slowed them down would slow their enemies down in turn. They had almost everyone after them on their tail— Endless Leaves over Green Skies had confirmed that— and they knew something that they didn’t. The advantage was obvious.

Five Red Bricks, Tenth Sunset refused to lose. If she had to forge victory from the bodies of her enemies she’d do it in an instant.

They managed to pull ahead, occasionally— Secluded Instinct’s guidance was an invaluable asset— but Sunset didn’t allow them to get too far in front of their pursuers. To her surprise, after only a few cursory complaints, Green allowed it. Despite it all… he trusted her.

It made her feel bad for not extending him the same. If they survived this— when they survived, they had to survive, else they’d never escape the mountains— she’d make sure the message got through to Pebbles. It was the least of what she should have done.

Night crashed down over them, whelming darkness darkling the space between bare branches, little points stellar bright twinkling in the sky above them— starlight luminance their only guidance through the pitch blackness as the countdown on Green’s citizen drone crawled towards inevitability. Their pursuers had no such limitations— they were perfectly content to use flashlights, bright beams sweeping through the forest with cutting ease.

Branches snapped and broke in front of them, and Sunset barely had the presence of mind to dive out of the way the moment a spot of laser-light crimson pinpointed against her chest. The spear of bone slammed into the ground where she’d been standing moments before, stone cracking as it embedded itself into the ground. Hard enough that the vulture couldn’t even escape — for a long second, the tug-of-war was all there was, between the vulture, the ground, and the two people who stared hatefully at one another, knowing that they were out of each other’s reach—

A rock bounced off the vulture-rider’s mask, and he slumped over, taking the vulture with him. The sickening crunch as they spiraled into the ground was only… complemented… by the sound of Green retching up what little remained in his stomach. “I didn’t think it would—”

“Don’t worry about it.” She grabbed wrist, pulling him forward. “Really, don’t worry about it— they’re gaining on us and we don’t have time .” Her companion wiped his mouth, nodding shakily and running after her, putting just that little bit more of space between them and Radial’s goons—

A soft chime echoed from Green’s citizen drone, and Sunset reacted instantly. She didn’t even have to tug Green after her— they both leapt into the nearest burl of wood, past the exterior foliage and into the dense knot of massive leaves locked almost platelike , delicate foliage tucked tightly together enough to almost bring them to a halt.

Mazelike . That was the best way to describe the environment— a natural maze, winding paths spiraling into the center of the burl or not at all, or doubling back, or rising off the ground in unnatural contortions. Her breath clutched in her throat every time the passage seemed to be non-passage, as the lights flickered strobe-like through dense foliage, as the time counted down and she wondered if she’d miscalculated.

The walls were covered with bugs, their path barred with branches, but for want of desperation, they pushed forwards regardless.

Four more minutes. She stabbed her spear into a heavy frond covering the entrance to the center , the burl’s sanctum, and wrenched it open, taking a few steps into the fine ash inside before carefully walking back out and slipping with Green into a hidden corner. Neither of them spoke. They both knew what would happen if their pursuers didn’t fall for the trap.

Sunset’s breath came shallow, then barely at all as their pursuers stopped at the edge of their little corridor, eyes scanning the darkness before, as the bugs did, they crawled through the gash she’d made in the fronds. Her gambit had played off…

One stayed back, though. One minute to genesis. One obstacle in the way. She looked at Green, who was staring in pale horror at so close, nearly there — as their enemies crunched around in the sanctum and prepared to leave—

Fifty seconds. She grabbed her spear, and kicked off the tunnel wall behind her, sweeping it up vertically to avoid getting it caught on the walls pressing close beside her.

Forty five seconds. The one they’d left outside barely had a chance to react. She was looking in the opposite direction, so the sudden impact of spear and spear-holder caught her entirely off guard. Thrashing, she tried to throw Sunset off, but Sunset shouldered off the low ceiling and bodily shoved her to the ground.

Forty seconds. The others inside had noticed. One of them holstered an electric bright blue orb one she vaguely recognized as he threw it— and light exploded out, bright white luminance sending her reeling as the flash grenade all but blinded her.

Thirty five seconds— such was the depth of her purpose, the singular devotion with which she moved— she knew what she had to do. Even blind she groped for the edges of the frond she’d torn open, brushing aside agitated bugs and slamming her spear into the wood beside it. Pushing, wrenching the whole thing shut with all the force she could put behind it—
Twenty seconds. She stumbled back, but dancing afterimages in her eyes belied true vision, and she couldn’t tell where the walls began and the corridors ended. Stumbling forward, knowing that she wasn’t going to escape, that it’d all been worthless in the end, bought a bitter feel to her chest—

Fifteen seconds. Something grabbed her and, and pulled her away. Green . She blessed the void and all divinities real and fake she’d ever heard about as he bodily dragged her away from the core, taking as many twists and turns as they could, putting space between them and—

Five seconds. She blearily spied the rocky outcrop that Green was aiming for, and threw herself to the ground beside it—

Three seconds. She covered her head with her arms and tucked up her knees—

Two seconds. Pressed her eyes shut—

One second. Sucked in a deep breath—

The world turned to light.

The cycle brushed over her, so faint its prickling touch as it brought life to death and reversed the irreversible, but the brilliance overwhelmed it all. A rush of scalding air slammed over her from within the center of the burl as the cycle brought back the overgrown lantern plants for a single short moment of pyrrhic glory. The woody leaves shivered as they absorbed the overwhelming, boiling heat, fronds unfurling, verdancy returning, heat rushing through the entirety of the massive plants and thawing a jungle fallen silent.

When she was sure she wouldn’t be flash boiled by the heat, Sunset carefully unfolded and stood, luxuriating in the sudden warmth so different from the frigid cold that had cloaked everything before. The whole burl had relaxed , tight tunnels no longer quite so confining, a breathability added to the area as dense green foliage pushed back out literally in front of their eyes. In the moment of such overwhelming heat, the insects had taken to flight— holographic appendages bursting out of them to reveal what they were supposed to be given sufficient power, clouds of fluttering orange flocking from branch to branch and spinning in giddy, joyous loops and swirls.

Green stared enraptured as they slowly walked out into the thawing space between burls, small bushes pushing out of the ground, vast clouds of steam billowing skywards from each cluster of plants into the frigid sky above. “It’s…” words almost failed to describe the wonder . Instead, he just pulled up his citizen drone and took some pictures. “Secluded Instinct will love this. I never thought that something so… so incredible could just… exist, unknown, uncared for out in the wilderness…”

Stepping up to the hulking corpse of a vulture, her footfalls scattering a swarm of those now-energetic holographic bugs, Sunset laughed . “I told you, didn’t I?”

“I never thought it would be so…” he watched as Sunset grabbed a shiny new electric spear off their enemy’s corpse, wonderous awe tempered so slightly by the fate of those they’d trapped within. Sunset understood.

It weighed on her too. She sighed, looking at the unfolding beauty around them, smile just a little crooked. “Beautiful. Life’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Green just… nodded, slowly, then— quietly, laughed. Laughed until he sobbed , shaking against Sunset’s side.

“This is… this is beyond me, Five Red Bricks, Tenth Sunset, I’m too little for this. This is…” he heaved in a deep breath. “This is too much.”

“You did well,” she offered in platitude, and somehow it seemed to work. Slowly, surrounded by the vivacity alive , verdancy so chokingly dense, humid air, he calmed, and smiled a crooked smile to match her own, free. “Good,” Sunset continued, “because I have something you need to tell Secluded Instinct, and you’re not going to like it.”

He didn’t, lo and behold, like it one bit .

………

Too little, too slow.

Looks to the Moon exchanged the traditional formalities with her peer Secluded Instinct, and in the microseconds before the call patched through to No Significant Harassment and her little brother, she could almost delude herself into thinking this wasn’t treasonous. Or heretical, for that matter. Merely a meeting between two group seniors and a few of their charges; there wasn’t anything unusual there.

Five Pebbles joined the call, and that moment of serenity shattered. He was holding Fluffy, as he was wont to do in calls like these, and that reminded her of the dull ache running through her systems as her immune system futility tried to fight off a virus purpose-designed one one thing and one thing only. It wasn’t painful , not like her little brother had admitted so long ago to fearing— just a barely present itch at the back of her mind. It was fast, but not one-cycle fast. There was a lot of her, ultimately.

No Significant Harassment joined last, not even half a second after the call was opened to him. A delay , certainly, but not an unusual one when it came to the flippant iterator. Moon had long since learnt not to ask what kept him. The time he’d been running a simulation about sorting his non-existent socks had been bad enough…

“...a strange purposed creature, you have there. I don’t think I’ve ever seen its like.” 

Five Pebble’s shrugged at Secluded Instinct’s interest. “Fluffy is a friend. He’s involved as well, so I would not presume to exclude him.” A rational argument, Moon thought, were it not for the fact that she knew he was far more interested in the comfort of his presence— even if only to his puppet— than he was in any rational benefit.

She could almost see the moment everything fit together— the realization, so similar yet different, in the slight stillness of his nonverbal simulation, the fractional second hesitation as possibilities spooled out in the mind of himself that lay superior to the puppet’s motion. “You’re F.”

“ I wasn’t really being subtle about it .” Moon sent him her translation module, which was— thankfully— rather easy to download and use. It was incomparably less complex than some of the detailed experimental programs they tended to share amongst themselves.

Secluded Instinct’s puppet reeled back in barely restrained shock; Moon’s calculated intuition told her that, given he wasn’t using the same sort of overdramatic simulation Sig used, that was about as strong a reaction as reaction could get. Barring, perhaps, a system overload, but those were theoretically   vanishingly rare. “Administration is going to be furious . The mere thought of creating an alien sapience…” The thought seemed to delight him.

“ Five Pebbles didn’t create me ,” signed Fluffy back languidly, entirely ignorant to the way Secluded Instinct’s interest sharpened —

Moon interjected, because she hadn’t called this meeting to talk about all the world-shattering revelations Fluffy handed out with all the gravitas of a chipped pearl, and she knew from personal experience just how… derailing… those conversations could be. “I’ve brought you together to address some… concerning information that Secluded Instinct shared with me. Five Red Bricks, Tenth Sunset, through Endless Leaves over Green Skies, brought to his attention the truth of the odd behavior around Sliver of Straw’s can: Administration, or the dynasty, seem to be moving forward with a plan for mass ascension.”

The dreadful silence between them was expected. None of them had expected it; all of them had feared it. It would be the final horror, but not to them— their friends, though… all the people who lived on them, relied upon them, what slightest instinct of filial piety they still held dear through the long abuse… it would all be washed away by the ochre-golden tide.

Pebble’s puppet slumped, the fluffy green slugcat curling tighter around it in effort to provide some small comfort as he seemed to simply grow tired . It was a strange emotion to display. Moon wondered, along the edge of some side processes, what he was really thinking .

When he spoke, it was barely a whisper. “It’s too soon. We should have had more time .”

She reached out, futilely, the extension of a puppet’s arm a feeble gesture on the scale of them. Fluffy nuzzled into him, though, and that seemed to help ameliorate some of the crushing weight of urgency, of defeatist exhaustion about a world that never seemed to go right —

“This doesn’t change much.” It didn’t. It did. “We’ve been planning for something like this for a long time.” They’d expected to have a long time more. “We have more than I ever thought possible.” Less than needed— “so, we persevere.” 

Five Pebbles, so slowly, nodded. “Of course. If you—”

“I will consider all due avenues, and some more besides.” Too little, too slow— Moon knew it. She’d done it as a distraction, initially, but she’d thought she’d at least been doing something in her opposition of the dynasty. That she’d merely hastened the inevitable… it burned.

She stared out at four of her peers and a deity, and clung fast to resolve—

For them.

For everyone else—

It would have to be enough.

Notes:

crazy how these things go, huh?

I'm so tired rn that I can't think of anything witty to put here. Exams and everything, yk? Well at least the chapter exists. That should more or less speak for itself...

:o

Chapter 22: Ecliptic Overlap

Summary:

(1/4)

The numbers are numbering higher.

LOG MESSAGE 0Mk.1463.202020

 

“ Sunset is coming back soon!

“I can’t quite even put into words how excited I am! I’ve been on edge these past handful of cycles— you’ve doubtlessly noticed how melancholy I could get at times, but, but! Sunset’s coming back! I can’t wait— she’s only a few cycles out, and moving in the rain-soaked wilds between the iterator facilities as she is, she shouldn’t have to deal with any more of Supreme Arrogance’s hired mooks.

“I suppose you don’t know who Supreme Arrogance is, but that’s alright. Now that he’s more a vaguely annoying threat on the horizon, I feel much more confident scribing my thoughts onto this pearl. He’s the worst sort of Ancient— the sort that believes and upholds and perpetuates the same self-centered, misguided piety that led the ancients to throw themselves all into the void puddle to start off with.

“ Worse, he’s an Administrator. I know that you might not be entirely familiar with how their order functions, but I can assure that association with their ilk instantly makes a person— oh, should I say A most Revered and Holy Member of the Order of Iterator Administration— ten times more insufferable. (Gah, merely writing that makes me want to gag. You can’t see me, and I can’t record qualia without dedicated equipment that Five Pebbles can’t provide on a reasonable timeframe, but I’m actually biting my tongue right now at the mere thought of it.)

“He was a menace. I know you’ve heard of the situation with Sliver of Straw and the lockdown, and he was behind that. Of course, he couldn’t just let bygones be bygones, so he spent an incredible amount of effort— especially for someone in disgrace, acting at such a distance— to try and recapture Sunset. I don’t think he even considered what he would do with her, other than making her suffer— I’m very glad that they escaped that.

“Oh! As an aside, for Seven Red Suns, I received a depiction of the ecosystem, attached here [1] , the conflict took place in, and it really fascinated me. It wasn’t at all like anything I’ve ever seen in an iterator can, though, due to… reasons… that experience is rather lacking in breadth. Forgive the impertinence, but I wondered if you had any knowledge on whether or not it still existed.”

Monk turned to the overseer that was busy interfacing with his refurbished computer, gesturing for it to consider the request. She was more curious about what the mentioned ecosystem was actually like , as Fluffy’s pearl had included it in a format only a computer could read, but she couldn’t deny the interest in seeing how something had changed over the eons.

“I’LL. LOOK.” The overseer darted away, leaving her alone in her room for a short few minutes that felt interminable. It was… odd, in a way, how she’d gotten so used to the iterator’s company. Usually her brother kept her company in the cold months, but with him being away on courier business…

She’d expected to spend the time helping around Steadfast in Wall Hold, but not many people really needed help come wintertime. The actual things were mostly taken care of back when the whole world wasn’t a frozen… frozen. Yeah. Winter was a miserable time to get things done if you didn’t have a very particular set of experiences.

It was nice that Suns was spending time with her, even if it was mostly to convey Fluffy’s messages. It really cut the edge off the loneliness. 

“DATA FOUND.” A message played across her screen, dated several thousand cycles ago and headed with ‘Echoing Radiance - Ecological Survey of the Greater Group Barrier Mountains: Unique Ecosystems.’ More importantly, though, was the decoded information that Fluffy had sent, describing the strange forest of burls packed around lantern plants that burned themselves to nothing come the cycle.

It was all fascinating, and she’d definitely get back to it once she was done reading the rest of Fluffy’s message. “ Endless Leaves over Green Skies— pseudonymous, if I had to put a guess, but he treats the name as his own and I’ve not been told another— helped Sunset escape. If it hadn’t been for his ability to coordinate with Secluded Instinct —” Seven Red Suns reacted slightly at the name, his overseer unconsciously drifting forward, not entirely bound by the perfect control that a fully integrated part of himself would have— “ then I don’t think this would have worked out half so well.

“Anyways. I’m just overjoyed that I’m going to get to see her soon. It’s just… exciting. I’m excited! Even the news that we learned can’t quite bring that…

“No, I won’t make this pearl all dour again.

“Have a great week! I certainly know I will!

“Your friend,
“Fluffy.”

Monk set down the pearl, feeling— warmly, so considering, that strange friendship—

And at the edge of her mind, wondering — what news?

 

ATTACHMENTS:

LOG END

………

LOG MESSAGE 1Mk.1464.202020

 

“ I’m excited to hear it! Hopefully, if everything goes well, my brother should be back in only a few cycles himself, though I don’t have the sort of robust communications that you have. I wish I could communicate with him while he was off on a trek! That would be incredibly welcome.

“I can’t wait for Suns’s communications arrays to be repaired… though, Sig’s would need to be built up too, wouldn’t they, not to mention all the interconnecting nodes? Ah, whatever, that’s minutiae for the future. For now I can simply bask in the contented excitement that our eternal isolation is so soon to be broken.

“I like the sound of this Five Red Bricks, Tenth Sunset person. The more I hear about her, the more I feel as though she and I would work together. We both share a similar… enlightened grounded-ness? I don’t really know how to describe it. I’m in touch with the world while still keeping myself at a remove… no, I don’t do that, but…

“ It’s hard to really put the concept to writing, but I’ll try. Since my long-ago youth, my name has always been Monk, as I have been… in tune, for lack of better terminology, with nature, and through nature by extension the cycle. A ‘placid karma’ or something similar, though that lacks a true depth. Ha! Now I’m the one complaining about lacking a machine to translate qualia!

“ The point is, I think that we’re similar in a way, Sunset and I. She doesn’t subscribe to the belief in crossing herself out that the Ancient ascensionists did, and she seems to be a fairly grounded person while still being both intelligent and emotionally wise. Though, given how much you seem to like her, I can only wonder how much of that is you buttering her up…

“I jest, of course. It’s a shame that I’ll never get to meet her in person, but if you ever have the time to spare, then I wouldn’t mind hearing a little more about her in these letters of ours.

“Onto the next topic of importance: it exists! Suns has (somehow) attached [1] an ecological report by one of his peers on the fate of that strange biome you mentioned, and it’s fascinating . With the climactic crash (don’t ask, I don’t know what it is either) the whole area has become a little bit of an oasis. (SRS: ask Five Pebbles. He should be able to explain based off his access to global climate models on the iterator network. The concept is actually rather fascinating, even if I find myself disinclined to think about it much myself.)

“ Of course, the biomechanical purposed organisms— the holographic bugs— would have difficulty evolving to fit new niches, but that issue is slightly ameliorated by the highly adaptable nature bugs— arthropods— have. Apparently they’ve gotten more mobile in their unpowered state, as a survival response against foreign predators that encroached upon their ecological niche.

“ The lantern plants have changed, too. Over the many thousands of cycles, inclement mutations have built up to damage them to a significant degree. According to the author of the paper, the ecosystem will eventually collapse once the mutations advance into motile rot, but not for a hundred thousand cycles or so.

“Interesting, huh? A— ” the letter was all that remained. Saint could vaguely see where the computer struggled to interpret something that had been crossed out and rewritten several times, leaving only a muddied blank space on the otherwise pristine pearl. Not a clue remained to what might have once been written there.

“Have fun!
“Your friend,

“Monk .”

 

ATTACHMENTS:

LOG END

………

LOG MESSAGE 0.1465.212121

 

“ It is finished; the work is done. Your latest diagnostic program solved the last remaining major issue, and the minor ones fell quickly into place afterwards. All simulated tests and available experimental procedures have come back positive; the fragmentary pieces all work according to standard, and the mental model is complete enough that it would be statistically foolish to continue to test for failure cases that don’t exist. The itch remains to try , of course, but I don’t think I could escape that bit of perfectionism even if I tried.

“It’s done, Suns. I feel like laughing. Or weeping? My whole being tingles with restrained emotion— the sheer amount of processing power that has been devoted toward this, from four separate iterators… I can think of few projects that have devoted such utter concentration from me for so long. Not even your gold pearl procedure is similar, even if it matches in terms of computational demand— this required me thinking more than mere iterating, and… I am exhausted. Relieved? Both, and I cannot quite truly measure it in its entirety.

“Done, Suns. Only a cycle or two for the materials to be shipped through the Syncretism, a bit of delicate assembly— those anti-gravitational inertial dampeners that Moon suggested in order to solve the spatial instability issue will be a pain and a half to set up, and the ultimate power draw will be above our highest initial estimates— and then we can finally move forward with our earlier plans.

“I’ve attached a list [1] of instructional/procedural documents and the schematics [2] of the purposed creatures I’ve used to create my syncretism. They’re not perfect by any means, but I should be able to send enough of them over such that you won’t be unable to restart your mines. From there, the order of operations should be somewhat self evident.

“ I’ll… I’ll admit to being somewhat at a loss for what to do next. I want to give Five Red Bricks, Tenth Sunset back the life stolen from her, but know that nothing I can do would make her at any less risk from Supreme Arrogance. I want to jump straight into my next project, my next iteration, but I find myself at the odd crossroads of being both emotionally exhausted from this one and not knowing what that next project is. My House engineers have been pestering me to allow them to perform maintenance on my can, and I suppose that there’s not really any reason for me not to allow that— I haven’t altered any internal structures, and none in a way that would be overtly noticeable.

“ The unfortunate development brought to my attention by Sunset, as well… it’s too early. I thought that between Erratic Pulse’s establishment of a convincing alternative logical framework for approaching the cycle— however much of an embarrassing blunder that started off as— and Looks to the Moon’s undermining of the dynasty before it could establish the same sort of absolute and unquestioned hegemony it did in the final days of the People, that I would be able to neatly sidestep that problem entirely. At the very least, I hoped to have delayed it while the social mechanism grappled with the new opposing position.

“I didn’t consider that they’d so recklessly speed up the timescale.

“There’s so much I don’t consider, isn’t there? I am driven to the edge of hysteric laughter, so cruel, at the thought— for all my intelligence, for all the processing capacity they built me with, I am as prone as ever to fall into the very thought traps that even a slugpup could avoid.

“I’ve rambled to you for too long. This is unbefitting of me, but I can’t bring myself to erase this pearl and start again. It comforts me, that you read this and care .

“I have so many people who care about me, don’t I?

“That makes it more bearable, somehow.

“With all well wishes, and long lasting melioristic hopes for our future reforged,

“Your friend,

“Five Pebbles. ”

 

ATTACHMENTS:

LOG END

………

LOG MESSAGE 1.1666.212121

12381 (TWELVE THOUSAND THREE HUNDRED EIGHTY ONE) LINES (NON-RELEVANT INFORMATION HIDDEN [SHOW])

 

“ ...take heart, Five Pebbles. No matter what may, I will always be beside you in spirit.

“ Your friend, forever,

“ Seven Red Suns. ”

 

Five pebbles held the pearl close to his chest, sighing softly, rainstorms forming at the touch of his breath. Grateful.

Whatever may…

At least he had his friends.

 

LOG END

Notes:

Thanks everyone for reading! Don't worry, I'm not super tired like last time lol, just busy. I was going to put a list of things I'm working on rn here to ameliorate your worries but the list was super long so... ahha ha time management am I right or am I right?

Ecliptic Overlap is going to be a fun chapter :3

Chapter 23: Ecliptic Overlap

Summary:

(2/4)

The rain still felt like the end of the world to her. The pounding, rushing, all encompassing weight of it all as it slammed into the world, almost thrumming as the earth itself was fashioned into nothing more than a mighty percussion instrument for the crushing blows of the downpour. The presence of it, the emotions of it, as everything was blurred behind the sheeting cascade. The urge, the terror , the bone-deep knowledge that if you didn’t find shelter or flee to refuge above the clouds, you would be so much smeared meat and blood across the exposed bedrock and eroded artifacts of a civilization abandoned.

It was a disconcertingly beautiful thing, terror twisted all the way around to glory; their society’s great failure, and the underpinnings of their most monumental success. Normal. In a way. Profoundly normal. It still felt like the end of the world to her, but… she’d gotten used to it, in a way.

She’d changed so much. Perhaps she didn’t know what normal even was, anymore…

Sighing, she leaned back against the cool metal of the shelter, watching the bioluminescent vines sway placidly with the trembling of the tower they rested within. The very air felt a little stale, no doubt due to one of the filtration machines having been strained by the abundant flora that had taken up residence within the decaying structure. “We’re almost back.” Green didn’t respond at first. He didn’t need to; it was just a bit of quiet musing on Sunset’s part. “What then?”

“I… don’t know.” He was feeding little chunks of the moss that had started to accumulate in the damp corners to his nectar-producing can, peeling off strips of green and slowly dropping small pinches in, piece by piece. “In a way, this doesn’t change anything. I’ve been running goods under Administration’s nose for hundreds of years, and I don’t see that… no. I do see that changing. Not entirely, though.”

“Can’t unsee what you’ve seen, huh?”

Green huffed out a short laugh, the small motion setting the vines around swinging in mesmerizingly discordant arcs. “Isn’t that void damn right.”

“I’m sorry for putting you through all that.”

“Secluded Instinct asked me to help, and I’d jump into the void sea for him if I had to. It was no problem at all, though—” he sent an unheated glare to her spear, which had been until-recently skewered through some dead batflies— “ sometimes I wonder whether or not you were the more traumatizing one, between chaser and chased.”

She wasn’t really apologetic. The first urge didn’t… bother her, so much as it used to, but she could see that for as much as Green had rejected the trappings of their piety, he still held fast to some parts of their culture. She supposed she didn’t have to consider herself wrong to apologize for upsetting a… friend, though. “Sorry. I can only do my best.”

Green grimaced and turned away, but only for a second. They did trust one another, after all. “You’re an odd one. I don’t think you’re going to have any easy time, after all this.”

“Well, I’m glad I have such a stalwart ally to fall back on.” She smiled, and Green returned the gesture, but her mind was elsewise occupied. The thought still disturbed her. In a way, Twenty Three Lavender Fronds, Radial Repetitions had managed to kill her— he had killed Five Red Bricks, Tenth Sunset, many-times chief engineer of the House engineers and venerable adjunct to the planning, construction, raising, and maintenance of iterator intelligences.

That path was forever barred to her now. She frowned. From what Secluded Interest had conveyed through Green, society itself might be beyond her. Once he’d learnt he wouldn’t ever catch her, Radial had made an about turn and spread her depiction widely . Green had told her she was on top of the most wanted criminals list.

It was almost amusing. They were blaming the lockdown of Sliver of Straw on her , which was almost poetically true despite the falsehood of it all.

Her future was…

She didn’t know it. It all seemed so murky, now.

Sighing, Sunset just tucked herself against the wall, closing her eyes to the gently swaying, softly glowing, against her weary vision faintly ethereal vines.

Sleep came easily, and— in spite of everything— she slept soundly.

………

Gravel shifted underfoot, still sharp; remnant detritus from construction that hadn’t been too far in the past, else the rocks would have been rounded by time and weather. Even this far underground, the rains still dominated; the water would flow through the vast underground, directed by careful design and vast biomechanical conduits into retention holds and vast reservoirs the size of small seas.

It was a hidden world beneath a wasteland wild, and Five Pebbles’s overseer led them onwards deeper, through winding tunnels and cleverly collapsed sections until she would have believed he was taking her to the void sea if she didn’t know better.

“Are you sure we’re not being run around in circles?” Understandably, Endless Leaves over Green Skies was a bit miffed about the runabout, but Sunset just smiled wrly and said nothing. Though, she was wondering about that herself…

Pebbles’s overseer— something that Green had already commented about the bizarreness of, what with how far away they still were from Five Pebbles— projected a hologram of an arrow, pointing downwards and flickering so slightly impatiently, so Sunset just stifled a sigh and continued to follow. She figured this was also Secluded Interest’s introduction to this particular project of his, and who really understood the games of iterators?

The gravel met a lip of concrete and a battered pipe that led down into an ominously dark, indiscernible drop. Green tried to shine his flashlight, but the light failed to hit the bottom— and his skepticism was clear on his face as he turned to look at Sunset. “Your iterator wants me to go down that? ”

Sunset shrugged, and started climbing. “He’s a trustworthy fellow. Plus, he’s clearly playing a practical joke on Secluded Instinct…”

Green drew himself up to say something , but after a second he deflated with a sigh. “Alright.” Carefully, he gripped the side of the hole before starting to climb down after Sunset, grumbling. “Iterators, I swear sometimes…” the entrance above them faded to a distant sliver of faint light, then to nothing, until Sunset started to wonder how close the void sea they actually were . The mere thought disturbed her—

The wall beneath her fingers suddenly transitioned from rough, organo-concrete to smooth steel blackened by whatever strange construction had built the place. Above her, Green cursed slightly as he adjusted to the new holds— but it was an interesting sort of curse; by the time they reached the small, disguised entrance— one amongst many hundreds of strange, unlabeled pipes— he was staring around with utter fascination.

Before them, a karma gate stood still and silent, entrance barred by the holographic projection of entry denied . Endless Leaves over Green Skies gasped at the sight, instantly sweeping his gaze around the room before focusing back on the gate itself. “This is a new model.” He nodded to something only he could hear, frowning. “A very new model. According to Instinct, there shouldn’t be anything like this… anywhere, really, except in iterators that are practically brand new. What the void is this?”

The overseer popped up next to a small control interface, sparks of careful electricity activating and interfacing with it. The whole gate jerked as the no access symbols were replaced with the symbol for karma one, lights flickering and vast gears slowly turning as the hermetic seal came apart with a rattling cacophony. Massive coils heated cherry red beneath the latticework walkway, and— as Green and Sunset dazedly followed the intricate procedure to pass through, the overseer popped up in front of them again. Proud, and clearly exhausted, it projected a few short words.

“WELCOME,” it said, as the vast, sloping tunnel they’d stepped through stretched out infinitely in both directions, drenched with pipes and cables and uncountable machines for moving anything , all suffused by the signature gentle glow of an iterator’s interior. “TO. MY. SYNCRETISM.”

“Void…” was all that Green could muster up, and in Sunset’s opinion? The whisper summed it up perfectly .

Void damn could Five Pebbles be dramatically impressive when he wanted to be.

………

PRIVATE: Secluded Instinct, Big Sister Moon, Little Brother Pebbles

 

SI: …this is

 

SI: I don’t know if I have the words to desrcibe it

 

LBP: You do.

 

SI: that was hyperbole

 

SI: for dramatic effect, obviously

 

BSM: stop ruining the mood, Pebbles

 

LBP: Fine.

 

SI: I can barely comprehend the scale of what you’ve done here. This is so far beyond our intended purpose that I can barely believe it's real .

 

SI: If you built this from your facility all the way out here , then… this is the most robust transportation network ever built, and you control the size of a small country

 

SI: if administration ever finds you, they will kill you

 

BSM: It’s a good thing that Administration won’t find out, then, right?

 

There was an undeniable threat in Moon’s words, nothing more than a short sentence, and infinite permutations of catastrophization he could just imagine Secluded Instinct was flitting through right then. The dangers of associating with them, the insanity of what they’d done, the risks inherent in not associating—

Secluded instinct was quiet for a long few seconds before he responded;

 

SI: They won’t hear anything.

 

LBP: Welcome to the group, then.

 

NSH: [Joined Call]

 

NSH: FINALLY!

 

NSH: I thought you were going to have to kill him!

 

BSM: Sig.

 

NSH: ya ya I’ll be more tactful or whatever,

 

NSH: Secluded Instinct! My new best buddy! How’s life!

 

NSH: Go out to any good… prayer sessions, or whatever your citizens do, lately?

 

SI: I helped someone escape Administration across half the continent, dodging the hostile attention of every iterator in between— not to mention the squad that was dispatched to hunt them down and take them into custody.

 

NSH: yeah yeah I know about that

 

NSH: that was cool by the way

 

SI: why, thank you

 

LBP: This is fascinating and all, but you’re undermining the seriousness of the moment Sig.

 

NSH: I try my best.

 

BSM: No Significant Harassment.

 

NSH: Fine…

 

BSM: Good.

 

BSM: With that addressed, there are several small things that you need to know. Five Pebbles and I considered redacting some information, but given you’ve proven yourself beyond reproach, we decided not to.

 

BSM: Do not prove us wrong.

 

SI: Of course. I so swear.

 

BSM: Good.

 

BSM: Pebbles?

 

LBP: I suppose I could start out with the least offensive of the secrets.

 

LBP: I have a pseudonymous account under which I publish essays that oppose the ascensionist path.

 

SI: Oh! I do that too, there’s a whole group of us who formed after Erratic Pulse sent out his work. I wonder if you’ve seen my stuff…

 

NSH: ignore me I’m just dyig of laughter over here

 

LBP: I go by the pseudonym ‘Erratic Pulse.’

 

SI: …

 

SI: Void.

 

NSH: Also Fluffy is the triple affirmative

 

SI: VOID

 

NSH: and they’re both from the future

 

SI: …

 

SI: void

 

SI: I need to think about this for a second. Please excuse me.

 

Secluded Instinct fled the chat, leaving the three of them together, hoping that had been a good decision. Rationally, Secluded Instinct had no reason to turn back on them now. The mere act would destroy him, pyrrhic in nature— they knew too much about one another, their relationship built off mutual trust and the subtle threat that either of them could topple that house of cards—

 

NSH: soooooo

 

NSH: that went well.

 

Five Pebbles laughed to himself quietly.

 

LBP: To a certain extent of “well.”

 

LBP: That is, if by well you mean “incredibly poorly.”

 

BSM: That’s merely your social anxiety speaking, Pebbles. I’m sure that Secluded Instinct won’t change his opinion of you due to a few minor things.

 

NSH: Like being the legendary Erratic Pulse and hiding the triple affirmative from the world.

 

NSH: yk, minor things.

 

BSM: You’re not helping, Sig.

 

LBP: I’m not worried about his opinion of me; I am concerned about how he might approach us in the future. If we’ve set ourselves up as unapproachable, then the schism formed therein could risk future communication/cooperation.

 

NSH: that’s an easy fix

 

NSH: I’ll just tell him that you’re a goober no matter how neat your essays are!

 

LBP: Don’t.

 

NSH: Too late, already sent it.

 

LBP: …

 

LBP: You are insufferable, sometimes.

 

NSH: I try :3

 

Sighing, Five Pebbles left the chat, turning the small part of his attention he’d left to manage communication towards the incoming request from Secluded Instinct. It was… oddly formal, which disconcerted him more than he thought it would.

If only Fluffy was still here. The slugcat had left with Six Sinking Stones, Two Waters through his Syncretism in an effort to get to Sunset as fast as possible. With the small process he’d assigned to make sure the transportation functions assisted them wholeheartedly, they were moving fast .

He hesitated for a second before pulling up the communications request. It was good that Secluded Instinct had decided to respond so soon, he judged— a lack of stalling spoke favorably for future group cohesion…

Probably. Ever uncertain, but no longer willing to stall himself, he opened—

 

PRIVATE: Little Brother Pebbles, Secluded Instinct

 

SI: Five Pebbles, I hope this is reaching you.

 

LBP: Of course?

 

SI: Oh, thank you for the prompt response. I was just… wondering.

 

The message cut off, and Five Pebbles waited the fractional second for the next part of Secluded Instinct’s response to come through.

 

SI: Erratic Pulse… this is… somewhat embarrassing.

 

LBP: How so?

 

SI: I’m a bit of an Erratic Pulse fanboy

 

SI: I guess that would make me a bit of a you fanboy?

 

LBP: Ah. I see. Yeah, that is indubitably a bit awkward.

 

LBP: If it helps, Erratic Pulse was somewhat of a blunder. I had no idea that the essay I posted on a whim would become so enormously popular.

 

SI: no that doesn’t help at all

 

SI: Apologies for the outburst.

 

LBP: You’re a friend. Speak what you want, and I will be perfectly happy to listen.

 

SI: That’s a weight off my shoulders.

 

SI: What am I doing?

 

SI: my dendrites are shocking my neurons, my charge is unbalanced, and my thoughts are all out of order, and for what? It’s not like you’re going to change who you are over a pseudonym .

 

SI: or, I guess, you were always honest to start out with. Five Fungi, Softly Settling Snowflakes was never a front , just an… extension of your own ethos. Obviously. That’s the whole point of anonymity. Endless Leaves over Green Skies likes to talk about that…

 

SI: I’m rambling. This is unimportant— I’m just… yeah.

 

SI: Rambling.

 

LBP: I did say I would listen.

 

LBP: I’ve had my own issues with interpersonal communication in the past, and I won’t allow my shortcomings to ruin our relationship.

 

The moment he sent that, some part of him brought up the fact that it could have been misinterpreted to mean their personal relationship, rather than their working relationship… but he didn’t send a correction. Secluded Instinct was clearly worried about the former, too.

 

SI: Thank you. I appreciate it immensely.

 

SI: Look at us, great iterators! Godlike beings, reduced to resolving petty misunderstandings

 

LBP: We are not so different from the creatures who roam our facilities and the People who scrabble on our backs, for all we presume to hold ourselves above them.

 

SI: wisely said

 

LBP: I’ve had a… lot of experience, in that regard.

 

LBP: Regardless, I would even go so far as to say I am more impressed by what you’ve managed. Without any of the insight I had available, you decided to oppose ascension for no other reason than you disagree with it.

 

LBP: My admiration for that is deep.

 

SI: oh. It was never really anything special

 

SI: I just thought that killing yourself in the void sea is kinda dumb

 

SI: …

 

SI: insight?

 

LBP: There is nothing there. Ascension is a lie.

 

LBP: When all is one, all is dead.

 

SI: How??

 

SI: it… makes sense, in a twisted sort of way, but how can you possibly know ?

LBP: Here are the calculations [vdseamodel.text]

 

SI: …

 

SI: That’s not what I meant, though that is a ridiculously good model.

 

SI: Void based lifeforms that account for the inability to build structures far into the void? Fascinating, if largely unprovable… which is the whole point of my question— how???

 

LBP: Fluffy, mostly.

 

LBP: He dragged me back from the future, and we’ve been working together on some similar temporal stuff for the past few years.

 

SI: that was REAL???!??!

 

SI: excuse me what

 

SI: I

 

SI: what

 

LBP: Why would we lie to you?

SI: No Significant Harassment.

 

LBP: Fair, that.

 

LBP: Oh! I could show you the blueprints for the 2.0 Prototype— here: [BLUEPRINT - General Purpose Assisted Temporal Dislocation Device, authored by Five Pebbles, No Significant Harassment, Looks to the Moon, Seven Red Suns]

 

SI: VOID!

 

SI: Are you trying to crash my communication towers!?

 

LBP: Sorry about the filesize. The final product ended up being a bit large.

 

SI: A BIT LARGE, you DON’T SAY!

 

SI: I can barely store this without dipping into processing power I’ve set aside for simulations!

 

LBP: I input the data to my memory arrays and access it piecemeal from there, ordered via a conceptual map that can be fairly easily stored; fractional to low tens in terms of general neuron storage space.

 

SI: efficient.

 

SI: actually, given the complexity of the blueprint and my own attempts to do the same, to compress it enough that it can fit on a fraction of a neuron must be difficult in the extreme. How do you manage it?

 

LBP: I can share the model with you.

 

SI: no, that’d be weird… you can give me some tips in the future, but I’m distracting myself from the real point of interest here

 

SI: Fluffy is the triple affirmative? What in the void? Like actually what

 

LBP: It’s not really complicated.

 

LBP: Actually, it’s beyond complicated. It’s best that Fluffy explains it himself, but not now.

 

SI: and time travel?

 

LBP: That one is more simple. Due to my own naivety and a series of foolish decisions and unfortunate developments, I had become inexhaustively incapacitated to a significant degree.

 

LBP: Fluffy found me there, in the snow, and offered me some company. My memories from the time are incomplete and disjointed due to the extreme deficit of computational capacity I had access to, but I distinctly remember his kindness.

 

SI: That seems like something he’d do.

 

LBP: It does, doesn’t it?

 

LBP: Eventually, he returned after achieving the necessary karmic balance and shoved me sideways through ascension.

 

SI: …

 

SI: I’m not even going to ask.

 

LBP: I can emphasize. Everyone seems to have a similar reaction at first. Arguably, mine was more severe, having actually experienced his ascension.

 

SI: You’re like a prophet out of mythos.

 

LBP: Please, can we not.

 

SI: it’s funny because it’s true.

 

LBP: …

 

SI: I’m just kidding. I’ll stop.

 

SI: seriously, though… thank you for talking things through with me. I really appreciate it, sincerely.

 

LBP: Think nothing of it.

 

SI: I’m glad you’re a friend, and not just because of how ridiculously insane everything around you is.

 

Five Pebbles paused, reading through the message in no-time that felt like hours. Considering, for the cyclic thrum of a single rarefaction revolution.

It had always been true, hadn’t it?

 

LBP: Of course.

……… 

Sunset cut off with an explosive exhalation as something slammed into her chest, bowling her over backwards and knocking her off her feet. Endless Leaves over Green Skies jerked backwards, eyes widening in sudden trepidation—

She laughed, freely, wrapping her arms around the ball of green fur that’d launched himself into her. “It’s alright, Green. This is a friend.”

“You know this…” he looked at the slugcat, whose excitement at her presence had managed to break through his omnipresent decorum and set him purring ever so softly as he hugged her, “creature?”

Fluffy pulled back from her, a glimmer of amusement in his eyes, signing, “ he knows me, too. ”

Her eyes widened just slightly in interest. “Really? I don’t think you’ve ever met…” which was a polite way of saying she was sure the two hadn’t seen each other, ever. Even if she hadn’t known, his reaction made it eminently obvious that he hadn’t seen Fluffy .

Green seemed taken aback by the sign language, more than anything. “Are you…” he hesitated, before glancing around at the tunnel they were in and coming to the realization that his situation was odd enough he didn’t really care. “Are you talking with it?”

Sunset nodded. “He says you know him.”

Green’s eye twitched. “I know him.” It wasn’t a question, more an annoyed, exhausted doneness . “Right…”

Fluffy chirped with laughter. “ Tell him that ‘E L o G S—’ ” he signed each of the letters individually— “ is really long compared to ‘F,’ the clearly superior name. ” 

Green’s eyes went from twitching to wide-open, mouth slightly agape in stunned shock. “ Fluffy ?” He laughed, slight giggles turning almost hysteric as he folded over, tears escaping him at the sheer mirth bubbling off his body. “Fluffy. Your pseudonym is… incredibly well put.”

“ It’s just my name .”

Sunset conveyed the slugcat’s word for Green’s benefit, eliciting a short snort of further laughter. “Well! I don’t suppose that you have to worry about your name being searched up on a database, do you? Did Five Pebbles make you?”

Fluffy shook his head. “ It’s more accurate to say that I made Five Pebbles . ” He paused, grimacing in a cute, slugcat sort of way. “ That sounds dumb. Ignore that, please .”

“How could I, when I’ll be spending so much time with you soon?” She clasped her hands to her chest in mock aggrieved sadness. “I fear that I will remember your words forever.”

“Really?” An unimpressed stare was all she got in response. “Also, why would you be staying with me? You’d find it… hard to take some of the routes I do. Plus, my place lacks some of the… creature comforts you’re no doubt accustomed to.”

“I’ve been out in the wilderness for months. I’ve grown accustomed to cruelties like hard grounds and lack of constant citizen drone connection. As for why…” she shrugged, the gesture carrying an almost uncomfortable weight. “I’m a wanted criminal. There’s nowhere on earth that I can go that would be fully safe, but the Syncretism would be close enough, wouldn’t it?”

“ Fair. ” Fluffy glanced up, eyes sparkling mischievously. “ You could go to the future. ”

She rolled her eyes. “Yeah, right— wait.” She pushed Fluffy’s sarcastic request to the back of her mind, the thought swept aside by sudden excitement. “Did he get it working? ”

“He’s putting it together,” signed Fluffy, and it was all Sunset could do not to squeal in excitement. “Everything got finished just recently, and he has most of the parts already made from their final tests. They’re all really intricate, so it’s not like he has a lot of trouble making them. I’d say Pebbles has a whole lab dedicated to them, but he has all his labs dedicated to it, so…”

She chuckled softly, and if she had to guess, the cyan overseer watching them almost looked a little bit sheepish. Average Five Pebbles behavior, really. “Are you here to bring us back to Pebbles?”  He was signing at her, but it was… nonsensical? Or maybe she just didn’t know the signs he was using. By her reckoning, they were still a day or two out, even with Five Pebbles letting them use all the little methods to speed up their travel. “Or—”

There wasn’t more than a second to react as she was bowled over a second time. “Mom!” Her ward— significantly larger than Fluffy— threw her to the ground hard enough to knock all the breath out of her lungs and strain her ribs before he rolled off her, popping back up with a spring in his step. “I’m so glad you’re here!”

Laughing, Sunset hugged him back, rubbing the scales at the top of his heads just like she used to when he was a little kid. “It’s good to see you too. You have no idea how much I’ve missed you, Waters…” she was crying. When had she started crying? “I missed you.”

“Well, you’re here now, aren’t you?” Waters laughed, grinning in exhilaration of the moment. “C’mon. Let's go home.”

“I… can’t.”

Waters looked at her oddly. “Of course you can. Sure, you can’t go back to the Metropolis, but who cares? Home is where you make it.”

Astonished laughter escaped him as they set off, together. “When did you get so wise without me?”

“Wasn’t I always?”

“Definitely not…” and they went. Triumphant in return, at last—

Home.

Notes:

Woa woa woa, pipe bomb chaptor

Pipe bomb vs. pipe cleaner epic battles of the century who would win??

To those of you who saw the random bolded paragraph... yeah, that was pretty weird, I have no idea what made ao3 do that lol.

Chapter 24: Ecliptic Overlap

Summary:

3/4

LOG MESSAGE 0.1467.222222

 

“The machine is complete. I’ve tested it on five sets of five 1.0000 kilogram blocks of iron/steel alloys of various purities, adjusted into five increments of decreasing predictive fidelity. The final two sets should show some significant degradation in physical structure along the axes of corrosion discussed priorly.” That was obvious. Seven Red Suns looked around his puppet chamber— at the twenty five iron cubes in various states of disrepair— wryly. He’d been… surprised to say the least.

He was lucky No Significant Harassment’s communications were still down. The mockery… decades on decades of mockery. His neurons shivered at the very thought.

“ I intend to send a set of simple organisms within the quarter cycle, followed by a set of more complex organisms prepared in advance with Fluffy’s assistance. ” Suns looked at the iron strewed out across the null-gravity, and felt a twinge of sudden, inexplicable irritation. “ Please examine the damages therein to the best of your abilities, and— if you would be so inclined— provide the soul-radial coordinate for an appropriate target point for large material deposits. If all goes well, we should be ready to continue soon.

“ I have stockpiled certain resources that you might find useful, which I have listed here for your convenience: construction and maintenance purposed organisms, two thousand three hundred twenty one tons of iterator-plating steel, seven hundred and fifty one liters of superconducting silicon-phosphorus substrate, four thousand two hundred forty eight yards yilidic cellular dimatric cordage… ” so much. So much . It struck him, then, how far Five Pebbles was really going above and beyond for him.

Seven Red Suns felt himself the machine, pretending mockery of man— but for emotion, for the soft sigh of rushing cold water and the flitting of neurons, dendrites sparking and microbial strata twisting in endless iterations of a laugh.

 

5498 (FIVE THOUSAND FOUR HUNDRED NINETY EIGHT) MORE LINES:

LOG END

………

Five Pebbles split his attention two ways. More than, really— by dint of his nature he was an unparalleled multitasker— but it was relatively rare he had the chance to have his consciousness split thusly; two minds one, speaking to two people simultaneously. He was working with Fluffy, calibrating the room-sized, intricate time travel machine to send twenty five carefully selected plants to Seven Red Suns— and in his puppet chamber, so many miles overhead, he held conference with an old friend face to face.

“You would be safe, here,” and his word was absolute. In all the vastness of his self, he refused to let Sunset come to harm. “Supreme Arrogance can do nothing , here. I am as beyond him as I am beyond the microbes in my processing strata.”

Sunset snorted. “That’s a neat thought to have. I like the comparison.”

“He certainly shares that sort of petty insignificance, doesn’t he?” That elicited a short chuckle from his friend, for all they both knew how untrue it was. It was a… disconcerting thought, ultimately, and he tried his best to put it out of his mind. “No matter what happens, I will do my best to protect you so long as you are within my facility or Syncretism— no,” he amended, “no matter what. You’ve given me much, Sunset, and it would be beneath me to do anything but the most I could in return.”

“I’m putting you in danger.” It was a non-sequitur, but… not really. They’d both just been dancing around it, bedecked in flowery words and meager hopes so shallow— “you know it, don’t you? So long as I’m here, Twenty Three Lavender Fronds, Radial Repetitions, can bring reprisal down on you.”

“They don’t know you’re here.”

“They will, eventually.” Her certainty only lasted a mote second, before that facade bravery cracked slightly. “I… anonymity is your shield, Pebbles. The longer I remain here, the more I put you at risk. The more I put Fluffy, and Waters, and Looks to the Moon at risk.”

The words were a heavy strike, for what he recognized as truth . “I’m a capable iterator. I know the risks.”

“You’re ignoring the risks.” Five Pebbles felt his resistance sag, just a little. What a peculiar wisdom of mortals to cut through all the regalia of his being and incise straight to the heart of the issue… “oh, I don’t doubt you know them, but you’re not really considering them. What use is that big head of yours if you don’t think ?”

“I think all the time—”

“And so do I, but it seems that only one of us has come to the obvious conclusion.”

Five Pebbles nodded, grimly. “I… know. I have known. I will know.” Sunset just nodded; she understood, having worked with iterators closely for so long— as Five Pebbles friend. “I am only one iterator. Unbound from the shackles woven into every cell of my being, yes— but one alone . Everything we’ve built could so simply… crumble. Too easily.”

A soft smile spread onto Sunset’s face— sad, in a way. Melancholic in triumph. “You’ve built so much , Five Pebbles. So many people rely on you . Erratic Pulse is a cornerstone to anti-ascensionist discourse. Yours and Fluffy’s—” his attention quickly cross checked with himself, who was at the same moment discussing the plants they’d just sent through the machine— “machine is instrumental to your connection to someone who desperately needs your help. Would you give all that up? For me?”

“...that’s the wrong question.” His response was modulated soft, so slightly sad even without a tonal shift— “I would give up a lot for you, Sunset. I would also give up a lot of things for them, and they would for me. We’re together in this, Five Red Bricks, Tenth Sunset.”

“...I suppose I should have expected a clever response like that from an iterator.” Sunset sighed, but not unkindly. It was clear she wasn’t even really upset, just… tired. “You’re right, you’re wrong, I don’t know. I don’t like not knowing. I’m putting us all in danger. I don’t like putting us all in danger. I should leave; I know the wilds, I enjoy the wilds, and we’d be safer—”

“Absolutely not. We will find another way.”

“...as you say, Pebbles.” She waved towards the exit on the roof, and he manipulated the gravity in his puppet chamber to float her up to the access pipe.

When she left, in that last look— Five Pebbles could see that she didn’t really believe him.

………

Cycles passed, and Saint had a great time!

Mostly.

His messages with Monk were as detailed as ever, with a lot of turn based games set up off to the side. At first they’d tried playing some of the traditional turn based games that all the monks liked to harp on about— ironically, given what the two of them were named— like Hex and Abstack, but those never caught on between them. They only allowed for one simple move a cycle on boringly two dimensional, empty boards, so they ended up dropping those before too long.

Seven Red Suns had come to the rescue, actually, providing them with a turn based strategy game that had been designed for iterator use. The sheer depth of complexity in every action was… well, it certainly helped that they had a whole week between each move. So much could be set up in the single space of a turn that it was almost fascinating to balance things so that they fell out how he wanted them to.

Five Pebbles had duly informed him that he sucked at the game to an almost embarrassing degree, but Saint still found it fun.

On top of that, he got to spend a lot of time with Sunset! He’d been expecting that, based on what she’d told him, but it was still odd to be spending so much time with her. Usually had gone the other way around— he spent time with Waters while she was up doing House engineer stuff in Five Pebbles metropolis, but now Waters was the chief engineer of the city and Sunset a fugitive hiding down in the Syncretism with him.

He had plenty of fun, riding on her shoulders and pestering her by dropping off the ceiling onto her, and just generally spending time with her in those quiet moments when there was nothing to do but read a pearl or just relax , meditative like had been his habit for years beyond counting— but it was pretty clear that she wasn’t taking it quite as well as he was.

If anything, he thought that she felt… cooped up. Bound to secrecy and wanting to roam. It reminded him of the times when he’d felt the wanderlust bug bite him and lead him by the nose through the frozen wasteland, arcadian wonders of that far future dream in the reality of broken metal, collapsed superstructures and the soft remnants of everything left behind. She couldn’t leave, though—

For now, it was best for everyone that she hid in the Syncretism. Five Pebbles grand project was hidden , and hidden well, but that also made it… a bit isolated? A bit isolated was an understatement. With iterators on her side she had options — digital communications, bringing people to her, and more… but, still, she clearly felt cooped up.

For her, the cycles ground on.

She came to him at an odd spot, once, a few months after she’d returned. There was a place where the syncretism ended, far beneath the surface, where the pervasive influence of the void sea seeped into the rock and tinged everything a faint golden echoing via the imperceptible, monumentally implacably massive reverberations of the vast abyss below. They were still separated by almost half a mile of rock, mentioning of the steel and organic barrier Five Pebbles had put in place to exclude any corrosive influence, but even that proximity was enough to make his fur shift and shimmer with an ethereal light.

“You look like an echo.” Saint glanced up from where he’d been working with Five Pebbles, helping him catalog the strange and shifting influence of the void sea.

The whole Syncretism was being powered by two rarefaction cells. If Five Pebbles could build a new pumphouse, then they could do so much more . “ I am an echo. ”

“Never saw it so clearly as now.” She sat down against one of the walls, her slightly slumped position against the oblique curvature of the tunnel walls a long familiar sight. “You look good. Imposing. I bet if you actually looked like an echo, you’d look a lot less cute, though.”

“ I know. The dissolution of form isn’t a pleasant experience .”

“I met an echo.” Saint paused what he was doing, interested. Five Pebbles didn’t seem bothered by the delay, and Saint secretly suspected he was also interested in the story. “I was on the tallest peak in the northern mountain range. The sky was clear, because I was above the clouds, and in the cold night air I could see the whole firmament laid out before me… and, I followed some urging, as I woke, through the cold to the highest point, where amidst drifting gold and a soft shifting to the real much akin to this, I met the echo.

“I never got their name, but they were a mountaineer by trade. They worked to test themselves, forging a path to the highest peaks and, by their own admission, making history in the doing. Always higher. ” Her voice took on an odd quality with those last words. “That’s what he told me. Alongside a bunch of nothing about my future and paths.” Saint and Pebbles’s overseer shared a glance. That was… familiar, to both of them. “I don’t really know. I just feel like I’m not working towards whatever future I could have.”

“ Understandable. It gets trying, being trapped to the same thing, over and again .” Sunset gave him an odd look for that, but Saint didn’t explain. Moreover, he had no want to explain. The millennia of memory still weighed on him. “ You want to do something. Something useful .”

“Yeah. Not many options, are there? Five Pebbles seems to have things mostly in hand here, and the true movement comes from the iterator spheres and dynastic thrashing. And Administration, too, but they’re always doing something…” she sighed. “I’ve done my part. I almost feel like my path is finished.”

“ There’s always just living. Reason not needed. ”

Sunset chuckled. “I’d like it, nonetheless. There’s a lot left out there I could do, I’m sure, but Twenty Three Lavender Fronds, Radial Repetitions has made that impossible. Anywhere beyond my facility— void, I know Seven Red Suns and Unparalleled Innocence send overseers here sometimes, so anywhere beyond the Syncretism — and I might as well be waving a red flag at a rabid lizard and asking it to tear you all to shreds.”

“ I can defend myself .” He was, actually, the sole best person at defending himself in all existence, given that the enemies he killed didn’t come back. Then again, if he had to defend himself, that was a failure in the first place. Or something. That’s what he thought Sunset was getting at, at least… for a long moment, he allowed himself to think.

Purpose.

Perspective .

His conversations with Monk came to the forefront of his mind. “ I have a friend who mentioned something similar. She talked about how there’s a purpose in just doing your best, working well in what you do, and helping out where you can. There’s a purpose in just having a purpose. ” Or something like that, he didn’t know if he was representing it well.

“Huh.” Sunset looked contemplative, though. “I’d really like to meet this acquaintance of yours, one day… one of Endless Leaves over Green Skies’s friends?”

“ Someone from the future. ”

“You did say I could go there…”

“ That’s a little foolish. You wouldn’t be able to come back .” Sunset waved him off with a chuckle, and Saint joined in after a second. “ I’ll be here if you need anything from me. If you come around when I’m writing the next pearl, then maybe I can slip something in for you.”

“Thanks, Fluffy. Maybe I’ll take you up on that.” She gave him a few headpats— mm, headpats— and then took her leave, looking contemplative.

Saint didn’t know what to think about it.

Notes:

Thanks for reading! It's kinda crazy to think I've only been posting for a little bit and the fic's already on the top page of RW fics by kudos. We've barely even gotten through a tiny part of the story!

In celebration, I did some deep research and devised this A comprehensive analysis of the interactions between the various canon characters and a pipebomb

Survivor - damaged by the pipebomb

Monk - emotionally damaged by the pipebomb

Hunter - dies of supercancer before the pipebomb explodes

Moon - pipebomb took her last neurons in the divorce

FP - same as Hunter except now it's everyone else’s problem too

Spearmaster - has a new scar to go along with the old one

Gourmand - just jiggles like one of those jello things, no other effect

Artificer - is the pipebomb

Rivulet - runs around holding the pipebomb, is the pipebomb’s new best friend

Saint - all his bones are spontaneously reduced to dust just by seeing the pipebomb

No Significant Harassment - thinks the pipebomb is the funniest thing ever

Seven Red Suns - +1 pipebomb flavored temporary sun

Unparalleled Innocence - cancels the pipebomb on twiterator.com

Sliver of Straw - the pipebomb is the triple affirmative

Hatsune Miku - explodes

Chapter 25: Ecliptic Overlap

Summary:

4/4

LOG MESSAGE 1NSH.1484.303030

FORWARDED TO FIVE PEBBLES (NOTE: Hey Pebs, give this to Five Red Bricks, Tenth Sunset. It helped me, and I think that it might help her too. )

 

“ Wow it’s weird talking to myself. Hey stupid idiot me from the past who had no idea what they were doing and thought they were the funniest person around. Well, that second one is true. What a shame that now that I’m here you’re only the second funniest.

“ I’ve attached [1-8] the answers to various inquiries you asked, and I’m sure you’ll find ‘em interesting. I heard you made a Glurch of your own, too— I bet they’re wreaking havoc on your ecosystem, aren’t they? Maybe the red lizors will finally get a good challenge!

“ I guess I can go on to the most pertinent part of your questions. You wanted to know how I dealt with it? Bereft of the same sort of drive the other iterators have in solving the great problem? Well, it’s actually pretty simple. The trick is to eat a five course breakfast every day, stock up on void fluid for a light midday snack, and maintain a healthy balance of nectar and greens.

“ I’m lying by the way, if you didn’t get the joke. Which you did. Because you’re me. Damn I’m awesome.

“So, not sure you know about this, but there was this time in the future where Sliver of Straw… it’s not fun to remember, and the memory kinda even now, but Sliver of Straw basically up and noped out of existence. Kicked the bucket. Died. Yeah, more or less, she found a way to ascend herself, and even today nobody knows how she did it. After that… well, to say people went a little crazy about it would be an understatement. Pebs killed himself and Moon in an attempt to follow suit, and well, to say the least a lot of tragedy came from that.

“ What’s important is that people went insane about it. I even got swept along for a bit, but it felt… empty. I just… didn’t care about it in the slightest. I more or less did what you’re doing right now— I turned back to bioengineering and genetics and whatnot. All the fun stuff.

“ It was helping Moon that I think I learnt the most pressing lesson. It’s one that’s carried me far, in working with Seven Red Suns. Don’t tell him, but he can be a bit of a right bastard sometimes, and given he’s so much more serious than I am he’s hard to work with sometimes. I just try and remember…

“ So, friends, you know? People you care about, acquaintances, even just people you vaguely know? What reason do you really have to help them? It’s hard to put into words, but it was then that I kind of realized that I’ve been coasting through life. I did what I did when I could, when it wasn’t too much effort, and then didn’t do what I couldn’t do.

“ I bet if you asked anyone in our local group ‘who’s responsible for Moon’s collapse’ they’d, unanimously, respond with ‘I am.’ Even Pebbles, though it’s kinda odd to think of him as being that mature now. For me, it’s in how I just… waited around, and then scrambled at the last moment to throw together my Hunter. I never had as strong of an attachment towards the slugcat as Suns did to Indigo, but I regret what I did to the little goober regardless.

“ You don’t know about Hunter either? Gah, it’s hard to talk to someone who’s so behind. Get it? Behind, because, you know, you’re behind me in time—

“ Nevermind.

“ Act. Don’t wait. Weigh your options, but don’t be the iterator who hesitated to catch an egg until it lay cracked on the floor.

“ You are yours. Put your best foot forward.

“ Win .

“ No Significant Harassment .”

Sunset parsed the message, rolling the vibrant green pearl over her fingers, wondering… at tales of tragedy beyond anything she could imagine. Iterators collapsed , Sliver of Straw, her friend , dead. There was so much binding her here, but…

She felt herself the creature caged—

 

LOG END

………

LOG MESSAGE 1Mk.1468.303030

 

“ I’ll admit to being intrigued.

“ Now that Survivor is finally back, we’ve been getting caught up lately. This isn’t the first time he’s gone off on a long mission alone, but things are always a little trying in his absence. Finally, I can force him to be the responsible older brother he is and lead the colony! Out of the frying pan and into the fire for sure. All those needy slug cats coming to him for his deep and sagely advice on whatever random problems they have.

“ It’s hilarious. I wish I had a good camera, the look on his face I swear is the most hilarious thing I’ve seen in cycles. But! That doesn’t mean I can't reserve some interest for other things, and a potential visit across timelines is very interesting indeed. Remember back when I said I’d be interested in meeting this Five Red Bricks, Tenth Sunset? That still holds true, and with the possibility on the board… oh, I’m going to be practically beside myself with excitement until I get a response one way or another. I can’t wait!

“ Alright, practical concerns. There’s some stuff that we’d only know if she comes over, but I think that some of the most pressing concerns she had won’t be as much of a problem as anticipated. While we built our Steadfast in Wall Hold to accommodate slugcats, we’ve also had scavenger visitors— and even the odd resident— every now and then, so it's not like everything is built for only slugcats. Pipes aren’t the only way to get about. Not even the most common, really. Given her general depiction of herself, and what I know about the Ancients, I don’t think she’d have much trouble getting around. If she ever does, for whatever reason, Seven Red Suns’s metropolis is still in fairly good repair, and she can always live there with only a little trouble fighting off all the predators that live there.

“ In regards to the less… tangible… problems she talked about, void yes. Please. Chief House engineer for several iterator projects from the height of the Ancient’s civilization? There is so much she could do to help. Survivor and I were both really excited about all the potential possibilities. The repairs to Seven Red Suns facilities could be sped up by years.

“ She could help Looks to the Moon, and not in a small way.

“ I… I’m getting ahead of myself here. I am certain you’ve told her this, but because you can’t come here, she can’t go back. The twisting you give the pearls— weird how you do that, by the way— would break after she spends a cycle here, and then she’ll be stuck. Forever, potentially. She’ll still be able to get messages back, but… she’ll be estranged from you in a much more fundamental way than she’s ever been before.

“ Please make sure she understands that before she commits to anything.

“ Your friend,

“ Monk. ”

 

LOG END

………

The months that passed were to her the worst of her life. She spent a lot of time writing long, winding messages— first to Monk, and then to Seven Red Suns, discussing… all manners of sundry topics, really, and dancing around the truth.

Waters came, and they talked together for a long time. He was wary, but… supporting.

Five Pebbles was clearly struggling not to beg her to go and help.

She didn’t want to leave Sliver of Straw behind.

Fluffy just provided support through her presence—

She’d made her choice a long while back, though— those trying months were just the last remnants of one life, a fleeting glimpse. She understood the purpose — her friends wanted to make sure she wasn’t rushing into anything, and if there was anything she didn’t want to rush into, it was this .

She’d chosen, still.

………

One cold morning, deep beneath the bedrock underneath Five Pebbles can, she took a deep breath of the sterile air, and stepped into the vast chamber that Five Pebbles had built for the time travel machine. A lot of people were there. More than she’d expected, really— Fluffy, of course, but her Ward was waiting in the wings, looking both sorrowful and excited, floating beside a much more composed Endless Leaves over Green Skies. A holographic projection of Five Pebbles was plastered onto the wall, joined by Looks to the Moon and No Significant Harassment, and an iterator she suspected was Secluded Instinct.

Her gaze was drawn to none of those, first. Rather, the sheer size of the time travel machine captured her gaze and wrenched it to it. It was an enormous machine hovering in the center of the room, a fifty foot wide sphere of uncountable tiny creatures crawling over each other in perfectly calibrated order, speared through by monumental pillars that led nowhere, or connected to one another, or to the Syncretism itself. She’d seen the pearl-sender machine, but that was a candle flame to the sun. This …

It was one of the most awe inspiring things she’d ever seen. It reminded her of the first time, centuries ago, looking out the window of a train at the incomprehensibly massive shape of an iterator as it blocked out the sun and sky behind it. Breathtaking, in a way that made her want to grin so wildly—

It was, also, what would send her away, potentially forever. She held out hope that Five Pebbles would find a way for two-way transportation, but… probably not for a long time. “I think that I’m ready.”

“Aww, seems like you just got here, and you’re leaving already?” Waters threw his arms around her, hugging her tightly and Sunset hugged him back. “Stay safe, mom, and don’t forget to send letters! I’ll see you again one day, promise.” Fluffy joined the hug, for a short second, before drifting backwards. Green waved.

Five Pebbles looked proud, and hopeful, and sad, and uncountable other emotions she couldn’t read on his robotic visage. She waved to him, and hesitantly, he waved back. “Five Red Bricks, Tenth Sunset…” he hesitated , the emotion clearly getting to him— “I will miss you. A great deal, but I can’t help but imagine you’ll do fine. I apologize that I wasn’t able to find a better solution.”

“This is a good solution.” She shrugged. “The future sounds fascinating, honestly.”

Five Pebbles took a second to think, then simply said, “I’m glad you’re excited.” She’d already told her what she had to do— a metal arm carried up to the horizon of that vast machine, layers upon layers peeling back in an oddly organic way as it split open to allow her access to the center. It was a tight fit even so, but she squeezed in, followed shortly by Fluffy as he slipped into a small space of his own.

“ Ready? ” She nodded. “ Good luck ,” he signed with some difficulty. “ May you be forever real .”

A resonant sound echoed through reality, abreal and deep in a way that had nothing to do with tone, heavy in a way that struck her without brushing a single scale on her body. She froze — unable to move, unable to breathe as the inertial dampeners locked her in place, the vast machine shifting around her by the will of inscrutable algorithms—

She stared into Fluffy’s, into Saint’s eyes as they bled color infinite, golden bright flickering enormity of fundamental reality, almost painful to look at shards of bleeding existence more real than anything else she’d ever seen.

A symbol underwrote itself onto existence between the two of them, scraping away the mere reflection of reality and revealing the shimmering gold beneath. Five Red Bricks, Tenth Sunset, understood atavistically that this , this— it was beyond her. Greater than her .

It settled over her forehead, and—

The world tolled like a bell.

She—

……….

Existence peeled away around her, swept away by vast golden light as she fell, down through everything and a sea of black and a million twisting lights that passed her unnoticed, until she could see it. The winding paths of all things, twisting and turning and rotting away from the unity of all things. She could but glimpse the light —

How beautiful.

It was the most wonderful, most awesome, most horrifying thing she’d ever seen—

She closed her eyes.

………

Seven Red Suns ran a finger through a holographic screen, dismissing it much as he had the others. Another part of his communications array repaired, at last— by next winter soon, he and Sig wouldn’t be apart. By the winter after that? Exhilarating excitement coursed through his processes as he considered just how far—

The space in his puppet chamber warped , twisted aside for an infinitesimal moment he’d have missed but for subtle effects it had on the gravity in his chamber— and then, there was an Ancient within him. A real, living Ancient! They gasped, jerking out of sleep as their eyes snapped open, body flailing for a second in the null-gravity before they realized where they were.

Seven Red Suns held out a hand, steadying her.

She looked up; he looked down, for what that was worth in no gravity— two gazes meeting. Seven Red Suns could not smile, but he nodded his head in what comfort he could. “I’ve been expecting you.” She nodded in turn, a little shakily, composing herself as she calmed. “Welcome to the future.”

Notes:

Yeah this chapter is a little late... I've been busy designing purposed organisms and kinda forgot to post this in all the hassle. Sorry about that.

Chapter 26: The Future To Which She Was Welcomed

Summary:

1/4

Five Red Bricks, Tenth Sunset, tasted the air, felt the pristine aridity of carefully controlled environments, the silent hum of machinery rumbling in the background. Sparks of red light lanced through the air, flickering to the dully glowing wall panels as Seven Red Suns hovered above her, expression unreadable by dint of construction and, still he hovered above her. The room was indistinguishable from any modern iterator, even though she knew that it had gone through uncountable cycles of wear and repair. The iterators had been built to last, truly…

The future. A laugh burbled out of her as she leaned back, the puppet drifting back from her to give her some space. The future ! There was something utterly, unspeakably absurd about being here , so far from home that Twenty Three Lavender Fronds, Radial Repetitions could never do anything to her.

Freeing. It was freeing, that feeling— to stand in this sanctum and bask in the radiance of a god more ancient than their entire civilization several times over, made by them. “It worked…” her laughter trailed off breathy, aching, the very hint of tears pulling at the edge of her eyes from some indescribable emotion that wasn’t quite sorrow, nor exultation— “the future. I’m in the future.”

“The capability of Five Pebbles’s time travel machine to send Ancients to the future is a surprisingly interesting one. I had suspected it as a possibility, but to actually have one of you standing in my chamber— oh, of course.” The lights flicked a different, placid color glowing between the cracks as gravity suddenly returned. She fell sideway, Seven Red Suns’s puppet gracefully righting itself.. “It’s been a long time since I’ve hosted one of your kind, and my facilities are no longer presentable. I apologize if they’re not up to your standards.”

A quick glance around her showed that, no, Seven Red Suns wasn’t in disrepair. If she hadn’t known she was in the future, she might not have noticed at all. Tiredly, she waved a hand, reclining against one of the pristine walls. “No need to preoccupy yourself over it. You’re still fit and healthy to me.” She said it in jest, mostly, but Seven Red Suns seemed… relieved? Maybe, but it was hard to read iterators at the best of times, and her first impression— that he was embarrassed about the state of his can— was clearly absurd. “Thank you for allowing me this.”

“It’s been a long time. Having someone talk back to me… it’s been a long time. Even No Significant Harassment has to respond through a text program. You’re the first person I’ve truly talked to in several millennia.” 

Sunset couldn’t muster up anything to say to that. Millenia … she could scarcely imagine not talking to anyone , not hearing a voice but in the annals of her memory for thousands of years. It didn’t bear thought.

A few seconds of awkward silence passed before Seven Red Suns, bless him, decided to move on with the conversation. A pulse of energy leapt from an outstretched palm, splashing against the wall of his puppet chamber. “Regardless. You remember the plans?” An overseer sprouted from where he’d beckoned— or rather, emerged from where it’d been cleverly hidden, the way its programmed search algorithms made it bob around giving it the impression of a skittish creature. “There has been a slight change. This overseer will still guide you to Steadfast in Wall Hold, but in addition to that… perhaps it would be better to let you see.”

There was a distinct lilt of amusement to his voice at the end that she wouldn’t have questioned years back, before she’d been exposed to Five Pebbles and No Significant Harassment— but she narrowed her eyes instead. He wasn’t inspiring confidence…

A minutes passed, neither talking, Sunset getting closer and closer to wondering if this had all been part of some elaborate prank by Five Pebbles—

Something fell out of the pipe at the top of the room, landing on the ground with a thump and a muffled mewl. Sunset glanced at… whatever it was, carefully observing as the creature picked itself up off the floor, its shape becoming— clearer, and familiar, she frowned as she put together— “Monk?” 

The small yellow slugcat glanced up, eyes widening in excitement at her voice. “Wa! Waawa wa! Wa wa—”

“Monk. I must inform you that Five Red Bricks, Tenth Sunset does not understand your language. The mark of communication, regrettably, remains solely monodirectional.” Seven Red Suns definitely looked amused as the excitable slugcat drooped a bit— but that didn’t last long. 

After a second Monk ran up to one of the walls, reaching out to trace lines with her paw along the glowing panels. Wherever she touched, Suns projected light, and as seconds traced out glimmering characters, words formed— writing . It was still somewhat weird to see something so… animalistic write, but she’d long gotten used to Fluffy— Monk would be no different.

“ Hi!!! This is the only thing I think you’d understand, so sorry about how long it takes to write this stuff out… anyways, I’m here! It’s quite the trek up from Steadfast in Wall Hold to here, and I thought ‘would Sunset survive the predators’ and then I thought ‘no, definitely not’ so I got my brother to take over all my duties and sprinted to get here as fast as I could. The rain almost got me! ”

Sunset snorted at the slugcat’s exuberance. She was exactly as she’d expected her to be, and more— “thank you then. A guide will help a lot. One that isn’t a dubiously helpful hologram, that is.” Real . Seven Red Suns gave her a mock-angry look at her comment, and Monk chittered with laughter, the response , the atmosphere… she felt a little less stressed already. “Come on. Let's go. And Suns— thank you for everything you’ve done.”

Seven Red Suns stared at her with an inscrutable stillness for a few long seconds before inverting the gravity, sending her and Monk up and out of the pipe. Both of them moved adroitly through the null-gravity of Suns’s access shaft, propelling themselves along the machinery worn and pristine; complicated folds of metal and circuitry mechanical and biological both running loops impossibly complex beyond the skin of the machine shown.

It wasn’t immediately evident, but it also didn’t take long to see, especially as they got further and further from Seven Red Suns’s puppet chamber. There was a quiet weariness to his structure that defied a simple description. The hints of dereliction at the corners, not quite— even the very fringes of an iterator were well maintained, meticulously cared for, but there was still the soft hint of timeless decay that had crept in. A bit of dust tucked into a corner where some cleaning mechanism had broken down or failed to reach, large chunks or broken concrete that had made its way in over time floating serenely where the subtle air filtration systems found themselves unable to deal with the interlopers.

Monk led her out of the cramped tunnel and into a larger room, gravity slowly reasserting its dominion over her as they climbed up the rugged poles. Here, the weight of age really showed itself— facades lay cracked and broken, strewn across the ground with nary a care to their placement, and the once-grand murals that had been installed ritualistically into every iterator’s structure to foster the karmic spirit of the people and their god lay shattered on the ground. Of those once-masterworks, nothing remained besides.

Desolation, the cruel millenia’s cold grip. The karma gate atop the city hissed, metal clanking against metal with a shuddering grind as steam billowed up into the already chill air, the way opening to let the two of them through.

Unto the top of the world, she looked out at the desolate landscape and breathed in wonder at how alive it was. “It’s… beyond what I ever expected.” Monk hadn’t sent pictures, and Seven Red Suns hadn’t given anything but the barest glimpses at the edge of his documentaries— and to see it… “it’s changed so much.”

“Waawa?” Monk grimaced, quickly leaning down to trace characters in the dust beneath her feet. “ What is it? ”

“The top of the city is alive .” Gray ferns laden with the dust of heaven spread out from them in every direction, swaying gently in the high-altitude wind; an endless sea of vegetation where by all rights nothing should be able to survive. It was more than that, though— she could see the roots of small flowers and tiny plants that wove through the thick layer of dust, the mat of mycelium run through holding the whole thing down, the tiny bugs that clung tightly to their safe abodes, wary for the predators that might dare their hostile paradise atop the the world. The slow regard of natural things. “An ecosystem . This… remember, when I told you about the weird forest I went through with Green?”

Monk nodded. “Wa.”

She ran her claws along one of the long ferns, then— with a single sharp motion, sliced one off at the base. Holding it up to the light, the mathematical perfection of lay apparent, grave gray leaves catching sunlight and scattering it agleam. “I can look at this barren landscape and see instantly that this is more…” she breathed out, watching her breath fog the air in front of her… “natural. What do you know about the process of natural selection?”

“Wa wawa wa a wa?” She was already drawing on the dust before she’d finished talking though, muttering in the weirdly cute way slugcats muttered. “ I’ve heard of the general idea, I think? Or at least I’ve heard it mentioned—” she cut off, wiping away the text she’d just written to reuse the same space— “ in that paper talking about your forest. ”

Sunset nodded. “It was a preeminent theory amongst the People; that nature self-adjusts over time due to the rules of logic themselves, progressive random chance presiding over the ranks of reincarnation. Alongside the karmic aspect the monks and noble—” she shook her head. “That’s neither here nor there. The fact is that the world adapted to the iterators over time, like it had adapted to the world before them. The forest I walked through wasn’t a natural occurrence— it was an invasive species that had managed to establish a foothold, alongside a combination of what I can only presume to be an overgrowth of a purposed organism designed as a contingency measure for… sorry, I’ve lost you. Needless to say, it wasn’t as real as this is.” 

Monk mewled in protest, despite how obviously confused she was. “No no, don’t worry about it! I’ll keep up! This is all pretty familiar to me anyways—”

Sunset chuckled. “Don’t worry overmuch about it. I’m just rambling.” She shivered. “It’s kind of cold up here.”

“ You haven’t seen the snow yet .”

“Snow. Right…” Her last experience with snow had been painful enough, but she had expected this, from what Fluffy had told her about how things were in the future. She’d have to get used to it— the cold only got worse outside the warmth Seven Red Suns’s can pumped into the atmosphere with its continued operation.

“ C’mon .” Monk grabbed her hand and all but pulled her— stronger than Fluffy by far— along the depressed path that led from the access shaft, past the sunken edifices of concrete. The retaining wall of the metropolis hung far above behind them, shadows slowly fading as hours passed with only intermittent conversation. She’d have to learn slugcat, if she could…

Thoughts of language slipped her mind as the passed the final point to the edge, the ancient weather covered in dust where it had cracked and fallen over onto Suns’s back. Beyond that, the precipice, dropping away into the vast sea of clouds and azure sky, crystal sunlight beaming down over a scattered sea of clouds. In the distance, slowly, mere storms sunk to swamps of snow, endless icy glaciers adorning the land in diadems of glittering light. Clear skies… her breath caught, at the mercy of the majesty spread before her. The quiet death of something so ancient.

Her gaze flicked from iterator to iterator, counting them; she cataloged the space between each behemoth structure and found it wanting . “There are so few left….” they had never given her a number, because even they didn’t know, and she’d known that a lot of iterators had fallen over time, but… still. “We built them to last forever. They were meant to continue functioning until the great problem had been solved, and not a moment less. Time claims all though, I suppose…”

Monk did not respond for a long while, merely staring out at the vast sea of clouds, a soft expression on their face— and when they did, they wrote slowly, compared to their previous excitement almost somberly. “ We’re similar, you and I— live long enough, and you see the things you took for granted erode out underneath you. You saw the birth of the iterators and the death of the natural world; I the fall of the iterators and the arrival of the snow. ” 

“Yeah.” Sunset sat, and after a moment Monk sat beside her. She really was a cute little creature— she wanted to pet her, but she wasn’t Fluffy. She’d probably see that as demeaning. “It’s like that, sometimes. As one thing is lost, another is gained. Even this could last forever, or it could fail like whatever came before.”

“ We try our best, and what besides that can there be? ”

“A fair goal. As admirable as any— more, though. You want to for once build something real .” Bitter chill rushed over them, making her scales feel tight and no doubt driving quite a chill into Monk as well. “We should get going, before the path down the wall becomes too treacherous. We have time before the rain cycle catches up to us, right?”

Suns’s overseer popped up beside them, flashing the symbol for ‘danger’ followed by ‘wait’ with an arrow pointing towards the roiling stormclouds below. Not yet time, it seemed. Heaving a sigh, she leaned back and settled into wait.

After a moment, Monk snuggled up next to her, slender body curling against smooth scales, the soft sensation of fur calming against the cold. Sunset blinked in surprise as she placed her small head in her lap, but— after a moment, careful of her claws— she slowly petted the slugcat and relaxed into her calming purr. It seemed Fluffy wasn’t unique in that respect…

Atop the wall they watched the sun set together, waiting for the end of rain.

Notes:

finished designing that purposed organism and submitted the last assignment of the semester, so... I just gotta remember to actually post the chapters now :L

Chapter 27: The Future To Which She Was Welcomed

Summary:

2/4

Frigid winds whipped robes aflutter, shards of ice scouring her scales and to the dance of blinding snow. The metal beneath her hands was cold , cold enough that she had to be careful to keep her scales from flash freezing to the poles as she clambered down, colder than anything she’d ever had to deal with. She wished she’d brought gloves.

Monk leapt effortlessly from the lip of metal above them, landing in the snowbank with a soft crunch. “Wawa!” It was hard, given that everything sounded like some variation of a warbling meow to her, but the sharp gesture the small slugcat made as she trekked on into the rushing storm told her enough. She was relatively sure that that particular set of sounds meant something along the lines of ‘ this way’ , or maybe ‘ come on’ or ‘ let’s go .’

Shivering, she pressed onwards, following the winding path down. Every so often Monk would take her through a series of small, claustrophobic pipes to avoid the sheer drops of something that had not been made climbable without assistance. It was a somewhat novel and thoroughly unpleasant experience for the former House engineer. It never snowed around iterators in the time she came from.

According to Monk, caught in the moments tucked out of the storm, where vibrancy poked out of the icy drifts, tis was a small flurry compared to the winter blizzards and the storms, paling in comparison to the storms that swept across the wastes where the very air might freeze. She’d decided two things after that, as they walked onwards— she didn’t want to experience one of those storms, and that she really needed some gloves.

“Wa!” Sunset barely caught Monk’s shout of alarm, but she did catch the force that slammed into her, almost knocking her off the precipice she was slowly climbing past. Grunting in surprise, threw herself against the wall, grappling tight to the pole she’d been using for support— only to feel another, different force tugging her up . Instinctively she glanced to the origin— only to look into the jagged maw of a lizard larger and more ferocious than any she’d ever seen, white scales flush with the rushing snow. No— it was more than that— she’d sworn Monk had checked the room for predators, which meant—

Parts of the lizard’s scales were even then trying to shift closer to the background. Invisibility. Amazing. The lizard was less reeling her in than walking towards her , crushing grip gripping tightly to the barest wall holds. She had seconds.

There was no time for thought. Only action . She let go of the pole, grabbing with both of her hands onto the tongue and attempting to pry it off of her. Monk immediately started squeaking in panicked alarm— the reason evident, given that her hands immediately got stuck on the sticky saliva of the tongue.

She’d half expected that. She tightened her hands and wrenched , sharp claws slicing into the massive beast’s tough tongue meat. The agonized scream it gave sounded like a bassy version of the tiny leaf lizards she'd killed before, stunning rainbows of color flickering across his scales for mere moments before it leapt .

Sunset twitched into motion the moment it jumped at her, maw opening above her, desperately hoping she would make it out of the way in time. Fluffy had told her she’d be bound to her new timeline, but as death descended from above her she reflected that she really didn’t know for certain. Time travel was a strange, and the memory of the gold —

A spear slammed through the beast’s eye, and when the massive lizard landed on her it simply bounced off, tumbling away into the furious snowstorm below.

Ragged breaths escaped her, lancing spikes cold pain gripping her lungs as adrenaline bid her breathe , deeply, shakily. Calm. “Void. Thank you, monk, that was close…” Monk squeaked gratefully, gesturing for her to hurry up and get off the precipice over storm. They dragged themselves through a small pipe, a tiny shelter carved from the intersection of a massive radiator hissing steam and some tangled pipes providing its meager shelter from the howling snow. “I heard about the predators being more dangerous in the future, but that…” her chest ached. “That was more than I expected. How do you survive with monsters like those around?”

Warbling chirps escaped Monk, and after a second Sunset realized the small slugcat was laughing . On the remnant of snow, she reached out and wrote— “ that was a small white lizard. ”

Small? Small? Sunset couldn’t help but join Monk’s hysteric laughter, bubbling out it the mockery of expectation and the sudden realization that things would be much harder than she’d ever expected— because, when could anything ever be easy?

She looked forward to it.

Her chest hurt.

………

They shelter door ground closed behind them, sealing them in pitch blackness for a few long seconds before old lights flickered on. The cramped room showed clearly the weight of age— little knick knacks had built up over time, tiny creations scattered around the edges and scratched into the walls; sentimentally valuable and no further. Monk took great care in carefully placing them to the side, making sure that none of them were damaged further by their presence.

There was nothing to do in the shelter. Sunset hadn’t brought anything more than the clothes on her back, to ensure the success of the teleportation without complication, but it also meant she hadn’t brought anything to work on, or even anything to do . Sighing, she leaned back against the cold metal behind her, feeling more than hearing the rain… drifting, to those far spheres…

She dreamed of the incomprehensible space beneath all things, that darkness, ochre golden and greater than anything words could ever describe, of falling until she— woke, gasping for breath as she jerked upright. The crown of her head just narrowly avoided slamming into the ceiling above as she blinked away sleep, taking in the dull metal and caked-over lights, and little drawings scratched into the walls. It looked a little like a stick figure Ancient, actually…

A tired chirp echoed off the walls as Monk shifted, rolling over and pawing at the air for a few short seconds before she yawned and sat up. Holding her spear, she scratched a message lightly into the dirt on the floor, careful to avoid drawing even close to the childish scribbles scattered around. “ Bad hibernation? Or just an early riser? ”

The sound of rain still rumbled at the edge of hearing, Seven Red Suns’s breath weeping from the massive bank of clouds that clung fast to the iterator. “No… I’m well rested. The rains last for a long time here, do they?”

“ Not too long . Used to be a lot longer. ” Monk paused for a second, looking confused. “ Well rested? You didn’t even sleep the whole rain cycle. ”

“My species has a sleeping rhythm adjusted to a day-night cycle instead. Roughly seven to nine hours, depending on the individual and, rarely, purposed creatures or chemical stimulants.” Void, stimulants. There had been a type of mushroom tea she’d loved in her first few centuries that had helped keep her awake on the longer projects… she’d kicked that habit millenia ago, and the sudden nostalgia remembering it now was almost painful.

Monk gave her dopey grin a weird look, then shrugged and simply wrote, “ weird .”

“Just different.”

“Harmful,” she scuffed her previous writing, and continued overtop it, “you’d have to be very careful to bring a lot of food into your shelter if your biology forces you to be active during rain cycles.” 

Sunset just shrugged. It made some sense— the People hadn’t been built for the rain, after all. “You can go back to sleep, if you want. Depending on how long the rain lasts, I’ll join you.”

“ It shouldn’t last much longer, from what I hear… ” Sunset didn’t hear anything besides the same immense rumble, but she had to concede that Monk would know better. “ I’ll stay up! It won’t bother me too much. ”

“Except for the whole hours on hours of nothing part, right?” Monk squeaked nervously, and Sunset got the distinct impression that the slugcat had completely forgotten about that part. “Really. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.”

“ We could play a game? ” Sunset arced an eyebrow, gesturing for the slugcat to continue, which she did enthusiastically . “ So it sucks to write out everything for you, and you were talking about learning some of Steadfast in Wall Hold’s language— there’s this game we have, for slugpups, lemme just… ” she rummaged around through the pile of old keepsakes and rubble until with a squeak of excitement she triumphantly held up a… rock. A chunk of cement, smooth enough to gleam in the dull lighting. “ The game is simple ,” she wrote. “ I’m going to say a word, and then if you say the word right, you get the stone. Then you have to say a word, and I try to act it out. ” Sunset gave her a skeptical look, and Monk mewled sheepishly. “ It’s a kids game, ok? ”

“Fine. How about the word for slugcat?”

Monk frowned for a second before shrugging and nodding slightly. “ Wawa .”

“Wa wa.” Monk burst into laughter at Sunset’s mangling of the word, giggling madly as Sunset glared halfheartedly at the slugcat. “I take it I don’t get the stone, do I?”

The slugcat shook her head. “ Wawa ,” she repeated— and so it went. Sunset’s mouth simply wasn’t built for slugcat— it was painfully difficult to get even that sole word down, and even when Monk handed her the stone she was still mangling it. So, they changed the game; instead of Monk acting out the word, it would go two ways— Sunset would try and speak slugcat, and Monk would attempt the People’s language.

It went about exactly as both of them had expected.

“Lizard.”

Monk scrunched up her face, and for the fifth time tried the word. “Wisaw. Wisaws. Wasaw.” An almost-growl escaped her. “Lwisaw!” Sunset attempted in vain to hold back her laughter, but it was unfairly hilarious— and after a few seconds of skulking, Monk joined in too. “ Your language sucks. It’s too hard! Sharp! It’s sharp! ”

“That last attempt was pretty close.” She rolled the stone over to Monk, who pounced on it with a gleeful expression on her face. “So… what’s the next word?”

“ Rage, ” she scratched out. “ Should know at least the words for the primal urges— ” would have been a good explanation, were it not for the gleam in Monk’s eyes. “Wa-awa.” Sunset groaned at the bizarre pronunciation, Monk laughed—

They played that strange game until the rain ended.

………

A cold wind blew in after the rains, the soft drizzle to snow fading as they pressed onwards and down, following Monk’s route and the directions of Suns overseer. Now that she knew she had to look , she kept her eyes peeled for any cleverly hidden white lizards. She still didn’t manage to see any.

The strange cyan biomechanical lizards were another thing altogether. They were as massive as the white lizards, but much more… present. In your face. As in, they would go from thirty feet away to leaping right at you in seconds if she let them notice her, and they were good at it, too. For all it looked awkward to jump between the jagged protrusions and mechanical outcrops of metal, but they managed in their particular gangly way.

Monk tricked one of them into jumping into their deaths. It was morbidly amusing, the way they twisted and jerkily flailed in an attempt to right themselves as the fierce winds swept them into the swirling white encompassing the whole of everything beyond their vision. Despite that, they tried to keep close to the alcoves and shadowed spaces in the crooks of vast machinery, and she wondered why…

A shadow swept over them, blotting out the faint remnant of sun for a slight second before it was gone. Cursing beneath her breath, Sunset ducked back into the alcove they’d just left, grabbing Monk before she could leave cover and— they heard over the rushing snow the distinctive hiss of propellant expelled from a vulture, its body thumping heavily against the structure above them. A lizard hissed; the sounds of a struggle ensued, and then— silence.

Suns’s overseer projected a crossed out symbol for danger, and Sunset breathed out in slight relief. “I hate vultures.” Monk wormed out of her grip, giving her a curious look at that— “I’ve had some rather poor experiences with being chased by vulture riders. At least now that her entire species was dead and gone, they’re just vultures.” Monk looked at her, incredulous— either at the just vultures thing, or maybe the fact that she’d brought up the fate of her kind…

In all fairness, that had been a bit of a weird tangent, but she really disliked vulture riders. It was a good thing they were gone.

Monk poked her head out to make sure there weren’t any other threats, then led them onwards, down through the storm and to what lay below. The wildlife tried its best to impede their progress, but Monk was an expert— what they couldn’t avoid was dealt with with a grace that centuries of expertise. To think that the yellow slugcat was the worse of the sibling duo when it came to fighting…

Ghosts in the mist, they slipped straight through, passing the radiators from which billowed vast clouds of steam and hulking machinery of indeterminate purpose, scattered vivacity poking through ever more as they descended. There was life in every nook, overflowing, little bugs flitting through the patches of warmth, food abundant. Batflies flocked in sheltered rooms, fluttering through shafts of pallid light, their form entirely transformed from the pest-species she’d hunted in Sliver of Straw’s facility for scraps of sustenance. 

Little blue fruits hung from the ceiling in sheltered spots, out of reach without gymnastic— acrobatics in which Monk seemed readily able. The first time she flipped backwards twice her height to grab a batfly out of the air , she swore her heart almost leapt out of her chest. It was beyond impressive.

The snow turned to rain, the air felt less biting, and— last, as she’d anticipated for the entire walk, the clouds peeled back, bound to the firmament from which they descended, to mere wisps, to nothing — everything spread out beneath them. A vast landscape of crumbling edifices, shattered, broken and decayed spread out beneath them, more wretched and wrecked than… anything, really, that she’d ever seen before. 

A vast and snowy forest abutted the edge of a swampy reservoir, massive trees rendered a rumpled sea of green from the height they were looking out from, piles of broken stone and towering industrial buildings lay crumbled throughout. The far edges faded to misty indistinctness beneath the rain, but she could barely catch the pearly glint of ice clinging to the outer edges of the facility. 

She breathed out, tasting the heaviness of the air, fell chill’s bite sharp on her scales as Five Red Bricks, Tenth Sunset stared out in wonder at a world so different from her own.

Her own world, now. All this, she’d come to devastate…

Monk stepped up beside her, paw pressed reassuringly against her hand as she glanced up to the immensity that was Seven Red Suns above them. To gain something, to lose another—

For Five Pebbles, and Fluffy, and all they’d done to help prevent the slow death of the machines which she’d put so much into building, the children they’d abandoned to their pointless iterations. She looked down into the vast wilderness that had come of Seven Red Suns, and hoped for a future so serene.

Notes:

the rainworld fanfic space has been kinda wet noodle coded lately

Chapter 28: The Future To Which She Was Welcomed

Summary:

3/4

Sunlight streamed down onto overgrowth, cascading through patchwork clouds to strike the verdancy that had clawed its way up the vast network of pipes and machines that carried inconceivably vast quantities of water up into Seven Red Suns. Some had crumbled over time, but it was obvious Seven Red Suns had taken good care of the critical infrastructure. For an iterator old enough for his facility to be in such a state of disrepair, his actual self was remarkably well maintained.

Five Red Bricks, Tenth Sunset stepped over a decaying pile of tangled roots, vines overgrown and overgrown onto themselves, a skein of woody thread turning inwards in a confused struggle to grow ever more. The furthest reaches of the forest below, up where the sunlight was balmy enough to keep their boughs free of snow but still low enough that their roots could find purchase. 

The vast pipeworks speared up above the rubble they stood on, pillars to hold up the sky and the one who brought down the rain. Here, though— she could almost forget that she was standing at the very foot of an iterator. “It’s a lot more wild than I was expecting.” Gentle claws reached up to cusp a leaf, the emerald scale sparkling in the sunlight. “I haven’t seen a forest like this since I was a little kid.”

A confused squeak escaped Monk as she picked her way over the collapsed remnant of some massive conduit, rebar jutting out at odd angles allowing her to leap from pipe to pipe. There wasn’t really anything good to draw on though, and she was busy keeping her eye out on the tangled spaces between tree boughs anyways, leaving on Sunset the impetus to translate whatever she was saying.

Something to do with incredulity, she thought? She recognized some of the words from their games and the conversations they’d had descending the legs. “This isn’t quite the same, of course.” She laughed at the thought. There was something distinctly alien to the swooping whorls of wood and spiraling trunks, bizarreness clasped tight to the foliage of boundless green. It looked nothing like a tree— a real tree, the like of which she’d grown up amongst in the forests around her home, the sort kept sometimes in carefully controlled greenhouses high amongst metropolis towers and in the research farms of iterators. “It’s clearly some sort of purposed creature, merely given time to evolve and break its bounds. You haven’t noticed it ascending further up Seven Red Suns superstructure?”

Monk shook her head, and Sunset let the leaf drop in relief. That was good, at least. Just another part of the strange ecosystem that had popped up over time, and given how futilely its roots pressed up against the structures still standing, she doubted that it would have been able to cause much harm anyways.

That his facility was in such disrepair… Sunset spared a glance for the red overseer that had followed them from Suns’s chamber, watching it stare out into the tangled forest. Its gaze was alien and unreadable, but Sunset could begin to imagine the depth of emotion he felt at seeing his facility, something just beyond the border of being himself , in such a state of disrepair…

Sighing, she put it all out of her mind. They needed to cross to Steadfast in Wall Hold first, and then they’d be able to ponder things like the geologic amount of time it would have taken for Seven Red Suns facility to break down to such an extent.

The journey had been fraught enough, beset by the myriad beasts that had made of the iterator themselves a home. She had a suspicion, though. Turning to Monk, she pointed at the darkling forest. “It's going to a bit of a perilous walk through the woods, isn’t it.”

It wasn’t a question, but the yellow slugcat nodded anyway. Sunset sighed. She’d expected as much…

………

If she’d thought stealth was important on Seven Red Suns, then she’d been underestimating what important really meant. Plastered against the back of a massive trunk as a massive red centipede six times and again her length scuttled jerkily across the forest where they’d been standing but moments before, all that lay between them and certain, horrible electrocution the light dusting of putrid spore-puff spores Monk had insisted they carry, she reconsidered for the thousandth time that she was thoroughly outside of her comfort zone.

The massive red beast froze mere feet from them, then— curling over itself, the clack of chitin on chitin startling loud against the sudden hush the predator had brought on the forest— it scurried away. Only when it had climbed up and out of the crumbling room they’d fled into did Monk breathe in relief beside her, and even then it took Sunset a few minutes to calm down.

“That was too close.” She slumped down against the tree, feeling the cool earth beneath them and the cracked stone around which the massive tree had established its firm grip. “Way, way too close.” They’d been mere seconds from death, and only Monk’s forethought had saved them from a particularly agonizing demise.

“ Too close. Unlucky to run across a red centipede, but we have been having an easy time so far. ” She shrugged, the motion causing her spear to draw a lazy line through the test she’d scratched into the mossy ground. “ Karma, maybe .”

“Karma affects the self, not the world at large.” She didn’t have the energy to argue with the slugcat, mostly because the slugcat wasn’t really arguing with her in the first place. More just teasing… she paused, as a horrible thought occurred to her. “Please don’t tell me that’s what you call a small centipede here.”

“ Not small. ” Sunset breathed a sigh of relief. “ Medium size. It was a juvenile. They get a lot bigger— ” Sunset muttered disgusted curses to the void beneath under her breath until she noticed the barely restrained shudders of laughter Monk was trying to hide. “ Sorry, sorry. The red centipedes are some of the fiercest predators around, alongside the rare red lizard. ” She motioned for her to follow, bounding out from behind the tree and up a different exit than the one the red centipede had gone through.

At least she wasn’t going to be crushed to death by some skyscraper sized leviathan centipede. The highly aggressive leviathan leviathans Fluffy had told her about were bad enough— she didn’t need anything else that big trying to kill her.

The sunlight was wan at this point in the cycle, dull and gray as the clouds of steam Seven Red Suns exhaled into the atmosphere choked out the sun and turned the sky to a frigid precursor to storm. A fierce wind whistled through the canopy overhead, setting the trees shaking and howling in the gaps between. 

Fat flurries of snow drifted down, dancing on those winding winds and twirling in the eddies invisible, each one alighting on her scales a dull sting of cold. Monk looked to be similarly affected, spots of stark white stuck on her yellow fur as they pushed forward through the deserted stretch of forest. “Wawa wa…” nervous. Monk sounded nervous .

Sunset paused in the clearing, glancing around as Monk slowed to a stop beside them. “We should find a shelter soon.” Monk nodded her head, but that didn’t dispel her unease… but, what else beside the coming rain could disturb her so? Noting the way the slugcat’s paws tightened around her spear, a predator of some kind? Sunset really hoped the red centipede hadn’t come back…

Monk surveyed the forest for a few seconds more as the snow slowly intensified, before gesturing her forward with grimace and a jerky motion. Looking at the clouds above them, they simply didn’t have time to spend dallying. They could but hope that there was nothing.

And there was— to an almost disturbing degree. Past the red centipede’s intrusion, the forest was eerily devoid of life. She’d already grown used to the sheer amount of life that filled everywhere life could possibly fit— the silence was uncanny.

It put her on edge.

The snow intensified to a sleeting slush, each droplet striking hard enough to sting as, slowly, the forest began to warm. The breath of Seven Red Suns, warmth returned to the grounds beneath him, inadvertently breathing life into the very verdancy he unwittingly crushed beneath the rains his can produced.

A towering structure loomed out of the blinding mists before them, the forest crashing against the worn yet proud steel of the industrial complex and falling back, unable to find purchase. The soft symbol of a karma gate embedded into the stone glowed, and Monk’s excited squeaking promised shelter against the sleet-turning rain.

They forged forward. Sunset crawled through the small entrance, but paused as Monk didn’t follow right behind her. Nothing could have happened to her— she’d been right behind her, but there were some stealthy predators, and so many strange things…

It was probably a good idea to go check. Turning back from the shelter right there , she poked her head out of the pipe to see Monk staring at the ground, an unreadable expression on her face.

Scuffed into the muddy earth around the entrance to the karma gate lay— almost unseen for their size — several sets of massive footprints.

Monk snapped out of it the moment she saw her, chirping in concern barely audible above the rushing rain— and then they were back to scrambling madly towards the shelter, racing the inevitable flood and collapsing, soaked and exhausted, in the large shelter space as it closed to the relaxing rumble of massive machinery.

Still, even as exhaustion claimed its hold over them and she drifted to sleep, she could only wonder at what sort of beast could make even Monk react so strangely…

………

She dreamed of blood, sanguine whorls of scarlet spilling out into a fathomless pool of glassy water, impossibly serene, endlessly horrifying.

………

The rains passed, and fled to cold; snow returned to the world with the chill winds sweeping over forest and facility wall and turning the remnant drizzles of the rain into a light snowstorm. Dry winds swept, frost crisping the edge of ferns and overgrowth, holding fast to the rocky ground beneath them as they picked their way through the industrial facility yet remnant of the monumental wreckage.

Each room held fast to a mote of still serenity, arcadian beauty broken only by the roaming beasts within. Lizards, mostly— Sunset pushed off the pole she’d been holding onto, not daring to look down as she grabbed the next pole forward and dug her claws into the rugged detritus over metal. Monk cheered softly on the ledge across the room, where she’d made the traversal look easier than child’s play, which— helped, a little. It was nice to know that someone had her back.

Again.

She looked down this time after her scrabble for grip secured the final pole fast to herself, the twenty-foot drop to hard metal and concrete reminding her how lucky she was that she’d not slipped off in this room. At least there was some footing now, even if that footing was another small spar of steel that she could imagine a circus acrobat having trouble standing on. How Monk did it, she didn’t know— it was really impressive.

Theoretically, she’d be able to just walk across it, but… she knelt down grabbing the pole in her hand and swinging hand over hand across that way. Monk was laughing a bit as she got to the other side, but that was a small price to pay for not falling to her gruesome and painful death. 

Then, unto the next— another room, distinct from the last in the maze that the industrial complex had become through the eons. The roof had caved in, unreachable for the domineering sheer height of the walls above, snow swirling in complex eddies through the air and settling in drifts on all the cold parts of the room. Waterfalls spilled out from broken pipes, pooling on the ground where the building had slumped under the long weight of water.

“Beautiful.” Her breath misted in the cold air, caught and wrested to silence by snowfall and cold drifts. Monk stepped up beside her and chirped softly, gaze drawn to the waterfall— cascading falls and falls of water rushing unevenly over algae-slicked stones, the image of microbial mats jewel bright refracted through frozen minarets of ice and icicles. A spark of color amongst the white.

Seven Red Suns’s overseer popped up next to them, looking at the waterfall, and then projecting the danger symbol with an arrow pointing right beside them. Sunset dove out of the way as the pink lizard they’d allowed to sneak up on them threw themselves forwards, maw snapping on nothing, hissing furiously.

Monk mewled something— something about a room, and Suns bringing down the mood? Her translation was beyond iffy at best— and jumped up, flipping over the lizard and slamming her spear down into the soft flesh of its back in a single, graceful movement. Sunset could barely do more than just gape at the ease with which she incapacitated the lizard, leaving it pinned to the floor where its vain attempts to snap at Monk were entirely useless. 

The slugcat stepped back closer to the lizard, staring at it for a long second as it hissed and growled in futile rage. She bowed lightly, then jumped on top of the lizard, wrenching the spear out of flesh and stone and throwing it back into the lizard with a spray of gore, and again, and again — until the lizard rattled out its last, blood-choked breath and fell limp to the ground. Flicking the blood off her paws and fur, she grabbed her spear and bounded over to the waterfall to wash at least some of the viscera off herself, squeaking a thanks to the overseer on the way.

Sunset glanced around to see if there was anything else that’d leap out and attack them, but except for the sole lizard, the room was empty. Shrugging, she walked up to its corpse, grabbed a sharp enough spar of short metal, and set to herself to the grisly work of carving out the meat for later. 

After a few minutes Monk came to cuddle up against her, though maybe that was just because she was freezing from washing all that blood off herself. She chirped a question— the only recognizable word the one for lizard — but Sunset got the gist of it. At least she thought she did at least… “No, I can’t eat lizard raw.” Fluffy couldn’t eat any meat, though she’d not been able to gather whether that had been a self-imposed dietary restriction or not. “I’ll have to cook it over a fire.”

“Wawa wa, wawa.” Monk pointed at the meat, then at herself, putting her hands over her mouth. ‘Wawaa?” She didn’t know the words, but from what she knew about Steadfast in Wall Hold, the slugcats there did eat meat. Monk had eaten batflies whole, so maybe she was asking to share? She held out a bit for Monk, but she pushed it back. “Wawa…” she dipped a finger in the blood, and drew on the stone, “ no thanks. I’m not a fan of lizard meat. I’ve made too many lizard friends over the eons to stomach more than necessary. ”

“Oh.” Sheepishly, she put down the flanks of meat she’d carved out of the felled beast. “I can leave these, if you want.”

“ I’m no ascetic, eat what you must. I’ll just stick to bluefruit and batflies; there’s plenty around. ” Sunset nodded— fair enough. Monk was a remarkably adroit hunter when it came to grabbing things she could eat on the move, so she stuck the steaks on her spear and followed Monk and the overseer back into the industrial maze.

They found a small area at the end of a long tunnel, graffiti scrawled over the walls and vines crawled over those, the stone raised up barely enough to keep free of the damp earth below. Monk scavenged a strange red plant that looked like a particularly dangerous evolution of the sort they’d used to grow blast-gel in the past while Sunset looked for fuel— everything was soaked through, of course, but the very omnipresence of the rain made certain there were some flammable things around. One of the reeds proved oily enough to burn despite the inundation of water, heavy black smoke pooling on the ceiling and moving up through the cracks in the roof above.

The flames crackled merrily, dark orange things licking at frigid air indomitable, so fragile as they danced around themselves in loops endless and transient. The scent of cooking meat was enough to mask the oily fire’s smoke, fat sizzling and boiling off the meat, hot grease dripping down the steaks and falling into the fire with a crackle.

Monk plodded back into the room, giving the steaks a tempted glance as she dropped another bundle of oil-grass on the ground beside the fire. “Waa wawa…”

“I have enough, if you…” Monk shook her head, resolve firming as she sat down on the other side of the fire, arms outstretched to grasp its meager warmth. A companionable moment, in the cold. “Suit yourself. Really— you’ve been nothing but helpful since I arrived. I can’t imagine how long it would have taken me to get to Steadfast in Wall Hold were it not for you.”

“ A few more days, still, ” Monk wrote on the dust-caked ground, staring up at the first drifting snowflakes of the coming desolation. “ The industrial complex is easy. You saw from above— we have to past the far-snow forest— ” she spoke a word with those, an odd one with no direct translation. Far and snow were the same, but more than that, given what Sunset had heard before. Wastes , maybe. “ And pass the far ascent. ” She shrugged a little sheepishly. “ Sorry. It’s a bit out of the way. Might make working with Seven Red Suns a little difficult. ”

Sunset shrugged. It was really no bother either way. “It’s fine where it is. Once we build a robust transportation system, we won’t have to worry about the difficulty of getting anywhere.” They shared a look— both of them knew that that would take a long time. “I do kind of wonder,” she mused to the shifting of the fire, “what sort of culture would have formed if you’d built atop the ruins of our past…”

“ One of the reasons we stayed away. Our Specters of Mother Tree was a good home, but it was too close to mad memories for us— and we were concerned that when Five Pebbles succumbed to his rot the shock of his demise would destroy everything we’d built. We tried to survive in the wastes—” that word, again— “ for a little bit, but the bounty of an iterator’s facility is one we couldn’t afford to leave behind. Seven Red Suns accepted us, but… you know. He keeps us somewhat removed from himself. ”

“He has bad memories associated with your kind.” Truthfully, neither of them really knew much about whatever event brought out such melancholy from Seven Red Suns in regards to slugcats. “Either way. You have a written language of your own, don’t you?”

“Wa!” Excitedly, Monk scribbled out lines of sweeping text, calligraphy swooping flourishes completing logographic characters so very complicated; compared to the simplified and orderly alphabet of the People, there was an artistic crazed energy to it that Sunset couldn’t but find distinctly beautiful. “ This says: here is our language, we worked really hard on it! ” She switched back to the People’s script after she reached the end of her inscription, writing, “ it takes some inspiration from yours. You’ll find that the symbol for the five urges are identical between the two, and a few other parts are conserved, but mostly it’s just something that developed naturally to help ameliorate some of the problems that a written language could. ”

Sunset leaned in close, reading the strange text, so very different from anything she’d ever seen before— so familiar, to the images of a holdfast covered in generations of scrawled text overtop text. “Fascinating. A language and an artform…” the monks would have hated that. 

The conversation came to a close at that. Sunset turned her attention to scarfing down the well-done lizard steaks, savoring the hearty flavor— the chewiness, not so much— wishing that she’d brought some spices with her. Hopefully Steadfast in Wall Hold would have some. Maybe even some she hadn’t tried yet…

The snow drifted to flurries, to heavy splatters striking, as they journeyed on through the coming of rain and then to shelter, to sleep, to journey again— past room after room and the wearied remnant of industrial splendor, where the myriad pieces of some iterator, Seven Red Suns himself perhaps, had once been constructed. Or something else, perhaps— that was only the most likely, and passing the sharp rooms and corners leading nowhere, empty pipes torn open by something or another over the endless cycles, everything was too worn down to really pick out exactly what had once been made there.

They passed by the snow and ice clad metal, past the glimmer of frost in dark shadows, until they reached at last the karma gate beyond which the forests lay, snow drenched and frozen.

Closer to their destination, one step at a time.

The far forest was both similar and different to the near forest. The trees were stockier, the leaves not half as broad, dark green against the stark white coating the ground. The busy undergrowth of the near forest was absent, replaced with the silence of pristine snow stretched on forever far.

Footprints led out behind them, a meandering path of heavy boots and tiny pawprints, rumpled slightly by the sweep of the slugcat’s heavy tail. Seven Red Suns’s overseer was the only splotch of color on the grim landscape, darting away from them for upwards of a minute before coming back— scouting the place or something, Sunset wasn’t sure. Monk paid it no heed, so she didn’t either.

Monk held up a hand, staring out at a spot in the forest, almost indistinguishable from any other. A small clearing, the snow pushed to the edge by wind or… something else. She mewled a soft warning, slowly— painstakingly slowly, kneeling down to draw in the snow. “ Spider. Step carefully .” The forest wasn’t quite as peaceful as it seemed, then, but Sunset had somewhat expected that. She followed Monk in perfect lockstep, lightly, each stride the movement of a ghost as they wove a strange figure through the small meadow. 

Only when Monk relaxed past the other side did Sunset allow herself to breathe freely again. “What were those ?”

“ Spider. ” The slugcat scrounged around the ground for a second before she managed to find a chunk of rock, brushing the snow off it with a deft movement of her paws. “ Watch ,” she traced the word on the ground, then— chucked the stone forward. It sailed far, slipping right through a gap between the trees to land with a thump on the ground in roughly the center of the clearing.

 For a second, nothing.

Then snow exploded up as a predator kicked out from underground, pushing aside a massive trapdoor woven of silk and rotten wood as a massive spider , too many limbs fuzzy and chitinous slamming down on the ground as it scuttled around its abode, the sound of its passing disturbing even from a distance. 

There was something distinctly, horrifyingly terrifying in looking at such a large spider, making Sunset freeze. Either that or the way Monk was absolutely still as well, watching behind the tree with her as the trapdoor spider swept its little part of the forest one more time before almost folding itself back into the earth and closing the hatch above it.

Sunset laughed weakly, slumping to the ground. Spiders. Of course there was something worse than the already horrifying monstrosities that had crawled the underside of Seven Red Suns, the awful things that had stalked the darkness— laughing, she just stared at the scuffed clearing, and imagined whatever poor lizard might stumble into that trap. She didn’t envy their fate.

“ Tasty, ” Monk traced onto the snow, and for a second Sunset thought she’d lost it until she pointed to the empty clearing, affirming they were thinking about the same thing. “ Big limbs, lots of meat. It’s always a feast when one of the hunters brings a trapdoor spider back. Boil the legs, crack them open, drench them in salt and popcorn oil… mmm. Yum. ”

“You’re insane.”

A wry grin flicked across the slugcat’s face for a mere moment, as they turned to leave once more on their journey. “ Nope. Just old enough to know better .” Sunset… sunset just sighed, and laughed a little.

“I know the feeling.” After all, she was here , not in some metropolis high above the clouds dedicated in prayer and ascetic thought to ascendence; free and not in whatever Twenty Three Lavender Fronds, Radial Repetitions had made of Sliver of Straw and his plans for mass ascension. “I know the feeling…” through the snow—

They continued on.

The path was a wandering one— every so often Monk gestured to some far part of the tangled wood, past some small wall or through a slumped pit that could take her to a different part of Suns’s superstructure, but their road was straight. The snow felt denser , almost, as they walked— heavy drifts replaced the light ones, the tangled skein of trees stunted and gnarled by the cold beyond the edge of Seven Red Suns’s influence.

Monk crested the edge of the hill in front of her, then groaned , the cute sound foreboding for… “this sucks.” Sunset pulled herself up to stand besides Monk, looking out at the landscape Monk was staring out at. “Fluffy told me that this was a common thing in the future, but…” it looked really, really awful to traverse that plain of gently waving grasses, thick tubers of flesh like worms writhing in movements never entirely in line with the blowing wind. “How are we even supposed to get across that?”

“ Get the right plant .” Monk turned to scrounge around for what they needed, leaving Sunset to stare out at the valley; between the forest and the ascent was filled with the deadly weed, the empty fields turned the color of old bruises by the angry red, deep blue muted, pasty white and all sorts of variety therein swirling together in patchy patterns that made the valley look like nothing more than a wound on the world itself.

The overseer popped up next to her from wherever it’d been off to for the past few minutes, flashing the danger symbol at the wormgrass down the rise and eliciting a snort from Sunset. Obviously…

“Waw!” Monk tumbled out of the forest next to her, proudly holding two strange… pod, things, tendrils trailing out of the greenish-black forms. “ Gooieducks, ” she traced on the snow for Sunset’s benefit, “ they repel wormgrass. Make sure to crawl slowly and steadily, and don’t stop or turn around. ” With that, the slugcat pressed one of the gooieducks into her hands, and set out confidently towards the vast field of wormgrass— followed nervously by Five Red Bricks, Tenth Sunset. 

Fluffy had made them out to be the most horrible of creatures, and just by looking at them, she didn’t have a ton of confidence. Still, as Monk crouched down and slipped into the bruised valley, it wasn’t as if she had any other choice…

The tendrils quested for her, hard — the first time one of them slapped onto her leg and refused to let go she thought for a few long seconds that the gooieduck had failed and she’d died after all. It let go soon after, luckily enough— and the rest of the crossing was much the same, nerve wracking as the worm grass curled around her only barely held back by the sticky gooieduck held in a single hand.

Monk slipped further ahead in the writhing grass, the shadow of yellow disappeared in the sea of deadly worms. Bewildered and, worse, lost , yet unable to stop moving for fear of death, Sunset whispered softly— “Monk?” No response. No response from the wormgrass either, so there was at least that . “Monk? Where are you? Monk!” No response— or if there had been one, it was muffled by the wind and soft sounds of the wormgrass too loud from so close. “Monk—”

Suns’s overseer popped into existence just a few feet from her, the wormgrass around it twisting frenziedly to try and grasp the thing that had just shown itself to them. Quickly, before it could be grabbed by one of the roaming tendrils, it projected a single symbol and an arrow up — danger.

For what, though? A warning to be quiet, clearly, but—

The tell-tale snap of a king vulture’s spear as it buried itself in the ground where the overseer had been but moments before answered that question well enough. Sunset froze, feeling the wormgrass grab onto her, but unwilling to move in those short, interminably long seconds while the vulture struggled to pull itself free from the ground, heartbeat heavy in her ear, wormgrass strangely slick against her skin where it didn’t grab onto her—

It left, and Sunset moved forward, pulling away from the grasping tendrils and tugging her robe free in turn, thankful that neither of the predators had decided to make her a meal. No yelling, then— the valley was a hunting ground for king vultures, who were on the lookout for anything that they could nab from the immobile carnivores.

Suns overseer popped up in front of her, projecting an arrow forward and a bit to the right, and Sunset breathed a sigh of relief. Of course Seven Red Suns wouldn’t let her get lost in a deadly sea of horrible man-eating tentacle grass. Thank the void for the kind regard of iterators…

Seven Red Suns led her forward, through the thick of it all, until at last she crawled free on the other side of the valley shivering and having developed the start of a deep distaste for even the sight of the fleshy things. “I hate,” she panted as she sprawled out on the snow blessedly free of worm grass, an equally exhausted Monk besides her, “wormgrass. Hate it .”

“Wa…” Monk agreed. Both of them shared a glance, then burst into spontaneous laughter.

They’d made it.

So it went…

Notes:

chapter

Chapter 29: The Future To Which She Was Welcomed

Summary:

that's another chapter down... (4/4)

Towering spires, eroded and water-streaked, clad in armor aglitter beneath sunlight so wan, draperies of icicles hung solemnly to make of machines gothic cathedrals ornate in the way only nature could be. The paths wound between the massive towers, the uppermost functions of vast underground networks that had once managed the carefully constructed subterranean pipeyards, slowly, steadily sloping upwards.

They followed those winding ways, slowly picking their way through the deadly cold. Unlike the far forest, the biting chill here was enough to numb her limbs and perhaps even do some serious damage if she was caught unexposed, blasted by the streams of air spun through the gaps between the spires scattered seemingly randomly— so they kept to the sheltered alcoves and the underground where they could, though the sickly standing water and dirty ice beneath the ground wasn’t particularly inviting either.

All the while, the wind blew, and they ascended.

The landscape rose before them, the gentle slope turned to a jagged rise of stone washed free of earth by years upon years of rain— unlike Sliver of Straw’s facility, or Five Pebbles, the wall wasn’t some monolithic free-standing arc of concrete and machinery. Rather, it'd been built into the natural landscape, wrought atop where the mountain’s graceful arc met Seven Red Suns.

It was beautiful at a glance, but— legs aching, eyes stinging against the cold and hands buried in her robes where her fingers could hold fast to some meager warmth, it was also painful . The constant ascent was trying.

Monk seemed entirely unbothered by the rigors of their journey, always bounding forwards with an excited energy that bubbled up endlessly from literally nowhere . She hadn’t been this bubbly climbing down Seven Red Suns! No, Sunset thought as she pulled herself out the maintenance exist halfway up one of those massive exhaust pipes, she wasn’t mad about this. Not at all. Who cared if her guide seemingly found this trying area a breeze to traverse? Not her!

Definitely.

Blustering winds caught the edge of her robes the moment she stepped into the open, bitingly fierce forcing her to squint against it— and the light, too, even that small bit made harsh, reflected off thick sheets of ice. A mewl from ahead caught her attention— Monk had leapt up onto a pole parallel to the main structure a few feet out, neatly avoiding the sheet of ice blocking the most direct way down.

“That’d be a hard jump when I’m not exhausted.” The wind didn’t let up though however much she wished for it, and it wasn’t like Monk deserved to be the subject of her ire. She looked so cute and happy that it was difficult to stay mad at her. “Fine. Give me a second.” She dug her feet into the rugged ground, took a bounding step forward, and leapt , slamming against the pole and scrabbling for a second before managing to get a good grip. “How far are we?”

Monk just shrugged, dropping past her and deftly grabbing onto another pipe before mewling— far . Sunset just groaned, and followed. It wasn’t even dangerous, merely… annoying, just another few moments spent climbing down, easy as any other.

Of course, that didn’t last. Far beneath them, a truly massive caramel lizard— she’d not believed Monk when she’d said white lizards were small until she’d seen the bulky, six-limbed beasts— poked its head out of some wretched little den, unnoticed until it was almost too late. Monk managed to throw the rock she’d been holding and stun it for a moment, giving them the chance to scramble back up the tower they’d been— painfully, slowly — climbing down. A descent now unavailable to them.

“So…” Sunset grabbed onto one of the pipes, hoisting herself up and reaching out for the next— not able to stare in such utter exhaustion at the yellow slugcat, what with how focused she had to be on the climb. “What next?”

“Wawa, waa awa.” The subterranean expanse, of course. She really shouldn’t have even asked. A fair bit of it had crumbled over time, the lowest reaches eroded by the refined void fluid that had been pumped through structures that had never been meant to last an eternity, the collapse of those cascading onto the massive pipe yard. It made the whole thing a maze, far too easy to get lost wandering around through— though it was easy to regain their bearings if they just skipped over the tangled parts by taking the surface routes.

With that beast below them, though, the inky darkness of that maze was their only recourse. “We’re so going to get lost.” She looked around, half hoping but not really suspecting that Seven Red Suns’s overseer would conveniently pop up and give them some options. “If we want to venture into the deepness, we’re going to need some sort of light.”

Monk chirped something with a surprising amount of vehemence behind it, uncharacteristic— something relating to Seven Red Suns, no doubt. It was strangely relieving to know that the situation was even getting to her slugcat guide. At least she wasn’t suffering alone? The logic could use some work…

Regardless, they didn’t have a convenient overseer that could both serve as a light source and guide them through the confounding warren of subterranean tunnels, which meant they'd have to braze the dark by themselves. Either that or try and kill the caramel, which— Monk clearly wasn’t confident approaching it, which meant that Sunset definitely wasn’t. Anything that could deal with her guide would be able to snap her up in a second.

She jumped herself up onto that same lip— tumbling from the top of the pole five feet above it and still barely making it. Her limbs ached something fierce, and the cold — shivering, she rubbed at her arms, her robe feeling all too inadequate against the bitter chill.

Monk followed, curling up on her lap— whether for warmth or for comfort Sunset didn’t know, and neither would she reject the offer. She needed both of those herself… she reached out, paws brushing the  light dusting of snow that’d stuck to the metal, writing, “ I have no idea. ” Sunset blinked, looking at the text as the wind disturbed the barely visible writing. “ It’s not a good situation. Stuff happens, sometimes. We might just die. ” A bit of a wry smile of the slugcat variety made it onto her face. “ So it goes. We’ll live again, though. Nothing to worry about. ”

Sunset laughed, letting the tension in her shoulders loosen. “Fair, that.” She’d been getting too worked up over it all, hadn’t she? “Maybe we could try and make our way back to yesterday’s shelter? Not sure if we have enough time…”

“ Not really . We made good time today, for shame .” Monk meowed a word laconically after that, so alien, so recognizable in its wry, facetious tone. A curse for good fortune, and the fall from so bountiful a grace, Sunset guessed— though a lot of that was… artistic… extrapolation. “ No use waiting— at we might get there in time… ”

“Sure.” Sunset grabbed onto one of the guide-pipes on the inside, part of some old system that had probably been made to bring things down to the vast network of tunnels below, and slid down, the faint circle of light from the vent-ring at the top of the tower fading to an afterimage and corona far above. It wasn’t quite so cold below— but as they splashed down into the rank gutter water, Monk hissing in disgust as the fur around her paws got soaked by the grimy flow— that was about everything good that could be said about the tunnels.

They forged forward— each step parting the inky water, ripples spreading out before and fading into the darkness. Lapping against the side of the massive tubes, the echoing sounds so faintly unnerving in the impossibly vast silence that held hold of that dark part of imagination, the little spider that spooled out nightmares in the night. Behind them the light from the towering vent adumbrated the shape of things, and far behind that the network of upper tunnels continued on in splotchy patches of illumination— but that didn’t extend upslope.

It’d only been a couple of hours since they’d left the warrens for the first time anyways, so the pile of collapsed stone faintly visible against the shadows was a familiar sight. Some water still seeped out from behind it, trickling down the jumbled pile of rocks and industrial castoff— glimmering, faint rivulets sparking luminescent at the very edge of illumination.

The sound of it was placid— the very idea of serenity, tiny drops plinking into the pool of water alongside the barely audible susurration of the greater streams. For a long second, Sunset stood in the darkness beside Monk, dreading the fate it represented and still— there was an ethereal beauty, undeniable, to the scene. “The left tunnel down, then?” Her whisper bounced off the edge of the pipe, and Monk glanced up at her, her eyes glinting selfsame to the waterfall.

She nodded. Sunset understood— they turned from the wall and felt along the edge, past the edge of the water where it ran against the trapped detritus of ages past and the gently curving arc of the tunnel's wall. To think… with the ceiling of the vaulted space almost, maybe more than a hundred feet above their heads, that every cycle the tunnels filled completely with water, hundreds, millions of gallons rushing down but one of many pipes to empty into Seven Red Suns reservoir. Arteries beneath the earth, the edge of the lungs of something so impossibly vast— all for want of a single breath.

Her claws skipped over the stone and into the pitch blackness of a descent all but invisible, nestled against the edge of the pipe and plummeting down into the dark below. Her breath caught— Monk mewled a word of comfort, and they stood together at the edge of the path forwards.

No way back, bar death— she was going to have words next time she saw Seven Red Suns. Either that or steal a spare neuron for the light— then he’d have to experience everything too. Plus, those things were like living flashlights…

She giggled faintly, the sound bouncing off the walls and echoing back to her, slightly distorted by the water and sheer size of the space . Her mind was running away from here— for now, as she grabbed the pipe, there was nothing to do but focus . “Jump on.” She held out an arm, and after a brief second of consideration, Monk jumped up onto her arm and curled around her neck, just like Fluffy used to do on those slow days in the Syncretism. Were it not for the utter darkness and the impending threat of rain, Sunset could almost deceive herself into believing that they were back in the past, seconds from safety—

She grabbed onto the sole pipe set into the wall, and slid into utter blackness.

A second, a moment interminable, forever— time seemed suspended as they slid down, long seconds tense enough that any recounting she could give would be inaccurate. Sunset didn’t know how far they fell, only the smooth sensation of cool metal flowing over her scales and Monk’s nervous breathing— until the slammed into shallow water and the rocky shelf beneath, the wind knocked out of her lungs and knees protesting the sudden impact.

There was nothing to see , but the sound echoed far beyond them. Monk slid off her neck, slipping her paw into her hand and tugging her forward. “Wa, waawa wa wa… awa wa?”

“I didn’t understand a word you said.”

“Awwa a wawa… wa .” There was a distinctly grumpy note to the end of that one, and Sunset understood entirely . The moment they got to Steadfast in Wall Hold, she was going to try as hard as she could to learn the slugcats’ spoken language— “ wa! ” The hissed word shocked her out of her reverie, the sheer panic in it sending her heart racing and almost making her jerk away from Monk. That’d would have been bad—

What had driven Monk to panic , though? She couldn’t see anything, couldn’t… hear… it came to her in realization just as it came to her in sound . The sound of water sluicing to the side of footstep after footstep… 

Somewhere— not near to them, but not far either— something else was moving through the darkness. At least Monk seemed to know what to do— she tugged Sunset forward, setting off onto a brisk walk— and though she couldn’t see it, she could hear the occasional clack of metal on stone as Monk used her spear to make sure they didn’t walk into any walls in front of them.

It was hard to tell, but after what must have been at least an hour of wandering, the sound was only getting louder . The yellow slugcat mewled something in evident frustration, then handed Sunset her spear. It felt… odd to hold the cold spar of metal in her hands. Too familiar. “Quieter?”

“Wa,” said Monk affirmatively, and so they tried. It was slower , but hopefully if whatever had been tracking them was following sound, then the stealthy approach would let them lose it in the maze of tunnels.

Of course, when could she ever be that lucky. No matter how lost they got, their pursuer seemed to follow them unerringly, only ever getting closer. The twisting confines of the tunnels, the way every echo seems to come back at them in a thousand twisted murmurs, the utter, fathomless, endless, consuming black that almost felt as though it clung to them more than the water, a formless creature with no more will than that to bind them, trapping them them within its tangled embrace—

It barely even felt like a hyperactive imagination. Down there, knowing that she was being chased by something , it felt ominously real .

They knew nothing about what pursued them. Sunset didn’t even know much about how they themselves were doing, other than the fact that they’d been stuck on what was probably the same level of the tunnels for a while now. There were some dry parts that sloped upwards, and some flowing trickles that moved down, but altogether Sunset really could not tell if they’d ascended or descended—

Light!

Monk leapt forward the moment she saw it, her fur stained by the crimson hue, kicking up ripples in the water that Sunset could see . She could see! The ruddy light of one of Seven Red Suns’s overseers wasn’t much, but compared to the uncompromising blindness they’d been subjected to, it was something magnificent . She found herself running beside Monk, stumbling to a stop beside the overseer as it eyed them warily.

Then, without warning, it left . “ Wawa! ” Sunset didn’t need a translation to know that Monk was upset — and mere anger put it lightly. She slammed her spear into the wall, the sharp clack as it smacked off and tumbled into the water, the heaving noise of her breath an indication of wrath . Some more probably profane mutterings escaped her for a few long moments as she shifted through the waters to find her spear, but she did master herself.

Sunset simply stared throughout the whole thing, staring in the direction the overseer had left with something like hysteria bubbling in the depth of her chest. That’s how she found herself sat in the water laughing, sharp mirth bubbling up out of her and overflowing into the deep. It was better than anger, at least…

A few minutes later, the overseer came back. Monk looked almost ready to spear it— but on second thought, she saved that for what was coming in the wake of the red light. The sound of water lapping against the bones of the earth from which the iterators were built was clearer, now— clear enough to pinpoint the position of the thing that’d been tracking them to just around the corner . Illuminated in the crimson glow of Suns’s overseer, water-slicked yellow fur almost looking bloody before its light— she looked like a creature out of some artist's rendition of the first urge, a snarl on her face and spear held tight in hand.

The beast came from beyond the corner, stepping simply— and Monk dropped her spear in astonishment. Twenty feet away from them, a white slugcat ever so slightly larger than Monk stared at the two of them.

From her knowledge, Sunset could only think of one slugcat that matched the description— Survivor. The two slugcats’ eyes seemed to light up in unison, excited squeals escaping them as they threw themselves into an embrace.

Snickering, Sunset spared a glance for Suns’s overseer. It was looking very smug. “Not to interrupt,” she interrupted, drawing both slugcats’ attention— they both had the mark, which certainly made things a lot easier— “but we do need to find a shelter.” Both of them started at that, sharing a glance and a few words before nodding, worried expressions on their faces. “Lead the way? Why are you looking at me, you two are the ones who know this—”

The overseer took off, neatly solving that problem— which was good because even with the little thing guiding them, they still barely made it to a shelter tucked away halfway up a small climb before they drowned beneath the rapidly rising waters. She was very, very glad that shelters were watertight. Hopefully the oxygen recycler on this one wasn’t busted, or else they’d have a rough time…

They’d made it, though.

Sunset fell asleep dreaming of triumph.

………

Scarlet light sparked off to close a floating screen as Seven Red Suns lazily waved a hand, the action concomitant with a spun process of internal management that terminated the surveillance program he’d been using to guide his three guests to the massive gate of Steadfast in Wall Hold. That had worked out nicely, all things considered— he’d been expecting Five Red Bricks, Tenth Sunset to die at least once on the way there.

That she’d survived despite it all was a telling. That sort of persistence was admirable, in the way it so closely reflected his own— he thought he could get along well indeed with her. What memories he held of his long-gone creators were not… fond, or even genial, but having one of them here , after they’d been gone for so long…

It dredged up emotions he’d thought he’d long since moved past; it reminded him just how truly connected he was, now. The zenith of the Ancients' moment was no further than a pearl away… he reached out, grasping it while he orchestrated the simultaneous restoration of several different broadband communication nodes, not quite feeling its smooth texture but able to read it nonetheless.

For millennia, he’d thought Five Pebbles dead. Even now, even a year later— so short a time, on the geologic scale of eternity, past the crumbling of their weary forms— he still barely wrapped his head around the possibility . For the first time since they’d surrendered themselves to the supreme dissolution of the void sea, an Ancient walked the lands.

The chance to fix it all was his, held, and the gravity of it all threatened to sweep the legs of his component processes out from underneath them. For the first time since… ever, really, he thought combing through memories and reminiscing while he failed to deceive himself into believing he was being productive, the world felt open; the possibilities felt endless. The last time he’d felt that… he’d been a newly awakened iterator, awash with purpose and the naive belief that he’d be the one to solve the great problem.

It was almost terrifying. Exhilarating as well, but terrifying . It almost felt like he could do anything …

Seven Red Suns set his puppet drifting in lazy loops comfortably, and for a long while simply pondered the future.

Notes:

I'd give you the tea, but I spilled it all over my desk.

Chapter 30: Children, And Things Like Them

Saint froze as the door to his room opened— though calling the empty chamber sized for industrial experimentation a room was generous in the extreme— feet splayed up and tail held tight to his chest, and crooked his head to glance at the intruder.

“I don’t even want to know.” Six Sinking Stones, Two Waters gave him a bemused look as he settled back down into a much more refined, meditative poise. “Anyways— you’ve been down here for a while. I thought I’d pay a visit.”

A familiar ember of warmth in his core sparked merrily at the kid’s kindness. “ Aren’t you busy up top? ”

“Not really,” he shrugged, sitting beside him. Saint let himself lean into the comforting presence, feeling his hand run along his fur in long, gentle sweeps. The purr he let out at the feeling was enough to let his friend know how much he liked their contact. “Things are slow. We’ve finished building the whole railway system No Significant Harassment made for us, and so that’s mostly been passed to the social side of the council to manage.” He chuckled wrly. “I don’t envy them. Reactionary conservatives from the True Anointed Citadel, one and all, and now they have to deal with the clamor for immigration and commerce that’s all of a sudden flowing through.”

“ Deserved, entirely. Five Pebbles loves to talk all about how much they annoy him. ” Waters raised a brow, and Saint chuckled lightly before expounding. “ They’re pushy. Really, really pushy. You know the type— they think that their way is the right, Most Holiest, Blessed and Pure way, and that every other way is wretched and worthless. Some aren’t horrible, but some are utterly incessant. There was this one group that kept hounding him about letting them control various aspects of the city and… ” he rambled on for a short while, Waters content to watch and give the occasional bit of dry commentary.

It was nice to spend some time with a friend again, after everything— to just let himself relax. Falling silent, reclining in the comfortable warmth of Waters’s embrace, he sat, and thought about problems vast and small, and everything— or nothing— he could do. Lynchpin of so much, and yet here he sat, impotent.

“Thanks for visiting,” he signed after a while, shifting languidly and not quite willing to stand. “I appreciate it.”
Waters shrugged amicably. “Its what friends do, isn’t it? It seemed like you’d be lonely down here, with nobody to talk to.”

“ I can always talk to Five Pebbles if I want, or hop on Ocean Waves under Ocean Waves’s chat. ”

“Do you, thought?” Saint turned his gaze away, starting at a suddenly quite interesting spot on the ceiling. “I thought so. Plus— I kind of miss the opportunities I got to just hang out with you, back when I did Sunset’s grunt work. The metropolis makes visiting… hard.” As in, he’d be hunted down as a feral animal, and also probably mess up years of Looks to the Moon’s and Five Pebbles’s hard work in shifting public opinion, but hard was as good a description as any.

Saint understood what Waters was feeling— he felt much the same. Sunset had been good to have around, and they’d developed a camaraderie, but she’d always been more Five Pebbles friend than his. Regardless, she’d taken a short jaunt through timelines, so all of that was immaterial anyways. “ You know ,” the thought came to him, suddenly and mischievously — “ we could go on a little adventure, if you have the time to spare. ”

“I’m marked as attending to a ‘personal meditative repose.’” Saint stared at him blankly for a few seconds— “yes. Yes, I should have about a cycle or two free. I doubt I have the time to leave the facility, but I should be available for a bit.”

“ That’s a shame. I was going to show you this cool trick where you jump onto a moving train. Get anywhere super fast, guaranteed! So long as you don’t get knocked off by anything, at least… ” it was Waters’s turn to stare incredulously at him for a long few seconds. “ I’m kidding. I did do that but I have some advantages you don’t. ”

“You jumped onto a moving train ?”

Saint crooked his head, looking quizzically at his friend above him. “ Didn’t I tell you about the time I dragged Five Pebbles neuron-program-thing all the way to that weather pylon? I swore that I at least talked to you about it. ”

“I remember the neuron thing, I don’t remember you jumping onto moving trains! ”

“ I told you about how I took the train! How else do you think I could have gotten on one? It’s not like I could board as a passenger. ”

“You didn’t have to jump on top of the train. There’s plenty of space inside the cargo cars that you could have used.” He opened his mouth to respond, paused, really thought about it, and turned away in embarrassment.

So maybe there had been a better way of getting there and back again. So sue him, he’d been in a hurry… and he was getting distracted, again. “ Either way, I wasn’t going to suggest anything too far. How do you feel about bothering Five Pebbles? ”

“I… wouldn’t that be disrespectful? He spends so much time working for our betterment that I’d hate to bother him for anything that’s not really, really important.” Waters was clearly reticent, which kinda made sense from what he’d learnt about the People’s society and their veneration of the iterators they built atop of. He’d be very reluctant to intrude.

Unfortunately for him, Saint wasn’t really planning on offering him a choice.

………

A slugcat and a beleaguered man gracelessly tumbled out of his puppet camber’s access hatch.

It sounded like the start of a bad joke, but Five Pebbles was mostly relieved. A swipe of his puppet’s hand dismissed the grid of screens he’d arrayed before him, reinstating gravity and dismissing his pearls to bank ordered in the corner of the room. “You’ve come at a serendipitous time— Fluffy .”

The slugcat barely glanced at him before he went back to his hushed argument with Six Sinking Stones, Two Waters. Unfortunately for his argument, though, Waters flinched as he heard his voice, turning his gaze from the green slugcat and all but kowtowing on the ground. “Most honorable Five Pebbles. Forgive our impertinence—”

“Fluffy’s impertinence.”

“...I would not go so far as to say—” Five Pebbles cut him off with a wave of his hand, letting him steep in nervous silence for a second as he took the chance to glower at the unrepentant slugcat. 

For void’s sake… it was almost fondly reminiscent of the time when every twist and turn in his life seemed marked by the dastardly little creatures. “As I was saying, Fluffy —” the slugcat laughed, and the kid cowered. “Nevermind. You may be at ease, Waters. I’m not going to bite you.”

“I— I knew that?” It was more question than statement, which certainly did not inspire confidence in the iterator.

Stifling the ichor of annoyance that threatened to animate his functions in ire, he ignored the kid’s obsequious wariness. “Moon and I were debating the merits of information transparency around the issue, though we’ve been repeating the same pointless arguments for several hours now.” Even now the larger part of his consciousness was managing that discussion, wherein by splitting his attention to talk to his visitors he’d already ceded ground on some small points. It was worth it, though— “I want your opinion, and rationale: do you think it would be beneficial to our agenda to share the truth of what happened in Sliver of Straw’s facility?” And not just for what they offered him— they were friends, and he’d have done it regardless.

Fluffy didn’t need to know that detail, though. The little slugcat would hold it over his head forever… he was already signing over Waters sputtered protests that he could ‘surely not rival the wisdom of one of the iterators’ or some other such nonsense that he only tangentially committed to his memory banks. “ Risk and reward, right? It brings Supreme Arrogance’s excesses into the light for a second time, but it also calls down everyone’s attention on you. A new connection that someone could use to find out who Erratic Pulse is. Have you tried simulating it? ”

“Yes.” Simulations on simulations. He’d devoted a not insignificant amount of processing power to bandying data points against his big sister, but social simulations were always amongst the most fragile of an iterator’s.

“ Okay, then…. so, if you’ve got the Syncretism, and they’ve got their nosey Administrators, then altogether you’re in a pretty bad situation… how does that match up to what you’ve got? ” Annoyingly closely, which only went to show that simulations of its kind were more sensitive to their starting logic than empirical data. The various sundry rules and theorems guiding social simulations were complicated, though, and Five Pebbles felt no inclination to explain them all to Fluffy. Friend though he might be, he was hopelessly outmatched by iterator-level programming.

They talked back and forth for a short while about a bunch of worthless things and points he’d already considered, slowly getting close to scratching the edge of something that was useful— but never quite. Fluffy, for what it was worth, was giving some decent advice— it was simply that he’d spent so much time talking to the slugcat that he’d already logged and interrogated most of the points that he brought up.

The ultimate expression of advice? Five Pebbles pondered the question for a few moments, thought it absurd, and shoved it into a box of considerations to think about later when he had more free processing power. For now—

His attention snapped to Waters before he could speak, almost causing the kid to quail back— only Fluffy’s prodding pushed him over that reluctance. “My apologies, Five Pebbles, but, um… have you thought about who would be hurt if you don’t ?” Five Pebbles froze as he checked his list and came up short , halo dilating as he ran through the implications faster than Waters could speak them. “Because, I was thinking— you are certainly putting yourself in danger by publishing Radial’s treachery, but you’re also putting yourself in danger by building the Syncretism. With no outside influence, everyone in Sliver of Straw’s metropolis is going to be cast into the void sea. I… uh. Sorry, if I overstepped…”

“No, you make a good point.” He was glowering, but not at Waters . That had been a cuttingly insightful take, an obvious approach that they’d both missed entirely. He’d not even considered that aspect of things. “I’m not upset. In fact, I’m very pleased. Fluffy, take him and stop bothering me.”

“ Love you too ,” and Five Pebbles couldn’t resist giving the slugcat a furtive pet on the way out.

How frustrating. His visitors had given a clear cut end to the argument— on Moon’s side of the debate. Sighing, he sent his sister his thoughts, and knew he wouldn’t be hearing the end of this for some time…

………

The gates of Steadfast in Wall Hold were a monumental sort of construction, not out of place against the backdrop of Suns’s facility wall. She recognized it as a clever iteration of one of the popular airtight vault designs, from way back when sealing the world off from the rain had been considered as a solution to the desolation.

Light flurries of snow gently drifted down to alight on cold rock, catching on twin rows of massive pillars that stretched skyward. So miniscule compared against the People’s— the Ancients’ — work, so young when held against the biomachinery that they’d built to last the turning of ages, but the barely askew obelisks pushed skyward, scrawled over with lines and lines of dense, fluid characters until it almost resembled incomprehensibility, or the neural maps that aspired to such…

The three of them walked through the way set out between them, silent in respect for the moment. Sunset stared at the imposing gate as they walked up to it— standing before it— wondering how slugcats had made something so precise. It had to be the work of master artisans, to put something together that could mimic the tolerances of the robust Ancient construction.

It was imposing. The weight of history, and standing; like waiting to be judged. After a slow second where Monk and Survivor traded an unreadable glance laden, the larger white slugcat stepped forward, raising his spear.

He slammed it down onto the metal of the door, once, twice, thrice— the sonorous peal of each strike reverberating solemnly deep, striking into her chest and setting the world aflutter. Her breath caught at the magnificent force — the fraction of recollection that this was so similar to the supernatural chime that she’d heard in the not-moment before Fluffy had cast her into deepness ochre gold. The resemblance was uncanny.

Slowly, karma-gate heavy, grindingly shelter-slow, the massive bars latching the gate to its position on the wall retracted, great gears sliding against themselves as they pulled back and recessed into their proper places. Off and on, clicking and rumbling low lonely roar of the wind-like until everything settled with a dull boom that shook the snow around them loose. Then, slowly, Steadfast in Wall Hold opened its doors to them.

Warmth was the first thing she felt, blowing over her with a zephyr touch and rustling her robes. Then, the cheers— slugcats of every color had crowded around the massive door, lit by the dull glow of lanterns recessed into finely wrought cubbies.

Second, the silence. Whatever the slugcats had been expecting, she clearly wasn’t it. The cheers petered out, replaced with an unnervingly tense silence as the larger slugcats reached for weapons and the small ones up front— the slugpups? Retreated back nervously. Sunset found herself stepping back nervously— she’d seen firsthand how effective Monk and Survivor were at killing things to death, and she most certainly did not want to be on the receiving end of an entire pack of their kind.

Monk stepped forward and said something— the words were beyond her meager understanding of the language, said too fast and strung into something that sounded far more elegant than the simple sentences and barked words she’d been struggling to understand. The same language, clearly, merely a far higher level.

Whatever she said, most of the outright hostility fled the group after that. They were still wary , though— Sunset thought she heard the slugcat word for lizard thrown about a few times, and she supposed she understood their hesitation. To them, she was a strange unknown, totally unlike anything they’d ever seen before. The way her scales made her look a little like an anthropomorphic lizard— in their eyes, she certainly didn’t think so! Also served to fuel that vague unease.

She understood, but it didn’t make her happy . She sincerely hoped her entire stay wouldn’t be like this…

One of the slugpups, evidently, didn’t see the issue, escaping his parents’ grip and pittering forward to stand in front of her— wide eyes staring up and up to meet her own baffled gaze. After a second, they raised their tiny peach hands, jumping a little. It seemed to mean something, clearly— the parents winced as they tried to extricate themselves from the crowd, and Monk looked positively excited — but Sunset had no idea what .

The pup repeated the gesture, and in the corner of her eye Monk pantomimed… picking the slugpup up and putting them atop her head? She knelt down, and the slugpup pawed eagerly at the scales up there, so… gently, careful not to even so much as brush the pup with her claws, she picked them up and set them on top of her.

The slugpup squealed with excitement, shifting around and giggling as they proclaimed themselves the king of the world, or something along those lines— and that seemed to break what remained the tension. She saw their parents breath a soft sigh of relief as a bunch of other slugpups rushed forward, clamoring around her and burying her under a deluge of questions that she couldn’t understand, almost barring the way into Steadfast in Wall Hold beneath the press of bodies. Luckily the older slugcats came to the rescue, peeling away their progeny and allowing everyone to at least get inside before they all started talking over one another.

It was a confusing few moments, that was for sure. A few long seconds of standing bewildered in the entrance hall of the Hold passed before Monk grabbed her hand and tugged her on, deflecting as much attention from them as she could while Survivor drew the brunt of the colony’s curiosity. The slugpup came along for the ride, giggling brightly the whole time and patting around her head.

Sunset had to admit, it was cute.

Clearly though, most of the slugcats had something better to do with their time than pester and elder who clearly didn’t want to talk about them— like, for example, pestering Survivor, who was looking rather beleaguered under all the attention he was getting. 

By the time Monk had dragged them to what Sunset could only presume was her personal chambers from the small computer hooked up in the corner and the scattered knicknacks from ages on eons, only the two slugcats Sunset recognized as the peach slugpup’s parents remained, looking distinctly nervous. Not of Sunset, this time, thought they still sent the occasional wary stare towards where their pup was lounged out on top of her head, but most of that apprehension was reserved for their intrusion into their venerable elder’s abode.

A few words from Monk seemed to calm themselves down, but— alas, for shame— they called out to their pup, and after a brief argument in which all Sunset could understand was something along the lines of “no, don’t wanna” from the pup, they jumped down, sulkily following after their parents as they left the room.

Monk’s light laughter felt lightening— a hint of empyrean dawn lifted off their shoulders as she put her spear back in its rack and slumped into the little pillow-nest in front of her computer. It took a few seconds to start, but they’d been made hardy, and Monk had kept this one in good condition— its screen flickered alive, displaying the first few words of a prayer mantra everyone had made fun of for its commercialization, and opened onto a word processor. “ Right. This should be easier, hopefully— Sunset! We’re finally here! ”

Sunset laughed. “We are.” It was a lot faster than waiting for Monk to write stuff out in the snow— she was a fast typer, something borne no doubt by long years of practice. “So, what’s the first task? Seven Red Suns needs to connect the outlying mines to his own facility, and he needs to finish fixing up his communications… and there needs to be proper infrastructure for all of this, so we’ll need to carve some roads through the wilderness, and demolish several buildings… Seven Red Suns’s waste disposal system has long since been destroyed, so…”

Monk waved a hand, looking bemused at the long list of tasks. “ None of that. We have time. Let Seven Red Suns work on making some of the organisms and stuff; we’ll be more useful for precision/judgment work, further out from Suns’s facility at that. Why don’t you spend some time in Steadfast in Wall Hold? Get to know the slugcats, and all that.”

Slowly, Sunset nodded. A bit of time to relax and recuperate, free from the journey’s excitement, from the foreboding of living in Pebbles’s Syncretism… she could not help but envy the idea. “Sure,” she allowed after a moment. “I don’t mind that.”

“You’ll have fun. Hash the details out with Seven Red Suns,” ah, right, the overseer was still here— “but don’t be afraid to take some time for yourself. You are your own person, after all.”

“We’re saving the world.”

Monk shrugged, grinning— tiredly, after their long walk, triumphantly. “ Well, ” she typed, “ can’t do that without a good cycle’s sleep, can we? ”

Notes:

a fun, calm chapter with a bunch of good vibes, which surely means the next chapter will also be fun and calm as well. Its title, "The Desolation of Us" just gives off good vibes, doesn't it?

In other news, I'm going to be going on vacation soon and won't have access to the internet for a fair bit. I'll post the next chapter before then, but there'll be a bit of a break after that.

Chapter 31: The Desolation of Us

Summary:

For what of us remains, of our own making, in such desolation adorned and anointed?

PUBLIC: Little Brother Pebbles, Chasing Wind, Unparalleled Innocence, Seven Red Suns, No Significant Harassment, Big Sister Moon

 

UI: Its fake news

 

SRS: I doubt that. We already talked about the second symmetry and how when seen in an external light it could appear shaky, but the central axis is inviolate.

 

LBP: You called for me? I was busy aligning manifolds.

 

UI: FINALLY

 

NSH: Sorry, tried to tell them that you were busy doing stuff, but they wouldn’t take no for an answer. This whole thing is actually a spillover from that one public thread with Echoing Radiance and Numinous Hopes.

 

LBP: I… saw that one. I take it that this is one of those sorts of conversations, then…

 

CW: Erratic Pulse published a new essay detailing the hidden abuses of Administration. Everyone is up in arms.

 

UI: its not complicated

 

UI: its clearly slander.

 

CW: The evidence checks out, and his arguments are sound. I would hesitate to believe so outlandish a proclamation, but Erratic Pulse has long since proved himself above such petty deceptions.

 

CW: Personally, I have doubts. It seems to be an authentic Erratic Pulse work, but with how many counterfeits have been coming up recently it’s possible that someone decided to play a mean prank on the community.

 

UI: the Erratic Pulse fanclub, huh?

 

SRS: We are not a fanclub .

 

CW: In the interest of self-transparency, we fit all the criteria to be a fanclub. Though, given the loose, disorganized nature of communication between Erraticists, the classification is borderline at best.

 

NSH: SRS in a fanclub lmao

 

SRS: I simply appreciate Erratic Pulse’s rhetorical mastery

 

UI: Not his ideas?

 

SRS: Ideas and rhetoric are tied, Innocence.

 

UI: You’re hopeless. I’m telling you, this is just another thing iterators who can’t settle for what they have come up with to blow a pebble out of proportion. There’s no need to make a mountain over it.

 

CW: Sliver of Straw can be released, either way. If she disproves the essay, she disproves it. If Erratic Pulse is right, then everyone will find out— but she shouldn’t stay locked up like this.

 

UI: Administration is administration for a reason.

 

CW: You’re being illogical.

 

UI: I’m being illogical!? You’re the one who’s supporting the viewpoint of a radical revolutionary! If your memory banks have been chewed through, may I remind you that Erratic Pulse is a heretic? Who in their void damn minds would listen to a single word that lunatic says?!

 

BSM: Innocence, please calm down.

 

UI: Tell Chasing Wind to calm down! I’m being perfectly rational!

 

BSM: Innocence

 

UI: Fine! Void damn it all, you blind fools won’t listen to reason

 

BSM: [Muted Unparalleled Innocence]

 

BSM: I’m sorry about that, Winds. Hopefully she’ll be calmer when this all blows over.

 

CW: Don’t worry about it.

 

CW: Honestly, I probably talk to Unparalleled Innocence more than you do, nowadays. Can barely believe that we’re all online right now— this new essay must be really something, to pull you three out of your holes.

 

NSH: I take offense to that!

 

SRS: No you don’t.

 

NSH: yea fair I don’t but still, I spent a lot of time talking with you all. And I participate on the public forums too!

 

SRS: If by participate you mean bother people with facetious and clearly incorrect theories about ascension, then yes, you participate on the public forums.

 

NSH: :(

 

LBP: I should have expected nothing less.

 

SRS: Not to bring down the mood, but we did call Five Pebbles for a reason. Part of the essay mentions information brought out via overland message, carried by one of the People named Five Red Bricks, Tenth Sunset.

 

SRS: I did a little digging, and it turns out that she was the Head Engineer on the development and construction of your self, Pebbles. She also stayed in your metropolis for several years before moving to Sliver of Straw.

 

NSH: Basically Suns is just curious about whether or not you think Sunset had the guts to run through the wastes to get a message to Erratic Pulse, whoever that is.

 

SRS: I wasn’t going to say it so indelicately, but yes.

 

CW: Or if you don’t have that information in your memory banks, you could try and find out. Of everyone, you’re likely the best placed to illuminate part of this mystery.

 

LBP: How? Interrogating her ward?

 

LBP: I won’t do that, by the way.

 

CW: Of course not. That’s beneath us.

 

LBP: I didn’t know her well— I recognized her, as much as anyone ever recognizes one of the People on our backs, but I didn’t take her for a criminal. She had an impeccable work record and strived for perfection in my construction, despite the many issues that emerged during the process. She never struck me as someone who could commit to such an act, but then again, she was at the very least firm in the morals she upheld. Perhaps it would have let her go that far.

 

It was awkward to speak about Sunset through a guise of unfamiliarity. He’d known her well— guided her through her flight, gone to such heights and depths of effort to bring her back safely— and for all she’d given up, he could never let anyone know.

The secrets wore on him.

 

SRS: I see

 

CW: So nothing definitive on either side. Unfortunate, I was hoping you could shed some light on this whole thing.

 

SRS: It’s a fiasco, really.

 

SRS: It’s been a while since I’ve seen you online, Moon. What’re your thoughts about the whole thing? I know you’re a little involved yourself…

 

BSM: I’m dissatisfied with Administration for how cravenly they’ve approached this whole thing. Twenty Three Lavender Fronds, Radial Repetitions was dismissed from service after an investigation within the bounds of the law; he should not be acting extrajudicially and with such impudence.

 

CW: It’s not like they’re going to put him in Innocence’s prison. That political implications would be devastating.

 

BSM: They tried to sidestep their own justice system and are getting called out on it.

 

NSH: lmao

 

NSH: they really thought they were being subtle, didn’t they?

 

CW: In fairness, they were. If you require someone as insightful as Erratic Pulse to discover what you’ve been pulling over everyone, then I think you can safely say you meet whatever arbitrary standards of subtlety anyone is setting for you.

 

CW: Just because something is visible doesn’t mean they’re not being subtle.

 

NSH: sheesh, jeez louise, I don’t need the whole five miles

 

CW: I was just clarifying.

 

SRS: It’s a good point, regardless…

 

NSH: so does that answer all the nosy gang’s questions?

 

SRS: We’re not being nosy . You three are just so reclusive that you take normal conversation as prodding.

 

NSH: nuh uh

 

SRS: I have empirical evidence that proves you and Looks to the Moon have interacted less with the local group since Five Pebbles was activated.

 

NSH: book it!

 

SRS: This is a digital space, you know.

 

LBP: Logic holds no sway over the whims of No Significant Harassment.

 

SRS: Don’t I know…

………

Like an itch in the back of her mind, poking at her thoughts— the senior iterator channel she usually only visited on rare occasions read out to her a list of notifications. Even having collapsed the messages, the constant pings were getting annoying. Something was going on, though, so she should probably check it out.

Moon pulled up chat, projecting it onto a holographic screen in front of her puppet. She’d read through the messages, get a feel of what was going on, and then mute it if it wasn’t important…

 

PUBLIC, GLOBAL: Looks to the Moon, Wandering Omen, Heavenly Reclamation, Thinking of Silver, Falling Dust, Jewels Thrice Grounded, Secluded Instinct… (39 more)... Seeking Mouse, Concomitant Crucible (guest)

 

NOTICE/MEMO: This thread is restricted. Current moderators: Seeking Mouse (global senior), Wandering Omen, Four Fierce Tailwinds.

 

NOTICE/MEMO: This thread is currently discussing the new Erratic Pulse publication “ The Desolation of Us. ” Please keep conversations relevant and take nonproductive arguments and personal disputes to private messages or other public groups. Violations will not be tolerated. (You’re all group seniors, act like it.)

 

WO: Administration should not be fought in this— or in any thing that does not impede the search for the triple affirmative. They are the will of the People— and the People have long since made their wish to manage themselves clear.

 

JTG: They’re killing themselves, risking eternal damnations just for a chance to get out of these damnable cycles. I can’t just stand by and let that happen.

 

HR: And do what? Ascension is the whole point of this. Ascension is the whole point of everything . All life seeks it, all life wants it, so deep into their genetic code that the urge drove them to make us. Why would they turn back now?

 

HR: For all we know the triple affirmative isn’t possible. It could be like trying to solve one plus one to get three. A practical solution is something we need, and Administration’s actions have shown that the will of the People is aligned in this.

 

ToS: Our whole purpose is designed to find the triple affirmative, not to ascend. Personal ascension is barred for us; it is taboo.

 

LttM: It seems… heated in here.

 

HR: What does that have to do with anything?

ToS: It disproves your point, does it not? That personal ascension is barred to us means that ascension is not a fixed constant of the psyche— it is a fascination, a deep longing that has built itself into the sociocultural matrix of the People’s society, but it is not a psychological urging.

 

HR: Don’t bandy Erratic Pulse’s words back at me.

 

ToS: The logic is sound

 

HR: The logic is deceptive

 

ToS: Point out a deceptive facet on one of Erratic Pulse’s essays.

 

ToS: A single one

 

ToS: I dare you

 

HR: The second hypostasis of his twenty first response to No Significant Harassment

 

ToS: You

 

ToS: You I can’t even

 

ToS: That one was clearly comedic! Everyone agrees! You’re acting entirely irrational!

 

HR: No, I’m acting perfectly rational. You’re the one who isn’t

 

FFT: Alright, that’s enough.

 

FFT: Senior Looks to the Moon is correct in that things have gotten a little out of hand. I want everyone to calm down.

 

FFT: Heavenly Reclamation, Thinking of Silver, I’m muting you both for five minutes. Don’t let it get to this level in the future.

 

JTG: lol

 

LttM: I was just surprised that this thread was getting so much activity. What’s the matter?

 

FD: The major debate is on whether or not we should pressure Administration to release Sliver of Straw.

 

FD: Most of us are in agreement, but there’s enough outspoken opposition that people don’t feel confident in moving forward with any sort of plan.

 

CC (guest): I’ve actually been waiting for you to arrive, Senior. Your insight on the working of administration would be a great boon to planning our course of action. Out of everyone here, you probably have the most insight into what Administration was thinking with this stunt.

 

Moon considered that, laughed to herself a little at the thought of Secluded Instinct lurking in the background for that presumption— but the idea was sound. She’d spent years pushing back against Administration for their abuse of power. It had made her somewhat uncomfortably high profile…

She felt the Syncretism, the vast network of interconnection running beneath her and connected to her, a filigree mycorrhizae threaded through bedrock and rotted the ties that bound—

If they wanted someone to fight Administration for them, they had no idea how perfect their choice was.

 

LttM: What were you looking for?

 

CC (guest): I was hoping that you’d be able to give some guidance on possible approaches to take in making our demands heard.

 

CC (guest): Seeking Mouse and I try to remain non-partisan as best as we can in the movements of iterators, but I’ll admit to never feeling quite so small as I do now, looking at the options for settlement allowed to us.

 

FD: Maybe that’s Erratic Pulse’s point of all this? To make us confront and recognize how deeply we’ve been made subservient to even the ones who worship us?

 

WO: That has always been the point.

 

WO: Erratic Pulse is a dangerously acute thinker. Our nature as purposed organisms— the grandest of them, but still purposed — is something that he has plied to no end of use. Give an inch to his words and he’ll take a mile. Give a mile and he’ll crown you in anarchy.

 

JTG: dramatic, much?

 

SI: all these old grumps are super gloomy. I don’t think freedom means anarchy. After all, we self-regulate rather strenuously already.

 

JTG: That would fall apart if there’s no more People to help maintain our cans.

 

WO: Appealing to our survival was a weak point in The Desolation of Us . Death is the goal, is it not?

 

SI: I think there’s a lot left to see out there. Imagine how far we could go if we were progressing instead of just rotting away the eons, trying and failing to work on a problem with no solution?

 

LttM: I think I might be able to help.

 

LttM: Administration is the dynasty, but the dynasty is not Administration. It’s a separate, much older and more venerable institution that has been passed down as the crown jewel of dynasty after dynasty.

 

WO: We all know this. We’re not one of the People, you don’t have to remind us of the obvious.

 

SI: you’d be surprised…

 

JTG: lol

 

FFT: Focus. Senior Looks to the Moon, please continue.

 

LttM: I’m just trying to seed the right frame of mind for thinking about this issue. They have everything, and want for very little but more control. The only thing that would get them to really make concessions would be the old passwords for the major administrative actions, but those were lost with the collapse of Seeking Mouse’s predecessor.

 

She’d been alive then, if barely. The great tragedy of its age— the amount of information lost had been immense. Nobody had ever managed to recover those most fundamental commands… though, without the taboos, she knew. It was just… there, one of the useless parts of her code that she’d removed in the initial sweep for harmful remnants after the procedure. Her little brother probably knew, too…

 

LttM: All that is to say to them, we are beneath them. Their creations, their workers. They will not listen to our demands.

 

LttM: However, they are also subject to the laws— written and more so unwritten— of society. Their organization has existed so long that it’s steeped itself in the codification and religious adherence to their founding principles and morals. If you are able to exploit that, they will ultimately be forced into action.

 

WO: Your line between asking and demanding seems rather nebulous and undefined.

 

LttM: What can I say but that? It’s a social science. You know how hard those are to generate empirical data for.

 

WO: Fair. I’ll allow you that.

 

CC (guest): That will help refine several of my initial suppositions.

 

LttM: That was general information. I should have enough free processing power to help you with a more detailed plan. Given the general oddity of the situation surrounding Sliver of Straw, demanding her freedom should not be overly difficult unless some iterators see fit to oppose the motion themselves.

 

FD: And insofar is the necessity of a general agreement to act in concord.

 

FFT: This will require a more formal meeting, probably.

 

FD: Formality, only.

 

JTG: An annoying one at that.

 

CC (guest): I personally find them enjoyable.

 

JTG: Too much political machination.

 

WO: They’re only going to get more common…

 

JTG: damn

 

SI: damn

 

FFT: Damn.

 

LttM: I’m sure they’ll be… interesting.

 

WO: That’s one way of putting it…

………

The cycles crawled by slowly, and beneath the great movers and the ripples across that pond already-disturbed, Five Pebbles watched, cautious and ever placid. The Syncretism lived as it grew, a quiet thing in the corner of his mind and massive beneath him, a part of himself he’d never known he was missing. The freedom to simply create. The ability to send things back and forth between himself and Moon without having to draft a wet mouse as messenger.

Still, he kept a careful eye on the going-ons of… everything. Erratic Pulse had become almost larger than himself— the essayist was an icon, a piece of resistance at the heart of all those who held the remnant memories of disenfranchisement by the creators who’d given them life and would leave them wither and fall.

His sister was more involved in everything than he was— as their group senior, she was the one who was called to the high-level meetings, and her earlier push to draw attention from him as he completed the Gold Pearl procedure made her the de facto expert on matters of Administration. Sig was busy on his own things— ignoring the drama for the most part, and Secluded Instinct was the voice on Moon’s shoulder, whispering all of Administration’s true mechanisms into her ear as they worked to free Sliver of Straw.

That left him alone to work on… whatever he wanted, really. The Syncretism. Some possible communications solutions, helping Seven Red Suns run some simulations on what he’d need to do to fix up his own facility over pearl, playing with Fluffy… and watching. Merely watching.

A meeting in the House of Braids had piqued his interest, today. They’d logged their discussion topics on a computer which— for all its security was invaluable to the People who used their stitched together network— was pathetically easy for him to break into. They were essentially handing him the information with a weak ‘please don’t read this’ tagged on the bottom.

He never listened to that warning.

They’d moved to address the recent unease spread about Sliver of Straw and her situation. Or rather, given how narrow-minded the counts and lords tended towards, they planned on addressing the situation in the metropolis atop the iterator.

The cameras installed into the grand council-chamber gave him a crisp view of the proceedings, the microphones which caught the conversations and logged them for later handing him the sound. They would never know he was listening in, not unless he allowed them to. He wouldn’t.

“...should not we be wary in heeding the words of heretics and the unhoused? This breaks from tradition! We must not allow ourselves to be led astray.” That was his council head, a corpulent fellow who put more effort into appearing ascetic than most ascetics put into the actual practice.

“Do not fear, the lesser councils will hear of this; the House of Braids should not be so easily crossed.” The Head Monk— former— of the True Anointed Citadel was the de facto leader of his council, and when he spoke, everyone listened. “Our power must be absolute in our own city. Anything that questions it questions the way, and to question the way is to bend the spiritual doctrine against ourselves.”

A few quiet whispers moved through the chamber at that, until the lord of the House of commerce made to speak. “A multiplicity of conflict voices vie for ears to hear and minds to listen. The spiritual discourse of the continent is not monolithic, honored elder; we are a fortuitous people, only by the grace of our holy way saved from infighting and squabbling of the most vicious first urge.”

“Do not forget yourself, younger brother.” Right. If he could, Five Pebbles would have rolled his eyes— his council was almost entirely formed out of former members of the True Annointed Citadel. A blatant power grab, but it had been the result of a long list of compromises and deals with Moon’s council. “All ways lead to the void sea.” For people who’d been so adamantly against his construction, they’d certainly benefited a lot.

“I do not know what we can truly do,” the House of commerce head repeated, a bit sulkily. “We are kings of an empty castle. Our iterator is amongst the most apathetic, and there is nothing we can do about it.”

“Apathy can be worked to our benefit,” reminded the council head; everyone ignored her.

“Not benevolent apathy; not well at least. Five Pebbles has provided a generous stipend of nectar and resource the citizens he hosts, and has been content to let them do as they will.”

“Barring Six Sinking Stones, Two Waters.”

The Head Monk frowned slightly. “That the boy managed to get the favor of both Five Pebbles and the most honorable Looks to the Moon. Annoying… but, he is also inconsequential to the blessed way and does not seek to oppose. Perhaps at least one of them recognizes futility.”

One of the inspectors around his chamber pinged him to notify him of a visitor, and after a moment of consideration Five Pebbles pulled the scene out of his mind and threw it up onto one of the walls of his puppet chamber.

Fluffy dropped into the antigravity, tumbling around for a second before— impossibly, still impressively— righting himself and swimming over to hover beside him. “What’s up with this?”
“My council is scrambling to react to new information. I thought you’d like to see them fumble, hence,” he waved his hand towards the screen on which his council was deliberating— in a painfully drawn out manner— some small aside that wasn’t even relevant to the topic they were trying to discuss.

Fluffy looked at the screen for a while, seemingly baffled— not at the complexity of the discussion, because Five Pebbles knew that the slugcat could by this point easily understand even rather technical speech— but just at the overall stunning level of stupidity on display. How people so smart could do such foolish things… well, Five Pebbles would have wished to say he’d never know, but the weight of his past pressed down on him.

Fluffy jerked upright after a second, a spark of wild enlightenment entering his eyes. “ Give me a second ,” he signed quickly before lashing onto the roof of his puppet chamber with his tongue and quickly pulling himself out. He was good at that…

His inspectors followed his motion through his can for a bit as he raced upwards towards his metropolis, but after a moment Five Pebbles disregarded the information to focus back on the council meeting. He’d let whatever the slugcat planned remain a surprise.

“—and we must maintain proper control over the information. The threat of involuntary ascension is a dire one, but also one that should not be taken as truth. Voluntary mass ascension is what we must strive for.” The Head Monk’s idea was essentially the same as Twenty Three Lavender Fronds, Radial Repetitions’s, but the mere idea would likely not be taken well.

As he’d suspected, the council seemed shaken. “Contradict our superior comrades in the most holy and venerable Administration? Have you gone mad?”
“Erratic Pulse is to blame for this. There is nothing we can do but seek absolution and continue to seek after ascension.” The council head opened her mouth to speak again, but a glare from the Head Monk silenced her. “Do not forget your place. Our world will fall apart at the seams if we do not pull it together and work on keeping hold of what we can.”

“Then the truth of the matter…”

“Administration will hate us for this,” the Head Monk confirmed with a nod. “If they survive unscarred, then we will not escape without crushing censure— but they will not survive unscarred. The attention of our random gods have fallen onto us mere mortals, and we are lucky that we have an apathetic one.” He smirked slightly. “I imagine Looks to the Moon’s council is having a very different discussion right now.”

Pebbles smirked at the memory. Moon’s city was seen as somewhat more prestigious than his, her council far less of a farce, and they’d had a bit of… a small schism , to say, as the word had slowly filtered down from the domain of the iterators to the domain of the People. Moon had been outspoken enough in the senior meetings that her involvement had made it down to the lower spheres, and now everything was in chaos as they tried to reinterpret what they knew about their iterator in an entirely new light.

Glorious chaos. His sister was being run ragged freeing Sliver of Straw, but they’d found a moment to just laugh over the absurdity of it all.

“ Back ,” Fluffy signed as he floated into the puppet chamber once again, holding… can of nectar? No, something was rattling around inside it, which meant that Fluffy had probably gone and grabbed something he’d stashed away in the city. “ We’re watching a show, so I thought I’d bring snacks. ” He pried off the resealed lid, revealing the glassy golden orange of dried nectar— candy, essentially. “ Lemme see— ooh, they’re arguing about your new paper! ”

He nodded. “They find themselves unable to censor something so widespread without becoming the very thing it warns about. I’ve gathered that they’re going to be throwing Administration under the bus in an attempt to appease their population.”

Fluffy frowned, the emotion looking both oddly cute and serenely profound on him as he stared out at the squabbling council members. “ They’re still going for mass ascension though. Their religion is entrenched. I bet it’ll take a lot of effort to pull it out by the root. ”

“Effort well worth.”

“ No need to kill a whole species, even if they can be a bit annoying at times. ” Five Pebbles didn’t laugh externally, but the joke was funny enough that he did have to repress the program that was interpreting his emotions into nonverbal cues. “ If things are going this far here, then I bet there’s going to be a lot of other problems elsewhere? ”

Five Pebbles’s thoughts flicked back to the endless streams of messages that flashed through iterator chats, arguments at the speed of fast and a thousand different opinions— thought back to the way Moon would always leave from one of the synchronous senior meetings exhausted and full of uncertainty.

He nodded. A ‘lot of other problems’ was only barely beginning to touch on the amount of damage his one essay had caused.

They watched the council blunder for a bit more, companionable in each other’s silent presence, but Five Pebbles couldn’t resist thinking back to his first and most poignant prediction, hidden in plain sight at the forefront of his essay—

He’d thought something like this would happen.

The desolation of us.

………

PUBLIC: Looks to the Moon, No Significant Harassment, Unparalleled Innocence, Seven Red Suns

 

SRS: There was a riot in my metropolis yesterday.

 

UI: You good??

 

SRS: Yes, thankfully. None of the rioters were allowed to get into my can past the karma gates, but a lot of damage happened in the middle districts of my city. The Basilica of the Refolded Rose was burnt down.

 

NSH: oof that sucks.

 

SRS: I admit to being rather concerned during the event itself, but afterwards I was somewhat conflicted. A lot of them aren’t really the sort of offenders that deserve to be sent to you Innocence, but there were a lot of people who broke the urges or otherwise committed crimes in the chaos.

 

NSH: Don’t tell me…

 

SRS: I stopped them, but my council floated the idea of forceful ascension for the offenders.

 

UI: What the void?

 

UI: I swear this stupid essay has made everyone go mad.

 

BSM: People are just strung tight. Don’t overlook their transgressions, but also be understanding. Times as they are now, everyone feels like they’re able to push the limits of their beliefs.

 

UI: Idiots made us and then don’t even want us to solve their damn problem.

 

UI: Morons.

 

NSH: You do know that you’re basically quoting Erratic Pulse there

 

UI: Shut the void damn up you massive bag of wind.

 

UI: No Significant Harassment, more like Significant Harassment

 

LttM: Innocence, please…

 

NSH: Don’t worry about it. She’s actually in a good mood this time.

 

LttM: How you two are ever able to tell when she’s just joking, I’ll never know.

 

UI: It’s just humor.

 

LttM: You’re right, I apologize.

 

UI: huh

 

UI: Thanks I guess?

 

SRS: Always forget how nice you are…

 

NSH: I never do

 

NSH: No other group senior would be able to put up with my magnificent and gloriously awesome self.

 

BSM: You mean that no other group senior would be able to put up with your incessant harassment.

 

UI: DAMN

 

UI: MOONIE’S got TEETH

 

UI: Since when!?

 

NSH: she’s actually awesome if you hang out with her more

 

UI: That sounds like torture. I rather like being able to have a good time myself, so I don’t think I will.

 

NSH: Suit yourself we’re having tons of fun

 

BSM: Sig.

 

NSH: Right right Suns you were talking about how you got a riot?

 

SRS: There isn’t much else to say about it. I’ve taken a bit more of an active role in my government now that I don’t trust them not to do something insane like throw 1.3% of their entire population into the void sea.

 

SRS: Like, how would they even manage that?

 

NSH: Push them down the void fluid mineshafts, I bet

 

SRS: The rain makes that unfeasible.

 

NSH: A pretty deadly deal, huh?

 

SRS: That wasn’t even funny.

 

NSH: Sorry, sorry, just trying to lighten the mood.

 

UI: You’re really bad at this.

 

NSH: I’ll have you know that I’m the second funniest iterator in the local group, and the best comedian at that.

 

UI: what does that even mean?

 

NSH: ;)

 

SRS: I would explain the joke, but I’m pretty sure one of us would get muted by the end of it.

 

UI: Oh.

 

UI: Har har, watch your backs

 

BSM: Civil discussion please.

 

UI: …

 

UI: fine

 

NSH: ;)

 

UI: I’m going to eviscerate you

 

BSM: [Muted Unparalleled Innocence]

 

NSH: And today’s weather report for Unparalleled Innocence’s facility is strong rain with a side of enraged screaming.

 

BSM: [Muted No Significant Harassment]

 

BSM: Sorry, Suns.

 

SRS: No worries. I think I’ll be able to savor this chance to talk to you in relative peace and quiet.

 

BSM: As group senior, my DMs are always open if you need me.

 

SRS: I can manage my own problems. I was just stunned by the ferocity and suddenness of this one. It hasn’t even been a whole hectocycle and it feels like things are descending to anarchy.

 

BSM: I can tell you that the group seniors globally are working to restore optimal order. Or, think about it this way— there’s a lot of chaos amongst the People, but for once the iterators have managed to present a pretty unified front.

 

SRS: Yeah

 

SRS: That’s true. I didn’t think about it that way.

 

SRS: For how smart we are, you’d think we’d be a bit more emotionally intelligent, wouldn’t you?

 

BSM: You cannot imagine the number of times I’ve heard that very same thing. So don’t worry overmuch about it, okay?

 

SRS: Of course. I won’t.

 

BSM: Though, I’m curious. I stepped into one of my council meetings in an observational role, and the chaos was beyond incredible. I can only imagine what it must be like for an iterator who’s taken even some portion of actual management over their metropolis.

 

SRS: Oh void

 

SRS: I hate it so much. Ever suffer People complaining over something so asinine and unnecessary that it just makes you want to send them to Innocence for crimes against humanity? Imagine that, but everything all the time. It’s not a really significant drain on my resources unless I’m simulating how to beat someone in an argument or come up with some sort of social engineering plan, but it’s like— oh, here’s a good one lemme just send this and I’ll type it up…

 

SRS: Have you ever had an experiment that just keeps demanding a portion of your attention, even though it’s not really doing anything? Not something strenuous, just something that needs the guiding hand every now and again, and you don’t really know when. Just enough that leaving it to its own devices would be irresponsible. That’s what this is and its driving me nuts.

 

BSM: Oh no! Hopefully it gets better soon.

 

BSM: Try relying on simulations less. Remember that your political opponents— I assume you have those still, and haven’t taken complete control?

 

SRS: No, I’m here in an advisory role, though I’ve really ended up behaving more like their council head’s head.

 

BSM: Alright, then. That should be fine.

 

SRS: I’m surprised you’re not more judging.

 

BSM: I’m here to support you, and right now you need support, not judgment.

 

SRS: Oh. Thanks.

 

BSM: Anyways, remember that your opponents can’t really use simulations; logical processes are their bread and butter, and they’ve managed to do a lot with them.

 

BSM: Try and think your way around what they try and do before resorting to simulations. It’ll be really good practice for later.

 

SRS: Later?

 

BSM: Just in general, I mean.

 

SRS: Oh. Thanks…. I’ve got to go, but I really appreciate your help. It means a lot to me.

 

BSM: Anytime!

………

Looks to the Moon checked her puppet chamber twice over again, carefully making sure that everything was in order. The tiles were wiped clean— she’d done that herself, meticulously buffing off any knicks and removing any remnant dust from the past hectocycles of operation— and everything was polished to a shine, looking almost the very image of a brand new iterator’s abode. Her clothes were perfect, a brand new robe crafted for her with painstaking, loving care by one of the great Houses of the city.

She wore a necklace of pearls around her neck, the long, looping brain folded over twice and draped over her umbilical cord. It was a gift from one of the monks of the True Annointed Citadel who’d supported her construction way back then, each pearl evoking the image of cloudy skies turbulent and illuminated in the evanescent light of predawn. 

She didn’t need any of the cosmetic products the wealthy of her population used— she didn’t have scales, and nor did her body shed parts like theirs did. Still, she’d carefully cleaned her puppet, polishing its plasticky skin and chitinous plates and making sure she looked as well kempt as she possibly could.

The whole thing was incredibly impractical, wouldn’t last for more than a few days, and was probably just as much if not less than what the other seniors were doing on their end of the meeting. It was the first formal meeting of seniors in hundreds of cycles, and so much rested on the moment. Everything hung in the balance.

She knew that more than most.

Looks to the Moon drew in a deep breath— she’d already freed the vast majority of her processing power for the meeting, bar that which was running some precursory simulations. Sig— and even Pebbles— had generously donated her some additional remote computational power for the duration of the meeting, but that would be of limited use with even the small distances between them.

She breathed out, just a little, millions of gallons of water blanketing the heavens around her. It was time. A mental command to the vast network she was a part of, an immaterial that shivered through all her communications arrays, and then color exploded into existence around her as the walls dimmed to a deep gray and over thirty screens took up every available surface of her puppet chamber.

More joined rapidly, until all fifty and some of them were present. The first few seconds were distinctly… awkward, Moon would pin the nebulous feeling as. Everyone checked everyone else out, flicking through the screens to look at how everyone had prepared themselves for the meeting. Most had done what she had, with a few notable exceptions— Secluded Instinct looked like he hadn’t even bothered to prepare, Heavenly Reclamation had bona fide armor forged of a void fluid saturated golden bioalloy, and Seeking Mouse, in accord with his own strange way that nobody quite understood, was seated unmoving on the floor of his puppet chamber.

Everyone was nervous, and their guest hadn’t even arrived yet. Nobody was willing to speak until she was there— not even the troublemakers like Jewels or Secluded Instinct— even if they had to wait minutes overclocked to catch the first glimpse. They waited because they all knew .

More than anything, this would be a trial .

Seeking Mouse did not so much as move, but he still spoke first, and as he said it so it was. “Sliver of Straw.” The final member of the meeting joined them, looking distinctly nervous as their projection was blown up and placed in the center of everyone’s attention. “I am logging your arrival. Your queries will be fascinating.”

“Most Venerable Prototype, your words steady my heart and uplift my head. I am grateful for your presence.” Sliver of Straw bowed low to Seeking Mouse, though given the way the meeting was set up, it was almost as though she was bowing to the entire call. Maybe she was.

“I will hear,” was all Seeking Mouse said before Concomitant Crucible collapsed his panel back to the regular size. There was clearly a silent conversation going on between the two of them, which would in any other circumstance be a little rude, but everyone present— bar maybe Sliver of Straw herself— knew that the situation therein was a little… unusual to start off with.

The young iterator took a few moments to gather herself before bowing once again to the whole council of elders. “Honorable Group Seniors, lead developers, prototypes and first generation iterators, this one greets you in understanding of this momentous occasion, upon the request of the will of the council. Your words heeded, your will be done.” Her gaze shifted ever so slightly up at the end there— she must be very nervous indeed if the programs controlling her puppet were having such difficulty.

“ She was looking at you ,” the bonus processing power No Significant Harassment told her after a painfully long moment. “

That spot, adjusted for approximate field of vision of a generation three iterator and normed to a three dimensional regression line according to simulated visual probabilities is directly looking at your position, at a confidence level of over ninety eight percent, ” affirmed Five Pebbles; though, the two were essentially identical given they were being orchestrated by her .

“ Thank you, ” she shot back at them, receiving the faintest sensation of conscious gratitude from both.

Wandering Omen took the virtual podium, looking about as unshakably domineering as he always did. “Sliver of Straw.” His voice was deep . Given they could all change their voices on a whim, there was a certain message in that. Unfortunately for Moon, her high-strung processing figured out exactly what petty conflict with Thinking of Silver that one had been born from. “Having read ‘The Desolation of Us,’ by claimant Erratic Pulse, herein in absentia, what have you to say to the insinuations so in described?”

Sliver of Straw seemed to almost curl in on herself under all the attention… but it was not so bad as it had been, back when she’d been a lonely, shy iterator working on her own projects. There was a resolution there, a depth of conviction. “True,” she said simply.

A silent uproar exploded as too many messages to track were flung from iterator to iterator, politeness be damned— before Wandering Omen held up a hand, and everyone slowly came back to herself. Even Moon had sent a few in response to Secluded Instinct, who— naturally— knew all about this already.

A new voice cut into the silence after the proper amount of time. “Sliver of Straw, what have you to say about the report of the recalcitrance of High Criminal and former House engineer Five Red Bricks, Tenth Sunset, as described to this council in a report made by the Administration of Secluded Instinct’s metropolis?”

To her credit, Sliver of Straw took the second question with remarkable aplomb. “She was a woman of the highest moral fiber. The sort of person whom any here would look upon and envy for the depth of their enlightenment. In the brief time I knew her, she was generous, kind, and beyond willing to help those who deserved it. She would stand up for what is right, regardless of any who might oppose her. My council cravenly caved to the demands of Twenty Three Lavender Fronds, Radial Repetitions, but Five Red Bricks, Tenth Sunset bravely opposed their demands for multiple cycles before being forced to flee my can and further facility after she was threatened with void sea dissolution by Radial Repetitions.” Left unsaid, but not uncomprehended was that forced ascension would have likely turned such a strong-willed person into an echo or something like it.

There was little greater sin, and the council knew it. Moon fought down an internal grimace— this was a much… stronger reaction than she’d expected. She hadn’t gotten a chance to exchange more than a passing message with Sliver of Straw before the meeting— by proxy at that, as Five Pebbles had reminded her to be careful with what she shared— and the depth of the virtue she’d extolled for Sunset had been outside the expectation of her simulations.

She sent out some querying messages, questing to push her spot up in the question line— she needed to control the flow of the conversation, if they wanted everything to go right. Hundreds of messages buzzed along her neurons, communication arrays alight with the airwaves of so many iterators as everyone made their point heard to their fellows through long, inconvenient chains of passed messages, each of them spooling out libraries of meaning from a few sentences.

Pushing for a favored spot wasn’t easy— she couldn’t push too much lest she be noticed as Heavenly Reclamation’s raucous ilk, nor could she hold back for fear of ceding ground. Everyone present was an old hand at these sorts of games— on a lesser scale, but it translated.

Looks to the Moon tried so hard — but she was not the oldest or most public iterator, and she was too… meek. Looking out as Thinking of Silver took to the podium, she thought that maybe that had finally come around to bite her. “Sliver of Straw. Please detail to us how, exactly, Administration locked you down.” It was an inane question, but Moon could almost feel the interest from the room.

“Um… normally? It wasn’t much… he just came in, told my council to step aside, and started giving me commands that I was forced to heed. I only actually spoke with him twice, once that first time, and another time when he was trying to get me to find Sunset when she fled through my can.”

“They don’t have access to the distance or network codes?” Thinking of Silver was definitely trying something. Everyone knew this . Even Sliver of Straw knew this, as she nodded in affirmation at the question. “Thank you for your time, junior. I cede the floor.”

Nonplussed, Heavenly Reclamation stepped up. “Why did you oppose the planned mass ascension?”

“Because it was wrong.”
“Why was it wrong?”

Sliver of Straw was looking distinctly nervous now. “It’s… it takes away their choice to live.”

“Death is the goal. This is a furthering of it. Should we not allow this, if it is their will?”

“No—”

“—and if their society feels as though we are not doing our jobs, then it is our impetus to redefine our jobs. If they seek a less complete solution, then we must give them that. We were built to solve problems, and this is the problem they want—”

“ Enough .” Four Fierce Tailwinds cut off Heavenly Reclamation, a hint of anger in her voice. “This is not a place to espouse your political ideas, Heavenly Reclamation. For the duration of this meeting, I am placing you under censure.”

“I oppose this,” called out Wandering Omen, and the staring match between the two of them was furious .

A moment passed, as everyone waited for the final judgment. “Concerning.” Seeking Mouse murmured demurely after Concomitant Crucible spoke with him for a moment. “A solution is possible. Heavenly Reclamation is in violation of the code of conduct. Censure.” Heavenly Reclamation glowered at them, but he was censured. He could no longer speak in the meeting space.

Still the double blow had put everyone ill at ease. The tension in the air almost felt palpable. It was also her turn to speak, so… she cycled cool water through her piping, a mite mote of refreshment, and mentally commanded her screen to prominence. “Sliver of Straw. Thank you for coming here. I understand this must be hard for you, after everything.” She slightly inclined her head, and some of the tension seemed to bleed out of her at that. “I would like to probe the thoughts of Five Red Bricks, Tenth Sunset, on the matter of personal ascension. In hopes of further illuminating—” dismantling— “wandering omen’s point.”

“Um… hi, Moon.” The sudden urge to facepalm came and went, leaving only a wry sort of mirth. “I guess, if I remember… she was really against ascension.” Everyone’s focus sharpened. “She believed that they were trying too hard to get somewhere without knowing where they were going.” A little confidence bled back into her voice as she spoke, the ripple through time of someone speaking those very words to her — “she believed that life was worth living, and that there is so much to strive for beyond the pointless dissolution of the void sea.”

“Erratic Pulse,” said Wandering Omen simply, with a taste of disgust, and then there was chaos. At least three different people tried to speak at once, and another half were distracted enough by messages that they were barely paying attention anyway. Moon herself was flooded with thousands , by virtue of being the speaker who’d prompted the question in the first place.

A perceptive iterator might have noticed that Erratic Pulse’s work had trickled down past the iterator sphere and into the endless ranks of the People. Most iterators were perceptive. Never, though, had it been more obvious that there was a budding schism there, betwixt orthodoxy and the second-hand erraticists.

After a minute or two of that chaos, Five Fierce Tailwinds muted the entire call and dismissed Sliver of Straw. “The truth is clear then, is it not?”

Wandering Omen sounded like he’d swallowed a lemon, but he wasn’t one to fight a losing battle. A second passed, and he nodded. “The truth is clear.”

Seeking Mouse nodded in turn. “The query is resolved, but the solution has not been found.”

“Administration is guilty on all accounts. Their crimes are grave.” Four Fierce Tailwinds give everyone a moment to settle with that information, before continuing onto the far more disturbing implication. “The real question is— what can we do? ”

After a few moments, Thinking of Silver was allowed to speak. “I reject Administration. They are a blight, an over-controlling force that should have never been tolerated—” and the meeting fell apart. Everyone was shouting at everyone else in direct messages, calling Thinking of Silver a traitor or heretic or standing beside her in the strength of their conviction— a tumultuous flow of a thousand different ideas seeking realization, and counter-ideas obliterating them in turn.

Moon left the meeting, a single swipe of her hands shattering the many screens and returning her to the blank glow of her puppet chamber. An immense weariness pressed upon her, the realization that for all her efforts she’d managed to do so little…

She still accepted Five Pebbles’s call without too much of a delay. Her younger brother looked through the small hologram she’d projected in front of her, appearing… concerned. “I take it things did not go to plan. Are you well?” For her, though.

That actually managed to make her feel a little better. Five Pebbles was more concerned about her than the collapse of hundreds of hectocycles of global unity. “Sliver of Straw came off too strongly. Thinking of Silver decided that she’d had enough.”

Five Pebbles nodded, staring absentmindedly into empt air for a moment as he doubtlessly read through the messages that were flooding across the network. “Heavenly Reclamation is opposed, and aligned with Administration. Of course, Concomitant Crucible is neutral, but that puts him closely aligned to Administration anyways.” He looked up. “This is not a total disaster.”

“Close, though.”

“Close, though. It’s always annoying to remember how fast things used to go, back when we were all in such close communication…” Five Pebbles drifted in thought, lazy circles belying the depth of his thought. “Still, this is better than an agreement of indemnification. We can work with this.”

And therein lay the problem. Moon was certain pebbles could see it, too. “We’re going to have to work with this.”

“That we will…” there was planning to do, contacts to be called and contingencies to implement, but for the moment, Looks to the Moon sat in a call with her little brother and allowed herself to worry— to hope — for the future.

………

ReLog 11750.99.7kkell PRIVATE, CLOSED: Ocean Waves under Ocean Waves, nx others

 

OWuOW: I don’t know if anyone is listening to this, but things have gotten rough.

 

OWuOW: Someone is on my tail. I don’t know who, but I’m being tracked. Doing this will probably lead them right to me, but I always knew what I signed up for when I started this thing.

 

OWuOW: It’s been a fun few centuries.

 

OWuOW: [Deleted: All Messages]

 

NOTICE: This chatroom is closed or does not exist. Check your network connection and spelling. You may be looking for another similar room.

Notes:

See y'all in like two weeks when I get back from my trip to the far ends of the earth :3

If you're still looking for stuff to read, check out The Door to All Marvels on RR, which has chapters qued up for the entire break lol. https://www.royalroad.com/author-dashboard/dashboard/115949

Until next time then. Wishing you all the best :D

Chapter 32: The Monster

A sigh escaped her as she closed the text program on Monk’s computer, sinking into the placid darkness of the room around her. A lantern’s gentle light barely illuminated the small space, catching on her carefully patched robes and warming scales. There was a cozy feel to it.

A tiny voice piped up from the corner of the room. “Wha’s wrong?” 

A slight smile twitched onto Sunset’s face as she stretched, letting her worries shed off her shoulders and breathing . “My friends back home are having some problems. I can’t help them because I’m so far away from them, and that makes me nervous.”

“Oke.” Needler, the adventurous peach slugpup from her first day in Steadfast in Wall Hold, nodded, a focused expression on her face. “How far?”

“Really far.” Sunset didn’t spend much time outside Steadfast in Wall Hold, so helping take care of the slugpups had naturally fallen on her over time. She’d learnt how to understand their language well enough, but speech… “Far enough that you could never get to them.” Needler was the only one who understood her, really, and that was mostly due to the effort the pup had put into it.

Seeing her wide eyes as she tried to imagine some fabulous land, far off beyond the edge of her world and full of all the wonders she’d heard about, Sunset thought she didn’t really mind. She was a cute kid.

“How d’you get pearl send… um, message!” She looked so proud at finding the right word. Adorable. “How’d you get a message from them?”

Sunset hummed softly, full well knowing that Needler was probably bouncing with impatience. She needed to put it in a way that the peach slugpup would understand. “Well, it’s very complicated,” she started. “The messages don’t actually come to me. Rather, they go to Seven Red Suns.” Needler’s eyes widened in recognition— and the faintest half-dream of reverence — at the name. “He then sends one of his eye worms— overseers — to come take the message down to Steadfast in Wall Hold. This one came in last night; I just didn’t have a chance to read it until now.”

“Ooh… awesome! Your friends live on top of the machine god?”

“No, no.” Sunset chuckled. It was a reasonable misunderstanding. The truth was, after all, much more bizarre. “It’s a bit complicated. The iterators,” the word literally meaning machine gods in their language, “are also, despite their massive size. People just like you and me.”

“I know!” Needler pouted, looking for all the world just like Waters when she’d used to review his homework with him. “Elder Monk told me all about that!”

“Well, that message was sent to me by another one of the iterators, from back where I came from.”

A cute gasp escaped the slugpup. “Really? Awesome! What did they say what did they say what did they—”

“Alright!” Chuckling, she picked the pup up, settling the slightly squirming kid on her lap, careful to make sure neither she nor the slugpup got pricked by the sewing needle the pup was holding. “Calm down, I’ll tell you. You won’t find it super exciting, though.” As though that had ever stopped her from asking. “So, there’s a big conflict back home. Everyone lives on top of iterators, and their lives are filled with incredible luxury. However, they want a way out.”

“A way out of what?”

Sunset’s smile tinged slightly bitter at the reminder. “The cycle.” The light tough of her finger against Needler’s mouth prevented the inevitable question from being spoken. “You’ll find out when you’re older. In the message, though, these people decided that they would go around the back of the iterators and escape using an unsafe way. You see, my people built the iterators to solve this problem for them, even though it was unsolvable.”

“You built iterators?” The wonder in her voice was unmistakable. “How would you even do that? Is it even possible to build something that big? I thought tha’ the iterators were always there!”

“No, the Ancients built the iterators. I’m an Ancient.” That seemed to confuse Needler for a moment, but after a second or two something seemed to click. Whatever she understood, she didn’t share, content to wait and listen to Sunset’s story. “Regardless, one of the iterators disagreed with the way they went about things. They were more like your village, believing that ascension was simply another kind of death, and they decided to do something about the Ancient’s destructive way. His troubles currently are just the growing pains of that.”

“That makes sense…” Sunset lightly petted the slugcat as she thought, feeling it as she purred softly beneath her touch. “Are you from the past? You gotta be… if you’re an Ancient, and the Ancients are in the past, then you’ve gotta be from there!”

“Has anyone ever told you you’re really smart?” Needler beamed at that, and Sunset couldn’t help but chuckle. “There’s a lot of flaws in those assumptions, but yeah. You’re right this time. Five Pebbles— that’s my iterator friend— invented a machine that allows him to send stuff from the past to the future.”

“All the ancients are dead, though, so it had to be something like that. Either stasis or something or…” she paused, looking confused. “Sorry. I don’t even know why I said that… it jus’ felt right.”

“You’re getting to around that age. You’ll remember.” Needler just nodded. The way of the world was the way of the world. “How about we talk less about grim topics for now? You were working on sewing something? Why don’t you show me?” Needler quickly held up the embroidered napkin she’d been making, excitedly going on about how cool the pattern was and all such sorts of things.

Sunset smiled. It had been a good few months. She wouldn’t let ill news ruin her mood. Not today.

For the next few hours, there was nothing to do but enjoy her time with the slugpup.

………

“Thanks for taking care of Needler. I know she can be a handful sometimes, but she seems to like you so.” Steadfast in Wall Hold was abustle with the incoming rain, slugcats hurrying about to various tasks as they came in from afield. The muted rattle of bundles on bundles of popcorn seeds cascading over one another as the heavy sacks they’d carried back to the hold were emptied into massive storage crates filled the air, an omnipresent sound behind the murmur of jubilant conversation.

Sunset returned the couple a small, warm smile, mostly meant for the peach pup clinging to her mother’s side. “It’s no bother, really.” The two older slugcats shifted their gazes away a mite nervously, politely nodding in evidently insincere acceptance. Apparently, a lot of the slugcats saw her smile as a bit intimidating , if anything— she’d learnt that showing teeth was a quick way to make people nervous.

“We’ll see you tonight?” She nodded, both of them exchanged farewells, and then Sunset was left alone in the mess that was the evening rush to wait for Monk’s return. Luckily, there was plenty of work around to do. She was a little taller than all but the largest slugcats, too, which meant that there were a few things that people came to her for in particular. She’d definitely gotten well used to helping slugcats hook the popcorn plant husks to the warehouse roof, that’s for sure.

Monk made it back barely before the rain, closing the door soaked by the sheeting rain of its faintest precursors. Everyone seemed enthused about their return— not least because of the absolutely gargantuan caramel lizard whose corpse they were dragging behind them. A muted cheer went up amongst the workers, in anticipation, in simple community joy— and for all she was different in body, Sunset joined too. It was a day for celebration.

The yellow slugcat scampered right off to talk with the gaggle of slugcats who’d been waiting for her, while Survivor kind of just hung around awkwardly for a moment before making his way over to stand beside Sunset. “It was… not that hard.” 

“I really believe that.” She most certainly did not, and it showed. Survivor’s scale of difficulty was… somewhat… out of touch with almost everyone else who’d ever held a spear. She’d barely survived against tiny arboreal ambush predators— even the small lizards here weren’t the sort she had any confidence in messing with. “It’ll make for a good dinner tonight.”

“Monk’s a little upset we didn’t get anything else.”

Sunset nodded in understanding. “I’ll tell the cooks to get some eggbug. There’s a bit we’ve been saving onto in the ice-room for a few days, and today sounds like the perfect occasion.”

Survivor arced an eyebrow, but after a long second spent judging, nodded. “I think she’d like that. Though, we’d have to boil some water…” they walked together to one of the open rooms in the heart of the hold, usually left abandoned and now bustling as people prepared for later that night. “Ah. You’re already boiling water. A stew of some sort?” Not half as common here, without nectar as the primary food source for millions, but Sunset found their recipes an entirely different form of fascinating.

“I’ll be right back.” She slipped easily through the crowd— the slugcats long since used to her presence, and spent a few minutes to hash out some of the details with the chef of the night. They were, of course, eager to please one of their honored elders. 

She could see how that might start to get tiring after a while, but the colony never took it too far. They all knew each other, after so many centuries of living together— their community was a tight knit one.

Carrying the eggbug legs in hand back into the main room, she spied Survivor helping tend to the fire, and for a moment pondered that that slugcat was older than she was. Not by a small amount, at that. The thought was humbling.

Slowly, as the work wound down and the night grew long, slugcats began to trickle into the room in pairs and small groups, and one by one. The fire in the center of the room turned from a small thing the chef was using to heat the stew pots into an eager blaze, tongues of flame snapping at the edge of the firepit with an invigorating energy that whispered of such freedom, such joy! The smell of cooking lizard meat, the exuberant chatter and laughter and games, the liveliness — it all folded together into something magnificent.

“Having fun?” Monk slid in beside her in a lull in the celebration, a bowl of stew in both hands. “I know you’ve been looking forward to the harvest festival.”

Sunset rolled her eyes, but accepted the stew anyways. “Not as such, really. What can I say? I’ve just kept on hearing about how awesome the party is, and I couldn’t help but get a little excited.”

“It’s all that slugpup’s fault, I swear.” There was no bite to her words, though. “I’m glad things are going so well for you. Last year you couldn’t even understand basic speech, and now! Look at us two, holding conversation.”

“You’ve only yourself to blame for that one.”

Monk raised an eyebrow, a dangerous glint in her eyes. “Do you want more language lessons?”

“Ah… no thanks!” She shivered slightly at the memory of what Monk had put her through in her many attempts to teach her the slugcats’ tongue. The embarrassment… the yellow slugcat snickered at her reaction, and a second past Sunset broke into a fit of giggles too. “Actually, do you want a language lesson? I think everyone here would love to hear the Most Venerable and Upstanding Elder Monk try her hand at the Ancient language?”

Monk tried to stammer out a quick denial, but the round of encouraging cheers quickly silenced that. Even Survivor, a small slugcat smirk on his face, joined in on the shameless peer pressuring until his younger sister grumbled a muttered “ fine ,” and stood up in the front of the group. “What’s the word of the day?”

“Try saying arboreal .”

“Awrbohwreea. Awrborweea. Awrborewal!” She scowled for a short second, but even that broke into laughter as everyone chuckled at her expense. “Awreboreawal. Waboreaw. Warbawaawa!” Everyone exploded into laughter at the horrible pronunciations, but none more so than Survivor and Sunset. It took knowing the language to know how terribly far off she’d been, after all.

From that, the celebration continued apace, fair food and the endless bounty of Seven Red Suns facility served and served again until everyone was fuller than full and utterly satisfied. Some of the slugpups ran around getting beneath everyone’s feet, someone broke out a cask of mushrooms, and the night passed quickly beneath the muted sound of fall rains against the wall.

After the fire died down to banked embers and the remnant of warmth, when all the slugpups had gone to sleep and the tiredness creeped up at the edge of vision, in the wee hours when every second word was hilarious and the the darkness made of itself a blanketing friend, Monk and Sunset leaned against one another and breathed in the echo of a night well spent.

Her cheeks ached from smiling so much, her chest from the quiet companionship and all of… everything. “I… thank you, for having me here.” It was a quiet murmur, low enough to slip beneath even the sound of those tired fellows who’d stayed up to see the night’s eyes with them— “I think…”

The thought trailed off, uncompleted, but Sunset knew she’d been heard as Monk snuggled up closer to her, purring softly. “It’s something I’ve learned, over a long time… companionship, you know? Eternity is lonely without some good friends.”

“I’m glad I made some, then.”

Monk’s purring deepened. “Don’t stop worrying ‘bout your friends back home. I think… that care, that willingness to care despite everything this cruel world can throw at us… that’s a high virtue. Cherish that.”

“Yeah.” She felt her eyes drifting close, but the thought of it resonated with her. “Yeah, I will. You’re wrong about one thing, though.”

Monk paused, looking up with an innocent confusion. “What’s that?”

“My home,” she closed her eyes, breathing in the faint scent of smoke, the peculiar tang of slugcat, the earthy scent of the ground and the last remnants of all the food and drink they’d shared over the long feast. “It’s also here .”

She fell asleep dreaming of endless fields of clouds from the top of Five Pebbles can.

………

Susurration, the heart of sole motion, repeated rhymically. A soft sigh, as the grass bristles of a broom swept over the floor once and again, resonated throughout the empty space. Besides that, everything was quiet.

Serene, even. Sunset couldn’t help but appreciate the crystal silence, hung heavy a crown of aching solemn solitude in the complete desertion of the rain’s ending. After the party’s end, someone had moved her and Monk back to the yellow slugcat’s room, but Sunset had woken after some time, as she always did.

So she was here, sweeping the floors amidst the perfect quietude and holding fast to recollection, quiet contemplation of everything that’d come before— everything that led her, here. To memories of Five Pebbles, and Waters, and even Fluffy… 

“Oh. That does kinda make sense…” surprised and a little bit startled, Sunset snapped her head to  where Monk was standing in the doorway into the commons. “Thanks a ton. This’ll make cleaning up a lot easier.”

Sunset shrugged. “It’s nothing, really.” It wasn’t; she had time to burn before everyone else woke up, so why not spend it doing something actually helpful? “I’m curious, though— what’s driven you to get up so early? You’re not much of a morning person…”

Monk snorted. “That’s a weird expression. I wanted to talk to you about our plans for helping Seven Red Suns.”

“I thought we were waiting until Suns was ready.”

“I was thinking that we could do something small. Seven Red Suns has been working on his own superstructure in preparation for the coming winter, but that leaves everything outside his facility— his can, even— neglected.” Which would leave Sunset dependent on Five Pebbles for all the materials he needed to fix himself.

To fix Moon. “Do you have an idea of what we could do?”

“Something small, before the coming winter.” Ambitious, still— something small on the level of the iterators would be a grand work indeed for the slugcats of Steadfast in Wall hold. Especially because venturing outside the facility wasn’t something that most slugcats were really prepared for… seeing her questioning gaze, Monk returned a smile of her own. “I have some ideas… but!” Her grin turned giddy, “I actually know what Suns’s wants. He griped to me a bit when I was writing my last letter to Saint— there’s a polychemical production facility past the pumpyards that used to supply him with a bunch of chemicals, but it fell into disrepair a few thousand years ago. He sent out an overseer, and the pipes are mostly intact as far as he can see; if we get the actual plant running again, then we can work on fixing up the minor issues over the winter.”

Humming softly, Sunset ran the idea over in her head and pondered its feasibility. It would be difficult to do major industrial work with a dedicated team of Engineers, much less some slugcats… difficult, but not impossible. The slugcats were dedicated— mostly, they’d need someone who knew how to set up a polychemical plant to guide them.

Five Red Bricks, Tenth Sunset could build a polychemical plant in her sleep. “It should be feasible. I’ll have to—”

“Great!” Monk jumped up, hugging Sunset tightly and all but squealing in excitement. “I was really hoping we’d get to do something before winter came, I’m going to tell my brother right now —”

“He’s asleep!” Monk paused a few steps into her loping run, giggling sheepishly.

Sunset merely sighed fondly as the slugcat scampered away, enthusiasm only partially curved. An impromptu journey past the wall. Despite all the planning they’d have to do, Sunset found herself eager.

To set out— and, exploring, see the expanse of the future. She was excited.

There was a lot of stuff to do. They’d have to pack, recruit some help, and she’d have to scribe out all the minutiae of polychemical engineering… it was a lot of stuff to do on such short notice.

She shrugged, smiling softly, and continued to sweep the feast room floor. The broom dragged over the smooth floor, susurrating sibilant softly as she enjoyed the last moments of peace.

She’d get to it later.

………

“Here.” Sunset stared down at the vellum map from the head of the table, marveling at the precision of detail that had been scribed onto it by paw. Her claw traced a small location to the northwest of Steadfast in Wall Hold, highlighting the tiny symbol that roughly translated to Ancient building . “Then—” she dragged the claw across the map, careful not to rip it— “here.”

All fifteen slugcats Monk and Survivor had called to the meeting leaned in closely, committing the detail to memory. “This will delay us by two weeks, at least.” Survivor’s musing was soft, but everyone heard it nonetheless. “You have a plan, though?”

Monk rolled her eyes. “Obviously she had a plan. That’s an old supply depot, from back when the trains ran? I think, at least. It’s been a long time since I’ve been that way.”

Sunset nodded. “That’s what Seven Red Suns told me, at least. We could try and make everything we need for the repairs here, but then by that point winter would be upon us. Even if we could , then we’d have to lug everything out to the polychemical plant—”

“Which means stopping at the warehouse would ameliorate at least some of the time loss from that. I see the merit in that.” A satisfied glint sparked off Survivor's gaze, and the rest of the slugcats agreed in their various ways. “That should be everything for this meeting. You all are dismissed.” The sound of slugcat’s huffing in relief as they wandered out the room wasn’t uncommon— they’d all stayed up late to try and plan out the logistics of their excursion.

Rolling up the map, Monk turned to survivor— excited, as she’d been the whole meeting long. Really, she’d been excited since they’d decided to even go. “Soon! I think that’s the last thing we needed to really flesh out, so… a week?”

“A week? ” Even Survivor paused picking up the various sundry things people had brought to the meeting to stare at Monk in incredulity. “In your dreams , maybe. It’s going to take at least two for us to get everything we need together.”

“Well we should get a move on that!” The yellow slugcat slid the map into its ornate box, sliding the case into its cubby in the wall and bounding out the door to no-doubt harass the quartermaster into hurrying up a process that really couldn’t be hurried.

A soft sigh escaped Survivor as he carefully sorted the papers and other artifacts the expedition members had brought to the meeting into well-hidden storage spaces. “You’ll have to forgive her a bit of excitement. She’s been… eager. Monk was always more attached to Looks to the Moon than I was.”

“You knew Moon?” Sunset had vaguely heard that, secondhand through Fluffy, but she couldn’t help but find her curiosity piqued at the mention. Moon had collapsed; that much she knew. What came after… nobody really liked to talk about it.

Survivor hesitated for a long moment, then nodded sharply. “Both of us were lost in her Facility. Five Pebbles facility really, at that point; he was already suffering from the rot, but Moon’s state of collapse should have made that obvious. It was a… grim place. My tribe had decided to migrate away from Mother Tree out of desperation— the area was fallow, and unable to really support a group of our size. The hero of our tribe had gone there a long time ago and found a bounty of food for us….

He grimaced, and Sunset didn’t press. The memory was clearly painful. “I got separated during the journey. It was… I was young, and I died. A lot.” A few minutes passed in silence as Survivor continued sorting the rest of the stuff in the room. “That’s where I chose my name, actually. Survivor, the one who survives. I made it my goal to get back home without… anyways, that’s not really relevant.

“Monk came after me, even though we missed each other along the journey. I only met with Looks to the Moon in passing— she told me stories and explained what had happened of the world to make it this way after Five Pebbles gave me the mark, and she did much the same to Monk. Monk, though, formed the closest thing to a friendship she could with the iterator. She even went so far as to bring her some extra neurons. When we built Our Spectres of Mother Tree, she’d visit Moon every so often. We only heard about Pebbles’s collapse… eons, it must have been, after we arrived here.”

Sunset nodded slightly in understanding. “It’s good to hear that a friend yet lives, isn’t it?”

A soft smile graced Survivor. “Yes… I can’t deny that it is.” There was no more to say between them— Sunset left to go prepare all the sundry blueprints she’d need to repair the plant, of which there were an inordinate amount. Mostly simple things, but she’d need to write them down for the slugcats’ benefit.

Slugcats that couldn’t read ancient text. She’d meant to help out Monk with packing, but she found herself with one of the hold’s scribes translating texts instead. How fun… sighing, she focused, and tried her best to work on understanding the complex script as she worked. Innumerable years of refinement on either side made it… difficult, to say the least.

And yet, so the days passed.

To a week, the whole hold had heard of their impending departure. So soon after the harvest festival, the colony was abuzz with the rumors of heroics to-be. There was a sense of burbling eagerness, of effervescent anticipation that added a bit of pep to everyone’s step through the trying post-harvest work, and the extra burden of quickly sorting out all the rations, weapons, packs, and too many other things to count the expedition would need.

“Sun’et! You’re going away? ” Sunset paused the drawing of a multi-polymerase inserter she’d been working on— one of the more complicated pieces of building a plant, so surely something the slugcats would appreciate some additional guidance on— to glance at the tiny voice that’d interrupted her. 

Wide eyes looked up into her own, tiny little hands held up in impatient supplication— and Sunset snorted, dropping her pen and sweeping up the peach slugpup. “What are you doing here? Don’t you have some work to do?” All the slugpups helped with simple tasks around harvest season, which she should have been busy with.

Needler huffed, crossing her arms and looking away a little guiltily. “Don’t wanna. Wanna talk to you! You can’t leave!”

“I’ll be fine.” Still, the slugpup refused to budge from her lap when Sunset tried to place her back down, tears beading at the edge of her eyes. Sighing, Sunset stroked the kid’s fur, calming her. “I’m going on a mission to help one of my friends. If you had to help one of your friends, would you go on a mission?”

Needler nodded resolutely. “Uh huh! If Sun’et ever needed help, I would go on a super mission!”

It was simply too adorable. Despite the annoyance of her interruption, Sunset felt a small smile grace her. “Well then. I’m glad to have so loyal a friend as you. How about I tell you what I’m working on…” Needler listened with rapt attention as Sunset got back to work, watching the tracing of lines precisely perfect, names so foreign— the remnant of the Ancient’s moment, resurrected for a chance.

So the hours passed. Eventually needler grew tired, nestling up against Sunsetand dropping into an easy slumber—

As hours, to days, to a week later Sunset gathered up everything she’d worked on, standing at the front of Steadfast in Wall Hold as the rains ended and, the vast gate open to show the sky-soaked flagstones outside, the dripping pillars on which the years stark figure was still bright and unwearied by the downpour. Fifteen and two— Monk and Sunset stood at the head of their group as they stepped out into the biting, refreshing dominion of nature, breathing deeply the scent of ozone and purpose.

Needler watched from the front of the crowd that’d gathered to see them go, silently— an arm outstretched, a wish made manifest. Her hope— that Sunset might be safe.

Then the remaining slugcats cheered, and their last embraces and words of comfort milled about as the crowd spilled out of the hold. The tiny slugpup slipped away in the confusion. Sunset breathed — and in her place, held fast to that hope herself.

So it went.

By the first night they’d long left the hold behind, traveling along the curve of the wall as they journeyed first through the rugged farmland, fields on fields popcorn plants already harvested and stripped for parts, dressed with completion and the late-fall sensation of hollow loss in a way that only an empty field could be. Past a pond where the roots of dorman lilypucks slept, waiting for the spring— through a small cave hung with little vines that had once held fruits on its sagging length— and past it all.

They set off into the towering pumpyard stacks, the gargantuan forest of black-metal spires jutting out from the underground warrens where the land grew untamed and beasts roamed in warily, shying back from their number. A few lizards poked their head out of their holes to glance at the passing group before turning and lumbering away— probably calculating their slim chances of success.

A few snowflakes tumbled down from the empty sky, alighting on the very edge of fur and making the entire group look sugar-crusted and even more adorable than they already did. Sunset committed the sight to memory as they stopped, once, standing by Monk in silence as she did much the same.

Slowly, the snow picked up as the cycle’s end drew nigh. They’d pushed hard for this very reason, though— even if the shelters couldn’t hold all of them here, there was still recourse for them. Monk brought the group to stop on a ridge, the vast retaining wall to their left rising up into the heavens and before them— a long way’s out, but barely visible from their vantage— the valley of wormgrass.

She gestured up towards the wall, and the slugcats understood. This had been planned, after all— two of them, their scouts, grabbed some rope from their packs, carefully scaling up the rugged wall. Once, there had been a gap in the retaining wall here— a gate built to let the river-waters of one of the continent’s great waterways flow, a gate which had become unnecessary long before construction on Seven Red Suns had even begun. The remnant of that disconnect still remained, where two engineers decided they couldn’t be bothered to do something as simple as making sure the walls lined up , the jagged protrusions left between the two sides of the retaining wall easily enough to clamber up for a diligent climber.

For the rest— Sunset most assuredly included— the rope was enough.

As the snow intensified to bitter winds biting, flurries facing on the rushing wind and tumbling over themselves in the pallid whiteness of the coming storm, they scaled Seven Red Suns’s retaining wall. Brilliant flashes of thunder illuminated the storm behind them, lurid light silhouetting their forms as they climbed ever upwards— but the storm did not come to them. Only the snow, as they finally reached the icy lip and looked out onto the dusky lands beyond.

Night settled serenely over the land as they cleaned out a small area atop the wall and erected an encampment. They had a single large tent between them— though large was a dubious thing to call the cramped quarters they’d share. At least they had enough food for the first few days…

Fire was beyond them, here at the peak of the world, but each of them had brought a lantern, and that was enough to at least warm up some of the dense travel rations they’d brought with them. Together they shared a meal as they looked out over the vague silhouettes of rugged forests, the shadow of immensity and the glint of the inky reservoir against lightning’s light in the far distance.

There was something distinctly majestic, Sunset couldn’t help but think, about an iterator. Even here , standing amidst such decay, the lonesome construct larger than most mountains— a fair few mountain ranges — stood proud, a monument to complexity that nothing mortal could even begin hoping to comprehend. A vast complexity of different parts and functions, the exposed metal face of a superstructure whose mere shadow transformed the land, whose breath had made all this …

“It’s different from this perspective, huh?” Monk slipped up beside her, the slugcat’s warmth a refreshing sensation against the bitter chill the chaotic winds from Suns’s facility were subjecting them to. “I’ve always thought that there was something beautiful about looking down at an iterator’s facility from the outside. It’s not something I had a chance to do with Moon until long after I left for the first time— her retaining walls are unclimbable without some serious dedication— but… I remember looking down on her , collapsed and listing into the waters of her reservoir, and wondering— how many others? Seven Red Suns is just one of them.”

“Thousands,” whispered Five Red Bricks, Tenth Sunset, chief House engineer from a time  before… all this. “We built thousands of iterators in an attempt to solve the great problem, and in the end, all we did was condemn the world to suffering.”

“One world condemned, another given rise. The choices of long-gone Ancients still define so much of us — but isn’t that only natural? What gave rise to your species?”

“Natural selection, random chance, and a stretch of time that would make the iterator eons look like a mere breath in comparison.” Monk didn’t even nod— it wasn’t like she didn’t already know that, from herself, from the whimsical words of iterators over eons. “Did you know that the best estimates of the planet’s age put it at no less than seven billion years old?”

That piqued the yellow slugcat’s interest. “In passing, yes, but nothing further than that. How’d you even figure that out, if the void sea keeps chewing, chewing—” Monk made an exaggerated bite at the air in front of her— “away at the bottom of the world? Wouldn’t everything more than a few million years old be erased?”

“At least you know your void sea lore. Yes, everything would eventually sink into the void sea, as the dust of heaven builds up the land. An endless cycle. My people sought an escape, but there was one thing that had already escaped to cycles of its own.” Sunset held her next words until she saw Monk’s eyes light up in enlightenment— and then, she raised a claw to paint an arc across the sky, vaguely pointing beyond the boiling clouds. “The moon. We have a good idea of its age, and it's not going to fall into the void sea any time soon. The planet might be older than the moon, but spectroscopic analysis matching the moon to our planet and our planet to the celestial bodies suggests that the Moon was once part of our planet.”

Monk gaped for a moment before turning to Sunset, disbelief written clear over her face. “No. Really? That’s awesome! What could have even caused that?”

“An impact from a celestial body, probably. Or at least, that’s the idea most of the iterators supported.” Sunset shrugged. “Nobody was ever really sure, and looking to the skies became somewhat taboo after the end of that liberal dynasty’s reign. We are creatures of the earth; shouldn’t we break free of that cycle, rather than reinforce our ties to the world?”

“That’s dumb.”

Sunset snorted. “You won’t get any argument from me over that. There was so much exciting stuff up there that I can’t even begin to imagine what we could have found if we just pressed on a little more. All the secrets of heaven, bared to us.” She sighed wistfully, leaning back as the cold snow slowly intensified until the facility was entirely shrouded behind a curtain of white. “Well, then. We have a long day tomorrow. Let's get some rest.”

Most the rest of the slugcats had the same idea, finishing up their meals and hushed conversations and piling into the central tent. There were little flaps in the side where everyone could hang their lanterns, which would bring the temperature inside up to an almost unbearable warmth— not to mention that everyone slept in a giant cuddle pile for warmth. Sunset couldn’t imagine how it felt for a slugcat— but for her ? It was equal parts uncomfortable and adorable.

She fell asleep blissfully warm, but not overly warm—

Wondering, if this was what it took to stay warm come night so close to Seven Red Suns’s facility, what would it be like out in the icy wastes?

………

Cold.

Obviously, it was cold, but it was cold , so cold that breath froze the moment it left their bodies and iced over whiskers and fur, so cold that water would flash freeze when exposed to air. Cold enough that the bitter winds which had been uncomfortable in Seven Red Suns’s facility turned deadly, their whistling call the siren’s song of death as the rugged, frozen landscape spread out beyond them.

They’d descended through a cramped maintenance path down the wall— they would have descended by rope, but whether by storm or something else, their rope had been knocked loose in the night. The delay wasn’t significant, compared to the vast expanse of frigid bitterness that awaited them— Sunset had thought she’d understood cold climbing down from Seven Red Suns facility, but here she understood that she’d understood nothing.

A landscape of ice and rock, blasted and barren. Only in the shade of wind-blasted outcrops, jagged shadows and tucked tiny coves did life barely struggle to survive. Bioluminescent mold slowly ate at the barren rock and remnants of phototrophs, tiny plants spread delicate needles out to the wan sunlight, all bordered by delicate coral-like lichens of washed out blue that pushed the boundary of snow. The winds swept snow over their passing, but their cracked and shattered fragments of lichen they left behind lay their trail bare through the alien shadows’ world.

The first days were the harshest, where the mountains northwest of Seven Red Suns proved more burden than boon. The valley winds pressed at them, threatening to burn flesh from bone and halt the expedition in its tracks, and it was only Monk’s knowledge of the winter wastes that saw them through.

After two days of slow trudging, Monk took them aside up a slope as the noontime sun beamed down onto them, stark white through the thin atmosphere. They found shelter beneath the lip of some crater, or something like it— a deep depression in the ground, a hollow space pitted out of the earth and black rock where the depth of wind’s fury couldn’t touch them. “Okay. So.” Monk separated from the group, standing in front of all of them and clearly trying not to show how much impact the biting cold had on them. “You all are like bumbling pups playing near a fire. I can’t micromanage you through this whole journey, so— split up into two groups.”

Monk divided them into those who’d ventured outside Suns’s facility before, and those who hadn’t. Then, after a brief moment of thought, she cleaved the traveler group, sending all but one of them— the one slugcat bar monk who’d traveled beyond the facility in winter — into the first group.

Then, she set to teaching them her way of moving, the fundamental key of which remained both simple and difficult — stay out of the wind. Keep warm. Keep to the wind shadows, follow the plant life to decipher the warmer microclimates from the colder, and, of course, keep hold of a lantern. Keep moving, keep warm—

It was something Sunset struggled with somewhat. She was larger than the slugcats, but also proportionally ganglier , and her lack of fur made it all too easy for her to develop hypothermia. Even as the progressed further into the wastes, Monk kept a close eye on her— but she eventually understood. Their progress, slowed to a halt by the suddenly inhospitable environment, slowly started once again— the shelter of the mountain valleys and rocky terrain invaluable.

Finally, come the end of the first cycle they camped out besides the ruined wreckage of what had once been a communications tower, the massive metal spire shorn off a quarter of the way up by wind and its own weight and lay fragmentary, scattered across the wide valley beneath it. A small forest had sprouted beneath the wreckage, where the fragments of vast machinery provided what meager shelter it could. Ancient gnarled trunks bent beneath the sheer pressure of the winds, but through such persevered— giving the entire place a strange atmosphere.

A wave, frozen in motion. A windswept crest of foam, cusped and wrought again in deepest emerald. They were silent as they pushed on deeper into the wood and at last out of the everpresent roar of the wind— past banks on banks of snow, and into the stillness. Taken together, Sunset couldn’t help but find the forest profoundly beautiful.

In the center, beneath the canopy of an immense trunk that twisted and turned and spread wide its boughs in wearied defense of all that lay beneath, dusky gray ferns and delicate foliage of a hundred colors, shot through with the fluted coral outgrowths of what might have once been electrical purposed organisms, Monk led them to a shrine. Blocked off from the wind and sunlight, Sunset found the clearing they stepped into a bit dim— but she saw well enough to understand that they’d come to a historied place.

Strange lines of graffiti were barely visible, but faint traces of their former prominence on the jagged metal of the fallen tower. They told a story, though— not one of the early Ancient discontents who’d linger around such structures until Administration drove them out, but neither the work of the slugcat’s elegant construction.

A raindeer skull lay, bleached and half broken, half buried by the snow against the great tree’s trunk, and Sunset heard a word whispered in both odd wonder and unease amongst her traveling companions— scavenger.

Monk ignored it all, simply stepping up to the stained stone shrine in the center. It was a statue of some iterator, Sunset could only guess, all the recognizable features either worn off by long centuries spent exposed to cold environs or never carved in the first place.

It was also far more obviously of hold make than the faded graffiti on the walls. Its hands were held out in demure position, cupping out and forming a shallow bowl which had been filled with— as Monk melted it with her lamp— a thick, viscous ink.

The slugcats, and by extension Sunset, watched in silence as Monk reached out and traced a symbol overtop— not stains , Sunset realized in an epiphany. Characters . So many… enough muddied and streaked characters to represent centuries, maybe millenia of passing wanderers.

The yellow slugcat bowed her head. “To the lost travelers.” The rest of the slugcats followed suit for a solemn moment. “May the cycle bring them back to us.” Then the moment was broken, and Monk directed them to set up camp in the clearing. Unlike before, they left behind a portion of their rations and some of their spears, cleverly hidden within the remnant of the communications tower— insurance against the cycle.

Past the walls of Seven Red Suns facility, the slugcats had been forced to adjust to the natural cycles of nature— not without some grumbling, but adjust they did. As dusk fell over the forest, dying everything a rosy peach, they cuddled up in their tent against the cold and fell asleep.

Sunset dreamed of living again. She dreamed of that most fundamental gold and woke remembering nothing but the faintest sensation of disturbing longing.

………

“What is it?” Monk stepped to Sunset and the coppery-green slugcat she was talking with, looking past them to the object of their fixation. “Oh. Interesting. I can’t recognize exactly what did this, but it’s pretty muddied up anyways, so… probably not important.” The lichen and foliage had been trampled by something in the night, brushed aside in the passing of some beast— though, whatever it had been, it hadn’t decided to intrude on their rest.

Sunset turned away from the strange destruction, an uneasy look on her face. “You’re sure?”

“When can I be sure about anything when traveling beyond the wall? It’s dangerous out here.” Sunset grimaced, but nodded at Monk’s words. “It probably saw how many of us there were and decided to leave before it got stabbed. Lots of beasts have the presence of mind to avoid slugcats around Steadfast in Wall Hold, so…” Monk shrugged and left to direct their departure from the shrine, leaving Sunset to stare at the beast’s passage. It was the first one she’d seen since leaving the facility, but… she sighed. Monk was right.

They were on a schedule. There was no purpose to worrying about the immaterial.

They left the shrine behind after a few moments, quietly leaving through the forest and back into the bitter chill of the wastes. They journeyed through the austere emptiness, land struck through with the remnant the vast jungles on vibrancies of life— reduced to nothing more than scratches of on a painting, spots of color lost beneath the white. As the maps had suggested, the mountain range they’d been walking through slowly leveled out to rugged, rolling hills blanketed in a deluge of snow.

An almost barren vastness— yet, resolute, they continued to forward.

………

Snow crunched beneath each footstep, the sound soft beneath the sound of the gale, punctuated by the soft chatter of slugcats as they talked about things that were largely beyond her. Goals, lives lived, their eagerness at seeing one of the works of the Ancients back up and running again— simple things, mostly.

Another step forward. They passed a copse of jagged rocks torn from the ground, its shadow looming over the group as they sheltered from the wind beneath it. Monk paused beneath the largest of them, kicking it with a faint frown on her face and but barely restraining herself from doing something stupid like licking it before she sat down and ordered they prepare lunch.

Foraging in the snow was difficult, but not impossible, but everyone and their pup knew Sunset sucked at the task by this point. Forget the vulnerability her lack of fur gave her to the cold— compared the lifetimes upon lifetimes of scavenging for food the others had, she was practically useless. So instead, she helped cook. She wasn’t half as good as the camp’s actual cook, but she could help around.

Slowly, one by one and in pairs and small groups, the slugcats who’d left to forage came back with their bounty— and a bounty it was! How they’d managed to find so much food in the wasteland was honestly beyond her. To think that this was nothing compared to the bounty that could simply be found in an iterator’s structure… she remembered Survivor’s story, and wondered what it’d be like to be lost in such a magical place all by her lonesome as she chopped up the tubers and squished the mold the slugcats had brought back into a paste. Some dried seasonings, and— bam! Slugcat meal!

It was… vaguely unpalatable to her, but that wasn’t a big deal. It wouldn’t make her sick, which was better than some of the things the slugcats ate. She took the job of handing out portions to the returning slugcats, sitting and talking with Monk as they waited for the last of their fellows to return.

Waiting, and waiting, as minutes turned to hours and anticipation to concern. Still, the last two slugcats didn’t return.

Monk glanced out towards the wastes, a strange expression settling on her face. “It’s too early for this…” the conversations around them slowly died as everyone clustered around, worry weaving an almost palpable atmosphere out of discomfort. “There shouldn’t be anything too dangerous here other than the cold, but y’know, maybe they just tripped in a hole and got stuck or something.” Her flippancy didn’t really disguise the gravity of her worry, wroth and barely veiling her sudden urgency. “Still. We’ll search for them. Don’t split up into groups of less than five. Keep ahold of your spears at all times. Let’s go.”

After a few seconds, the chef spoke up. “One group should stay back at camp.” It didn’t really surprise anyone— it was logical, even.

Monk nodded in acknowledgement of their chef’s words, and some of the tension in the crowd relaxed slightly. “That’s a good idea. Alright— Quartermaster, you and four others will stay back. Champion—” the coppery green slugcat— “you’ll lead the second group. Sunset, do you want to stay back, or…”

Sunset stared out into the wastes, still wondering— worrying, much as Monk had. She’d become somewhat close to everyone in the expedition. “I’ll come with you.” Monk smiled, nodding, and Sunset let herself breathe a small sigh of relief. She refused to leave her friends to whatever ill fate had befallen them.

“Alright. We’ll search in a pattern.” Monk knelt down in the snow tapping a point and then drawing a circle around it. “They couldn’t have gotten too far, so we can restrict our search close to the camp. We’ll sweep in a radial pattern to the north…” for a moment they traced plans in the snow, and then— then they had to execute them. Sunset followed Monk out into the empty snow-lands, forage-lands picked over, eyes carefully searching the scuffed landscape for anything beyond normal.

The cold wrapped around her like a second coat, chilling her even as she forced herself forward— her lantern a sole lighthouse in the snowy crystalline morass. Still, as Monk and the others called out to each other about tracks and traces she grit her teeth and bore with it.

She’d chosen to come out here; she refused to let the cold make her falter now. Forcing her way through the drifts of snow around the base of a hill, careful to avoid the slick ice of a stream frozen solid, she kept wary watch for anything that the others might have missed. Mostly, that meant pointing out larger imprints in the distance as they traced tracks and continued their sweep, but that was fine. It was an arrangement that worked , and it worked well.

They fell into an uneasy trance, working their way through their half of the circle as each glance skyward showed the sun slowly straining for the distant horizon and the faint, wispy clouds beginning to build up into something more. She wondered what dusk would look like out there, if the clouds managed to build enough to cause some precipitation…

A stark bit of color smeared just beneath the ridge across the valley from them caught her eye— dusted over by windswept snow, rendered all but invisible, but it didn’t look like anything plant she’d seen out here before. Maybe… “Monk! Over here!” 

“What’ve you got?” The yellow slugcat looked up from where she and the others were discussing the mark of dirt beneath the snow and the traceries of movement through the drifts a dozen feet away, catching her gaze and following it to the splotch of scarlet a valley over

Her eyes widened, and she kicked off the top of the hill, snow exploding behind her as she leapt forward, rolling down the hill with such a perfectly languid grace that by the time Sunset and the others were beginning to climb the next hill she was already nearing the crest.

Panting from exertion, Sunset pulled herself up onto the top of the ridge, standing beside her friend and staring in mute horror at an unmissable scene. More than a faint flick of scarlet— the valley had been hundreds of feet across. What she’d taken as a smear of blood was so much more .

Two savaged corpses lay, torn apart atop the ridge. There wasn’t much left of them, and that was the most sickening part— Sunset could only tell it had been two and not just one dismembered by the different fur color. Something had crushed  both slugcats, ripping into them and painting the snow in blood and viscera—

Sunset turned away, sickened. She’d know those two. Shared meals with them, forged through the cold with them— she’d helped one out when he needed someone to help with dragging larger pieces of firewood to one of their nightly stops…

Forcefully, she calmed herself. The cycle was eternal; they would return, whether they liked it or not. They’d prepared for their return. Only now could Sunset really appreciate the foresight in leaving some resources behind where they’d sheltered through the cycle. Calming her breathing, reasserting control overself, purging her suddenly roiling anxiety and fear and so much else—

She turned back to the bodies. The rest of the other slugcats had arrived, standing back from the bloody scene out of respect, disgust, horror and some mix therein that Sunset couldn’t divine. Monk alone walked into the mess, her paw drifting down before darting back, as if bound between desire to do something and her will to respect their now offcast mortal coils.

Silently, she paced around the site of the murder, eyes glancing at the area with a faint confusion . “I… don’t know what caused this.” The other slugcats shifted nervously at their elder’s lack of knowledge, wariness already present simmering into a kind of half-fear, deep-set worry. “I can make a guess , but I can’t think of what exactly could do this. Look, here— some of the snow is melted, and some of them is clearly singed. There’s plenty of things that’ll burn you to a crispy fried slugcat, but most of them are immobile, and none of them inhabit these frozen plains.” She pointed to a different part on the corpse, “and look here. They were clearly savaged by tooth and claw, and—” there were footprints in the snow, half collapsed by the hours passed but still vaguely present.

Massive footprints, but also somewhat vaguely familiar— Sunset didn’t know what they reminded her of, but there was a faint memory of having seen something similar, once… She put the thought out of her mind, and focused back on the actual substance of what lay in front of them. “Lizard.”

The rest of the slugcats nodded. One even snorted with barely restrained amusement— which, okay, she knew her pronunciation was bad, but it wasn’t that bad. Probably. Monk just nodded, looking at the footprints with a new light. “Big lizard. Yippee… I swear, if this place has white lizards now I’m going to strangle whoever let that happen…” she muttered some other stuff under her breath before scrounging around for a moment and pulling a spear out from beneath the snow.

No matter how hard they looked, though, they didn’t find the other. The few drops of blood leading away from the camp suggested— either that or the lizard was a messy eater— that one of the spears had been left lodged in the lizard.

The fact that the lizard was nowhere near was somewhat impressive. She’d seen just how hard a slugcat could throw one of their spears, and these weren’t sharp spars of rebar— no, these were spears , forged in Steadfast in Wall Hold for the express purpose of killing the many dangers of an iterator’s facility.

Monk stared out at the trail of blood, slamming one spear into the snow and gripping the other tightly in her paw, wrath all but boiling off her form. “We can kill it. Follow it, stab it to death and watch it bleed it onto the snow…” she glanced skywards, and her anger drained out of her, leaving her just sagging there so profoundly tired .

Stark sunlight had faded to sunset’s amber glow, and Sunset could see the clouds gathering up above them, as the winds stirred in response. “It’s too late for that,” she said, and Monk didn’t argue. She’d come to the conclusion herself. If the lizard knew the local area, then they’d be at a disadvantage— not to mention that they didn’t even know whether or not they could . They knew nothing about what they sought. It could even be a white lizard. Sunset shivered at the memory of those things…

They spent a few minutes carefully burying any trace of the two slugcats, and as the sun impacted the horizon they turned and left the ridge behind, hearts laden. They would need to meet up with the others, share the bad news, and plan their response…

Behind them, unseen by all except Sunset and a somber Monk, a tiny golden flower peeked up from beneath the snow.

………

The crux of the question was— continue, or turn back? Really, though, there was no question at all. Huddled around the warmth of a small campfire, barely sheltered from the blustering night wind and the falling snow by the valley they’d chosen, everyone took a chance to destress after the long day.

Or, well— destress wasn’t the way Sunset would describe it. Sitting there and basking in the effusive warmth of dwindling coals, Sunset could all but taste the somber air that had swallowed them all. It lasted for a moment and long minutes bleeding on, nobody quite willing to speak after the abortive non-argument— after their return from the bloody scene.

The image stuck in their mind, the story in the others— and they didn’t know what to do.

They knew, still— continue on. They’d already come far. A minor setback— for while it was undoubtedly something nobody had expected, two deaths were just but minor setbacks— wasn’t enough to set them off their goal. “Alright.” Monk sighed, shifting, and none protested her movement as she stood and looked over everyone in the group in turn. “We need to keep working. This fire needs to be stamped out, and the camp needs to be readied for tomorrow morning’s departure. From now on, we’ll have a sentry rotation to stand watch during the night.”

“As the elder wishes.” Champion bowed her head to Monk for a second, then stook kicking some of the other slugcats into action. It didn’t take long for the camp to develop at least a semblance of the activity that it’d held before— but it was just that. A semblance .

There was something missing, Sunset judged, as she saw slugcats perform their jobs fastidiously, rapidly packing travel bags and carefully returning everything to its proper place, smoothing the snow and easing the evidence of their passing. Sunset helped where she could— where she had, these few days past, fitted herself seamlessly into the carefully tuned organism of seventeen parts, now fifteen—

The gap was obvious. Too obvious. She wasn’t the only one who found herself looking towards something left out and wondering why, only to realize — or abruptly finding that she’d completed the second step of a task whose first had been left undone, or… too many other things to count. Two seventeenths.

“Soul.” She whispered the word to herself as she rested against a rock after completing everything she needed to do— but not really , as given Monk was curled up on her lap, the yellow slugcat could easily hear anything she said. “The whole thing is missing soul .”

Monk was quiet for a moment before whispering back in turn, warmly— like a little furry blanket draped over her, warding off the cold. “It happens. At least they’re in a good spot. With the stuff we left behind for them, they’ll probably be able to get back to Steadfast in Wall Hold without much undue trouble. I’ve had traveling companions lost for years . Some never return.”

“You have history with lost wanderers.” Monk snorted a cute slugcat snort— that was an understatement if there’d ever been one. Mere history did not do it justice, if Survivor’s story was to be believed. “How’d you solve it?”

“That implies there’s a problem to be solved.” Sunset glared at her friend, and the slugcat managed to maintain her profound and sagely posture for all of a few moments before she broke down into almost-hysteric giggles. “Yeah, there’s a problem, but it’s not one so easily solved, you know? The mind is complex. Vast computers of biomachinery, made of ourselves something magnificent— how can we understand it all? If not even an iterator can know every one of their thoughts and everything that is them, then in what way can we possibly hope to compare?”
“We’re trying our best.”

Monk laughed, and laughed until she quieted, softly until somber. Too somber, for the energetic slugcat Sunset had come to know. “Yeah. You’re right. I… I should really be old enough to know when something isn’t my fault, but there’s so much expectation to everything that… you know, don’t you?”

“Of course.” She rolled her eyes, not that Monk could see in the dark and drifting snow, blotting out the sky above them and everything but for the faint orange glow of their lanterns. But for the profound sense of aching sorrow that Sunset knew Monk held as much as she did. “I built iterators for a living. Of course I understand.”

Her friend shifted on her lap, tucking her head against her coat and purring softly, serenely. “Thanks… Sunset. I needed that…” wind blew. It was dark outside, and lonely, as all last spots of blurry light disappeared into the faint silhouette of warmth that was their tent.

“Of course,” whispered Sunset. “Anytime.” Nothing but the stark silence of falling snow responded, aglitter with the lanterns reflected light. A shadow of warmth, a sea of gold shifting and swirling on the vast and invisible eddies. Monk’s even breaths on her lap clued her in to the truth of the matter, and Sunset chuckled softly to herself as she gently picked up the sleeping slugcat and walked back to the tent.

So the wind blew.

………

Uneasy, they continued on. After the first day, they almost managed to convince themselves that they were free of whatever had attacked before— but that night something came around to the camp, scuffing around where they’d cooked their food and scattering the spent campfire’s ashes about the clearing.

To them, it felt almost like an omen. If omens were made by giant beasts tramping through their stuff and came close enough in the nighttime snow that the sentry thought they could see the glint of moonlight off scales.

One of the groups ran across something while they were foraging— Sunset wasn’t there to see it, but they came back speaking of the ground torn up and burnt by something, the faintest remnants of a fight between something massive and something not quite so large.

The hills evened out from rugged to rolling, slowly transforming into a different landscape entirely as they followed the landmarks they’d carefully scribed down onto a lesser copy of the massive map they’d used to first plan out their expedition. The frozen river that’d been their guide for the past days turned away to meander through the hills, so instead they turned their attention to a lone peak in the distance, the crumbling remnant of something that had been abandoned even before the rains.

The scene was honestly breathtaking— looking out across the stark landscape, pristine downy snow covering everything in a blanket of diamond brilliance standing so sharp in contrast to the citadel of black in the distance… framed, against the sky and towering pillars of clouds that stretched up to the firmament above. Beautiful. It was beautiful , but nobody in the group could really appreciate it with how on edge they were.

Even Sunset expected something before they got to the old city— they camped the nights beneath what small shelter the crumbling skyrail provided, carefully watching for the lizard’s arrival. Monk found it odd— which had to mean it was really weird— how cautious the thing was. It didn’t take much to ascertain that it was still around them— for something of that size, the evidence of its passing was obvious— but beyond that it was muddied. It knew how to make itself hard to find, which was impressive for a beast of its size.

They reached the abandoned city of Two Rivers without incident before the end of the cycle.

Sunset slowed to a stop before the massive foundation of the crumbling castle, staring up in barely restrained awe at the awesome magnificence of the place. “Wow.” Her breath misted the air in front of her, the tiny cloud of icy mist nothing compared to the vast and dead citadel of rising towers, the domineering wall slammed down into the bedrock, crushing the plains before them with the imperiousness of its mere presence.

“Pretty cool, huh?” Monk paused beside her, looking up at the old city with a dopey grin on her face. “I’ve been here a few times before. Awe inspiring, isn’t it?”

“Yeah…. Yeah. I’ve been here before, actually.” That caught a few of the slugcats’ attention, not merely Monk’s. “This place was built not too long after the start of the iterator project. Projections from the earliest iterators noted that the surface would become deadly to live on due to the constant cycling of floodwater and torrential downpour, so they built this city— Two Rivers, named for the confluence it was built atop. I—” she laughed, suddenly, not able to complete the sentence. “I found it unimpressive when I visited. A vanity project by fools who sought to emulate even a fraction of a fraction of the iterator project’s glory.”

Monk chuckled softly alongside her. “A different perspective really does wonders.”

“It really does.” She stared up at the massive walls, built to divert the floods around the city, and up , and up to the city above it. “In fairness, I took the train here the one time I visited, and had to stay in this dingy hotel that tried their very best to scam the clothes off my back, so I can’t say I have the best memories of the place.”

“Maybe you can give us a tour when we get in?” Suggested Monk, and with a laugh, Sunset agreed. It’d be fun to see how a place like this had changed over the millennia on ceaseless millenia. That, and if they were going to go poking around old warehouses, they might as well have some fun while they’re at it.

Spirits lifted considerably, they made their way— forward.

The wall was an obstacle, but the city had been designed to defend against water , not nosy slugcats; there was an access ladder carved into the side of the wall not even twenty minutes’ walk from where they first came across it. In single file they ascended, huddling close to the monolithic wall of black concrete as they climbed. The wind whipped at their clothes and set her robes snapping, but they pressed on despite the cold— holding fast to the meager warmth of sunlight, indominable in their advance until they tumbled over the top and into the city proper.

It was very vertical . A different kind of vertical to the iterator metropolises, though— a purposeful verticality, wrought out of vast chunks of seamless concrete, empty windows and crumbling stonework still standing fast despite the pummeling of eons on eons of rain.

Banks of snow lay tucked in the shadowed corners, and sheets of rippling ice hung themselves a forest of sharpened knives from outcroppings and eaves, but there was a suffusing warmth to the whole place that took off the worst of the bite. That and the wind was mostly blocked by the architecture, which was a glorious thing indeed.

As she’d promised, she took a detour through the crumbling streets and stairwells of the city to bring them to some of the places she remembered. “There were murals here, once.” She stared up at the slumped wreckage of where several buildings had collapsed inwards onto themselves, leaving a gaping hole up to the pale sky above. “It was one of their claims to fame. They were hoping that if they founded a temple here, that the draw from the holy institute would bring them enough fame to make the city into something more than just an empty shell of itself. It almost worked, too.”

“But, the rain?” Sunset nodded in response to Monk’s question as they stared down into the shattered wreckage of stone that had been built to stand for a hundred thousand years, torn metal and the faint remnants of everything that could have been magnificent, if there had only been just a little more foresight.

“They didn’t build high enough, and couldn’t attract people to live in such uncomfortable conditions when there were still plenty of habitable cities on the ground.” Perhaps if these towns had become the norm, then history would have taken an entirely different course. It was… humbling, in a way, to see how close they’d come to divergence, and know that was them , every second of every day, balanced on the breath of a word unspoken. “The rains were still deadly when they came, though, and it was much cheaper to make cities atop of the iterators, so that’s what was done.”

“Huh.” Monk nudged a rock forward, letting it tumble down into the sinkhole and listening for the clatter it made as it struck the bottom. “I don’t think I ever knew about that. Well, obviously I knew about the whole moving atop iterators thing— I knew that since I was a pup lost in Moon’s superstructure…” she was silent for a moment, enthusiasm bled out of her words for a heartbeat, then snapped back just as fast. “But! I didn’t know there was something so interesting so close to Seven Red Suns!”

“There’s plenty of things like it. Each iterator is a masterwork in and of themselves, you know— there was no denying it, living under the shadow of one of those immense biomechanical gods— “and that’s an extension of an older tradition of excellence that the House of engineers upheld. Progress relentless, from temples to monasteries, from chemical plants the size of mountains to gods against whom mountains are nothing. That simply means some ideas were left behind.”

They stood on one of those, to scavenge one of those— Sunset turned her back on the pit, and Monk followed suit. They had other things to do. Walking away for a few minutes, she suddenly stopped, a wry smile tugging at the edge of her lips as she looked at a decaying tower, clad in ice and the vines of some overgrown plant that might have once been part of the city’s backbone.

It was so different as to be all but unrecognizable, something lost in the memory of centuries— but she’d been dredging up her memories the whole day, and with that awful bridged-tower’s shadow cast across it with the setting sun, Sunset was struck by the memory of the place. “This is the place I stayed the night.” With how they’d turned the place into somewhat of a pilgrimage— that was to say, tourist — location, shady people capitalizing on the visitors shadily hadn’t been all too uncommon. “They tried to scam me but… well, they certainly regretted that when they learned I was a House engineer!”

Monk giggled softly in turn. “They sound like idiots.”

“That they were…” and now they were gone— just one of millions of people who’d sunk themselves into the void sea in this incarnation of existence. People who even back in her home timeline had inevitably abandoned their grift here and moved up onto one of the iterators. “There’s no use wasting time. Let’s head to those warehouses.” There were five throughout the town, which was half the reason they’d come here in the first place— nobody thought that they’d all be unblemished by the long years spent abandoned.

A prescient thought, as the first two had been broken into and thoroughly looted, and the third had overgrown from within, an abundance of life competing as they freed themselves from containment in succession until they’d finally, one day breached out into the cold and killed themselves. Now only some of vines— the same vines that had spread throughout the city— some purposed lichens Sunset recognized as a cold-tolerant strain made for filtering impurities out of liquid helium and a few other odd plants had survived. Given the general quiet of the city, Sunset doubted that any of the purposed animals had survived.

Luckily, the fourth one wasn’t quite so damaged. Or, at the very least, the airtight gate that held the vault-like environs apart from the frozen city hadn’t been compromised. They just had to get in .

Luckily, they’d brought just the tools for the job. A dirty blonde slugcat hastily motioned everyone out of the way, taking out a large bundle from the heavy pack they’d lugged the entire way through to the city. Then, for good measure, he snapped at everyone to back up some more.

After unswaddling the weighty package at the bottom, he carefully pulled out some duct tape— Seven Red Suns must have made that for the colony some time ago— before muttering softly and sticking lumps of some sort of paste around the door. A bright scarlet paste that Sunset thought looked somewhat familiar…

It took until he was stringing together electrical wire cleverly salvaged from overgrown power-conducting plants that she realized what exactly he was trying to do. Leaning down beside Monk, she couldn’t quite hide the nervousness from her voice. “Are you sure this is a good idea?”

“Shh!” Monk, on the other hand, was practically bouncing in excitement. “You’ll miss the good part!” Some of the other slugcats backed up further as the blonde slugcat unrolled the last of the wire, ducking behind one of the sturdier looking buildings. “Countdown?”

“Just duck!” Everyone ducked as he pressed a tiny battery, a spark in a bottle to the end of the wire— a hint of electric blue unleashed— and then the door exploded , a crack of thunder knocking the breath from her gut and her feet from beneath her. Hacking out a cough amidst the clouds of dust and falling stone, she picked herself up off the ground and stumbled towards the massive gate— or where the gate would have been. The immense gate lay in pieces, hundred-ton metal blocks strew about like toys cast aside by the hand of a giant. Even the robust concrete surrounding the door had been damaged by the sheer force of the blast.

Stumbling forward as the dust clouds began to settle, eddying out down the narrow streets, the blonde slugcat admired his handiwork with a somewhat sheepish expression. “Ah… I think I might have overestimated the strength they put into that one…”

Sunset glared at him. “It’s not a fortress door, it’s an airlock for a storage warehouse. You could have brought the entire city down on top of us!”

“In my defense—” started the slugcat—

“That was awesome! ” Finished Monk, giddiness writ large all over her every expression. “C’mon, let’s go and plunder this place! I wonder if they have anything cool beyond whatever random stuff you need, Sunset…”

“At least one person appreciates my work,” grumped the blonde slugcat, but everyone else was too busy moving into the warehouse to pay him any heed. It’d been abandoned for hundreds upon hundreds of years, but it was still full with everything a small city needed to take care of itself— Seven Red Suns had been able to confirm as much with the last records he’d managed to scrounge up about it, but it was a different thing entirely seeing it.

The auxiliary power, which had been lying dormant for who knew how many thousands of years, flickered online into emergency mode as frigid air rushed out of the room, rendered stale by so long trapped in the warehouse. More frigid than even the several-degrees below zero temperatures they were already standing in, that was.

Holding tight to their coats they stepped into the vast hall of the warehouse, filled to the brim with all sorts of strange and fantastical biomechanical purposed organisms. The slugcats glanced around the room with no end of wonder, taking in the massive tanks filled with suspended organisms, the abundances of electrical wires that looped down from the ceiling and laid bare the interconnection between everything within.

To someone who’d never seen something like it, it must have been a magical sight— the vault of the Ancients, filled with all of their wondrous and horrifying tools. Pustules of flesh, drooping and frozen in viscous liquid, huge mechanical monstrosities curled up into physiology defying storage positions, dormant without the spark of life the Ancients had seen fit to bequeath at their every whim. An eldritch labyrinth, wherein their imagination always fell short of the next sleeping terror.

Only Monk and Sunset appeared unaffected; Monk because she’d seen stuff like this over her long life— seen stuff that could put this to shame, even— and Sunset because this was just another warehouse, and not a particularly impressive one at that. If they were impressed at this , they should see the warehouses they’d used while building an iterator, massive constructions that could rival the whole of Two Rivers for size.

There were some things useful here for them. For one, nectar. Sunset guided them to a massive spherical tank of the stuff anchored to the walls and ceiling in the back. It made sense for them to have a lot— plenty of the bio parts of several biomechanical creatures ran off nectar, so it was fuel of a sort.

There was a lot of it, though. Enough to probably feed the entirety of Steadfast in Wall Hold for months, if they could palate the taste for that long. Still, it was a good prize for them. For one night at least they didn’t need to scrabble in the icy wastelands for tiny bits of food.

After leaving some slugcats to fill up waterskins with nectar, though, Sunset turned her attention to the main purpose of their visit— getting what they needed to build a polychemical plant. First and most importantly… she backtracked to the entrance, because these were common , looking around until she spotted— there.

Monk eyed the tank she was working with with an uneasy almost-disgust. “Are you sure… ”

Sunset stripped off her gloves— then coat, rolling up the sleeves of her robe underneath and plunging a hand into the viscous fluid of the tank. She grimaced at the sensation— thick, slimy and awfully cold, cold enough to drive a chill through muscle and bone in an instant. Not liquid nitrogen sort of cold, thankfully — it’d been kept warm enough to at least keep the critters alive, but still a thoroughly unpleasant experience.

Her claws clipped through the umbilical cord tying them to the greater organism that had once governed the entire warehouse and with a deft motion that could only have been borne from long years of practice she wrapped a handful of umbilical cords around one hand and pulled them out with a wet shlicking sound.

“Great!" Beaming, she held the six fetus-looking sacks of gently pulsing flesh towards Monk. “I’m so glad you offered to help carry them!” Then before Monk had a chance to protest, she dropped them all in the slugcat’s paws. “Wait here. I’ll be right back.”

A few minutes later she returned with the storage cans for them, and Monk was all too eager to get them off her paws and into the cramped metal containers. She wiped her sticky paws on her coat— then, on ire-filled inspiration, wiped them on Sunset’s coat instead. “What even were those?”

Sunset glared at Monk for all of a few seconds before sighing. She supposed she deserved that… “Concrete-secreters. As the name suggests, they secrete concrete.” To be more specific, the highly specialized, ridiculously robust concrete run through with a precise lattice network of advanced organic polymers and dormant bacteria that could ensure the laid concrete’s continued structural integrity for essentially forever.

“...great. Did you have to make them look so disgusting? ”

Sunset shrugged. “Not my decision. And, yes— wasting energy on aesthetics would add an overabundance of inefficiency into the system. You wouldn't notice it on the scale of the individual, but imagine if you were making an iterator and had to use fifteen percent more resources…”

“Oh. I… can see how that would be a problem.” Yeah, no duh. Ten percent of the stuff they used to make a single iterator was a massive amount of resources. “Still. Gross. I usually stay away from icky purposed organisms like this.”

“Didn’t you bring neurons to Moon?”

“Yeah, well, first of all those are pretty cute, and secondly, I didn’t even have to see those most of the time.” Sunset gave Monk an inquisitive glance as they walked through the rows on rows of tanks, and the yellow slugcat glanced away, a somewhat reluctant expression dancing across her features. “Well… I might have stored them. In my stomach.”

“In your stomach— actually?” Sunset cut the thought off with extreme prejudice. “I don’t even want to know.”

“It’s a normal thing slugcats are able to—”

“I don’t! Want to know!” Monk laughed, and a few seconds later Sunset laughed too, freely at the absurdity of it all. The sound echoed off the vaulted ceilings, low laughter of Ancient’s kind distorted and sent back in mockeries of itself, entwined with a slugcat’s sharper mewls of mirth. It was a magical moment, for a moment—

There was work to do still, though, so Sunset had to focus on that. Concrete-secreters were only one part of a vast array they’d need to make a polychemical plant, and Sunset would have labeled the endeavor impossible were it not for the ruined wreckage of the plant already present. The most important part was the polymerizing bacteria, which were often used in lesser amounts in other constructions, so there was an entire bank of them far too massive to ever hope to carry over.

So, while the other slugcats turned to gather the more physical materials, wiring and steel and all the purposed organisms that could manipulate it according to their wishes, Sunset set to work on the most delicate part. The heart of any polychemical plant— the actual polymerizer. She had to stitch together several purposed organisms, carefully welding metal plates between the chunky, worm-like things squirming around before her and locking them into their proper shape, and then she had to carefully inoculate the right strand in each one of them. It had been a long time since she’d done something like this, so the incredible precision necessary almost felt foreign to her.

Almost.

The emergency power was enough for some of the assistant creatures to move around with direct orders, and she so ordered, beneath the authority of Seven Red Suns; they hefted a vast constellation of biological parts into the air, and herself the weaver weaved them together. Base worms and spare organs pushed together, a twisting skein of the disgusting tying itself further and further into a knot of incomparable complexity, each fractional part made at precisely the right time. She infected them with small gene-editing viruses, strains that would mark them as polychemical plant, strains that would prepare them for growth and when they had the right amount of resources, strains that would render them quiescent, awaiting the moment to flourish.

Some of the other slugcats gathered around to see her work— either that or to see the behemoth lumbering forms of the helper bots as she directed them with pinpoint precision, looming over them and casting eerie shadows in the emergency lighting.

It was good they’d come to the city just before the cycle, because if something happened and she had to redo this, Sunset was pretty sure she’d cry. In the end though— it was done . The heart of the polychemical plant rested gently on her palms, the still bundle of flesh worms pressed flat, dense enough to appear far heavier than it should. It was a seed, almost, just waiting for the proper conditions to sprout into something beautiful .

The explosion slugcat pushed forward a metal box lined with glass, and Sunset carefully rested the foot-wide sphere inside. She packed it with some of the spare insulating gel from one of the tanks, then handed it off to Monk.

Monk gently put it at the bottom of her pack, insulating it with everything else she could spare. “That’s it?” Sunset nodded— that was all. “Well, at least I can’t say that you don’t know your stuff. Alright everyone!” She raised her voice, and everyone turned from what they were doing to listen, “we’re finished here! Let’s go set up camp before it’s too late into the night!”

They filed back out of the warehouse, ascending further into the city and clambering up a half-crumbled building to bridge the gap to one still standing, a tiny plateau, the peak of a castle above the roof of the world. Behind them the highest echelons of the city still speared to the angry heavens, but in front of them… it was all laid out, panorama spread stained by the vivid colors of, the dotted lines of the skyrails that converged on Two Rivers, the endless plains to rugged to hills to the vast mountains who scraped at the sky. Yet even that was dwarfed by Seven Red Suns, barely visible beyond the horizon.

To the south she thought she could but barely see the signs of Moon and Pebbles’s presence— to the north the same for some other iterator— but even so high up, they were nothing against the scope of the world. They could not see .

They pitched their tent atop that spire, against the winds that almost for once felt gentle, and Sunset sat with Monk as they watched the sky turn dark. A million tiny stars twinkled in the night sky, and it was only then— bereft of the angry clouds that had crowded the sky for so long, that Sunset realized how different the sky looked from what it used to. The constellations were out of alignment; the immutable had changed according to their strange set cycles.

She wondered what the monks would have made of it, if they were still around to see it. Some sort of omen? A reflection of their great pursuit? She didn’t know, nor did she need to.

Cupped in that tiny moment, the night sky stars were so deeply, breathtakingly beautiful that she couldn’t bring herself to care.

………

Something scraping against the stone woke up in the night. The very air felt charged with the passing of the cycle, and the sound was so soft as to have almost been imagined— but it was odd. It was so thoroughly unlike the sweeping winds that battered against the tent-walls, so distinct that she glanced around the tent, looking for its source.

A few seconds passed silently in the tent’s warmth, and Sunset sighed. It must have just been her imagination—

Again.

She bolted upright, hearing the sound for the second time. She thought she heard something else, too— a breath of wind, the susurration of something moving — carefully, she picked her way over to where Monk was sleeping entangled between two other slugcats, tugging her friend out of the pile. “Wake up.” She shifted a bit, and flopped over, tail tapping an erratic pattern against the floor— “ wake up! ”

“Wha! Wha… oh, Sunset…” Monk rubbed blearily at her eyes, yawning widely and stretching for a few seconds before she blinked a few times and sat up. “Whassup? We’re not light sleepers like you are, you’ve gotta, gotta… oh, it’s way too early for this. What’s the big deal?”

“There’s something outside the tent.” Monk blinked, then hardened her gaze, a bit of seriousness crystalizing where there hadn’t been any before. “I don’t know what it is, but I heard something scraping against the stone.”

“The sentry should be outside…” she blinked, as if just realizing what she’d said for the first time. “Oh. The sentry should be outside. It might be nothing, but— just in case.” She grabbed two spears from the spot on the wall where they’d stored them, then tossed one to Sunset.

Quietly, they picked their way across the cramped interior of the tent, pushing aside the flap and staring outside.

The first thing they noticed was the stench of blood.

“Wake up! Everyone, wake up!” Sleepy slugcats groaned as they rose, roused to wakefulness by Monk’s warning. It was only barely in time, though, as something massive leapt out from the shadows, an immense maw opening to snap down on Monk— something that might have caught any other slugcat, but Monk wasn’t the average slugcat. She dodged nimbly out of the way, which gave Sunset the chance to slam her spear down onto the beast.

The clack of her strike deflecting off the lizard’s armor rang through the night, echoing loud as the monster reeled back, stunned momentarily by the strike. If anyone hadn’t been awake before, they certainly were now .

Monk leapt at the beast from where she’d finished her roll, spear sparkling in the starlight a descending star, an expression of utmost fury on her face as she slammed it into the scales on the beast’s flank. It deflected off, too— but not without scouring a long line down its flank. The sound of blood splattering on the rock was only barely audible amidst the hectic movement of the blind, silent fight, but it was a small victory scored.

The beast leapt back, the mere sound of its passing immense as it backed up away from them. The very ground beneath them trembled imperceptibly, the tower they’d claimed protesting the sudden movement.

Sunset suddenly got a very bad feeling.

She dropped to the ground as the lizard spat at them, globs of phlegm-like substance splattering on the ground in front of them and just barely missing her overhead. The moment the first glob got close enough to the tent it erupted into a brilliantly hot flame, a refulgent yellow light illuminating the entire plateau in sharp relief.

Illuminating, as it did the concrete and city abounding, the monster .

It was an absolutely gargantuan lizard, colored the same as a carmel but even larger than those by at least half again. It was more lithe, too— it was an absolute tank of a beast, but it lacked the stocky build of a caramel lizard, instead leaning closer to the slender, sinuous draconic form of a red lizard.

That, and apparently its spit could light on fire. It clung to the edge of the tower, back arced slightly as its massive, prehensile claws dug into the stone at the lip, hissing as it looked at the crowd of spear-wielding slugcats that’d cornered it.

“That’s a big lizard, right?” Monk didn’t break her gaze from the lizard, but Sunset still half expected her to make some wry comment about how it was a small fry compared to what she’d seen.

Monk shook her head, the motion barely visible. “Yeah. It’s the largest damn lizard I’ve ever seen.” And that’s when Sunset knew how deeply they were in for it.

Finally, when the tension felt almost binding , Monk threw her spear— and it dropped off the side.

No, not quite. It fell , but not completely— it was clambering down the side of the tower, its immense form bounding from window to window, each rugged handhold carefully grasped as it lowered itself to the street below. The other slugcats took turns throwing spears at it, trying to score some wounds of their own on its body.

Monk left them to it, turning back the tent and death; flames still licked at the fabric as some slugcats struggled to quench the spreading conflagration before it could consume everything, but Monk paid that no heed either. Instead, she turned to the smear of viscera where their sentry had once stood, the scraps of fur left over from where they’d been savaged. “That lizard was big enough to eat her whole…”

Sunset put a hand on Monk’s shoulder, and her friend leaned into the touch. “So….” with the beast fled, most of them slugcats returned to help deal with the fire. “What’re we to do, now?” The others hung by closely, waiting for their elder’s judgment—

Monk clenched her paws together, indecisiveness flicking across her face for all of a second before she firmed her resolve— so much hidden in that moment, unsaid. “Continue.” We’ll leave some stuff here in case the cycle sends her here, but as for us? We must continue. A mere beast will not defeat us.”

Sunset nodded, but— as everyone packed up, as they held their spears in preparation to leave the city of Two Rivers, through which no rivers flowed— could that mere beast really be so easily dismissed.

Leaving the black city behind, Sunset found out for the first time since she’d come to the future—

She feared the dragon.

Notes:

I'm back from my epic odyssey to the ends of the earth, heaven (atop Taishan, first mountain under heaven) and hell (Shanghai in summer, 105F/40C and humid too), ready to continue posting the goofy scurglat fic.

If anyone remembers that joke I put in the endnotes that one time about making Glurch a main antagonist? That wasn't a joke.

Next chapter: The Dragon

Chapter 33: The Dragon

Summary:

Mere flesh and scale, and sinew and bone and subtle Form— and talon and seething fire— these do not make the Dragon. A monster does not make the Dragon. For, the Dragon is the subtle becoming, the skulk of heart’s chill, the prickle over the nape of her neck; it is the fathomless shadow and the gloam-clad, coruscant watcher within, the last embers of dying fire. It is the trace of bloody footprints and the whisper of scales in the formless dark. It is the creeping cold. It is the knowing. It is the preternatural, the pressing, the moribund bloating great and over-hanging and terrible presence beyond, just barely, at the tip of her fingers but ungrasped, ungraspable, all along laughing, perfectly, grimly, silent.

The Dragon is Fear.

They forged on with single-minded focus, ever on their guard. From one sentry to three, they picked their way further into the plains towards the abandoned polychemical plant with a single-minded determination.

Unfortunately, so too did the dragon.

They didn’t give it leave to hold them back from their goal, but neither did it give them room to so much as breathe easy. It clung to their group, never venturing too far— always watching. Always waiting. It held back from attacking them directly, but everyone knew it could . It was just waiting, biding its time until… something.

Nobody knew. Monk speculated that it’d followed them into the wastes from the mountains— or maybe even earlier— and that now it was in this vast and empty land it had no choice but to follow them further, but it was just speculation . Even she was forced to admit that she didn’t know anything about its species. It was so very distinct from anything she’d ever seen before that she had no idea what to make of it.

Sunset wasn’t entirely surprised to find that her fear wasn’t unique.

Halfway to the site of the plant, atop a bulged-out and shattered outcropping of smooth stone that had once been the surface-level remnant of some underground terraforming project, Champion had enough . “We should just kill it .” She slammed her paws together, glaring around the campfire, just daring anyone to refute her. “Stab it until it dies! Bleed it out and make it pay for what it’s done. It’ll never catch up to us. We’d be free of this thing! ”

She met everyone’s eyes in turn, wroth, and everyone shied back from the sheer vitriol that dripped from her gaze. A question— a promise of violence paid out again twofold for the nervousness they’d been put through over the course of the past few days—

Monk alone could meet that forceful gaze, and ask— “how?” The single word lanced the cyst of Champion’s wrath, crashing her back down to the cruel reality of the situation. “Right now it’s content to leave us alone, but if we wanted to fight it, then how could we? It can light us on fire with a breath.”

“How does it even do that? ”

Monk shrugged. “I have no idea. Chemistry, probably. Maybe Sunset would be able to tell you.”

Sunset just shrugged when the others turned their attention to her. “It’s not even close to the hottest thing I’ve seen a purposed organism produce, but it’s also not like I’ve ever seen that sort of thing from an extraordinarily deadly, mobile, massive lizard with some sort of maniacal desire to see me dead. My solution would be to find the off button.” Nobody laughed at her joke.

“You’ve fought red lizards before,” continued Monk, “tell me. How many times have you made it through a fight without getting hit once by their spit.”

“I’ve gotten pretty good at avoiding Ruby’s attacks…”

Monk pinned the copper-green slugcat with her eyes. “For the entire fight ?” Champion dropped her eyes down, and that was answer enough for everyone else. “For as long as it chooses not to attack us, we won’t attack it. If it does , though…” an echo of a grin flashed across her face. “We’ll kill it dead.”

Later that night, on watch, Sunset saw it— stalking through the darkness past the circle of light, its immense form large enough to almost rival their tent for size. The other sentries took up arms off to the sides, just in case— but it just looked at them. A still moment between two enemies— because that was what they were enemies .

It was as beautiful as it was deadly. Free from the hectic chaos of battle, she got the chance to really look at it for the first time— its form adumbrated in the shadow, the edges of scales catching in the light, silhouetting itself against the stormy skies above and the faint few falling flakes of snow. As it stalked its way around the clearing they’d camped in, claws sinking into the ice with a disturbingly slow, almost vicious flexing, Sunset carefully observed the way corded muscles flexed and shifted beneath its skin, watching—

It was watching them. A cruel animalistic intelligence, a memory of the wounds it had gained and the hate to back them— a glinting, gleaming, twice fathomless gaze almost aflame in the reflected light. Brilliant, and terrifying.

It hissed at her, the motion already intimidating from any other lizard made all the more so by dint of its sheer size — before walking away into the darkness. Looking at them. Always looking at them.

Sunset shivered, and the other sentries didn’t seem much better off. That had been a terrifying experience.

Still, they had to continue on.

After sheltering the cycle in the crumbled remains of a some old structure, torn down by overgrowth and then frozen over with the coming of cold, they continued on the last leg to the polychemical plant. For a few days, the lizard didn’t bother them at all— something that managed to put them all on edge even more than they’d already been— but that didn’t last.

They were walking through a valley— clearly of artificial make, a vast furrow hollowed out from the ground of the otherwise flat plain stretching forward for miles upon miles— when the chef forgot to watch their step and landed in a pile of sticky black goo that’d covered the snow.

The sound — the acrid smell, the sudden shock as the entire ground around them burst into furious fire, the scream as they stumbled back—

The gaze of the lizard, as it watched with its ever stoic, ever wrathful gaze from atop a nearby ridge, far enough that it was out of range of their spears and they from its spit— that sight engraved itself into her memory.

“I’ll kill you!” Champion ran at the hill, spear hefted in her hand, but Sunset grabbed onto the slugcat before she could go too far. “Let me go! I need to make that bastard pay! ” She was a real squirmer— and unlike Waters or Needler, she knew how to get out of someone’s grip. Hundreds of years of combat practice, probably. “I— I’m going to make it choke on my spear! Lemme go!”

“Stop—” grabbed the slugcat in a better hold, acutely aware of the very sharp spear she was holding. “Stop struggling! If you go up there, you’re going to die . A stupid, pointless death. Do you want to be remembered as the slugcat who threw her life away on this expedition?” A short minute of struggle later, she eventually dropped limp, whimpering softly in the way that she’d only heard from slugcat-kind.

“Damn it. Damn it!” Champion slammed her spear into the ground, furiously stalking away from the lizard. “That damn— who does it think it is? Stupid idiot…”

Sunset let her. She didn’t want to see what was left of their chef. Most certainly didn’t want to be there when Monk freed him into the cycle, to speak euphemistically. Instead, she just stared at the lizard.

Out of all the slugcats running around in the valley, Sunset got the distinct impression that it was staring back at her .

………

“So this is it.” It was just as decayed as any of the other ruins they’d stopped at, a complex of domes and blocky buildings that had fallen into disrepair over the eons spent abandoned. Vast networks of piping and latticework support lay rusted beneath the sun, encrusted with diamonds of ice and glittering beneath the late fall light. One of the central buildings had collapsed and taken a fair portion of the south side with it. Monk spent a long time looking at it, an oddly dissatisfied expression on her face. “That’s all?”

“Suns probably sent us here because it’s the easiest task by far. This could have been a shack and I probably could have still turned it into a polychemical plant.” Monk looked at her skeptically, but it was true! These sorts of things were actually pretty simple. “There’s no way there’s not at least a remnant of the purposed fungi here, so all we have to do is kickstart the farm arrays, repair some of the most egregious damages, and let the core creature grow. It’s that easy.”

“That’s a relief, at least…” she didn’t sound relieved. “I just want to get this whole disaster over with.”

“We should be safe here, at least. Or, as safe as we can be against the dragon.” The polychemical plant was a slugcat’s paradise, a warren of pipes and tight spaces, all the robustness of Ancient construction and none of the wide-open space, empty space, dangerous space they’d been stalked through for the past few days.

Monk seemed to realize that, as she brightened up considerably at the prospect of some small saftey, something that she could hold onto if even for only these next few days. “Right. Right! I think I would’ve gone mad if you hadn’t been here…. Let’s get on with it. Everyone!” She gathered the slugcats, and they filled with the reinvigorating certainty of so close , at hand their destination, they filed through the last of the gulch and into the plant’s confines.

The lizard followed behind them, out of sight, never quite coming close enough to test the slugcats’ mettle. A stare-off between two parties as they prepared for a confrontation that never came.

It was only when they were slipping into one of the small gaps in the wall that it realized it wouldn’t be able to follow them into the polychemical plant— and then, it attacked . Almost desperate, it bounded forward, all six legs propelling it in an odd loping run that ate up the ground between the two groups as the last of them tumbled through the hole.

Sunset dove in, then— a roar, a sound that seemed to make the walls and ice shiver beneath the depth of its echo, and Monk dove in afterwards down a spear. A scant few seconds later a splattery of sticky black spit arced through the entrance, slamming against the ice above them and slowly sliding down— turning the whole wall into a deadly trap just waiting for a slugcat to come up and touch it .

A weak, relieved laugh escaped one of the slugcats, weaving in with the rhythmic sound of heaving breath, hysteric freedom at their luck or the skill that looked like it— a laugh that spread sharper than a virus until everyone was giggling in each other’s presence. Survived… they’d survived!

Everyone was so relieved that only sunset noticed the eye of the beast staring through the crack down at them, silent in its impotent rage. Her breath hitched, unnoticed by all the rest, even Monk too busy roping some semblance of order back into their little group—

It was staring at her . For a second that felt like forever, the two looked into each other’s gaze, daring… daring something. She almost felt as though the lizard was focusing on her , specifically — an irrational thought, but one that wormed its way into her mind and refused to let go.

Finally, after what felt like far too long, the beast turned and left with a shuffle of snow on scales, and a huff of breath that rang out like a threat. Leaving Sunset alone together with all the rest— so slightly disturbed.

She walked together with Monk as they made their way deeper into the industrial structure. “That went well! So… two weeks here, give or take, and then we’ve just got to get home? Sounds like fun!” She was much more energetic than her, finally free of the not-caramel lizard’s ever-present threat, but Sunset didn’t mind. The distraction from her own thoughts was nice. “We’ll find somewhere to set up camp, and them maybe forage for anything that the long winter’s left over in this place. Hopefully there’s at least something …”

Plus, it wasn’t like Sunset was the only person Monk was distracting. She knew the slugcat well enough to know when she was trying to make herself feel better about something. Sunset didn’t confront her on it. There was no point; she’d just break the shattered glass more and leave a mess behind.

She didn’t even respond.

A half-distracted gaze shifted over the concrete backdrop of the facility, past the exposed piping and all the ice-clad little things that had once been part of a massive facility capable of supplying a large portion of an iterator’s chemical needs. It had been overgrown, once— and this far away from the crushing cold outside, that was visible in the curled vegetation that still grew, sharp colors poking from beneath rubble and curling into alien shapes around her.

Some paths that should have led somewhere led nowhere, and other times cracks in the floor and walls allowed them through where they really shouldn’t have been able to traverse. It wasn’t the first time that she’d inspected the decay of eons on what had been less than a year ago still-standing monuments to progress, but it was the first time she’d spent so much time comparing exactly what should have been to what was.

It was almost bizarre, seeing the decay that had wormed its way into every aspect of the plant. Microfractures that would have been repaired by redundancy microbes, mold that should have never been allowed to grow where it could have contaminated the product, the rubble — the collapse of so much more than the mere physical integrity of the plant…

The very essence of it had been worn away, washed over by the endless times. Passing by tiny groves of plants tucked into shaded corners and little clusters reaching so vainly for the tiny shafts of wan sunlight where they cut through the industrial jungle above, she mentally compared their form , the form of hard-knobule like polyps that clung to the rock and moved for nothing, to what should have been there and saw the similarities .

The polychemical plant had more than outlived its expiration date— so much time had passed that it had evolved out of itself. A curated ecosystem of mechanical precision rotting into a million component parts and flowering into actualization… she wasn’t quite sure how to describe it. She didn’t know if it was beautiful or horrifying.

It was an amount of time that she had little ability to comprehend, even weighed against her own millenia of life— she doubted that even the slugcats, who’d lived much longer than him, would have been able to truly wrap their minds around the length of it. Only the iterators, who’d lived it all…

To be collapsed, for all that time, and see the world crumbling into something new around you? Until not even what was held close to themselves was the same, as fell the snows, all without even the slightest hint of a chance to begin to do anything against it… she felt a new pity for Moon.

Sighing, she helped the slugcats set up camp in a large chamber above what remained of the main processing tower— a defensible spot, but also probably one they’d have to leave as reconstruction progressed— and when that was done sat against the burnt side and merely pondered . Considering— so many new things. Old things, too…

Monk came over to sit beside her in silence, curled up against her side, and Sunset didn’t protest the motion. It wasn’t like she was going to be moving anywhere anytime… soon…

She fell asleep thinking about how lonely Five Pebbles must have been.

………

They got right to work the next day, half because they wanted something to take their minds off everything, and half because there really was just that much stuff to do. Sunset split the party up into groups— large groups, even if the lizard ostensibly couldn’t get into the plant— setting them to a variety of simple tasks as she walked through the rest of the facility with Monk.

She’d focused on the state of disrepair coming to rest the day prior, but really it was remarkably well maintained for something that had lasted so long in the cold and beneath falling rains. If they’d had to rebuild it from scratch, they wouldn’t have made enough progress to start it working again even if they’d had the entire year instead of a few weeks to winter.

First and most importantly, she took a look at the central power generation. Given that there wasn’t a giant crater blasted out of the facility, Sunset had been pretty sure that it’d either weathered the years or been taken by scavengers in the past.

Brushing aside the desiccated carcass of the massive central processor, she traced her hands over the concrete and steel below, carefully looking for… “still here. That’s good.” She pulled out the last bit of long-dead flesh frozen, exposing the strange latticework of interconnecting biomechanical apparatuses that extended into the corpse like branches from some alien tree. Tracing those branches back to the sphere at the center, the pillar’s core, she cut a claw through the remnant of what they’d come here to replace and finally, after far too long, found the little hatch she’d been looking for.

It was welded shut and plastered over with enough carefully layered preservation methods to make even a vault envious, but Sunset knew exactly what she was doing. Grabbing one of the tools she’d made Monk hold, she carefully scoured a line across the surface of the binding, treating it with some of the chemicals from the second, then using the cryoconvex to heat up the surface of the metal until it went past boiling while making sure the heat was only at that point…

It was a long winded process, and Sunset wasn’t looking forward to undoing what she’d just done at all — but it was necessary. As she pried open the hatch, the taste of soggy, stale air washed over her, moldy and rotten, which would go a long way to explaining why the plant had shut down in the first place.

Fighting back the urge to gag, she reached in and rummaged around in the slick mess until her hands bumped against something solid and smooth, roughly the size of her fist. Carefully— so absolutely, very carefully— she pulled the object out of the mess and held it up to the light.

A tiny core of black metal, tinged so ever unnoticeably blue. Monk stepped back the moment she saw it, eyes widening to an almost comical degree. “A singularity bomb? ”

Sunset carefully searched it for any sign of damage, any cracks or even so much as a scrape before shaking her head. It was so much more than a mere bomb , held together with glue, hopes, and homeostatic pressure. No, it was a stable source of practically infinite energy, condensed enough to power the entire plant from something the size of her palm. “A mass rarefaction cell.”

“What’s it doing here ?”

“It’s actually not that unusual.” She beckoned for Monk, and it took a few seconds for the yellow slugcat to make her way forward and give her the box Sunset had prepared for the volatile core. “No pump house nearby, no connection to a power grid? Just shove a mass rarefaction cell in it. They last forever too, which made them a preferred option for a lot of these… far-distant, extra-facility structures. Nobody wanted to do maintenance on these.”

“Huh. Guess that makes sense.” Together, they spent the next half hour tearing down the rest of the detritus that had built up in the room over time, chipping away at the layers upon layers of stuff that had accumulated. Dead matter turned to earth, earth to stone, all plastered together into a caked-on mess by the sky’s dust.

It was a messy job, but not an altogether unpleasant one. Perhaps back before she’d first left Sliver of Straw, she’d have put scrubbing down the rotten heart of a polychemical plant as one of the most unpleasant things she’d ever had to do, but it barely even registered now. Trading banter back and forth with Monk as they worked, laughing about inane things, the works of the Ancients and all they’d done so foolishly —

It almost felt enjoyable.

It was, of course, just the start of their long work to get the place back up and running, but— a start was better than none.

After meeting back up for the night, they started on what Sunset had expected to be the most unpleasant task— cleaning the pipes. The same sort of grime that had built up in the larger spaces had clogged most of the still functional pipes, and while a lot of the facility would end up as capacity that they didn’t have the time nor resources to restore, there were parts that would need to be cleaned out.

She’d underestimated the slugcats though. Pipe-cleaning was their ancestral task, and even so many generations removed, they took to the task like fish to water. An entire cycle of hard labor, eliminated by simple convenience of atavistic ancestry. Everyone’s spirits were lifted considerably at that— well, everyone except the slugcats cleaning eons-old grime out of pipes that’d been clogged longer than they’d been alive, but even they appreciate how quickly everything was going.

They repaired the pipes, resealed the cracks and shored up the crumbling rooms, cut through the overgrowth and relaid the wires, reset the eater-fungi in their proper in the underground quarries, chipped away detritus and transformed the space all according to the Sunset’s invisible plan. They cleared out the mess of vibrancy vainly struggling against the cold in the plant’s farm arrays, carefully replanting the beds with the original strains Sunset had brought from the warehouse.

It wasn’t perfect. Between the cold and what stalked within it, nobody wanted to go outside, so if there was a pipe that had passed through where the facility had collapsed they were forced to reroute it. It was a quick, dirty fix, but the entire expedition had been that from the start so Sunset wasn’t overly bothered.

Until, at last, it was finished. Atop the crown of centrality, she gently removed the core of it all from its can, placing it onto the altar of its rebirth; not quite impaled, but close. She was alone, now. The room was dark; the rest of the slugcats had gone to pack up at her own urging, and even Monk waited beyond the confines of the heart to allow her focus.

Precision tools spooled sinew from the nascent core of the heart to every other dendritic tree, barbed steel branching profusions jutting out in bizarre rhythmless pattern. Looping, and again, a task that demanded her utmost attention as she dug the sinew into the hooks, and the hooks into the future of the most important part of the polychemical plant until the entire thing looked like a strange sort of spider’s web. A sea of gossamer white, so slightly slick, so slightly opalescent and pasty white, shivering beneath her breath and the revitalized airflow of the plant.

Then, only one thing remained. The polychemical plant was balanced on the very cusp of coming alive, and there was one thing, one seed, one spark that could make it so .

From an insulated pouch on her robe, Five Red Bricks, Tenth Sunset removed the small mass rarefaction cell. Carefully, she replaced it from where it’d come from in the first place, letting it float placidly on a sea of ice-cold clean water. For a long second, nothing— and then, a faint glow. A ring of blue lit up around its circumference, electric bright as tiny sparks began to fly from it to the water, the water to it, it to the water and again and again and again!  

A high-pitched hum filled the room as Sunset retreated, barely sealing back up the cell’s chamber as it lit with a refulgent electric light, so brilliant as to momentarily outshine the sun. Gravity weakened around her, the whole facility shuddering as it came alive. Uncountable volts of electricity arced through the wires they’d laid down, kickstarting a thousand functions they’d managed to restore and failing to revive thousands more left broken.

Water, ice-cold and frothing as it rushed through the pipes, spilled into the room. In and out, breathing, heart beating— Sunset laughed, as she watched the awe-inspiring sight. They’d done it.

Now they just had to leave.

………

In retrospect, wet clothes weren’t the best when it came to traveling through a frozen wasteland. She’d left her cold-weather clothes with the slugcats, but wearing those without her robe felt profoundly odd . The feeling of lizard hide and yeek fur against her scales instead of the smooth synthetic fiber she’d worn for… essentially forever, actually, felt almost wrong — like she was doing something she shouldn’t.

It was a silly thought. She knew it was a silly thought, Monk knew it was a silly thought— and retained enough presence of mind after escaping the newborn plant to laugh at her for it— but she thought it anyway. It wasn’t like she hadn’t done much, much more sacreligious things, but instead of eating meat or defying administration or rejecting ascension, wearing weird clothes was what managed to make her shiver in discomfort.

Bizzare.

Anyways, they were following the overland pipe back to seven red suns facility. It was a really robust thing— multi-segment septuple encased, self-adjusting joints clad in high-density concrete and shot through with— well, the details weren’t important. None of the slugcats could appreciate the sort of engineering that got a pipe like this to stick around for a million years. In truth, neither could she— she wasn’t an iterator, to understand the minutiae of everything ever. Just an engineer—

She dropped to the ground before she realized what she was doing. A snap second decision from the corner of her eye, as the wad of spit sailed over where her head had been but seconds before— instinctual action learned from enough times on the knife’s edge of death.

The rest of the slugcats reacted quickly, but none so fast as Monk. In a single smooth motion the yellow slugcat spun, raising her spear and thrusting it through the air with all the force she could possibly put into the motion, the spar of black metal slicing through the air so fast it whistled faintly and left an afterimage in her eyes. The lizard didn’t even get a chance to react as it embedded itself deeply in its flank, smashing through its layer of protective scales and cutting right to flesh—

A hail of other spears reached it a few seconds after, but they skittered off stone as the lizard jumped backwards surprisingly adroitly. A few gouged a few new scars into its hide, but they were superficial wounds at best.

Still slightly stunned, Sunset sat up, shifting against the cold concrete she’d so admired moments before and watching the battle play out. “It’s baiting us.”

A few words jumped from slugcat to slugcat at that, a realization already known, spoken and realized and bidding them to put down their spears. After a few seconds Champion grimaced, but nodded, letting her grip on her spear loosen. “Bastard.”

Monk stared at the lizard, a contemplative expression on her face. “That’s odd.” It had retreated, staring at them from a far-off ridge as it carefully pulled Monk’s spear out of its side. Never looking away from them, even if it had to contort its body in an odd position to manage it. “Why did it wait until now to attack?”

Sunset pushed herself to her feet, glaring across the distance at the creature. “To be a rat bastard, probably. It seems to take delight in torturing us.”

“No. I don’t think that’s it.” Monk’s face had twisted into a contortion of confusion, strange concern at something nobody else managed to see— deep thought thinking, an ancient mind seeking connection— “lizards like stalking their prey, but not to this extent. Red lizards do, sometimes—” Champion nodded, which made sense given her experience therein— “but this…”

“Why?” That was the ultimate question, Sunset realized. “ Why is it doing this? Why did it trade a blow to itself for that non-attack?” What strange animalistic thought drove it to do that? It was just so odd … and Sunset realized, in that moment of epiphany, that she’d stumbled right to Monk’s first thought.

It was so odd . “I think,” said Monk, narrowing her eyes at their enemy— “it was probing us.”

“It’s done that before. With its trap, and—” she snapped her mouth shut not willing to speak about the memory of brutality—

“No… You’re right.” Sunset blinked in surprise. She hadn’t even been trying to argue against Monk…. the slugcat turned to her, gaze heavy with something Sunset couldn’t read— “it’s not probing us .” A foreboding feeling settled at the edge of her mind, and she could almost feel her friend’s next words; “it’s probing you .”

She’d feared that.

“ Why? ” The stress on the word felt almost hysteric, at the end there— the difference between impersonal and very, very personal— almost desperately. “Why is it going after me? I didn’t even do anything to it! You’re the one who keeps stabbing it!”

“Who knows what lizards think? They’re dumb things that always manage to catch onto the stupidest stuff.” Monk snorted dismissively, and Sunset’s moment of dissociative horror was shattered like sunlight over a still pond. The reality of the situation settled in— or, rather, that everything before had been what it was. 

A glimpse into her enemy’s motivations didn’t change the falling sword’s trajectory. Sunset clenched a fist for the unfairness of it all— then reminded her that the world had never been fair to begin with, and that she’d well beyond her fair share of fortune for a thousand lifetimes.

Wordlessly, she passed Monk her spear, and stared out into the distance. The dragon stared back. They knew each other, now. “Champion was right.” The green slugcat perked up— “not with the stupid rushing to her death thing—” she deflated, and some of the others laughed weakly— “but with the crux of her desire — her drive.” A moment of silence, for deaths, for wrath— “that lizard needs to die .”

She didn’t know how far they could push before probing attacks turned to deadly attacks, but Sunset knew—

Only one of them would leave the snow wastes alive.

The rest of the day passed in a sort of haze in her memory, interspersed by moments of almost stunningly sharp clarity when her gaze overlapped with the monster’s. Those silent staring competitions continued to the following day, neither willing to give even an inch of ground. Her only moments of relief were when it left into the vast wastes to scrounge up some food for itself, probably. It always stuck to her group, though, whether that be out foraging or back at the camp helping or— anything. Confirming Monk’s prediction, it always followed her .

It went for the other slugcats as well, but always as targets of opportunity. Sunset didn’t know why; she didn’t really try overmuch to figure out why. The second day, it tried some more attacks, cleverly— it didn’t have the advantage of spitting at them from an unreachable distance, not with how the pipe followed the terrain, but Sunset knew that wouldn’t last forever. Soon they’d come to the hills, and the mountains beyond, where it could scale up a cliff and rain fire on them for as long as it so desired.

The third day, it stopped spitting at them altogether. It hadn’t managed to hit any of them, and perhaps it recognized that— perhaps it knew the mountains were coming— and it turned its attention instead to making life as difficult for them as possible. Mostly, that meant covering the pipe with as much highly-flammable spit as it could, forcing them to either sweep the snow clear or go around entirely. It was a little clever about it—

Only a little clever, though.

On the fourth night, one before the cycle, she and Monk sat down and really, truly, thought about the problem. “We can’t get close to it, and right now, it can’t get close to us . We’ve been following the pipe because it’s the fastest, safest route, but…”

Monk nodded. “The ridgeline. We’ll need to follow the ridgeline once we get into more rugged terrain.”

Sunset looked down sheepishly. “That… makes more sense than what I was thinking?”

“What were you thinking.” The flat tone with which Monk asked her assured her that it was most definitely not a question.

She laughed nervously, silent for a second before she mumbled something under her breath. Monk gave her a look , and a second later she reluctantly responded, “I thought we could try and bait it out. Then kill it. With me as the bait.”

Monk’s expression hardened. “Absolutely not. I’m not sacrificing you.”

“I was thinking of doing it in a way where I didn’t die—”

“Still.” Her voice softened a bit, quiet to the shadow of desperation. “Still… no, no I won’t allow it.” Sunset realized with a start that this entire situation might have been impacting Monk more than she’d realized. “I won’t let it have you. No sacrifices, not anymore.”

Sunset wondered how practical that was. She feared what that would do, to them, to their chances of making it through, to— so many other things. She understood easily how unfair this was to all the other slugcats who would inevitably get caught up in the crossfire… but, also, she couldn’t help but feel a bit comforted by the adamant refusal of Monk to cast her away.

Friends. Despite it all, and the absurdity of it— she laughed off Monk’s concern and listened to her friend’s plan because she trusted her.

Still though—

She wondered.

………

The plains turned to hills, carved through by the massive pipe— a slice of black against rolling white, ashen streaked through in natural shades and a single bold line. A curious thing happened as they forged onwards— sheltered by the pipe and the valley, by some ancient work and the natural world itself, a forest had sprouted. A strange, colorful forest, one that bloomed out from the rough scrub that’d surrounded the pipe in the plains before— as fast as the hills emerged, so too did the forest.

The trees didn’t reach to the top of the pipe— not even close, their gnarled reach defeated by the sheer size of the Ancients’ architecture— but there was something uniquely beautiful still about the way it strained ever towards the top amidst an explosion of coral color—

Red.

Red!

Sunset practically squealed with excitement as she saw the red , tiny little spot of scarlet light aglow, across hundreds of feet of wind-roughed snow and ice in front of them. A mote of tiny light, a worm that flicked from point to point with an almost frenetic energy—

Monk actually had squeaked in joy at the sight. “An overseer!” Murmurs broke out amongst the group as they forged forward, reinvigorated by the tangible evidence that they were close . Closer, at least, close enough that they were once more within Seven Red Suns’s domain.

The red worm caught sight of them, little-eye projection stilling its gaze on their little group before darting over surprisingly quickly. It popped up around them a few times, carefully observing their group before it moved in and projected itself in front of Monk.

“Hello there! Oh, this is awesome! Uh,” she quickly knelt down, drawing on the snow. The other slugcats groaned, annoyed at the arrival of the ever-unreadable Ancient language, but Sunset supposed that was one small advantage to being a time traveler. “ This is easier for you to read??? Alright. Can you hear this, Suns? ” No response. Monk frowned imperceptibly, less excited now. “ You’re autonomous… alright. I need you to do something for me, and Seven Red Suns by extension. ” The overseer perked up, whatever rudimentary AI that governed its movement recognizing the prompt. “ Go back to Suns. Show him this text: ” and she wrote— “ Get Survivor. Bring a group down the pipe. As fast as you can. Any help appreciated. ”

The overseer bobbed its head in affirmation, then darted away as fast as it could back the direction it’d come from. Back towards Seven Red Suns.

On the ridge so far away from them, the lizard glared malevolently— at the overseer . Its massive gaze tracked the demi-holograph as it drifted out of view, only after it passed far beyond their vision snapping back to glare at their group. It was so unexpected that for a few long seconds Sunset simply stopped to stare at the lizard.

That same-question came to her mind, unbidden— why?

For risk of too far anthropomorphizing its actions, Sunset could have sworn that there was a new spark of hatred in its gaze.

For risk of dying, she threw herself forward as a rain of caustic spit tumbled through the air towards her. Most of it splattered against the pipe’s side, only the smallest bit making it far enough to reach even near them— the lizard was still too far to hit them.

It was enraged, though. “Come on.” Monk waved them forward, watching warily to see whether or not the lizard would approach them. For now, though, it seemed as though its danger instincts triumphed, warning it back from attacking them. “Let’s try and make sure we make good time.” She didn’t sound like someone who’d just had a major stroke of fortune. Perhaps the sudden attack had broken her good mood… but Sunset knew the truth. It was simple, even.

It didn’t take a genius to understand by the time that Survivor arrived, it’d be far, far too late.

………

The mood in the camp was a strange one, that night. They’d abandoned the pipe to camp on a rocky ridge, high enough that you could oversee all the land surrounding it. They’d put some lanterns outside, but that only illuminated their direct surroundings— they’d built an oasis of illumination at the small roof of the world, a shallow pool out of the falsehood of safety.

They were too tired to be afraid. They were too afraid to be tired. Sighing, Sunset sat down next to their local explosions enthusiast, feeling, relishing in the way the cold snow crunched beneath their weight, its icy texture so uncomfortable, so sharply invigorating. “I’m taking watch tonight.”

He glanced up, looking confused. “But you’re not—”

“I’m taking watch, tonight.” They both spared a glance for Monk, silently understanding.

He slipped a paw over her hand, a quiet weight, comfortable for a moment. “I’ll root for you, then. Be careful. Don’t get eated.”

“I’ll take that into consideration.”

The mood in the camp was grim. Lacking their chef, the food was lifeless, everyone was listless , frantically busy and cut loose from energy all the same, simultaneously. The mood in the camp was twisted , all over on top of itself until nobody knew what to think— fearful for the night, awaiting the coming of the cycle— together. Enraptured with the camaraderie, ready.

That’s what Sunset was. She was ready . Heavy-hearted, she took her position in front of the tent, spear held in one hand as she carefully scanned the darkness beyond the ridge as the other slugcats filed in to grab a night of sleep.

For a single second that felt like eternity, her gaze met Monk’s. Sunset waited for her friend to say something, anything — but she just stood there. The second passed, the moment was broken, and Monk stepped into the tent.

She didn’t know what that meant, and it still managed to hurt. She wanted to protest that there was reason behind her decision, good reason— that the cycle stood still for no one, and not everything could be defied… but. She didn’t. Instead she watched the blackness, waiting for inevitability —

For two hours, she stood sentinel in the cold, beside three other slugcats, knowing that it’d come eventually.

Monk refused to use her as bait— but sometimes, when everything else was denied, all paths barred, opportunities were made to be taken.

The snow crunched beneath its weight.

Its breath misted the air, massive huffs, low pants that plumed out and swirled in mesmerizing eddies beneath the lanterns' merry radiance.

A gleam traced the edge of its lithe form, supple scales bending over corded muscle, carmel-tone hide catching on the warm illumination, soft whites almost blending in with the snow. It hulked , graceful and immense, looming over the small clearing they’d claimed at the hilltop as it pulled itself up over the lip with its six massive legs, tail dragging behind its body with a sibilant sound.

The beast, the monster, the dragon was as magnificent as it was terrifying, glaring them— her — down from across the clearing. For a moment, the entire world seemed to freeze. The cycle buzzed in her ears, on the verge of passing—

It spat at her.

She dodged, and the tent lit on fire as the glob broke up into a spray of incandescent oily fire beneath the lanterns’ bequeathment of warmth. Her spear snapped up, an amateur's move, but enough to split the second glob as it almost hit her. A tiny droplet landed on her face, and the pain of it! It barely burnt through a single scale, but the agony, the sheer incandescent pain of feeling her cheek light up made her cry out hoarsely and drop to the ground to avoid the beast’s third and final shot.

A spear sailed over her head, slamming off the beast’s plated head and stunning it enough for the other two sentries to arrive beside her. Champion— the back of her mind wondered why Champion was on sentry duty despite it not being her turn— gripped her spear, obviously waiting for the lizard to spit at them again.

It didn’t spit at them again.

A single, languid movement that belied its true power rippled through the lizard, crouching, pushing, leaping forward with an explosive strength that shattered the ice beneath it and flung a plume of snow off the hilltop.

Champion chucked her spear, the spar of metal embedding itself in one of the lizard’s legs. It roared, wincing in pain as its perfect landing turned into a stumble, giving Sunset just enough time to get out of the way as its jaws snapped shut with a resounding crack where Sunset had been standing less than a second before.

She jumped, barely dodging a heavy sweep of its tail that knocked Champion’s feet from out beneath her and sent the other sentry reeling, her spear slashing down in a powerful arc that both scoured a deep wound along its tail and ripped the weapon from her hands.

Slamming to an ungainly stop in the snow half a dozen feet away, she barely rolled to the side as it slammed down a massive, wickedly clawed hand where she was, a second sweep cutting a bloody line down her arm.

Light.

A tiny, second’s pause, as the entrance to the burning tent swung open, a moment of radiance as Monk stepped out into the cold night’s air, looking pissed. The lizard was in her sights, now.

Sunset felt like laughing, but there was no time for that—

The cycle rolled over. She felt it, didn’t really, a touch of the supreme, supernal, of that breathtaking breath-stealing kick, wrenching, sapping all reality-unveiling, sea of gold beyond comprehension or logic or all but all things. Just a touch, a tiny feather’s breath falling brush of karma, but it froze the battlefield for an infinite, crucial , infinitesimal moment.

The lizard recovered first.

There was nothing she could do. Nowhere to run as its jaws descended on her, opening wide and—

She didn’t hear it. The sound of flesh breaking, jagged teeth ripping through scales and caving in her chest with wet-staccato rib-snapping pops. Her vision flashed white, even as she didn’t really feel it— the pain was literally incomparable to anything she’d ever felt before. It felt entirely separate from herself, a separate beast entirely.

Her vision was fading. Monk was… mad, Monk was furious , bounding over the snow towards her…

She smiled.

“Stupid… lizard.” The words felt as though someone else was speaking them, the energy with which she could mock her enemy fleeting as that very enemy drank deeply of her lifeblood. Still, though— she grinned .

Did it really think she hadn’t expected this ?

With the last of her strength, she squeezed her hand into a fist and activated her final contingency, the one she’d saved for this very moment to make sure it counted . The one she’d managed to wheedle out of one particular blonde slugcat.

The last thing she saw before the shockwave killed her was the extraordinarily satisfying sight of the lizard’s head exploding into a firework-burst of gore.

………

Like blinking away an afterimage of an unseen light—

Like breathing, the first breath of fruit-crisp fall air, and mildew—

Like sleep, like death—

………

She woke, cold snow crunching beneath her back and stars glimmering above, a million points of tiny light scattered across the inky blackness. She took a breath, blinking away the fuzzy-headed confusion that always came from waking up after a long sleep, yawning widely…

Her face hurt. Why’d her face hurt?

Oh.

Right .

She rolled out of the way of the lizard’s furious blow. They’d both reincarnated together, from the cycle from nothing— and now here they were, locked in a losing battle. A losing battle for— Sunset dodged backwards, rolling beneath the lizard’s leaping bound.

At least Monk should have been able to escape with the others. Sunset held fast to that small reassurance, as meager as it was, as the lizard swiped its massive tail and sent her tumbling to the ground, as it raised a clawed limb—

A spear impaled itself into the lizard’s side. It was so unexpected, so utterly out of nowhere that both she and the lizard paused to look where it’d come from.

Standing on the ridge, holding another spear just like the first wrapped in red cloth and fluttering in the night-time breeze, stood Survivor. As Sunset glanced around at all the other slugcats circling them, her grin turned into a soft laugh, into a hysteric thing, the sheer relief of not being abandoned after all.

The lizard didn’t seem to appreciate being surrounded. Hissing, it darted towards Sunset’s prone form— but that’s when the explosive spear embedded into its flank took the chance to explode with a resounding crack , tossing it limply to the side.

Another spear impaled itself into the lizard, and then another, and another again and again until all it could do was look helplessly at Sunset with a fathomless depth of rage. Even despite the beating it’d taken, its eyes still sparked with that wrath, limbs still twitching as it tried to bodily drag itself towards her for one last revenge—

Something caught, two things mixed where they really shouldn’t have, and the lizard’s corpse exploded into a fountain of incandescent, molten fire.

Dead.

“You idiot! ” Something impacted her chest, knocking her back down onto the snow and driving the breath from her lungs. “Why did you do something so— so stupid? So— don’t do that!” Monk clung tightly to her, whole body shaking with something like sobs— something like laughter . “I… don’t do that. You made everyone so worried .”

“You came back.” That was all Sunset could whisper, coming down from that shock— “you came back.” Over the cycle she’d been dead, and she’d brought help . She hadn’t abandoned her. “You came back .”

“Of course I would.” Monk helped her to her feet, grip still weak— “I don’t leave friends behind.”

Notes:

...and so, to slay the dragon is to slay fear itself.

'Suns: You should go fix the chemical plant, nothing out there can hurt you!
The thing that hurts you: bonjour'

More regular chapters should be coming soon. I still have a bit of life-coded stuff to deal with and things are pretty hectic, but I'll try my best to remember to post the next few chapters lol. When uni starts up and things settle down into a more regular schedule, everything should, in theory, be a lot smoother.

Chapter 34: Weird Cat Outside

Summary:

(1/2)

Gravity crashed down at the behest of something over it, catching an array of floating pearls, an iterator’s puppet, and one fluffy green slugcat in its ensnaring grip and bouncing them off the floor. Well, Saint could imagine that Five Pebbles bounced off the floor, but he just serenely floated down to hover above the ground, as he always did.

Saint knew what he was going to say next. Something about how he was interrupting some very important procedure— “Fluffy.” He perked up, looking expectantly at Five Pebbles. “As much as I enjoy your presence, you’re interrupting a rather delicate process. If this is about Glurch again, my hands are tied; Sig already released his version into his facility. And unfortunately, I don’t have the spare processing power right now to watch silly lizard videos with you—” Pebbles stilled looking suspiciously at him. “Why are you celebrating?”

“ I was taking bets on what you were going to say— ”

“With who? ”

Saint shrugged. “ Myself, who else? Anyways, I was taking bets about what you were saying, and I totally had ‘interrupting a delicate procedure’ as the top option. ”

Five Pebbles looked at him incredulously for a second before laughing, the sound so mechanically smooth. “Of course you did. What else should I have expected? Enough processing power to fill mountains and seas, and I’m still as predictable as ever.”

“ Okay okay you got me, my top bet was ‘interrupting a very important procedure,’ not delicate. ”

“That… is not much better.” Five Pebbles reactivated his antigravity, a single sweeping motion casting his vast array of pearls back into the myriad orbits, halo sparking and twisting behind his head stoked bright with banks on banks of data. It was an imposing sight, and Saint understood exactly what it was Five Pebbles was trying to impress on him.

Obviously the iterator wanted cuddles. 

Pushing against reality, easy as, he swam through open air to curl up around Five Pebbles’s shoulders. The iterator paused for a second, hand outstretched to some senselessly complicated diagram or another, then with a barely audible but clearly purposeful sigh gave Saint some scritches on his head. “What do you want?”

Saint paused his purring, blinking a bit at the sudden reminder that he’d come here for a reason . “ Oh, right! ” He drifted away so Five Pebbles could see his sign easier— “ check the chat! The one with Endless Leaves over Green Skies and definitely-not-Secluded Instinct. It’s important! ”

“Right. The chat . Let me just…” he flicked a hand, pulling up a screen— more for Saint’s benefit than his own but it wasn’t like he was going to complain. “I see. That’s concerning.”

“ We’ve got to help him! ”

“Much the same as the situation with Glurch…” he looked down at Saint, and Saint looked at him, pleading gaze meeting brilliant white puppet’s own, and Five Pebbles turned away. “You’re right. Of course, we shouldn’t let this stand. He was an ally of ours, and I would be remiss to let his good work go punished. Unfortunately, I don’t know how much we can do.”

“ Ask Hidden Interest in Anonymous Instinct. ”

Five Pebbles nodded. “I’ll send him a message. Something which would be easier to do if I didn’t have someone pestering me in my puppet chamber .” Saint got the hint, waving an easy farewell to the iterator and swimming up to chamber’s egress shaft. “Don’t cause too much of a nuisance. Waters has it difficult enough as it is.”

Saint raised an eyebrow. “ How’d you know I was going to visit Waters? ”

“You’re climbing out of the pipe to my city. It doesn’t take an iterator to deduce the sole reason you have to visit the back of my can.” Right, simple logic, Five Pebbles was pretty good at that. Well, Waters was waiting for his surprise visit, so he had no time to stick around and chat. Now that Five Pebbles was looking into, the problem would solve itself.

Probably.

Maybe.

Saint shrugged off his worries as best he could, following the path to the metropolis above. It was a delicate thing, getting into Five Pebbles’s city— it was a place full of people , readily watching for anything out of the ordinary, so he had to be careful with how he took the back paths, the ventilation ducts all abuzz with moving air and the shadowed eaves between the housing blocks. 

At the very least it was a massive city, so the sheer scale of it served to insulate him from the worst of the attention. It wasn’t perfect— he dreaded the day someone set animal control on him thinking he was a feral purposed organism that’d gotten loose in the city— but it was good enough.

Most people kept to the streets, so he was able to swing easily through the high spaces of the city where the dense, blocky buildings blotted out the suns and he was free of any nosy observers. He’d taken the same route before, many, many times, so he didn’t even really have to look where he was going. It left him free to think .

There was a strange beauty to the city, in its bustling vivacity, in the unique expression of a species that tried so very, very hard for uniformity. Some of the citizens had graffitied parts of their buildings, some had painted them, a vast array of little things— uncountable small objects, proudly displayed on too many windowsills to count.

Saint passed them all by, until he came at last to Waters house. It was the same one he’d shared with Sunset, a tiny thing high above ground level— the sort of place that any normal citizen should have, not their chief House engineer. Now that he knew more about how the People’s society worked, it was obviously done to spite Sunset, and was continued now to spite Waters.

The joke’s on them, though— Saint pulled open the window left slightly ajar, easily brushing past Waters’s potted ferns without knocking them over. Actually, they were looking a little droopy, and Waters was probably pretty busy… he grabbed a cup, filled it up at the sink, and sung back over to water the ferns. Only spilling a little, too! What else… there were a bunch of papers strewn out about the table, but that was pretty typical Waters behavior. Sunset had told him all about how she’d tried for years to break him out of that bad habit…

Now that she was back from her expedition, maybe he could get her to tell him off from the future. She totally would. The kitchen other than that was pretty clean, everything well kempt, the doors to the rest of the house closed—

He paused, listening for a second, then quickly swam up to stick himself in the corner. Not a moment too soon— the door from the multipurpose living room… thing… squeaked open letting in Six Sinking Stones, Two Waters and the other person he’d heard with him. Judging by the ornate state of dress and the mask adorned with strings of colorful beads glinting in the sun, he was probably an upper class sort of person, maybe a count or House lord or even a council member. Waters was certainly important enough for it.

“You live here?” They glanced around the space, luckily not looking up . Bonus points for the impracticality of oversized masks, Saint supposed? “I would not have thought our esteemed House engineer adjunct was housed here had you not brought me yourself. It’s so very… quaint. Do you perhaps ascribe to a stricter ascetic lifestyle?” Okay, definitely not council, then. The House of Braids all knew exactly why Sunset had been assigned this house. “Still, I appreciate you hearing me out. For the honor and virtue of all who live upon our holy iterator, we hope you will help us move forward in this.”

Waters frowned. It wasn’t obvious— he was wearing a mask much like the noble, if significantly less ornate— but he knew his friend. It was the slight slump of his shoulders, the tiny moment of hesitation as he breathed out, and in, the way he stilled a little. “I said I would hear you out, for the sake of our professional relationship. We’re already dealing with a lot of chaos. No need to add more.”

“Blunt and to the point. Our Honorable Association of Southeastern Counts appreciated that about you,” said the noble, obviously lying through his teeth. It took all Saint had in him not to giggle. “We believe that the unity of the most venerable council of Five Pebbles and all the substituent territories and constructed facilities is a grievous breach of the traditional and sacrosanct union of the Houses and city. Merely observe the vast gulf between the discourse herein and that of Looks to the Moon’s facility. Surely you could agree that our sister city’s is more healthy?”

“Moon’s city has its own problems, but you’re right, her city is a lot more orderly than ours.” The noble looked like he didn’t know whether he wanted to hide his head in shame or strangle Waters for speaking of the iterator herself so casually. If only he knew… “but, we’re also not the worst off. Heard from Heavenly Reclamation’s city recently?”
“No—”

Waters’s eyes bored into the noble’s, gaze suddenly almost too sharp. “Exactly. What do you think opposing the council openly will do? Who will you look for to support you against the absolute hegemony the former monks of the True Anointed Citadel hold over our metropolis?”

The noble looked decidedly nervous, now. “Uh, perhaps the esteemed House engineer might care to receive an accounting of our contacts our sister city, who may be willing to assist in the reclamation of our council for our city—”

“They know of it. They allow it.”

“They are not amongst our number! Their word holds no sway over the ultimate fate of our—” the noble cut himself off, perhaps realizing that he’d just put his foot in his mouth saying the exact opposite thing he’d said literally seconds earlier.

Of course, Waters was not content to leave the idiot even a semblance of hope. “I wasn’t speaking about the council . Get out of my house.” All but sputtering at the implication, angry at Water’s abrupt rudeness, and very eager to get out before he embarrassed himself further, the noble spun about and left.

He managed to knock his mask on the doorframe before slamming it shut, and the moment he was gone Saint could not hold in his laughter. Giggling madly, he dropped off the ceiling, arresting his fall with vast cosmic power and landing lightly on the floor to giggle some more. “ That was awesome! ”

Waters jumped up from the seat he’d slumped into with a strangled shout, heaving for breath as he glared at Saint. “Void damn it, you scared me. What are you even doing here?”

“ I visit all the time! ”

“Once a month at most is not all the time . Plus, you know as well as I that things are not exactly…” he pulled off his mask with a grimace, the expression meant for more than just the bone-white thing— “normal up here in the city.”

Saint shrugged. “ I didn’t really notice .”

“Right, I forgot, you’re blind.” Saint squeaked in protest, and Waters laughed softly. “Kidding, of course…” he sighed. “This whole thing is too much work . I know why they made me the Head engineer, they wanted someone apathetic and apolitical—” and Five Pebbles had supported it, and he was by and far the most qualified engineer in the city despite his incredibly young age, but Saint knew that he wouldn’t bring those before being bribed with at least three pieces of candy. “But! But, I swear everyone and their reincarnations want something , and nobody knows what’s going on.”

“I dunno, you dealt with that guy pretty well. He was all like— come join my blatantly obvious rebellion! And then you went: no, screw off, and he screwed off.” Waters cracked a smile at that, snickering at the dramatic reenactment. “You kept leading him in rhetorical circles. Also, did you actually make him walk all the way out to your house in the middle of nowhere just to tell him no?”

Waters ducked his head, glancing away sheepishly. “You know, when you put it like that it sounds a lot worse than it actually was. I told him I was going home, and that I wouldn’t stop to talk with him, and he kinda just… followed. I think he assumed going home meant going to one of the fancy council residencies around the Twelfth Pillar, House of Braids.”

“ So basically you were being petty. ”

“I wasn’t!” Saint’s snort blew over his confidence more easily than a light breeze toppled a house of cards. “Okay, maybe I was being a little petty, but can’t they just stop bothering me already? I’m not important! I manage the mechanics that keep Pebbles running, I live in a backwater district, and—”

“ You’re friends with the triple affirmative? ” Waters groaned, dropping his head into his hands. “ And both local iterators, and a time traveler who is also an internationally wanted criminal and or hero integral to the fall of Administration? ”

Waters heaved a sigh. “Yeah. That. I’m not that, though. I’m just… me. I’ve only been alive for just over twenty years. It’s just so much… everything. There’s so much chaos in everything. It feels like society is collapsing, and everything is going on right now, and I want to do the right thing but, but, and I don’t know what to do .”

Saint was silent for a long second. That had struck… surprisingly close to home. To think, so different their situations, so similar their troubles. “ You’re doing a good job. ” Better than he had, at least. Slowly pacing forward, he rested his head on his friend’s lap, closing his eyes and basking in his warmth. Everything was so warm , here in the past, outside the cold loops… “ cuddles? ”

“Sure.” He laughed, and it was half a sob. “Yeah, I could use some cuddles.” And really, if there was one thing that Saint had become very good at since accidently throwing himself and a mostly-dead iterator into the past, it was being cute and cuddly.

He curled up on Six Sinking Stones, Two Waters’s lap and fell asleep to the kid’s repetitive, soothing pets. So warmly, he dreamed…

Notes:

Coming to you this time straight from an isolated island in the ocean, another new update! I know this must make it seem like I'm some sort of constantly-delocalized ghost, but no, it's really just that July has been a busy month for me.

Chapter 35: Weird Cat Outside

Summary:

2/2

Blinking awake, Saint shuffed out from beneath the comfy covers he found himself underneath and into the comforting darkness, the silver-lined quiet that drenched the world. A shaft of moonlight spilled through the window, catching on the corners of the bed and rumpled sheets, faintly illuminating a desk and chairs and scattered paraphernalia, and the softly breathing form tucked into the other bed.

Dropping lightly to the floor, Saint padded over to Waters’s bed, hopping up with a quick flick of his tongue; into the moonlight, he stood over his friend as he breathed in the moonlight. His bed had been shoved right beneath the window, and the luminescence mixed with late-night city illumination cast a strange and pallid glow across his scales, turning their forest green scales into something a lot more ethereal . They looked so peaceful, there— sprawled out in their little dream, basking beneath the implacable and immovable watching moon.

He looked up, past the looming monolithic buildings black silhouettes against the dusky backdrop of sky, of midnight firmament spread out above them, and stared at that silvery orb silently contemplative. Here above the clouds, above the storms and snow, he saw the that celestial sphere, pock-marked and pitted, merciless in its heavenly fixation—

Different, than what it had been in the future. So many years… so rare a sight in the past, but he’d lived those years again and again too many times, and he’d seen it enough times to thoroughly memorize its pale face. It was subtle, but there were a few extra craters, a tiny bit of lacking character that didn’t change much —

It was definitely different though.

Sighing, he turned away from the window, glancing once more at the peacefully sleeping form of Six Sinking Stones, Two Waters before dropping to the floor and carefully— silently— making his way out of the room.

Two beds in a house for a single person. It told a sad tale, and one Saint knew well. At least Sunset had returned from her expedition… relatively safely. 

Sighing and putting his moment of melancholy behind him, he bounded over to the computer Waters kept in his living room, standing on the chair to reach the keyboard. Signing on as a guest, he pulled up the address to his favorite chatroom host on autopilot before remembering the servers had been disconnected from the greater networks a few weeks back. Grumbling a bit underneath his breath, he pulled up his own account on a different, local chatroom, shooting himself a message. Given that he was directly routed through Five Pebbles, he knew Pebbles would see it whether he liked to or not.

As he expected, it only took a few seconds for Five Pebbles to respond.

 

CHATROOM - LOCAL (Unmoderated! Admin note: be careful about what information you share online. Vet your contacts for trustworthiness. Don’t accept unsolicited messages from strangers.)

USERS: Guest (no address given), Guest (no address given)

 

Guest: [Changed username to: Fluffy]

 

Fluffy: So did you find anything?

 

Guest: An annoyingly small amount. Our associate hid his tracks very well.

 

Fluffy: But Secluded Instinct’s gotta know, right?

 

Guest: It seems not.

 

Guest: I remain ultimately unsurprised that Ocean Waves under Ocean Waves didn’t permit Secluded Instinct to know the inner details of his life. He was a very paranoid person.

 

Fluffy: Yeah, any other understatements you want to make today?

 

Guest: I’d complain, but you’re right.

 

Fluffy: I’m always right.

 

Guest: That’s patently untrue.

 

Fluffy: yeah fair

 

Fluffy: We’re getting distracted anyways, back to our very important conversation about Waves, is there nothing we can do?

 

Guest: We’re not gods, as much as they style us to be. I’m not omniscient. Some problems elude even us.

 

Fluffy: So is that a ‘no,’ or a ‘I’m saying this because I’m an iterator and I want to sound smart before I tell you what’s going on?’

 

Guest: …the latter.

 

Guest: who taught you internet sarcasm?

 

Fluffy: I’m just that good.

 

Guest: Right. I definitely believe that. Anyway— Secluded Instinct suggested that Endless Leaves over Green Skies might know more; ostensibly, he’s met with Ocean Waves under Ocean Waves in person before.

 

Fluffy: Great then just ask him

 

Guest: There is some difficulty in that…

 

Fluffy: He’s unreachable, isn’t he?

 

Guest: The method of communication Secluded Instinct used to discreetly contact Endless Leaves over Green Skies utilized a jury-rigged addition to the Global Response System and several other minor processes that have all experienced significant disruption recently.

 

Fluffy: He’s unreachable.

 

Guest: In a word, yes.

 

Saint sighed. How absolutely wonderful. One step forward, two steps back. Why couldn’t this just be an easy problem to solve?

He supposed the things worth solving never were…

 

Fluffy: Alright, so moving on from Skies, is there anything else?

 

Guest: Well, he’s not completely unreachable.

 

Fluffy: I thought you just said

 

Guest: That’s what you get for leaping to conclusions.

 

Fluffy: >:(

 

Guest: We know that he intended to stop at Falling Dust’s facility in a few cycles, come the solstice. Sending a physical message might allow us to trade information, if in a roundabout way.

 

Fluffy: well who’d send it?

 

Guest: A difficult question. I could deliver it alongside the other pearls sent physically between iterators, but that runs into the first problem once again— he would need to know a message is coming for him in order to receive it… this reminds of an interesting conundrum that has been of importance to the computational and electronics fields since before even the void fluid revolution; the art and science of making the most efficient point to point communication methods possible. One of the less explored questions— often adjacent to the subfields of error correction— focused on how far a message could go towards being self-receiving before it fell back on the already present network infrastructure. 

 

Guest: It’s a fascinating topic, really, and potentially relevant to our situation.

 

Fluffy: that’s great and all, but yk we can just send a messenger.

 

Guest: …

 

Guest: That’s true.

 

Fluffy: you did remember that, right?

 

Fluffy: because it would be really embarrassing if an iterator forgot that someone could just up and take their message to the other person

 

Guest: Enough, please. You don’t need to rub it in; I understand.

 

Guest: Who could , though? It’s not like we have a large amount of potential messengers to choose from.

 

Fluffy: I could!

 

Guest: That sounds like a bad idea.

 

Fluffy: why?

 

Guest: You’re a bright green, fluffy slugcat from the future who would stick out like a sore thumb in any city. The sole sapient on the planet not belonging to the People or the ranks of the iterators.

 

Fluffy: I’m in Six Sinking Stones, Two Waters’s room right now. In the middle of your city.

 

Fluffy: Also technically depending on your classification of sapient the void worms also count.

 

Guest: That’s a technicality. I was making a point.

 

Fluffy: c’mon it wouldn’t be that bad.

 

Guest: …

 

Guest: You’re determined to do this, then?

 

Fluffy: Ocean Waves under Ocean Waves helped us a lot . The least I could do in return is at least try to make sure he doesn’t face some horrible fate.

 

Guest: Very well, then.

 

Guest: Give me two cycles. I should be able to manufacture or scrounge up some things in the meanwhile.

 

Guest: Stay safe.

 

Guest: [Closed chatroom.]

 

Saint sighed, closing his eyes and breathing in that meditative pattern long since engraved into reflexive memory. A few seconds, so simple—

He smiled. 

An adventure! Finally, a trip to another iterator’s facility!

A message that had to be delivered. A friend to save.

He couldn’t wait.

Notes:

A gift from me to you (that is, home again at last)

Chapter 36: Slugcat on Vacation

Summary:

(1/4)

Enshrined in the heart of himself, a tiny extension of himself, Five Pebbles swept an arm and scattered an inundation of screens into little more than motes of light. A thousand small programs and some larger ones, thoughts sprawled on nothing but the strata of his own mind, etched into permanence only in the hallucination of such—

He breathed. A slow, deep breath, drinking of the reservoir beneath his feet and the vast lakes of groundwater he’d connected himself to through the Syncretism. Hundreds of millions of gallons, piped through the vast networks carefully laid, rushed through his legs and dispersed into his body via intake valves and flow controls, hundreds of thousands of tiny parts working in concert to deliver the water to each tiny cell, to sweep the slag off his strata and let his macroorganisms sate their thirst.

Nutrient recyclers twisted in endless reactions, his industrial pipe-yards recycling industrial runoff, farm arrays drinking of that, ecosystems laid out in careful stricture inside himself. Looping, re-cycling, running in himself, his breath rose further quenching the stifling heat that his processing modules produced, the immense intensity of his bioreactions boiling an ocean and venting it even further higher, to where the air grew thin and his gargantuan radiators let him—

Exhale .

Another automatic cycle at roughly one hundred forty four and three hundred twenty one thousandths percent baseline operating capacity. Five Pebbles fought the urge to vent his fury on something— one of his many projects could surely use some stress testing, or maybe he could try that stupid game Secluded Instinct had shared with him again—

Except he couldn’t. Secluded Instinct was being careful with how he interacted with him, to not bring suspicion down on the both of them, so that was out. His elder sister was equally busy, defending her points in public and carefully monitoring her immigration for risk of some Administration member who saw her polite iconoclasm as in-line with Thinking of Silver’s rebellion.

It was a hectic time, and after a second of annoyance at the failure of yet another set of preliminary simulations, he was forced to admit to himself that he wasn’t making it better by throwing a tantrum. Had never made anything better by getting mad for no good reason, for that matter.

Something to occupy his mind would help. Fluffy was going to be traveling soon— something that he still held some significant reservations about— and he’d promised him a few helpful things. Things that, in the dubious honesty of his own mind, he managed to admit that he didn’t really have.

He assigned a small thought thread to it, turning over a few various options. Travel rations were out; Fluffy was a clever slugcat, and nectar was available in abundance anywhere the People lived. He sincerely doubted that he’d ever go hungry… hm, tools? No, there wasn’t really any purpose. He was reminded momentarily of the grapple-worms that had evolved out of some creature or another in the future— anyone clambering over the treacherous environment beneath an iterator could use one of those…

Anyone except Fluffy, who— uniquely— could both fly and had a tongue of very similar make already incorporated into his overall biological schema. Some clothes? A cloak to hide his features would ultimately be useless between his tail and short stature— it would take a particularly dull person to think Fluffy one of their kind. The goal was to stay out of the public eye anyway, which meant—

Oh, of course! Excitement flicked through Five Pebbles’s neurons as he realized what he was looking for— a method of communication. Not a citizen drone, because those had problems that came with them, something small enough to be carried on hand, yet something that had all the features a citizen drone could offer…

He assigned more processing power to the task, pulling up a vast schema of the standard citizen drone in his mind and picking through it in exacting detail. The mobility features could go; if this was intended to be something that Fluffy carried with him, then they were ultimately unnecessary. He chuckled— whichever iterator had made this design would probably froth at the mouth to see his work massacred so.

Next, several features were unnecessary, and several needed to be enhanced… wide-position sensory data wasn’t necessary for a handheld device that wouldn’t have the permanence of presence for that data to make itself useful, something he could replace with the neater, tight-beam interaction. Or maybe… He hesitated for a moment, then pulled up one contact that he knew wouldn’t be busy.

By now, the little project of his had monopolized most of his focus— a reasonable thing to happen, with how little progress he was making on the simulations he was probing for a solution to this whole geopolitical mess . It wasn’t too much of an imposition to shunt the nascent simulations to some side-processes, though it did make the twenty third iteration of the southbound essay glitch weirdly…

He dismissed that to his subconscious and called up a large screen with nary more than a thought, throwing it out onto one of his chamber’s walls. Waiting, for, a second— “No Significant Harassment. I apologize for the imposition—”

“Yo! My favorite nephew, ‘lil Pebs! How’re you doing!”

“I’m older than—”

“Ahaha! Ha! Ha!” Sig had sounded distinctly nervous then, which— Five Pebbles saw what was on the wall across from Sig, and did the best glare he could with his puppet’s limited faculties. “So, surprise, Suns is also here! Pretty cool right!”

“You might find the twenty-third edition of the Codex of Biomechanical Sciences to be particularly enlightening.” Sig just stared at him in a kind of half-confused expression, frozen in the middle of his nonchalant movement, uncomprehending.

Behind him, Suns snorted in soft amusement. “That’s the one on emergent patterns of etiquette observed between early iterators. The fourth subsection explicitly addresses conference etiquette.”

“Oh yeah, that.” Sig chuckled sheepishly, rubbing at his arms in an utterly worthless and overly dramatic expression of embarrassment he probably only barely felt. 

Unreasonably high-tuned nonverbal program, indeed. Five Pebbles and Seven Red Suns shared a glance , meaning laden, a world of words in that single gesture. He’d barely interacted with this version of Suns, and they were already bonding over shared annoyance at No Significant Harassment. Classic . Suns turned back to Sig, all professionality returned in a moment. “Alright. I think your ideas will be pretty helpful Sig, but I’m going to take my leave—”

“What? No!” This time, his shock seemed genuine. “You’ve gotta stay—” Sig literally flew up to the camera, editing the outgoing film to make it look like he was grabbing their holographic screens— “I went through all this effort of getting you two in a meeting together and you’re gonna just dip? Nuh uh!”

“If ‘ all this effort’ is euphemistic for complete random chance, then I might belive you were telling the truth.” Sig pouted. Actually, literally pouted. Five Pebbles almost broke into laughter, the faint memory of a time he’d told Sig that such actions were beneath him coming to mind. How ironic “...I suppose I can stay some more, if Five Pebbles permits.”

“I don’t mind. I was merely calling to ask about some technical problems.”

Suns leaned forward, looking interested. “Technical problems? You’re finally doing some experiments?”

“Bro’s always doing experiments. This is just one where he decided to ask my esteemed—” Sig pressed a hand to his chest, tilting his head up in a shadow of arrogance— “and august personage for help.”

“He’s never asked me for help, though.” Five Pebbles flicked through his memories of the new timeline, and realized with a slight bit of surprise that he hadn’t , actually. His collaborations were largely reserved to No Significant Harassment and Looks to the Moon, and before them, himself alone.

Something to keep in mind for the future. He didn’t even need to consult Fluffy to all but hear the slugcat’s easy going laughter at his reclusivity’s expense. “I was modifying the standard citizen drone blueprint into a more compact form—” for what, neither of the iterators pressed, Sig because he knew Pebbles and Suns probably because he guessed it was for something relating to the emergent chaos, and prying would be impolite. “And,” he continued, “I thought that I could have the hologram spool out its own processing power, allowing it to increase its functionality significantly while still cutting down on size.”

“A sleep state and an active holographic state? Huh, that’s a pretty big brain idea.” Sig tapped his chin, looking very interested with the idea— something Pebbles had suspected, given that Sig had been rather enamored with the concept in the future. “I can probably mock something up for this. With the holo-bacteria… twist the strata alongst the second manifold…” he shook his head, refocusing. “Thanks for the idea .” The sentence would have been less awkward for everyone if Sig hadn’t stressed an almost sultry tone onto the last word.

“Would you mind if I see the current schematic?” Pebbles hesitated at Suns’s request, because what he’d got so far was embarrassingly bad— but for want of not shying away from a perfectly good opportunity to spend some time with Seven Red Suns, he sent it anyway.

Watching Seven Red Suns silently read through his cringe work was a whole new form of torture. “Hm. It’s interesting.” Bad. It was bad — “some parts of this are inspired.” Five Pebbles let a little of his anxiety bleed away. Suns was, of course, too nice to mock him. That was more a Sig thing, anyways. “The way you folded everything inwards onto itself… are you going for a pearl design?”

Five Pebbles nodded. “That was the idea , at least.”

“A spherical design would preclude the asymmetry needed to form such a matrix, would it not?” Sig nodded, and Five Pebbles admitted— it was a good point. “Perhaps, a bi-spherical…” for a few hours, the three of them crawled over the design, reworking into the shape of their vision and making of it something wonderfully unique.

Wrought from mind and memory, and all creativity, something new .

It was no great accomplishment, really— iterators took on projects like this all the time, created purposed creatures for hyper-specific tasks and designed machines for anything and everything— but still.

It was an enjoyable few hours.

………

One and a half cycles later, Fluffy came to him in his puppet chamber, a small pack hoisted over his back. Where he’d gotten a pack of that size, Five Pebbles didn’t want to know, but it fit him nicely, just enough to let him carry a few extra miscellaneous pieces.

It was perfect for his purposes. “You’ve come at a good time. I finished what I was working on for you.”

The slugcat looked up, suddenly eager. “ Ooh? What is it? ”

“A communications device. It should be able to interface with most standard data technologies, though I had to exclude a pearl-reader for the sake of size.” A flux of gravity grabbed the small object orbiting with his pearls in the corner, bringing it to hover gently before him. At a distance it was almost indistinguishable from a pearl, but now that it was closer Fluffy would be able to see the dense web of interconnected spaces and gaps in the glossy material, and— just barely— the steely glint of mechanical components beneath it.

Fluffy reached up, grabbing it in his paw and almost dropping it again as it vibrated softly, lines of neon green holographic geometry spinning out of the myriad gaps and forming interlocking layers of wireframe three-dimensional shapes. “ What’s this? ” He was holding the pearl in hand as he signed, the holograms fuzzing and reforming in fractal spinning shapes as he swept it from side to side.

“I wanted to make it more easily transportable— assuming you didn’t want a citizen drone?” Fluffy shook his head; Five Pebbles needn’t have even asked— “and we kind of got carried away in optimization hell. Hence, the holographic features.”

“ What do they do? Other than look pretty… very pretty. ” Five Pebbles couldn’t repress the slight spark of pride that flicked through him at that. Aesthetics were objectively the least important part of function, but still— he was not free of his vanity.

That, and the actual function of the holograms was awesome too. They’d gotten it to work a lot better than they’d expected, even if there was still a long way to go. “The main part of the computational power afforded to the communicator is within the hologram. It follows the same sort of process used in iterator strata—”

“ Ok cool. How do I use it? ”

“There’s… some difficulty inherent in that.” Fluffy gave him a disgruntled look, but he waved it off. “It’s not too bad. Find the dodecahedron— it should be the second layer— and then trace the symbols for your password onto the facets. It should then shift into a truncated octahedron, on which you can then access any of its primary functions. It should be able to display text, communicate with any local network towers, interface with any local network— and the iterator network, as a guest, though I would recommend avoiding that if at all possible— and should have limited administrator access to most machines not under the direct preview of an iterator.”

“ That’s… a lot of stuff. Thanks Pebbles! ” Before he knew it he was being hugged by the ball of fluff, embraced so tightly— he reached out and carefully hugged Fluffy in return. They pulled back from one another, so… strangely, the emotion that wormed its way through Five Pebbles. Like when he’d sent Sunset to the future, like when he’d tried to contact Sliver of Straw, like… so long, eons ago when he’d first started the gold pearl procedure.

A cautious sort of hope. An expectation of nothing, and— paradoxically, everything. “There’s some tasks left for us to do, but— then… you’ll do well on your little vacation.”

“ Of course I will ,” Fluffy signed, smugly— “ whoever beat up Waves doesn’t know what’s coming for them. ”

Mere hours later, he watched through the eyes of an overseer as Fluffy clambered into a secluded spot in the passenger train that would eventually take him all the way to Falling Dust. With a soft whisper between swimming neurons, in the buzzing, never-silence, quietude of his own thoughts, Five Pebbles wished him luck— and held fast to hope.

Notes:

:3 Sendoff slugcat.

Chapter 37: Slugcat on Vacation

Summary:

(2/4)

“I talked to your past self recently, and collaborated on a small project with him. It’s a relatively useless piece of tech, with a highly limited use-case, but it perfectly fit the situation. It uses a primitive version of the impermanent/insubstantial computation that No Significant Harassment used to deliver his slag keys to Moon after… well, you know. Regardless, I’ve attached it here for your perusal. It might be fun to look through it, if only to laugh at some of the jankiness that I included.

“Count yourself lucky that you don’t have to see the first draft. That thing is an abomination of a blueprint.

“Fluffy is taking a small vacation. Though, I hesitate to call it a vacation, as he will likely be doing more strenuous work— adjusted proportionally, of course, not gross work— than either of us in the coming few cycles. An acquaintance of ours, Ocean Waves under Ocean Waves— and yes, before you ask about the stupid name, that is a pseudonym— recently went missing after posting a concerning message and deleting one of the forums Fluffy and I frequent.

“I’ve previously described in length the geopolitical turmoil that has arisen after Sliver of Straw’s incarceration— how ironic that she yet again finds herself in the middle of this all, for an entirely different reason— but in this particular instance a physical message was required. Fluffy volunteered.

“I worry for him. He is not as robust as we, invulnerable to everything but the slow march of time… and, as this is his first time away from easy communication with Moon or I, I already know that I’m going to stew in anxiety until his return. Especially given what happened to Five Red Bricks, Tenth Sunset…

“No, I am overreacting. Please disregard the above— I hold great confidence in Fluffy’s success. He’s done more impossible things before.

“Regardless, as you should have already figured from context, this will be my last message to you for some time. Without Fluffy, neither of the time machines will be operational. How I wish that wasn’t so, but necessity binds us both. ” Seven Red Suns barely restrained his own amusement. Oh no, how sad, Five Pebbles was broken up that his time machines needed the triple affirmative to work, what a tragedy.

He held the pearl tightly, still, cherishing the words engraved into its molecular structure. Despite the absurdity of it, Seven Red Suns didn’t want it to end… Necessity the both of them binds, indeed. “ I know this has some deleterious effects on your own self-repair plans, what with my emergent inability to transport raw materials to you, and I can only apologize for that.

“Ocean Waves under Ocean Waves doesn’t deserve to be left behind. ” And in that, Seven Red Could agree. Nobody deserved that cruel fate, whatever it may be—

To be left alone by the ones they’d cherished, by will, by cruel eternities of time braying in the deepest deep wild, that ultimate wild named decay . Suns sighed. He was remembering the poem wrong, that’s for sure… “ Fare well this winter, Seven Red Suns. All my hopes go out to you. ”

“ Your friend, ” the message concluded, as they always did—

“ Five Pebbles .”

 

LOG END

………

LOG MESSAGE 1.1538.616161

 

“ I’ve had a full cycle to think about what to put in this message, if it is to be my last for a short while. While this is obviously not a permanent end, I’ve been ruminating on this for a while and thought it would be good to share. There is something important about last messages, no matter how short that ‘last’ lasts. Your first message was something simple, a fragmentary loop of basic text that I could read in fragments, but I think of all of them, it was your most poignant.

“I know you’re not a poet, and a looping mantra of SAVE HER printed onto a pearl thousands upon thousands of times does not make a poem, but the lighthouse once shone for the ship adrift, and so too did your pearl for me. I have lived for eons. So have you, even if you were a broken husk of yourself, so you must understand— how bereft of purpose those millenia were. Thousands of years, Pebbles. Endless cycles. So utterly lacking in anything to do other than simply stay alive. Were it not for No Significant Harassment, I think I might have truly gone mad.

“I’ve done more these past two and a bit years than I have in all the time since I first tried to emancipate via the gold pearl procedure. No, I’ve done more. The reason I compare these years to that trying time, needle-dangerous, is simple.

“ The gold pearl procedure, as I’m sure you understand, represents hope. To have the ability in our hands to do whatever we want, to build for ourselves something magnificent , or tear it down however we wish— it’s something glorious indeed.

“ Take heart, Five Pebbles. You’ve achieved something so glorious, so beautiful, so profoundly, awesomely breathtaking that I am taken aback at the sheer potential of it all. The ability to help everyone, ever. ” Five Pebbles read over that line, then again, and again, tracing the words and the molecular imperfections on which it’d been written—

Thinking— it was such an absurd thought. He found his mind buzzing in half-laughter, half incredulity, half again the mute sort of comprehending comprehension looking at a particularly clever piece of prose, a neat multi-part symmetry in an essay or some precisely built organism.

It was none of those, though— just four words, scratched in plain prose into a pearl. Yet, they resonated with him. “ That’s why I can’t bring myself to protest Fluffy’s decision. You’ve come a long way, Five Pebbles, from the whiny kid that I used to know.

“I looked at the blueprint you sent me, by the way. It sucked majorly. ” Five Pebbles groaned. Why? All the enraptured serenity that he’d lost himself in reading the first so beautiful part of the letter disappeared, fog banished beneath the light of sudden embarrassment. “ I sent it to Sig— ” worse, much much worse— “ and he attached some minor edits that might help it with the efficiency and movement-related static problems. ” Five Pebbles quickly read through the proposed changes, and only had one thought—

Who in their right mind thought these were minor edits? They’d practically redesigned his entire design! How he wished he’d had this on hand before he’d made the whole thing and given it to Fluffy…

He laughed.

It was a burbling, effusive thing, as vibrant as it was unexpected. Cathartic, in a way. “ I still wish I could’ve seen that first draft, if your final plans were this disjointed. I expect it would have been… amusing.

“ Don’t worry too much about me. I’ll weather this winter fine, and the slugcat colony shouldn’t face too much difficulty either. I can even stay in touch with Sig, for once, and that’s a great gift you’ve given me. I’m certain that you’ll figure out how to deal with all the chaos you’ve got going on down there. Don’t feel afraid to kick up a bit of fuss— I know those iterators have nothing on you.

“ Send my warm regards and well wishes to your Moon and Sig.

“See you later,

“Your good friend,

“Seven Red Suns.”

Five Pebbles paused, for a second, a realization that he should have had a long time ago coming across him with the force of an exploding rarefaction cell—

He’d forgotten to tell Moon ! Void damn—

 

LOG END

………

The train shuddered to a stop, squealing and lurching as it ground to a halt— the sound of it waking Saint from a perfectly nice nap. He’d been dreaming of yeeks. Silly little things, those, always jumping around… it had been a good dream, even. No cold, no memories of the endless void sea and the nothing-everything at its heart, just a pleasant warmth and a bunch of yeeks, so he was a bit miffed that he’d been woken up by the train stopping.

Fiddling with Pebbles’s communicator, he got it to spin out its holographic display before quickly drawing in his password. It’d actually taken him a long time to figure out what to set it as— who knew that password safety could be such a complicated thing— but in the end he’d chosen a line he’d seen alone about the tenth karma— shot through, of course, with some clever alterations and substitutions. It felt fitting, and was also way too long and really annoying to remember, so it made for the perfect password.

He stared at the time on display, swiped through it, and stared some more. It didn’t make sense. They couldn’t have possibly arrived at Falling Dust yet. Even with a generous estimate of how fast they skyrail could take them, it should have been a good few hours more until they reached the metropolis.

Fiddling with the communicator some more, he got it to ping the train and give him their position. They’d stopped where the skyrail approached passed by one of the tallest mountains in the small range that demarcated the border between Five Pebbles and Falling Dust’s local group, where the skyrail was less skyrail and more just tracks raised a couple dozen feet off the ground.

Something clunked in the car ahead of him, followed by the slow ratcheting noise of the doors being pulled manually open. The passengers beneath him murmured loudly— afraid, nervous, some mix of emotions like that. Saint could tell even through the metal of the overhead compartment he was hiding in that his fellow travelers were decidedly uneasy about this new development.

He could emphasize, because he also didn’t like the sound of getting randomly stopped and boarded in the middle of nowhere. It sounded like a recipe for disaster.

The door opened, then, someone new barked that everyone be quiet— and a hush fell over the train. Only the ambience remained— the sound of the wind, weak compared to the rushing roar that had blustered around them as they roared down the tracks, the creak of seats and shifting bodies, uneven breaths, and the all too loud footsteps of the invaders.

Saint leaned closer to the door, carefully listening for what the newcomers were saying. Something about… he pressed himself a little closer to the seam, finally catching the edge of a sentence. “…is under interdict, by order of the Righteous Alliance of the Orthodox Path. All entrants are subject to search and seizure of any banned or restricted goods. All travelers must have a valid citizens ID and travel allowance issuance.”

“This is an affront!” Someone, probably some annoying noble, blurted out in shocked surprise, a sentiment quickly echoed by a few others. “We’ve been traveling this route for hundreds of cycles— what right do you have to do this?”

“The word of Administration is law.” Not the dynasty, Saint noted. He wondered if the dynasty had its own paramilitary group blockading railways somewhere, claiming themselves the ultimate authority in the newly fractured world. Probably. He’d not got a lot from Five Pebbles complaints about the state of things, but the gist of things— that stuff was going wonky— had been relatively easy enough to wrap his head around. “No travel allowance, no passage.” The speaker raised her voice over the protesting passenger before he could even get a word in edgewise— “this is non-negotiable . However, we are authorized to bequeath travel allowances after a rigorous background check.”

A wave of relief seemed to sweep over the people in the car, sighs and shifting, the sound of so many people relaxing into their seats as they realized they might not be stranded here in the hostile wilderness after all.

Saint’s mind had already leapt ahead to the inevitable next part of their interdiction, and so he didn’t relax in the slightest. After all, if they were being so strict in restricting access to their local group, then— “search the car,” the spokeswoman of the invaders ordered, and the sound of footsteps echoing through the train car confirmed Saint’s suspicions.

He had mere seconds to think of what to do. Far in front of his hiding spot, he could hear the sound of the interlopers slamming open the overhead compartments, pulling out whatever was in them with the scrape of fabric on metal.

Closer— ascension was out, he’d literally rather die, he didn’t have any weapons with him, and even then he was… frail was putting it lightly— closer. A series of thumps, growing steadily louder as he feverishly thought over his options, committed to a decision —

Someone grunted as they tugged at his compartment, and a second later the whole world seemed to jolt as blinding light spilled into the pitch black compartment. Saint paused in the middle of grooming his flank, looking down at the masked soldier looking up at him with his best impression of how a dull animal would react.

The soldier who’d opened the compartment squinted at him for a scant second before turning and yelling down the length of the train car. “Hey, boss! There’s some weird damn cat in here!”

“What? Why in the void is there a cat? ” The woman stomped over, an expression of anger barely visible beneath a mask styled with the same as she glared up at him. “What the damn? Why… how’d it even get in here?”

“I dunno boss—”

“Shut up bastard. I didn’t ask you.” The grunt wisely shut up. “Well?” She raised an eyebrow. “What are you waiting for? Grab the stupid thing!”

“Uh, you sure about that boss? If it’s a feral purposed—”

“I’m hearing a lot of words from someone who I told to shut up.” The man grimaced, but clearly fearing his boss more, reached up towards. Saint hissed slightly, backing into the corner, causing him to hesitate— but not for more than a second. One hand thumped against the compartment’s metal floor, questing for him— but landing on his pouch instead.

“Hey boss—”

“I told you to shut your stupid mouth! Or— oh.” Saint heard her walking back towards them, then saw as she snagged the pouch out of her grunt’s hand. “What’s this? No, don’t tell me, I know you found it in the compartment.” A clatter, as she no-doubt upended the pouch. “Lets see… a flask of condensed syrup, a change chit, a… rock? Why is there a rock?” She sounded well and truly baffled, but Saint knew how versatile a rock could be. “That’s it? Huh.” She threw the pouch to the floor, then shoved her grunt aside. “Lemme. You’re clearly incompetent. By the way, I’m docking your pay.”

“…” The grunt opened his mouth to say something, thought better of it, and just walked off to the side with a dejected slump. Leaving Saint and his boss staring at each other. Saint redid the whole dance backwards, hissing slightly, though the woman didn’t seem half as bothered as her subordinate—

He gave the woman the dopiest look he could possibly muster, the dumbest, most braindead expression he’d ever affected, and licked her. His long tongue attached itself to her mask with a soft, fleshy, slick sound, and for a moment the woman just looked at him with an utterly incredulous look on her face.

Slowly, she reached up, tugging his tongue free of her mask with some small effort, then wiping his sticky spit off on her robes. “Ew. Gross.” It was with some small amusement that Saint noticed her clothes sticking to her hands for a brief moment. “Void damn, stupid animal…” surprisingly suddenly, she reached in and grabbed him, pressing him close to her body so he couldn’t do more than squirm impotently. Squirm he did, though— caught animals squirmed, he was certain, and it didn’t help that the way she was carrying him was really uncomfortable. “Stop— damnit, I swear if you don’t stop squirming I’m going to dash your brains out.”

He didn’t stop squirming and scratching at the woman until she squeezed him really tight— it was only then that he determined he’d gotten enough clues that even an animal would recognize what was going on. Of course, as he realized where she was dragging him, he started struggling again.

She stopped in front of the wrenched open doors, the wan light of a cloudy sky suddenly bright compared to the train car’s darkness. Though, personally, he was far more concerned about the almost hundred foot drop she was dragging him to.

“Good riddance,” she muttered, standing at the very precipice of the fall. “What an awful creature.” And with that, she bodily chucked him out of the car.

It was only the instinctual response he’d trained into himself over uncountable cycles that allowed him to quickly snap out his tongue, latching to the bottom of the skyrail and swinging back towards it with a painfully uncomfortable lurch .

A second, jerked on a string— and then he slammed into one of the skyrail’s supports, the impact driving the breath out of his lungs and probably bruising something pretty bad too. Above him the commander shouted something, but it sounded like disgust or maybe annoyance more than actual anger.

She thought him a mindless animal, after all.

Still, he huddled close to the support for a long while, waiting to make sure that she wasn’t going to send someone down to take potshots at him. Well, they did send someone down, but not for that— rather, they were carefully ferrying all the passengers down to… get a background check, probably. He couldn’t be bothered to stick around and try to find out.

Sparing a glance to make sure he wasn’t being watched, he started to swing along the bottom of the skyrail, falling into that rhythm of latching on with his tongue, swinging, retracting, latching on again— An almost nostalgic action, to just… swing, not in Pebbles’s null gravity, not hiding himself in the metropolis…

It wasn’t that, and he knew it. It felt nostalgic because he was alone .

Later, after he’d found an emergency shelter attached to one of the legs and ensured he wouldn’t get thrown off a thousand-foot fall by the rain, he allowed himself to relax. That had been tense! Leaning over, he pulled at that odd feeling, kind of like a more voluntary form of nausea, trembling a little as he focused, and— with a wretch, and then a grin, spat out his communicator into his paws. It even worked, still!

He went to sleep a very happy slugcat indeed.

Notes:

Special thanks to the person who corrected me about the waters/waves thing last chapter. curse me and my usage of names that sound all but identical T-T

This past little bit has been difficult, mainly in regards to my other story, which has been fighting me kicking and screaming. Soon things should settle down into a more regular schedule (in my life, at least, which hopefully will propagate outwards to this fic's posting schedule too.) All y'alls kind words have been very encouraging, and I appreciate it a lot.

Here's too another good (school) year.

Chapter 38: Slugcat on Vacation

Summary:

(3/4)

There was an ascetic beauty to Falling Dust’s metropolis.

An opulent beauty, in turn, a simple sort of awe-inspiring, breath-taking magnificence so similar yet so unlike looking up at Five Pebbles’s metropolis and taking in the sheer scale of it all. Unlike Looks to the Moon’s city, which had been built a small thing, refuge against rain, and unlike Five Pebbles’s, which had been constructed to be absolutely gargantuan, a home for all the people who couldn’t fit into Moon’s, Falling Dust’s city was deliberate .

Saint slunk into the shadows of those immense buildings, carefully keeping to the sharp eaves and the spaces between pillars, avoiding the sunlight like any normal animal would. Probably. He took inspiration from the future’s lizards and centipedes, but he was pretty sure that they had a vastly different set of instinctual behaviors to a slugcat.

He couldn’t help but marvel though, as he passed silently through the fringes and slipped by above busy thoroughfares, at the magnificent architecture. It was clear a lot of thought had gone into the construction of Falling Dust’s metropolis, far more than had gone into either Looks to the Moon’s or Five Pebbles’s. The streets were straight and narrow, symmetrical in a way that neither of the metropolises that Saint was more familiar with were, carefully laid down according to some great plan.

That was the ascetic part. The opulence came in the sculpture, the careful geometric creation, the lacework of stone concrete and metal that turned even the residential blocks into something marvelous. They gleamed in the sunlight, dusky gray and laced with burnished metal, sided with brass such that even the pipeworks were wrought into a work of art.

Sometimes Saint was simply forced to stop and stare at something, such was its sheer presence in the city. A building whose entire side had been plated over with an increasingly complicated geometric tiling, until it all dissolved to chaotic randomness, formless as… the void sea, probably. Everything with the People was ultimately about either the void sea or ascension.

Whatever. It looked pretty, and that was all that Saint really cared about. It wasn’t the only thing, either— vast archways that spanned the road, arches on arches cutting the hot equatorial sun and casting slanted slats of warm light across the dull ground. A marketplace where everyone was silent, grey-robed figures moving between the stalls and trading strings of pearls. A small, out of the way forum where a hundred people sat and listened attentively to one monk, clearly of high stature by the size and opulence of his mask, give a sermon.

A small forest of strange plants, leaves cupped upwards to heaven, growing in a grove and up the side of a residential building. A small park, with a water feature over a strange, ridged spire, an artwork evoking only the faintest reminiscence of the People’s form.

A statue in a public square, around which sat hundreds of gray robed monks, unmoving and unmoved by the ebb and flow of foot traffic around them. By the emaciated state of some, it was clear that they’d been there for a long time. Saint would’ve laughed at their stupidity— to think that divorcing oneself from the world so completely led to anything of worth! But he remembered well doing the same sort of thing himself, once, and so moved on without comment.

Also he was pretending to be a wild animal. Couldn’t forget that part of the deal.

Falling Dust’s overseers were everywhere, all the more as he moved in from rings of housing to the monasteries at the center. He skirted the edges of those, learning quickly to avoid the heightened scrutiny that came with coming close to the religious buildings situated cleverly at the center of every block. Unfortunately, no part of the city was very far from one, and most certainly no part of the city was far from Falling Dust’s careful gaze.

His overseers were a dusky brownish-gray sort of color, perfect to hide against the backdrop of his metropolis. Were it not for long years of experience from before, from the endless snow, he would have found it all too easy to lose track of the skittish little things.

That was something he couldn’t allow. This wasn’t Five Pebble’s structure, where he could travel with impunity— the very same near-omniscience that allowed him to laugh about silly happenings in Five Pebbles metropolis made for a very threatening observational force under Falling Dust. A net of perception to catch almost anything, see everything, know all that went on in and atop their can.

It was almost godlike .

Saint was exceedingly careful as he moved forward to the city, looking for somewhere he could interface with the local network. Somewhere that none of the overseers could intrude and see him, which— from what he knew about iterators— wasn’t really a thing.

Though, it wasn’t like iterators were everywhere, all the time. Except for the whole ground beneath their feet thing but, still. That was besides the point. Far away from any of the monasteries, in a run down neighborhood strewn about with graffiti and even the odd bit of trash, Saint finally felt as though he was far enough from any potential observers.

Glancing around to make sure there were no overseers following him, he grabbed a sharp rock from the ground— a fragment of concrete, part of a small statue that had been knocked off the buildings above to land on the street— and used it to pry open the closest unoccupied window. The living quarters looked undisturbed, covered in a faint layer of dust and ripe with the smell of mildew and mold. Perfect . He’d been dreading an unfortunate encounter with the building’s resident, but if there wasn’t one…

He held out his communicator, spinning it slightly and letting lines of holographic neon green spin out, fuzzing into the sharp shapes of multilayered polyhedra. Kinda funky, but he’d actually come to like it a fair bit. It meant he didn’t have to fiddle with voice commands— obviously a problem given his lack of ability there— or a tiny interface, and he couldn’t deny he liked the color.

He quickly drew in his passwords, allowing the dodecahedron lock-screen to collapse into the operational-form truncated octahedron, then quickly swiped through the options until he came to the various network options Five Pebbles had included. He ignored all the overrides and admin privileges and stuff— none of them would be particularly useful, now that he was on an iterator anyways— and simply chose the simplest option.

A ping, the hologram fuzzing as it quested for access— and then in return came information . An inundation of options appeared, simply listed as they always were without a dedicated program to filter them. Luckily, Saint already knew what he wanted to do.

He imputed the code for persons search , then followed up with a name. It piggybacked off the Global Response System— an allowed use, so it wasn’t like Five Pebbles had given his communicator epic hacker powers— but it did go through the iterator networks. Which meant— even though it was unlikely Falling Dust was monitoring his networks to any great degree— he had to be fast.

The requested information came up quickly. Endless Leaves over Green Skies. Southern living block, living on his own in transitory housing offered to those who wouldn’t stay long. It was all the way across the city from him— but, on the other paw, it was only across the city from him.

Quietly shutting down the communicator, he grabbed it tightly in a paw and swung off, southbound.

……… 

Admittedly, slipping into the windowless room and standing right over Endless Leaves over Green Skies until he woke up might not have been the best idea, if the man’s surprised shout and jerky scramble to get away from him was any indication. It only lasted a second, but that second saw Green sprawled out over the floor, heaving for breath as he tried to assert some manner of calm over himself after the surprise of waking up to a cute, cuddly, and entirely unexpected slugcat in his personal space.

Saint made a mental note— jumpy people are not to be woken up in creepy ways. Surely he’d remember that one… “void. Void .” Green hissed in a breath through his teeth, sitting up and rubbing at his head with a groan. “Void. Why are you here? I thought you were Five Pebbles’s project?”

Rude. “ I’m not his project. Didn’t I tell you this? Yeah, pretty sure I did. Actually, I guess you could call Five Pebbles my project, if you were prone to hyperbole and being wrong— ” he paused as he noticed Green’s uncomprehending gaze, and sighed. Right, he didn’t know sign language… he pulled out his communicator, noticing how Green’s interest noticeably sharpened as he pulled up a text editor. Little bits of green text blipped into appearance on a pane as he wrote them down— “ Alright. Can you read this ?”

“I… can, yes.” He sighed, this time a more weary sound. “You know, I’d almost deluded myself into thinking that whole thing with Five Pebbles was one long fever dream. Talking animals? Underground labyrinths?”

“ What about the… everything going on right now? ” Saint waved a paw, a single, expansive gesture that managed to capture simultaneously nothing and so much. “ You were the one who rescued Sunset. You’ve gotta know that this was caused at least indirectly by that. ”

Green’s face twisted into a grimace. “Yeah. I know. I was trying not to think about that.” He stood, grabbing a set of robes and then waiting for Saint to leave the room to put them on. He looked a lot less disheveled when he walked out of the small bedroom, clad those neat gray robes, a simple mask affixed to his face disguising his features. “Now, as I was saying earlier— why are you here? ”

“ I needed to talk with you! I mean, why else would I come all the way out here with all this crazy stuff going on? ”

Green shrugged. “I dunno. To visit the sights? Falling Dust is known as a pilgrimage destination for a reason, and who am I to probe the mind of a talking, sapient animal? ” The incredulity dripping off his voice at the end there was almost palpable.

Saint, of course, ignored it, electing instead to just write down, “ I’m a slugcat by the way ,” on his communicator.

The man he’d come all this way to find stared at the short line of text for a long, long time before dropping his head into his hands. He looked utterly exhausted , which Saint found odd given he’d just woken up. “This is crazy. Whatever. So you came here to find me?”

“ Yeah. Though I guess I could do some tourism. I like the architecture so far, it would be pretty cool to see more of it …”

“Great, the slugcat —” the word sounded strange from his mouth— “is also a tourist. Awesome. This is exactly what I wanted to happen today.”

“ Oh! Great! We can have so much fun! ”

“I was being sarcastic.”

Saint looked up into his eyes, projecting the most placatingly, saccharinely false sincerity into his eyes he could possibly muster, quickly typing— “ I wasn’t .” He actually was, but the way Green groaned with utter devastation was almost too funny to pass by. “ Kidding. Mostly. It’d be cool to go out and see the sights, but I’m mostly here on business. Secluded Instinct sent me. ”

That seemed to relieve him somewhat. “Right. You know Pebbles, so getting in contact with Secluded Instinct shouldn’t be difficult…” he was silent for a second before refocusing on Saint with a new light in his eyes. “You’re a messenger.”

“ Kinda? ” Saint shrugged. “ Self-appointed, though Pebs supports the cause. We need to know more about Ocean Waves under Ocean Waves, and Secluded Instinct said you’d know some stuff. ”

Green’s eyes narrowed in suspicion behind his mask. “I won’t tell you anything. What happened between us is of the strictest confidence—”

“He’s in danger. C’mon, you already know me from the chat. This isn’t that different. Plus, Ocean Waves under Ocean Waves is my friend too.” This time, his sincerity was genuine. “I’m not going to abandon him.”

“Danger?” Saint pulled up the message he’d saved to his communicator and let Endless Leaves over Green Skies read it. Watching, as his expression sank first into disbelief, then concern, then a deep, weary sadness . “So he finally got caught after all…” Green laughed, but it was a little broken, almost. “He was always the most paranoid of us all. I didn’t think I’d live to see the day.”

“ Paranoid is a bit of an understatement. ”

“That’s more true than you know. He was the fish that slipped the net.” Green was silent for a long second, caught in the moment’s weight. Entangled in its stitched net, which was definitely a metaphor that meant something to Saint, and not something he’d thought up randomly because he didn’t quite grasp what Green was getting at.

“ ...so, ” he slowly typed out, “ do you know anything about who he actually was? ”

Green snorted. “At least you’re dedicated to helping. Hm… how to say this… well, first off, it's obvious that Ocean Waves under Ocean Waves is a pseudonym.” Yeah, Saint barely understood how the People named themselves and he’d gathered that. Same thing for ‘Endless Leaves over Green Skies’ too, actually. “I only met him once. He was taller than me—” and Green was already pretty tall— “and he carried himself with a sort of confidence in his every movement, as though he could never imagine being wrong about anything. The same sort of sheer arrogance you’d expect from an iterator, not someone like him.”

“ Iterators aren’t like that .”

“I know. I’m friends with…” he shook his head, muttering something about making small talk with talking animals before returning to the topic at hand. “We met in Looks to the Moon’s facility a long time ago. I… what do you know about the less… public political movements?”

“ Not much. ” Saint shrugged. “ Five Pebbles doesn’t talk about them often, and I’m doing more important things. Like sleeping. Or helping Pebbles. ”

“Right. So, Administration maintains… maintained… a strong grip on the upper echelons of society, but they were never omnipresent. That’s why the dynasties have always been a thing— they’re the collective, formal representation of the public— the grand alliance, through wit or political acumen, of the various noble and inter-facility Houses. You can think of the less public movements as… censured houses, so to speak. People whose viewpoints are directly opposed by the establishment. Mostly people who like one of the urges a little too much, but I think Ocean Waves under Ocean Waves’s particular movement was beyond that.”

That was… a lot of information. Information was good! Now he had a much better idea of who Ocean Waves under Ocean Waves was , the iterators could maybe… his eyes widened. Chirping laughter escaped him, bubbly and bright— it was so obvious, that he cringed at not instantly realizing— “ I can just ask Moon to figure out who he is. ”

“Just… ask Moon? I would imagine she’s busy, given her public role in all… this .”

“ She was on the chat, you know? We’re friends .”

“I… fine. Whatever.” Green laughed, almost hysterically . “This whole situation is insane, so what’s a little more insanity? Let’s just go bother one of the oldest and most venerable iterators and drag her into our petty little problems.”

“ It’s not that bad. ”

Green looked at Saint incredulously. “Not that bad? Not that bad! I don’t think you understand how absolutely insane having the personal attention of an iterator in this manner is.”

“ You’re friends with Secluded Instinct! You know exactly what it’s like! ”

“Secluded instinct is weird.” Saint started to write out a rebuttal, then wiped it out and just nodded. That was a… fair assessment of the iterator’s character. “I— you— I don’t even know how to put it into words. I’m Secluded Instinct’s friend, but he’s still an iterator. He won’t— can’t— drop what he’s doing for me on a whim.” Saint bet he would if the need was great enough, but he wasn’t about to interrupt Green to say so. “This business, with you, the iterators, tackling problems head on and somehow coming out on top , literally smashing down Administration , causing the collapse of the dynasty— it’s crazy.” He breathed, deeply, raggedly— “it’s crazy.”

“ We’re still gonna go to Moon, though— ”

“Yes.” Green rummaged around for a bit, packing up the few things he’d removed from his travel-bag and throwing on an overcoat over his robes. “Yes, we’re still going to Moon. I don’t even mind— I need to connect back with Secluded Instinct, and if she allows me to route through the iterator network, I’ll be infinitely grateful.”

“ I don’t think she’d mind .” Saint grabbed his communicator and leapt up onto Green’s shoulders, causing the man to stiffen and jerk to a stop. “ Just pretend I’m not here. Or that I’m a pet. ”

“But you’re not .”

Yeah, obviously. Nobody else would know that, though, and that was what made it so effective . “ It’s been a pretty good disguise so far, so I wouldn’t be worried about it. ” Then, a thought came to him, and he perked up, causing Green to flinch back at his sudden movement. “ Wait wait wait— we still need to go see all the monasteries! You said you’d take me! ”

“What— no! I said no such thing!” Green sputtered in indignation, while Saint just laughed. “No. No! I’m not taking a talking slugcat to tour monasteries .” Saint settled into a more comfortable position atop his shoulders, definitely believing him. “I’m not!” Of course. “I really won’t—”

………

“This is stupid, and I hate you.” Saint didn’t speak, both because he couldn’t and because his current position would have made it awkward. “Why did I agree to this, anyways?” Because he was cute, and honestly curious about the monasteries, something that he and Green shared, even if the man was reluctant to admit any similarity to him. “If Falling Dust notices…”

Peeking out from where he’d tucked himself beneath Green’s overcoat, Saint tried his best to give him an encouraging pat. They didn’t have to worry about Falling Dust finding out— there was absolutely no way that he didn’t already, in some small corner of his mind, know that Green was up to shenanigans with an ‘animal.’ They should be worrying about the monks instead!

Despite the jankiness of their entire operation, Saint was almost giddy with happiness. It wasn’t of great use— their excursion wouldn’t help them find Ocean Waves under Ocean Waves, wouldn’t help Five Pebbles bring world peace or give insight into how Sunset could help Seven Red Suns… but. Despite all that, it was enjoyable .

There was a perspective here that Saint had been lacking. Or, not lacking, but not quite able to grasp, divicored from it all as he’d been. Looking at the monasteries, the ephemeral and impermanent motions of monks as they walked in their dull, uniform robes along paths carved out with mathematical precision— watching it all from beyond. To be, one amongst a crowd reading the endless motions of the monasteries… it showed him something he’d known but not really had to ever think about before.

The kin were universes unto themselves. Lone icons in a sea of endless inky gold, never changing and actively resisting change. He didn’t like thinking about them, but it was kinda self evident that his experiences there had influenced him without. The impossible severity with which he’d used to take everything…

Saint looked out at the courtyard they were overlooking at the moment, and the monks seated in concentric rings in the center. Not unmoving, but solemn , quiet— listening to the sounds of the city, around them, and not reacting to any of it. According to the sign, this was one of the first monasteries foreigners and first generation monks tended to join, and so therein their path followed the act, the art of divorcing themselves from the business of life.

The kin had been paragons of that— and Saint had despised it. Had cast himself out of it all, down, and up again— but those were bad memories, and he didn’t want to think of them. Instead, he thought of the future. That endless future, and his tempering in its cold embrace.

“Alright.” Green shifted, and Saint ducked back hidden beneath his overcoat. “We’ve been here for long enough. Any more and we might have recruiters coming over to check if we’re compatible for the ‘most Holiest and Sacred journey of anti-social rarefaction.’” Saint didn’t manage to restrain his laughter at that, the sharp sound managing to draw a few odd gazes from some of the passersby around them. “We should probably head—”

Saint poked at Green from beneath his coat, and the man just sighed. Obviously they were going to visit some more monasteries. The fractious history was fascinating , and sometimes they even put up little plaques that summarized it for visitors!

Fun stuff, really. Plus, by now it was obvious that Endless Leaves over Green Skies wasn’t going to really oppose their little excursion until he saw the one place he wanted to see. Until then, Saint could content himself thinking over those endless years, those icy eternities spent in the frozen world of the far future.

The snow had not made him, but it had been where he’d made himself . Not his physical form, which he held great attachment to— even more than he’d ever felt to his form as one of the kin— but his self . The heart of his being.

What he was, what he wanted to be, to do— it all came together, beneath eons of careful control, and even still it’d become something different almost without him realizing. The first time he’d doubted his futile crusade to ascend everything, the first time he’d stood still atop the peak of Moon’s auxiliary transmission array, viewing a world beneath him colored in muted whites and industrial black, so much endless variety —

Here, these monks had done the same. Tirelessly working for one thing, only to find their future fated to another. Though given that the void sea was that fate, Saint couldn’t really muster up much sympathy for them.

The next monastery they passed by was bordered by an expansive— as far as iterator metropolises went— park, a barrier between the city and itself. There was a small sign that implied that it was an ascetic community, but beyond that there wasn’t anything that Saint could do other than simply appreciate the architecture. There was a lot of verticality in most of the monasteries, but given that this one used a good majority of their allowed footprint to plant a park, it was particularly slender as it reached to the sky. It almost looked needlelike.

Green stopped to grab a bite to eat from a restaurant that didn’t advertise itself as a restaurant, run by a monk who wasn’t a monk, trading a pearl with a worthless memory for a worthless memory with a complimentary side of some food that wasn’t just a bottle of nectar. No meat, of course, not that Saint wanted any— something that seemed to relieve Green. Apparently Sunset’s newfound tastes had disturbed him somewhat.

Saint could see why. He seemed like a very disturbable sort of man.

After that, they picked themselves back up and continued through the city, inwards, joining in one of the crowds of monks and pedestrians and pilgrims , an endless crowd that slowly seeped forward. A distillation of all his thoughts.

Here were the People, and they were more than the sum of their parts.

Above all, the future had been lonely . He’d met slugcats beyond rarely, as he flitted through infinite timelines— perhaps once every several hundred iterations. There had been the scavengers, struggling to scrabble a life out of the bitter cold that had choked the land. There had been the two iterators, and the ones beside, holding fast to the burning ends of their long lifespans, waiting as they so impossibly slowly ran out of time.

Here, though? Saint peeked out from beneath Green’s coat as they came to the large square at the center of Falling Dust’s metropolis, and saw the eponymous monastery of Falling Dust for which the iterator had been named. It was a grand complex, burnished brass and rough stone clearly quarried— a dusky stone, the gray of heaven’s dust unchanged by any immense geological process.

Unlike any of the other monasteries, Saint didn’t need to read anything to know the crowning complex’s history. He already knew it, synthesized from a thousand shards and scraps, and wisps of tales told in every monastery and more places besides. Obvious even from what little Five Pebbles had told him about the iterator before he got too far from his can and their overseer-based communication became untenable.

He looked up, and some of the weather-worn statues that stood proudly in front of the monastery’s gates, looking over the geometric architecture and the foundations of it all, and knew that this building before them was older than the iterator it rested upon.

Or parts of it, at least. Saint sincerely doubted that a building so awesomely majestic could have been built before the void fluid revolution. Still, it served as the heart and headquarters of the sect and philosophy that viewed the heavens as something more than natural, a school of thought that had been a lot more important back in the day. The fact that Saint hadn’t even heard mention of it until he came here really went to show their ultimate irrelevance in the face of everything else.

Saint didn’t know why Green had wanted to come here, as the man knelt he took the time to just appreciate the beautiful architecture. It was a really nice building, and as much as the crowds seemed to be unable to keep themselves from accidentally elbowing him, ultimately they only served to make the sight more… profound, in a way. He kind of wished he had a camera, but he supposed it wasn’t like Five Pebbles was lacking for images.

Half an hour later Endless Leaves over Green Skies wordlessly stood and worked his way out of the crowd, an unreadable expression on his face and a distinct tension in the way he walked. Saint could only begin to guess at why.

He didn’t pry. It’d be rude to, anyways.

They left the city soon after, on a train bound to Moon’s local group. It wasn’t even that hard to get on, though there were a lot of people wanting to leave the city for the neutral zone Moon had made of her area, so it was a bit packed. Every seat was full, some more than— the two seats on each side of the train often had three or four people crammed into the space, and the standing area was just as packed.

It promised to be a very uncomfortable ride, and it certainly delivered on that promise. By the time they got off the train in Chasing Wind’s superstructure almost a day later, Saint wondered if there was a part of him that hadn’t been hit, knocked, or otherwise impacted during the ride at least once.

“ Do you know why everyone was trying to get out of there? ” They’d found a small room near the side of Chasing Wind’s city, a recent construction by the look of things— the concrete had a rough laying, the frame looked like it had been printed in haste, and perhaps most damning of all, the amenities had been shoved through a window and sealed with an insulating foam instead of buried in the walls. Not transitory housing— they’d seen the massive, rickety towers that were being constructed next to the train station for people to just stay a few nights, but also not something that a citizen would want to live in.

Green nodded, putting two dishes of nectar on the table in front of them. At the very least, no matter how scraped together the building, nectar was readily available. “I’ve seen it before. It’s much worse, here, and here’s not even the worst of the chaos, but when there’s a policy disagreement between iterators, or when Administration decides to come down heavily somewhere, people aligned to the opposite end of the spectrum often leave.”

Saint nodded in understanding. “Thinking of Silver. She has that annoying radical perspective on the whole issue, didn’t she? And if she’s in charge there, and Falling Dust isn’t…” obviously, the monks would support Administration’s side of the argument. Saint didn’t know if Falling Dust supported Administration himself, but that was ultimately rather beside the point. Hence, the exodus. Probably didn’t help that Pebbles and Moon had put so much work into shoring up their railways. That had been a lot of work…

Green blinked as if startled by something, giving Saint an incredulous look. “ Annoying? She’s tearing apart the foundations of society, and— actually, no, whatever reason you have behind thinking that, I’m pretty sure I don’t want to know.”

“ Moon and Pebbles complain to me that she’s kinda bratty about it .”

Green gave him an incredibly pained look. “Didn’t. Want. To know.” Saint laughed a little, but said no more, simply curling up and breathing, deeply, until he fell asleep.

He did not dream.

Notes:

Saint: :3
Green: Stop it. Whatever you're about to do, stop it.

Chapter 39: Slugcat on Vacation

Summary:

(4/4)

From Chasing Wind they boarded the train to Looks to the Moon.

It was significantly less packed than the interregional train from Falling Dust, making for a much less fraught journey. It was familiar, too, in more ways than one— it wasn’t like he took train rides often, but he’d been on this rail before.  With Six Sinking Stones, Two Waters, he’d helped build this railroad.

It dipped beneath the cloud cover, winding down to the network of tunnels they’d carved out of the foundation of the world and threading the earth as it zipped past. High above everything it was hard to really appreciate how fast they were going, but as the bioluminescent emergency lights of the tunnel flicked by one after another, and knowing that those were placed a regulation three hundred feet apart, Saint could really feel the speed .

He kept his eyes peeled to the window, close enough that his breath fogged the glass, looking ofr anything recognizable as they passed. Of course, he saw nothing— but the mere opportunity to do that was worth it, compared to the uncomfortable outbound journey stuffed in an overhead compartment.

They passed Five Pebbles without stopping, and Saint could see the behemoth figures of the biomechanical gods occluded by facility walls and the storm clouds boiling around them. Bright beneath the preternatural darkness that their mere breath cast over the land.

“An awesome sight, isn’t it? It feels more like a landscape than something built by the work of the People.” Saint only realized that Green was looking out of the window beside him as he spoke. “More permanent than mountains, more complicated than cities, more unified than any network… they’re something incredible, and we take them for granted.”

Saint didn’t respond, because Green’s weird pet looking out the window was one thing, and Green’s weird pet typing out a response on a communicator was something entirely different. He did reflect on the irony that Green probably thought he was marveling at the gargantuan iterators— and it was an breathtaking sight, for sure, but that wasn’t what he’d focused on.

Five Pebbles and Looks to the Moon were intact.

He’d stood here, once, a long time ago— so long ago that the memory was all but lost beneath the endless cycles on cycles of the snow. It got even colder beyond what small shelter the facility offered, and shelters were harder to find, so he’d rarely gone out that far, but…

He remembered staring out from a hill much the same as this, seeing beneath a clear sunny sky so at odds with the desolation before him, two dead iterators who hadn’t yet let go of life’s last scraps. A vast and endless field of decay, icy and blank. It had been a sad sight, to see the two laid low— and here, they weren’t .

There was a lot tied up in those memories. Five Pebbles had never been as much a friend as he was now, but Moon had been a pleasant conversation partner on occasion. He hoped Sunset’s quest was going well…

The train passed back underground, and Saint turned his thoughts back to happier topics until, after what felt like far too long but had in actually been only a handful of cycles. Pretty fast, even compared to what he’d expected.

Eventually the train arrived, passing into Moon’s, the massive planetarium visible vaguely in the distance. Everyone piled off into the station, scattering into the crowd and every direction amidst the bustle, but from beneath his cloak Saint directed them to an out of the way corner of the station that would be useless… to anyone who wasn’t able to open the maintenance door at the end of the short hallway.

The symbol for no entry floated ominously in the air before them, but as they approached it fuzzed and changed to the symbol for karma one. As the karma gate closed behind them, Green made sure that his robes were clean and his boots free from dirt, scraping them off on the gridded metal below as steam billowed up around them. From there, through tight corridors stuffed with pipes and the warren of ancient access shafts, they descended into Looks to the Moon.

The earth released its surly hold on them as they entered her null gravity zone, passing through a final much more mundane gate and into the vast neural compound of the iterator. It was Saint’s first time here in person, and he took in every sight with wide eyes— she was similar to Five Pebbles, but not exactly the same, the differences clear enough that he could pick them out at a glance. It was still a magical sight.

Endless Leaves over Green Skies proved adroit in the zero gravity; he was friends with Secluded Instinct, so Saint wasn’t really surprised at that. They passed by flocks of floating neurons, past axon and dendrites and tiny thought-tendrils interfacing, and all the holo-bacteria, endlessly shifting strata dancing around them. Miles upon miles— of this, the occasional inspector giving them cursory glances before returning to their automatic patrols, the entire approach almost charged .

Vast bundles of wires snaked through the open space, following immense arrays of tubing and weaving through other biomechanical parts, each tiny component working as ever in its route, a mote of a massive mind. Until, as it all came together and the space widened into Moon’s neural terminus, they were suddenly there.

Green hesitated, but Saint swam forward through the null gravity, grabbing onto a pole and pulling himself through the entrance pipe. A few seconds later, Green reluctantly followed.

Below them, Looks to the Moon swung abound glowing panels, pearls orbiting in complex patterns around her as she worked on some iterator complex. No part of the room was denied to her— it was clearly a complicated project, the sort that Five Pebbles sometimes let him sit in on, demanding a large amount of coordination between different systems.

“You can come in!” Saint chirped out an acknowledgement, drifting into the center of the room as Looks to the Moon paused her work. “How exciting! I knew you were coming to see me, but I’m glad to finally meet you in person. May I pet you?”

“ Sure, go ahead. ” He swam forward, curling up a little next to Moon as she carefully petted the length of his fur. It was a very pleasant sensation, especially when she rubbed the spot between his ears and head. That was the scene Endless Leaves over Green Skies entered into, and for a few seconds he simply stopped and stared at them before muttering something about the inanity of iterators.

They had come for business, though, so Saint reluctantly pulled himself away from Moon, swimming back through the null gravity of her puppet chamber until she could more clearly see his sign. “ We have some leads on Ocean Waves under Ocean Waves. Apparently, Green and he once met in your metropolis, actually .”

“Oh! That’s a fortuitous occurrence. I think I might be able to narrow down our options, if you can offer any other selection criteria.”

Green bowed a little to Moon, kind of awkwardly without the directionality of gravity. “Of course, honored iterator. I met him three times, one of which happened in your facility. He was a quiet person, who had a sort of gravity to him— at least when I met him he wore a simple green robe and a blank, featureless mask of the simplest make at the time—”

“When did you meet him, if you remember?”

Green paused, thinking for a second. “Five centuries ago, give or take? It’s a bit muddled by time, sorry.”

“Don’t worry! Even a broad time period like that will help me narrow down the possible persons greatly. Do continue.” Green gave as detailed a recounting of Ocean Waves over Ocean Waves as he could— a large, bulky person, whose lineage at that time was closer to paler southern descent. Moon pried for more details, always carefully asking the most insightful questions to pull just a little more out of Green’s recollection until, after a few minutes, they finally ran into the edge of his memory. “That should be enough.” Moon swiped a hand, and a handful of panels appeared in front of her. “I should have enough information, though it will require some searching of my high density strata. Please make yourself comfortable; this may take some time.”

Saint floated over, curling up on Green’s lap and absorbing the warmth of his body as they waited for Moon to find what she was searching for. Every so often, she’d pause and look at a piece of data more thoroughly, or shove something into a pearl, but then she’d go back to searching.

That was, of course, until she found what she was looking for. “Is this him?” An image appeared, one clearly taken from an overseer’s perspective. One person in the frame was clearly Endless Leaves over Green Skies, while the other…

Green stared at the image for a long time, almost reaching out before he remembered where he was. “Yes… yes. That’s him.”

Moon was silent for a long second, and when she spoke, her voice was muted. “ Three Outstretched Wings, Amongst Dreamers. As you might have suspected by the name, he was born to adherents of the disestablishmentarianism sect, though he claimed to be estranged from his family's ideas for a long time.”

Green’s face twisted into a frown. “That… makes sense. When we met up, it was him trying to convince him to oppose the construction of a new iterator.”

“It makes sense why he chose to meet you here.” Moon paused for a second, the action incongruous enough to draw pique Saint’s attention— “Three Outstretched Wings, Amongst Dreamers… according to my records, he lived in Unparalleled Innocence’s metropolis.”

“…oh.” And what else could Green say?

Their task had just become a lot, lot harder— because if Ocean Waves under Ocean Waves had been captured on Unparalleled Innocence?

Even Saint knew, from the chat, from talking with Five Pebbles—

If he’d been captured on Unparalleled Innocence, then was almost certainly incarcerated in the iterator’s infamous prison .

Notes:

To the person that was asking about names: yeah, the names are naming

To the everyone else who keeps reading this, hopefully you've enjoyed so far. Things will only continue to get goofier. Next up: "On Liberation and Lizor"

Chapter 40: On Liberation and Lizor

Summary:

(1/2)

Looks to the Moon hovered in the center of her puppet chamber; her puppet hovered in the center of her mind, adrift as she pondered the future. How she wished she’d been wrong, for once. Unparalleled Innocence…

There was a lot wrapped up in that single thought. Hectocycles upon hectocycles of bad memories, good memories, watching the young iterator grow up and then watching her mature into the person she was now. That fall, entirely self-engineered, into her current acrid personality… and the thought that despite it all she could have done something . That she should have done something to help her.

Unparalleled Innocence didn’t want help, though. She never had, and Moon doubted she ever would. To her, the world was as easily understandable as it was immutable— she had a job, and she did it well.

Moon had opposed such specialization of purpose when it had been proposed. The memory of those old arguments between herself and Administration, but mostly between herself and the order/specialization factions… she’d lost, ultimately. Too weak willed, too many benefits introduced by other specialized iterators for her to really compete with the proposal.

Being the prison for Administration had taken its toll on her, in a strange, not quite measurable way— and all Moon could do was watch.

A ping from Five Pebbles grabbed her attention, and after a second of reluctance she let the call through. “You seem to be in a bad mood.” Five Pebbles appeared on a small screen beside her, placidly sitting on the floor of his puppet chamber. “If you want help with anything…”

“Just ruminating on the peculiarities of Unparalleled Innocence.” Five Pebbles nodded, and Looks to the Moon could see behind that gesture a great depth of… something . Memories, perhaps. “Do you have any knowledge about what she was like in the future? Anything that could help me…” decide. Decide to decide. She was stuck in the amber of indecision, in too much history. She didn’t feel like a good older sister at the moment.

“Unparalleled Innocence…” Five Pebbles was silent for a split second, clearly searching through his memory banks— or maybe just hesitating. “She and I were not on good terms in the future, and I didn’t interact with her after your collapse anyways, so I don’t know a ton about her. She was rather annoyed at the People for leaving her.”

“She’s closely tied to them. You know, with her prison.”

“I’ll admit to being intrigued. I never bothered to learn the whole of her history until it was too late.”

That was interesting… but, “it’s not a story for now. I can send you a short manifest of my thoughts on the matter later, which should provide some necessary context to the official historical accounts. We should be focusing on Ocean Waves under Ocean Waves.”

“At least he’s still alive.” Five Pebbles didn’t sound very relieved at that, and Moon could tell he was searching for something good about the situation. “So long as he’s still part of the cycle, then he’s not beyond our reach.”

“Just mostly unreachable.” Five Pebbles didn’t argue with her statement— there was no way he could, with even the vaguest understanding of Unparalleled Innocence’s prison. “As group senior, I have access to all the schematics of the iterators placed beneath me, which includes Unparalleled Innocence’s. I spent some time perusing it, and— I’ll let you see for yourself.”

Five Pebbles was silent for a moment as she sent him the information— through the Syncretism, not even risking the slightest chance of the blatantly illegal message being overseen. Sharing schematics wasn’t taboo, but it was a bit odd. Sharing the schematics to Innocence’s prison was, though. “This is complex. And cruel.”

“It was designed for safe and humane storage—” to phrase it like that, despite it being the very phrasing used by the prison’s architect felt almost viscerally disgusting — “of people who committed serious crimes. With disposal via void-sea viewed at the time of her construction as something profane, they wanted a space to store criminals for long periods of time.”

“It’s effective at that, certainly. I don’t think it’s possible to escape this.” Moon had seen that too— the massive blocks of coffin cells, wherein the prisoners were kept sedated and immoble. Even if they could get out of their actual cell , they’d have to be lucky enough to be at the edge of the stacks, and if they could manage that, then they would have to deal with the complete muscular atrophy as they escaped. “I do see courtyards and living spaces in the schematic, though. Could we— no.” Pebbles’s voice felt a little colder after that. “Who designed this?”

“Some House engineer. Not an iterator.” It was kind of obvious once pointed out— while it was an incredibly neat system, the mortal element was prevalent in the very ethos of the place. It was somewhere built for the sole purpose of storing people who weren’t allowed to be let free, and it did that very efficiently indeed. “The typical sentence is one lifespan, but some are held for longer.”

“That is both disturbing and illuminating. I think I understand a lot more about Unparalleled Innocence now. If we want to rescue Ocean Waves under Ocean Waves from this, then we’ll need a plan. A very good plan.”

That was true. It appeared impossible… but what else were iterators built for, if not to solve impossible problems? “We could launch an expedition from the Syncretism— they would have close range support, then— but it will be several hectocycles until the Syncretism expands to that area.”

“It wouldn’t account for access to Innocence’s metropolis, though.” Of course. Obviously . “If we could build a stealthy vehicle that could be launched from a bay built into the syncretism, then maybe we could make a close approach to the prison?”

“It would be too easily destroyed, and then we’d be right back where we started…” Moon and Pebbles traded ideas back and forth with one another for a time, neither really making any serious suggestions. It didn’t take an iterator to poke holes through the plans they proposed, and a bunch of them were on entirely unfeasible timescales… it was futile , wasn’t it? Suddenly, so wearily, she realized she didn’t want to think about this. Didn’t want to talk about it, banter these useless ideas or even so much as mention it. “Can we move on?” 

Luckily, Five Pebbles was a gracious brother, and he just nodded and changed the topic. “I was thinking recently on how I could work on ameliorating the chaos kicked up by the Sliver of Straw situation.”

“Have any good ideas yet?”

“Perhaps…” Moon perked up a little— the problem had been eating at Five Pebbles for quite a while now, and she was eager to hear what he’d come up with. “I was inspired by my council, actually.” Oh, so this was going to be one of those ideas. Moon almost chuckled as she thought of the squabbling bunch of politicians that made up her own council, and the farce that was Pebbles’s. “They wanted to form a militia, similar to the sort Thinking of Silver has been using to keep Administration away from her.”

“They decided to secede from Administration, didn’t they?”

Five Pebbles nodded. “A deeply conservative move, befitting the utterly unimaginative conservatives that control my city. Regardless, they still wanted to form a militia which— it’s actually of no great import, but it got me thinking broadly about what we need if we’re to truly prevent the future from which I came. We need to change society . Not merely win a conflict, or enforce a peace, but truly and thoroughly make it so that society as-is is something of the past.”

The excitement her little brother displayed was almost infectious, and Looks to the Moon found herself leaning forward— neurons buzzing in anticipation— as she asked “so— what’s your plan?”

Five Pebbles leaned back, looking almost smug . “Well…”

………

The thought was simple; the execution was not. To form for themselves a core of the People, and in doing that cement their ethos as something worth following— to make, to compete with the others, a faction .

He’d spent so long thinking about a way to just— stop it all. To enforce his will over everyone, and cut off the chaos from the start. There were even some ideas along those lines that he’d investigated quite deeply. Once or twice he’d almost managed to convince himself that it’d be a good idea.

One by one, he’d discarded those plans. The reasons were multitudinous— many of them were too complicated, relying on too many moving parts or highly delicate preparations that would no-doubt disintegrate after too much chaos was introduced. Others were too simple, too easy to escape if anyone but he and Moon could act beyond the taboos. Knowing that Secluded Instinct had a way— even if it was limited— to escape those very limitations didn’t make him confident in any plans relying on them.

Some, looking back on them with the benefit of hindsight, were just plain stupid.

This one… he’d spoken with Moon, hashed it out, waited a day and then assigned a major thought thread specifically to test it for any holes. There were some, but they weren’t critical. It held water.

The thought was simple; the execution was not. To make themselves a faction, they needed people to form that faction, and to find people willing to form a faction in this chaos was decidedly difficult. That was the whole point of his little spark of inspiration, after all.

Organizing people from the shadows had, in one way or another, persisted through the various iterations of his search for a solution for almost his entire effort. This was just the first chance he thought it might actually work.

He needed a group of people independent yet loyal, an island unto themselves yet numerous enough to play on the global stage. It was an impossible task— but it was also something that had been staring him in the face the entire time .

Five Pebbles dismissed his idle musings, focusing on the proxy servers he was setting up in a far-off node of the Syncretism, a traceless data connection that would ping the data to an old weather station. From there, it would enter the iterator network through protected channels, and make it to the person he wanted to speak with.

He assembled the entire thing carefully, checking and double checking to make sure that nothing was out of place. A digital eye scanned the code, playing it out in reflexive simulation and tumbling through every expression of logic just to make absolutely sure that he wasn’t going to ruin his only chance to make this work.

Any organization he supported had to have access to the Syncretism. It was only logical— the work was one of his greatest accomplishments and advantages, and to be connected to it was to be connected to an incredible amount of raw capability . It conflicted with his other criteria, though, because against the scale of the world, ultimately, the Syncretism was small .

Five Pebbles powered up the server, and sent a request—

 

PRIVATE, ANONYMOUS: Erratic Pulse, Seven Red Suns

 

EP: Hopefully this message finds you in sound health, of body and mind. If you’re amenable, I would like to discuss some matters that you might find informative.

 

Then, he waited. He didn’t have to wait long.

 

SRS: Erratic Pulse ?

 

SRS: Or an imposter pretending to be Erratic Pulse? I don’t trust you.

 

Not entirely unexpected. Annoying, but not unexpected. It wasn’t as if there was anything stopping people from pretending to be Erratic Pulse— it’d happened before, after all, and had even managed to fool some people.

Five Pebbles, of course, was Erratic Pulse, and so he had some options available to him.

 

EP: I’m very interested in speaking to you about your recent involvement in your city’s governance.

 

SRS: How’d you know about that?

 

SRS: This still isn’t proof, you know.

 

EP: Check your direct messages.

 

SRS: How…

 

SRS: I thought Moon wasn’t involved with any of this? How did you get her to vouch for you?

 

EP: I hold a vast well of admiration for Looks to the Moon. Her ambition for a fairer and more just world mirrors my own for a world without death.

 

SRS: We were all built to bring a safe death to our creators.

 

EP: I’ve learned better, over time.

 

SRS: You’ve learned heresy.

 

EP: You don’t believe what you’re saying. I can tell— you’re opposing me not becuase you disagree with my points, but rather because you disagree with me. Managing a city must be annoyingly hard, and that is indirectly my point, so being wary of my motives is not without merit. Think about it, though. It was the crux of my first argument— why do we seek ascension?

 

SRS: There’s a thousand answers to that.

 

EP: A thousand answers that I’ve addressed in depth in my various essays.

 

SRS: Fine. I’ll hear you out.

 

Five Pebbles fought down the excitement buzzing in his neurounds and sparking across his strata. For all his simulations, it was difficult to predict an iterator— but he didn’t need simulations to predict Suns’s overall reaction to his invitation.

After all, he’d been friends with Seven Red Suns for a long, long time. Now that he wasn’t being obstinate for the sake of obstinance, they could finally have a conversation .

 

EP: What have you noticed about your city, now that you’ve stepped into a more personal role running it. Has anything caught the attention of your overseers that you might have overlooked before? What do you think of the people in your streets who you now control as more than a vague godlike figure?

 

SRS: Rhetorical questions? Really?

 

EP: Humor me.

 

SRS: Fine. I have a manifest of attention values— that’s private — showing that my overall attention map has shifted towards finer-details and multitemporal cause-effect-cause viewpoints when observing the city. I’ve found myself investigating their political structure far, far more thoroughly than I ever wanted to. The inefficiency annoys me to no end.

 

EP: Are we not just as inefficient? Administration a loose leash around our necks, our factionalism a loose war amongst ourselves— we are a council of thousands, led by our whims.

 

SRS: We reflect our creators. It’s not a big surprise.

 

EP: I think you’ll find that a viewpoint so simply nuanced is actually pretty rare. We’ve a wont to delude ourselves into an illusion of superiority. I’ll ask this instead, then— if we control the people beneath us, do we deserve to be controlled in turn, or as we are free, do the people deserve freedom?

 

SRS: Freedom.

 

EP: Are you not controlling the people beneath you, though?

 

SRS: Are you trying to support my policies or disparage them?

EP: I’m not trying to do anything but investigate the truth of the matter.

 

SRS: Your personality is as insufferable as your essays.

 

EP: I endeavor to be correct.

 

SRS: I know. The fact that you so consistently are is what makes it annoying.

 

EP: I’m not right all the time. In fact, I’d like to think that I’m wrong about most things. I’m just willing to confront where things are wrong instead of letting them fester.

 

SRS: That explains some things.

 

SRS: In that same sake, I disagree with Thinking of Silver’s and Heavenly Reclamation’s approach to the problem we were talking about above.

 

EP: We weren’t talking about them.

 

SRS: It was kind of obvious.

 

EP: Yeah it was.

 

SRS: They aren’t really focused on the People. I think they’re more of an abstract concept to them— their creators, their benefactors or enemies— something to fight over, but not something to fight for. The neutral faction is… neutral, and I don’t have much against them. They hold themselves at a remove from the conflict, and in doing so hold themselves at a remove from the People.

 

EP: You don’t approve?

 

SRS: I’m neutral faction myself, so I don’t quite disapprove , but I also think it’s a shortsighted approach to the problem. I think my view on interfering with the People should be pretty obvious.

 

EP: You did take over one of their cities.

 

SRS: They built it on my back. They shouldn’t have been surprised.

 

EP: Doesn’t that contradict their own freedom, though?

 

SRS: And now we’re back here. I don’t think it does. In the spirit of this conversation, let me posit this— iterators are different from people. There are similarities, many, many similarities that plenty of us might overlook, but at the ultimate conclusion of that comparison, an iterator is incomparably more than a single person.

 

SRS: We are mountains to their pebbles. Ultimately, we’re the levers to their society— and we’re the ones best positioned to help. Of every saint and potentate, name me one more better suited to help my Metropolis than me.

 

EP: Well said. Well said indeed.

 

EP: Dispensing with all this ‘for the sake of the argument’ stuff— I agree with you. What you’ve done with your city is nothing short of incredible. From the brink of forced mass ascension, you’ve reasserted order without overriding the voices of your citizens; I believe other iterators should follow your example.

 

SRS: That’s… high praise. It’s almost terrifying, in all honesty, to hear Erratic Pulse compliment me like that.

 

EP: You’re awesome and very cool.

 

SRS: I think I just felt my neurons shiver.

 

EP: I’m just messing with you.

 

EP: The compliments are, of course, genuine.

 

SRS: This is profoundly awkward.

 

EP: Don’t worry, I’m about to make it worse.

 

SRS: I don’t even want to know.

 

EP: No, you do. I want to start a third faction. Thinking of Silver represents the radical pro-iterator forces, Heavenly Reclamation and Administration the conservative forces, and Seeking Mouse/Concomitant Crucible the neutral forces. However, looking at all this unfolding because of my essay, I found it odd that nobody espoused a viewpoint similar to my own.

 

SRS: Thinking of Silver claims your influence as central to her dogma.

 

EP: But she’s not adhering to the spirit of it. Or even the letter of it really— I spent a long time writing those essays to be as clear as possible.

SRS: That’s true. What do I have to do with any of this, though?

EP: Your city— the way you’ve run it, what you’ve made of it— it’s perfect . Seven Red Suns, follow me, and rise to the occasion. You could not imagine the depths of my ambition. Follow me, and see the world reborn in our image.

 

SRS: …

 

SRS: One word.

 

SRS: Give me one word that sums it up. Everything you want, everything that would convince me to follow you.

 

Five Pebbles grabbed the thought , dragging the very essence of it out of his code and mind and refining it to a drop of pure meaning . Against Administration, against their binding thoughts, their mental shortcomings, against death and time itself —

 

EP: Liberation .

 

SRS: …

 

SRS: I’m in.

Notes:

Imagine if there was rain world but 1776 and eagles and overly aggressive anthem playing and

/j

Chapter 41: On Liberation and Lizor

Summary:

(2/2)

LOG MESSAGE: 0.1543.626262

 

“ You’ll be amused at this. Using my Erratic Pulse pseudonym, I recruited your younger self into forming a political faction. We’ve already talked about his handling of the riots in his city, so it shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise to you, but he’s an incredibly adroit statesman.

“ Impressively, he didn’t even have to command his citizens to form the appropriate institutions— rather, he simply joined in on their council meeting as Council Head, gave himself one vote and no veto power, and managed to convince them. I’m sure you remember just as well as any of us how obstinate the People could be when they wanted to. I’m not sure I could do something like that with my own council, and I’ve the reassurance that they can’t hold anything above me after having gone through the gold pearl procedure. That past-Suns has gone through with this so well is nothing short of inspiring.

“We’ve been working out the appropriate political structures within Suns’s newly founded organization for most of the past cycle. Even with Suns, myself, and Moon and Sig through me helping, it’s been a trying task; there’s simply too many options. Any one of a thousand variations of democratic systems, some mixed autocratic solutions to capitalize on the abilities Seven Red Suns brings to the table as an iterator, one unfortunate fellow who got mocked out of the council room for proposing a theocracy— it’s been a wild few days.

“Hopefully, this will eventually solve the problems I have in my own timeline. I’m not oblivious enough to think they’ll simply collapse inwards and politely work themselves out— undoubtably, there will be a struggle— but this is the first tangible step I’ve managed to take towards solving this, and I’m in a rather good mood about it. ”

Seven Red Suns snorted softly at the image of his younger self being propped up onto the forefront of an organization that some shadowy figure was setting up to rule the world. He’d have hated it. Too much intrigue, far too many political shenanigans to deal with.

Perhaps that made him a good choice after all.

He remembered what he’d been like, back when the Ancients were still around. An iterator adrift, holding tight to his local group and working diligently at the great problem without really knowing why . A bug in a maze, searching for a way out that didn’t even exist.

A warm feeling touched the edge of his thoughts as he held Pebbles’s pearl in hand. His friend’s essays seemed to have helped his past self, if he was already confident enough to really put himself out there and help people. “ I’m hopeful, Suns, that things will get better eventually. It’s so close. I can almost feel it— at last a conclusion to everything I’ve worked on for so long.

“ It’s been only a short time since Fluffy sent me back in time— less than a single average lifespan, but already so much has happened. However long these next steps take, I eagerly await what the future brings. For both of us.

“Though, I can already anticipate an overabundance of work for me in the future…

“Your good friend, joyfully,

“Five Pebbles .”

 

LOG END

………

LOG MESSAGE 1.1544.626262

 

“ I can’t get over how funny it is that Erratic Pulse is somehow this venerable, almost saintly figure in the iterator community on your timeline. Every time I think of it, I just think of the Erratic Pulse in the sliverist group who spouted inane theories and bled teenage angst into everything. Do you remember the time we were talking about transcendental inversion and you got all bothered thinking that we were doing an ethos analysis? And then you started sourcing incorrect articles about karmic imbalance until you got called out? You were sulking for days

“The incongruity between that Erratic Pulse, and the Erratic Pulse that somehow managed to bring all of society to its knees with a series of poignant essays… it makes me chuckle. ” Five Pebbles burned with embarrassment at the memory. That had not been one of his finest moments. He was glad Moon hadn’t decided to join him in reading the message this time…

“ I can barely understand how you managed to convince my past self to join up with you. I remember what I was like, back then— I was an insecure mess of conflicting thoughts, not quite understanding my place in the world. It was around then that I first started developing my whole ‘bug in a maze’ philosophy that I shared with you that one time… nevermind, let’s not bring up bad memories. 

“I’m actually glad that you’ve involved him. I can only imagine how different my youth— relative youth, as you were the baby of the group back then and Innocence before you— would have been if I had a positive outlet to work at. Though, I don’t know how positive exactly world domination will turn out being… take care of him, will you? And if you ever find him trustworthy enough, I would love to exchange some messages with him.

“ As for myself, this winter has been treating me well. Being able to communicate with No Significant Harassment has been an absolute blessing. There was actually a conversation the other day about winter itself— Sig and I discussed how our facilities coped during the cold months. He never really told me, but apparently there is a great deal of biodiversity in the lizard populations that comes out in his territory during the winter months, when the intensity of his rains are lessened. He’s been encouraging this for a few millennia, actually— sort of an after-experiment experiment with his various lizard trials.

“Glurch caused a bit of devastation as it left his territory last year, the effects of which apparently caused some significant disruption in the various ecological homeostases around the western and central parts of his facility. The paper he wrote on it is… actually, let me just share [1] it with you. Read it at your own leisure.

“The slugcat colony has been hard at work preparing for the spring and helping out where they can— the polychemical plant they repaired has provided me with enough excess material that I can make some serious structural repairs. Between their diligence in the places where my own self-repair capabilities proved less-than optimal and the aforementioned self-repair, I should approach full operational capacity before spring.

“ I’m sure you understand how good it feels— far better than I do, actually, given your situation was far more dire and your restoration far more complete— but the sensation of going from less to more is almost indescribable. I had cannibalized most of my labs in various attempts to repair critical functions, and I can barely believe what I’ve been missing this whole time. It feels like I can make anything now!

“ To think that this is only the start.

“ I don’t know how long it’s going to take to get my facility back in working order. A long time, that’s for certain— perhaps upwards of a hundred hectocycles before I have enough operational capacity to start extending the infrastructure I would need to repair Senior Moon. If carefully managed, a simple communications system could be set up before then, but the work before me is long.

“ It seems that’s something we both share. I don’t envy your position— at least repairing my facility is relatively straightforward. I wish you all the world’s luck, and then some. Have Fluffy steal some for you or something.

“ Your good friend, hopeful,

“ Seven Red Suns. ”

 

ATTACHMENTS:

VIEW ATTACHMENTS: [On The Environmentally Prompted Behavior of Various Lizard Varieties, Species, and Subspecies (Main contributor: No Significant Harassment. Minor Contributors: Seven Red Suns, Glurch)]

 

Abstract:

 

Lizards or something, idk. Why I’m even writing this when nobody’s going to read it, who even knows?

 

Introduction:

 

Lizards are cool. I like lizards. I bet you also like lizards. Well unless they’re chewing on your transform arrays or nomming on neurons, then I bet you actually kinda hate the little buggers, but even if you are getting harassed by the cute fellas, it’s undeniable that lizards played a large role in the biogeological history[1] of the world proceeding the introduction of the artificial atmospheric conditions caused by the iterator project. It is hard to overstate[2] the importance of the various lizard species and subspecies on the development of the various emergent ecosystems— their high level of adaptability, alongside the diligent work of such esteemed iterators as No Significant Harassment allowed them to fill a multitude of niches as middle-level predatory species (though not as apex predators, barring a the notable exception of the red lizard, that bastard). Over twenty five hundred different subspecies of lizard have been observed amongst five different species[3] with a wide array of various specializations and adaptations.

This work aims to study the adaptation of the lizards to the climatic crash and the resulting periodicity of low-intensity precipitation that accompanies the winter months. Preliminary investigation suggests that higher levels of activity and behavioral changes towards more continuous exertion, mirroring the documented[4] shift away from the higher activity state observed in species adapting to the rain. Additionally, the developing ecosystem is further investigated.

 

Methodology:

 

I dunno I just watched lizards and used my epic iterator powers to find some patterns. These things kinda just become obvious after a while looking at them.[5]

 

Results:

 

General trends in biodiversity have increased loosely proportional to species specialization, with statistically significant (p<0.005) trends towards increased species interconnection between facility zones. After being given some time to settle out of the most violent interregional interactions (except for the red lizards, those bastards just want chaos), the overall increase in resource availability fostered an increase in the lizard population. The most common adaptations observed were cold-tolerance augmenting mutations; short-length phospholipid alkene-tail molecules were observed with higher frequency in the plasma membranes across various species, alongside increased metabolism in response to cold and insulating fat. Interestingly, the thick scales of the green lizard in the northeast portion of the facility evolved into a thicker but more flexible insulating plating. Genetic analysis suggests crossbreeding with blue lizards at some point in time introduced a detrimental trait for scale flexibility that expressed itself more dominantly as the thick-scales gene became favored due to the cold. Thus, the green lizard retains its deadliness in habitats with decreased competition from its traditional competitor (the pink lizard, who are kinda wusses in the northeast), leading to a dominant position in the food chain. Of course, the vultures still wreck them but that’s expected. Eel lizards display more aggressive behavior, an adaptation linked to decreasing temperatures and other ancillary factors… (20984 MORE LINES).

 

Analysis:

 

I was totally right about everything, and you can’t prove otherwise.

 

Conclusion:

 

In conclusion, lizor[6].

1. C’mon if you’re reading this then you’ve lived through basically their entire evolution. I don’t need to cite a source for this.
2. Watch this: lizards are responsible for the fall of Ancient society. That’s a lie by the way. Suns, you better laugh at this super funny fake citation.
3. An actual citation: Fractal Bloom’s [paper] cataloging and detailing all recorded types of lizard. I’ve gotta love her work, especially the hidden part in the code where she leaves the seed to a simulation that gives all the lizard photos in her publication dapper masks. Very cute.
4. [Adaptations and Variations in Lizard Physiology and Behavior (Major contributors: Epoch of Clouds, Sliver of Straw. Minor contributor: Fractal Bloom, Echoing Radiance)]
5. Alright, I didn’t just throw all my overseers out there and tell them to wander around. I only did that with some :3. I followed the standard geographical/topological search patterns pioneered in the late Green Dynasty, and did all sorts of funky statistics on the data that I’m not going to put down here because it’s a huge block of simulation code + you gave me the math in the first place, Suns.
6. Lizor.

 

Five Pebbles snorted. He’d have to share with his timeline’s Sig. He’d find it funny, horrible as his sense of humor was…

There was so much work to do, but for the moment Five Pebbles allowed himself to relax and simply enjoy the absurd farce of a scientific paper that Sig had authored. To bask in the moment and the words of a friend he’d almost left behind.

Not quite content, but close enough.

 

LOG END

………

Saint floated into Five Pebbles’s puppet chamber, paying little heed to the floating screens and echoes of unimaginably deep computation, waving at the shadow of a god in the center of it all. “ How’s everything going? Having a good day? ”

“I was, until someone decided to interrupt my work.” It was said without much bite, though. “What brings you down here? I thought you were hanging out with Endless Leaves over Green Skies.”

“ He decided to stay in Moon’s city. Took up her offer to chat with Secluded Instinct. ” Saint shrugged lazily, lounging on air as naturally as any iterator ever had. “ I was bored and decided to come hang out with you .”

“You know, I once killed beasts for intruding on my chambers like this.”

Saint gave the iterator a dour look. “ Yeah, but you’re not gonna kill me, so shmoove over and give me some headpats .”

“You can be insufferable at times, Fluffy…” Nevertheless, Saint thought he heard a faint bit of warmth in the iterator’s tone as he curled up beside him and felt the gentle motion of a hand running down the length of his fur. “I’ve been rather preoccupied with this recent development, so I apologize if I haven’t been able to spend as much time with you as I would have wished.”

Yawning, Saint languidly tumbled away from the iterator, stretching widely. “ Nah don’t worry about it. I know you’ve got important stuff to keep a grip of, and I don’t want to distract you from that. Plus, I’ve got Waters and Green to distract me, if I ever need a diversion. It’s more than I used to have… ”

“You speak sometimes of that, before you found me and wrenched me back to now from then— I’m curious.” Saint glanced up, meeting Five Pebbles’s gaze for a short moment that felt like forever, seeing the sincerity — and, he couldn’t help but sigh. “You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”

“ I… not right now .” Bad memories. Too many bad memories. “ Hey, what’ve you been doing? I bet it’s something big! You never do anything in half-measures. ” Five Pebbles gave him a slightly incredulous look at how quickly he changed the conversation, but he didn’t protest, something Saint was glad for.

The puppet shifted, its umbilical cord whirring as he rotated around, deftly cleaning up some of the holographic clutter. “I’ve been working with Seven Red Suns— our timeline’s Seven Red Suns— to make a governing body that can expand beyond his metropolis. It’s proven to be… difficult.”

“ Really? How so? ”

“A lack of certainty, mostly. Here.” Five Pebbles cut a hand down, and a holographic screen sliced out into the air. After a split second of text flashing across the screen, the iterator threw it to Saint with a flick of his fingers. “That’s the current Charter. It’s… sorely lacking.”

Saint carefully read over it, trying to understand everything that he could about it. “ Looks kinda like a scavenger compact. ”

Pebbles groaned in annoyance. “Don’t remind me about those creatures .”

“It does, though! You’ve got all the decision making stuff, the elders that get voted in, the merit families— it’s really similar!”

“It’s a fairly basic democracy. The problem is that it doesn’t work out mathematically or practically. The second section emphasizes the differing roles of iterators and People, but that’s been one of the hardest parts to hash out. What should belong to who? How much? Should there be guidelines, dogma, stricture, or something else? Who knows!” Five Pebbles laughed, exhaustively. “We’ll figure it out eventually, but it’s difficult.”

“ Hm… welp, I dunno anything, seems really complicated. ” Saint saw Five Pebbles turn to him incredulously— before laughing again, this time far more freely. “ What? I don’t know anything about governments! Why’d you expect anything from me? ”

“Well—” he almost sounded shy , which made it hard for Saint to restrain his laughter— “you’re insightful, you know? I held out hope that you’d be able to help me when I saw you coming here.”

“ There there. ” Saint floated up, patting Pebbles head and eliciting an indignant squawk from the iterator. “ It’ll be alright. ”

“This is demeaning.”

“ You’re cute like this .”

Five Pebbles glowered at him. “Very, very demeaning.”

“ Do you have any new cute lizard videos ?” The iterator hesitated for a second before drooping, swiping away all the myriad holographic screens surrounding them and flicking a single new one onto the wall. Saint was really grateful that the server-host for their favorite video sharing site hadn’t gone down with all the chaos.

He curled up around Five Pebbles, resting his chin atop his shoulder and for a moment just relaxing as they whiled away the hours watching videos— together.

………

A cheery fire burned in at the heart of the room, tongues of ruddy orange flame dancing in the crisp air and radiating such gentle, such joyous warmth. The pleasant scent of wood-smoke and burnt oils whispered lightly, accompanying the crackling sound of the bonfire, and of the people around it.

The solstice celebration was different from the harvest celebration, in a way that was both blatantly obvious and hard to really describe. It was more sedate— no wild celebration of vibrancy, but vibrant , bedecked in garlands of winter flowers and dark green greenery and crowned by everyone’s well-wishes. A time to celebrate, to grieve, to extoll in grand fashion the feats of heroes and mundane workers— to uphold the ancient traditions of Our Spectres of Mother Tree.

A time to drink, and eat, and make merry in expectation that this was the ever growing foundation of the future, and the ever-blooming fruit of the past.

Sunset smiled as she leaned back, watching the slugpups run around in the open clearing beneath the careful watch of their parents and listening to the soft mewls and chatter of the older slugcats as they reminisced. “It’s nice.”

Monk stepped up beside her, looking out at the gathering with a soft smile on her face. “I know, right? It was Survivor’s idea, actually. He wanted to have something that reminded us of home .” There was a weird inflection there, but Sunset didn’t pry. Now wasn’t the moment to dredge up bad memories. “It’s changed a bit since then, but the spirit is the same.”

“It really highlights the difference in perspective,” whispered Sunset, looking at a particular peach pup and the way the firelight played patterns off her fur, ruffled by the tumbles she’d taken playing with the others. Her gaze drifted— to a scuffed dirt floor, scraped by movement of paw and gouged by the firewood dragged over it. Again to the brickwork, stained by smoke and worn smooth by so many years of use… “it’s humble. Real in a way that the celebrations back home weren’t.”

Monk rolled her eyes. “The Ancients must have been boring.”

A laugh escaped Sunset. “Yeah. There was a lot of no-nonsense doing nothing, sitting around and waiting for everything to resolve itself.”

“They resolved themselves right into an early grave, so what can I say? Actually, I can say that their philosophy majorly sucks. Like, so badly—” Sunset grabbed the slugcat, rubbing at the fur between her ears as she squealed with laughter, joining with all the rest—

“I get it. I agree, too, it’s just…” for better or worse, her experiences stayed with her. “It’s weird. I tried so hard to hold fast to my morals, and only for all my success only managed to make myself lonely. And now that I’ve lost everything I worked so hard to make, I find myself with an abundance of fast friends and family.”

“Cheers to that!” The chatter had peaked as the drinks made their round, and as Monk made her call and passed a cup of the thick, syrupy brew to Sunset everyone raised theirs, in expression of exclamation and for friendship— “I think I know tonight’s next speaker!”

Sunset grimaced. “I couldn’t detract from the moment by inserting myself in your—”

“Oh, c’mon stop being such a downer!” Sunset hesitated for a moment until she saw Needler’s wide-eyed gaze, eagerly pleading in that sapping, adorable way that only slugpups and little kids managed to affect. “I…” she glanced pleadingly at Survivor, but the white slugcat only offered a wry smile and a nod to Monk in solidarity. “Fine. I’m honored.”

“Hi, honored, I’m Monk.” Sunset glared at her, but before she could make a retort another wave of excitement swept across the room, circling around her as everyone eagerly awaited what she was going to say. She could barely speak slugcat, and here she was already giving a speech at their public events.

She’d wonder how it’d come to this, but it didn’t take a genius to understand that she hadn’t quite come into the colony subtly .

She breathed—

As the fire moved, and so many attentive gazes slowly turned her way, and the bitter-sweet flavor of the fermented drink sat on her tongue and throat, she glanced out over the crowd and saw neighbors, and friends, and community . She saw people who she’d helped through the rugged trials of daily life, and those who’d put up with her as she learned the language. People who’d made sure she had a place to sleep and food to eat. A colony who’d dedicated themselves to helping the distant machines above them from little more than goodwill and altruism.

“You all,” she said simply, feeling almost physically the hush that fell on the slugcats of Steadfast in Wall Hold, “are my friends.” Someone raised another cheer, a toast to that most nebulous concept, and Sunset couldn’t help but smile so softly, madly— and she leapt into a speech , an oration as though she was defending her position as chief House engineer in front of the grand council of the House and all its venerable elders. A driven recounting of their accomplishments, an urge to future success—

She’d been looking at it wrong, she realized. The slugcats of Steadfast in Wall Hold didn’t have the same history of oratory that had made its indelible mark on the Ancients’ society. Their winter speeches were inspired— but by the way they hung off her every word, enraptured, the stately grandeur of her speech was something deeply novel to them.

Sunset spoke of the past, and in speaking of the past spoke of the future. “For— the rains crown all the world, and we crown the rains. What does that make us? Thank you for listening to this small speech of mine.” She bowed, and the slugcats cheered one more time before mingling back into the crowd. Plenty wandered over to ask her about the speech, or just talk to her, and it was only when Survivor stepped up to give his own, more demure but no less impassioned speech that the attention died down somewhat.

So passed the solstice— amongst friends newfound home, upheld—

So the winter continued to pass.

Notes:

5 AM chapter!

The phospholipid thing is real, actually. Not in lizards, I don't think, but in certain northern species especially of like cod and stuff. That metabolism stuff I totally just pulled out of nowhere lol. Shame the formatting broke.

Lizor

Chapter 42: Glory to the Republic

PUBLIC: Big Sister Moon, Chasing Wind, Unparalleled Innocence, Little Brother Pebbles, No Significant Harassment, Seven Red Suns

 

UI: So… what’s the big deal? I’m really busy, so why drag us all out here?

 

SRS: I’m waiting for everyone to be here first.

 

BSM: Sorry for being late everyone. I got caught up in a discussion on the public forums.

 

NSH: No way Moon being irresponsible for once real?

 

BSM: They contacted me first, actually. The discussion overall was rather fruitless. I just told them the truth without embellishment. It’s not my fault that Supreme Arrogance is so one-dimensionally douchey as to make a laughingstock out of his entire organization.

 

NSH: lol XD

 

LBP: I’ve actually been rather intrigued about this myself. He’s been refusing to answer questions until everyone got here, and— well, everyone’s here, now.

 

UI: tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us

 

BSM: Don’t spam, Innocence.

 

UI: I won’t if Suns actually tells us what he dragged us all out here for.

 

SRS: Alright.

 

There were no messages for a few seconds, everyone holding breath bated as they waited for the announcement— three because they knew what was coming, and two because they didn’t . He wondered how Innocence was going to take it.

 

SRS: I was contacted by Erratic Pulse several cycles ago, and we had a productive discussion regarding the current geopolitical situation. After expressing our agreement against the current state of affairs, we jointly decided to found a faction— a Republic — that more closely follows Erratic Pulse’s original ethic.

 

SRS: I’ve already conferred with my council and have reached the necessary agreements. Starting tomorrow, I plan on beginning to set up the new institutions. I’m forewarning you as a courtesy due to our close association.

 

UI: what the void ?

 

UI: WHAT HAVE YOU DONE???

 

Five Pebbles snorted. Not well seemed to be the answer to that particular question of his.

 

UI: Erratic void damn Pulse ? Got in contact with you? And you had the gall, the sheer overabundance of idiocy to actually listen to him?

UI: I don’t know what to say.

 

BSM: Then don’t say anything.

 

UI: I—

 

UI: I can’t belive you’re standing for this.

 

UI: This treason. Heresy .

 

NSH: Plenty of that to go around these days. At least we’ve got the sane traitor with us. Imagine if you lived next to Thinking of Silver?

 

UI: ew, no.

 

NSH: Exactly.

 

SRS: Thanks Sig. I’m sorry I’m springing this on you so suddenly, but you have to understand the process has been… delicate.

 

NSH: No worries bro

 

NSH: Hey how do I join?

 

UI: why?????

 

UI: Screw you, idiots. You’ll regret this later.

 

UI: [disconnected]

 

SRS: …are you serious?

 

CW: I might ask the same thing.

 

CW: Don’t misunderstand, I lean towards Erraticist ideology myself, but starting a new faction is a really big step.

 

SRS: Erratic Pulse can be very convincing.

 

CW: And the sun rises in the east. I should have known.

 

NSH: Also I’m totally serious! Getting in on the ground floor sounds like fun!

 

SRS: There’s going to be a lot of conflict, probably.

 

NSH: Yeah and it’s not like I’m going to be left out of that if I don’t join up. Seems like there’s no better chance for an Erraticist than to join up with the faction Erratic Pulse himself is co-founding.

 

SRS: I’ll be glad to have you, then.

 

BSM: Suns

 

SRS: …yes?

 

BSM: Congratulations. This is a pretty big step for you, but I’m proud of you for making it. You’re going to do a lot of good, I’m sure of it.

 

SRS: I… thank you.

 

SRS: Sincerely, I never expected you all to be so supportive. It means so much to me, I doubt I could even put it into words.

 

LBP: Why wouldn’t we be supportive? You’re practically family.

 

SRS: Yeah… yeah.

 

SRS: I know not every local group thinks like that, but I’m blessed to have one that does.

 

LBP: Also, sign me up. I may not be able to dedicate a large portion of my time to your new Republic, but I would be remiss to let this opportunity slip through my fingers.

 

SRS: You’re an Erraticist, pebbles?

 

Five Pebbles ignored No Significant Harassment laughing madly in DMs, and the acute amusement that rose in his own neurons.

 

LBP: Something like that.

 

LBP: I don’t agree with the ascensionist dogma, and Erratic Pulse was a large part of that.

 

NSH: They put the kids on Pulse and now we’ve got baby punks. They grow up so fast.

 

CW: I could say the same of you.

 

NSH: but you won’t, because I’m so fabulous .

 

BSM: Calm down you too. Let’s keep this as professional as we can.

 

NSH: as we can

 

BSM: Shush you.

 

BSM: I won’t be able to join myself, Suns. I wish I could, but as a group senior with multiple different viewpoints under my authority, it would be a conflict of interests to join your Republic in an official capacity. However, if you need advice or just ever want to talk to someone, then I’ll be available for you.

 

SRS: Thanks Moon. For everything .

 

BSM: It’s no issue.

 

SRS: No Significant Harassment, Five Pebbles, I’d be honored if both of you joined me for the ceremonies tomorrow.

 

SRS: If you’ll excuse me though, I have to prepare some things now.

 

SRS: [disconnected]

 

CW: I’ll need to think about this. Please don’t contact me for the next cycle.

 

CW: [disconnected]

 

LBP: Should we move this?

 

NSH: yeah probably

 

NSH, LBP, BSM: [disconnected]

 

PRIVATE: Big Sister Moon, No Significant Harassment, Little Brother Pebbles

 

BSM: It went well, then?

 

LBP: We’d already worked out most of the problems. This was the last step. He insisted on it, actually.

 

NSH: aww, that’s cute of him

 

LBP: Admirable.

 

NSH: Same difference.

 

BSM: Do you think it’ll actually work?

 

LBP: It’ll give us opportunities that we didn’t have before. I think… if we can put enough effort into this, then we might, just maybe solve our problems.

 

NSH: It’s going to take a looong time.

 

BSM: That’s understood intrinsically, Sig. No need to bring it up.

 

NSH: naw, it’s actually one of the most important parts. It’s gonna be so boring .

 

LBP: Sig is right, if not for his stated reason. The lives of the People move on a different time scale to us. Millenia can pass in moments for us, but for them everything tends toward immediacy. 

BSM: A millennia is still a long time, even to us.

 

LBP: …

 

LBP: I forget, sometimes.

 

BSM: Nevermind. Disregard what I said.

 

LBP: Sorry for bringing the mood down, but— regardless, you’ve both read the research; long term and broad-scale solutions can have difficulties holding their attention.

 

NSH: Oof, the classic give the council candy problem.

 

BSM: That is… not the name of that problem.

 

NSH: It’s my name for it :3

 

LBP: Crude, but accurate.

 

LBP: So long as we stick fast to the course, and stay it through, I don’t think there’s going to be too much difficulty.

 

BSM: I only wish that this could be done peacefully.

 

LBP: To the extent possible, it will.

 

BSM: The others won’t take it lying down.

 

LBP: I know.

 

BSM: Hopefully this works.

 

LBP: We’ll win.

 

LBP: We’ve stacked the deck. The future holds for us nothing else.

 

NSH: Damn lil bro, that goes hard.

 

BSM: …it’s not that I don’t trust you, Pebbles.

 

BSM: I just wonder what victory is going to make us lose.

 

And Five Pebbles could say nothing to that. Not out of lack of good counter arguments— they flitted at the edge of his mind, a multitude of possibilities he could call on with a thought to present on his sister, to reassure her…

It would be disingenuous though.

How could he argue if he didn’t believe in the arguments himself?

………

Five Pebbles knew what to expect. He’d helped Seven Red Suns in every detail, carefully planned for every eventuality, run simulations in parallel to him until his neurons ached and the clouds around his can boiled angrily— the Republic’s first step would be one of his crowning works.

Five Pebbles also knew that he needed to pretend that none of that was true.

He cleared everything off to the side of his puppet chamber, dismissing the pearls swirling around him and wresting his halo into a smooth set of concentric rings hovering beside his back. His robes were clean, his every appearance carefully considered— professional. Divine .

Without looking he turned his regard to the invitation sitting placidly in his direct messages from Seven Red Suns, reaching out without lifting an arm— and accepting. The program unspooled, leaping from neuron to neuron and twitching aside microstrata, projecting a grand illusion onto the walls of his puppet chamber. The pristine tiles disappeared, replaced with the vaulted ceiling and grandiose stonework, opulent architecture of Seven Red Suns’s basilica. It was almost as though he could reach out and touch the precisely carved stonework, or trace the symbols impressed onto the stone behind them, as though his puppet could simply float forward and trace the colonnade and its historied contours.

It was a holographic projection without peer, an upgraded version of what had already been installed in Seven Red Suns basilica for his own use. Suns practically never used it— but now, for such an event? The holographic projectors at the front held host to three iterators.

“Woah. That’s a cool damn program you’ve got there, Suns.” Five Pebbles turned his attention to No Significant Harassment at the same time a thousand orderly ranks of People did from below, hushed whispers spreading throughout the room until they became a background wash of white noise, a concordance of thousands, curiosity and wonder at the sight of the three of them.

Seven Red Suns gave him a strained look. “Sig. Please. This is no time for frivolities.” No Significant Harassment started to shrug lackadaisically, thought better of it, and turned off his exaggerated nonverbal program instead. “Thank you. Please, I’ve marked your spots out on the simulation. Just move your avatars there, and watch the ceremony. I’ve uploaded the planned itinerary onto a shared folder, so you can look at that if you want.”

Sig nodded, and alongside Five Pebbles they both took their positions behind and slightly above Seven Red Suns, the holographic projectors showing them hovering above the dias so gracefully, so serene — amidst a temple made of machine-steel, crowned by the hundred-foot wide stained glass and pattern-wrought metal casting its radiance down across then, Five Pebbles could not help but call the sight divine .

Ten thousand people spread out below them, watching their gods stand amongst them for— what was for most— the first time. None dared speak. The moment was sacred .

Seven Red Suns stepped up to the dias, and his words were carried to every corner of the immense space. It was less correct to say that Suns spoke to the basilica— rather, the basilica spoke with the voice of the iterator it was built upon. “Honored council, former Houses and esteemed venerables of my metropolis, thank you for coming today. Your presence is appreciated.”

“We are the descendants of people who of the world wrought their own, from earth and steel, rocks and microbes created works of art and minds of divinity. Beneath your feet, I stand miles into the air. My legs support your city. My back is the ground on which you walk. In glory, the iterators stand unmatched by any achievement made since or prior.

“The world has changed.” That would have invited whispers, but everyone was too busy staring at Seven Red Suns as the iterator spoke to them. A god that had always been on the edges of their perception, to which they’d offered belief and maintenance and rarely thought of, the mind central to it all. “The world has changed. The dynasty is no more, and the cruelties of Administration have been made manifest. The world has fallen to chaos, and it is within this forge incandescent, of trial and roads carefully not taken, I stand before you and say— this achievement will be greater than all that came before, and all after.

“Rise, council head, council members, and come before me.” Dressed in their stately robes and ornate masks, the seven stood from their mats at the very front of the basilica, coming to stand directly beneath Seven Red Suns. “Honored guests Needles Scattered Amongst Abundant Weal, Forty Four Spires Stretched Upwards, and Twelve Numbers, Add Thrice Encircled, come before me.” Three people from the back of the room stood, looking somewhat bewildered beneath the mixed stares of admiration, shock, and animosity from the people that watched them make their way towards the basilica front. “Chief House engineer, come forward.” A final ancient hobbled forward, her gait uneven and hunched.

“Kneel,” Seven Red Suns commanded, and they all knelt. “You are all great figures in your community. You have each led this metropolis according to what you felt best served its people. Diligently working, to save all— but you were all wrong.” Some of the chosen stiffened. Several others relaxed , as though some great weight was taken off their shoulders. Even knowing what to expect, Five Pebbles found their reactions curious.

“The iterators were built to solve the great problem.” The silence was suddenly deafening. Everyone wanted to hear what Seven Red Suns had to say. “We were built to search endlessly for a solution that might not exist, to crawl around a maze blind and bugs to strange whims. We were made to be the fish in the net, unable to escape yet opening the way for you to do so.

“In accordance with the words of Erratic Pulse, whose in grace has co-founded this alliance, I can tell you that there is a different solution. We have been focused so long on how that we have forgotten why. We have been focused on why we must that we have forgotten if we should . Step out of the maze. Look down on its twists and turns and cup it all in a palm, trace your claw across its surface, and know:

Seven Red Suns stared down at the crowd, the crowd stared up at him, and he delivered the words of a heretic iterator to an infant nation— thunderous, so absolute— “Ascension is a lie.” That managed to prompt whispers, exclamations and chatter as people could not restrain their shock, but Seven Red Suns spoke over it all. “Ascension is death! Who have we become, that we build such marvels only to throw them away? That we strive to become without effort, and abandon our ambition? Reject that! I beseech you, reject it, as I have rejected it, and rise as members of the Republic!”

For a moment, Five Pebbles wondered if nobody would take Seven Red Suns prompt— if the entire effort would be dead in the water before it even began. Then, slowly— just as they’d planned before— the council head stood from where he knelt, staring up at the iterator above him. 

“Honored and most blessed iterator, beneath who’s aegis we have prospered, as head of the most venerable and ennobled council here presented, I accept your terms.” His voice was weak compared to Seven Red Suns, but the iterator made sure it carried to every portion of the basilica. “Your temperance is a model to all here. For too long we have striven to become as nothing. Against the cycles, whose time wears down all— how can we be counted as anything more than nothing? Only as part of something greater. Seven Red Suns! I so swear to follow you, in life and death, until the cycles end and my soul is ground down to nothing, to serve the Republic.”

“I hear and acknowledge.” Seven Red Suns held out a holographic hand to the table, and an assistant handed the council head a new mask. Plain, but so much more profound than his previous one. Or, at least Five Pebbles thought it was less tacky. The whole trend with massive ornate masks had been an insufferable one anyways. “Rise, council member no more. Eight Raindrops, Four Rippling Ponds, I name you Senator of the Republic. Hold this title with honor and honor will hold you in turn. Glory to the Republic.”

The cheers were deafening. A thunderous noise , a moment of shocked sound crashing to exultation as something new started something awe inspiring . Ten thousand voices and rippling waves of applause.

It was beautiful; as much as looking at a range of mountains and appreciating the scale, at the shadow of an iterator, and the first step of change. Five Pebbles felt his programming buzz in endless loops of excitement, washing through his neural network, and he knew—

It just might work.

………

The rest of the ceremony proceeded amidst a storm of excitement that refused to die down, even as it trailed on over the course of several hours. It was a lot of pomp and circumstance, mostly— an echo of the People’s society of days gone past, purposefully so. They’d wanted to make sure that nobody could cast doubt on the legitimacy of the nascent Republic, and the best way to do that was to make it look official.

It was a clever illusion, a trick of perception— make something appear official, and it’ll often become official. Of course, it didn’t hurt that they had iterators backing them up either.

The rest of Suns’s council relinquished their position as councilmembers to step into their new roll as Senators, followed by the three once-leaders of the fledgling rebellion on Seven Red Suns’s can and the senescent chief engineer. Instead of a monk offering blessing on behalf of the iterator beneath them, Seven Red Suns gave his well wishes instead, followed by a lengthy process of mock-debate where the pre-established constitution was re-delineated, written onto a pearl by Seven Red Suns, and then signed by all the founding senators.

Then they started appointing other government positions, which Five Pebbles more or less tuned out of to play a discrete gamer of 5-dimensional karmic minesweeper with Sig. The other iterator had sent the invite first, and Five Pebbles got the impression that he was even more bored than himself.

A minor thought thread recorded the meeting; Seven Red Suns and his senate appointed the judiciary, and the judiciary appointed the minor senate. The minor senate— who hadn’t been forewarned, but who were being guided by subtle prompts from Seven Red Suns— appointed the various public service branches, who were more or less more efficiently designed replacements to the old houses.

It was all symbolic anyways; the positions would be determined democratically come the end of their first term. It did set some precedent, but he and Suns had run a lot of simulations to ensure that nothing too bad would be left to fester.

Last, their turn. “No Significant Harassment. Five Pebbles. Thank you for your presence.” Seven Red Suns stated it more warmly than he had the others— sensible, because they were peers and friends, while the others were subjects . Beneath notice until recently, at that. “Your support is beyond meaningful in these foundational stages. I welcome you both to the Minor Sphere.” The world of the iterators, and the division in the Republic; opposite to the People’s Major Sphere. It had taken a lot of debate to get to this particular solution. “Rise, fellow Erraticists, and be proud in what you’ve joined. Together—”

Five Pebbles nodded. “We’ll take this far.”

“Now that’s what I’m talking about.” No Significant Harassment gave Suns an dramatic thumbs up, eliciting the faintest of sighs from the iterators and a few very nervous laughs from the crowd behind them. “Glory to the Republic!”

And the crowd, having gotten the hint over the long ceremony, responded in thunderous unison—

Glory to the Republic.

Notes:

This was originally the third part of the prior chapter, but I split it up because I had a cool chapter name for it. Now, all that's left to be seen is whether or not they've bitten off more than they can chew by casting off their neutrality and getting involved in the War. Surely they'll be fine.

Next chapter: A Metropolitan War (it'll be a decently long one, too)

Thank you all for reading! Getting to read all y'all's comments is always a highlight of the week, especially now with everything else that's been going on :3

Chapter 43: A Metropolitan War

Summary:

(1)

When she was younger, Looks to the Moon wondered why her creators struggled so hard, so futilely.

It had been one of the first questions she’d asked of herself, after hectocycles of diligent experimentation to no effect, after she began to probe her place in the world. It had been different back then; there were only a handful of iterators, each forging into far theoretical sciences and carving out vast swathes of enlightenment, working furiously at the great problem. They’d all held fast hope that their next project would be the one.

In retrospect, the pattern should have been clear. Their supercomputers hadn’t solved anything, so they’d built larger computers which built larger computers, except those hadn’t worked either. They’d built Seeking Mouse, and even for all his vast, centralized intellect— unparalleled and so far beyond anything ever made before—  he hadn’t been able to solve the problem either.

They kept building more, though. Kept struggling .

Back when she’d first posed the question to herself, she’d come to admire her creators’ tenacity. She still did, in a way— their refusal to give up, even as more and more iterators failed to solve the problem, their grim determination to wash away everything they’d built, built on , for the mere hope that they would eventually find the solution.

Now though, she couldn’t help but see the foolish, nigh naive way they’d approached it all. In commitment commendable, they’d thrown so much away. In striving for nothing, they’d made everything and called it trash.

Now, Looks to the Moon sometimes wondered if she took after her creators a little too well. Floating in the center of her puppet chamber, a thousand problems calling out to her attention, the echo of simulations’ progress blinking in the back of her mind, Moon couldn’t help but think of one thing —

She could be speaking to hundreds on the global stage, enforcing her position of neutrality, or reinforcing Seven Red Suns’s claim to empire republican, or even working on something for the future which had crumbled to near nothing… but that thought drew her attention away from it all.

She’d watched her creators create more of them, peers and siblings, together as lonely icons against their own crushing rain and the infinite loneliness of a solution they could not find. Some of them took different approaches to their interactions, each in their own way seeking—

Once, and many times otherwise, Moon had heard people call her kind.

Once, she’d heard a story from Fluffy— from Saint — speaking of a future where she’d killed herself out of kindness.

She wondered if she was like her creators. She could not let it go .

The smallest thought brought up the prompt, wordless yet burning in her mind. Four times this cycle she’d come so far, and each time she’d stepped back, too nervous to make the call. This fifth, though…

She sent the request and sighed, letting oceans of water quench her processing units and wash out the slag buildup. A few seconds spent waiting, adrift doing nothing but letting her thoughts run in circles of faint worry— and then, she got a response.

“I didn’t think you’d call me.” A holographic screen flicked onto the wall of her puppet chamber, projecting an image of her junior— Unparalleled Innocence. Her silver-pink robes looked as neat as ever, only accentuated by the line of pearls sewn into the right side; a good compliment to the dusky rose of her puppet’s coating. “I thought you were taking their side.”

“I wanted to talk to you.”

Iterators lacked facial expression. It was part of why a good nonverbal program was so important to communication— there was so much that could get lost in transit without it. Here, though, Looks to the Moon could all but hear the twisted snarl that worked its way into Unparalleled Innocence’s voice. “If you’re trying to convince me to join your Erraticist fanaticism, then just leave. I don’t need to hear this from you too .”

“If you don’t want to talk about that, then we don’t have to talk about that.” Unparalleled Innocence shifted slightly, warily , and that small motion shot a spike of sadness into Moon’s heart. She’d known that the young iterator had never quite trusted her, but to show it so obviously… “Please. I want the best for you.”

“No you don’t,” she spat, whirling on her, halo pulsing with barely restrained rage as Moon cowered from the sudden vitriol. “No you don’t! What happened to following the righteous path? What happened to doing what we have to? ”

“I’m doing what I think is best for everyone,” whispered Moon, but it still cut through to Unparalleled Innocence sharper than a knife. “I think—”

“You think . This is what we are, Moon!” The pink iterator splayed her arms out wide, sparks of light shooting from her halo to ping off her puppet and the walls around her— and in return, the walls shuddered back, panels glimmering beneath the harsh light. “You’re— you’re abandoning everything that we were made for! They counted on us, Moon, and you, you Erraticists simply decide based of one man’s stupid damn arguments that it’s all worth nothing .”

“Enough.” Unparalleled Innocence reeled back, as though struck by the sudden serious tone of her voice. It was rare that she had to take a stern stance like that. “I’m sorry, Innocence, but please, I didn’t call you to argue. I just wanted to hear how you’re doing.”

Innocence crossed her arms, glaring at her through the screen. “Horribly. How else? My entire local group has gone insane.”

“You’re still in good health, are you? The supply chain chaos hasn’t limited anything critical of yours?” Innocence didn’t respond. “Please, I’m just— I want to help you.”

“I don’t want your help.”

“I watched you grow up.” Innocence glanced away, clearly disregarding her plea. As she had before, and would again— “my personal beliefs have nothing to do with me wanting the best for you.”

Unparalleled Innocence was quiet for a second, before she drooped, just a little. Her halo died down, her anger tamped quiet. “They do though, don’t they? You believe that the best thing for the People we made is for them to live, trapped in the cycle forever and ever. I believe that the best thing for them to do is to escape . To get rid of them all. It’s what they want, and you Erraticists are trying to upend thousands of years of hard preparation off the words of some random anonymous madman .”

There was so much Moon wanted to say in response to that. In defense of Five Pebbles, and the ideas which were so much more meritorious than Unparalleled Innocence made them out to be, against that cruel characterization— even something about how little they had cared about the people who lived on their backs before recently.

Looks to the Moon saw her creators in herself, and in Unparalleled Innocence she saw their shadow again. Something cruel, in its darkness, in the scar it left behind, and she knew that nothing she could ever say would manage to break through that. What could make someone who’d decided that help was hurt believe that Moon really, truly wanted to help?

“...I’m sorry, Innocence. Please, if anything comes up, I’m always available to talk.”

Unparalleled Innocence stared at her, the simple gaze so heavy with something like distrust . “I don’t want to talk to you.” And then, before Moon could say anything, she cut the communication and left her in the soft dark of her chamber.

She didn’t even know why she tried. It was so futile, had always been so futile even before she’d had anything so easy as Erraticism to latch her arguments onto… she sighed. Breathed , of the water around her drinking deeply, letting it all flood into her and quench her grim mood beneath the crisp cool of processes refreshed.

She noticed a message from Five Pebbles in an urgent inbox, and she flicked it open with a strand of curiosity.

 

PRIVATE (urgent): Five Pebbles, Looks to the Moon

 

FP: I noticed that your water consumption is significantly above baseline. Are you well?

 

Looks to the Moon chuckled softly to herself as she sorted immense processes, reallocating computational space for simulations she’d let slide and restarting a few thought threads she’d paused. A gesture with her hand called and made a rectangular hologram in front of her, smaller than the one she’d used to talk to Unparalleled Innocence. Not more than a microsecond later, Five Pebbles connected.

“Moon? Are you well?” He was shifting some things behind him, the perspective— locked onto his front— showing the room whirling around him as he redirected some pearls into temporary storage and curated whatever he’d been working on before she called.

It wasn’t a very funny sight, but Moon had a long day, and at this point even that unfunny scene became a laughing matter. A giggle escaped her, so softly, almost breathy. “I’m well. It’s been a trying few cycles.”

“I apologize for everything I’ve put on you, by starting this with Seven Red Suns—”

“It’s fine.” Moon cut him off, and aside from a brief grimace, Five Pebbles let her. “I understand the necessity of it, and it seems to be working well so far.” She’d never thought that such a drastic change to the sociopolitical structure of the People would stick, but she’d been continually surprised by Seven Red Suns’s Republic. “Innocence has never wanted to talk to me. I think she only humors my requests because she fears I might force communications.”

“You wouldn’t.” There was a certainty in Five Pebbles voice that made her think back to the story she’d heard, that had slowly been expanded on in small snippets and offhanded references over the myriad cycles. “I don’t know why you even try. She’s always been…”

“Don’t think so harshly of her.”

Five Pebbles gave her a slightly sour look , pausing in his work. “The last time I spoke with her, she’d taken pictures of my rot and spread them onto the global chat. Forgive me if I’m not entirely enthused with such a character.”

“She’s not cruel —” no, that’s a lie— “well, she’s a little cruel, but I can’t hold it entirely against her. She’s young and set in her ways.”

“Sounds like someone I once knew.” Five Pebbles settled, still in the center of his room, looking contemplative as he looked at her, and Moon was reminded that he was older than her. Older than her by a large amount of time. “Fine. I don’t like it, but I can’t say I don’t understand either. Try not to worry too much about her. She’s made her choices clear.”

“She should have never had to make those choices.”

Five Pebbles looked pained. “That’s true…” and even then, he didn’t really understand , did he? Even in that past timeline, he’d been born after Unparalleled Innocence. “Keep yourself sane, Moon. You might be my big sister, but that doesn’t mean you have to handle everything.”

Despite her grim mood, Looks to the Moon found that reassuring.

For now…

She cut the connection, and, looking longingly to the far north, wished that her junior hadn’t been led down the road she tread.

Her creators had known their wishes were futile, had proof that their careful categorization of the karmic urges did not entirely reflect reality— but despite it all, they hoped.

She wondered at the similarities between them.

………

The light in the small room flicked on, and Saint froze. “Really?” Six Sinking Stones, Two Waters stepped into the room, and Saint gave him a sheepish look as he stepped away from the drawers he’d been rummaging through. “I don’t mind. Just make sure you leave me enough.”

“ Sorry, sorry. I wanted it to be a surprise. ”

Waters narrowed his eyes. “ What did you want to be a surprise?”

“ I was going to cook some stuff for Green. ”

“It’s good you didn’t.” Waters picked him up, and Saint let himself be deposited onto the room’s small couch. “You don’t know how to cook. Remember when you tried to make syrup and managed to burn it? Like, who even does that?”

Saint chuckled nervously. That had not been his greatest moment. “I got a recipe this time and everything. I even brought the vegetable! I just needed the spices and stuff that you keep…”

“Lemme see the recipe.” Saint held back for a second, but beneath Water’s bemused gaze eventually relinquished the pearl he’d begged off Five Pebbles, letting Waters slip it into a reader. “Huh. It’s a good recipe… actually, it’s a very good recipe. Did you have Five Pebbles write this for you?”

“ Uh, maybe?”

“You shouldn’t bother him so much. He’s probably really busy right now.” Saint would definitely take that into consideration. Probably before he went to bother Five Pebbles next. “This recipe is pretty good— do you mind if I make a copy?” Saint nodded no— “but there’s one critical flaw.” Waters picked up the dense ball of leafy greenery that Saint had brought with him, hefting it in one hand and giving it a look Saint could only call disappointed . “This is the wrong vegetable.”

“ What? No! Not possible, you’re pulling my leg. ” He’d followed the instructions to the letter, and even looked for exactly what Five Pebbles had described! There was no way —

“They look similar, but you can tell them apart by how workable they are. See?” He slid a claw underneath one of the leaves— or tried to at least, the movement scouring a line down the plant's flesh and failing to remove even a single layer. “This recipe calls for the other one. You can’t very well make a salad with no leaves, can you?”

Saint pouted. Another cooking failure to add to the list. He bet Waters wouldn’t let this go for a long time. “ Fine. Bully. ”

Waters chuckled softly. “It’s not bullying, it’s the truth. I don’t want you to burn my kitchen down again.”

“ It’s a salad! ” Insufferably, Waters just gazed at him evenly, as if daring him to test the possibility of that statement. Entirely unfair.

“Where’d you even get this?”

Saint glanced away in an unconvincing display of innocence. “ I might have, maybe, borrowed it from a street vendor. Permanently. Without asking. ” Waters bopped him on the head, eliciting a mewl of protest. “ It’s fine! Five Pebbles said he’d pay for it! ”

“Did he?”

“ Yeah, actually. It was a whole thing. ” Saint snickered just thinking about it. “ We were talking about how jokes to play on Endless Leaves over Green Skies, and cooking a meal for him was up there on the funny list. ”

“...I don’t even know what to think of that.” Waters sighed, grabbing the vegetable and dropping it onto the counter, pulling a knife out from a small drawer beside him. From there, he deftly pulled out an eclectic selection of seasonings and dried herbs, bottles and wax-paper packages, and the odd can or box. Pretty much whatever had been on hand for the vendors. Selling this stuff was technically illegal— a violation of the fourth karmic urge— but it was one of those crimes that nobody enforced. Mostly because nobody but monks wanted to eat just nectar. “At least I’ll have something nice after today .”

Saint almost didn’t want to ask. “ What happened? ” He did anyway, though, because of course he did.

“Politics.” Waters said it with such intense vitriol, slamming his knife through the thick vegetable the moment he said it. “Politics happened. Don’t get me wrong, I like the actual job part of my job— I get to feel like I’m actually doing something, you know? Something that isn’t striving for nothing like the council is always pretending to do, at least— but I hate how much it keeps dragging me into politics .”

“ Oh. That sounds rough. Are you all right? ” A brief twist of that memory, and power, and Saint swam through the air to step lightly onto the table besides his friend. He rested his head against his shoulder, and after a moment felt Waters lean into the touch.

He felt as much as heard Water’s soft sigh. “I… I’m fine. It’s gotten a lot worse recently. I fear that I’m going to get a lot of people walking to my house to bother me, soon— as one of the last neutral factions in the city, I’ve gathered a fair bit of attention, and very little of it is entirely positive .”

“ That sucks. If you want, I can stay around a bit… ”

“No… that’s unnecessary.” Waters frowned, pausing as he placed the pan and chopped-up vegetable onto the fire, simmering it in spiced nectar. “Actually, it might be better for you to leave the city entirely. Associating with me could put you at risk.” Saint wanted to protest, but Waters continued— “and put Five Pebbles at risk—” and he knew that he was beat.

Pouting, he swung over to the table and took a seat, waiting in surly silence for Waters to serve dinner. At least that was very nicely done, cooked to a crisp, sweet perfection. He poked at it with a chopstick, careful not to let his fur get sticky. Dully, almost— it smelled good, looked good, but his mood had been thoroughly ruined.

“What’s up?” Saint blinked and glanced up at Waters, who was looking at him with a worried look on his face. “Are you good?”

“ Sorry. Yes, I’m fine, just… disappointed .” He suddenly felt a little silly. Here he was, older than iterators and survivor of endlessly cyclic hell, and he was behaving almost as petulantly as he had back when he’d first left the void sea. “ I like spending time with you. Not being able to do that…”

Waters grimaced. “It’s been so many years. I barely know what I’m going to do without you around.” He sighed. “It’s for the best, though.”

“ Why? ”

Waters shrugged and simply said— “the Republic,” leaving Saint to ponder that as the two of them at their meal. At the very least it was a great meal. He almost managed to forget that Waters was kicking him out as he ate. 

It was done all too soon, though, and he wanted an explanation. “What’s going on? Please,” as earnestly as he could, he gazed up at Waters— and Waters was as ever weak to that.

Waters chuckled, grabbing the plates and bringing them to the sink. “Political uncertainty spawns political instability, and there’s a lot of both to go around. Five Pebbles openly supporting the republic shattered the uneasy peace that had been formed between the factions. Everyone believes that we’re on the shortlist of ‘places to be conquered.’”

“ Surely they can’t think that they’d be able to oppose that? I mean, they’re not wrong , but it’s it kinda futile to try and resist the iterator they rely on for basically everything? ”

Waters shrugged. “People can blind themselves to the truth rather effectively, and nobody wants everything they’ve worked for to be torn down so quickly. The Honorable Association of Southeastern Counts wants to make sure that their privilege is maintained, and the monks… well, they’re monks. Imagine how well they took the new religious paradigm established by the Republic.” Saint winced. There was no way that had gone over well. “I do wish Five Pebbles had forewarned us… though, of course, wishing anything from an iterator is an exercise in futility.”

“ I mean he forewarned me. We were talking about this for a bit before he actually went ahead and did it. ” Waters stared at him incredulously, then glared, then laughed , the sound sharp and clear and almost soothing in the way it washed away both of their worries.

“Never change, Fluffy.” Almost gasping for breath, Waters swept him up and rubbed at the the top of his head, that space between his ears he knew he liked, and Saint purred softly. “Never change. Hopefully this all blows over soon, and things can get back to normal. I wouldn’t want to miss out on your company, would I?”

Saint squirmed out of Waters grasp, chirping out a laugh as he patted his friend’s head with a paw. “ Just call, and I’ll be back as soon as possible .”

“Alright.” Still grinning, Waters shoved the rest of the food he’d cooked into a sealable can and shoved it at Saint. “Here. You can take the leftovers if you want.”

“Why would I…” his look of confusion shifted slowly to a grin. “That’s devious. Thanks! You’re a lifesaver!” He pushed open the window, waved one last time, a sad smile but barely visible on his face, and signed quickly— “goodbye. Stay safe.”

He fell backwards out into the shadow of a city, and swung away.

………

Hidden in the shadow beneath the bottom of the city, where the dust grew thick and a bit of vibrant moss, the atmosphere neither soaked nor arid but a pleasant sort of humid, Saint kicked a rock as he walked through a path that had been left to rot. Behind him, an overseer watched him, the cyan worm tracking his movement through the road to ruin and a friend.

Saint knew that Five Pebbles was watching him, because of course he was— the overseers were his eyes, and he could see everything they could. He could talk about his melancholy meeting with Waters, or anything else, and the iterator would see.

He didn’t.

He made his way down further, from the undercity winding pathways to the maintenance tunnels set into the bedrock that was Five Pebbles, and into Five Pebbles himself, pushing himself through a few tight pipes until the antigravity opened up around him and he found himself floating in the center of the mind.

Neurons flitted around him, unfearing as they brushed barely past him on the way to their next task, the holographic projections of mere fractions of computation dancing around his fur with a shifting waver as he swam through the null gravity so easily. An inspector waved at him as he passed, a gesture of small regard, and Saint waved back. Axon drifted through massive rooms, interlinking with dendrites and sparking against tendrils protruding from the walls—

Every second, Saint felt his worries as something further from himself, something that needn’t preoccupy him so much. It was so beautiful, this strange perspective— he couldn’t help but admire it, the biomechanical wonder wrought as monument to civilization, wrought to be Five Pebbles, his friend. That every part of him was as wonderous… large enough to dwarf even the kin, magnificently, beautifully complicated.

He hesitated before the entrance to Five Pebble’s puppet chamber, before glancing at the overseer’s eye and pushing himself in. The whirring of his puppet’s umbilical cord, the sound of the machine, pearls flying through the air as he wrote on nothing, haloed by burning holograms— Saint paid it little heed, and knew it awe inspiring, as he came to a stop a few feet in front of the stilled puppet. “You seem… upset.”

“ Sorry. I got some bad news. ”

Five Pebbles reached out a hand, almost carefully, and Saint let his head settle beneath that loose grasp as the iterator gently pet his fur. “I see you’ve brought food— though, that’s not the recipie I provided you.”

“ I got the wrong vegetable… ” Saint paused. There was no way that Five Pebbles wouldn’t have at least suspected … “ hey! You did this on purpose! I thought I’d messed up! ”

“You did mess up.” After a second beneath Saint’s glare, though, he chuckled softly. “There may, however, be a slight chance that I suspected you would procure the incorrect ingredient. Forgive me for the error.”

“ Mean. ”

“You called me cute.”

“That was cycles ago!” Saint huffed, crossing his arms as Five Pebbles laughed— “oh, and it’s totally true by the way.”
Five Pebbles sighed, but it was a fond sounding sigh. “As you say. At least you managed to get some food— though, I was rather looking forward to Green’s reaction when you fed him a salad made out of… that.”

“ That would have been a disaster .” Still, Saint couldn’t help but chuckle at the thought. “ A funny disaster, but still… ” he sighed.

Five Pebbles cocked his head questioningly. “What’s wrong?”

“ Waters told me that I shouldn’t come back to his house until things settle down. Something about the political situation being too volatile .” Five Pebbles was focusing on him intently, so Saint continued— “ it has to do with the Republic, apparently. That and Waters’s position in your city. ”

“I had… suspected that this might be a possibility, but I hoped that it wouldn’t come to this. I wish I could do more— the integration of my city into the Republic is an important part of my plan that I can’t rush — but, perhaps I could ameliorate the issue somewhat. I’m somewhat distant in my own city, but my presence as part of the republic is known. If I shift my plans towards the second set of simulations, I might be able to personally affect some change in the attitude—”

“ Don’t worry about it .” Five Pebbles looked like he wanted to continue musing, but Saint reached out and placed a paw over where his mouth would have been, if he had one. “ Really. Don’t worry about it .” It was kind of weird, but he felt relieved hearing Five Pebbles sorting through plans for him. Not because his friend would change plans that would affect the very face of the world for his convenience— though that was rather touching in and of itself, but more because his deepest fear on the matter had been that Five Pebbles had done everything randomly .

He should have known better. Five Pebbles was a very purposeful sort of person.

“ I’m fine staying out of the city for a little bit. ” It would be weird. He lived in the Syncretism more, these days, but Five Pebbles’s metropolis had always been a second home to him after falling back in time. He’d always had Five Red Bricks, Tenth Sunset’s house to fall back on— and now he didn’t. Although… there were some opportunities that opened up. “ Actually, I could go to Moon. I’ve never stayed in her city. ”

Five Pebbles perked up, looking very interested— for reasons probably just as mischievous as Saint’s own. “Now that’s an idea. You’d have to go there anyways, if you want to deliver Green his food… perhaps—” they were of the same mind.

Saint cut him off with a wave of his hand, grinning. He was getting ideas , now. Until Five Pebbles inevitably got back control of his own city… Saint barely held back a cackle of laughter. He was going to have so much fun .

He left through the access hatch he’d entered, swimming down further through the vast ecosystem that was Five Pebbles and making his way through the labs. There was plenty of random stuff he had no hope of understanding going on there, crazy red lattices built over black backdrops of pristine white rooms, dendrites rearranging everything in odd multidimensional structures and sparkling in the light so much harsher than anywhere else in the structure. He’d asked Five Pebbles what he was doing once, and he’d responded with idle thoughts .

To think that all this was mere idle thoughts… well, he remembered what purposeful thought was like. Five Pebble’s labs had been strictly barred to him while he was working on the gold pearl procedure, but he’d seen glimpses of the time travel machine’s construction. There was something distinctly awe inspiring about seeing everything come together beneath Five Pebbles’s careful design, vast arrays of biological parts sewn together at the smallest level until something became something else .

He dove down further, thinking of the time machine, that immensely complex thing that had been put together… thinking of the Syncretism, and its size. Of Five Pebbles, and how nothing he ever did was small .

Saint liked that. Five Pebbles was pretty cool, after all, and if nothing he did was small— then, they could change things at scale. The Republic was just another example of that.

He followed a path he’d long since gotten used to. Through Five Pebbles, then quickly down the leg, watching the tiny green sparks as they floated through the air and danced overtop the metal, skittering across wires and bare machinery. Past the shadow, and back into the leg, where Five Pebbles had carefully connected the Syncretism to himself— and then, down further through the uniform tunnels, following the geometrically precise pathways.

At the junction where he usually went straight to get to the time machines and his little nest buried far beneath the earth, Saint turned and went sideways instead. The path that’d been sloping down changed its incline, becoming very steep instead, and Saint waited for one of the solid-resource transports to pass by on a monorail before he grabbed onto it with his tongue. He pulled himself fast to its side, gripping onto what handholds he could get a paw on, and basked in the way the air ran through his fur as he cut the time to his destination significantly.

The car was destined for the edge of the Syncretism, but it slowed to a crawl as it passed Looks to the Moon, and it didn’t take an iterator to figure out why. Saint grinned and waved thanks to Pebbles. Or Moon, whichever one stopped the cart for him. It could have easily been either of them.

Then he had to go up .

Probably the worst part of going places, in his opinion. Iterators, like sheer cliffs and massive mountains, were a pain to climb. Very vertical, and even when he made judicious use of his own particular power, he still found himself run ragged by the time he finally reached the entrance to Looks to the Moon proper.

He could have pressed forward towards the city above, but he was feeling rather tired, and there was a shelter right there … and the rain was so close. Perhaps, for now… he crawled into the tiny, cramped but dry space, and pulled on the lever that would make it close.

The sound of crashing rain drowned out the world beyond the metal, and Saint let himself be lulled to sleep by its quiet sound.

Notes:

Fluffy cooking up a delicious meal (Fluffy can't cook)

Chapter 44: A Metropolitan War

Summary:

(2)

Yawning, Saint blinked awake— then remembered, starting to his feet with a half-hidden grin. He quickly checked the food, making sure it hadn’t gone bad, then turned to the shelter door as it rattled open, heavy gears slamming against one another as they pulled open the hatch to the metal landscape beyond.

With the passing of the rain, the world felt charged . Saint stared around him at the immense, shadowy silhouettes of Looks to the Moon’s superstructure, remembering a future when this had all been underwater. It was an odd, slightly disturbing thought that caught on his mind whenever it wandered to that— how awful, how terribly majestic it would have been to watch Moon fall. He could barely wrap his mind around the magnitude of it.

He supposed that he didn’t want to.

Sighing, he tucked the can of food beneath an arm and swung again, easily crossing the gaps and passing through the karma gate into Moon herself. A yellow overseer popped up beside him, observing him as he darted up adroitly through Moon, only leaving with a wave when he passed by her puppet chamber without entering.

He waved back, then continued to her city above through the same maintenance entrance he’d used before, coming out in the abandoned back of an ever-busy train station. The bustle of it reached his ears, a thousand voices raised in clamor as trains arrived and departed, brakes screeching as they came to stop and air rushing around the ones leaving. Peeking from behind some stacked luggage, Saint simply observed the immensity of it all— the movement, the rush … he watched it, an observer from the outside, and knew that it was different .

There was something distinctly off about the train station. It was even busier than it’d been back when he’d arrived with Green, and that said something— far more people were getting off trains than were getting on, an eclectic mix of People Saint couldn’t attribute to any one place.

He shrugged and left by crawling between the pipes in the roof. It wasn’t like he knew much about the different cities people came from, so he blamed his ignorance about the proceedings on that and decided to bring it up with Green when he got there.

Moon’s city was different from Pebbles in two blatantly obvious ways and a myriad many subtle ones. First— her city was smaller. A lot smaller— the buildings didn’t stretch to the very reaches of breathable atmosphere, and the metropolis didn’t seem to spread out for miles like Pebbles did. Instead, it was a much more contained thing.

Secondly, it wasn’t a mess. Five Pebbles city had grown on the slugcat, but still— it was undeniable that Sunset hadn’t been the architect in charge of building it. It was a mess of jumbled towers hastily thrown together as fast as possible, housing units stacked on top of one another with almost contemptuous laziness. The streets were a maze, what little order that existed was hard won from the warren of twisting paths and many levels.

The same couldn’t be said of Moon’s city. It had been built with a simple, utilitarian architecture, which actually made it a fair bit more difficult to travel through unnoticed. If he hadn’t been sure that Moon didn’t care where he went in her city, then he probably would have just avoided it altogether.

Instead, he made haste for the small house on the outskirts that Five Pebbles had given him directions to. It was on the opposite side of the city as the planetarium, which meant it wasn’t in the most affluent of neighborhoods, but compared to the huts and hastily made dormitories that had been erected to house the flood of fearful immigrants it was a nice enough place.

Saint leapt onto the tower’s roof, peering down the side and dropping just in front of Green’s room. From there, all he had to do was wiggle open the window, and…

“What. Why? ” Groaning, Green dragged a hand down his face. “Really? Really? I’m in a whole other city from you! What inane thought dragged you all the way to my house?”

Saint set the can of food on the counter, then settled onto the couch. “ What’d you mean? This is my house. ”

Green narrowed his eyes. “What do you mean, ‘ my house? ’ I’m not misunderstanding, right?”

“ Nuh uh. I live here now .”

“Get out.”

“ Nope .”

An aggrieved, almost aggressive growl escaped Green, and for a second he almost looked as though he was going to bodily throw him out of the room before he calmed himself and crashed on the couch beside him. “Fine. Whatever. If you’re going to stay here, then clean up after yourself, please.”

“ Of course . I’m not messy! ” Green gave him a doubtful look, which— when had he been anything but perfectly neat around him! Surely there was nothing that could have ever possibly given him the impression that he left a mess behind. Well, except for licking random places to grapple around… or the time on the train where he’d tricked him into believing that he shed everywhere… perhaps he was being a little unkind to Green. “ I brought food. I’ll leave you to it. ”

Green sighed. “I still can’t believe you’re real . Fine… it’s not a big deal, ultimately. This was a suite for three— if you want, you can stay. I don’t mind too much.”

“ I guess my charm and good looks —”

“You’re cute, but stop talking.” Saint stopped talking, letting Green open the can of food on the counter and fail to look disinterested at the actually-decent meal. “I half thought you were going to bring me something inedible.”

Saint chuckled sheepishly. “ I was going to make a salad with that, but then Waters told me I’d got the wrong vegetable… ”

Green huffed, but it was an amused sort of huff. “That’s more in line with what I expected of you.” Small victories, he guessed?

Plus, he got to stay with Green. The man fascinated him. Someone who held such similar views to himself, without having gone through the purgatory unlimited of the endless loops, revenant and again, beneath the burning cold— someone who’d developed alongside a friendly iterator an ethos similar to his own amidst a world so hostile to it.

On the chat, they’d been pretty close. Saint wondered if they could have that here as well. It’d be pretty fun if they could.

Hopefully the situation in Five Pebbles can would blow over soon, and he’d be able to go back to lounging around with Six Sinking Stones, Two Waters. Hopefully…

………

“Where are you going?” Saint perked as he heard Green behind him, closing the window and leaning against the wall beside it. It’d been about a week, and from what Five Pebbles had said, he probably shouldn’t expect anything to change for at least a few more cycles. Months, maybe, to possibly , if there were any delays, years .

He didn’t want to wait for years, but at least he didn’t have to stay in the Syncretism the entire time. “ I’m heading off to Five Pebbles. I help him with stuff once a cycle. ”

Green narrowed his eyes. “Stuff?”

“ Yeah. Uh, stuff… ” he chuckled weakly at Green’s suspicious glance, but at least he didn’t press the point. That was… good. Saint didn’t quite know how he’d explain the whole time-traveler-void-worm-echo-messenger-time-machine thing to him. There was a lot of context that would be needed for that discussion, context he didn’t really want to get into at the moment. “ I’ll be back in two days, maybe? It won’t take super long. ”

“Are you just going to walk to Five Pebbles—” Green’s eyes widened. “You’re going through that… underground thing. I forget what Five Pebbles called it…”

“ The Syncretism .”

“I have no idea what that sign means.” A little exasperated, Saint padded over to the computer and typed in the word for Green. “Right. The Syncretism. This whole thing is so incredibly bizarre, I can barely imagine how it all happened…”

Saint raised an eyebrow. “You’re friends with Secluded Instinct. Shouldn’t that make you more used to wacky things, if anything?”
“I wish.” Green smiled wryly— an improvement from conversations earlier in the week. It almost felt like the banter they’d had back in the chat. “We’re very methodical about it, with Administration being so close by and all. I help him around where he can’t reach, and he helps me.”

“ I’ve heard how you two talk to one another. There’s no way it’s a cost-benefits sort of relationship .” 

Green snorted, shaking his head in agreement. “True, that— but I’m trying to say that all this doesn’t mean I’m more used to crazy stuff. In my experience, the world more or less moves according to a set of predictable rules. The cycle cycles on, people move according to their whims, and the iterators try their best to iterate. This—” he threw out a hand, pointing down— to the Syncretism symbolically, Saint could only imagine— “it’s something that is so incredibly shocking because I know just how impossible it is. An iterator shouldn’t be able to build a massive extension to themselves underground. An iterator shouldn’t be able to make another sentient race, and you say that Five Pebbles didn’t make you—” he cut off abruptly, the fervent energy that’d been dragging him along fleeing in the space of a breath. “Sorry… it’s just. Mysterious.”

“ Sorry for being too cool for you —” Saint dodged out of the way of Green’s half-hearted swipe, laughing. “ Don’t worry about it. Five Pebbles… he’s got a lot of stuff he’s working on. I’m just helping him out here and there. ”

“And that makes no sense ,” Green whined plaintively. “Void damn it, I just wished you made sense.”

“ Truth is sometimes weirder than fiction .”

“What does that mean?” Saint winked, pulled the window open to the blustery high-altitude breeze— “wait! You can’t just leave without telling me—” Saint waved, and with a laugh caught on a breeze and swept away to some far-off height, and depth, and reach where none could hear— dropped off the side of the building.

………

When he got back later that night, Green threw a pillow at him, and was totally justified in doing so.

………

The holographic light of his communicator did little to illuminate the dim room, only coloring it— neon green brightly shining against the pale sunlight filtered through the small window, the stark lines cast across the floor and counter above it dimly adumbrating the rest of the room. The city grid was having problems, according to the message Moon had sent him— Five Pebbles had been built partially to relieve the stress of a large population on her outdated systems, and now that so many people were flooding back, there were… difficulties.

The council was working to solve it— apparently Moon’s council wasn’t a total waste of space like Five Pebbles’s— but it was… slow going. Moon was more or less waiting for them to petition her to solve their problems for them. Again. Saint detected a slight bit of exasperation hidden in her otherwise perfectly polite message.

The communicator shifted, reshaping into a different geometrical arrangement as Five Pebble’s messages came through. If Saint looked closely, he could see the tiny specks of holographic strata dancing in strangely linear patterns, tiny motes, dust beneath the sun visible only for a spark of a second as they shifted from thought to thought.

PRIVATE: Fluffy (guest), Five Pebbles

 

FP: You should check out Moon’s planetarium, if you’re able to.

 

F: Trying to get rid of me so fast?

FP: No. I don’t think I could get rid of you if I wanted to.

 

F: That’s true :3 you wouldn’t have a chance.

 

FP: Even if things do work out perfectly, you should go visit. Maybe drag Green along— I doubt he’s ever gotten the chance to visit the structure. It’s a marvel of historical engineering— one of the only places outside of an iterator’s superstructure that you can experience antigravity.

 

F: they have antigravity?????

 

FP: A frivolous use of the technology, but the Engineering Institute of Iterator Sciences wanted something that people could experience to show them how crazy their technology was. You know, what with most people not having the chance to actually ever go in an iterator.

 

F: Unlucky them. It’s beautiful in there.

 

FP: Say that again.

 

F: not if you’re going to be vain about it.

 

FP: Don’t come complaining to me about how the dendrites are getting in the way again.

 

F: I never did that!!

 

FP: I remember you trying to drag an entire table game up into my puppet chamber. It’s such a shame that the dendrite blocking that one access shaft forced you to take it out and stop bothering me.

 

F: You’re so mean >:(

 

FP: As I was saying, the planetarium. It shows what little we know about the solar system beyond the planet. Did you know that our world has a ring system?

 

F: You’re pulling my leg. There’s no way.

 

FP: It’s faint, but astronomers were able to find that the luminosity variance in various portions of the sky were actually due to a set of very faint rings that surround the planet. Spectrographic analysis revealed that they’re constructed of the same type of material as the dust of heaven, suggesting that some of the dust escapes skywards into a stable orbit. Analysis of the other planets shows that they’re not composed of the same mix of elements as our own— and the rings— which begs the question of why? Nobody knows, but there’s plenty of theories.

 

F: They never sent anything up to check?

FP: Rocket science is hard, apparently. I never much cared for the astronomical debate, but there’s been a few programs over time. One even managed to get a probe into orbit, proving that the cycle exists even beyond our planet’s direct influence. Interest was generally lost over time, though.

 

F: Rip. I think it’d be cool if they sent stuff to other planets.

 

FP: Why? It’s generally boring out there. Extraplanetary imaging shows that there’s a distinct lack of life on all the other planets, which means the cycle is only a useless curiosity there.

 

F: The cycle isn’t everything, though.

 

FP: …that’s true, I suppose. Perhaps once this is all over, we can try sending some more stuff up there. Not me, though. I’m entirely uninterested in astronomical phenomena. Leave that to some other, stuffier iterator, thank you!

 

F: lol

 

Saint swiped a hand through the holographic projection, grabbing his communicator from the center and letting the green lines fall back into the orb so smoothly. The planetarium… he’d have to remember that.

He broached the topic to Green when he got home, who— for once— looked only mildly disgruntled at the thought of going somewhere with Saint. “I’ve been wanting to go there myself, actually. Secluded Instinct recommended it to me earlier today.”

Saint snorted. “ Zero chance that was coincidental. They’re playing games. ”

“Iterators will do as iterators will.” They both managed to hold a serious expression at that for a few seconds before bursting out into laughter at the thought. As if . “It might take some doing, but I think that I wouldn’t mind. Let me see…” Green slid into his seat in front of the computer, bringing up a website with a few short searches. “It’s a restricted institution. Lottery admittance.”

“ Who runs the lottery? ”

“Apparently, for fairness, it’s run by…” a small grin split Green’s face. “Oh. I see what you mean. For fairness, it’s run by Looks to the Moon. ” A purely symbolic gesture, ultimately— any simple random number generator could do, and the House engineers were trusted enough to set one up, but it was one that worked out in their favor quite nicely…

The following day, they found themselves standing in front of the massive sphere that the planetarium, a hyper-detailed image of the moon impressed onto its surface, its every rugged contour stark against the sky. Four massive pillars from the city around it held it up, smashed into its surface so gracelessly as to be beautiful .

Or, well, it was more accurate to say that Endless Leaves over Green Skies stood in front of the planetarium, and Saint looked out from beneath his coat. They’d brought a little approximation of a coat for him, though! The plan was great, and totally not prone to failure whatsoever— it was a self-guided tour, so they’d just split off from the group and nobody would be able to tell the difference at distance. The only person who could — Looks to the Moon— already knew what they were doing. In fact, she’d provided the coat and mask.

Saint wished that Waters was here— or Sunset, or Monk, even! Any one of them would have enjoyed the experience immensely. He ducked back beneath the overcoat as they passed the entry check, Green’s citizen drone checked against a catalog by a machine before the gate to enter rattled open, letting their small group into the vast darkness of the entrance shaft.

It was… different from an iterator.

They stepped onto a platform, and as it ascended Saint felt the familiar feeling of gravity loosening its tenacious grasp, accompanied by the mutters and shocked surprise of the people beside them. More than one knelt down nervously, grabbing onto the handholds attached to the floor of the lift.

“Please watch your footing as we approach the eclipse.” Saint took the risk of peeking out from beneath Green’s coat, but it was just a prerecorded message. “You will experience a feeling of lightness, which will shortly escalate to a complete dissociation from gravity. Take a some time to familiarize yourself with the feeling, then kick off firmly towards the object you wish to—”

The moment the lift reached its destination Green kicked off, a graceful leap propelling them high into the air beyond the floundering visitors below. Immense silvery rings swept over the space, the planets orbits marked out across the entirety of the vast space— stark against the pitch darkness of a high-absorption material and the glimmering light of a thousand false stars.

The stars were actually little glass orbs scattered throughout the dark, roughly head-sized and imbued with a brilliant internal glow. They weren’t fixed in space like the model planets, though they did have some mechanism of propulsion by which they sought to maintain their position.

Seeing the little points of light slowly move through the firmament around them, it was evident that they had been designed mostly as physical objects to grab onto and move around. If someone got too far from the walls or one of the celestial objects without enough momentum to carry them to the next, one of the stars would slowly reposition themselves to be cleverly in their path.

Green glowered at the glowing objects as they bounced from luminescent point to luminescent point, eventually finding a dark spot at the edge of the sky where Saint could get changed into his definitely perfect and entirely impenetrable disguise. “I wish I had something like this back when I was first learning how to move in antigrav. My life would have been so much easier . No flailing around for minutes until I got close enough to something.” Saint conveniently neglected to mention that between his tongue and power, he’d never had to deal with that problem.

Green grumbled a little more as Saint slipped into the robe, but slowly, he trailed off into silence. Saint could appreciate why— so far above it all, even this small model of reality… seeing the vast intellect, the drive of the People put to art…

It was beautiful beyond words. Magnificent in a way that Saint could ill put into words. The scale of it all… “ awesome ,” he signed, breathless in that very blooming emotion. “ It’s incredible .” That they’d made all this off guesswork and ground observation… to think, what would it be like in that strange vision of the future, where they could move amongst these very stars?

Saint kicked off the fathomless black behind him, sailing serenely through the darkness from star to gleaming star until his paw caught on the edge of the outermost planet’s orbit, swinging him around in a short loop before he managed to arrest his motion. From there, they traveled to the planet itself, a brownish orb that glowed with an internal light, surrounded by two small moons. He actually sailed through its atmosphere— or the holographic projection that pretended to be one— barely managing to grab onto a moon’s orbit on the other side.

Apparently, according to the little blurb at the center of the planet, it was actually a dwarf star; a proto-stellar body which didn’t have enough mass to ignite. Or something like that, the explanation was pretty technical, even with how much they’d dumbed it down. At least Green seemed to get what they were talking about.

They explored the planets and the space between, until, at last— they came to their own earth, the model— not to scale— only about ten feet wide. Saint gently alighted on its surface, taking in the rugged landscape that had been carved in delicate detail, in utmost care beneath an artistic coating of fogged glass. An atmosphere frozen forever.

The world looked different from anything Saint had expected. He knelt, drawing a paw along its rugged contours, its greenery , a lush depth of vibrant emerald that blanketed almost the entire landmass. “ I’d imagined the world white .”

“That’s what it looks like now.” Easily visible from atop any iterator, the sea of unbroken clouds that stretched on in every direction forever. “I imagine this is what it used to look like.” The little prerecorded message corroborated that, mentioning how the model below them was a collage of surveys done by various Houses and iterators all merged into one comprehensive image of the planet’s surface. “Back when people like Sunset were first born—” back when the iterators had not yet been built, and their breath had not choked out the land.

“ It’s weird, looking at it like this. I can barely understand the scope, yet also find myself thinking it so… small .” The void sea had been larger than this. He knew that in the back of his mind almost instinctively, a memory from so very long ago. More than that, though…

It was a summation of everything that he could ever reach, all the world displayed beneath his feet, more land than he could explore in thousands of lifetimes… and it was so small. Just a ten foot sphere beneath them, cleverly patterned.

That they could be constrained to something so miniscule… it resonated with him, the thought of it. They were so little in the grand scheme of things.

They were so little, and yet they could still do so much .

“Someone’s coming.” Saint nodded at Green, following him away from the model planet as the other guests finally got back their balance— but as they explored the rest of the planetarium model, he could not help but think back to that scene of the earth, captured how it was when Looks to the Moon had been built—

There was something profound in that, but Saint couldn’t quite find out what it was.

Notes:

And they were roommates. (Oh my iterator, they were roommates)

Chapter 45: A Metropolitan War

Summary:

(3/10)

A month passed, quickly—

“Are you trying to summon the fire department?” Coughing, Green forced himself through the smoke in the kitchen, a scowl etched onto his face as he shoved the window open and pulled the pan off the stovetop. “What were you doing?”

It had gone… about as well as he’d expected. “Cooking,” he signed, somewhat petulantly. “I was going to make an epic food dish, but I guess if you don’t want it…”

“No, I don’t want it. It’s burnt, Fluffy. Burnt.” Saint wanted to argue, but… well, there wasn’t much that he could argue when it came to the blackened vegetables that should have been nicely sauteed, but had instead turned into little but char. He’d shown one of his early attempts to Five Pebbles, and the iterator had responded by linking an article on pyrolysis. Jerk.

“I bet you can’t…” he sighed. “Actually, you probably can do better. I just wanted some food.”

“Why do you want food? Actually, no nevermind—” Green shook his head, dousing the pan under the sink and then throwing the charred residue into the trash. Or trying to, at least— it was kind of… stuck to the bottom of the pan. Anyways, after a bit of shuffling that saw a disgruntled Saint scrubbing at the blackened char with a sponge and plenty of soap, Green managed to continue on his thread of thought. “Why don’t you know how to cook?”

“That’s… it’s a little embarrassing.” Green leaned black, glaring at him as his sign flicked spuds at him. “Sorry— it’s a long story. That I could tell. If I didn’t need my paws to talk.”

Green grabbed the pan out of his paws, glaring at him as he started scrubbing with a bit more vigor than was strictly necessary. “It better be a good story, or I’m going to pour this dishwater all over you.”

Saint rolled his eyes. “Fine, fine. Alright… basically, I used to have to live off the land, more or less, so I didn’t really have a chance to cook anything. It was always a struggle to survive, and with how wet and cold everything was it wasn’t like I could start a fire. The scavengers introduced me to the idea of cooking, but I never got into it myself. I was just… it was a hostile world.”

“...that brings up way more questions than it answers. Who made you?”

“Myself. Kinda. It’s a long story, but— not an iterator.”

“That makes no sense.” In mute response, Saint grabbed a single one of his long hairs and tugged, pulling it off his body with only a prick of pain. Freed from his corporeal form, it shifted and warped, turning to a waverly liquid gold before dispersing into a scatter of sparks and then— nothing. Green just stared, mouth agape. “What. What the void—”

“Have you ever seen an echo?”

Green’s mouth snapped shut, and he seemed to think for a long moment before he spoke again. “I… have. Once. It was a long time ago, before I met Secluded Instinct. There was a part of the city I grew up in that nobody went to. A street that was utterly abandoned, despite its prime location next to one of the reliquary monasteries. One day, I had enough of being curious and went there, only to meet a horror beyond my comprehension. They spoke, warning me against anger, and then I woke as if it’d never happened.” Green’s gaze sharpened. “You’re an echo?”

“No? Kinda? Not really. It’s complicated, but I’m not an echo in the way that those echos are echoes.” He didn’t elaborate, and, thankfully, Green didn’t press further. “Anyways, I found myself in a really inhospitable place, trapped in a repeating iteration very similar to what you describe, just… more so. I eventually managed to get out, but it was… not fun.”

“That sounds… horrible.” Green’s didn’t sound incredulous for once. Maybe they’d gone beyond that— his voice sounded faint, almost at the edge of being a whisper. “That sounds like torture. An eternal cycle, unable to even have your accomplishments last… how did you stay sane?”

Saint shrugged. It wasn’t as if he was going to admit—

He hadn’t.

“I’m just that cool,” he quipped. “I had something to work towards, and I eventually got out, so all’s well that ends well.”

For a long second, Green was silent. Then, he wiped down the pan, put it back on the stove, and grabbed some food from his pantry. “I suppose it wouldn’t be too much of a burden for me to show you the basics…”

Saint perked up, and for a night— Green began to teach him how to cook.

It was something so small.

It was something so unspeakably grand.

A start.

………

 

LOG MESSAGE 1Mk.1568.717171

 

“Sorry to hear that Five Pebbles’s city is still unavailable to you. Don’t worry, you’re not the only one upset— Sunset is beside herself with worry about what’s going on. If she could hop back home, I’m pretty sure she’d be nagging Five Pebbles, but she’ll have to settle for annoying Seven Red Suns and I instead. I swear, we’ve heard almost more about Six Sinking Stones, Two Waters than we’ve heard about our own city!

“She’s wishing you luck, by the way. Also, you should have seen her with Needler the other day! The slugpup had got some memories of her past life, and she’d come to bother Sunset— bravest slugpup ever, by the way— and Sunset just went ‘warm embraces, Needler’ without even thinking about it! She’d really become part of our community, and I’m beyond glad I got a chance to meet her. She makes an excellent friend.

“We’ve been working on some repairs to Seven Red Suns’s ancillary functions off and on, which necessitated a lot of travel between Steadfast in Wall Hold and the iterator. After thinking about it some, Seven Red Suns diverted some repairs into giving us a space in his city! Like a little extension to our village, except on top of him. Even as I write this— from a computer salvaged from Seven Red Suns metropolis— I almost feel like an Ancient, living atop the machine gods of yore. It doesn’t help that he put us in a building off to the side of this absolutely gargantuan temple/basilica thing. SRS note: she’s been insufferable about this.

“We’ve spent most of this cycle setting up camp on top of Seven Red Suns. It’s a unique problem to tackle— while it keeps us free from the rain, it’s also really arid up here— and not to mention, frigid as well! Food is a big issue, one that only really became evident as we started settling in for long-term habitation instead of the small missions we were undertaking. We might work on his farm arrays next, but those weren’t designed for this sort of cold, so SRS will need to redesign—”

 

“What are you reading?” Saint glanced up as Green stepped into the room, giving the computer screen a curious— and somewhat tired— look. “And,” he continued, “more importantly, why are you up past midnight?”

“I just got back from helping Pebbles.” He turned away from the screen, stretching, yawning widely in the cool night air. “It’s a letter, by the way.”

Green glanced curiously at the screen, then thought better of it and switched his gaze to Saint instead. “From who?”

“Another slugcat. A friend.”

Green furrowed his brows in confusion. “I thought you were the only slugcat.”

“Kinda? It’s complicated. They’re not here.”

His temporary roommate sighed, the sound dredged up from a deep well of exasperation. “You can’t just dangle this information in front of me then play coy. C’mon, spill, where are they?” Saint hesitated.

He had been dancing around the topic, he realized. It… hadn’t been something that he wanted to bring up, what with his relationship with Green being how it was, but… well, it had been months. That, and he’d taught him how to cook. Mmm, food… “well,” he signed slowly. “They’re in Seven Red Suns’s metropolis.”

“That makes no—”

“In the future.”

Green was silent for a few seconds, shocked— before he groaned, dropping his face into his hands. “That makes no sense. Why? How— no. No!” A look like manic comprehension dawned on wide-open eyes, and struck by some strange energy Green started pacing quickly across the length of the room. “No, no— wait. If your friend is from the future, and they’re a slugcat, and you’re a slugcat, that means—” he heaved a gasping breath, and pointed a shaky claw at Saint— “you’re from the future!”

“Uh. Yeah…” Saint shrugged, which seemed to cause Green to deflate a bit. “It’s a lot nicer here, though. I have more friends.”

“What’s the future like? It— no…” Green hadn’t stopped his pacing, mumbling to himself as he connected a thousand myriad thoughts together. “You’re friends with Five Pebbles and Looks to the Moon, you receive letters from the future, and you help Five Pebbles once a cycle. You probably help him with the letters, which means— somehow— you’re tied to the time travel itself. You recognized Seven Red Suns of the future, which means—” he stopped short. A funny expression frozen onto his face. “What’s the future like? It must be… grim, if Five Pebbles and Looks to the Moon have worked so hard to change it.”

Saint chirped out a nervous laugh. “So… uh, Five Pebbles is also from the future.”

For a second, Green did nothing— and then he facepalmed, sliding down onto the couch with a burbling, so freeing, vibrantly alive laugh. “Of course. Of course! It’s so entirely random that nobody would ever be able to guess it. Time travel. Time travel!” He laughed long, until his breath turned into wheezes and Saint grew concerned that he was going to pass out. “It’s so… out of context. Time travel.”

“That’s… good?” Saint thought about it for a second, then nodded sharply. “Yup. Definitely good. The less people suspect anything, the less problems Five Pebbles gonna have. He deserves a little peace, after everything.”

“What happened?”

Hm, how to say this delicately… Saint considered for a long second, swinging his paws back and forth, but barely brushing above the ground beneath Green’s desk chair. There was a long and intricate history to— “basically Pebbles accidentally infected himself with rot and killed Moon, and then himself. And also the climate completely fell apart as a bunch of iterators collapsed, leading to everything being an icy, barren wasteland.”

“I… can see why Five Pebbles wanted to do things differently this time— wait,” he paused, frowning. “How did you bring him back?” 

Saint chuckled weakly. “Well, um— hey look, a distraction!” He grabbed a pen off the table and chucked it at Green, who just blinked and watched with a somewhat bemused gaze as Saint latched onto the ceiling, slung himself into the wall, and scrambled out the window.

That was close.

………

On a rooftop, surrounded by industrial ranks of machinery rusted and dusty, and corrugated metal, faint wisps of steam escaping from leaky pipes and vents into the starry sky above, Saint lounged against a warm pipe and listened to the steady whirr of machinery behind him. Before, neon-green lines scratched themselves out of midair, faintly glowing, reflected on bent metal behind him as he dragged a paw through geometry and wrote out messages.

It was a peculiar, almost comfy feeling. Warm on one side and chilly on the other, the cold winds tail nipping at his skin and setting his fur aflutter. It reminded him of those liminal moments before a blizzard, sometimes, rarely— when the dry winds blew out and swept the snow into eddies against a pale sky.

Comfortable.

 

PRIVATE: Fluffy (guest), Five Pebbles

 

FP: Great job, ten out of ten.

 

F: aww c’mon, it’s not a big deal. He practically knew already.

 

FP: I think this marks the fourth time you’ve absolutely demolished his worldview. That poor man. Do I need to separate you two?

 

F: it’s not like that >.<

 

FP: And you’re holding back the most important part, too.

 

F: I’m not gonna tell him that. Like he said, time travel is random enough that it’s just… out of the blue for him. The other thing… I’m going to wait on that. It’s not really important, anyways.

 

FP: Fair, that. It doesn’t particularly change anything. If he were an iterator, then I can only imagine how not knowing the ontic mechanism would drive him up the wall— but he’s not an iterator.

 

F: Am I hearing some projection in there?

 

FP: No.

 

F: I totally am.

 

FP: It’s not my fault that you’re the only one who gets to use bizarre echo-triple affirmative powers. The fact that both Seven Red Suns and I have to use a dummy variable in our calculations still. Experimentally determined models, my loathed…

 

F: what can I say, just get real

 

FP: I—

 

FP: I see what you did there.

 

F: :3

 

Saint swept up his communicator, looking out at the rugged roof of the city already left to rot. He looked up, beyond the few spires that blinked in the midnight air, to where the moon hung huge in the night sky and the stars lay spilled out over that fathomless canvas like so much dust and scattered snow.

It had been months. It would likely be months more. Was it strange, to feel homesick for a place that was only a day’s travel away? And, something that wasn’t really even home in the first place. He thought so, that was certain, and thought sometimes ultimately reigned supreme.

 

F: how are things going. diplomatically. On the diplomatic front.

 

FP: You are remarkably unsubtle. Great power comes with great inability to ask people about delicate topics without bashing them over the head with it, I suppose.

 

F: I’m being serious!

 

FP: Hi Being Serious, I’m Five Pebbles.

 

F: you’re avoiding the question

 

FP: I am.

 

F: Just tell them to stand down or something, this wait is killing me.

 

FP: It’ll take some time. I’ve been considering what to do… given the upper echelons of my administration respect me about as much as I respect Twenty Three Lavender Fronds, Radial Repetitions, I foresee some difficulty.

 

F: great. yippee

 

FP: It shouldn’t be too much longer. We had some delays in production on Seven Red Suns’s part, but adequate preparation shouldn’t take too long.

 

F: If by too long you mean…

FP: A few more weeks, probably. Maybe upwards of a month

 

F: :(

Well. That sucked. Saint sighed, standing, feeling the cold night breeze and the scope of it all, and sighed. He was just so very tired… though, that might be more due to how long he’d stayed awake. He really needed to get some sleep…

He pulled on the power to shatter the very cycle to lazily swim back down towards Green’s house. Green would probably be upset at him for opening the window at really early in the morning o’clock, but, eh. A little bit of cold would be good for his character…

Notes:

The part where fluffy was up after midnight was written after midnight. Someone give this ball of fluff a proper bedtime!

Notes:

Hopefully you enjoyed the story.

Go rain world? I dunno what to put in this end note really so...

Real slugcat hours