40 - That is not dead which can eternal lie
Salrath's software modifications, crude hacks of the aircar's control and safety systems, activated when she slammed the control stick all the way back and all the way forward. The levitation drive, barely producing enough lift to make the vehicle buoyant, was absolutely silent as it snapped to full power; the ducted turbine was not. A shrill, banshee wail, loud enough to make Salrath's ears fold back reflexively, filled the aircar as it darted forwards. She let go of the controls, paw dropping to her knife holster half way down her right hip.
The police officer, head bowed and focussed on his terminal, looked up, eyes widening in paralysed shock. The gryphon, already strapped in to the police cruiser's saddle, was faster. Its claws slammed on the restraint harness' quick release, wings opening just as her aircar struck. There was a crump, then an immediate string of closely-spaced bangs; the view out of the windscreen vanished behind bulging layers of fabric that slammed into her from all sides. Held rigid by the airbag array, Salrath kept her eyes closed, pushing back the pain and ignoring the taste of iron in her mouth.
She drew a shaky breath as the pressure started to fade, the press of the interlocking airbags still holding her immobile, then drew the little black knife and stabbed upwards, puncturing the emergency restraints. Arm free, she slashed sideways and deflated the rest of the bags, then kicked open the door, struggling free of the tattered strips of fabric. In the police cruiser, the gryphon, unrestrained, had been thrown against the side of the roll cage on the cargo platform, head striking one of the metal bars hard enough to leave a red smear. It moved, sluggishly, one foreclaw reaching up to the roll cage.
Salrath leapt onto the side of the cruiser, pulling herself up with the hook of her prosthetic and swinging into the gryphon's compartment. The animal gaped its beak at her, but the motion was slow and its eyes were unfocussed; she ducked under the sweep of its claws, pressing against slightly rank chest feathers. The knife darted up, vanishing under the lower beak and into its windpipe. It choked, thrashing, and she tipped it over, straddling it with one knee on each flopping wing. She dropped the knife, grabbing the gryphon's beak and pushing it back, stretching and exposing the bloodied neck. Her prosthetic, the simple claw sharpened on the inner edge, dug into throat and ripped sideways.
The animal relaxed under her and Salrath gathered up the knife, jumping over the driver's compartment to stand on the forward turbine cowling. The compartment was filled to bursting with the alveolar structure of the airbags, slowly deflating. There was motion within, struggles that became stronger as she watched. Salrath smiled, lips peeling back from bloodied teeth, then dropped down to the driver's door, knife in her mouth. It was buckled, distorted by the impact, but opened when she pulled. The cruiser’s sophisticated crash protection meant there were far more airbags than in her own stolen vehicle. Carefully detonating in sequence, they had swathed the police officer in a cradle of interlocking protection, allowing him to survive any crash that didn't collapse the driver’s compartment. It also held him securely in place.
Blade in paw again, she pushed into the airbags, stabbing into the wriggling object within. The fabric of the bags discoloured, red leaking out from between them. "Don't die just yet!" she sang out, slashing at the airbags. They were deflating but the fabric was tough, and Salrath grunted with the effort as she sawed and pulled them away. The officer was slumped in his crash couch, breathing with unhealthy, bubbling rasps, more blood flecking his muzzle. He scrabbled ineffectually at her paws as she dragged him clear of the cruiser.
"That's better," she said, smiling. "This one never did like having to hide." Salrath glanced over the display screens while removing the remains of the airbags. Then, picking up the officer's arm, she used his other paw to issue commands to the vehicle, unlocking the controls and disconnecting the security systems. Dropping him, she trotted back to her ruined aircar, pulling a set of large packs from the storage compartment and dropping them into the rear prisoner compartment behind the driver. They were heavy, loaded with preserved food and the contents of the various caches she'd accumulated during her time in Security.
About to get into the driver's seat, she looked down at the officer and frowned, lost in thought. He was still alive, slumped in a slowly spreading pool of blood. "This one supposes a uniform might be useful..." Sighing, she levered him into the co-pilot's seat, using the straps and discreet blobs of sealant to give him a semblance of an upright position. A quick search through one of her packs pulled up a plain grey box, and she plugged it into his comms bracer, tapping away on her own. Got it. The vehicle accepted her, fooled into thinking she was its pilot.
Salrath stashed the little box and gave the officer a pat on the arm. "This one always wanted to see the mountains," she said, winking at his slack face. He didn't seem to be breathing anymore.
===
There was a wordless yearning in her head, pulling her in multiple directions. It felt like it had always been there, an irreducible part of her that she was only now realising existed at all. Fusion picked the location closest to her current heading. They are scattered over the whole world, Grav.
One per Hive, you told me, so that's to be expected. Gravity's mental tone was one of distraction, most of her attention on the dissolving mess of debris ring orbits. I can't help, got my hooves full stabilizing all the damage I've done. I want to burn out the dogs, not kill every living thing.
We've got to get as many of our ponies out as we can... try not to do too much more damage. We can clean up the remnants later.
There was a snort, ghost-felt through the link rather than heard. If there is a later. Just the big military bases, then. Busy. Her tone sharpened, barriers starting to constrict the flow from her sensorium.
Fusion's ears folded back and she thought about forcing the link open again, then let the half-formed spell patterns fade. "Sure, Grav. I'll let you know if I find anything." Her speed and altitude climbed, plasma sheath forming once more--
~~~discontinuity~~~
--the sun moved across the sky with a jerk, then another and another as the chain of teleports propelled Fusion around the world, until--
~~~discontinuity~~~
--flying over a blackened landscape pockmarked by overlapping giant craters. Some were oddly shaped, the smooth interior curves cracked and distorted with the honeycomb structures of exposed tunnels and artificial caverns like an excavated ant’s nest.
One in particular called to her and, flying closer, she inspected the openings. Long shafts, partially collapsed, retreated into the bedrock. They were filled with the wrecks of vehicles, wadded up like packing material, mass transit vehicles themselves filled with blasted and flayed corpses, little more than tattered and splintered bones disarticulated by the shockwaves. There were no signs of life; the whole area glowed a sick purple to her energy sensitivity, the ungentle taint of neutron-activated rock and soil. The touch of desire was deeper in, towards the partially melted flash-glass floor of the crater center.
Defences hardening, she dropped below the crater rim, magic first used in the labs of the Institute now tasked with intercepting the bath of gamma radiation. The other Stone was there, a bright, scintillating point under a hundred lengths of overburden; Fusion dug down with her telekinesis, pulling free a jagged boulder half a length on a side. The rock, a section of primary roof support and tougher than any natural mineral, had a hole in one side.
Fusion sectioned the lump with a single force field cut, opening it up to show a ragged tunnel terminating in an unblemished stone sphere. She pulled it out, freeing it from a layer of mildly radioactive dust. The touch of her magic turned it transparent, save for a bright point of light at the centre.
A rush of cold, then heat, flowed through her body, bringing with it a feeling of sudden expansion. Fusion gasped, shivering slightly, then dropped the rubble and accelerated upwards.
===
Geodetic, tears streaming down his muzzle, looked out of the opening to the launcher's accelerator shaft and down into the output mouth of the autoloader mechanism. Concentric rings of conveyors filled the bottom of the shaft, toothed things like coils of spiked tentacles surrounding the central maw. Chains of bright needles filled the cavity, descending into the armoury depths and fanning out to all sides. There was enough ammunition there for another kilosecond of firing, but they had stopped moving the instant the drive spell, normally occupying the core of the accelerator shaft, had failed. The ponies had not collected the next batch of projectiles, for want of a way to fire them.
He looked upwards, eyes searching the ranks of dark niches for any evidence of magic from the ponies within. He made a quiet keening whinny, unconsciously echoing the sounds made by the rest of the propulsion herd. The sound filled the mechanically silent space with the whine of wind blowing over taught wires. Clumsily, he reached down, fumbling at the harness release with his mouth, biting and twisting at the emergency handle. Thank the Master who designed this system! he thought, as the mechanism popped free. Thaumic suppression was always a possibility and that nameless Person had built a harness that could be opened by a magicless pony.
A shrug and wriggle shed the rest of the straps, leaving them to tangle on the soft bedding of his work niche. Geodetic took a hesitant step forwards, leaning out over the edge and looking straight up. Other heads looked down at him, each from their own chamber set in the sheer wall of the accelerator shaft. "Planar, are you there?" he called out to the other head of the propulsion herd.
"Yes, Geodetic, I'm still here." Planar sounded tired and on the verge of tears, lifting her head up to look across the empty air of the accelerator shaft. "You were doing the targeting... are we going to die?"
Geodetic reached for the interface systems that normally tied him to the launcher, and the launcher to the wider strategic networks. Those links had been progressively severed, his world shrinking until it was little more than the local hardwired sensors and a tenuous emergency radio link back to Arcology One. The thaumic link, ten thousand dancing lights kindled in the centre of his mind, had failed a kilosecond ago, but strategic updates had still flowed from the speaker system. That had gone silent a hundred seconds ago in a pulse of quiet, digital noise.
Command is gone... The deepest bunkers, a kilolength below the gardened surface of Lacunae's population centres, below gryphon aeries, accommodation blocks, service levels and power systems, below even the deepest storage chambers. The most heavily protected sites, chosen at random from dozens of similar locations to avoid easy targeting, gone. Did the enemy get lucky, or... did they hit them all? "I think Arcology One has been destroyed." His own faint whinny joined the rest, tapering off when he inhaled a juddering breath.
There was silence from the rest of the propulsion herd, an expectant hush from the fifty other ponies surrounding the accelerator shaft. Planar gave a long sigh, her head drooping. "Yes. My dam served security in One, my sire was in weather management. There would have been surface bursts--" Her voice became strangled, then vanished under murmurs from the rest of the herd. She shook her head, black mane whipping back and forth. "Foals gone, magic gone, never coming back. Can't even get out of this stupid bunker!" She screamed out the final words, imbuing them with sudden, vicious hate. "The whole world's gone mad."
Crying and shaking Planar stood, then leapt from her alcove, falling wings-folded and in absolute silence into the autoloader machinery. It wasn't far, compared to the overall length of the shaft, but the structures below were full of sharp ridges and points. She stayed silent as she bounced, once, twice, her flank ripped open by the needle prow of an exoatmospheric interceptor, the fall mercifully ended by a reverberating thud when her head struck an inspection gantry. Her body slid out of view on a smear of blood, down between a pair of main projectile conveyors.
Geodetic groaned, then shook the tears from his eyes and turned his muzzle upwards to the shocked faces looking down. He glared up at them, ears flat back. "Don't get any rutting Maker-damned ideas! The Masters will get us out of his, we just have to be patient." The heads all retreated and he shuffled back, pressing his rump against the rear wall. What did she mean -- 'never coming back?' This is just a targeted suppression, isn't it? He dug through the memories of basic training, hunting for that one brief session when they'd all felt the effects of an Arclight.
It wasn't the same. There was no feeling of oppressive weight or being smothered; instead, his magic was little more than a fading dream, gone like it had never existed. Can't fly, can't get out. The sheer walls of the accelerator shaft turned the base into an inescapable trap. The Masters will save us. The thought rang hollow; there had been no contact since the original cease-fire and the maintenance crew had not returned from their bunker, some twenty kilolengths away.
They have left us to die. The thought should have brought with it a stab of pain, a punishment for the doubt, but the Maker was also silent. Feeling very alone, Geodetic lay on the alcove's padded floor and pulled his wings up over his head, trying not to think of the release only a few paces away.
===
Weapons arced up from a scattering of air defence sites around the buried structure. It was a different design from the Arcologies Fusion had seen in Baur and Lacunae, a subterranean pyramid picked out with the lights of crystal thaumic systems and a tracery of power systems. Is that a Church? It was huge, the size of an Arcology core structure but without the disordered amoeba look of something dug out over a gigasecond. The shape was the same as a Church, a square-based pyramid. I wonder if it's covered in names like ours was? Fusion laughed, a harsh whinny of a sound.
The pull was coming from the very centre, and was stronger, more focussed now she carried two of the Stones. She batted aside the closest missiles without even thinking about it, then turned her attention to the launch sites. There were things she could do to those hardened installations, even the one that was over the horizon and out of sight... The magic was complex, and that was the exactly correct phrase: was. Something about the Stones made the intricate patterns and the once-extreme effort no more difficult than assembling a foal's toy.
Electric light kindled from nothing as Fusion called up magnetism and tied it into a dense knot that ripped electrons from the very air. She stretched herself, making finer and finer modifications to the spell patterns, layering delicate magical functions around the brutally simple energy channels that kept the plasma confined. The containment bubble fractured, subdividing as the field lines folded inwards, one for each target, the virtual thaumic rings of the accelerators springing into being and aligning themselves on the targets. The power built, a roaring wall of energy like a tsunami thrown up by an asteroid strike, far more and far more quickly than she'd ever thought possible. She held it, feeling the warmth flood through her body, filling her from poll to tail root, then let it go.
She could see it happening, but only because she'd built the spells and knew exactly what the magic was supposed to do. The plasma packages, formed into self-confining ring vortices loaded with magnetic and thaumic fields, opened vacuum cavities for themselves and accelerated away, so fast that they might as well have been teleported. There was none of the flare of light and heat her previous strikes had; protected from the erosion of the air, they held onto their power all the way to the ground. The closest detonated first, flashes of light that hit her defences like slaps ahead of the laggard shockwaves; the last curved over the horizon and around the limb of the world, accelerating to relativistic speeds, annihilating the final launch site with a flash.
All of this was suddenly so easy, like the universe itself was doing all the heavy lifting and pattern computation for her. I can see why the dogs never let us near these things... or did they even know?
There was a volume within the pyramid that seemed to be empty, a space surrounded by the glow of power and networked systems, so Fusion built her spell, the same double teleport she'd used when they were still hiding--
~~~discontinuity~~~
--swapping her local volume with that of the target and appearing in absolute silence near the top of a pyramidal cavern. Brightly lit and with polished sides, it was a negative mirror of the physical building they'd had at her corral. The inner walls were decorated with complex, fractal forms reminiscent of spell patterns and finished like mirrors. This will give them a shock-- Fusion frowned, looking down. There was another, smaller pyramid beneath, its tip at the geometric centre of the hollow, and surrounding it were hundreds of robed dogs, all kneeling untidily on the stone floor. Around and among the robed ones were a press of other dogs, a riot of different clothes and uniforms. The floor was packed to the edges of the chamber; more dogs were filling the access tunnels as far as she could see.
None of them had noticed her. She spiralled down, landing at a clear spot near the edge of the inner pyramid. The closest dog was slumped sideways against her neighbour, like she was asleep. The person she was leaning against had fallen forwards, head awkwardly at an angle on the smooth stone. There was a little splash of blood where he had bitten his tongue.
All of the dogs were like this, fallen or slumped and completely unresponsive. Their eyes were open and they breathed with a slow, steady rhythm, but not one even twitched at her arrival. Fusion lifted a hoof and gave the female a push; she sprawled sideways on to the stone, eyes looking up at the brilliant lights. Her slit pupils contracted, but she didn't blink. Is this what goes on in the dog Churches? Are they all on drugs? Fusion laughed again; the giggle burst out and filled the space with shocking echoes and made her flinch.
"Their minds are gone," she whispered, suddenly shivering. "There are no sounds of panic and no medical response... how far does this go?" She swept the area for any signs of magic, seeing nothing. There was something approaching, descending through the upper atmosphere, but this was mere mundane technology highlighted by the bright sparkle of antimatter at its core. "Well, I know what that is," she said in a normal tone, magic slicing the top off the central pyramid. "You dogs only have a few seconds left, in any case."
The tip was hollow, filled with mechanisms to elevate the small stone sphere or retract it to some deep vault. She lifted it out, watching as it changed to crystal with a spark of light at the centre. There was the now familiar numinous rush of confidence and extra strength, and she looked up at the descending cluster of warheads, hardening her defences to a degree far beyond what she could have managed unassisted. "I wonder if..." Fusion blinked, then shook her body vigorously. Stupid mare!
~~~discontinuity~~~
--coming out in clear air, smoothly compensating for the shift in velocity vector. Streaks of light fell from the heavens and the horizon behind her lit up with a string of double pulses. A dirty, yellow-glowing mushroom cloud started to climb into the heavens, but Fusion was already travelling at a kilolength a second and still accelerating.
===
The transit tunnel was packed with a confused mass of aircars and ground-bound heavy transports. The curfew was in effect but people were trying for the Arcology exits. These ones know what's coming and don't believe the civil defence precautions will work, Salrath thought, grinning as she activated the external strobes and siren -- and the far more useful remote override. The mass parted before her, flowing away as each aircar's flight computer reduced the mandatory close approach distances under the prodding of her emergency codes. There was little room and she imagined curses and scraping of paintwork following her progress.
A loud crunch penetrated the hull and racket of the sirens; two vehicles had tried to follow through the temporary tunnel she was making and collided. One, a streamlined sporty thing, was no match for the other, a courier van, and had burst into flame, white-hot sparks and fragments exploding out from the nose. The pilot, an indistinct shape behind the sharply raked viewport was struggling frantically with the controls. "And that's why disabling the safety systems is illegal!" She laughed, pushing her own throttle forwards. This was too fast for some of the other aircars to get out of the way, but her cruiser was made of tougher stuff than the average consumer vehicle.
The faint sounds of swearing penetrated the hull, even over the splinter-scrape of metal against composite.
One of the Arcology access shafts was dead ahead. The transit tunnel looped around it, the traffic being directed in both directions away from the free-space exit. The shield doors had been half-closed and the 'no exit' warning signs were flashing, the command backed up by a pair of gunships that flanked the them. There was a cleared area in front of the tunnel, the forbidden volume marked out by a red haze on her cruiser's HUD.
Salrath hissed, her ears flattening, then fumbled with her bracer, knees and prosthetic hand holding the controls steady. She sent her stolen authorisation, only to have it rejected. Orders to land popped up on the HUD and she eyed the opening, then tensed as threat warning systems reported the cruiser was being painted by hostile radar from the gunships. Rutting Maker, what is the military doing playing guard?! She thought of the dead gryphon, slumped in the bay behind the pilot's compartment. Too heavy to quickly move, she'd left it there, hurriedly covered by a plastic sheet.
"Unidentified cruiser, land immediately or be fired upon." The voice, made harsh and grating by extreme amplification, was loud enough that she hunched her shoulders.
Salrath's paw hovered over the controls trembling slightly. Her lips pulled back from her teeth in a silent snarl, and she stared at the gunships, measuring the distance between her cruiser and the exit. Would these ones really fire, risking shots into this crowded transit tunnel? The vehicles were stacked up behind her; even a direct hit would have horrible collateral damage. The panic would be even worse. "Maker-damned martial law!" She patted at the knife in its holster, making sure it was accessible and secure, then landed the cruiser in the empty space before the exit door.
The rear sally port swung open and a pair of troopers jumped down from the hatch. Both were in light armour, suits not dissimilar to that used by the police officer, with solid scales on a ballistic weave suit, except for a layer of electrochromic camouflage, currently set to grey and black blotches. The lead had a rifle shouldered, a short-barrelled railgun ridged with heatsinks and a bore large enough for a paw, and duck-walked in the manner of one keeping a careful aim. Salrath could clearly see the shiny armatures in the cavernous barrel. The other trooper gestured at her, then at the cruiser's door.
Salrath snarled again before composing her features into an expression of terror. Then, holding both paws above her head and ducking her head in a cower, she kicked open the cruiser's door and stumbled out. "T-there was a riot back at the Arcology, when the civil defence orders were sent. The officer helped this one but was injured." She crouched a little further as the armed trooper came closer, paws trembling slightly. Nearly... The muscles in her legs tensed, booted paws pushing against the concrete floor, and she stared fixedly at the soft spot under the trooper's jaw.
The second trooper was doing something on his bracer, then abruptly swore and reached for his own rifle. Salrath sprang, ducking under her target's gun and drawing her knife. The pair of them tumbled over backwards, the gun too large to do anything other than get in the trooper's way. She used her prosthetic to ram his muzzle up and back. The knife darted in, aiming for the thin, flexible armour layer, then something struck her on the side of the head with stunning force.
Her vision blacked out for an instant and the knife went flying. Another impact, this time in her side, accompanied by the green-wood crack of a rib breaking. Salrath gasped and rolled to one side, fending off a follow-up kick. The attacks stopped and she popped up onto all fours, grunting at the spike of pain in her chest, then froze. The troopers had backed off and moved apart; both had their rifles trained on her. She laughed in their faces. "Can't blame a girl for trying, right?"
One of the troopers had his head cocked slightly to one side, like he was listening to something. He slung his rifle, then opened his muzzle guard and drew his sidearm. "Security knows this one," he spat, the small laser generating a guide beam that put dazzles across her vision. "Agent Salrath has been on the arrest lists for some time, if she had managed to escape Naraka."
Salrath sat back on her haunches, holding up her prosthetic and paw. "This one surrenders. Take Salrath in." Her smirk faded slightly when the pistol didn't waver.
The trooper returned her smile with a wide grin filled with bright teeth. "Emergency powers act, Agent. These ones are at war. Command has declared Salrath a non-person. Turns out this one can blame a girl for trying." The pistol moved from her face to her gut. "This one is not in a terrible hurry." His paw tightened on the trigger.
She tensed, uselessly hardening her stomach muscles against the expected thrust of burning light, but it never came. A look of confusion crossed the trooper's face, then his eyes rolled up and he collapsed. The other followed a breath later. "What--?" There was a sensation of ice at the centre of her head, a sudden staccato flicker of memories from all parts of her life, then it faded to leave behind an urge pulling her in an unexpected direction.
"Why is Salrath thinking of the Church at a time like this?" The Maker is a lie told to keep frightened pups and servitors happy. Salrath climbed painfully to her paws, turning to look at the gunships. There was no movement and the chin turrets had drooped slightly.
Behind her came a gentle crunching sound and she turned again. In a wave, every aircar and truck was slowly settling to the ground, piling up in heaps as they landed on each other in the crowded transit tunnel. Nobody moved inside the vehicles; everyone was slumped in their chairs. This went back as far as she could see, all the way to the vanishing point.
===
Two left. The desire to hunt them down was stronger, pulling Fusion in separate directions; it was a nearly physical sensation, like she was standing between a pair of steep gravity wells. One was closer than the other, so she fell towards it--
~~~discontinuity~~~
--this part of whatever Hive she was above was mostly undamaged. A few kilolengths away fires were sweeping through the dense forests that coated the landscaped cap of the arcology, mature trees made tiny by the scale of the conflagration. Flame and dark smoke, speckled with air-lofted sparks and embers, was rising past Fusion's altitude to collect in dark, lumpy clouds. They radiated heat and glowed a sullen red as the burning continued in the gas phase, spreading with an unnatural speed and fueled by violent turbulence from the rising fumes, spawning fire tornadoes around their edges. Down at the surface, all the flames streched inwards, fanned by howling winds to replace the climbing rocket-exhaust plumes.
Even at this distance Fusion could feel the heat from the fire, a steady beat like the noon sun at the summer solstice. All around embers and larger burning fragments were settling towards the unburned ground, spreading the inferno. There were no strings of craters or purple-glowing clouds of fallout; this was only flash ignition from air bursts. Her defences hardened and she circled in the updrafts, invisible to any camera or radar. Shadow sight and clairvoyance filled the dark spaces within her nested force fields, rendered exquisitely sensitive by the triplet of Stones that circled her head like stars in tight orbits around a singularity.
Her target was moving through the deep earth, hurtling down a vacuum tunnel towards some distant redoubt. There were dogs in the vehicle, a levitation-engine equipped carriage on a single rail, all with the same Church robes as the previous group; her surveillance locus kept pace with the segmented machine, passing through metal and ceramic with the same ease as vacuum or air. Fusion smiled as she found the Stone, sitting in a transport case at the centre of the lead car and surrounded by robed figures apparently engaged in an urgent discussion.
The Stone seemed to reach out for her, begging her to get closer. The urge turned into a mad desire, very similar to that she'd felt when refusing to eat the dog's supplements, and Fusion felt a tickle of worry at the back of her mind. What choice do we have? These things are too powerful to let the dogs keep any of them. Another thought flickered past, barely strong enough to register. Did the dogs keep them separated for a reason?
Fusion built the teleport pattern, modifying it in now-obvious ways to compensate for the differences in motion between here and there, then pushed--
~~~discontinuity~~~
--appearing silently at the head of the monorail car, all four hooves flat on the carpeted floor.
Shocked screams and panicked motion filled the room, until she reached out and encased everyone present in the white-gold of her telekinesis, freezing them in place. The twelve dogs, all of whom had been seated around a narrow oval table, on which stood an ornate case, followed her with silent, tortured gazes as she opened the case and extracted the Stone. At her touch it did the same trick as the others, fading to a crystal globe with a scintillating point of white at the centre.
Fusion added it to the rosette circling her poll, fascinated for a moment by the shifting shadows the moving lights cast, before being jolted back to reality by a whimpering noise coming from one of the dogs. His throat worked, trying to get words out past a jaw held shut. She cocked her head, suddenly uncertain, and loosened her grip on his muzzle.
"Please don't take the Stone!"
Fusion snorted. "Why ever not? It's not like you dogs ever did anything with them."
The figure made a choking sound. "The People created ponykind!" His eyes grew wild, gaze suddenly fixed on the three circling Fusion's head. "These ones need the Stones, especially now. The Maker--"
Her magic tightened fractionally and the dog fell silent. "Yes, I heard that particular tale when I was Blessed. I remember that the Priest seemed particularly disinterested." She watched as his throat worked, then relaxed slightly.
"The scientists agree," he whispered. "The pony has wild ancestors, although they only exist on preserves now. The genetic patterns run through its every cell, overlain by the Stone's changes. These one's own evolutionary record shows abrupt and unexpected developments that cannot be readily explained... magic works and the Stones made the pony." He shrugged, a mere twitching of the muscles against Fusion's power, and his eyes filled with tears. "The Maker is real and these are the end times."
"For you." Fusion leaned forwards, staring into the dog's face. He was older, chocolate muzzle shot with grey on the underside. "You’re not even sad about that, are you?" she said, a note of sardonic wonder creeping into her voice. "You are looking forward to it!"
"The Maker returns," the dog said softly. "These ones can all feel it... a desire. The immanentization is at paw. That is why the pony must leave the Stones with these ones." His voice turned pleading, paws twitching where they rested against the table.
Fusion shuffled her hooves, feeling her own pull to the one other Stone on the surface of the planet. The one Gravity carried was a fainter trace, coloured by distance and the taste of her sister's mind. That one didn't hold the same draw. "I recovered the first from the wreckage of the Baur weapon that used it to wipe magic from everypony; my sister has that one now." She made the glowing, crystal orbs dip one at a time. "The second I took from Lacunae's Basilica, after burning the Deacon alive. This one was pulled from the bottom of a crater." The third Stone paused in its orbit, hovering in front of her muzzle as she stared into its depths. "This... I took this one from a Church in another Hive. It was surrounded by your kind, thousands of them. They were all dead, minds wiped."
His eyes bulged. "Why was it necessary for the pony to kill--"
"I did not kill them!" Fusion snarled, suddenly angry, pawing at the carpet with one forehoof. "Their hearts beat and they still breathed, but their minds were gone. Not my magic, and there were no traces of any spells." She paused, ears folding back. "Not that it would have made any difference. I left the Church ten seconds ahead of a nuclear strike."
More tears, a bizarre blend of bitter desperation and amazed joy. "They managed it," he breathed, the words not directed at her at all, "they called to the Maker and It took them... with all the Stones these ones can all join with the Maker. Please, this one begs the pony to let him fulfil the Maker's promise."
Fusion straightened, taking a step back and adding the fourth stone to her personal orbit. "No."
~~~discontinuity~~~
===
The ground and low altitude defense systems were firing at extreme range. The targets were easy to identify, brightly lit by the fires of re-entry, but there were too many of them to deal with without the assistance of the mid-course and exoatmospheric defence bands. Swarmjet launchers, wide-bore railguns firing canisters of flechettes, and the sweeping strobe of weapon lasers accounted for scores of attackers, but the majority were simple mass, little more than tungsten rods tipped with a guidance package. Here and there were more exotic targets: the lithium and deuterium of fusion weapons, marked out by warning symbols thrown up by the plasma spectroscope.
The frantic dance, far too fast for more than subliminal impressions, abruptly ended in another flash. A swelling ball of fire, close enough that the edges cut through the ground and turned it into a dome, appeared over one arcology mound. It expanded, only visible through the aggressively filtered emergency navigation cameras, a roiling wall of incandescent air and vapourised rock that cooled from a blinding white to yellow and then orange as it grew. It started to lift, an infolding vortex ten kilolengths across, climbing rapidly and drawing in smoke and hot dust to form the stem of the mushroom cloud.
There was a ripple in the air, visible where it crossed the horizon at blinding speed, and Rthar closed his eyes and tensed his muscles. The dropship jerked like it had been struck, dropping precipitously, then recovered. "How--?" he gasped through suddenly chattering teeth.
"These ones are too high," the pilot said, turning the dropship away from what was left of the Hive. "No meat to the shockwave." He was still staring at the display showing the rising cloud, paws moving of their own volition. "What are the Captain's orders?"
Defend the Hive! Rthar drew in a breath to say that out loud, then stopped. On the sensors, another cluster of weapons were closing. Defences cleared... the next will be configured to penetrate and gut the Arcologies. "Maintain this course; best speed." He issued orders to his surviving gunships to fall back. "There's nothing these ones can do for Lacunae, other than carry out the final orders." The pilot nodded like he was in a dream.
In the belly of his dropship were a few strategic weapons, not much compared to what was falling now, but enough to cause enormous damage if they could be delivered. Paws moving slowly, he pulled a slim deck of plastic cards from their little safe next to his console and fanned them, pulling out a red one edged in black. "Orders Of Last Resort," he muttered. "It's really come to this." Staring at the card, Rthar gripped it and twisted, pulling off the case to release the sheet within. One side was covered with a data-filled optical surface, designed for the reader in his console, the other a few lines of simple text. He held it like it was a poisonous insect, reluctant to bring it close enough to read.
The first line was what he'd hoped for; the second was not. Rthar's ears drooped. "This one shouldn't be surprised. Pilot, turn to bearing two zero five. Best speed." At the Pilot's questioning look he sighed. "These ones are ordered to assist whatever remains of the Hive civilian authorities."
"No brokeback war, thank the Maker," the Pilot said, rubbing at the sides of his muzzle, then placing his paws back on the controls and curving the dropship onto the correct course.
Rthar inserted the card into the reader and placed his paw on the input pad. The console flashed, a set of new icons appearing down one side. "Done," he whispered, then opened a link to the remaining senior sersjant in the gunship fleet.
A gryphon's head, red-tinged tawny feathers and bright orange eyes, appeared in his display. The creature was breathing heavily, beak opening and closing, sharp little bird tongue twitching in and out in time with panted breaths. "Master. What are your orders?" he rasped out after a moment. One talon came up and touched his command collar, then dropped. There was a bleak hopelessness in his eyes.
"This one has the gryphon's final orders," Rthar said, holding up the black card. "Sersjant Thorvald, this one has been ordered to dispose of any remaining client species before falling back to await contact by the contingency Synod." He felt his face twist into what probably was a smile, and wondered what sort of rictus it was.
"Captain Rthar, Master, no, we are loyal--" There was panic in the words, but the sersjant fell silent when Rthar held up a paw.
"Rthar knows, and that is why he is not going to execute those orders." He tapped a control and the gryphon's collar popped open. "The gryphon has flight authority; Rthar has disabled the command locks. This one suggests that Thorvald head north and join up with the freed gryphon divisions, with the ponies."
Thorvald reached up and snatched the collar away, throwing it to the floor. "I don't understand." Some of the panic faded, replaced with wonder and confusion.
"The Hive is gone. The gryphon's aeries are gone. There is nothing here for either of these ones." Rthar shrugged. "No need to add more death to this day. Besides--" He smiled again, and this time it felt a little more natural. "--it is likely these ones may run into the gryphon forces, on more even terms. It seems prudent to leave Thorvald with a good impression. Perhaps he could tell his tale to those he meets? In any case, good luck, sersjant."
The gryphon nodded slowly, glancing down at his own controls. "Thank you," he said, then cut the link.
On Rthar's screen, the small collection of surviving gunships curved away, dropping to low altitude. He switched his console to the rear cameras, staring at the turbulent, dust-filled base of the mushroom cloud. A streak of light fell through the murk, which abruptly flared and bulged, then another and another fell in after it. There was no way to see what was happening, but Rthar had seen the simulations.
Under the cover of the superheated, radioactive dust, nuclear detonations were digging through the top cover and punching a hole all the way down to the deep command redoubts. A final streak, then the ground over a wide area erupted like it was inflated by a balloon. Rthar shut off the feed, then held his head in his paws and closed his eyes.
===
Salrath knelt next to one of the troopers, her paw feeling for the artery that passed across the underside of his jaw. There was a pulse, but it was slow and irregular. He still breathed, also very slowly. "Huh. What in the Maker's name..." Some thaumic weapon? No alarms and Salrath wasn't affected. She shook her head, trying to dislodge the odd feeling of need, of desire, to go to the Church, then shrugged it off. Humming quietly, she pulled her supplies from the back of the cruiser, packing them into one gunship's storage bays. More work, this time to drag unconscious troopers from the drop bay and pilot/gunner positions. The last task was to pull out her little grey box and attach it to the pilot's bracer, pulling out the command codes.
She sat in the commander's position and transferred the gunship's controls to her console. "Another kilosecond, another vehicle." Salrath can get to the Church quickly with-- Her eyes widened and she laughed, a nervous, hysterical giggle. "At least this one is better. Perhaps it will be an attack carrier next." The turbines spun up at her request, blowing dust from under the gunship and filling the cockpit with a rising whine. The ground effect kicked in and the gunship drifted to one side under her inexpert guidance. Salrath muttered something indistinct, then glanced up as the forward display abruptly turned a blinding white.
She looked up, blinking, as the cameras stepped down the brilliance. The far end of the transit tunnel was obscured by glare, even with the military filters. Alarms sounded in quick succession -- radiation hazard, nuclear detonation detected -- and she scrabbled at the controls, trying to jam the gunship through the half-open exit to the surface shaft. It slewed sideways, forward turbines striking the wall, and stuck. A ripple of dust and destruction was charging towards her down the transit tunnel, subliminally fast--
A violent jolt threw Salrath out of the couch and against the rear wall. More impacts, a crazy tumbling and hammering, like she was a bone being fed into a garbage grinder, then more gentle vibration that faded into a terrible silence. She lay wedged in the small space behind the commander's couch, dazed for a moment. "No," she whispered. "No!"
Breathing heavily, the pain ignored, she shakily stood and leaned over the command console. The cockpit was tilted at a crazy angle, nose down and to the right, making the operation both easier and slightly dizzying. The forward view was a blurred mass of grey and brown shapes; the camera was trying to focus but failing to do so. "Maker dammit!" She pounded a fist against the touch sensitive screen, but it didn't change the insanity on the displays.
Muttering, Salrath pawed through the basic display screens, then stared at the inertial navigation display. The gunship had lost all contact with Battlenet, but there had been insufficient time or displacement for the gyros’ dead reckoning estimate to have diverged significantly from reality. The vehicle was in the middle of the surface access shaft, about a quarter of a kilolength below ground level.
Climbing through the cockpit hatch and into the rear troop compartment, she hauled herself to the rear sally port, paw hesitating over the controls. Swallowing, Salrath turned her head away and tensed, then activated the hatch. It groaned and vibrated, then reluctantly retracted into the thick hull. It was immediately followed by a shower of gravel and pulverised concrete, but nothing more. She gasped out the breath she'd been holding, then reached out to touch the mass blocking the hatch.
Even battered and cracked, the shape was immediately familiar. A half-length to a side tetrahedron, the standard construction block used in all Hive structures. Wedged in to either side were others, the angled gaps packed with rock fragments.
Salrath moaned, pushing at the block. How much of the shaft has collapsed? "Staged, ground-penetrating atomics... the Arcology is gone." Feeling sick, she recalled Lacunae's own battle plans. If Baur operated with the same strategies, the upper levels would be nothing but rubble from the intersecting shockwaves, sealing even undamaged deep shelters -- should there be any -- under a cap of rubble. There were at least a hundred lengths of rock between her and the surface.
===
Gravity stared down at the world, watching the spread of dust and cloud. Sparks of light were drifting over the surface, fast things made to seem slow by the extreme distance. Lots of rubble was re-entering the upper atmosphere, a mixture of rocks she'd hastily parked in low orbits and fragments falling back down after her larger strikes. What little of the ground she could see was marred by circular craters and linear cuts, like the globe had been bitten and scratched by some rabid beast.
She'd circled the world several times, striking at all the Hive's territories as they rolled past beneath her. Any surviving space assets, mostly those in higher orbits that had escaped the building ablation cascade, were also targeted, being pulled directly from their orbits or struck by fractional c projectiles. The lower and middle orbital belts were heavy with glittering chrome specks, vast swarms of dust and larger material moving in tangled, chaotic orbits that were hard to predict with any degree of certainty, or to any useful time in the future. Collisions between objects were thickening the haze, a process that would continue for some time.
She made some more modifications to the orbital debris, then spun the trajectories forward in time, hissing with displeasure when a close encounter between two rocks resulted in the perigee of one dipping below the outer atmosphere. Not stable even out to a hundred kiloseconds! Gravity adjusted the tracks, then made more changes to compensate for other collisions and close approaches. The work wasn't hard, not now, but it was complex, with each decision having far-reaching ramifications, and there was so much of it! "Might be easier to push them all back together," she grumbled under her breath. Gravity let her mind wander, soaking up the sense of motion as she worked.
Nothing artificial stirred above the atmosphere and nuclear explosions were becoming few and far between. Have they finally run out of bombs? She floated in microgravity at the centre of her defences, wings and legs limp and drifting like a foal’s ragdoll down a river. Long strands of not-quite-hair, filled with starry depths, coiled around her, dancing in the tiny, unfelt air currents. The Stone, or amplifier, or whatever it was, floated between her and the world, a tiny model of the moon, Luna. She could feel the presence of the other Stones, mostly now blinking here and there with Fusion, and see the lit face of the Stone shift suddenly to match the teleport jumps.
===
Last one, Fusion thought, appearing over a section of unfamiliar Hive. Some high altitude detonation had swept away any surface structures, followed up by a barrage of kinetics that had knocked deep craters in the landscaped cap that covered the arcology proper. No surface bursts, though, and the internals of the structure seemed intact, albeit running without an active link to the local power grid. A fog of coloured lights moved in the tunnels and caverns, each one a vehicle or dog.
They were converging on a buried pyramid structure, very similar to the one she'd seen before, exactly where the final Stone was. Uneasy, Fusion thought about packed crowds of mind-dead dogs, all arrayed around the reliquary, or whatever the place they kept the Stone was called. There was no order to the flow, but some of the thaumic lights became stationary and winked out, mostly towards the edges of crowds; this strange effect was crawling inwards, like it was a gas overcoming fleeing insects. At the heart of it all was a different weirdness; next to the Stone itself the dark void of the shadow universe was alive with tiny, flickering traces of colour.
The background level of magic, away from the quiet zone around the Stone and normally supplied by the layer upon layer of thaumic devices, was higher than she'd seen even at the heart of Arcology One. So many... She pushed her mind down into the caverns, opening a clairvoyance node in the larger tunnels leading to the Church. As before, it was packed with dogs, all walking or running towards the Stone. They all had the same fixed, thousand-kilolength stare, obviously completely transfixed by their destination.
"Well, that's their problem. They had their chance," she muttered, then pushed--
~~~discontinuity~~~
--appearing in the air above the crowd. The whole space was alive with the oppressive, physical pressure of high-density magic, like she was standing under a weighty thundercloud just before a lightning strike, her shadow sight practically useless from the fog of colour rising up from the close-pressed mass of dogs. If they saw her they gave no sign, just all strained towards the central reliquary. Some were starting to climb the lower slopes, buoyed up by their fellows. The sound was the worst; a low, wordless susurration of desire. Now they saw her, and their attention shifted. Paws came up and the volume rose, changing to a roar of shouts and cries, no single one distinguishable from the others.
It's the Stones... just like those priests in the monorail. What madness is this? Fusion shivered, suddenly feeling very alone and vulnerable, and cut the top of the reliquary open, extracting the final Stone. The sound became deafening, and with it the shadow universe haze intensified. Then, scattered through the crowd, dogs started to fall.
They vanished like rocks dropped into a pond, trampled under paw as more dogs flowed in the chamber to take their place. Magic was doing the damage, but it was nothing created by a pony or some distant dog strategic thaumic weapon. Instead, threads of power came out of the shadowed darkness like the universe itself had birthed hungry tentacles that flowed through the unaware crowd, touching a dog here, a dog there. Each one of these fell without a sound.
Transfixed, Fusion hovered, her five Stones in a tight halo orbit about her poll, and watched the... collection for a long half-dozen breaths, until another noise distracted her. A chittering, buzzing sound, like the clatter of millions of wings.
Something else flowed into the chamber, a swirling mass of colour packed with glinting points of hardness. It rolled over the dogs, making the walking and fallen vanish in equal measure. The colours multiplied with each body taken, not gaining in intensity but in number, and when they passed the bodies were gone. There was magic here, a lot of it, self-contained and bound to some physical form. A series of air lenses brought the action into close and sharp focus; balls of fluff with membranous dragonfly wings, spidery legs and a pair of big, colourful eyes. They looked soft and inviting, things that would be a delight to nuzzle and touch, like some newborn foal's comfort toy. With teeth.
A dozen settled on a dog still stumbling towards the reliquary and opened mouths that practically split their bodies in two. Deep sea anglerfish, creatures little more than a maw attached to an afterthought of a body. They bit and bit, blunt-looking teeth shearing through fur and bone like it was paper; there was remarkably little blood, and none of it seemed to stick to the pastel fuzz of the swarm. With each bite, more than the mass of the creature vanished into its gullet, then budded off into a pellet of soft fuzz. Immediately, this inflated to full size and sprouted wings and legs. And more teeth.
Fusion's magic trembled, pulsing in time with her pounding heart and her heaving chest. Nostrils flared and eyes wide, she held back the sudden urge to move, to run or fly or do anything to get away. Her defences slammed down and she built an escape pattern, holding it in readiness as she watched. The threads of power accelerated, moving with whip-like speed as the numbers of the insect-things multiplied exponentially. There was a feeling of panic to the movement, and not all the dogs so touched fell unmoving. Some still twitched, jaws opening and eyes darting in confusion until the fuzzy tide overran them. The pastel flood approached, cresting like a wave around her--
Her magic surged, turning the air incandescent and flooding the chamber with heat. Everything organic flashed into immediate flame, dogs and fuzzy bug-things alike turning to char and blowing away.
~~~discontinuity~~~
===
A self-replicating weapon was working through the bipeds’ population centre; the automata seemed to know this and had picked this area to do their mysterious work. There was a Stone nearby, and Chaos couldn't get too close to the centre of the automata activity. Worse, the first servitor it had tampered with had just arrived, with four of the other Stones. Four! It dithered, circling the central populated area, then settled near the outer edges of the affected zone. The automata were working outwards in waves from the buried triangular structure that held the Stone itself. There were no Guardians in the immediate area, so Chaos was comfortable enough to simply watch. They were doing something to the bipeds, something that was killing them.
It sampled the minds of the local bipeds, taking copies of the neural maps and freezing them into patterns within itself. It worked fast, collecting a good-sized sample of minds; to the bipeds the effect was not stealthy, and pain, confusion and seizures flared in each mind as slow-moving waves of misfiring neurons rippled through their brains. A wave of automata approached, shot through with the hard, spiny shapes of Guardians, and Chaos retreated, waiting outside the danger zone while they worked. Each biped's higher functions collapsed, some part of their self abstracted and sent away down a communications channel that vanished along a direction Chaos could barely comprehend, let alone follow.
The data seemed little more than noise, random parts of each biped, some fraction of them collected while the bulk was discarded. Chaos compared the distillation with the stored mindstates; there was nothing in any single biped that seemed special. There were differences, though, and it worked feverishly to correlate each stolen fragment against an unknown whole. It didn't have enough samples, only a few thousand against the millions that were undoubtedly being taken, but the data set was holographic, each part a representation of the whole.
Chaos modelled the data, constructing a four-dimensional approximation of a much more complex eleven-dimensional object. There was something here, some tantalising familiarity. The object was not just a thing, but an entity, vast and nearly incomprehensible even to Chaos. Something that had been distributed through the mind of each biped.
Something that the automata were rebuilding.
This pocket universe was artificial, it knew that -- hints of structure coming through the brane walls had shown the outside environment was both less ordered and far vaster than the internal volume. It had never looked for a creator -- it really shouldn't have had to; any controlling works would be obvious -- but the bipeds thought it existed. The 'Maker' they called it.
Why would this 'Maker' have vanished from its creation? Why would it limit itself to this tiny space? If it had somehow spread itself through the bipeds, then the mass extermination that Chaos had engineered would be a direct threat to the Maker. This was some safety measure to ensure it couldn't be lost--
The thoughts hit and Chaos coiled through the quantum foam, compressing its form and increasing its processing speed. No matter what alternative hypothesis it formulated, they were all discarded as false or dangerously unprovable; everything came back to a single, unwelcome conclusion. This universe was the Maker's project and Chaos had spent most of its history creatively and violently breaking it for its own interests and, sometimes, amusement.
No! This couldn't be, this was only some stupid conclusion reached by ignorant bipeds, there was no way-- Trembling, Chaos extended itself, spreading thin and wide over a great volume. Its thoughts slowed to a crawl, but now it could feel the state of the space-time within its form. Something was changing; the automata it rode were different in some indefinable way. More ordered, a larger fraction of their operations directed to other processes. Under the skin of space, something profoundly, terrifyingly alien was thinking long, slow, glacial thoughts that vibrated in the hum of hydrogen nuclei and the silent drift of electrons down lines of magnetic flux.
The Maker was coming back, and it would find out what Chaos had done.
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Tower retracted, internal computer has control. Auto sequencer start; turbopumps at full speed, igniters firing.
Last one to escape velocity is a rotten egg.
And Chaos still doesn't realize the greatest irony of all... Of course, that hypothesis is the least provable yet.
I have to wonder what's so special about Salrath that she escaped the sweep. Is there nothing of the Maker in her? Is she so bloody-minded that she held onto her fragment? Or, perhaps most terrifying of all, was that the only thing keeping her even remotely sane?
Also, the origin of parasprites. I can only assume that their susceptibility to polka was a fluke bit of evolution over the intervening tears.
In any case, the sisters have all six Stones. So, what's the plan now?
...Is no one gonna talk about the title?
Consistently amazing, this story is. Unfortunately, it almost over.
Wait, so F****** SALRATH survives, but Merlon and Orgon don't?!?!? B*******! Oh well, if you don't see the bodies, then they ain't dead, and all that.
I never really connected the Maker with the Lovecraftian concept of the Eldritch. Those last lines about glacial thoughts really struck it home, though. 🤔
9348315
now that you say it... The punk is wrong with the title? Me not understood...
9348398
It's a reference to Lovecraftian lore, an excerpt from the Necronomicon. It basically means you don't have to die if you can become undead instead. In the context of this story, it's referencing the Maker coming back from being not-actually-dead.
Funny. I'd just used the quote you used for the chapter title in relation to my update schedule.
Well, I guess this chapter confirmed something many had suspected all along: Salrath has no soul.
Rthar sending off that gryphon was poignant. If ever there was a dog who didn't have it coming, it was him.
And hoo, boy. Was not expecting the chapter title to be quite so directly applicable. I'd forgotten that this universe incorporated chunks of (or was comprised of) the Maker's body... And Discord just cheesed it off.
The ultimate take on the Whole General sort Of Mish Mash and The Tiger In the Living room.
If Gravity is doing what she is with only the single stone, and Fusion has the other 5, then getting them together so they can double focus the Moebius flow of all 6, which gives a synthesis of the 7th needed to generate the Flat torus solution, and collapse the whole of local state space into a given Total form?
Chaos is about to get Prime Sequenced.
So... God is recompiling him/her/its-self... Neat! And horrifying. Rapture indeed.
9348210
It's Rainbow Laser time, that's what
9348398
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Solution
9349152
Only the first part of that quote is relevant to this story, obviously.
9348210
The root keys to the universe -- weakly god-like powers. Of course, the second order consequences can be severe.
Ah, parasprites. I can't be the only person who saw them and thought von Neumann weapon, surely? Fortunately they also evolved away from eating flesh.
9348391
Unlike much of the Mythos, the Maker is pretty indifferent to the works of meatbags, rather like a microbiologist looking at a bacterial colony. Still pretty bad news for the microbes, though. I always did like a bit of Lovecraft.
9348373
I just didn't want you to forget she was still around. That one needs a good send-off.
====
Thanks for all the comments, folks!
Was thinking about this story at work today, and it occurred to me that Vanca is probably dead / absorbed into the Maker now. D: And what about Korn? He was in horse-land, wasn't he? Is he safe from Maker-absorption? I imagine the automata were focusing on large population centers of gnolls, and there probably aren't that many hanging out with the ponies, compared to the Hive population centers. I'm gonna' hold my breath for at least one non-pony I like making it through this story, lol.
9349614
Not many microbiologists I know would be willing to infuse the whole of their mind and soul into a bacterial colony — but then, I don't know any microbiologists. For all I know, they're all a bunch'a kooks.
9349935
Just think -- at my normal posting rate you might have waited half a year for the answers to those questions!
I know a couple. They are all loonies. I'd rather work with high explosives than bacteria. Every time I go into the bio lab, I keep wishing I could bring white phosphorus and a flame thrower with me.
*prepares to read* Ok... time to start up the giant earth mover to pile up the bodies from this chapter...
9349614 And then, at long last, the Maker coalesces into its true original form!
fanboyfashion.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Unsexy-Batgirl-Cosplay.jpg
Chaos, "Ok, NOW this world makes total sense!"
9349935
9349614
Except this time, one of the bacteria has nabbed the remote for the devices that insert and retract the microbiologist, and has decided that pushing the retract button ain't gonna' happen!
I'm almost scared to think what that'll do to the Equestrian pocket universe.
Modular Astral-Grade Interrupt Code, or M. A. G. I. C., is the fundamental basis for your very own universe sandbox. Take your first step to a career in Reality Arbitration Task Management and Zoological Engineering here at Chaos Inc., where we provide all the finest live specimens on which to conduct any esoteric experiment or test you should desire.
So we have griffons, dragons, zebras and parasprites and obviously diamond dogs... We're still waiting on the creation of the 3 tribes/races as well as bat ponies, changelings and a million other things I'm not expecting.
9351731
I don't think I'd be surprised, either.
9352124
Now I'm thinking where I can use RATMAZE!
9354235
The world is too vast for me to put everything in it. Some of those things will be saved for a later day.
9348420
Not undead, but rather that if you can come back from death, then even if you are dead for ten trillion years, you could return in another trillion. Or in other words, to lie eternal.