Year 7
I was there to see them off – a pastime that I usually undertook in a distant, hidden niche far from sight. However, seeing as I was part of the reason they were leaving this time, it was the least I could do to publicly show up.
I stood in the front of a small crowd gathered at Ponyville’s primary spaceport. No ships were flying in and out of the port right now, because preparations for a very special voyage were underway. In front of us was a large, crystal ramp that led up to one of the ugliest ships Merodi Universalis had ever made. It looked like a boulder that had been chiseled at one end to a point, giving it a vaguely teardrop-like shape. There were no windows; instead jagged overlaid pieces of metal plating a quarter-meter thick arranged in such a way to maximize structural integrity, giving it the unfortunate appearance of a scrap heap. There were scant few holes in the armor for weapons, and the multi-system engines were hidden under the cone half of the ship.
It was the Marianas and it was built to withstand anything the multiverse could throw at it. Its mission was to go on a long journey to the Unrealities and the Beyond, to be the first Merodi ship to ever go that far. It was a monumental occasion that didn’t really need the ship to look pretty. The Unrealities were mostly eldritch locations anyway, so it wasn’t like appearance could matter.
There was no physical door on the Marianas, so everyone had to be teleported in – the ramp to the ship was purely for show. The crew would wave to the crowd, walk up to the top of the ramp, and then be teleported into the Marianas. The Captain of the exploration ship stood at constant attention to the left of the teleportation location.
It was always interesting to see Minna in full uniform, the current design of the Military Division Captain’s attire giving her a dull gold suit with red highlights. She had chosen the version without sleeves so her arms could have freedom of movement, showing off her muscular limbs. I knew she still had all her excessively long hair, but it was tucked down the back of her uniform, out of sight for the most part.
She’d come a long way in these few years. I would like to say it was all because of her abilities, but it was more because she had connections and O’Neill liked her. She would have risen to Captain eventually through her own merit, but things were accelerated slightly given her family.
Her husband Frigid was already on board as a civilian guest. They were going to be gone a while, so special accommodations were made.
After the primary military crew and guests made it to the ship – about three-dozen in total – the other expedition members showed up. A handful of scientists went first, including Starbeat, but they weren’t the ones the crowd was here to see. Pinkie’s Party was; the five of them walking and waving to the crowd – even Jotaro. He was in a good mood, though that may have been because Marina Kujo was coming with him for once.
Nova was going alone. Sunburst had decided to stay back, and Stardust… well she was an adult now, and while she loved her mother very much, the two of them didn’t really… get each other. She definitely had no desire to spend several months in an enclosed space with her mother.
It brought a frown to my features. I supposed I had no right to feel bad – they still talked to each other, after all, which was more than could be said for many families. Still, I felt like she’d been cheated out of something beautiful in her life.
As for the others… They’d changed as well. Jotaro not so much, but the other three? You could see it in the way they walked. Vriska was walking up to the crowd and saying hello to the children, shaking their hands and smiling warmly. Pinkie was still the party pony, but she was a lot more careful – she didn’t bounce around wildly when she moved. Instead, each step was almost robotic in nature, even if it did lead to an explosion of a party cannon. And Flutterfree… She was actually showing off a little bit, even posing for the cameras with her elegant, marble-tipped appearance. She’d fully accepted her role as a popular public figure.
Eve waved at her from her position a fair ways to my left.
The five of them – plus Marina – made it to the ship and were teleported inside.
After them came the foreign visitors. Hastur and Zod were together, despite Zod’s loyalty to Merodi Universalis – they would serve as the eldritch experts. They ignored the crowd, instead talking to each other to catch up on old times. The Sparkle Census had sent Twilight M4 and Twitter, while the USM had sent some unknown scientist named Sheldon. The TSAB and Empy’s Void were getting in on the expedition as well, despite the fact that both the higher Class 2 powers had already been to the depths of the multiverse. The childlike mage Vita and the White Mage Rarity represented them.
I waved to Mage Rarity. “Hey!”
“Oh, Twilence, good to see you here!” She walked up with a warm, nostalgic smile. “I see you’re doing well. It’s a good thing you got out of that stuffy library.”
“You don’t see me arguing.”
Mage Rarity smiled. “Apologies, but I do have to keep this moving.” She winked. “I’m sure you already know everything about what’s been going on in my life.”
I chuckled. “Yep. See you!”
Mage Rarity nodded, moving on to another pony – a white mare cloaked in a dark shawl. She paused to give the ‘stranger’ a quick kiss and then ran off to the teleporter.
I glanced at the cloaked mare and sent a telepathic message. You’re supposed to be avoiding the story.
I am not a smart pony.
Just get out of here before it drags you in.
Fine, fine… She teleported away in a flash of magical energy.
I looked up at the Marianas. Everyone was on board now, including Minna. It was performing final pre-flight checks before it activated its state-of-the-art Chronosplitter Drive, the latest in Merodi technology. It was essentially a primitive TARDIS core that allowed navigation through space, time, and dimensions; a combination that allowed for highly streamlined navigation of the multiverse’s metatime. The drive may have been a bit overkill for standard universal travel, but they were going to a place where time and space often made no sense. It would definitely be needed. As would the Reality Shaping Mechanism it had on board. They knew some of the universes would be brutally different, so much so that pure Reality Anchors wouldn’t cut it.
Of course, the purpose of these pre-flight checks was twofold. The ‘real’ reason was to ensure everything was safe. The ‘ka’ reason was to allow one more passenger on board.
Jenny had made herself invisible – not that she could hide from me. She walked up to the top of the ramp and teleported herself into the Marianas, becoming a stowaway.
Good for her.
The Marianas completed its pre-flight checks a few seconds later, activating the Chronosplitter. A red aura of magical energy that was clearly a mixture of Corona’s personal magic and Aradia’s temporal shenanigans appeared in front of the ship, tearing a hole through several different realities at different states of time. The Marianas was compressed into a speck of dust barely larger than a flea and was run through this bizarre network of connections like a rat in a maze, until it popped out the other side several universes away with what would be perceived as an overall reverse flow of time.
They literally arrived at their destination yesterday. Of course, if they tried to come back, they wouldn’t be able to get here yesterday. But even though the trick didn’t work backward, it was a way to save time.
The people on the expedition were going to experience a lot more time than the people living in Merodi Universalis, assuming the Chronosplitter’s programming worked out properly. It was a very new piece of technology.
They set off to their first destination – a pit stop in the Strands.
I smiled. They were going to have quite the adventure in the furthest reaches.
~~~
About a week later…
The Marianas was taking a last-minute stop before heading into the Great Void. They were in the ‘southernmost’-known Outpost universe of the Strands, one that Pinkie’s team had stumbled across by complete accident a couple years ago.
The universe was just a single building floating in a sea of blackness. That building was the Raven Hotel. It was run by a full ‘human’ AI who went by the name Poe – he appeared as a separate entity, but in reality was the Raven Hotel. Before Pinkie’s team had found him, his hotel hadn’t seen a guest in decades. Now the Merodi and its allies had started using it as a private nexus for travel and he was absolutely ecstatic about the sudden increase in customers. He’d even extended the hotel’s structure to have a few docking bays for ships.
Only one other ship was there – the Vaskahr – a trading ship run by the Melnorme. Now, Poe was not one to turn any customers away, but he certainly wasn’t fond of these particular guests. Always loud, orange, and annoying.
“I guess we really aren’t good at keeping secrets,” Nova told Poe, sliding up to the main lobby’s bar. The Raven Hotel had a vaguely Victorian feel to it with a dimly lit interior and a holographic raven sitting on a perch. There were several tables in the lobby, and most were filled with Marianas crewmembers talking about the journey ahead.
“Oh, it’s no issue,” Poe said, pretending to clean a glass – even though he had an instant-rinse dishwasher. His visual appearance was vaguely that of an Edgar Allen Poe, though with a decidedly warmer and friendlier demeanor than the creepy author. “Customers are customers.”
“Assholes are assholes,” Nova muttered, tapping her hoof on the countertop. A pink drink materialized in front of her. She drank it without looking.
“Trouble at home?”
“Eh, not really?” Nova shrugged. “Same as always. Nobody’s mad or upset. Not like we’re arguing or in danger of falling apart. But I feel like I know my friends better than I know my husband and kid.” She looked at the ceiling. “It’s been a few years since she left. You think I’d get over her now that she’s all grown up. Nope.”
“I can’t pretend to have any understanding of what it means to have a child, but from what I hear the bond is a curious one that doesn’t just vanish.”
“Mmm…” She took another swig. “Yeah, enough about that, it’s all I ever complain about. Nothing’s going to change about it now. So, Poe, what’s your story?”
“You already know my story Miss Glimmer. You are a regular. …Inasmuch as I have regulars. You know since I-”
“Yeah, yeah, I know, Earth Soulstack. I went there once, never again. I’m not interested in your stint with the Collector either. I know those stories.”
“Then what is it you want to know?”
“People blab to you about their personal problems all the time. What are your stresses? I know you have a life here, of sorts. What kind of things do you concern yourself with?”
“Hrm… Mostly the happiness of the customers a-”
“Er, excuse me,” one of the human scientists said, nervously glancing back at the table his friends were at, all laughing and having a good time. “Can you put the… angelic hooves package in my room?”
Poe smiled warmly. “Of course, the mares will be generated right away.”
The scientist nodded, and quickly dashed back to his table.
Nova glared at Poe.
Poe coughed. “I suppose my primary worries include that those I consider friends don’t think too hard about some of the services my hotel offers.”
Nova rolled her eyes and shook her head judgingly. She threw her drink all over the human scientist with her magic and left the bar. Technician Pidge gave her a subtle thumbs-up in approval.
Poe ignored the exchange. “Perhaps I could offer you a fully immersive stress-relief package? I’m sure there are some particular monsters you would like to decapitate.”
“No thanks,” Nova called back. “I think I’ll just go to my room and appreciate a comfortable, lavish bed before I get locked in a coffin the rest of the trip, hm?”
“If that is what you wish. Any furnishings you would app-”
“Poe, please, just the standard real stuff, okay?”
Poe shifted uncomfortably.
Nova facehooved. “Poe, I wasn’t insinuating that you weren’t real.”
“Hard not to take it that way. But I understand. Nothing but the standard furnishings. Would you like me to remove the Raven clock?”
“No, no, you can keep the Raven clock. It’s adorable.”
Poe allowed himself to smile. “Thank you.”
“Don’t mention it.” She turned around to head to her room – but was stopped by a Melnorme.
“Can I interest you i-”
“No,” Nova muttered. “Beat it, orange.”
“…My name is Lavender.”
Nova moved past Lavender marching through the Raven Hotel’s lobby – until another Melnorme walked in front of her. She jumped to the side – only to accidentally crash into a third Melnorme.
This Melnorme scrambled away, smacking her in the process. “What is your problem?”
“Stop trying to sell me things!” Nova blurted, teleporting to the Raven Hotel’s elevator. Unfortunately the elevator wasn’t currently at the ground floor so she just teleported into an empty shaft.
Clinging to the ladder in that empty shaft was Jenny.
Jenny smiled awkwardly. “So… Fancy meeting you here!”
Nova sighed, levitating herself with her magic. “Come on…”
“Nonono wai-”
Nova teleported Jenny and herself back to the lobby, in front of Captain Minna. “Minna, I’m 99% sure she’s a stowaway on the Marianas.”
Jenny grinned. “Hi!”
Minna looked down, her purple eyes narrowing to slits.
“Okay, so, it’d take you a week to get me back to MU so it’s probably better if you just take me al-”
“Stop talking,” Minna muttered, folding her hands together. “I don’t see us going back. Nor do I see us leaving you here. I do see us taking you along.”
Jenny brightened.
“But you’re going to be a janitor.”
Jenny blinked. “B-”
Nova summoned a mop and a bucket to Jenny. “HEY POE! Do you have some dirty rooms that need cleaning?”
Poe looked at Jenny with mischievous eyes. “Of course. Certain packages can result in quite a mess that is a pain to clean, even for an automated system like myself.”
“Oh please no,” Jenny said.
“I’m the captain,” Minna said, leaning in. “You don’t really have a choice.”
“Right, right. I’m here to suffer. Got it. So this isn’t really going to be a vacation from my normal team.” She swiped the mop and bucket and walked up to Poe. “Which room first?”
“Three-Thirteen. The one I never cleaned.”
“Why?”
“You don’t want to know.”
Jenny blinked. “…Oh boy.”
“You better get on it if you want to sleep at all today!” Minna called. “This is the last comfortable bed you’re getting!”
“I’ve been sleeping in the cargo hold!”
“And you’ll keep sleeping in the cargo hold!”
Jenny grumbled and marched to the elevator.
Nova decided to just teleport directly to her floor and walk into her room. As amusing as that was, she was still done with today. She wanted a nice warm bed…
Something she wouldn’t have for a long time. The cots in the Marianas weren’t like prison beds, but they weren’t exactly soft either.
~~~
Weeks later…
As it turned out, after the initial horror of Room 313 the responsibilities of a janitor on the Marianas weren’t that taxing. Most of the systems were equipped with basic cleaning spells so they didn’t even need a janitor. Jenny’s job ended up to be doing the stuff nobody else wanted to. Moving heavy machinery, watching boring sensor data, that sort of thing.
She was essentially a member of the crew at this point. One who was bored beyond measure.
She had been sure this voyage would be interesting – that they would find many interesting worlds and fascinating things. But they weren’t really doing that. They were slowly trekking their way through the Great Void area of the multiverse. Every universe they passed through had only a handful of connections to other universes, making it a slow process.
The worst part? Most of the universes in the Great Void were normal. A lot of them were Earths, and more than a few were just variations thereof. There had been a few eldritch locations, but those were few and far between. It had been four days since Jenny had heard about anything other than a relatively standard physics universe, and she was going nuts.
She needed to find a way to entertain herself.
She spun a little wheel in her head, choosing a random activity. The activity that rose to the top was ‘snoop for gossip.’
She already had a primary target in mind.
She activated her invisibility spell and walked around the halls of the Marianas, looking for her targets. The Marianas’ interior was rather cramped, with the exception of the lounge, mess hall, and bridge itself. Every other part of the space had been condensed to minimize the size of the craft and to increase efficiency. The interiors were mostly dull gray with rounded white nubs where holographic displays were installed – all Jenny had to do was touch one of these nubs to bring up the locations of the entire crew.
Less than fifty people on this ship. Wasn’t hard to find them at all. Currently walking around the second deck’s halls. She performed a quick teleport and began to sneak behind them.
Vriska, Hastur, and Starbeat. A complex relationship triangle centered around Vriska. Of course they would have gossip, right?
“So, I discovered that the burritos are good,” Starbeat said. “You’d think they wouldn’t be that good, but they are. I thought I’d have to conjure all my food, but I guess it looks like I’ll be eating our entire supply of burritos. I’m so bringing them back to the Collection.”
“Which flavor?” Hastur asked.
Starbeat smirked. “Pulled pork. Deeeelicious.”
“Wrong answer,” Vriska said with a smirk. “The actual answer is ‘all the flavors. All of them’.”
“That’s only the correct answer if you’re the one answering the question.”
“I just did, didn’t I?”
Hastur let out a soft chuckle. “Oh, that you did. If only you truly could have all the flavors…”
“I can have all the flavors of you.”
Starbeat put a hoof over her eyes.
Jenny did not, because she didn’t know what was coming. She quickly regretted not following Starbeat’s example, because what followed next was truly disturbing. It involved tentacles, two faces, and a lot of squishy noises.
Jenny teleported away, hand to her head. “…I just gained an insanity point. Note to self: never watch an eldritch makeout session. Ever.”
Pinkie came out of nowhere and hit her on the head with a squeaky hammer. “That was private, Jenny!”
“Hey! They were in a public hall! And Starbeat was th-”
Pinkie hit her again. “Moirail privileges. She was covering her eyes anyway.”
“But you were w-”
SQUEAK! “I don’t really have a choice. Plus, I wasn’t watching, this blindfold isn’t ornamental you know!”
“Agh! Fine, fine, I’m sorry, I’ve learned my lesson!”
Pinkie ‘looked’ right at her. “No you haven’t. But I’ll accept that anyway. Toodeloo!” She vanished into a nearby room.
Jenny grunted. For about a second she contemplated stopping her snooping.
“…Nah,” she said, standing up tall, checking to make sure she was still invisible. Time to check on their illustrious captain. She checked the personnel report again. Minna was in her quarters, the largest on the ship. Frigid wasn’t in there, so Jenny figured she was safe. Just a quick internal teleport.
She appeared in Minna’s room. It was the size of a normal bedroom with a queen size bed with an actual mattress on it. There was an adjoining bathroom, a few potted plants, and a desk.
Minna was currently standing in front of the bathroom mirror, combing her long lustrous hair.
She didn’t say or do anything interesting for five whole minutes.
I’m bored, Jenny muttered, teleporting out. She didn’t have to check the map again to find a target – she saw her target. Apparently Starbeat had moved on from the eldritch makeout fest and had taken to talking to the White Mage Rarity.
“I think the trip’s been a bit boring so far, to be honest,” Mage Rarity was saying. “Besides the Raven Hotel we haven’t really seen anything all that interesting.”
“We haven’t made it to the really interesting stuff yet,” Starbeat pointed out. “The Unrealities are through the Great Void, not part of them. We’ll find some truly bizarre locations and peoples there.”
“It is a long way away… And we all know that when we get there the level of drama will increase significantly.”
“Always happens.”
“Well, yes. This ship is destined to fall, after all.”
Jenny froze. What!?
Starbeat looked at Mage Rarity and shook her head. “We really shouldn’t be talking about that, you know. Not good for our heads.”
“I know, I know, I supposed it would have been fine in this case. Guess I was mistaken. Different topic then?”
Starbeat nodded. “How about that magic of yours?”
“Ah, a mixture of temporal and curative spells…”
Jenny wasn’t listening anymore.
She was still stuck on the fact that, apparently, Marianas was destined to fall.
Normal people would freak out and start panicking, fearing for their lives.
Jenny hadn’t felt fear for her own life in millions of years. She took this piece of information and grinned.
She knew things weren’t going to be boring forever.
~~~
More weeks pass…
The majority of Horrorterror space was within the Great Void. The Marianas had no intention of cutting through Horrorterror space, but they didn’t exactly have a map of the Great Void to aid them, so they ended up cutting through anyway.
Luckily the Horrorterrors didn’t seem to mind. Only one had actually bothered to speak to them in their journey, and it was just curious what they were doing this far from home. Minna had answered, Hastur had a short conversation with the being, and that was that.
The area of the Great Void they were in had fewer normal worlds and more empty worlds – a locale the Horrorterrors generally preferred. They came across the occasional world that had been the result of a successful SBURB session, but mostly it was just Horrorterror worlds of emptiness with a smattering of minor eldritch physics.
It was almost always dark.
Nova stared outside. The Marianas had no windows, but the Lounge had a large screen that acted like a window, displaying what was outside - filtered through a sanity program of course. They were in one of the dark universes right now, so regardless of what the program was filtering out, they couldn’t see anything.
Nova levitated the remote to her and changed the settings on the major screen, finding another setting that showed complete blackness. Behind her, she could hear other people playing the latest version of Multiversal Heroes – she had no idea what the number was, but they were sure having fun.
Nova changed the setting again. This time it shifted to a red-blue heat map of ‘how much time was distorted’ in the area. Everything was a solid purple, indicating normal levels everywhere. She checked for soul signs – a minor Horrorterror was apparently hiding in the darkness so far away they only appeared as a single speck of white light against the darkness.
She switched to the ‘spatial distortion’ setting, getting a slightly more interesting visualization of how space was folding in on itself out there. The greens and blues and yellows signifying higher dimensions played off each other in a soothing pattern.
She put a hoof to her head – why did she have a headache? It didn’t even look that complicated.
…Maybe she was just in a funk from not doing much for these last few weeks. Horrorterror space wasn’t very interesting for non-eldritch beings. Zod and Hastur were apparently right at home here, even though it felt nothing like the Embodiment’s impossible hellscapes.
She closed her eyes – but the headache only got worse. “Uuuugh…”
Vriska jumped over the back of the couch she was sitting in, startling the poor unicorn. “What’s up?”
“Headache.”
“Brought on by emotional stress or drama that I, as a great friend, may alleviate with my astounding skills of empathy and understanding?”
Nova raised an eyebrow. “You’re full of crap.”
“Heh. Yep. Still, I’m here. Sup?”
“Literally nothing,” Nova told her. “I’m just a little bored. And I didn’t feel like playing another round of Multiversal Heroes Umpteen.”
“See, that won’t cause a headache. Unless we were being too loud back there.”
“Barely noticed you.”
Vriska blinked. “Then, uh… Lie down? I guess?”
Nova let out a soft chuckle, a hoof still to the side of her head. “You know what, that may be the best advice you’ve ever given.”
“Yes! Bullshitting your way to truth is the answer!”
Nova got off the couch and stretched her neck, handing Vriska the remote. “Though the moment I leave we’ll enter a universe that translates to beautiful fractal patterns.”
“You know it!”
Nova let out an amused sigh. She lit her horn and teleported to her room – which she shared with Flutterfree, Pinkie, and Vriska. None of them were there at the moment, though, so she was alone. She climbed onto one of the higher-level cots and laid her head on a pillow.
She was about to cast sleep on herself when the headache drove itself into her brain, hard enough to make her yell out. White sparks crossed by her vision. She thought she saw a face.
She teleported herself right to the sick bay, where White Mage Rarity was waiting. The only other person in the room was Technician Pidge.
“Hey, Nova!” Pidge called while flexing her recently-repaired arm.
“Hey,” Nova muttered, rubbing her head. “Sorry, head hurts. Rarity, scan my brain. Please. It’s got a horrible headache and I was just hallucinating white lights.”
Mage Rarity nodded, levitating Nova up onto one of the examination tables. She placed a disc-shaped crystal on the side of Nova’s head, transmitting mental data to a nearby screen. “So, you two know each other?”
Nova nodded, glancing at the short flat-chested woman with large round glasses. “Pidge was stuck with the rest of my team on a world for a while.”
“Ah. Memories,” Pidge deadpanned.
“We should get together again, sometime.”
“I work at Renee’s Castle. I talk to you guys every few days.”
“I mean, hang out hang out.”
Pidge raised an eyebrow.
“Bah, I’ll have Pinkie explain it later.”
Nova’s brain scan completed and Rarity examined the data, checking it carefully. “You certainly have a headache, but I don’t see any signs of hallucination. Your visual cortex is operating completely normally.”
“Well I don’t see the sparks now,” Nova muttered. “Headache’s still real though. Yeesh…”
“Doesn’t seem to be a major concern. I’ll just cast a Clear on you, and everything should be fine. I doubt we’ll need anything as serious as Esuna.”
“Oh, that’s right, your magic system is the same as that Gilgamesh guy’s. You got weird names for everything.”
Rarity nodded, casting the spell on Nova. Her headache lessened considerably, but there was still a nagging in the back of her mind. “I think it’s still there…”
“The mind is a strange thing,” Rarity said. “It could very easily just not believe I could remove it that fast, so it’ll create its own headache.”
“Ah, ri-”
“This is your captain speaking!” Minna announced over the communication system. “Brace yourselves – the universe is destabilizing!”
Pidge pressed herself to the corner of the room. Nova checked her bracelet. “…It is. How is it going so fast?”
The Chronosplitter Drive activated, throwing the Marianas back in time. But the universe was still destabilizing ten minutes into the past, even though it hadn’t before. “What the…?” The Marianas shook from the dimensional stress, its reality anchors struggling against the strain.
The Marianas returned to the previous universe they had been in, escaping the destabilization. Nova decided it was time to teleport to the bridge – the same idea a lot of others had. There was a question on all their faces – ‘what just happened!?’
Minna furrowed her brow. “I have no idea what just happened. Vita, does the TSAB know?”
Vita grunted, folding her arms. In her childish body, this just made her look like she was pouting. “A devourer.”
Minna raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”
“Some universes are created with consciousnesses, as you know. Some of those consciousnesses decide it’s a good idea for them to eat other universes. They’re mostly native to the Unrealities – I’m a bit surprised we ran into one here.”
“Defenses?” Minna asked.
“You have a couple reality bombs on the ship, that’s about all you can do.” Vita shrugged. “The best solution is just to escape the universe. They’re entities the size of universes – even if your ship gives off a power signature more than any one universe, they won’t care if you run away. They know what their food is.”
“How horrible…” Flutterfree said, putting a hoof to her mouth.
“The Class 1s and 2s have hunted them to extinction in most other places. They only live out in these reaches, where there aren’t as many inhabited worlds.”
“There was a Horrorterror in that universe,” Nova said. “Is it… okay?”
“How should I know? They can naturally pass the boundary between worlds. I can’t tell you if that specific one did it in time or not.” She turned to Minna. “Those coordinates won’t exist anymore. We’ll need to move through the multiverse another way.”
“Should we be worried about these universe eaters?” Minna asked.
“They’re slow. You’ll have plenty of time to leave, every time,” Vita said.
“Be ready to leave inhabited worlds to die, though,” Thrackerzod said. “This ship can’t save them.”
Minna nodded. “Thank you for your inputs. Everyone return to your previous activity. Lieutenant, spin up the Chronosplitter Drive, find us a new way forward.”
“Yes, Captain.”
~~~
Another week passes…
Everyone was crowded on the main screen of the Lounge – those that weren't on the bridge, anyway.
Jenny was gawking. “No way…”
They were witnessing a standoff between not two, but three Class 1 civilizations. A Noble Horrorterror stood at one point of the triangle, flanked by several lesser Horrorterrors. The second side consisted of four Celestialsapiens, one of which had clearly achieved mental balance given the dramatic bodily motions he was making, unlike his three frozen companions. The third side contained one ship – a glowing blue conglomeration of loosely collected parts. A Beyonder Splintership, Vita had told them. She hadn’t been able to tell them anything else about it.
They were sitting in a universe of the Great Void that wasn’t black and empty, but instead a fluidic space filled with a dark green liquid. The sanity filters of the Marianas were currently editing the green sludge out of all visual reports.
In the center of the three powers was a thing. A thing the sensors weren’t able to understand, so they just replaced it with a glowing white orb. It was a source of impossible things – negative mass, inverted time, ka storms, and a power that took normal eldritch power and drove its impossibility so far that even the sensors’ purely mathematical readings were spitting out errors.
“What is that!?” Jenny wondered, putting a hand to her head. “Just… what?”
“No idea,” Mage Rarity said, furrowing her brow. “I’ve been to the Beyond before, encountered some of the truly outlandish. But I don’t have any idea what this is.”
“Dude… …We should steal it.”
A blindfolded glare from Pinkie was terrifying enough to get Jenny to shut up.
“Do you think they know what it is?” Flutterfree asked, hoof to her chin.
“I doubt it,” Hastur commented. “Even I have no understanding of what we’re looking at. And I have seen a few Embodiment experiment worlds designed to tax the limits of eldritch understanding. We never managed to create anything like this.”
“Apparently all three of them really want it,” Jenny observed. “Do they think they can use it?”
“Maybe?” Mage Rarity shrugged. “The motives of the Class 1s are often inscrutable.”
“Yare yare daze…” Jotaro said, shaking his head. “It’s a powerful, likely unknown thing. It doesn’t matter what any one of them plans to do with it, they can’t just let the others have it. We can still understand their competition motive.”
“Good point,” Mage Rarity admitted. “Still, I wonder what they think it is.”
There was silence as they watched the standoff. The only one of the sides doing anything visible was the Celestialsapien, and he wasn’t transmitting his thoughts in a way the Marianas could pick up. As far as they were concerned, the great powers weren’t talking at all.
Jenny walked up to the screen and placed her hand on the white star visually representing the thing. I wonder if you’re important… Or just a random curiosity we find on our journey and never understand… Are you the reason we fall, or just another speck on the road?
No answer was forthcoming.
~~~
The headache was back. Nova tried to go rest even though they were watching the Class 1s square off – or ‘triangle’ off, she guessed. It wasn’t like they were doing anything, and the thing couldn’t be accurately rendered in a way they could visually comprehend.
So she went to her bed and tried to rest her head.
And then she saw the white sparks again.
This time, however, there was more to it.
A shape formed in front of her eyes – half there, half not. It took the shape of an androgynous humanoid about the size of an apple. While its skin was glowing white, unlike albinos or angels, there were also sharp voids of black dotted in particular places. The fingernails were black while the figure lacked toenails – or even toes. The irises of its eyes were pitch black, making the pupil seem much larger than it was, only accentuated by the pitch eyelashes and eyebrows. There was only the slightest hint of a nose, lacking nostrils, while the mouth was small and pale. The being’s straight hair was pure white; long enough to reach halfway down the neck and cover the ears. The inside of the hair was pitch black, creating a dark backdrop for the being’s head and throat.
Out of its back sprung dozens of papery limbs, drifting behind the body like jellyfish tentacles.
The creature had no gender or, really, any features besides those on its face. If a human were to look at the creature, their mental bias would likely shift to perceiving the being as male – a young boy, as it were. However, ponies tend to have the opposite gender bias, so Nova’s internal processing decided what she was looking at was a young woman of some sort, even though deep down Nova knew this creature was something else entirely.
“…What are you?” Nova asked.
The creature looked into Nova’s eyes, her black irises growing to fill her entire eyeball and then quickly shrinking to a size so small Nova couldn’t see it. The creature smiled. “Looks like it’s finally come around.” The voice was just as neutral as the being’s body, doing little to twist Nova’s perception one way or another.
“Are you going to answer my question?”
The being winked. Then it floated to the right side of her vision and vanished.
Nova’s headache was gone.
She did the only sensible thing anyone should do in that situation.
She teleported right to the captain. “I might have an alien entity in my head. Either that or I’m hallucinating.”
Minna blinked. “…Really?”
“Yes. Really. A featureless girl with papery things coming out of her back just appeared in my vision while I was trying to rest my head.”
“Do you think it has anything to do with the thing we are observing?”
“Maybe it aggravated it? I went to Rarity about a similar issue a week or so ago. But there was no creature in it.”
Minna nodded. “Download an image of what you saw to the computer and then report to Rarity for a full analysis.”
Nova slated. “Right.” She created a projection of what she saw and used her hoof-screen to send it to the Marianas’ computer. “There you go.”
Minna blinked. “…That looks like a girl to you?”
“Uh, yeah?”
“…All right, that’s what it is. Any ideas what we’re going to call her?”
Nothing was forthcoming.
Nova decided to leave them to that and report to Mage Rarity. She told the white mage what was going on and got right into the full physical scan.
Less than a minute later Rarity let out a sigh of relief. “I was afraid it was going to take a while to find. But here it is.” She pointed at a hologram of Nova’s left eye. “You’ve got a camera-sensor in this eye.”
“…Wait what? When did I get that?”
“Well, I can only think of one group smart enough to make one of these who isn’t on this trip. They’d be quite enthralled with the information we collect here.”
“…Melnorme.”
“Yes. Though I doubt it is performing as intended – it’s just allowing you to tap into something else. I’ll have to send you down to engineering to find out exactly how the device works.”
“Can we remove it?”
“Probably. But if you’re the only one who can see this girl, why would we? She may be dangerous.”
“Or be a Melnorme virus.”
“I suppose…” Mage Rarity pursed her lips. “We need the engineers to look at it first regardless. Off you go.”
“Yay, being referenced to a secondary physician.”
Mage Rarity chuckled. “Bad experiences with Earth healthcare?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
~~~
Another set of weeks pass once more…
Nova named the girl White Nettle, eventually, because the papery tentacles reminded her of a jellyfish. Nettle kept showing up in Nova’s vision every few days, but would only speak a sentence or two before disappearing, never giving any information. She clearly understood what Nova said to her and reacted to the words but didn’t seem to care much for what Nova was saying.
They hadn’t learned anything about her, and until they could return to Merodi Universalis for more specialized research, they just had to deal with Nova occasionally freezing in place and talking to something that wasn’t there.
Jenny had taken to watching Nova closely in case any of those moments were about to happen.
It just so happened that today, she was going to get lucky.
Nova was sitting in the lounge, putting aside her prior aversion to playing video games all the time, instead placing herself right in the heat of battle. The game wasn’t Multiversal Heroes, but rather a complex puzzle game based around the fluidity of higher dimensions. Each of the four players was given a ‘cube’ and had to navigate the ever-changing eldritch maze to reach the end.
Nova was about to achieve victory – her little chibi-headed human just needed to climb past the hypercube using the nexus ledge a-
Nova dropped the controller in her magic. “Nettle?” Jenny dropped her controller to watch Nova’s gaze move around the room. “I’m glad you like the name, but I’d like to know what you are. Everyone would. Do you know?”
“YES!” Vriska shouted, tossing her controller in the air. “VICTORY!”
Everyone ignored her, paying attention to Nova. “Well then what do you want?” There was silence as Nova’s expression soured. “That wasn’t an answer, Nettle.” After a moment, Nova let out a sigh. “She’s gone, show’s over folks.”
“Aww, I thought it was just getting good!” Jenny said. “What did you talk about?”
“Well she likes her name. Other than that it was another round of dodging questions with her being cryptic and not all there. There was something about my journey and a big red rubber ball. And apparently I’m ‘a cute horse’.”
“You are though,” Vriska pointed out.
“Yeah. Thanks for that.” Nova deadpanned.
“Could everyone report to a holographic station or screen equipped for transmission?” Minna called. “Five minutes.”
Everyone scrambled for the couch, making sure to cancel out of the game. Jenny was sure the scramble outside the Lounge was a more frantic and less interesting one. Most of the crew was probably standing next to a white orb in the middle of a boring hallway, tragically couch-less. Their loss.
“Wonder what this is about,” Vriska commented.
“Wait five minutes and behold, all your questions shall be answered!” Jenny responded.
Nova facehooved.
She was right. When precisely five minutes were up, Minna and Vita appeared on-screen. “Listen up!” Minna said. “We’ve been on a long journey so far!” A map of the multiverse appeared in front of the two of them. It showed a red path that started near the edge of the Q-sphere, moved ‘west’ to the Strands, and then ‘south’ through the Great Void. At this point, the path stopped being a straight line, instead deciding to twist and turn, go backward a few times, and on one occasion swirl around in a whirlpool pattern. However, despite this meandering, the line tended ‘south’ more than any other direction and eventually touched the edge of a small, red Sphere near the bottom of the map.
At the edge of that sphere was a dot that read ‘you are here’.
“We have entered the Unrealities,” Minna said. “Those of you in the Lounge can look behind you to see the first universe contained within this Sphere, the rest of you can patch it through another feed.”
Everyone turned around to look at the outside display. It showed a world where the stars were clustered in a central ball, and the sky was covered in continents, oceans, and clouds. In between the stars and the ‘fixed Earth’ were a few planets, the sun, and the moon.
“That looks a lot like a standard ‘oddball’ universe,” Minna said. “A standard reversal. Except for two things. One, time does not exist in this universe – everything you see, even the forests that should have taken centuries to grow to their size, had no time to do so. This universe just exists.
“The second thing is going to become evident as we rotate the Marianas slightly.”
As the Marianas rotated, the spherical enclosure they were in suddenly wasn’t spherical, but a painting upon a flat surface. A flat surface juxtaposed with three other flat surfaces, each one with a different image. As the Marianas completed its turn, the view outside was now that of a ‘fixed Mars’ sky while everything else was in the enclosure.
Jenny blinked. “Sweet.”
“This demonstrates an eldritch property we have seen before,” Minna continued. “Some universes change based on what orientation you view them from. Expect much more of this as we travel through the Unrealities.”
Vita spoke up next. “Now, some of you weren’t at the original meeting for this mission.” Jenny could feel the TSAB mage glaring right at her. “So I’m going to reiterate some things the TSAB knows about the Unrealities. The Beyonders and Horrorterrors hold the most territory in this sphere, though they are not dominant. The Horrorterrors have their tentacles full with their space, and these worlds are just as eldritch and bizarre to the Beyonders as they are to us. You’ll know you’ve hit a Beyonder universe when everything within glows with a soft blue aura – their kind needs that to survive. A Horrorterror universe will be generally impossible to differentiate from a standard eldritch one, but as we saw on our journey they generally don’t care about us. But then there are the natives.”
Jenny brightened up. Oooh, natives.
“The Unrealities are a relatively small sphere that contains only two Class 2 civilizations. One is a low-end closer to Merodi in terms of power known as the Shabanash, or the Unbidden to those in the E-Sphere who have been unlucky enough to be victim to their invasions. They almost bestially eat all forms of standard physics energy, which means we are definitely a desirable food source. We should be able to withstand their power and escape if we run into them.
“The other one is a high-end Class 2: the Many-Angled Ones. I would describe them as what the Eldritch Embodiment would be if they got their act together. Normally they would be a big issue since their primary motivation as a culture is to impose rigid geometric order to all their universes, basically reducing it to an always-predictable machine. Luckily they understand the scope of the multiverse and have no desire to upset other powers. If we enter one of their precious mechanized universes they will likely just eject us back to where we came from.
“Other than that, expect to no longer see nothing but blackness outside – we’re in a cornucopia of eldritch bizarreness now.”
“May I remind everyone that this is not our goal,” Minna said. “While there are certainly interesting universes here, the Chronosplitter Drive will be moving us quickly through them now that connections are commonplace again. If we wanted to find these sorts of universes we would spend some time in the Embodiment or E-Sphere Horrorterror Space. We are going through this Sphere to the Beyond.”
“No relation to the Beyonders,” Vita clarified. “They actually don’t have many universes there since their universal-terraforming has difficulty adapting those worlds.”
Minna nodded. “But rest assured, the majority of our journey is behind us. We will soon be in the true fringes of the Multiverse. Captain Minna Belle, out.”
The transmission ended.
And then Nova let out a disgruntled groan. “Nettle, back again?”
Jenny wished she could hear the other end of the conversation.
“That made no sense,” Nova muttered. “…And at least you said goodbye this time.”
“What did she say?” Vriska asked.
“Something about downstream. I’ve basically given up trying to understand what she means. Though today must have been special because she’s never talked to me two times before.”
Maybe it’s plotting our downfall, Jenny thought.
“Maybe it’s like the protomolecule,” Starbeat suggested, having just walked into the Lounge. “After all, the Investigator has to talk to you through a signal of some sort. Maybe the signal is getting better.”
“So, what, the thing was a communication relay?” Jenny asked.
“Maybe. I don’t know, I’m not psychic.”
“I AM!” Pinkie blurted, pulling a crystal ball out of nowhere. “I see… an encounter in the future…”
“Well, duh, we’re going to encounter either the Shabanash or Many-Angled Ones,” Starbeat said. “Why else would we get that repeated spiel we all already knew? The story needed it of course.”
Jenny looked away, disgruntled.
“I mean a special type of encounter,” Pinkie said. “I see… Or, well, I guess sense… A battle on this very ship!”
~~~
Eleven days later…
“I WAS RIGHT!” Pinkie blurted, throwing her front hooves in the air.
A Shabanash energy beam shot past her ear, cutting off some of her mane. The Shabanash itself was a disjointed blue energy being with three ‘eyes’ that looked like miniature stars.
They were currently on one of the lower decks of the Marianas, fighting a squad of a dozen of these creatures. There had been twice as many in the halls a few seconds ago, but they had been quickly taken care of. No more were arriving because the Marianas had successfully jammed their teleportation signal.
The Marianas was having other problems, however. Namely the Shabanash ‘ships’ that were pursuing the Marianas through the multiverse, proving themselves easily able to follow the Chronosplitter Drive through all its temporal shortcuts. Possibly because the Shabanash universes tended to have two time dimensions in them, but nobody was really paying attention to that fact at the moment because they were trying to survive.
Flutterfree flew through the battlefield, the protective marble tips on her wings discarded long ago. She riled up a decent amount of Rage in herself, enough to tear at the intangible Shabanash with her blades. She was one of the few having an easy time damaging the creatures – even the Stands couldn’t touch the impossible beings unless there was soul manipulation involved, and Jotaro’s Passion wasn’t a strong combat stand to begin with.
Nova’s time manipulation was proving to be useless and she had never been great at soul manipulation to begin with. She had taken to teleporting parts of the Shabanash away from their central core, effectively tearing their bodies in half. Sometimes they reformed; sometimes they didn’t. It was basically a coin flip.
Vriska was working with Nova on this, draining the Shabanashes’ luck enough to where the teleportation ‘decapitation’ would work every time. It was slow work, but there were only twelve of them left.
Jotaro took a hit to his heart, falling to the ground. By now, nobody batted an eye – this had already happened a few times during the fight. From her safe place under a full meter of magic shielding, White Mage Rarity detected the fatal injury and healed it before it could result in death.
There were fewer than fifty people on the Marianas. It wasn’t that hard for her to keep track of all of them, especially with the aid of her computer system.
The Shabanash were not receiving expert medical treatment; they were just falling like dominoes. One at a time, their number dwindled.
This didn’t stop Jenny from suffering. One of them managed to cut her in half at the midsection. “FRICKASTICK!” She shouted, enchanting her gloved fist with transdimensional energy and punching the Shabanash to shards. “AAAAAAAAAAA!”
Rarity did not waste her healing magic on the unkillable immortal.
“GRAAAAAA!” Jenny dragged herself across the room, trailing blood as the fight continued behind her. She winced, tossing her lower end forward, having it meet the tops of her removed hips. Her body fused back together in a couple seconds and she was just as ready as she had ever been.
She vibrated her fist with transdimensional energy and charged, smashing the last Shabanash into a thousand tiny pieces. “TAKE THAT!” She spat.
Flutterfree dissipated her Rage. “Oh. All right.”
“You’ve gotten very good at controlling that Rage,” Nova observed. “Made the rest of us look like idiots.”
“Practice makes perfect,” Flutterfree said with a smile.
The Marianas shook. Nova checked her screen. “All Shabanash on-ship have been eliminated, but we’re still being pursued.”
“Why!?” Vriska asked. “We’re just trying to run away! Why are they so fixated?”
“Well, seeing as how more and more of their ships keep showing up, I think we’re running away through their space.”
“Oh. Great.”
“That’s it. This is where we fall,” Jenny said. “‘Sploded by destiny through the acts of living shadows of the void.”
“Yeah, no,” Nova deadpanned. “This isn’t it.”
“How can you be sure?!” Jenny blurted.
“Cause we aren’t in the Beyond yet, and it has to happen there.”
Jenny stared at her. “Wait, you know about it?!”
“Yeah? Everyone does, Twilence told the whole thing to everyone before we le-” Nova looked at Jenny, breaking out into a grin. “You weren’t there!”
“Why would you all go on a mission if you knew you were going to fall!?”
“Bec-” the Marianas shook again.
Outside, the Chronosplitter Drive was jumping from universe to universe, the blue ‘ships’ close behind. The ‘ships’ had no real shape, appearing on all models as ever-shifting blobs of blue energy. They were able to adapt easily and instantaneously to every realm the Marianas jumped into, not having to rely on reality anchors. They were able to transition seamlessly from any dimensional structure to any other while the Marianas had to force everything into three dimensions. It was a serious advantage. The Marianas’s one advantage, a mastery over time, was not helpful against the Shabanash since they had access to a second time axis that the Marianas hadn’t figured out how to contend with yet.
At least the Marianas was almost completely bulletproof, shields able to withstand even the hardest of attacks.
“Shields at seventeen percent,” Vriska observed. “That’s kinda low.”
“No, really?” Nova muttered.
“Sixteen now,” Jenny said.
“Not helping…”
And then the Marianas made a jump while firing a temporal laser behind it.
The universe they ended up in changed everything.
Suddenly there was no time and no space. The Marianas, forcing its own physics, remained completely active.
The Shabanash ships entered the universe and froze, condensing themselves into the aspects of pure consciousness that made up the universe. Consciousnesses that couldn’t do anything to the Marianas.
“Good news,” Minna called over the intercom. “We’re finally in the Beyond. Unfortunately, we won’t be sticking around here long since help is bound to arrive for those ships sooner or later.” The Chronosplitter Drive activated again, taking them to another universe – one completely devoid of Shabanash.
What it did have was seventeen different axes of time, each one represented by a different flavor of gypsum that physically manifested in the souls of all who entered.
Of course all the crew of the Marianas could actually see was a bunch of gypsum rocks floating around in seemingly random directions amidst a void of pink gas. It would take them a while to fully appreciate the bizarre nature of this world.
“Right, we’re stopping here for repairs. Looks like we’re finally out of Shabanash space. Be ready to jump at a moment’s notice should it be needed. Good work everyone.”
Flutterfree let out a sigh of relief. “Thank goodness that’s over.”
“But we’re in the Beyond now! We might be destroyed!” Jenny blurted.
Vriska slapped her. “This is why you attend meetings. And read the mission files.”
Jenny folded her arms. “I don’t do mission files, not unless I want to.”
“And you needlessly panicked yourself for no reason,” Flutterfree pointed out.
“What’s ‘needless’ about it? We’re going to blow up in the Beyond,” Jenny said with a smile. “Pretty sweet, if you think about it.”
“Right, I forgot you had no fear instinct,” Nova muttered. “Pinkie, want to explain?”
Pinkie nodded, turning to Jenny. “Stare into my void, and be enlightened!” Pinkie clapped her front hooves. “Back when this mission was first suggested by Red Diamond after one of her cosmic visions, Twilence’s opinion was sought. She told us she saw a guarantee that the Marianas would fall out here in the Beyond – but she also saw a great holy light catching us up afterward. She guaranteed our safety and our lives. But she also said something more – we’re going to find something out here in the Beyond. Something that has been lost a long, long time. It’ll be like a treasure!”
“We basically took Twilence’s vision to mean that we would die,” Flutterfree said. “But we would be sent do an afterlife universe of some sort, and solve some great mystery or something. That’s what Twilence thinks is going to happen too.”
“Thinks?”
Flutterfree shrugged. “She’s not sure. She knows we all survive this; the rest of it is all fuzzy. She suspects it has something to do with th…” Nova blinked. “Actually that wasn’t in the briefing. You aren’t cleared to know that.”
Jenny narrowed her eyes. “Wait a minute! I demand more explanation!”
“What more explanation do you need?” Vriska asked. “Red Diamond suggested we go here. Twilence said it was a good idea and that something major would be found. We know our ship is going to be destroyed and we’re probably entering an afterlife of some sort.”
“…Then how would we keep all the data?”
“Vita’s device,” Nova explained. “Graf Eisen has a backup of all scientific data collected so far within its personal memory. Even if whatever afterlife universe we end up with doesn’t accept ‘partial AI’, Graf Eisen’s mind has been bound to Vita’s soul so we still keep it all.”
Jenny blinked. “…Okay. So basically intentional suicide mission with a cheating way out.”
“Yep!” Pinkie said. “Glad you’re up to speed!”
Jenny rubbed her hands together. “Oh, I am too… I’m very curious to see how badly you’ve misinterpreted this.”
~~~
A couple weeks later…
The Beyond was exactly that – beyond.
The close-knit connections that had existed in the Unrealities Sphere were gone, once again giving way to looser universes. Not as badly separated as the Great Void so far, but bad enough that they couldn’t just move every second if they wanted.
But why would they want to? Every universe they found was something beyond the previous. Each universe took a concept from the Unrealities – say, multiple time dimensions – and ran with it to an absurd conclusion. In one universe, the flow of time determined the positions of physical objects on a ‘grid’ in which everything compressed in on itself. There was another universe where the tiniest subatomic particles were living beings, but they all combined into a single nonliving item. Seemingly paradoxical truths like that were all over the Beyond.
It truly was eldritch squared. Take a plane of existence a mortal couldn’t understand, and then turn it into a pretzel and then eat it while standing seven light years away. Even in eldritch realms, concepts such as logic, position, and minds made sense, no matter how convoluted they were.
Here? Some worlds didn’t have causality. Some universes existed based on math that continually changed, meaning two plus two could equal anything at different ‘times’ – assuming ‘time’ was a concept in that universe.
Several universes flat out couldn’t be displayed visually. The primary viewscreen of the lounge was often nothing but static, pure blackness, or a flashing array of colors that really needed an epilepsy warning. Most research had to be done through pure mathematics rather than standard observation.
Eventually, not even Hastur could go outside without taxing his mind.
But the Reality Shaping Mechanism held, no matter what they were hit with.
They had found no unique civilizations out here, for ‘civilization’ was a concept that required prerequisites to form. In most of these universes they weren’t even sure life was a thing. They had come across a handful of Beyonder and Horrorterror installations. The former were never explored because Beyonders were trigger happy. The latter…
They were currently in one of the Horrorterrors’ outposts. A ‘sphere’ of normal Horrorterror blackness had been inserted into the current universe, surrounded in a ‘perception field’ designed to keep the Horrorterror scientists ‘sane’.
The Marianas was taking a break within this Horrorterror Sphere, which meant the real universe was being filtered twice before reaching the Marianas. Minna and Hastur were currently speaking with Nathalanstanarananahsker, one of the leads of the expedition. He was explaining their main mission – to uncover the history of the Beyond, to determine how these universes had come to be. Unlike other ‘edge’ areas of the Multiverse, where things tended to lose complexity, the Beyond was quite the opposite. It was a major mystery to the Horrorterrors.
Nova was not talking to Nathalanstanarananahsker. Nova was talking to Nettle.
“…You’ve been sitting in the corner of my eye for a while today,” Nova observed. “Is today special?”
Nettle nodded. “Yes. It is.”
“You know about the fall don’t you?”
“You know about what’s downstream, don’t you?”
Nova glared at her. “No, I don’t, that’s the point.”
Nettle smirked, letting out a soft laugh. “You’ll find out soon enough. You should be enthralled, so many mysteries are about to be revealed. You’ve seen so many things on your journey. So many didn’t make any sense!”
“Well, yeah, it’s called the Unrealities for a reason.” Nova aimlessly walked down the halls of the Marianas.
“You’re not thinking big enough!” Nettle said.
“What, the entire journey from Merodi Universalis?” Nova paused, turning a corner. “Or maybe our entire journey in the multiverse?”
“There’s a lot of synapses firing.”
“…I wish Lieshy was still around,” Nova said with a sigh, placing her hoof on an ID scanner, gaining admission to the next room.
“Have you ever heard of Wishing Worlds?” Nettle asked.
“Maybe?” Nova said, walking up to a computer screen with a glazed-over expression. She pressed a few buttons.
“They can do anything. Doesn’t matter the scope,” she said, sitting upside down on the ceiling.
“I bet the Class 1s guard that sort of thing,” Nova muttered, scrolling through a few menus.
“They don’t know where they are. They’ve already used most of theirs. They think they can control everything. But they’re wrong. They don’t understand infinity.”
“True infinity does not exist,” Nova declared, almost robotically. She pressed a few more buttons.
Nettle didn’t respond vocally, instead fixing Nova with a knowing glance.
“What is it?”
“Thank you!”
Nova cocked her head. “For what?”
Nettle gestured toward the computer screen Nova had been typing at for the last minute or so.
REACTOR FAILURE IMMINENT.
“What the hell!? Why isn’t there an alarm!?”
“You disaaaabled it!”
“No I didn’t! You did!”
Nettle smirked. “Your own time stream has looped back in on itself to ensure that my interaction was not necessary. The possibility that you would perform these exact actions was forced from outside during the moment of this universe’s creation, long before either you or the Horrorterrors arrived. It was a specific, calculated measure made through Infinite Possibility.”
Nova blinked – that was the most words Nettle had ever spoken at once. “What in the…?”
Nettle chuckled. “Now all you have to do is press the launch button!”
“Never!” Nova’s hoof slipped and she hit the launch button. “Fu-”
The Chronosplitter Drive tried to jump to the next universe, but in the process of doing so it exploded in a shower of temporal energy that reached from the furthest past to the furthest future of both universes involved. The Horrorterrors had no time to react as the skewed time from the new universe mixed with their carefully constructed bubble of energy, popping it. The two universes mixed together in just the perfectly wrong way, combining into one. They would have fallen into absolutely nothing had the second universe not been connected to something elsewhere.
Several thousand universes back along the path of the Marianas, a thing was still surrounded by three Class 1 powers – each side having increased their number tenfold since the conflict started.
The thing activated, erupting into three separate pieces, each one engulfing a side. One orb obtained the cosmic power of the Celestialsapiens. The second took over the Beyonders’ blue aura. The third grabbed the Horrorterrors’ eldritch minds, combining them together with the impossible nature of the two colliding universes in a single instant.
All because of one carefully placed connection.
Nova saw all of this. And she also didn’t – because she was standing in an infinite plane of whiteness, where the only thing aside from her was White Nettle.
“Where are the others!?” Nova blurted. “What did y-”
“They’re all fine,” Nettle said with a smirk. “After all, it wouldn’t be a very good prophecy if all of it wasn’t true.”
Nova glared at Nettle. “…Nettle, what are you?”
“The multiverse is far older than you can comprehend…”
“Nettle, straight answer for once!”
Nettle looked at Nova and grinned. “Nope!”
“Ne- …waitaminute.”
“The multiverse is far older than you can comprehend,” Nettle resumed. “Your ‘Class 1’ societies have been around a while, have they not? The Xeelee have probably existed within a timeframe you can understand, but all the others… true ancient organizations. Their histories include those of your worlds as little more than a footnote, if that.”
Nova nodded slowly. “Yes…”
“There have been over a thousand Class 1 civilizations over the lifespan of the multiverse,” Nettle said, landing on Nova’s muzzle and making her cross her eyes. “Can you comprehend that? Every last one of them, save for these seven must have fallen.”
Nova furrowed her brow. “This isn’t really new information. We know the amount of time from the Dark Tower’s creation to now was beyond the understanding of even eldritch beings.”
“But not for the Downstreamers,” Nettle said, floating away from Nova. “They saw everything. Truly everything. The entire multiverse was theirs, even if the denizens of every world didn’t think so.”
“And you fell, just like all the others.”
“I never said I was a Downstreamer.”
“It’s obvious you’re at least related to them by the way you’re talking.”
Nettle smirked. “You are a smart one.”
“What’s the point of all this bragging? I get it, you’re from the people who probably made all the Universe Generators way back when. What’s your deal?”
“To prepare you to believe what I’m about to tell you. You believe that there’s no way a prophecy can be accurate if given over the size of the entire multiverse. That the inconsistency of causality destroys true prophecy.”
“Yes…”
“Oh, that’s false,” Nettle said, spreading her arms wide. “How else does the Dark Tower know exactly how many doors to show you when you climb it?”
Nova blinked. “…Might want to ask someone who’s climbed it.”
“Oh, I’m having this conversation with everyone,” Nettle said. “Starbeat’s reaction has been the best so far, but Jenny’s was a runner up. She doesn’t like feeling small.”
“Mhm. So if the Downstreamers could see everything like you’re implying, why aren’t you still around?”
Nettle ignored her. “In our last moments, I was saved. I am uncertain why it was me. Perhaps it was lottery. But the spines of a prophecy were created. One that would require a few things that didn’t exist. A being who truly understood ka, and yet would be fooled by a subtle manipulation of it. An area of the multiverse near the edge that rose in complexity instead of fell. A connection that would be discovered by the ruling societies of a distant era at just the right time. A ka powerful enough to be thought of as a true protagonist. A twist of fate to bring two universes together in the presence of eldritch, ka, and… well, everything.”
“…This entire trip was the last step of an elaborate multiversal ruse.”
Nettle clapped her hands. “Right!”
“To do what, exactly?”
“Return me to what I was before,” Nettle said. “To resurrect a Downstreamer.”
“And I’m getting a sinking feeling in my stomach about this.”
“Needlessly. You are of no concern to me, and I have no intention of engaging in wanton destruction. I’m just here to reclaim what we left behind.”
“I still have that sinking feeling.”
Nettle shrugged. “So does everyone. But your only purpose has been completed. The threads of fate keeping you aloft are gone now be-” Nettle paused, her black irises expanding and contracting rapidly. “…Hrm.”
“We still have it, don’t we?”
“It appears the Tower has overridden us,” Nettle said. “Curious. But it doesn’t matter. The goal was a success. It’s time for you to go home and wonder about this event the rest of your life!”
“Nettle don’t you dare stop this now!”
“Oh, by the way, I really do like the name. I’m ashamed to admit I’ve forgotten whatever mine originally was.”
“Ne-”
Nova and the rest of the Marianas crew were dumped into the main hall of the Hub, right outside the Mirror Portal.
“Ugh…” Vita muttered, standing up and brushing herself off. “Do we have the data?”
Gran Eisen beeped in confirmation.
“Good. I’m going to give it all to Nanoha and then not think about this. The rest of you, do… actually I guess listen to Minna.”
Minna had already stood up, shaking her head. “Everyone, report to the Hub Military Division Offices. We’ll fill out our reports there and then go home.”
“We were lied to…” Pinkie said. “That wasn’t a treasure! That was us being used!”
Starbeat was staring into space. “But I… The Tower… It knows… How in… What!?”
Jenny let out a laugh. “That was the stupidest thing ever. There’s no way. Heheh… No way…” She rubbed her head.
Nova looked down at her screen. Guess we’ve got an extra backup of the data. She scrolled through it, checking the images of Nettle.
She didn’t understand a lot that had happened. But she did know one thing.
Nettle was lonely.
~~~
Nettle began her work of reclaiming Downstreamer remnants.
She didn’t know where everything was – the true omnipotence of the Downstreamers had been destroyed. She had no access to it. But she knew where some of the things were, and that was enough to get started.
Because one of the keys was in Evening Sparkle’s possession. A simple, golden key – being used as nothing more than a primitive reality anchor.
Pathetic. That nature of the key was merely secondary, to ensure that it and its wearer would never be erased by any form of universal alteration. A security measure for existence. She’d get to use it for its real purpose.
I appeared in front of her before she left. “Don’t think you understand everything.”
“I don’t. But I understood more than you.”
“You don’t know of the end.”
“Please, the last time there was an end things kept going anyway. I’m proof of that.”
“The moment you bet on a trope being true universally, it fails you.”
She ignored my statement, opting to smile innocently instead. “You’re upset, aren’t you?”
“Of course I’m upset!”
“You just got too comfortable in your own skin.” She looked up. “I’m going to be going now. Don’t follow me.”
I bristled. “Fine.”
She appeared in a universe filled with loose stone objects and a blue aura all around, once used by the Collector for ‘auditions’. He hadn’t known what it was.
It was a home.
Lightning was currently in the universe with a small team from the Collection, trying to uncover its mysteries. They were so far from accomplishing their goal, but it was an admirable attempt. Lightning had the Infinity Gauntlet keyed to the universe – and every time she snapped her fingers to find out more, she ruined the feel of the home.
Nettle appeared in front of them. She had no more need for a pathetic machine to transmit herself into someone’s mind. She could do it directly.
“Get out,” she said, eyes twitching.
Lightning pointed the Infinity Gauntlet at her. “You don’t want t-”
Nettle teleported them right back to the Collection. That was enough of that. She scrambled the location of the azure universe so they wouldn’t be able to find it again. And then she rebuilt it. All the stone pieces fused together into a city – a city for one, complete with a coliseum. The azure void became a deep sky, and blue people began to appear on the streets below.
But they weren’t really people. They were just shadows. After all, this place served the role of a ‘safe space’ within the mind. It was essentially a solid subconscious. A retreat.
The actual mind needed to be created. As much as Nettle had right now, she was nothing to what a Downstreamer should have been. For that she grabbed a universe known to Merodi Universalis as the Duplicator. She placed the key in its central column, annoyed when she had to remove a temporal freezing spell to get the key to turn. Once the key turned, the Duplicator connected to several different universes at the same time, including certain ones from the D-Sphere. All of them were copied together, forming one universe-sized brain network. That brain became Nettle’s mind.
And she could see so much more.
The brain and subconscious universes pulled more to themselves. Now that there was full consciousness, it was time to add more and more and more. The Nexus universes that connected so many universes together? She needed some of those – they would be akin to her joints, connecting parts of her multiversal body together. They obeyed her mind combined with the key without question. They pulled to her the long lost universe creation realms that had been running on autopilot for eternity. They produced the rest of the universes she needed – constructing her full body. A universe devourer to become her mouth. Universes of psychic power to become her eyes. Eldritch realms fused together to produce intense computing systems and a ‘digestive tract’ that used the eldritch beings in a way akin to bacteria in the guts of humans.
Nettle became a mesh of universes, reclaiming a small part of the Downstreamers’ original glory.
This collection of universes was best represented as a giant jellyfish.
The White Nettle.
White Nettle swam through the Sea of Infinite Possibility, moving herself out of sight…