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To the surprise of every responsible adult in Colony 9 (which, perhaps unsurprisingly, were few and far between), the first few Bunnits the children stumbled across were not, in fact, the sort that blissfully scampered about wielding massive clubs.
This came as a relief to Carrom, who appeared to be fighting back a massive cardiac event through sheer strength of will, and a disappointment to Saomi, who in her perpetual state of suicidal gung-ho believed putting someone’s brains back into their skull was a lot easier than it really was.
The question of whether or not adolescents can strangle prey animals with their bare hands was not one frequently posed by the universe, but it was one that had to be asked eventually. The universe had asked. It would soon have a myriad of colourful and inventive regrets to accompany that query.
“Well, that’s boring,” said Saomi, scribbling in the margins of the Enemypedia with the disappointed tones of someone who has not yet had their fill of stomping small animals into jam. “Here I thought we’d have some fun weeding the ranks, but it turns out it’s just a whole lot of fairy tale fuzzy-wuzzies.”
“And have you ever stopped to wonder why exactly you’re raiding a bedtime story with incredible violence?” Carrom asked, strained.
A reedy sound escaped his throat as Finley screeched at the top of her lungs, broke into a dead sprint out of the bush in which she had been hiding, and performed a flying leap at and onto one of the especially feral Bunnits. Axel totted behind cautiously, raising a short dagger with the hesitance and morbid curiosity that all children are wont to have.
“We’re dead,” declared Carrom. “As soon as we get back, Panacea’s going to tear us a new one. If we don’t tear one ourselves! Or have one torn for us by something without the opposable thumbs to even make it exciting! And Shulk’s going to be—he’s going to be disappointed at us, and what am I supposed to do with that?”
“The man hardly uses his metal hand enough for that thumb to be count as opposable, but you’re lying if you don’t think that would be exciting,” answered Saomi. “And if we’re being candid all of a sudden, I think you need to destress a little. Is it the child endangerment or the consequences of your actions you’re afraid of?”
“Destress?” repeated Carrom, in climbing pitch and ignoring the first of Saomi’s unhelpful, pointed comments. “Consequences of my actions?”
“See, that right there’s what I’m talking about,” said Saomi, gesturing critically with her pen. “You’re too high-strung! So much anxiety, so little mental fortitude! It’s like you don’t live in a super-secret base under the constant threat of total annihilation. Come on! You don’t see the kids freaking out like that, do you?”
Carrom tore his gaze away from Saomi and forced himself to look at Finley and Axel, who had located with horrifying ease the animal’s jugular and had quickly determined how best to use the knife. There was a shrill, desperate shriek, and then the children were prodding the Bunnit gently with the curious expressions of someone who has, for the very first time, discovered how fragile life really is, particularly when you launch yourself at it with a sharp implement.
“Think about it this way,” said Saomi. “We’ve got to cross out everything in the book, right? Maiming a Bunnit’s foul style, but if we get a dinner out of it… well, someone has to do meal prep.”
“You’re not just saying that because you want to punch the lights out of that messed-up dragon that looks like it has a bad case of the ghosts?”
Saomi brightened, which was always a frightening sight to behold, if only for the implications. “Isn’t it wild? Where’d they see something like that, I wonder? Looks like someone even made a note to take a detour around the beast—not even that whirlwind of a man managed to Double Spinning Edge it into oblivion! Doesn’t that just tickle every bone in your body?”
“If someone tickled me right now I’d pass out,” said Carrom, in a trembling voice. He managed a piercing breath as Finley and Axel approached, Bunnit carcass in tow and pants splattered with the remnants of exploratory stabs. “Is it cruel of me to say I’m happy their parents aren’t around for this?”
“Unless you plan on avoiding Matthew forever, you’re not going to stay happy much longer,” said Saomi. As the children drew close, she threw on a beaming smile and doled out high-fives. “Good job, tots! What’d I tell you? Once you’ve got the tools, it’s not so hard after all, is it?”
“I liked the part where I took a flying tackle on top of it!” Finley said, heartily cheered.
Axel hesitated. The events of the escapade replayed in his mind, focusing on his less dramatic but far more involved role. “Um,” he began quietly, “I, uh… I liked the part where—”
“Alright then,” said Carrom. “Good job on all fronts, team! A very well-executed mission, that was. Nobody even died, despite all the efforts to do otherwise! Why don’t we shuffle off back to base, where we can… we can… see what Peridot and Eow think about—” Carrom’s tongue and brain waged a brief but fierce war “—our innovative resupplying strategy.”
“You want to employ child labour to support the supply lines?”
“No! I mean, not when you put it like that,” said Carrom, disappointed but unsurprised that the conversation had already adopted this sort of spin. “We just—we think the kids could use some hands-on experience! We can’t keep them sheltered forever, not with the way things have been going complete Gogol.”
In the relatively short time between having been dragged into Colony 9, screaming and kicking and lobbing profane death threats, and grappling the on-fire-logistics situation into a modest blaze instead of a wildfire, Peridot had clearly gotten it into her head that she was one of the few sane people on Aionios. Now, Carrom wasn’t sure he had the courage to argue otherwise, but he felt it proper to be happy for her. You know. On account of the whole child soldier thing. Evidently, she had adjusted spectacularly, since she now had a grasp on what “child labour” was, even if her definition of “child endangerment” was a bit wobbly. In any case, Peridot had confidently stated that her life now was better than it had ever been, as tends to happen with brainwashed, mass-produced cannon fodder once they get some down time. Since then she had learned what it meant to life in the midst of people who were also living better than they ever had—specifically, that it turns out problems don’t go away no matter how happy you are. They just evolve in new and horrifying ways.
Which was clearly what Peridot was thinking at the very moment. She was, in all likelihood, contemplating whether or not the higher powers landed bonus points for making her problems shaped like children.
“This is about that insane Enemypedia proposal,” she said dully.
“Only a little!” protested Carrom.
Peridot’s withering gaze would have scorched a weaker man’s shadow onto the wall opposite. Carrom forced himself to stand his ground, since it was clear he was never getting those hours spent in Saomi’s acquaintance back, and if he didn’t commit now he’d be led around the leash forever.
“Look, both you and I know that Shulk and Rex and the new kids are going through it right now,” tried Carrom, pivoting his strategy. “A little bit of help never hurt anyone.”
“And if it’s the child endangerment you’re concerned about, don’t be,” Saomi added. “They already work in retail! So really, we’re scraping the bottom of the barrel.”
Peridot appeared no more enthused by this sentiment. Carrom figured that adding Saomi to any of your arguments, no matter how grounded in reason, was the equivalent of adding a couple tons of dynamite as way of persuasion.
“We’re good at catching Bunnits,” said Finley, enthused by the many references to her recent accolades. “Especially the ones with the big sticks!”
Peridot stared down at the children, who had not yet been taught manners regarding the handling of corpses of small, fuzzy creatures. When her eyes swivelled back up to meet Carrom it was evident that she was thought he’d make for a charming chalk outline on the ground. “That was a very poor joke.”
“That’s not why she’s smiling,” said Carrom.
Finley beamed, thrusting the battered Bunnit remains well past the boundaries of Peridot’s personal space. “It’s not so bad!” she said. “You just have to find a rock thiiiis big—” here she spread her hands apart about the width of a human head “—and when the thingy hops by—whack!”
“Whack!” said Axel.
Peridot crossed her arms, causing Carrom and Saomi to retreat tactfully backward. Due to staff shortages as well as, er, everything shortages, no dedicated Weapons division existed in the Liberators. Hence it was anybody’s guess how liberally Peridot and Eow employed tools under their own keep.
A childhood spent in the trenches, however, is a hard habit to break.
Peridot pursed her lips. Then her brows furrowed. Every one of her nervous habits crept toward those same trenches carefully, head on a swivel in case someone raced out of nowhere armed with good intentions and common sense.
It is widely agreed that to inflict upon younger generations the same wounds done unto you is not particularly wise nor kind. In a better world one might even be held accountable for their actions. That world had long since receded into the eddies of time, or at least those old enough to long for the past liked to pretend it had ever existed at all. Thus all that existed in the present moment was the distinct feeling that there had to be a more human way to suffer. No promised land awaited. No paradise existed just beyond reach. There was only the here and now and the place that awaited beyond the horizon, which very smart people had hypothesized the foundations for since time immemorial and which very people people knew had already been built, on account of being the foundations.
Slowly, the newly freed inhabitants of this world recognized their wounds for wounds. It was only natural to try, then naturally fail, to hold the world accountable for its actions. And that was the rub, wasn’t it? You could shake your fist at the sky and demand justice all you wanted, but at the end of the day that justice was the thing you’d spent your entire life killing each other over. So without justice there was only this: everything, and its unbearable weight. So without a weapon you were left with just your hands. Suddenly nothing was only about what had been done to you or what had to be done to others. You thought about one thing and ended up thinking about it all. How could you stand being alive? Clearly it was something you were born to do. And won’t someone think of the children?
All this was to say that Peridot didn’t have any intentions of tossing Finley and Axel into the lake and telling them to make good with the Piranhaxes. Not without supervision, of course! But you had to survive the world before you could live in it. Surely a couple knives and a big rock didn’t hurt anyone—not without supervision! And for all Peridot knew, that big bulbous nightmare in the sky could come crashing down at any time. Self-sufficiency was the name of the game, along with every other game that was being played simultaneously, and from the way things were going it was clear someone had cocked up royally and lost the rulebook…
“…How long did it take?” Peridot finally said.
Carrom blinked the future in which he lay dead and dying on the ground out of his head. “Pardon?”
“Hunting the Bunnits,” Peridot said impatiently.
“Two, three hours? I don’t know,” said Carrom, withering under Peridot’s disbelieving gaze. “I was stressed! Sue me!”
“It took you three hours to kill a Bunnit?”
“Ah, you mean it took the kids three hours to kill a Bunnit,” Saomi interjected smartly. “We were just supervising, as responsible adults do.”
“Responsible?” Peridot offered a vacant blink. “Where?”
Before Saomi could toss in another one of her comments and, presumably, bolt in the opposite direction, Carrom said, “Never mind that. Er… to confirm, do we have Logistics’ support to pursue this—”
Carrom examined the look on Peridot’s face. He swallowed the first, second, and third things that came to mind, then massaged the fourth one around a little, on account of his enjoying all his teeth where they were presently.
“—Important, covert, but nevertheless low-priority initiative?” he finally managed.
“No,” said Peridot, with crushing finality.
The children practically crumpled with disappointment.
“You have my support,” finished Peridot, because a tense conversation doesn’t earn its stripes until someone reaches over to the other one and pulls. Hesitantly, she bent down and gave Finley and Axel a pair of gentle pats on the head. “I don’t want to make a habit of mixing work and pleasure. Not that this is pleasurable in any sense of the word,” she said sharply, as subtle and vague as a knife in Carrom’s gut, “but we have experience with the world that Shulk and Rex would rather we didn’t. They’re too kind for that. Though I’ll be damned if they don’t consider it important experience. It’s what let us live this long, and if the past is any indication, then we’ll damn well need to fight our way into a future that doesn’t need fighting.”
Peridot rose to her full, imposing height. She then turned toward Saomi and reached out a hand.
“Give me that stupid book,” she said.
“What? Why?” said Saomi, clearly flabbergasted to have wrenched any sort of sincerity out of Peridot at all.
“I’m adding a couple copies of the ledgers we have on hand,” said Peridot. “In the likely scenario that someone asks you why you’re running around with a hit list of monsters, you can at least present them with the benefit of the doubt.”
“Ugh,” said Saomi. “Supply chain management is not a good look on you.”
“I don’t hold your opinion in particularly high regard, but thank you for the advice,” Peridot said dryly.
As she riffled through the Enemypedia, Peridot’s face adopted a whole range of emotions. One might identify some of them as surprise, bemusement, and, most prominently, exhausted grief. Always a forward-looking one, that Peridot.
“Right,” said Peridot, once she was finally done. In the couple minutes she had spent perusing the pages she had aged several years. “Now that I have a better understanding of what exactly you maniacs want to do, I’m upgrading damage control from suicide to competitive suicide.”
“What’s the difference?” said Carrom, at the same time Saomi said, “Ooh, so it’s a competition now, is it?”
Peridot stared long and hard at the sky above. Once thirty seconds had passed she heaved out a breath and fixed Carrom with a penetrating but vacant gaze. Clearly this conversation had broken something in her.
“Moving on,” she said icily. “How’d you manage it?”
“Manage… what?” Carrom asked meekly. He shied away on the reasonable grounds that Peridot had started life in this world as a murderer and could end it as one if she so desired.
“There’s no way they let the two of you—the four of you,” Peridot quickly adjusted, as soon as Finley and Axel’s eyes grew twice their size and watery, “out on a picnic without a proper escort. So? How’d you do it?”
“It was your everyday expedition,” snapped Saomi, who was not doing well divorced from her Enemypedia. “We said, hey, let’s grab dinner, someone signed off on it, we went, we came back, everyone’s alive, nobody’s rotting in a ditch somewhere. What’s the problem?”
“So it was just a scouting expedition.”
“Yes?” tried Carrom. “It was all very above-board.” So above-board, in fact, that it could sprint hurdles over whatever Harby and Kayleigh had going on. But voicing that opinion was just asking for foot-in-mouth, so Carrom remained wisely silent.
“Except for Axel and Finley,” said Peridot, despite Carrom’s best efforts.
The children, bless their souls, beamed. “Saomi snuck us out in a big bag!” said Finley. “Carrom didn’t even notice until we were up Tephra Hill, and by then it was already Bunnit-bashing time!”
Carrom did his best not to look Peridot in the eye.
“Alright,” said Peridot, with an inflection that suggested that whatever mercy had been previously afforded to Carrom had evaporated instantly. “Hideous incompetence aside, officially, it was just another scouting expedition, right?”
“Er, yes, that’s how we managed it,” said Carrom. The only redeeming factor of this whole mess, in fact, was that Carrom had been entirely honest when he submitted the proposal for approval. Just another scouting expedition for safe hunting grounds a stone’s throw away from the colony, nothing more! On his deathbed Carrom would swear to his last breath that stones had been thrown, oh yes they had been thrown indeed, was I the only one who didn’t know small things travelling very fast could do that to someone’s head?
Peridot’s frown turned cavernous. She wandered off, riffled through the stockkeeping lists, and eventually returned with a haphazard collection of loose papers.
“That’s far too vague,” she said. “You should be glad Linka wasn’t the one stamping the approval. Panacea would’ve hung you by the ankles over the bridge.”
“Okay,” Carrom said cautiously. “And?”
“Ooh, are we taking name suggestions for a new scouting party? Because I’ve got tons,” said Saomi, practically vibrating with glee. The one thing you can’t shake off, unfortunately, is insanity. “We should go with something exciting, something that sends a message. How do we feel about ‘Headhunters’?”
“I like that!” said Finley.
“It sounds kind of… violent,” said Axel.
Peridot gave Saomi a look that suggested the former had just discovered the latter adhering to the bottom of her boot. “What I’m saying,” Peridot said, with saintly patience, “is that if you plan to expand this idiotic endeavour to the rest of the godforsaken Enemypedia, you’d better legitimize your standing. Get in touch with Lucille and submit a proposal for a new salvaging expedition; we’ll need a whole lot more parts to get those Armories off the ground. Get Clarity on the case as well—she’ll make sure you don’t hurl yourselves off a cliff, at the very least. And…”
Peridot’s face made a worse face.
“Since I know something’s going to blow up one way or another,” she said, “can you at least keep it away from the supply depot? We’ve been sun-drying heart peaches in there during our free time and I really will murder you if they go up in smoke.”
As one of the youngest denizens of Colony 9, Finley spent her days tossing her hat in the ring wherever she could, and, if nobody found her assistance to be of interest, she instead resorted to tossing rocks at the local Piranhaxes. She and Axel had become so proficient in the art of lobbing projectiles and having them stick that Saomi had approached them one day with the suggestion of learning the art of the sling. Which was great fun! Who knew rocks could travel that fast, and that people could get so mad over broken windows? The only catch was that people didn’t like it whenever Finley and Axel did anything really fun. They were allowed to have fun, but too much fun meant they’d be banned from helping out in the Supplies Office until someone felt sorry enough for them.
Finley understood in her heart of hearts that the adults meant well. She also knew that eavesdropping was rude, but when almost all public activity occurs within a single small plaza, the effort it takes to plug your ears and pretend to go about your day was an effort few could bother with. Hence the Colony 9 grapevine was hardly a grapevine at all. It was more of a Colony 9 rhododendron bush, and Finley was crawling about in it, spitting out leaves.
“I’m not saying we should abandon it completely,” Nikol happened to be saying in hush-tones to an unenthused Glimmer as Finley wandered by. “It’s just that… just that…”
“That detouring right now would be like putting brakes on a volcano?” Glimmer finished dryly.
Nikol winced. Finley had observed that in dealing with Matthew, either people responded with incredible enthusiasm or tried to summon the bomb squad through sheer force of will; A had a habit of orbiting around him in any case, and in general A was quite good at reading the room.
It was agreed by many that Matthew was an exceptional young man with a good heart and the energy necessary to spur others to actions. It was also agreed that he could be, to put it simply, a lot to handle. None of this dissuaded Finley in any capacity, since she herself was a lot to handle. When Panacea found out about the sling thing she had spent a good couple minutes turning interesting shades of red yelling at Saomi, which, while scary, was also kind of funny. Saomi had later insisted that nobody used slings anyway even though they were “super cool!” and “totally and unexpectedly lethal!” and that there was a whole cache of them in one of the houses on the outskirts of the Colony. Which was great news! All Finley and Axel had to do was learn how to keep secrets from responsible adults, which was nothing but natural for children their age.
In what was perhaps a logical extension of this lesson, Finley and Axel had also learned how to lie to their advantage. It would’ve been a skill acquired one way or another, but as of now they were devious little brats with a penchant for striking Bunnits dead with rocks.
“What are you talking about?” asked Finley, waddling up to Nikol, who reared back in horror.
“Er—we were just—it wasn’t—”
“Calm down,” said Glimmer. She turned toward Finley with a slightly scrutinizing gaze. “What’re you two doing here?”
“We were watching the Piranhaxes on the bridge all afternoon,” said Finley. Instinct informed her it was best to leave out the part where they were hurling rocks at them. “But we’ve got to help out at the Supplies Office later, so we’re getting a snack right now!”
“Really? That’s pretty responsible of you two.”
“We’re just helping out where we can,” said Axel. “Um, what were you talking about? Something about a volcano?”
“Please don’t tell Matthew,” Nikol said desperately.
“Matthew’s a volcano?” asked Finley, putting two and two together with despairing ease.
“No! I mean… he’s having a hard time right now,” said Nikol, bending down (though not much) and lowering his voice. “You’ve heard about, um, Na’el, right?”
“Yeah! That’s why we’re helping out wherever we can!”
To be sure, the children had been properly devastated when they heard the news. Not as devastated as Matthew had been, obviously, but devastation translated differently for those who lacked the means to act upon it. Thus both Finley and Axel were slowly but surely building a relationship with the world—one that boasted the greatest of power imbalances but was still, fundamentally, good to live in. And so, to continue living on this treacherous, dangerous, indifferent earth, children looked toward those who had lived longer than them and saw that they were a little sadder, but so much stronger; in absence of that strength, children supplemented destruction with creation. Helping wherever they could, building whatever accommodated their little hands. Oftentimes the path of most resistance, of endurance beyond reasonable means, evolved from children, to whom it was the past of least resistance by way of being the only path forward.
But other times, the path of batshit resistance also evolved from them. It was all about the variety.
Nikol quietly contemplated his options. Glimmer rolled her eyes. “Oh, come on. They’re just kids. What are they going to do? Go and beat up Abassy with their stubby little hands?”
“What’s an Abassy?” Finely asked cheerfully.
“I’ve never heard of that,” said Axel. “Can you eat it?”
“What? No, of course you can’t eat it, are you crazy?” Glimmer, who prior to all this had never interacted with a child in her life, had done away with all the complications and adopted a strategy of treating all children as if they were small adults. This endeared her to many youths but also came with consequences, including but not limited to: “But you know what you can do? Kill it!”
An image formed ominously in Finley’s mind. “Oh, wow!”
“That sounds awesome!” said Axel, no slower to kick his imagination into high gear.
“Should we really be telling them this?” said Nikol nervously, off to the side.
“Again, I have to ask: what are they going to do?” Glimmer gave the children another once-over. “You aren’t going to climb up an enormous, lethal mountain and beat up a giant dragon, are you?”
“No way!”
“That’d be stupid!”
“There you go,” Glimmer said, gesturing to Finley and Axel’s apparent helplessness. “If anyone’s filling out the Enemypedia, it won’t be them. Obviously.”
Finley, sensing an opportunity, perked up. “Enemypedia?”
“It’s… a catalogue of all the monsters in each region,” Nikol said. His shoulders heaved as he visibly gave up. He plumbed his belongings and came back with a well-worn book. “Oh, I guess… I suppose there’s no harm in it. It’s this big book, essentially, that lists a lot of helpful information about different types of creatures all around Aionios.”
“Okay,” said Finley, eyes trained on the book. “What’s it do?”
“Well, it’s not so much what it does, but rather what it can help us do. It’s an excellent teaching tool for scouting parties—the more we learn about enemy behaviours, the safer scouting expeditions will be.”
“But more importantly, it’s great for enhancing combat experience,” Glimmer added pointedly. “The more monsters you encounter, the more techniques you develop in response to their individual capabilities, and the stronger you become.”
“Ah, yes, there’s also that…”
“So what’s the problem?” asked Finley.
Glimmer made a face. “We have no time to complete it.”
“It’s not that big of a deal,” muttered Nikol.
“You were just saying how we could sneak off on our own and fill it out for everyone else!”
“Yes, but it was just an idea, you know how I get about those…”
Information swirled madly in the children’s minds, not unlike a food processor chronically stuck on blitz. “And… that’s bad?” tried Axel.
“Well, it’s not bad per se, but…” Nikol hazarded a glance in Glimmer’s direction. His voice dropped even lower. “Um, Glimmer was saying how she wanted to do something nice for Shulk and Rex since she caused them… uh… some trouble earlier on. And I think that’s a really nice gesture, so I wanted to help…”
“Shut up.” Glimmer rounded on Finley and Axel, flushed red to the ears. “That’s not—that’s not what all this is about, got it? It’s incredibly important work that could mean life and death for the Liberators! And like it or not, I’m stuck here, so that means it’s also about my life and death, right? So it’s paramount that we figure out a way to get this Enemypedia entirely done, without Shulk and Rex and Matthew finding out, okay?!”
“But not A?” Nikol said weakly.
“Have you met A?”
Unbeknownst to Nikol and Glimmer, something truly terrible had just happened. A might have even affectionally referred to it as the passage of fate. Not a lot of fate was passing at the moment, but good lord was it about to become a whole lot more complicated.
“Okay,” said Finley, apropos of nothing.
“That sounds really fun—nice! That sounds really nice.” Axel smiled in the way all children do before they do something unadvisable, such as delegate misinformation to those far more capable than themselves or, failing that, take a flying leap off a cliff.
“You tell nobody about this,” Glimmer said darkly, “or else.”
“Our lips are sealed,” assured Axel. “But won’t it be kind of hard to keep it a secret when you’re so close with Shulk and Rex and Matthew all the time?”
“That’s exactly what I was worried about,” Nikol said sadly. “Now that we’ve talked about it a bit more… maybe we should just make a nice meal. Or something.”
Glimmer appeared dubious about this suggestion. “You can cook?”
“I can try!”
“Right, because that’s so promising.”
And the banter went on, presumably. The children had at this point determined that they had wringed all the information out of their betters that they could feasibly manage, and that it was time for more drastic measures. Surely Nikol wouldn’t miss just one book, seeing as how he had so many…
Fortunately for Axel and Finley, as was stated prior, responsible adults in Colony 9 were few and far between. Hence how things got so out of hand so quickly.
“I think it’s a good idea,” said Clarity.
“Thank you,” said Carrom. Then his brain caught up with his ears. “Er, sorry, what?”
Clarity leaned against her spear, listening with mild interest. “It’s a good idea, I said. I just didn’t expect it to come from you.”
“I have good ideas sometimes!” Carrom said, offended.
He looked around nervously to confirm that nobody else was listening in with more than mild interest, or, even worse, interest at all.
“Do you,” began Carrom, with the steady cadence of one who is beginning to believe he is speaking to someone seriously deranged, “think teaching the kids how to methodically murder defenseless creatures is kind of insane?”
“How so? We used to hunt for Mud Krabbles by the river. Think of it like a nostalgic summer playdate.”
My playdates certainly didn’t involve picking up a big rock and smashing it down over and over again until the thing you’re hitting stops moving, Carrom thought to himself, but clearly I haven’t had enough experience with recreational stoning to offer a professional opinion.
“It’s a good life lesson,” Clarity continued. “I know they’re kids, but they won’t stay that way forever. It’s better to teach them early that we don’t live in a world where we have the luxury of not fighting—but that when you have to raise arms, that you learn to fight with a sharp edge.”
Out by the anti-air battery, a bird squawked out its death throes as a projectile rocketed skyward and sent it to the great big sky in the sky.
Clarity gazed out toward the massive shadow of the battery in silence. After a moment, she said, “or a really sharp rock, I guess.”
Things were a little fraught in Colony 9. Those on guard duty were glancing nervously up Tephra Hill with the aid of binoculars and a few swigs from their flasks.
The problem, it should be stated, since there were many of them when you allied yourself with the proverbial mouse in a room full of elephants, did not manifest as giant steel behemoths adorned with soul-sucking contraptions. No, indeed. Those were the everyday problems. A larger version of that problem had recently appeared in the sky, looming menacingly in the same way a homeowner glared at their neighbour in a quiet but intense attempt to get them to mow the lawn.
And lawns were indeed being mowed, with great caution and haste.
If there was a crime for illegal lawn-trimming, nobody had thought to raise any concerns. This was due in part to the fact that nobody owned any lawns to trim to begin with. There was, however, the constant anxiety of doing something extraordinarily stupid while the parents were out and getting away with it.
Things had started off simply. Or rather, things had started off horribly, and profoundly so. It just so happened that the most awful ends had a tendency to begin with the simplest of causes. Nobody knew in this case knew that very sad people can do a host of incredibly stupid things, but upon further reflection everyone would have chanced upon the possibility and immediately laughed it off.
In any case, the incredible transformative powers of Moebius appeared to have found a way to transform the City into a giant smoking crater, additionally transforming a whole lot of City denizens first into terrified refugees and later into manically determined existentialists. Matthew, who strode through life beating the crap out of his problems, was an exception due to the fact that philosophy slid right off him on account of failing to find anything between his ears to latch onto. Either that or the way he insisted on behaving contrary to any demands besides his own impulse scared off higher powers, who otherwise graced philosophy unto those beneath them to allow them to hallucinate that they were sane. Matthew, evidently, had been missed in the process.
The elusive A had nearly cracked a smile after catching wind of that second hypothesis. The Liberators weren’t sure what to think about that, let alone anything about A to begin with. It was agreed that trying to make sense of anything A said was a lost cause, and even if you deferred the translation to Shulk—who beyond all sense understood everything A said and didn’t say as simply as breathing—all he’d do is smile in that soft, smiley way of his, leaving you with nobody to get angry with but yourself. Unless you wanted to square off with a mirror you’d have to accept it as a lost cause on all fronts.
But what the Liberators did know was that A most certainly knew that scouting expeditions were setting out with increasingly ridiculous equipment for, how do you say, special operations. If those operations happened to demand the latest products of Lucille and Hamill’s late-night benders, A was happy to not only buy but wholeheartedly invest in the benefit of the doubt. This investment came in the form of small bags of supplies shuffled toward an inconspicuous corner of the scrap depot, which almost always consisted of A striding calmly over in the improbable window where there were no witnesses and Hamill scrambling to shove everything out of view at the exact moment everyone decided to exit their tents at the same time. Thus scouting parties were armed to the teeth with prototypes of propulsion boots, scent bombs, and, mostly recently, ether chainsaws, all of which had a tendency to explode. That last project had roped Riku into the fray, who, in a stroke of good luck, possessed no reservations at all concealing information from those who didn’t think to ask.
In general, stumbling into a… covert collaborative initiative with A and Riku didn’t make for the most communicative of efforts, but it certainly made for an interesting one.
Perhaps things had started off simple, but whatever was happening now was hardly such. All because of that damn Enemypedia.
“How are things coming along?” asked Clarity.
“Yup, that’s a hill, alright,” said Lottie.
Clarity took a moment to glance toward Tephra Hill and conclude that Lottie’s observation was, in fact, accurate. Out there in the great, wide (and round) world of Aionios a rowdy band of six was undoubtedly making some Krabble’s day hell. “Any news about our… frequent friends?”
“Not so far,” Lottie said absently, nibbling on her jerky. “Last I saw, Matthew was jumping off cliffs and at dance apples. Hey, what are the chances they’ve filled the whole thing out already and we’re just wasting our time?”
“Unlikely,” said Clarity, with conviction. “Did you get a chance to flip through the section with all the weird named ones?”
“No. Why?”
“The stuff in the margins is all sorts of descriptive. Apparently, they’d started keeping a tally for how many times the big boss got knocked flat on his ass.”
“Excuse you, that ass is hardly flat,” said Lottie, though a single brow had arched contemplatively, implying that she was now entertaining the argument. “It’s that human whirlwind thing he does, isn’t it?”
Clarity sighed.
Lottie grinned with all her teeth. “Between those golden locks and the madman hurtling uncontrollably forward swinging swords as tall as he is, you’d think the choice as to which one to focus your attention on would be more obvious, wouldn’t you?”
“Not in the slightest,” said Clarity. “And feel free to skip enlightening me, since your taste is up there alongside Janus’ insistence that he’s straight for the most questionable things in the world.”
“Look, all I’m saying is that Panacea ought to appreciate what she’s got.”
“Has anything she ever done implied that she doesn’t?”
“Not yet, but just wait until she figures out where the spare ether cartridges have been going.” Lottie shuddered, the ghost of early morning drills marching behind her eyes. “Whatever mental gymnastics you have to do to envision the afterlife, do it now while you still have the chance.”
“Well, you don’t have to worry about that,” said Clarity. “Didn’t you hear? The proposal was approved—by Linka herself, even.”
Lottie’s mental gymnastics had visibly gone for a flip and flubbed the landing. “The… cleverly disguised suicide mission?” she said slowly.
“To be fair, Eow wrote it,” said Clarity, “so it was more of an embellished, postdated obituary. Our local heroes have been all sorts of busy recently, so I can’t blame Linka if her eyes glazed over after the third paragraph of ‘under optimal conditions, the unit will salvage combustion chamber components (see Appendices 46-75) for further examination by available engineers…’”
“There was a schematic for a railgun,” said Lottie, “in the first twenty pages.”
“Maybe she only read up to page nineteen,” Clarity said diplomatically.
Birds chirped in the pleasant silence that followed. Distantly, one of those happy birds let out a loud squawk as it impacted a rock, or rather, as a rock impacted it at breakneck speed. And it indeed sounded as if a neck had been broken.
“We’re not really building a railgun, are we?” Lottie said at last.
“Why not? I’d like a railgun.”
“Does anyone here actually know how to build a railgun? Someone that won’t tan our hides the moment they find out, I mean?”
Clarity parsed for a long moment through the list of dedicated engineers currently in the Liberators’ employ. Two were appropriately insane, one was similarly insane but vertically challenged, and the other two spent most of their time saving the world—which, to be fair, you had to be a little out of your mind to do.
“We can build a little railgun,” Clarity conceded, in a disappointed tone of voice.
“Right,” Lottie said dubiously. “A cute little death machine. Hey, while we’re on the topic, can we remind Lucille and Hamill to point the damn thing away from the Colony while they’re working on it? I’ve run into them at ass ‘o clock in the morning, and I’m convinced they aren’t people before the sun rises. Best not test how trigger-happy they can get.”
A small railgun, it turns out, is still a railgun.
Carrom had no idea who exactly proposed the idea, or how the proposal even caught wind. Personally, he believed it would have been better if it instead caught fire, but evidently that time had passed.
Lucille and Hamill agreed in a heartbeat on the condition that spare parts would first be delegated toward “miscellaneous automaton upgrades” for “the good of the Colony” before pursuing other projects. Two days after the first haul, every automaton mysteriously received a bright red coat of paint and, even more mysteriously, learned to dance overnight. This came as a surprise to Lucille and Hamill, who swore up and down that you couldn’t trust a dancing robot, especially if it had guns for hands. This also came as a surprise to Shulk, who after the initial startle barked out a laugh before going on his way after his party, though he lingered behind at the entrance of the Colony to peer at the upgraded turrets by putting his face directly in front of them.
To the dismay of many, the sporadic dances were later attributed to a logic error and removed in the name of public health and safety. It had been funny the first couple times someone had to be extricated from the plaza with a giant rectangular welt on their face, but by the time teeth started coming out somebody had to step in. Specifically, the first, second, and third brave souls who stepped in limped away with various contusions; the fourth was Linka, who while disappointed simply stared at Lucille and Hamill with the knowledge that you can’t cure crazy.
Out by the cafeteria Georgie had also learned about the plan, as tends to happen when you run the only official establishment permitted to distribute alcohol.
“I don’t see any harm in it,” said Georgie, when Carrom sidled up to her nervously asking her professional opinion. “All I do is sit around and stir the pot. If the kids want to do their part, and if that part involves throwing rocks really fast, then that’s alright with me.” Here Georgie paused halfway through a carrot and narrowed her eyes. “Provided you don’t get them killed.”
“Of course,” said Carrom, not nearly brave enough to argue with someone holding a knife.
Soon enough Lucille and Hamill called for a midnight meeting. Carrom snuck along the dilapidated walls until one of them caved in behind him, then sprinted the rest of the way down to the ruined tower square. It soon became clear that his attempts at stealth went a shorter ways than anticipated, given half the Colony had gathered among the Armories.
Saomi’s head rose up from among the bobbing crowd. Her face split into a wide grin, handily cleaving a path through the muttering bunch.
“Told you it’d work,” she said.
“Yes, well,” said Carrom, carefully scanning across the irritated, yawning gaggle, “we’ll see about that.”
Toward the front of the crowd there was a commotion as Lucille and Hamill wrestled a large tarp over a metal frame. Carrom felt his heart drop past his knees when the plastic rolled out to reveal a diagram of what any sane person would recognize as a giant gun on wheels, but which someone more optimistic might have mistaken for a glass half full.
“Alright,” said Lucille. “Let’s not waste any time. If you’re here than you’ve obviously heard the news. Saomi?”
Carrom heard the words, but failed to process them in any meaningful capacity. He faintly registered Saomi detaching from his side and prancing up to the front of the crowd.
“Good to see such a lively crowd this evening!” said Saomi, with much more authority than she deserved. “I’ll keep it simple. We’re gathered here because of this—” Saomi raised the Enemypedia high and gave the cover a hearty smack, causing Hamill to chase after the papers that scattered out “—and a whole host of implications that come with it. Long story short, our colourful band of heroes have been juggling monster analysis and suppression alongside saving the world. So we’re doing them a favour! We’re hiking around Cent-Omnia and making it damn well sure we’ve got a place in this world.”
The crowd murmured uncertainly.
“Additionally,” said Lucille, because even an engineer is comparatively normal beside Saomi, “we’re planning on conducting tests for prototype weapons. With enough ether and sufficient tuning, we believe they should be able to damage both Moebius and Flame Clocks. There’s another thing we’ve been working on, but…”
Lucille and Hamill shared a look. And it is always concerning when the engineers share a look.
“So,” began Hamill, “we’re all familiar with annihilation events, right?”
There was a nervous but affirmative response from the crowd.
“Good. Good.” Hamill fiddled nervously with the papers. “Um… so. Hypothetically, if we refined the phenomenon to a knife-edge—and I mean a literal knife-edge…”
A hush descended upon the square. It seemed for a moment that even the Piranhaxes were listening, if only to prepare themselves for what was to come.
“That’s right, folks,” said Saomi. “Antimatter knives! I hear it isn’t really antimatter, since apparently that’s part of the problem to begin with, but calling it anti-not-matter kind of takes the wind out of my sails! Can you believe it? I can’t! In fact, I have no idea what antimatter is! But I do know that if Moebius is this reality, then we just have to punch a hole through that reality.”
“To be clear, we would be distributing antimatter arms very diligently if successful,” Lucille interjected, eyes narrowed. A few faces determinedly studied their shoes. “We’d only employ them on particularly difficult expeditions, like ones up the Black Mountains. And, well, not many of us can jump quite as high as our friendly neighbourhood heroes, and Flame Clocks don’t exactly drag low on the ground… so if you could please turn your attention to this diagram…”
The next hour was spent in tense conversation about the feasibility of building a railgun (low), operating it (also low), and actually using it without razing Colony 9 to the ground (comically low). Every now and then someone would, in a small voice, call attention to Shulk and Rex, both of whom would undoubtedly, for lack of a better term, flip their shit if they discovered—well, any of this.
“Look, I see what you’re saying,” said Saomi, “but you realize the only way we can do any of this is if we keep it under wraps, right?”
Kathy and Ruben shared a dubious look. It did not yet communicate that they were about to turn tail and tattle, but somewhere in the next few sentences they very well might.
In the recesses of Carrom’s mind, something prompted him to the awareness that this was very much his problem.
“It’s more than that,” Carrom blurted out.
Everyone in the little square was now looking at him.
“It’s, uh, it’s…” Carrom wracked his brain. In his panic he met eyes with Peridot, who stared unflinchingly back. Suddenly his cognitive functions sparked back to life. “Look. Shulk and Rex. They’re good people. Great people, even! Without them we’d be a mess… except we can’t think like that, because sooner or later they’ll be gone, mysterious longevity or not.”
This did not instill the crowd with much confidence, though for some it had clearly just sunk in that perhaps their magnanimous leaders’ creaky bones and achy backs weren’t just a bit. Carrom pressed the advantage.
“They’d rather we live out our lives without having to fight. Of course they would! And of course we would! But there’s what we want, and then there’s what is. Face it, folks. This world isn’t getting better overnight. If we want to be able to sun-dry heart peaches and dance apples and whatever else sort of leathery fruit abominations your mind can think up—well, we have to fight. Both to protect ourselves as well as to make it so those who are fighting don’t have to fight. That’s what home is at the end of the day, I think. A place where you can lay down your arms, but a place you’ve got to raise arms to preserve. Even if it’s with, er, antimatter knives or a giant railgun. So… that’s pretty much it, probably…”
Objectively, Carrom’s speech wouldn’t have registered as a rallying cry for bodies to be thrown at an impenetrable wall. If anything, it would have convinced several brave people to test their knuckles against the door and then politely excuse themselves from the front lines.
But these maniacs had gathered in the dark of night and were seriously discussing expanding supply lines to make way for a big fuck-off gun. Wherever objectivity ruled, it was certainly not between sundown to sunrise.
It could then be understood why, when the crowd dispersed, it was with the quiet determination of people who have just borne witness to a dream, albeit a really weird one, and decided to give it the benefit of the doubt. Because that was what you tended to do with dreams if you were alive.
The new salvaging expedition, led in name by Saomi but in reality by Clarity, received the stamp of approval, though Panacea squinted at Carrom the whole way through. She, too, had requested Eow’s proposal to “cross-reference some odd details”, but by the eighteenth page of technical jargon the circles under Panacea’s eyes began to take on new and exciting colours.
“I can walk you through it, if you’d like,” Lucille said kindly, leaning over the command center’s weather-worn table and scanning lovingly over the pages and pages of diagrams, which at this point might as well have been drawn in code. “It’s nothing absurd, not really. We just need more to work with if we’re ever going to mass-produce Moebius-slaying gadgets, let alone get the Armories off the ground.”
Panacea hesitated. If it were anyone else reading over the report Lucille would already rigging something up to blow, but Panacea was nothing if not diligent. She was, however, also human, and thus the prospect of being lectured for hours on end about the minor but fascinating differences in ether-photon conversation rates given different gear assemblies manifested as a monotonous but soul-sucking nightmare.
“How long would your explanation take, approximately?”
Lucille frowned. Then she glanced upward at the sun, which hung cheerfully in the dim morning sky. A long silence followed. When this failed to produce an immediate answer Panacea broke.
“Fine,” she said. Her gaze sharpened, not without the threat of physical violence. “But the instant I hear anything about hiking up the Black Mountains…”
“No worries, no worries at all,” Saomi said brightly. “Besides, I’m sure there are plenty of fun and exciting adventures close to home!”
“That,” said Panacea, “is exactly what I’m afraid of.”
Despite all of Carrom’s best efforts and the collective will of the universe, a bomb did, in fact, go off in the supply depot.
Nobody could be sure where exactly it came from, since Eow and Peridot were nothing but extensive in their efforts to ensure that the supply lines weren’t disrupted by sheer stupidity. Standing in front of Peridot, however, all Carrom could think about was an innocent conversation the day before about loading explosives into slings and letting god sort out the debris once the dust settled.
Or that would be all Carrom could think about, except this time Peridot was holding a sword. Something smoldered gently behind her, smelling faintly of peaches.
“How fascinating!” said Peridot, with the pleasant surprise of someone who has for the first time chanced upon an individual who doesn’t love their teeth where they were. “I don’t suppose you’ll slip up and make the same mistake again?”
Carrom took a moment to conjure an image of a fully psychotic Peridot and struggled to comprehend the idea that this wasn’t even as bad as it got. He diligently weighed his options. Specifically, he weighed a quippy response against a three-month stint in a full-body cast.
“Let’s not,” Carrom said, feeling very wise.
“Good on you,” said Peridot. “Do you do this whole blowing-things-up stint often?”
Carrom stared. He’d been doing a lot of staring lately. The possibility that this was all a bad dream was always increasing, and not against his will. “No, not really. I’ve been a little preoccupied with other tasks, such as not dying.”
“That’s too bad,” Peridot said sincerely. “Then let’s keep it that way, okay? Or else.”
The initial prototypes of the antimatter weapons soon spun to life. Or rather, they hummed ominously to life, often without command.
Once you caught your breath and let the dust settle it was obvious that what had happened was not, in fact, a reaction caused by the collision of two opposing forms of matter, but rather a reaction caused by a really big bomb blowing a giant hole in the ground—that specific reaction being your eyes bulging out of your head and your brain unconsciously moving your arm to perform the longest pitch you’d ever throw in your life. In horrifying but unsurprising fashion, the children turned out to be very good at this, despite lacking both muscle mass and the ability to take responsibility for their actions, as tends to happen when you equip adolescents with double-pendulum kinetics.
So there was good news, bad news, and loud news. The good news was that a whole lot of Liberators were becoming more lethal by the day. The bad news was that they were becoming lethal specifically by means of getting really, really good at blowing things up. And the loud news was that it is difficult to conceal progress on a railgun, particularly when you start taking potshots. Or, er, potshot, singular.
“Well, look on the bright side,” said Georgie. “You got one good shot—one really good shot, by the sound of it.”
“Huh? What?” said Hamill, squinting at the movement of Georgie’s lips in the way of overzealous scientists who forgo hearing protection everywhere.
“Never mind that,” Georgie said cheerfully.
She placed down two bowls of curry atop the flatter piles of scrap and then leaned up and back, admiring the really big gun that had just blown itself to pieces after firing a single projectile. It could be said, in a way, that people didn’t evolve from throwing rocks really fast. They just got better at it. Finley and Axel would be overjoyed.
Georgie wasn’t much of a fighter herself, and despite recent developments nobody had pulled her into a corner to have a serious talk about the ethics of not murdering fuzzy creatures. Everyone was content to give their all to a salvation that wasn’t coming anytime soon, but would pitch a fit if dinner didn’t turn up in the hour. Lucille and Hamill, however, were the type that wouldn’t notice if dinner failed to show up at all and most certainly wouldn’t recognize salvation if it broke into their lab screaming. So of course Georgie had to do her part: she couldn’t do anything about the latter but her grandad would’ve had her hide if she didn’t do anything about the former.
There was also the benefit of the doubt. That part was nice. Based off of the very bright light that had just knocked a massive slab of cliff into the waters below, Georgie had the feeling that at least a handful of people were preparing to blow their lids.
“What? Georgie? Why’re you here? Oh,” said Lucille all at once, stumbling out from behind the control panel looking like she’d gotten into a fight with a food processor and lost. “Dinner, right? Thanks. Hey, you saw that just now, didn’t you? What’d you think?”
“It was great,” Georgie said honestly. “I really liked the part where the gun blew itself up after the fact! Really cathartic—I think I see what you’re going for, with the whole ‘a good gun rains war down in a hundred years halfway across the world’ thing…”
“It wasn’t actually supposed to do that,” Lucille said reproachfully.
“I figured,” said Georgie, “but at least now you have less on your hands to deal with.”
“You’re telling me.” Lucille turned and dug through one of the scrap piles until it revealed what appeared to be a chainsaw. “It’s fine. It’s fine! We’ve got tons of other stuff to work on anyway. And we’re still building that gun, you know?”
“Oh, I didn’t mean the gun. I meant the evidence.”
Georgie glanced down the bridge leading to the colony, which had become a great deal busier in the last couple minutes. Fortunately, the gaping hole in the side of the cliff appeared to attract much more attention than that steaming pile of assorted debris clattering off the side of the anti-air battery.
“What? Huh? Oh, food,” said Hamill.
“We’ll be just fine,” said Georgie. In the crowd she saw a mop of blond hair hurrying nearer a lot faster than the others. “If nothing else, we’ll have at least put on a good show. Speaking of, where did Carrom and Saomi go? They’re our resident clowns, right?”
The show was not good. It was not even decent, and calling it bearable was an insult to the word.
It was, however, funny, and in a world such as this that counted for something.
“I’m sorry to interrupt,” said Shulk, “but are we approaching the part of the proposal that suggests any of this is sane?”
“It’s—I mean—” Carrom shrivelled under Shulk’s piercing gaze. “I’m sorry, is this not sounding sane to you?”
“No, not quite yet,” said Shulk, gently but firmly. His mind once again considered the smoking heap of railgun debris and its poor attempt at terraforming. “Though I can certainly follow the… chain of events, if we want to call it that.”
Ever merciful, Shulk had refrained from picking Carrom and Saomi up by the ankles and hurling them into the lake, where the Piranhaxes would likely be very eager to have a stern word, though that was possibly because he only had one good arm and the extra time required would’ve given one of them a head start. Neither did he lambast them in public, though that was probably on account of not being able to put words in the appropriate order to communicate anything with a semblance of sense or sanity. He instead walked the guilty parties to his tent, where Carrom and Saomi were now probably about to get hanged, drawn and quartered. And since it was Shulk, it would be done with care. Carrom wasn’t sure what to feel except sheer terror, which, while awful, was at least familiar.
“How long has this been going on?” asked Shulk, reasonable man that he was.
“Er…” Cold sweat poured down Carrom’s back. “Which part, exactly?”
Shulk was quiet for a moment. When he finally did speak, it was with the cadence of someone navigating a minefield. “There are multiple parts?”
“What Carrom means to say,” said Saomi, giving Carrom a fierce side-eye supplemented by a fiercer elbow in the ribs, “is that the rail—sorry, that the big gun thing wasn’t our idea. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we aren’t really built for that sort of stuff.”
“I’ve noticed,” Shulk said mildly, “but to be honest, it’s getting more and more difficult to tell by the day. Did you see the dancing automatons?”
“Yes,” said Carrom, wheezing.
“That wasn’t your idea, I presume?”
“My word, no,” said Lottie, who against all common sense had suddenly appeared in the tent. Her pleasant demeanor radiated good cheer beyond the gates of reason, possibly because Clarity stood some paces behind with calculating eyes. “From what I heard it was some sort of logic error, though Lucille and Hamill swore up and down that they’d rather die than trust a robot that knows how to jig. Good evening, Shulk, sir! Hope we’re not interrupting anything.”
“Don’t be too hard on Carrom and Saomi, please,” said Clarity. “They’re not entirely at fault. And they’ve got some good ideas, in any case.”
For a moment Carrom swore he saw a halo of light descend upon Clarity. His eyes watered as he turned back toward Shulk, who was glancing between the four of them in apprehension.
“Wait a moment,” said Shulk. “I’ve seen you all out in the field… you’re all part of the new salvaging expedition, no?”
“Er, yes,” said Carrom.
“Right,” said Shulk, exhausted in the way all parents are when the eternally unfurling scroll of concerning topics hits the ground and starts rolling. “I’ve been meaning to speak with you about that, actually. I’m concerned for your safety—you’re wandering into hotly contested territory between Agnes and Keves, and if the wreckages I’ve been seeing are any indication—”
“Hey, uh, sorry to butt in,” said Saomi, with growing offence, “but let’s clear something up, okay? If we’re the one making those wreckages, then we’re right as rain, aren’t we?”
“—then it’s clear that we’re just waiting for trouble to happen,” finished Shulk. Then he blinked. Several processes rebooted and failed again in minor but important ways. “Sorry, what?”
Clarity nudged her way past Lottie. Her face was stone. “Right. We can explain the railgun, at least.”
“But that’s the best part!” protested Saomi.
“Yes, but it’s also the only part that hasn’t exploded,” said Clarity.
Lottie coughed loudly into her fist.
“The only part that hasn’t exploded and caused a post-accident fire,” Clarity amended. “Let’s be realistic about our prospects. The antimatter knives are a long shot—no, Saomi, not that long of a shot, stop looking at me like that. The slings… involve details better not discussed now. So we’re left with the railgun.”
“What was that about antimatter knives?” said Shulk.
“Never mind that,” said Clarity, with dignity befitting her namesake.
On cue, because what are a bad situation and a coincidence if not dysfunctional lovers, Carrom heard the sound of a train of boots stomping closer outside. A few second later Lucille, with Hamill following wearily behind, stormed into the tent. Both of them wielded the dismembered appendages of what had once, quite obviously, been a chainsaw.
Shulk stared.
Carrom waved frantically at Lucille and Hamill from behind Shulk’s back, but by then it was too late. The two had located their resident senior engineer. The pieces weren’t so much falling into place as barrelling uncontrollably into and over them.
“So about the fuel source,” said Lucille, “there’s a problem. Did you know that ether and fuel go together about as well as a bomb and a preschool?”
“What?” said Saomi, outraged to have missed out on the fun. “Is that two explosions I’ve missed out on today?”
“Well, no,” said Hamill. “Preschoolers are pretty good at tossing explosives away when they start ticking, it turns out.”
“Ah, this is the part where you tell us you’re the preschoolers,” said Lottie.
“Er…” Hamill paused, finagling the scrap heap until it revealed an empty ether cartridge that appeared as if it had been the subject of a sudden and violent acid attack. “Yes, I suppose so. And the local Piranhaxes are the principal’s car right outside the window. Or they will be, a couple minutes from now.”
“From a preliminary once-over, it looks like we’ll need to rethink the whole shebang,” concluded Lucille, ignoring Hamill’s inconvenient metaphor. “The antimatter arms are proving difficult to manage, or at least difficult not to inadvertently transform into really big bombs, so we’ll set that aside for now. And while ether itself might not be able to shank a Moebius, it’ll at least be a nuisance. Though the whole plan’s out the window unless we can figure out a way to recycle the ether—according to Eow we’ve got enough fuel per person for everyone to mow through half an Armu, while in ether we’ve got enough for one maniac to really a make mess of a Tirkin and their extended family. Now, I don’t know about you, but I’d prefer my Armu steak sans the tortured cries of an animal with half its head cut off.”
“So rare you can hear it scream,” mused Clarity. “So… not great.”
“Nor quite efficient,” Hamill added.
The engineers’ gazes communicated that they did not for a second contemplate whether it was ethical. No. That time had passed. Somewhere behind them, still smoldering at the bottom of a crater, were the remnants of what once passed as basic decency. Somewhere in the bog of all-nighters and scorched eyebrows the last trace had been seared onto the ceiling, where it now resembled a demented smiley face. Lucille and Hamill frequently considered this, given they had spent the last four days sleeping on the ground of otherwise snapping to consciousness from it.
And then their railgun had blown itself apart. They were having what might be considered a very bad day.
“Now hang on a moment,” said the magnanimous co-leader of the Liberators.
Carrom turned an odd shade of grey.
“I see you’re all working diligently, and it heartens me to see all of you united, but—”
Shulk made a face. This face did not immediately communicate that he thought everyone at present was out of their minds, inebriated, or one bad break away from flying off the handle. It instead communicated that a man must decide for himself life’s priorities, and currently Shulk was looking at a spade and content to call it a chainsaw.
“Is there any particular reason it has to be a chainsaw?” he finally said.
Silently, out of everyone’s awareness, the tent breathed a sigh of relief. All except Carrom, that is, who had instead of preparing to play damage control for a few deranged but well-meaning people was rapidly reconfiguring his plans to accommodate one very well-meaning person. The former is a mob waiting to happen; before they kill you they’ll make a show of it, in which all the actors have to be convinced to play their roles, and after you’re dead they’ll at least have the decency to feel ashamed before their head hits the pillow that night. The latter, on the other hand, will take no joy in making a lesson out of you. A good man won’t forget you, but neither will he mourn you.
“We were thinking of making a sort of cartridge insert,” Lucille was saying, as Carrom’s cognitive functions readjusted to reality. “We’d need to overhaul practically all the equipment we’ve got to make it happen, but Blades only go so far, right? Of course right.”
“Friend not take into consideration massive retrofitting expense,” Riku said, because—because Riku had appeared out of nowhere, apparently? “If past experiments any indication, Friend Lucille and Hamill have tendency to make explosion rather than functional weapon!”
“Well, yes,” said Hamill. “That’s sort of the point.”
“Beg pardon?”
Lucille smiled, but it was the sort of smile the face retracts from, leaving only a floating impression of something that could’ve gone much, much worse going only marginally better. “Oh, no need to beg. Just listen.”
Some ways away, out by the anti-air battery, something exploded. Violently. And, since Lucille and Hamill were involved, probably dramatically. It was so violent, in fact, that for a brief moment it blasted away the haze that had drifted over Shulk’s face.
“What was that?” he asked. “Did you—how did you rig up a bomb? Wait, we had enough spare parts for bombs and nobody told me?”
“We just told you,” Lucille answered, unbothered even as a whole lot more boots started stomping about outside. Again. “And in any case, ether and fuel tend to do that. Some of the cylinders we repurposed weren’t too clean, is probably what happened. So when it caught a spark the whole system went into countdown! Unfortunate, but no harm done. We’ll test compounds, determine the most volatile reaction. Then we add a release tab along with a removeable cartridge compartment, and if everything goes to hell we’ll at least have a stock of ether bombs, right? Ones that are stable, at least,” Lucille added as an afterthought.
“And the Piranhaxes have been particularly violent recently, for whatever reason,” said Hamill, as Saomi broke into a sudden coughing fit. “Practically spiteful, can I say that? The scars I’ve got on my legs…! Anyway, I’m not recommending we lob explosives into the lake whenever the local wildlife acts up, but when push comes to shove—the rest is obvious, isn’t it?”
“Perhaps in this case friend doing both pushing and shoving?” Riku asked testily.
Riku, evidently, did not take kindly to how both Lucille and Hamill had adopted a habit of taking insane questions for granted. A respectable engineer himself, Riku was the sort who believed insane questions were best encouraged from others by one’s own evasive behaviour instead of, as it was said, encouraged by oneself after doing something extraordinarily stupid; blowing up a local monument made sure everyone knew you were an engineer, but quietly lounging about in canteens all across Kevesi territory every couple of years and see how many people spun to look at you like they’d just spotted a cryptid—then people didn’t know what you were at all. The sort of insane questions you got then weren’t the kind that involved earth-shattering conspiracies but rather the sort that pitched so far out of field it rounded back to being normal, including but not limited to “oh, so it turns out you do have digestive organs, huh?” and “right, right… and next you’ll tell me that you’ll die when I kill you?” The purpose of an insane question, Riku posited, was to convince the asker that they were insane. If it did the opposite then all you’d get is run out of town.
Unbeknownst to Riku, however, the conversation had employed use of insane questions to such a degree that Shulk was at this point not only concerned for the wellbeing of his colleagues but also, miraculously, himself. What Panacea had tried and failed to do for the past blink of eternity, Lucille and Hamill had done by hurling a bomb in a lake. And there was also the railgun…
It eventually dawned on Shulk that he was working on both sides of good conscience. “Nobody’s making any more bombs,” he said, as common sense finally clicked.
Saomi, who had been predicting this, beamed. “Not without proper supervision, you mean!”
Shulk’s mouth opened. Then it closed. It tried once again to summon the common sense which just a moment ago had reared its head. It being common sense, however, meant it was probably now ducked back under a table, in case Lucille and Hamill had even worse surprises waiting to explode.
No longer was Shulk young and spry, but often he missed those times. It was a feeling that returned with increasing frequency the longer he lived. The energy of youth had long since been replaced with the wisdom of experience, though it had hardly been transformed into such; thus, what came out of Shulk’s mouth next was driven by some innate urge, untouched by age and time.
“…You get one bomb,” Shulk said hesitantly.
The tent broke out in cheers. Riku frowned, but eventually cowed once Lucille raised the possibility of building a bigger and better railgun. Carrom made do with breathing very fast in the corner. It was all about how you lived in the moment, at the end of the day.
Despite all good sense, Lucille and Hamill did, in fact, complete a singular antimatter knife.
It was small, the blade no longer than a palm’s length, and it was also very ugly. It looked like a regular blade in every aspect except for the fact that it appeared to have lived its whole life in a particularly bitter blender. Down by the hilt, due to various technical issues, a wad of duct tape replaced traditional wrappings. If you didn’t look too hard at it you could mistake it for a demented playset knife that occasionally glowed in the dark.
Lucille and Hamill were mad with relief, then crushed by the burden of deciding who exactly should be responsible for it, which tends to happen in situations like this. Shulk and Rex were crossed off the list first, since they tended to call a spade a spade, even if it was a really cool one. Saomi couldn’t bear thinking about. Georgie could probably use a new knife, but the extra features might throw her off or, even worse, pollute the canteen’s curry. Kayleigh and Harby as well as Kathy and Ruben would be more receptive than others but also liable to hurl the thing off Aionios if it started making weird noises.
This left Carrom, who pleaded for half an hour for somebody else to be given responsibility for the knife but never broached the topic of destroying it. He held the shining blade at arm’s length the entire time, all the while shimmying uncontrollably as if he were on fire, which combined with his general disposition convinced Lucille and Hamill that they were leaving the weapon in safe hands, or at the very least sane ones.
You couldn’t trust anyone who was too normal or too weird with a glow-in-the-dark dagger, they figured. One could destroy it without a thought or, worse still, use it without a thought. Handling the antimatter knife was an exercise in using one’s head, preferably not from a distance of a couple inches but rather in the more abstract sense of using one’s brain, which Carrom did even when he tried not to.
And so Carrom would live out the rest of his days with a tiny fragment of annihilation lodged in his back pocket until he found permanent residence, or as permanent as anything can get in a world of permanence (which means a lot less than one would expect, surprisingly). After that it would be lost among the clutter that tends to accumulate when a lot of your ancestors die after having lived long but boring lives.
One day a young, nameless child of the City would fumble through those boxes and rediscover the antimatter knife. In a fortunate twist of fate, or rather, as the passage of fate demands, the child would be drawn to the fraying duct tape around the handle, which might as well be gold to adolescents. And they would tug. And everything that separated the antimatter knife from a really shitty knife would all at once dissipate into nothingness, leaving only a hunk of metal that would later be repurposed into cutlery.
Even if Lucille and Hamill had foresight so incredible as to predict the eventual irony, they probably wouldn’t have changed a thing. An engineer’s reputation survived the test of time not if they were extraordinary, not if they were a pox unto mankind, or even if they blew something up in horrifying fashion, though that last one upped your chances. It was thought that an engineer’s name lived through the ages if they were really, really funny, or if they caused something to be so.
If you told Carrom that in thousands of years the creators of the antimatter knife would be considered “not the sharpest knife in the drawer,” he would have laughed, then had a fit.
Shulk was a man of his word. Indeed only one bomb had been perfected to such a degree as to consider it a bomb by design and not by accident.
He did, however, consider it a slight waste not to make use of the antimatter arms, or rather, the antimatter explosives, especially when they were so light, so portable, and required little more than fast legs and a good arm to reduce a particularly mean-looking Darbus into green smog.
Possibly because how narrowly Shulk fit into those requirements, he looked faint as he took a few measured steps away from the welcoming sheer drop of the Diablada Cliffs.
Saomi, true to her nature, simply dusted off her hands for a job well done and gestured meaningfully to where the crater below had gained a new friend.
“Note the gentle blast radius, fellow Liberators,” she said. “Note the lack of post-reaction fire. And all it took was a bit of elbow grease, I should add!”
“Yes, but now everything that was salvageable is dust in the wind,” noted Clarity, with a note of disappointment.
“Sure, but you can always cry about that later,” said Saomi. What’s important is that now we’ve got another big X for this!”
Raised high above her head was the Enemypedia. Shulk stared at, or rather, straight through the book.
“Oh,” he said, in a very quiet voice. “I think I see the problem now.”
“It’s not just the Enemypedia!” Carrom hurried to say, already predicting the trajectory of the conversation. “It started off with it, sure, but now—”
Now our problems have become so much more than that stupid book, Carrom couldn’t say. Wanting to punch a dragon infested with ghosts or a really unique case of gangrene was one thing. Jumping to railguns and reality-bending switchblades and a whole host of explosives with different names but categorically similar effects was like lighting the way through the night with a flamethrower. For a furious moment you scorched a path ahead, laughing all the while. Then you ran out of fuel and realized just how vast the dark was.
“…Now it’s more about trying to help out in any way we can,” Carrom finished weakly. “Trying to do anything that matters.”
Silence swept over the small party. Clarity crossed her arms and directed her gaze over the cliffs meaningfully, though she had never been one for sentiment. Saomi looked around, uncertain whether or not the sudden tone shift meant she was in trouble. Carrom tried with his whole being to decipher the odd expression on Shulk’s face. All the while birds screeched in the wind, where one of them would inevitably fly a little too close to the colony and become target practice.
When Shulk finally spoke it was with the exhaustion of someone who has spent a long time fighting, would very much rather not to have to do so, but was willing to define their life only in relation to violence if it meant others didn’t have to.
“I wish it didn’t have to be this way,” he said. “I wanted… this isn’t the world we wanted for you.”
Saomi’s arm slowly lowered, something akin to shame colouring her face. Clarity’s eyes had dropped to her shoes. Carrom’s mouth worked fruitlessly to produce a response that could match even half Shulk’s sincerity.
You’d have to go out of your way to find someone who found the current state of affairs pleasant, let alone bearable, but you’d find them. That much was for certain. As time passed you’d possibly even find more of them, as the past faded into oblivion and the future remained firmly out of reach. People adapted to any circumstances you put them in, which was admirable in its own way, but beating those circumstances required a lot of faith. That faith said: you can sit down and cry into your hands. You can retreat so far from the world that you become entirely divorced from it. Or you can crawl back into the fight and see it through to the end. You can do what you think is right and make it right. You can either do what you were born to do, which was survive, or what you were meant to do, which was live. There was a very fine dividing line between the two, which is why so many people died holding it.
Of course Shulk knew all of this. He’d lived through all of it and more. If he hadn’t, the Liberators would’ve been down one leader long ago. Either that or they would’ve been home to one very odd, slightly manic, but nonetheless well-meaning engineer with a penchant for making laser blades.
“Well, yeah,” Carrom said pathetically. “That’s kind of how it goes, I think.”
Shulk offered a slow, languid blink. Several lights shuttered on behind his eyes. “Pardon?”
The wheels in Carrom’s mind floundered. Saomi pounced on the opportunity, and for once she had looked before leaping and handily, if not a little gaudily, nailed the landing.
“It’d be a pretty bad day if this was the sort of world you wanted for anyone,” she said. “You hardly have to tell us that. And, look—if all it took was wanting the world to be better, we would’ve been there and beyond a long time ago. It’s hard work, clearly.” Saomi scuffed her boots along the ground and very carefully slipped the Enemypedia away. “No hard feelings.”
“What can you do?” Clarity said with a half-hearted shrug. “Between this world and no world, the choice is easy.”
“That isn’t a choice you should have been forced to make to begin with,” protested Shulk.
“But it’s one you had to make, right?”
“Yes, but that’s not my point…”
“I know what your point is,” said Clarity. “You want to say that we deserved better than you got. How can we not appreciate that? Think about it this way. This world is hard, but this is the world we got from people who really, truly cared. So something went wrong along the way—of course it did! If you want to get rid of the wrongness you’d have to get rid of people, and correct me if my arithmetic’s wrong, but that doesn’t seem to solve the question for me. So here we are.”
Clarity waved vaguely unto the world in all its cratered glory.
“It could be better. It could be worse. At the end of the day it’s always going to be could-bes. Hence the railgun.”
Carrom couldn’t hold back the feeling that there was something missing, there. “The railgun being a collective effort to manifest a choice-worthy life,” he added on hurriedly. “We don’t want to fight, not really… but it’s better than not fighting at all.”
“I see,” Shulk muttered. “Seizing the future… but with railguns.”
Among other things, Carrom’s manic inner voice provided. Wow, were there a whole lot of ways to hurt a whole lot of people in a whole lot of horrifying ways when you pressed the subject. But he felt that would be sort of ruining the moment, and also that Shulk, who was missing a whole arm, would probably not need reminders of that particular face of humanity.
“Right,” said Shulk, after a long while. His face coloured again, or at least took a couple steps away from a mental spiral. “It’s always youths that drive headlong into the future, isn’t it?”
“Someone has to have a hand on the wheel,” Saomi said primly.
“Yes. Yes indeed.” Shulk’s face, which had previously been doing a very sad thing, now adopted a pained grimace. “But we’ll have to see about getting you licenses, I think.”
The process of “getting licenses”, it turned out, was a tedious endeavour made all the more frustrating by the fact that Rex had become increasingly curious as to why his fellow co-leader was putting aside so much time shepherding a gaggle of unruly recruits around Cent-Omnia. When pressed on the issue, Shulk calmly but confidently declared that he wanted to ensure that “all would be well when it was over”, which while ominous was also supplemented by A’s affirmation of his hard work that came at the speed of bullshit.
All was not well, unfortunately.
Despite Lucille, Hamill, and Riku’s best efforts, all that had been put together and allowed outside the confines of the lab was a slapdash prototype of what one might call an ether chainsaw, but what someone less generous might consider a motorized razor blade that spun really fast when you pressed a button. Riku had said that they weren’t quite sure that it wouldn’t catch on fire if you sneezed on it funny, but that on a balance of probabilities it wouldn’t do anything worse than sputter to a halt halfway through an Ories’ hide. Probably. Despite all common sense Saomi was given the high honour of running the first tests, on account that she didn’t know how to shave and thus had a higher chance of inflicting any sort of damage.
The contraption, unfortunately, had already started to lose steam—quite literally—halfway up Belgazas’ Drifts.
“Is it supposed to be doing that?” Lottie asked cautiously, several feet further away than she had been the minute prior.
“Clearly not,” muttered Saomi.
“Let me take a look,” said Shulk. He peered at the chainsaw, turning it this way and that, eventually unscrewing the colourful flame-patterned contraption. “Ah, I see the problem.”
“Is it the sort that requires running fast in the opposite direction?” Carrom asked nervously. The slanting elevation was doing odd things in his stomach. You could only run so far downhill before gravity caught up.
“No, I don’t think so. It’s primarily wear on the components.” Shulk gave the chainsaw a little pat before screwing everything back on and handing it back to Saomi. And, because Shulk was a very smart man with a foresight so accurate it was practically habitual, he quickly added, “I understand this might be disappointing…”
“A little,” said Clarity, obviously dejected.
“Then let’s look at alternatives,” said Lottie, pivoting neatly. “The youngsters are messing about with slings and doing well for themselves, aren’t they?”
“Yes, but do you really think you can stone Moebius to death?” said Clarity.
“Well, I dunno about that,” Saomi mused aloud, “but we could always try out exploding rounds, right? With the whole stock of ether weapons-turned-bombs we’ve got, I mean.”
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” Shulk said quickly.
“Oh, because we’re so full on ideas right now…”
Suddenly Shulk began to look very nervous. More nervous than he had been all day, which really did not bode well. Those nerves eventually dissolved into careful contemplation, particularly when one is about to suggest something really stupid.
“Well… we did have a strategy, back in the day,” he began slowly.
“Oh, so we’re back to strategy, are we?” said Saomi, giving the chainsaw a despondent kick. The contraption coughed out an encouraging wheeze.
“I think we could use some strategy,” said Clarity. “As we’re going now, we’ll have craters for days, but I don’t know how we’d fare against a dragon.”
“Really? Because I do.” Here Carrom made the helpful and specific gesture of being crushed underfoot by something horrifying, large, and utterly indifferent. “Squish! Just like that! It’d kill us all accidentally by rolling over in its sleep!”
“Oh yes, no doubt, but does it kill you immediately just by standing close?” Shulk said tersely, the words practically spilling out.
Everyone took a moment to look at Shulk. For a man so many looked up to so often, he seemed practically ashamed of the outburst despite the fact that everyone present had some time ago decided he needed to be watched in case something in him finally broke. Which it wouldn’t, evidently. But you worried.
“I’m sorry,” Shulk said wearily, sagging back down. “Back in my day you’d hit a dragon a thousand times over and it still wouldn’t drop—” A sigh twined out, accompanied by what might have been a really faint scream but which everyone was willing to believe was a spirited but gentle rallying cry. “No matter. It’s all the past, like we so often say these days. But I really do have a strategy. It worked astonishingly well for us, and I’d be happy to pass on the knowledge.”
“Will it require any explosions?” asked Carrom.
“I don’t believe so,” said Shulk, “but if you want them, I’m sure we could figure out a way to squeeze them in—”
“Oh no! That’s alright! Since your time is so valuable and such,” Carrom hurried to say at the speed of terror. “To reiterate, this strategy belongs firmly in the realms of the safe, sane, and consensual, yes?”
“What are they teaching you these days?” Shulk muttered, but with a fond sort of amusement. “Yes, of course. Entirely cult, canny, and scrutable. Comically so, compared to how Rex used to operate.”
Lottie and Clarity shared a look.
“It can’t hurt,” Lottie said after a while.
“It’s not like we’ve got any more to lose,” Clarity added. “Except maybe our lives, but we were already heading that way in the first place.”
“Then as the adult in the room, allow me to point offer a more roundabout route,” Shulk said diplomatically. Then he cleared his throat and offered a winning smile. “Now, there’s this thing called ‘topple-lock’…”
In a better world, where fate played by the rules and liked a good show, this would have been a turning point.
But because this world wasn’t that one, and because fate was unpredictable at best and wholly imaginary at worst, dreams were often disappointed. It was said that the world didn’t do well with people who didn’t pick a side, but those who made that choice had to survive making the wrong one. Whether it was easier to sit on your hands as the glass came down or live the rest of your life looking behind your shoulder was a question best left to your constitution, but you had to pick one of the two. You couldn’t escape it. Life was voracious in that way. It wasn’t a question of whether you could live a spotless existence or not; it was a careful balancing act of deciding what you could afford to lose and what you really, really couldn’t.
And soon enough everyone learned you could afford to leave some dreams behind. Justice. Fairness. Mercy. All gone in an instant and impossible to seize back. But something grew in their absence, one suit of skin sloughed off to make place for another. When you woke up on the other side of the day you didn’t believe in some innate rightness or order by which the world operated. The difference, fundamentally, between right and wrong was that you were right. It was a bad answer made worse by everyone who made the world a nightmare believing the same thing, but it was the only answer that meant something. Because you did it, because you lived in the world, and because you hoped everything the world had taught you made you more of a person instead of less of one.
Belief wasn’t good enough. It got you nowhere. You had to believe in something, at the end of the day.
The denizens of Colony 9 cast a wide net. They believed in a whole lot of things, some more absurd than others. Ether chainsaws. Antimatter knives. Railguns. Colourful explosives. But the most outlandish were by far Shulk and Rex, and of course each other. Human history was a parade of disasters, all of them taking shape as other people. Either tech worked or it didn’t; you couldn’t blame a bomb for blowing up if the hands that built it made it that way. But you could blame people. And you could hold them responsible until your life expired.
And that was the rub. You had to believe in things that weren’t real, otherwise they’d never be.
Carrom gave his little group a brief once-over.
It was, on the whole, not a good time to discover that topple-locking wasn’t a thing that worked. Presumably, a long time ago, it had worked, and worked like a charm; now it wasn’t working, and it wasn’t working like a curse. Worlds had collided. Times had changed.
Saomi was predictably upset, Clarity was waddling slowly down that alley, Lottie was generally indifferent but had clearly wanted to witness some action, and Shulk’s expression was serene through ease of long practice. Or maybe ease of long failure. It was difficult to discern between the two.
A failed prototype was a disappointment, obviously. It was a bigger disappointment still considering that all the others stepped off the roof with noble dreams of taking to the sky and ended up as a lot of hassle for elementary physics on the ground. When someone hallucinates they can fly, people tend to look away; when someone dreams they can fly, the lawn chairs come out. It was the same mess in the end, with the added disadvantage that you’d handily and publicly crush every dream adjacent to yours. And, er, other dreamers, if you were really ambitious.
But the Enemypedia was being filled, one comically large enemy at a time. In convoluted and moronic ways, that stupid book was slowly but surely driving the machine forward. It had spawned a lot of questionable ambitions, all of which ended up in the scrap heap, but the book was being filled.
Carrom, who never had a constitution strong enough to conquer mountains in pursuit of ideals, didn’t feel there was much tragedy to be had. What disappointment existed was the mundane sort, the kind that alighted you on the fact that most progress merely consists of a little extra time. And wasn’t that an easy fact to swallow, given the funny state of the world…
“Well, there’s nothing to it,” Carrom said. He was surprised by the steadiness of his own voice, despite the fact that the end of all days loomed overhead.
“Yes, I’d say so,” said Shulk. “It was a very valiant effort, and one that won’t go to waste. These sorts of things tend to take a while.”
“You’re telling us to give up?” Saomi said, hurt.
“Not in the slightest.” And there was that tired, distant smile again. It passed through people and slipped through time, though whether it was looking backward or forward was a silent mystery. “Even the mightiest lose their footing, but if you’ve got to climb, then you climb. You can be certain of that. It’s alright to be disappointed, but please, please never lose that spirit of defiance.”
Saomi crossed her arms stubbornly, though going by the tightness around her eyes it was obvious she’d been caught off-guard. “You—you don’t have to tell me that,” she said. “You want defiance? I’ll show you defiance!”
Clarity simply sat down on the ground, spear by her side.
“I’m tired,” she said.
Carrom winced. It had been a long day, and the sun hadn’t even set. It was best to call it before anything else had a chance to disappoint.
There was doing what was brave and then doing what would keep you sane. The scales had evidently tipped toward the latter.
“I’m pretty winded too,” said Lottie, catching the drift. “We sure tried a lot of weird and fascinating things, didn’t we? Let’s compile the data, submit a report.” She hesitated a moment before adding, “Who knows? Maybe someone else will have better luck.”
“Indeed,” said Shulk. “That’s all we can hope for.”
Sometimes you had to choose between a behemoth of wiry muscle and a small child with a slingshot and spite up the ears. Both choices were less than ideal, but only one was charging at you very quickly. And screaming. And getting closer. And liable to put a hole in your forehead from across the Colony.
“Carrom!” shrieked Finley, and it should be said that watching someone who has on more than one occasion hollowed out Armu skulls with a pebble sprint toward you with intent is not altogether a reassuring sight.
“Er, yes! What? I didn’t do anything!” said Carrom, covering all his bases.
Finley collided with Carrom’s legs at the speed of mania and sent them both tumbling to the ground. “Why didn’t you tell us you were going up the Black Mountains?” she demanded. “We wanted to see the dragon!”
“We could’ve helped,” Axel protested, his big, innocent eyes brimming with the unshed tears of a child who really wants to make known the injustice done unto him.
Carrom’s mouth opened. Then it closed. It opened again, then dropped further open as Rex approached, smelling of Responsibility.
“Well, look who it is,” said Rex.
“Yes! It’s me alright!” said Carrom, leaping to his feet. He chanced a look behind him and witnessed Saomi ducking quickly behind a dilapidated building, whereas Lottie and Clarity had presumably dove off the bridge leading into the colony.
Shulk, ever the better man, glided forward and clapped a hand on Carrom’s shoulder. “We’ve spoken extensively,” he told Rex, with the gentle implication that if Carrom had any more of his buttons pressed he really would detonate. “It’s been a long day for them, and I’m sure they understand.”
“I’m sure they do,” said Rex.
The Liberators’ magnanimous leaders shared a look laden with a whole lot of silent conversation Carrom couldn’t and didn’t want to parse, though it all probably boiled down to: we’ll talk about it later.
“Well, I’d better be off,” said Shulk. “I’m sure Panacea will have some… pointed suggestions.”
Carrom bravely restrained himself from clutching onto Shulk’s sleeve and wailing, since he was an agent of the world whose choices mattered. That train of thought derailed about two seconds after holding eye contact with Rex.
“Look, I’m really sorry,” Carrom blurted out.
“Sorry about what, exactly?” asked Rex.
“Sorry about—”
Er, what was Carrom sorry about? The Enemypedia? That technical logbook of a proposal? Every hairbrained idea passed off to the engineers? There was a whole lot to be sorry about, but Carrom hadn’t yet determined whether or not he was sorry about it all. A lot had been done; not a lot had been accomplished. They had tried to change everything and ended up back where they started.
“I’m sorry for not telling you,” is what Carrom landed on.
Rex was now, rather obviously, trying not to crack a grin. For someone who fussed over expeditions so frequently, his sudden humour was absolutely terrifying.
Carrom paled. “Nobody’s been killed or even maimed,” he babbled, “and the slings—okay, maybe that wasn’t too responsible—but the kids have to have something, right? Consider it a hobby—a carefully supervised hobby! One that doesn’t have any sharp edges, even!”
“Just broken windows and a whole bunch of angry Piranhaxes,” Rex said, amused.
Carrom slammed his mouth shut before he could spout off something that would get him tossed in with those same Piranhaxes, like how there weren’t many windows left to be broken in the first place.
“Look,” said Rex, “it’s obvious to me that you’ve been through the wringer. Put yourself through the wringer, in fact.”
“Tell me about it,” muttered Carrom.
“Every kid’s gotta throw their fists at the world and feel it hit back,” Rex continued sagely. “This world just hits a lot harder and leaves you with less to throw back. Unless you’ve got slings.” Rex made a face that communicated that going forward, anything involving young children firing projectile weapons was best moved into the realm of open honesty.
Carrom’s shoulders drooped. “Yes, sir.”
“And you can stop throwing a fit about keeping secrets. Subtlety’s definitely not your middle name, eh?”
“Probably not, sir.”
“Right. Right. Because Shulk puts on a good face, but some secrets need to be shared.”
“Yes, sir,” Carrom said miserably. Why had they all assumed that wouldn’t be the case, again? Good faith only went so far when it was stupid.
Then, as per usual, Carrom’s brain caught up with his ears. Both were struggling, and in this instance neither could quite process what had just been said.
“You knew?” said Carrom, his pitch spanning an octave and volume raising several orders of decibels.
If Rex knew… if Rex knew, and frankly, if the whole Colony knew, and nobody had bothered to step in, not even after the railgun plucked off a small but significant percent of Aionios’ total land mass…
“Wow, you look stressed. Would it help if I said yes? I should say yes.” Rex cleared his throat and put on his serious face. “Yes,” he said solemnly.
“You really knew,” Carrom said, horrified. “You—I spent weeks losing sleep over this!”
“You did?” One brow arched inquisitively, before the whole expression morphed into something decidedly abashed. Rex offered one directive finger pointed upward. “But I’ve got the feeling there’s been a misunderstanding—”
“Why did nobody stop us?” Carrom shrieked at last.
“That’s the crux of the issue, there,” said Rex. “But if you’ve been trying this long then you already know why.”
I know why, Carrom thought. Of course I know why. I’m not stupid! I’m no moron! It’s not wasted time if it means something, but it’s a bad feeling all the same to know people much stronger and wiser were watching from a distance, waiting for the fall.
Carrom struggled not to scream, with moderate success.
“That’s how it goes.” Rex rested a hand on Carrom’s shoulder, still smiling but with the same kind of exhaustion Shulk carried everywhere. Once time got to you, it got to you. “But you did good, kiddo. Try again tomorrow, alright?”
The very next day Shulk, Rex, and their merry band of heroes set off toward the Black Mountains. Carrom found it odd for a moment how diligent Shulk and Rex were toward the peculiarities of Liberations operations, though he appreciated their recommendation that the ether bombs and all other devices liable to explode be moved further from the Colony.
When they departed it was just another day. And then it wasn’t, for a whole host of complicated reasons. But among the very few people who had seen N materialize briefly at the anti-air battery, nobody could say for certain why he made an appearance.
Carrom felt like he knew, though. When you threw your fists at the world, the world threw them back. But sometimes the world got curious, as tends to happen when humans make it a better place than it was supposed to be.
Human eternity is desperate to be happy.
The world twisted, and suddenly, he was alone. And in that moment, everything came flooding back: the pain of loneliness, the acrid taste of betrayal, the shadows of farewells never received nor given. He sat there in the dark and cried for three days and three nights. When next he woke there was age in his bones and blood in his teeth.
A paradox cannot exist within another paradox. You couldn’t tear the past out of your flesh, no matter how hard you tried. Anything that promised to grant you happiness was fundamentally a lie, because nothing in the world comprised all that you needed—not love, not death, not eternity. Life was ultimately a journey of learning what you were willing to let go. And to live an eternity only to let go of life itself…
When you travelled the world the world also travelled through you. In wandering all over to kill the fear of death you’d never notice the future until it was already there.
Time cannot be stopped. The human spirit would never allow it, nor survive it. In refusing the future there is only the eternally changing present.
So keep running, boy-so-scared-of-the-dark. You never know what’s catching up.
Attempting to fire the recently repaired railgun at a target standing a couple meters away from you was probably not a particularly wise decision. Hamill did it anyway, since the unwelcome stranger was glowing red along the seams and had a big sword. It was practically instinct.
Ether wound, spun, and coalesced. Magnetic fields were drawn in and given direction. A very sharp projectile, many times more lethal than could be delivered from a sling, prepared to be put through a very bad man without drama, without fanfare. Only pure kinetic destruction.
And then something sparked. Something else whined. In a few moments the machine gave the audible dying hum of something gone terribly wrong.
Hamill collapsed to the ground without a sound, though curiously, he was still breathing. N lowered his blade.
“And so you have it,” N said dispassionately. “Abject failure. Wasted time, dreams finally rung hollow. Have you had your fun yet?”
Lucille stepped out from behind the control panel.
Her first thought was to bring her wrench down on the N’s head and see how he reacted when half the contents of his brain were dribbling out his ears. She restrained herself from doing so, given the fact that N was holding a long sword and with those dead eyes he was probably long-time roommates with incredible violence.
“Well, hello to you too,” she said.
N didn’t so much as twitch.
Alright then, Lucille thought. Maybe not all Moebius like running their mouths. Perhaps this one is a little smarter than the others, or maybe he’s been through the wringer so many times that he knows better than to monologue and make a fool of himself. A downfall, it was said, was one part hubris and two parts comedy; clearly this guy didn’t think himself much of a clown. Or perhaps he did, but he was certainly a very tired one. The gig life was rough.
“I see you’ve taken an interest in our machine,” Lucille said instead. “Admittedly, you caught us in a bad moment. But you don’t really think this is it, do you?”
She leaned casually against the now-defunct buttons and switches and felt a pang in her chest. All that work, all that time, all those hopes invested, for a single blast of light…
“There is nothing else for it to be,” said N.
…a single blast of light, but light nonetheless. Of which N’s eyes held none, and of which the future was made. You could ask whether it was good light or bad light, and given the circumstances it was probably wise to ask if being exposed to it for a long time caused any sort of incurable disease, but the fact of the matter was that something had piqued N’s attention.
Things weren’t moving, but they were changing. What sort of paradox was that?
“Then the one who’s delusional is you,” said Lucille. “From what I’ve heard you’re supposed to champion eternity. The endless now. So why do you think one failed prototype is as far as we go?”
Neither N nor Lucille had taken a step closer—this fact surprised both parties more than they’d be willing to admit—but important distance between them had been rapidly closed.
N didn’t tense so much as he stilled. “It is as far as you are permitted to go,” he bit out.
Well, alright, thought Lucille. Now isn’t this strange? Where’s the unhinged, murderous arse I heard so much about? In front of me, obviously, but that’s a weird face to wear when you’ve got no regrets. You could fool an honest person into believing you’ve actually got some.
“Well, that’s the crux of it, isn’t it?” said Lucille. “Looks like to me you’ve made your fair share of bad choices, and now you’re afraid to deal with the consequences. Or… maybe you’re too willing to deal with the consequences, so much so that you can’t deal with anything else. You’d make an awful engineer.”
N’s face was now doing something different. The promise of violence alighted upon his expression. He’d already destroyed the City; what was stopping him from blowing Colony 9 sky-high?
But something was there. Lucille didn’t bother to identify it. She merely pressed the advantage.
“What’s a test without a couple short-circuits? They say people like us—with the goggles and the gloves and all that—live in the moment. That we’re too caught up in our own heads. Well, fair enough. Make a gun sturdy enough, and in a hundred years it’ll be raining war down on some place halfway across the world.”
“You understand, then,” N said, so coldly and suddenly that for a moment Lucille could mistaken him for a wraith of destruction, “that what lies at the heart of humanity is wretched. An insatiable desire for hope, which so quickly dissolves into grief.”
“And… what?” said Lucille, stunned. “You think that’s news to me?”
This must be what Carrom feels all the time, Lucille thought, backing away slowly as N finally found something worth closing the distance. Pretending like you’re the only sane person in the world, except sometimes you have good reason to believe so. Like now, for example.
Oh, you dumb, stupid thing, Lucille couldn’t say, because despite how fitting it would be she liked her limbs where they were. You’ve lived forever but you haven’t lived as long as I have. You think you’re the only person in the world who’s scared out of their mind? Like fear isn’t just some feral animal. You could teach it tricks and have it attack its own reflection but at the end of the day a beast was a beast. It was dumb. I’m beginning to realize just how dumb it could be, and just how important it was to not be the beast.
“Unclog those ears of yours, because I’m only saying this once. I’m an engineer. We build. Everything we make, good or bad, miracle or hellfire, gets passed on. Nothing exists only in one place in time. There will be a tomorrow so long as you live that day like tomorrow.” Lucille bared her teeth. “Pop quiz, then. Between grief and hope, which one does that sound more like to you?”
It was perhaps not the most surprising discovery to find herself lifted off her feet by a hand gripping her collar. Lucille flailed for an appropriate amount of time before realizing that the hand could have been around her neck, or that everything from the neck up wasn’t technically necessary for N to make his point.
She calmed, or at least as much as one can calm when someone is mere inches away from garrotting you.
“You promise to build,” said N, “in the face of destruction.”
“Yup,” croaked Lucille. “That’s the long and short of it.”
“Even when you yourself embody that same destruction?”
Don’t project onto me, you stupid bastard, Lucille didn’t say. She instead wrapped both hands around N’s wrist and sneered. “Especially so.”
However mysterious N’s magnanimity was, it clearly wasn’t sufficient to dissuade him from hurling Lucille across the base of the battery. Bruised, battered, and winded but thoroughly alive, Lucille stumbled to her feet.
“This machine may be broken, and so may that machine up there,” said Lucille, pointing at the dark peaks of the Black Mountains, “but the machine isn’t broken. Do you understand that? The gears will turn; the cogs will align. It’ll all begin again. And when it does it’ll start chasing after you and all your immortal dreams. When it catches up…”
Lucille didn’t feel it necessary to speak any further, partially because her throat was killing her. Still, it was better than being killed by the other thing that could kill her.
And that other thing stared for a long time.
It was only after N dissolved in a shower of purple particulate that Lucille thought for a moment that maybe, maybe, if she had twisted the right way, executed a truly spectacular judo flip, she could’ve tossed the guy into the waters below. The Piranhaxes deserved something after all this time.
Up in Origin people were fighting for the fate of the world.
Down in Colony 9 someone wholly ordinary, mundane, and unspectacular was having a strange dream. One might consider it a contingency plan, a dying scheme, or a mere echo of intent, stretched flat and thin across anyone and everyone who would listen.
The giant falling orb ruined the moment a little, and certainly Georgie would remember none of this in ten years of even in the bleary moments after Saomi shook her awake, saying something about getting to the Armories right now and did you throttle Lucille? I thought we agreed not to do anything stupid, even if she deserves it and various other pressing concerns.
Flying away from certain destruction, Georgie would’ve never guessed that she was one of the very few people to hear the voice of god and one of the last people to do so.
But more uniquely, the voice of god also heard her.
What is man, that thou shouldest magnify him? And that thou shouldest set thine heart upon him? And that thou shouldest visit him every morning, and try him every moment? How long wilt thou not depart from me, nor let me alone till I swallow down my spittle? I have sinned; what shall I do unto thee, O thou preserver of men? Why hast thou set me as a mark against thee, so that I am a burden to myself? And why dost thou not pardon my transgression, and take away my iniquity? For now I shall sleep in the dust; and thou shalt seek me in the morning, but I shall not be.
(I shall, indeed, be something new.)
Why do you struggle on, despite so much fear?
“Our world is one in which the choice not to fight exists only as a distant dream.” Georgie spoke, and knew she would be heard. “We can carve out safe places to grow, quiet places to live—but without the strength to protect them, they’ll all be gone in a flash.”
Yes. That is how it goes.
“So we’ve got to teach the ones that’ll come after us. We’ve got to teach them when to raise arms and defend the lives they’ve nurtured and will nurture, and how to live in a world where everything, surely, will one day come to an end. To be able to fight with your entire being in defense of a choice-worthy existence, even if that time is finite—well, that’s what being alive means, right?”
But is such an existence not a horror? I cannot conceive of a life in which an individual forced to bear such a burden looks salvation in the eye and declares: no, I refuse you.
“Salvation?” repeated Georgie, with the surprise of someone who never bought into the fanfare. “I mean… sure, that sounds nice. I wouldn’t mind rest after all is said and done.”
There. You see? At the core of every human there is the unceasing and desperate desire to escape the trifles of mortal existence. The fear, the pain, the wretched eternity of uncertainty. A history of endless repetition, made bearable only through endless lies. There is nothing more pitiful in this world than the chemical monotony of humanity forced to contend with its own existence.
“I disagree,” said Georgie. “I can think of something worse.”
Name it.
“Pretending that salvation’s all we’re worth.”
Silence.
You cannot hope to comprehend what you lack.
“Maybe not,” said Georgie, “but I can try to appreciate what I have, as I am and as I will be. And I think it’s enough. So let me ask a question, O Lord. Salvation and this life I have are mutually exclusive, aren’t they?”
Not often is a god lost for words, and never for lack of trying. But consider a god whose core is truth—the untouched, raw essence of every possibility, every probability, everything that has been and will be; the finest essence of the mundane horrors that drives mortal life up, up, and further beyond, out across the stars and, when even that claim fails, across the boundaries of space and time, propelled into motion by hubris and a desperate hope to become as gods, as if gods were of any worth to begin with. Everywhere where humans venture, they forge homes out of mud and blind hope. Never has it been enough.
One can imagine, then, the impossibility of such an absurd claim: that not only is the present now perhaps not ideal but sufficient, but that the ultimate gift a god can bestow—that which cannot and will never be, that elusive salvation—is a poor alternative.
And so: silence.
“Thought so,” said Georgie, finally. “Between the dream that pretends as if everything’s okay and the reality that knows it’s not, I’ll choose my pick.”
You will learn regret. Viscerally. As if it is all that comprises you. How do you still fail to see sense? I offer you freedom. A place beyond the shackles into which you and all your descendants are born. I offer you rest. Beautiful dreams. Light.
“But that’s for after we’re dead and done, you see? That’s why we learn how to live before then. If you’re a god then there’s no doubt you get it. People are people. The only thing humanity can’t outrun is itself.”
You understand, then, that there is no future where humans join as one. Everywhere you go, there will be grief—grief and darkness, utter annihilation. And so it is proclaimed. And thus it shall be. Where is the shame in venturing boldly into a future where not a single soul suffers?
Georgie tried to assemble her thoughts. It was hard work, the sort that can only be accomplished when you stride through a world that works at every turn to erase your existence by holding onto those who have found a place for you, despite everything.
“Even if a future like that does manifest…” Georgie took a breath. “No. No, I don’t think it will. Everyone who lives long enough comes to understand that, I think: that no matter where we go, so long as we’re human, that future will never come to pass. And that’s exactly why it’s important that we live believing as if it will, not living as if it is. So that we pass the dream onto those who come after us. So that they, too, will understand humanity is inextricable from itself, but also that there is so much beauty in living regardless.”
And Georgie looked up, up, far up—beyond the false stars, the false dreams, all the falsehoods manifested as truths. And she looked truth in the eye and found its humanity, precisely in the dreams that constituted its inhumanity.
“So, liar in the dark, I refuse you. Take your dream far away from ours. For this one fleeting moment—this one fraction of a second you call life—we’ll struggle on. You’ve only shown me that all we are is human. Nothing more. If not that, then we’re nothing at all.”
Alpha was silent for a long while. When he finally spoke again the godhood had vanished from his voice like mist on the wind.
“Then be nothing,” he said quietly.
“Gladly,” Georgie said, and woke up.
And then the world broke, but gently.
It was generally agreed after the fact that world-breaking events could be surprisingly subtle when they wanted to, and you hear that, folks? Subtle! If I see you shovelling scrap into the shape of something even vaguely resembling a gun I’ll show you exactly how we pummelled that dragon and more! And put down that book—unless you plan on using it as cheap building material, I don’t want to hear it! And once all is said and done, and only then, we can think about railguns and antimatter weapons and topple-locking. Are we clear? Yes ma’am! Good! Then move!
Time would find a way. The gears would turn.
And the world rolled on to morning.