250, 2/2

Erick stepped out of the Abyss onto white stone, next to Kromolok.

His first inclination was to look behind them, because they had gone through a [Gate] and ended up in front of a standing armed building, filled with people. Erick rapidly decided the building and the people therein were not a threat.

It was an entire research city up here filled with wrought of various kinds. Most of them were obviously either researchers or guards, and there weren’t a whole lot of them, but they did exist; this place was constantly guarded by living forces. Those living forces glanced at Erick and Kromolok, briefly going on high alert, but then rapidly deescalating. No problems here! Just the Wizard visiting the Vault with the Head Inquisitor.

They had been warned ahead of time, for instead of mumbling to each other about the pure oddities of what was happening right now, they were quick to resume their normal guard duties, which chiefly seemed to be viewing their targets from far away or standing at attention, or walking their patrols this way or that.

What they guarded lay ahead.

Erick and Kromolok stood on a cliff, overlooking the Vaults.

The worker city had all the aspects of a real barracks city, with some nice trees and people on the streets walking from there to there. The Vaults, proper, were not that at all. It was impressive in the mundanity of it all. Down below the cliff under Erick’s feet, for a hundred kilometers or some other stretch of space, cubic buildings of various sizes stood like gravesites. Most of the buildings were maybe a hundred meters cubed but some of them were much larger. All of them were separated by streets, all of it done in a grid, all of it either white or off-white stone. No windows. Only solid stone. Diffuse light coated everything, everywhere, allowing no shadows at all, while extra light was painted onto the big gold numbers that adorned every corner of every Vault, marking each cube from every direction.

Magic in this land was still crushed down to nothing, but Erick’s artifacts still functioned.

He saw some Red Sparks here and there in the Vault but none of the Sparks looked too egregious. Just random floaters here and there—

Scratch that.

There was one Vault down the way, maybe twenty kilometers in and ten to the right. That one was suspicious.

Erick pointed. “What is in that one?” He squinted, trying to read the number off of the Vault’s corners. “122-571.”

Kromolok eyed Erick. “… A double memetic threat, kept in stasis through the interactions of each other.”

“Ah.” Erick lied, “That must be what I am sensing.” He moved on. “Which one is the ship?”

Kromolok eyed Erick for a moment longer, then he moved on. He stepped to the side, toward a staircase, saying, “There are multiple ships, actually. All of them are kept in storage this way.”

– – – –

The first ship was a thing of sleek silver metal and metal splashes that looked nothing at all like a ‘stereotypical’ spaceship. The ‘ring ship’ was about sixty meters across and rested in a simple, hundred-meter cube of a room. Kromolok had peeled back a lot of the restrictions in the room, so Erick was fully able to mana sense and experience the ship with all of his senses.

And Erick felt his heart pump hard as he learned an uncountable number of things just by viewing the swirled-silver machine. It wasn’t a gate, but holy shit, it probably could do that if it wanted. And that was just the start.

“Oh my gods,” Erick said as he stepped forward. “This means people use magic outside of Veird.”

Kromolok softly said, “Yes. We’re not sure what kind of magic, though.”

Because of the lingering Red Sparks upon the machine, Erick knew what kind of magic was out there; the exact kind that the Red Sparks didn’t want anyone to learn. Revelation upon revelation dawned within Erick and he struggled to keep up with all of them, so he went through what he saw, and how it must work, in an orderly manner.

First, the shape of the spaceship. All the rest of Erick’s thoughts extended from that first oddness.

The base ‘ship’ was a silver ring around 1 meter thick and 60 meters wide. It rested above the ground due to large grips of what were clearly a part of the stone structure of the building, and not the ship itself. The silver ring of the ship was solid silver metal, with a whole bunch of ‘splash-like’ silver metal parts that looked like it was almost flowing, stretching up and down from the ring, like it was crawling over an invisible orb that would have existed in the center of the ‘ship’. It almost looked like an art project, but Kromolok said it was a spaceship, and Erick absolutely believed him, but mostly he believed the Red Sparks lingering on the runic structures inside the metal.

The Red Sparks did not want people understanding ways out of its power, and this was one way to get out from its power.

The runic structures inside the meter-thick base ring, located several centimeters underneath the silver metal, were too dense to be understood, but they were runic structures, for sure. Maybe it was better to say they were like several different crystalline structures all overlapping each other. There was no circuitry. There were no electrical parts. There was no need for that sort of mundane shit. But this stuff certainly was ‘circuitry’ of a magic sort. Mana flowed through the interior crystals, and even off-gassed from the structures, forming a haze in the air that the Red Sparks devoured.

That was produced mana.

It was not siphoned mana, or mana transformed from the environment. That was new mana being made by the ship. It was a living ship… Or at least it produced its own mana. Like a cultural artifact? Hmm. No. ‘Living ship’ seemed more correct.

Erick asked, “Why not let its mana production get subsumed by the Script?”

Rozeta stepped down into the room, saying, “Because then this mana would be distributed to all the rest of Veird, and we don’t do that. For what it is worth, it seems about as neutral a mana as I’ve ever seen, but we don’t allow anything strange into Veird’s manasystems, and especially not strange mana from living ships.” She added, “Also; Hello, Erick.”

Erick smiled. “Hello, Rozeta.” He gestured to the machine. “Is it operable?”

“Not that we’re aware. I’m not letting you play around with it overmuch either. We don’t know what it does, only how it used to work. It used to fly around quite well, but the original pilot died, and though she left instructions on how to pilot it and that woman’s friends used to be able to fly it back then, it is a living machine, and the living machine doesn’t like anyone else touching it. Everyone who tries, dies.”

“That’s fine. This is a lot of information anyway. I never expected to be able to take a ship with me. Do you have any idea how the crossed crystals work?”

Rozeta frowned a little bit, thinking if she wanted to say anything, then thinking about a lot more than that. She asked, “Will you tell me why you don’t want people to mind read you?”

“Would that I could, but that would be a bad idea.”

“You understand how worrying that is.”

Erick nodded. “I do understand that. All I can really tell you is that I am not doing anything major for a while, and I’m probably going to pull back from rescues from beyond the Black Gate, as well. Solomon will be taking over a lot of that. Since you’re here, though; I want to help him become a Wizard through the use of the Lifeblood Heart. There’s a good handful of things to discuss with you about all that, but at the start, there’s the idea of grabbing a Void Well from the Dark, or a Grand Cleanser to control the mana around the Heart, or asking you to maybe work out some sort of… Release valves across all of Veird, or something… Not quite sure how that would work, but the idea is to put the Heart in orbit around the Core, and lay down a track of Void for it to follow while also pressuring it from the outside to stay inside. There’s a lot to work with there.”

Rozeta raised an eyebrow at the mention of the Heart. “We have a plan and you have stumbled upon a few key aspects of that plan, but not their full nature, of which we would be keeping private, especially since you have been exposed to a disruptive meme.”

“Fair enough. I’m going to give birth to Ophiel and Yggdrasil before we try for the Heart, though. So maybe in a month or two for the Heart.”

“That’s a fine timetable. How about 45 days to prepare for it?”

“Sounds good!” Erick smiled, asking, “Now the runic structure of this ship? The crystalline overlapping parts, that look like several grains of crystal all overlapping, somehow. Is it some sort of—” Erick had been about to say ‘quantum overlapping, or whatever’, to start that whole conversation, but apparently that was too close to what would eventually make the Red Sparks vulnerable. The air filled with a few more sparks, all of them multiplying and spilling out from every edge of space. In his excitement, Erick had fallen off his own Benevolent Path for a moment, it seemed. So he backpedaled, “Some sort of physical overlap?”

Calling what those crystals were doing a ‘physical overlap’ was completely unhelpful.

The Red Sparks retreated.

And Rozeta said, “We’re not quite sure how it works, only that it doesn’t work anymore, and that the neutral, unknown mana coming off of it is rather boring. It’s still quite alive, but it’s hibernating. The silver metal is just silver, but with some organic compounds strewn throughout. The Silverthorn Oaks that grow down in Nergal in that reserve and in the Gardens of Ar’Kendrithyst and a few other Geodes are similar in structure to the silver metal of this ship. So whatever made it, grew it.”

Erick smiled a little, looking over the ship. “This is awesome, you know. There’s life out there— Well duh. I already knew that. But seeing their magitech is… It’s a lot. A lot of good things. Can I have some of the silver?”

Rozeta said, “The silver disintegrates when it is removed from the ship.”

“Ahh. That’s a no, then.” Erick looked over the ring ship once more, then said, “Mind if I touch it? Use some Particle Sense Class Ability to poke around a moment? I don’t have to actually touch it, though; just aura?”

Rozeta leveled a glare at Erick. “What did I just say, Erick. It kills anyone who tries to touch it. This is why I came down here. Don’t touch it.”

Erick surrendered. “Fine fine fine! Heard and understood. Onto the next one!”

Rozeta sighed in relief, then said, “Don’t touch any of the other ones, either. And now, I must depart. Farewell, Erick.”

“See you later.”

– – – –

The second ship was much more what Erick was expecting. It was something he would have found in any sci-fi television show made back on Earth, and though Erick didn’t watch a whole lot of that back then, it was impossible to be a living person in America and not develop a few preconceptions about what a spaceship should look like.

This particular ship was not whole. It had been struck with some sort of power in several locations, exploding metal and other parts away from the main structure, leaving great holes in the ship. It was a shame.

Other than the holes, it was a boxy rectangle with a bunch of viewing ports and wires in the walls and a plant growing room that was devoid of anything living and bed rooms and mechanical systems that Erick didn’t understand at all, except in the broadest of strokes. There were also things that were like the ring ship’s multi-crystals stuck here and there within the wired system of the ship, almost like lymph nodes in a body, but this ship was not alive at all; no mana exuded off of it at all. These crystals were clearly some sort of magical system and solid state computers of some sort, though… probably. The crystals here had some Red Sparks on them, but barely any at all. There was something to be discovered here, but not much.

Still though, it was very high-tech.

Erick floated in the air near the rear of the ship, looking at the massive engine exhaust ports, or whatever they were called. “Someone should be working on this. Trying to make this thing functional.” Erick looked down to Kromolok, who had chosen not to fly around as Erick investigated the ship. “Have you all tried to repair any of this stuff?”

“No. All ways off this planet were deemed too high of a risk versus reward, what with Melemizargo being Melemizargo.”

“Understandable,” Erick said, floating back to the ground. “Have you all had discussions about that decision in any recent years?”

“Nothing beyond a reaffirmation that we’re not ready to explore space, but if we manage to get 50 more years of peaceful, calm growth, we’ve agreed to revisit the issue in a large way.”

Erick thought about that as he looked at the ship. “… Any interesting metal here?”

“We have samples of the hull for testing, if you want them. Adamantium is still superior, but adamantium needs to be exposed to at least some level of mana every ten years to maintain structural integrity, or else the mana-made alloy ceases to be a cohesive object.”

Erick’s eyes went wide. “I didn’t know that!” His brain raced away with him, and he instantly asked, “That 10 year timeframe is solid? What about when exposed to the rays of the sun? Cosmic rays? Extreme Light, etcetera.”

“As long as the level of Extreme Light does not exceed the level of ambient other-mana by any more than 5 times over, then that timeframe of 10 years to degradation holds. At 6-times over 10 years becomes 10 months. It’s a rather precipitous drop in integrity.” Kromolok said, “Outside of the Edge of the Script or a contained mana production system or a bunch of other nuances, adamantium will disintegrate under the sun in a matter of months. Still pretty good, though. Plenty of time to fix it.”

“… Hmm.” Erick thought. He asked, “The levels of solar rays versus, say, the ambient mana produced by a good hundred slimes?”

“A self-sustaining population of slimes is fine, so you could have around 10 and be good. But as exposure to the sun’s Killing Rays is not a uniform thing, I wouldn’t try it with less than a thousand slimes.”

“… Yet another thing I did not know.” Erick glanced at the increase in Red Sparks in the air and decided to end that line of questioning there. “What’s the final ship look like?”

– – – –

It was a simple disk about ten meters wide, half a meter thick, and solid white. It was also another magic ship, filled with dense, quantum-entangled multi-directional crystals that were also filled with Red Sparks. It off-gassed mana just like the first ship did, but in a whole lot lower quantities. The first ring ship gave off what was effectively a thick air all the time. This thing only had a mirage near it, and that mirage faded in the [Cleanse] of the room.

All three ship rooms had a [Cleanse] spell active at all times, making sure the mana production of these ships did not affect anything else, or be allowed to build up. All the rooms had a similar system, actually.

“So aside from the vast amounts of xenological information in the other two ships, and maybe even in this one, this one is boring and it’s not even alive like the first one.” Erick asked, “Does it work at all?”

“It does not work.”

Erick asked, “Want to talk about the histories around each item?”

“Not really,” Kromolok said, honestly.

“I can’t really blame you for being distrustful right now, Kromolok, but come on man. I’m still me.” Erick said, “If I could let you in on what is happening, I very much would. But that would be detrimental to you and yours, and you would not be able to understand me anyway.”

“I can understand anti-memes just fine, Erick. I am the person who comes up with a great deal of the meme and antimeme countermeasures here on Veird. I feel like you are being dismissive of me and it is making it hard to trust you.” Kromolok said, “It makes me feel that you have encountered something and it has changed you.”

“Encountering world-changing information will do that to a person—”

The Red Sparks crowded.

And Erick sighed. They were near a rollback, and that was frustrating. He had probably been rollbacked every time he talked to Kromolok, hadn’t he? Because, of course, now that he was here, Erick recognized that since he was investigating an anti-meme, he should have come to Kromolok or Kromolok should have come to him long before now. It only made logical sense to talk to the man who was in charge of all the anti-meme and anti-antimeme countermeasures in the world, right? … Or maybe Ascendant Prime had something to do with all that, too.

Now why hadn’t Erick spoken to Ascendant Prime before now, either?

It was easy to make excuses after the fact; Poi was there, Ascendant Prime never showed himself most of the time, Kromolok was more Erick’s contact for this sort of world-affecting stuff, etcetera. But looking back on it, Erick should have been talking to Ascendant Prime, Kromolok, and even Phagar, really.

Erick had only been at this for, what, 2 days? Hard to tell with all the rollbacks. But as for the anti-meme itself, Erick should have been talking to those very qualified people before now… And yet, if he had, he would have fallen off this God Pact world, wouldn’t he?

So of course, the one that survived was the one who didn’t do all that.

Well shit.

The Red Sparks were playing at the edges of this God Pact world, making sure no one ever found out about it, and rolling back when people got closer to it. But maybe it was time to talk to the other gods about this sort of stuff. Erick was more immune now, wasn’t he? Maybe he could—

Red Sparks flashed.

– – – –

Kromolok stared at Erick, saying, “It makes me feel that you have encountered something and it has changed you.”

Erick sighed, and repeated what he had said earlier, “Encountering world-changing information will do that to a person.”

“Yes, but whatever information you encountered has changed you for the worse.”

Kromolok was staring at Erick, probably half a step away from truly taking [Mind Control] of the situation.

And that hurt.

Erick said, “I would accuse you of being too paranoid, Kromolok, but paranoia is a good thing sometimes. I’m rather paranoid right now, too. Mostly, I’m paranoid that you have touched my mind and been very careful, not realizing that you are dancing around something that will literally not let you know about it, and the second that you do, you are dead.”

Even after Erick said the words, he had no idea why he had been allowed to say them, for surely the Red would have rolled him back. He had basically implied the true existence of the anti-meme, and that was too much information—

Erick realized something bad.

They weren’t in the God Pact world anymore.

There should have been a rollback, but there had been no need for one because Erick had fallen off the knife-edge of chance and straight into death.

In that realization, the Script slipped away from him. The Script was gone. Erick felt it leave him like a soft sigh in a bedroom. Kromolok had no idea, but he would surely notice the loss soon, too. But Kromolok didn’t need to read Erick’s mind to know something was happening far away; he could see Erick’s face.

Primal Lightning was eating away at the edges of the world already.

Erick did not panic, even as Benevolence began to seep away from his body in fits and spurts, erupting from his skin and pushing back all other mana. Kromolok started to say something, his eyes going wide, tendrils of thought ripping out of his own body and plunging into Erick—

And then Kromolok knew.

His eyes went wide, and defeat closed in.

There was no need for the Red Sparks to rollback this world, because it was already winning.

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

But Erick had hope. As white lightning flooded out of him like soft, sparking light, touching everything and harming nothing, the world transformed into green life and brilliant futures even in the face of The End. Perhaps all this life in this tiny section of a piece of the world would allow it more futures, in a Many-Worlds sort of way, allowing it some time to stave off the end. Erick wasn’t sure, but the world certainly wasn’t collapsing nearly as fast as it had when Erick had been talking to Sininindi.

It was still falling fast though. The Core of Veird was gone. How much could truly be left?

It had only been a single minute so far.

Erick had afforded Kromolok all the time he could, and this place was guarded against Time Magics of all sorts, for now, so he couldn’t give him more without triggering the alarms himself. When the [Ward]s failed under Primal Lightning, though…

“Kromolok.” Erick spoke, “What is the one thing I can take from the Vaults back to the God Pact world?”

Kromolok had a thousand things to say to Erick, but there was no time.

Most of his words did not need to be said, though, for Erick understood.

The sudden loss. The personal failure to guard against what he had spent his entire life guarding against. The unknown danger beyond the Edge of the Script all this time, and yet already here, on Veird. The depth of the problem. The fact that Primal Lightning still existed at all.

And then he moved on.

Kromolok stared at Erick, while the room of this final platform ship filled with greenery and white lightning. Moss and mushrooms sprouted around his white metal legs. He did not step above the growth; he accepted his fate even as vines twirled up his legs.

“I apologize for pushing you at all. You should do more to navigate that better; less poking, more softness.” His admonition finished, Rozeta’s Head Inquisitor said, “Nothing can be removed from the Vaults in a timely manner. Even the end of this world will not allow that to happen.”

“It’s probably for the best,” Erick said, the ground giving way under his natural mana generation, like a helicopter brushing grasses to the side and yet a lot more than that. A lot of weirdness was going on, so the floor literally transforming into grass was not too surprising. It was kinda odd to not have his skin breaking apart and his body destroying itself through his mana flow, either, but then, of course, the Script was probably holding him down back there on the God Pact world. Even under ‘no-Script’ dungeon spaces, the Script was still there, somehow. Erick wasn’t sure why he didn’t recognize the ease at which his body naturally exuded mana back when he was talking to Sininindi at that other Bad End, but he certainly recognized that fact now. As he floated there, above the spreading life, while Kromolok continued to accrue greenery, looking up at him beseechingly, Erick asked, “Please give me something, Kromolok—”

Explosions rocked the outside world, and Erick’s lightning greenery suddenly crumbled away the roof of this spaceship hangar. His mana pressure pushed away all falling stone, revealing the world outside.

The walls of the Vaults flickered prismatic, seeming like an entire stone sky lighting up as something struck the outside like a violent child tapping at the glass of an aquarium, scaring all the fish.

The [Ward]s were failing.

Hidden things in the Vaults were already escaping, going on sudden rampages, or twisting the world in ways it was not meant to be twisted, or fighting each other, or feasting. The Vault protection squads atop the cliff were trying to contain the sudden damage, sending people flying around out there, shooting spells at the escaped dangers to the world—