[ Vers. 1293898.39 

Gate opened.
Receiving load..........
Load received.
3 new units detected.
Initiating. 
///EVACUATE AREA NOW/// ]

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[Bootloading
Good morning!]

Receptors are a strange thing. They show the same information eyes do, but instead of being limited by refraction through a flexible lens covered in water, they pull in light only once they’ve fully booted and calibrated. Widget thought about that as she was blind for a few very disquieting moments. She never shut off completely, preferring power-saving mode to being literally powerless.

Widget loaded in the huge circular room around her. It was unlit, save for ambient light, and flooded with two feet of dark, murky water, in which she herself was submerged, along with notebooks, office supplies, crates and two deactivated robots who stood in front of her. One of them was a small green-haired girl, looking about ten years old, with one good eye and a beret that was too big for her. The other was a tall man with long white hair and teal eyes. They were styled after pre-splice humans, but not in such a way that it hid their mechanical nature- facts which struck her as quite strange.

When Widget stood up, three rectangular boxes she didn’t realize she was holding fell out of her lap and into the water. “Ah! Shit!” The girlbot hurriedly plucked them out of the drink by their individual handles before truly looking at them for what they were. “Wait... what... why are these...?” She looked up to the deactivated robots, as if to beg answers from them, but nothing would come forth from those motionless mouths.

It was around this time she noticed that she’d awakened in the middle of the room. The object she’d been propped up against was a large and obelisk-like terminal. On the very simple display screen, one phrase blinked:

[Transfer Completed.]

She stared at it for what felt like minutes, baffled. “Transfer? Transfer what? Where??” Another look around the room showed an exit, and not much else. “What’s going on...?”

Widget’s wet footsteps echoed through the hallway as she held the boxes close to her chest. Her face illuminated what looked to be some cross between a military base and research facility. All signage had been long worn away with the passage of time, and hundreds of gallons of water probably hadn’t helped. What facility was this? Stuttgart? Okinawa?

The facility was maze-like. Knowing what Nhilus’ general layout schematics tended to be like should have given her an advantage in finding her way around, but it was no help at all here. “Swear I’ve been here before...” Widget noted. “Wait.” Her foot hit something, and she felt around under the water. “... Ah! Ah ha!” She reached underneath the oily black liquid, grabbed a handle and yanked it as hard as she could. It took a few tries, but after some serious work, it finally, reluctantly slid open. “AH!” Widget found herself sucked into the current as the water in the room rushed down into the hole she’d opened, and try as she might, she fell down the access tube, banging against ladder rungs and smoothed wall the whole way down. It was a seriously loud THUD when she hit bottom, rained on by the filthy water above. 

“Ungh..... ugh!” She finally managed to gather up the boxes and get away from the nasty current, clutching them to her dented, wet body. “God, dude, this is so heinous.” Thankfully, the water was emptying into drainage grates rather than flooding this room, which was really more of an access passageway- something like a combination power relay and sewer system. With no other good options, she followed the passageway all the way to its termination point, kicking the panel open until she finally found something useful: A machine shop. 

“Alright. This is something. I can work with this,” Widget resolved to herself, scanning the control panel. “Power... power... where’s the damn... power?” She made a face of consternation. “Wait, there- no, that’s. What? ‘Hydro?’ But.” She puzzled this over. “But why?”

Confusion was the order of the day, but the automa decided that having possible access to answers was more important than being efficient. She threw the levers to power on what she successfully deduced was a hydroelectric plant. She’d operated them before for various schemes Nhilus had cooked up, but the man had never used one to power his facilities in her memory. This must have been a base she’d never gotten anywhere close to. Regardless, the turbines spun, the water flowed and the facility came to life, old lights coming on and devices going through their diagnostic boot-up routines.

It was a short-lived high; this computer system was as basic as it got, containing no data logs, journal entries or even a hint as to what it was for. Furthermore, it was very advanced but also very simple, in a way that baffled her. “What were they doing at this chapter? Ugh... whatever. At least I can get a read on these while I’m here.” She lined up the identical boxes on the counter, spinning them around so their ports were accessible, and fished some cables from underneath the console. To her great annoyance, the configuration was different, forcing her to break the terminus, split the cable and individually plug them into their specific slots.

Widget hesitated before turning on the device. “... Alright. I guess it’s time, then.” 

Power thrummed into the smaller device’s screen. Components whirred. Information reflected off of Widget’s face. Her expression was nothing short of shocked. “... No way...”

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[Bootloading
Good morning!]

Receptors are a strange thing. There are visual, audio, tactile, even olfactory. They don’t load in all at once, but they transfer information instantly, before decision-making parts are completely filled in. They saw the ceiling, then sat up, catching a glimpse of their feet. They stared at their hands, taken aback.

It was then that Widget came into frame, wearing a thick apron. “Welcome to the waking world, kiddo!”

Aren Tenthwood stared at his black and yellow face screen in the reflection of Widget’s and gasped with lungs he no longer had. His mind exploded with a hundred questions, and yet, all he was able to manage was: “What... what the heck is goin’ on?!” He jumped up from the slanted table. “Am I dreaming?!” He slapped himself, which reported a loud clang. “Oof! W-Widget! What did you dooooo?!”

“Aren! Aren!” She reached out and grabbed him by the shoulders. “Take it easy, bro. I don’t know how this happened, but you got... converted into an Automa somehow.”

“Oh wow...” he marveled. “Ooh, I bet I could do last night’s trig homework in my head now! Just divide the- HHGGHHNFH!” He jerked this way and that, holding his head and knocking a wrench off the counter.

“Whoa, hey, take it easy!” Widget cautioned. “Remember what I said about clocking? It’s bad. Don’t do it.”

“Oof...” He leaned against the panel, in a daze. “That’s... t-that’s... so weird...”

“Yeah, you’re telling me,” Gren said, examining her hands and listening to the tiny servo whines with each flexing motion. She, too, had a yellow-on-black face screen, and Widget had obviously used similar parts to build frames for both of them. They had black components with lots of yellow piping to reinforce their frames, and all in all, they didn’t look too dissimilar to how they did when inked.

“Whooooa...” Aren experimentally touched Gren’s face, then arms, then chest, and got an annoyed face for his efforts. “Oh whoops! S-Sorry!” When he turned around, however, she grabbed his posterior and smirked in petty vengeance. “Gah!”

“Yeah, they’ll be fine,” Widget determined with a smirk. She cleaned the grease off of her fingers with a rag. “Two down, one to go.” Her gaze settled on Shelly.

The butterfly was much more ornate than the other two, being made of either glass or plastic or some combination of both molded to fit inside of a metal mesh that framed it all.The orange-colored lubrication that ran through her various joints was visible in the clear piping, and amusingly, a large store of it floated in her giant glass breasts like a pair of lava lamps. Widget took one of the rectangular boxes she’d awakened with from the bench, walked around behind the slanted worktable, and shoved it into the back of the Shelly frame’s head with no real finesse.

The lava-lamp butterfly came to life like a beautiful glass sculpture imbued magically with a soul, her antennae flicking this way and that. She, like the others, looked down at herself, at her hands, then the others. Her eyes squinted with great consternation, then intrigue. “I’m a robot.”

Widget nodded with a smile. “You got it.”

Shelly’s head turned precisely in several directions, looking at various strange odds and ends, then Widget, then Gren and Aren, who had taken to looking back at her. “..... We’re in an alternate universe.”

All three of her friends did a double take, completely taken aback. “W-... Say what??” Gren puzzled.

She gestured in front of herself with her shiny glass hands. “The giant blue hand was obviously some kind of interdimensional being, possibly inkling, and before our appearance here, said something to the effect of testing our mettle- therefore, we’ve been placed into a world outside our own that nonetheless uses technology and language native to Earth which is too astronomically unlikely to be anything else.” She stood up from the work table. “It’s like, simple deduction.”

Widget blinked dumbly. “Wow. Uh, alright. Well... like... I don’t have a better explanation, so uh. I’ll just defer to you on this one, dude.” She hefted a box the size of a car battery. “Here, lemme load you up real quick.”

Aren looked on in curiosity as Widget fed several starburst-sized gray and yellow squares into the back of Shelly’s head. “What’re those??”

“This place is real weird- I couldn’t find a nice, simple fusion core to pop into your frames, so I had to install this thing that uses these little battery packs. From what I can tell, they’re fairly universal, and they’re supposed to last a while on one charge... but keep it in mind.” She bolted upright. “Oh! Dude! I almost forgot!”

“Like, what is it??” Shelly pursued Widget as she trotted off toward the ladder.

“These two other ‘bots I found when I got here! I wanted to see if I could get them running too!”

It was a short journey up the rungs and down the hallway- now decidedly less flooded- that took them toward the room Widget had awoken in. Sure enough, the tall man and the one-eyed girl were still there- now fallen to the floor, having been swept over by the rush of water.

“Heeeey...” Gren marveled. “They look like Jacent!”

“Yeah, weird, huh? Help me help ‘em up, wouldja?”

Widget and her friends managed to get both robots into upright, standing positions once more, after which the beetle-bot pulled out cartridge after expended power cartridge. After slipping in three each, exhausting their supply, the two deactivated droids hummed to life with a strange boot-up sound not unlike a phase-shifted synthesizer chord. They opened their eyes, looked around, locked eyes with Widget’s group, and the small one gasped. “Ferro! Look!”

The tall one seemed surprised. “Gamma? Oh. Hello.”

‘Gamma’ looked displeased. “You didn’t think it was gonna work at all! I knew it!” She turned to the others. “But look, but look! I was right!”

“And I’m sure you’ll never let me hear the end of it,” he conceded. “Uhm. Hi. I’m Ferro. This is Gamma. We, uh.” He struggled for words. 

“Summoned you!” Gamma supplied excitedly.

Aren looked up slowly at Shelly. “From a... parallel... universe...?”

“That’s the idea~!” Gamma beamed. 

Shelly looked over toward the monolith that Widget had woke up next to. “Our bodies must totally be in that thing then, probably attached to these frames via remote neuropathy or some junk.”

Ferro looked lost. “To be honest, I didn’t think it was possible... just more of the Caretaker’s nonsense...” He suddenly looked up. “Uh. Why are the lights on??”

Widget shrugged. “Oh, yeah, the power was off. I turned on the hydro generators to get this place going.”

Ferro and Gamma looked as if she’d admitted to murder. “Oh no. What have you done?!”

“What??” Widget asked, clearly confused. It was then that they heard distant steps. Heavy ones. Metal on metal.

“Uh-ooohhhh...” Gamma intoned. “H-Hurry! We have to get to the pipes!” Widget, Shelly, Gren and Aren followed the girl and her compatriot as they made a mad dash through the hall, down a ladder, into several access hatches and dropping down into a large pipeline. “We’re not safe yet, hurry, hurry!!”

The group redoubled their efforts as they sprinted down the pipe, passing rusted door after door. Ferro took a turn after what felt like entirely too much running, opening a vault-style door, ushering them in and closing it with great effort. It made a pressurized hiss, and he sighed with relief. “Finally.” A muffled boom sounded from outside. “And just in time.” 

He shook his head and walked into what seemed to be some strange combination of living space and bunker. There were strange panels and access hatches all over the walls, kitschy junk littered everywhere, and the only things that resembled beds were plastic slabs tilted against the wall with metal contacts at several points. Aren marveled at it all. “Is this your home? Where are the bedrooms?? And what’s going on out there???”

“It’s a patrol, which we’re gonna leave behind, riiiight-” she pounded a big red button with her fist, causing another pneumatic hiss as the entire thing felt like it was moving. “Now!”

The kids marveled as they looked out a glass hatch, watching themselves pass tons and tons of other, similar living pods in an absolutely massive transport pipe at speed. “Whoa...” their digitized voices spoke in unison.

“So.” Ferro leaned against the wall. “You know who we are. Who on earth are you?”

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The airy whizz of pneumatic motion was a constant- not unlike the sensation of flying, married to the strange acoustics of being in a vacuum. 

It took some time to fully recount the names of Widget’s friends, the basics of where they came from and the circumstances that led to their appearing. Gren, Aren and Shelly were pleasantly surprised to be able to summon their inklings, though it seemed that they weren’t drawing any prana from them. This, of course, made sense, and was troubling- though it was a problem that had to be put on the back burner, for there were many other concerns. 

“So, you guys have kind of a uniform going on,” Widget noticed, looking at the two of them. “I’m guessing you’re part of some kind of... resistance cell? Who are we running from?”

Ferro and Gamma looked at each other. “Oh. Yeah, I guess once upon a time that was true. We fought against the tyranny of the Administrator. That was before everyone was considered an outlaw.”

Gamma nodded, looking reflective. “When we finally had everyone on our side, the uniform didn’t mean anything anymore.”

“Who’s the Administrator??” Aren asked.

Ferro looked momentarily stuck on how to describe them. “I mean... he’s the one in charge. The one who runs it all. The Administrator has top-level control.” He paused. “Over everything.”

“Over... what?” Shelly questioned. “The whole world??”

They nodded in the affirmative. The gravity of the situation increased drastically. “So where are w-” 

~THOOM~

The group slammed into the wall at speed as the living pod was brought to a sudden stop. It was a crash that would have easily ended the lives of anyone who wasn’t made of metal.

A booming voice echoed from outside. “YOU ARE GUILTY OF USING POWER.”

“Slag!” Ferro cursed. “They knew we were coming!”

“YOU WILL BE TAKEN TO A RECYCLING CENTER.”

Given their present predicament, there was nothing about that sentence that didn’t terrify everyone present. “Quick! Through here!” Gamma urged, pulling up a floor panel and ushering everyone into the space below it. “Hurry!!”

The resultant explosive decompression of that section fo the housing pod burst the entire party across the vacuous expanse of pipe and toward an access door, which they all scrambled into. The scant look back at their pursuer revealed something monstrous, more like a mountain than a man, and made completely of metal. The door was shut before anyone could look too long, but it surely looked at them. “C’mon! We’ve got to keep moving!” Ferro cried. “I don’t want to take surface, but it’s our only option now!”

The oil in Shelly’s massive globes sloshed as the ran. “What’s wrong with the surface??” The access door shunted open, and when it did, a blast of cold air nearly swept them off their feet as it rushed in from outside to fill the vacuum. 

Miles upon miles of endless, spaghetti-tangled overpass weaved in and out of itself. This virtual labyrinth of transport platforms was covered in a thick layer of glowing green snow which fell to the ground like flakes of pure radium. The clouds above crackled with bolts of lightning that left poisonous purple streaks in the sky.

“Alright,” Ferro took charge. “We have to move forward, but be careful. The snow means we don’t know where any-”

Aren’s tentative footstep forward activated some terrible grinding sound ahead of them. A platform the size of a small car raised up, turned toward them and two barrels opened fire suddenly.

“GET DOWN!!” Gamma cried, taking the tiger down with her behind what looked to be some kind of hover trolley. Loud bolts of energy blasted overhead, percussively shaking the very road she stood on. Everyone managed to take shelter from the precipitous onslaught of artillery, unsure what else to do. Ferro motioned for them all to stay put, and sure enough, after a minute, the firing rate slowed down, shifting down in tempo, then shots became smaller, and eventually, the sound of too-slow moving servomotors ground to a halt.

Gren was the first to peek over her cover, a crate caked in glowing green ice. Sure enough, the automatic gunnery turret had, after tearing molten chunks out of various vehicles, simply shut down.

“Solar powered,” Ferro supplied. “We should get higher- the ones up there are already broken.” With that, he leapt up to the side of a support pillar, kicked off of it, jumped to another one, and repeated this process in a superhuman feat of strength and dexterity. 

Gamma followed suit, repeating his trick with little to no strain. She looked down at their new allies. “C’mon!”

Gren and Ten looked at Widget. “... Well.” The beetle bot shrugged. “Guess there’s no harm in trying.” She set her legs, prepared herself... then leapt! Inexperience made her falter slightly as she touched the support pillar with her hands and feet, but determination pushed her on; she launched back as hard as she could, gaining altitude and holding a hand out to cushion the impact, in the perfect position to kick up and forward again. She repeated this over and over, sometimes gaining altitude, sometimes not, sometimes sliding down a bit before kicking off again, but after a minute of trying, Widget finally landed in a roll on top of the new road. “YEAH!!” she cheered, victorious.

Shelly, with Gren and Ten hanging from each hand, flew up and over, landing with a flat look. “Yeah, like, no thanks.”

“Keep going!” Gamma urged, jumping up again.

They emerged from the jungle of roadways to find a break in the clouds straight overhead, revealing the Moon. It glowed with ominous intent, undulating with an ever-shifting gasoline rainbow of colors that made the sky itself seem sickly.

Now high enough to see past all obstructions, their eyes turned inexorably toward the ocean. The calm horizon of Locksmouth was nowhere to be found; instead, a gigantic, nauseating whirlpool of water the color of burgundy swirled endlessly around a dire, imposing tower located on a stone island in the center. It was an absolutely hellish version of a world they didn’t recognize.

“What... happened...?” Widget asked, horrified.

Ferro looked over the horizon, bemused. “Not how it is where you’re from? Well, anyone old enough to tell you that’s been raked ten times over by now.” He fished a glassy, fainly illuminated ball out of his pocket, rolling it between his fingers. “All I know is you don’t want to take a swim, unless you want to be stripped down to your support frame.”

They all looked at the rose red water and its unnatural illumination in the greasy moon’s reflection with trepidation. Shelly opined, “Even I don’t like stripping that much.”

The kids looked at each other, then Widget, and laughed despite themselves. “So... uh. So where are we going, anyway?” Aren asked.

“To our base,” Gamma explained. “That’s where everyone’s waiting. Well. Kinda.” She tucked her hands into her sleeves as she walked- a nervous habit. “They’re all turned off right now.”

“Completely?? Why?” Widget asked.

“We’re out of power,” the girl offered meagerly. “That’s the whole reason we came all the way out to the power station with our last two plugs- the Caretaker said we’d find a gate that would bring us heroes from another world. And she was right!” This perked her up. “Y-... you can help us, right?”

“Gamma...” Ferro chided her. “We ripped these people out from some random world, they probably have no idea how to-” He stopped. Rumbling shook the road, and grew louder.

“Oh, shoot, it’s an enforcer!” Gamma grew agitated, spotting the same mountain-shaped interloper from before- or at the very least, one just like it. Its huge, pyramid-like countenance hovered menacingly, flying toward them and stopping meters from them. Ferro and Gamma reached into the back of their heads, slapped a plug each into the pistols they carried, and fired them at it. Scorching shots of energy slammed into the massive hide of the thing, doing only surface level damage to an entity with a lot of surface.

The enforcer’s small, plug-like head turned to look at them. Two massive arms separated from its body, pointing at the two resistance soldiers with its opening palms and bathing them in massive rose-colored beams of burning power. “AAAH!!” Ferro cried as he was bisected, falling to the snowy road, blue fluids leaking out into it like some twisted man’s idea of a snow cone. For her part, Gamma leapt out of the way, but too slowly, the beam taking her leg. “NO!!”

Aren gasped at the spectacle, horrified. “O-Oh no... we have to help!”

Shelly grimaced. “Are you for real-real?? You’re gonna get yourselves killed!”

“Well if we don’t do something, that thing’s gonna do that for us anyway!” Gren retorted, grabbing Aren’s hand. “It’s time!”

They were covered in ink in moments, then joined together into one large tiger/goat hybrid much older and more developed than them, emerging with clenched fists. “FOR BIIIG VOLT!! Yeah!! I’ve been wanting to play this game again so bad- whoa, crap!” They sunk to the ground as a beam of scarlet light sailed over their head. “Gotta get closer, it’ll have a hard time aiming then!” 

“Gren! Aren! Be careful!” Widget called after them.

‘Big Volt’ ran up to the hovering hill, jumping onto its front slope and running all the way up to the top. They jumped at the zenith, turning and hanging off the back of the thing, arms wrapped around its head. Blind, it reached up and back for them, not quite able to grab them due to its unwieldy build. Concluding it couldn’t reach them physically, the juggernaut fired two consistent scarlet beams of deadly energy and began dialing it in to scrap them off of it like an unwanted barnacle. “Alright, you big jerk!” They affixed one hand on either side of its big, bulky head. “Let’s see how you like THIS!!”

Electric power surged through the construct’s entire body, instantly blowing every single indicator light it had straight off of it. The palm emitters, now unable to aim with finesse, simply sagged downward until the enforcer slagged its own head in its devastating crossfire. The giant metal monster fell to the ground with a deafening thud.

“..... Well I’ll be damned.” Ferro, whose upper torso had crawled up, looked at the destroyed enforcer with shock. 

“Ferro! You’re okay!” Big Volt slid down the front of the thing, landing next to him.

“That’s a matter of opinion,” he joked. “Could you help me with my legs?”

“Big Volt is so cool! I knew they could help us, I just knew it!” Gamma cried. “... A-And could you help with my leg too?”

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It wasn’t exactly a hero’s welcome. In fact, it was no welcome at all- merely the opening of a door into what looked like the top floor of a huge warehouse from the outside. Gamma pulled a plug from the back of her head and put it in the wall, illuminating the place bit by bit as lights kicked on in clusters. “Well!” she said. “Here it is! Home sweet home.”

It looked a lot less like the military base they’d envisioned from movies and games and much more like a storehouse full of open-faced living units stacked on top of each other from the ceiling to the floor. As they descended, their friends’ pieces in tow, they reached a central hub module jutting conspicuously from the floor.

“So! Big Volt!” Gamma leaned on the thing, holding her leg under her arm. “Think you can use some of that power to charge our base battery?”

“Hmmm...” Widget folded her arms. “Is that safe? I don’t know if my friends are giving their inklings any prana right now, given, you know, this.” She gestured to Gren and Aren’s robotic bodies. Ferro and Gamma shrugged, of course, not knowing what any of that meant.

Voltaus appeared  from them, in a hybrid form, but this time much smaller. He’d apparently bonded well enough to go dry- no mean feat, considering his dual nature. “It’s okay! I’m a lot more ‘ficient with my prana now. Gren ‘n Ten get along real good these days.” The kids folded their arms, smiled and nodded to each other. “Don’t worrry, I’m keepin’ an eye on my levels. I got plenty to spare if it’d help.”

“It would, it would!” Gamma encouraged. “We usually plug the base charge in right here,” she gestured to a pair of contacts on the top.

“Right, okay,” Gren nodded, taking Aren’s hand as Voltaus went back under. “I got neg, you got pos?”
	
“Yup!” Aren grabbed one contact with his free hand. “Ready!”

“Contact!” Gren grabbed the other end, and with a concentration of will, the indicators on the battery began filling, one after the other. Gamma watched with all the excitement of a child on Christmas morning, and once it filled halfway, she was bursting with joy. “Whew! That’s all we’ve got for now, I think.”

“Full plugs, full plugs!” Gamma cried, hitting a button that released a row of powered cells. “I never thought I’d see the base at half power again! It’s been so long since the charge has been that high!” She carefully plucked them from the rows, hopped down the ramp and began placing plugs in sockets. 

The entire place lurched into sudden light and motion, as if the child had plugged in an entire carnival at once. Lights, machines, even people began to spring into motion, looking around with renewed life and sound. “Wuh?? I’m alive! Gamma! How on earth’d you get all that??” cried [Gontak], a stout robot who looked kind of like a futuristic fur trapper.

Wait, what? Yes, it seemed that just by looking at them, the kids could discern the names and basic identities of the others present now- getting the information from an ad hoc wireless network that they seemed able to inuitively pull from.

A tall, thin woman who flicked something like a cigarette holder tilted her head dispassionately. “Who could have guessed she’d actually succeed? And it was such a touching long goodbye,” [Tartina] said.

“These are my new friends!” Gamma reported excitedly. “They’re gonna help us!!”

The base produced an excited din. Many, many robots of all shapes and sizes crawled out of the ironwork to gaze upon these newcomers and cheer their arrival. Their enthusiasm was outmatched only by their sheer variety- very few of them resembled hardened soldiers in any real way. “Gamma, I told you, these people- ugh!” Ferro threw up his hands in defeat.

“Is it true?? Did you come to save us??”
“Do you really come from another world???”
“Hey, you look like those things from the books, the... what do you call ‘em... animals!”

Widget shifted her weight from one foot to the other with a smirk. “Alright, you two. Go say ‘hi’ to everyone, see what’s up around here. I’m gonna find their shop and take care of some things.”

“Okay!”
“Roger!”

With that, the three of them split up to meet, mingle and mend, respectively. Shelly, on the other hand, had a lot of questions that needed answering. “Hey, like. Gamma. Before you go?”

“Yeah? What’s up??” She asked.

“You said something about a ‘Caretaker’ or some junk. Think I could ask them some questions?”

“Ohhhh.” She looked unsure. “Uh, yeah! You can ask. I dunno if she’ll answer, buuuuut. She’s over there!”

As the small girl hopped off, Shelly followed Gamma’s directions- they pointed to a basement level, only accessible via enclosed ladder. “I hate these,” she groused, lowering herself down rung after rung. She rued whoever invented this mode of elevation, as they clearly did not have huge-busted people with large wings in mind when they designed them.

After far too many steps, she finally touched down in a particularly dark and flickering section of the base. Electricity clearly wasn’t flowing very well to it, and judging from the heavy soot stains, congealed oil and random junk laying around, nobody was in much of a rush to change that. The place was like a large, strange open dormitory- a man made cave with lighting quality that could only be described as ‘ambient flickering television.’

“Uhm... hello??” Shelly called, looking for a person somewhere in this underground junkyard. Her body being a lamp made her extra conspicuous in the dark, and she felt exposed and vulnerable. “Is anybody... anybody there...?” She stopped and waited for an answer, but upon hearing no response, she pressed further into the room, chancing a corner. Was that mumbling?

A huge collection of food hung by steel cables. Root vegetables, leafy greens, mushrooms- a veritable cornucopia of produce, except... none of it was familiar. The roots were too long and scraggly, the fungus was unidentifiable, and to be honest, the leafy greens were really more of a leafy blue, and yellow, and black. And amongst all this, hunched a very strange looking robot- one made to look like an old crone with green skin. She was putting various pieces of produce into a boiling iron cauldron, heated by a fire that looked barely-contained and dangerous for a military base to have. Shelly could not help but notice she resembled a piece of pre-splice mythology Max had told her about- the witch.

She leaned forward, trying to be seen through the curtain of roots. “Uhm. Are you... like, the Caretaker?”

The crone looked up very slowly, fixing her gaze on Shelly. “... I am exactly like the Caretaker.” Then looked back down, examined a mushroom and threw it into the boiling pot.

“Oh, like, great! Gamma told me you knew all about the weird monolith that brought us here to your world and-... and...” She tilted her head. “Why are you cooking?”

“Ghoulash.”

She tilted. “Uh. No, like, not what are you cooking. Why are you cooking? You’re... you’re totally all robots here...?”

The old woman looked up irritably. “The only real question is why you aren’t cooking!”

“What??”

“You are from another world, are you not, yes?” She peered up at her.

This woman knew how to knock her off balance like nothing else. “Oh. Like. Yeah, totally.”

“And they cook where you are from yes?!”

“Uh, yes, yes!” she admitted, confused.

“Then COOK!” She slapped a root in Shelly’s hand and pulled her over to the cauldron. The butterfly, stumbling, put her hand on the edge of the cauldron before pulling it away, hissing in surprise. “... Very silly to expect burns, child, when you are glass.”

“Uh, what???” Shelly sighed. “Look, like, I’m so confused. What am I supposed to cook? I don’t know what any of these plants are, or what ‘ghoulash’ is supposed to even be, like, what the heck!”

“What, you expect to receive perfect instructions? Cook, COOK!”

“Yes!” She leaned forward, pointing to her palm. “Before you cook, you get a recipe, then your ingredients, then your cookware, and then you make whatever you’re gonna make, which is like totally irrelevant because we’re both robots and can’t eat.”

“Bah!” The Caretaker dismissed her. “Why is that important?”

She gestured in confusion. “Look, I don’t care about this. I need to know more about the monolith- how it’s keeping our bodies in it, how we’re controlling these frames remotely, how to get them out, the basis of its extradimensional storage... if I don’t understand this I don’t think we can like, get home.”

The old crone looked contemplatively into the distance. Her gaze focused to a razor’s edge. “... The water!”

“What??”

“It’s too cold. It must be hotter.” She nodded to herself and threw a bunch of paper into the fire.

Shelly clenched her fists around her antennae and pulled them down over her face in frustration- a habit from childhood. She wanted to strangle this weird old woman, but it was clear she was damaged or broken in some way. Sighing in defeat, the butterfly took a root from the top and put it on something approximating a counter. “... Okay, like. First off, you’re never gonna cook these through if you put them in whole. They’ll be totally soggy on the outside if you don’t cut them up, or at least break them into chunks.” She snapped it in half, then those halves into halves, and dropped them in the unknowable soup.

The Caretaker’s eyes lit up. “Ahhhh! Yes, yes!”

She picked up a husk of vegetation from the corner. “Secondly, the dry leaves are gonna be used for spices.” She ground them up in her hands and sprinkled them over the water. She didn’t know what they actually were, but it hardly mattered.

They created a bubbling foam, which the old crone nodded toward excitedly. “Ohhh ho ho yes!”

“And finally, like, you’re totally burning everything that goes to the bottom.” Shelly picked up a length of thermal piping and plunged it into the mix. “You’ve gotta stir it so everything heats up evenly. Here.” She helped the crone put it in her hands and guided a stirring motion for her. “See? Like this.”

“Oh hohoho yes, yes!” she cried with delight. “I remember now, I remember!”

Shelly laughed. “I dunno why you’d remember how to do this, it’s irrelevant. But yeah, like, just... keep stirring, keep adding spices, put in the stuff that’s less dense nearer to the end... and... just...” She looked up to notice that the old woman’s smile was gone, replaced by a somber face.

“It wasn’t always like this.”

~(_)~

“Once, our Earth was vibrant and beautiful. We took it for granted, then. We were still young. Angry. We felt the borders drawn between us were living, breathing things- and they were life and death to us.

“We pulled greedily from the earth, ever more, gorging ourselves on its precious blood, wasting gobs of life on bigger and better ways to obliterate each other. The weapons grew so big and so devastating that they sucked up every last bit of fuel we could get. The oil, the coal. Then we got greedier. The gas, the wood. The last bit of burned timber should have been our warning, but oh, we couldn’t leave well enough alone. The atom, we took its treasures for ourselves and wasted them on yet more destruction. When it became clear this would be all that was left afforded to us, we sabotaged one another so we could be the ones to keep the stones. Nuclear annihilation ripped what was left asunder. Bones ripped naked of flesh, earth cracked and salted, seas poisoned.

“Eventually the skullduggery did us in. We lost the secrets of the atom. We lost the secrets of the Sun. We blew our bodies away, and with them, our minds. Our collective knowledge was expunged in a wave of fear and hate. Every day I try to remember... and every day I know with a little more certainty that it was raked away in my damaged mind. I haven’t been raked, ever, and it makes it hard to grip reality.

“Now there is one final actor who dictates our fate, and his power is absolute. He shuts off the lights so that he may keep all the energy for himself. The rest of us are like parasites to him, and for that reason he hunts us down. For that reason, we’re made to embrace darkness... forever.”

~(_)~

Shelly’s eyes were wide as dinner plates as she listened to the old crone recount centuries of history in minutes. Speechless, she just stared at her.

“I think... it’s about time I had a nap, dearie.” She doused the flames under the cook pot and retreated to the corner, where she sat in a huddled heap. “Good night.”

The butterfly watched as she closed her eyes and drifted off into sleep mode. “... I-....... good night.”

 -
- -
 -

“Winsley Taylor does not like me!”

Gren and Aren sat atop the very highest living quarters’ roof, still contained in the base but well above the floor by several stories. Their legs dangled off the edge as they argued, talking as they had for hours now.

“Yeah-huh! Have you seen her??”

“Nuh-uh! No way!”

“Uh-huh~!” Gren taunted him. “She’s got the big googly eyes whenever you talk to her.”

He folded his arms, embarrased. “So what? Are you jealous??”

She made a faux-shocked face. “Of who??”

He shrugged passive-aggressively. “I dunno.”

“Hahaha, shut up dummy!!” Gren pushed him, and he fell on his side.

“Whoa!! Easy, we’re really high up!” He righted himself, laughing. “... You know, Widget hasn’t talked a lot since we got here.”

The goat leaned forward quizzically. “Whaddya mean?”

“I dunno. She’s not really quiet so much, but... I mean. These are robots, right? Automa. She’s one of them. But she doesn’t have anything to say about it. Isn’t that kinda weird?”

Gren considered it. “... Yeah, she never really wants to talk about it. The Automa. I can never get her to say that much.” She paused as they thought about it. “... Hey have you ever noticed that she mumbles in her sleep?”
“What??”
“Yeah. Kinda weird for a robot, right? She goes into sleep mode and she starts saying stuff.”
“Really? Like what??”

Gren paused for a moment. “Actually, it’s just the same thing over and over again. I’ve heard it so many times I remember it by heart. One nine eight oh one nine nine three. I asked her about it, and she says it was the name she got when she was built.”

“Whoa, weird.” Aren laughed. “I’m glad we call her ‘Widget’ instead.” He started giggling. “Remember that graveyard cake your grandpa baked, and we got everyone to sign their own little gravestones??

“Aw man, that cake was so good!” she gushed, wiggling just thinking about it.

He grinned. “Can you imagine if she signed it like that??” He traced his finger in the thick dust. “Here Lies one nine eight oh one nine nine three,” he droned like a stereotypical robot, making them both burst into giggles.

When Gren finally calmed down, however, she couldn’t help but stare. “... Hey. Wait a second.”

“What?”

She leaned over. “That... kinda looks...” She tilted her head. “Don’t you think it’s...?”

He tilted his head, unsure what she was talking about. She dragged her finger through the dust. A word. A dash. A little silhouette.

     ____
__/         \__
|                 |
|   Widget   |
|                 |
|1980-1993|
|                 |

They stared in silence.

“... Whoooa. Spooky,” Aren teased Gren.

“Haha, shut up butthead!” She pushed him again.

“Hey!”

“GAH!” they both started, seeing Widget’s head poke over the ladder. 

“Ferro says we all gotta go into Low Power Mode, there’s a security sweep happening and we don’t wanna give off too much juice or they’ll find us.”

“Awwww...” they both complained, nonetheless marching off to bed... or whatever approximated that.

 -
- -
 -

A first person view.

A comic page. Sketchy, featuring a young girl with a very punky manner of dress. The hand holding the pencil was fair and soft, and moved with practiced confidence, hatching out shading inside of the girl’s jacket- leaving a little paper-white trench on one side for the gleam of leather. She was almost through with this one, only two more panels to go.

“Christine?” an older female voice called. “You have a visitor.”

“Yeah, Mom, let ‘em in.” The voice was young. Early teens at most. She cleared her throat and closed her spiral drawing book, setting it on the night stand next to a bug box.

The door opened, but it wasn’t an old man or some other unwanted intrusion this time- it was a young girl, Han Chinese, with long black hair and piercing blue eyes. The girl grinned, her dimples threatening to unseat a band-aid affixed to one cheek. “Hey, dork.”

A sigh of relief, and a little laugh. “Hey, butthead. Get in another fight?”

“Pfsh, not! Calling it a fight is an insult to the art of fighting. I destroyed those losers three to one.” That confidence of hers was infectious.

“Where’s your boyfriend?”

She shot a disapproving glance. “Tsk! Shut up, stupid. I left him to finish off number four. He still needs to prove himself.” She got up on the bed, sitting on it facing her friend. “So, are you just not going back to the hospital again?”

“... Nah. No point.”

There was a pregnant pause between them.

“It’s better like this! I can just hang out in my room. Hospitals blow anyway. Hey, check it out.” Her hand reached for the drawing book, opened it up and showed it to the girl.

Blue Eyes took it, clearly impressed. “Wow. This is like, twice as good as the last one already. You’re getting good at this.”

“Haha, thanks, it’s... no big deal.”

“No, I mean it!” She grinned. “Maybe you’ll be one of those big time artists, right??”

Another pause.

Her face fell. “Ah, shit.”

Vision became blurry. Blinking. “Ah, sorry, I just-...”

“Ugh, I’m such a stupid dumbass,” Blue Eyes said curtly, crawling over. She put a hand on her friend’s wet cheek, wiping away a tear. “Hey. Remember what we talked about, right? The rest of life’s just some dumb bullshit anyway. A bunch of school, and more school, and going to work. And you’d be some dowdy mom and have like five snotty kids and a boring husband or some shit.”

Sniffling turned into laughter. “I would not!”

“Wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t you??” Blue Eyes egged her on. “What would you do instead, huh?”

She sniffed. Then ran a hand over Blue Eyes’ hand. Then wrapped it around her wrist. “..... I don’t know... maybe... I-I don’t know.”

Blue Eyes made a face of amusement, not understanding. “You’re being weird.”

“Haha. Sorry.”

~(_)~

A security camera feed.

An elderly white male, his hunched frame covered by a labcoat, approached a tall Haitian man in his mid-fifties, wearing a white suit. “Dr. Ricardo Toussaint. It has been a while.” A thick Swiss accent underpinned every word.

“Yes, indeed it has. I appreciate your hands-off approach, my research has gone much better without prying eyes and bleeding hearts.” 

“You’ll continue to get resources and time, as long as I get results. What do you have for me?”

The man reached into his briefcase and pulled out a rectangular box. “Here it is. My life’s work. The Sandbox.”

“Another prototype?”

“No. The genuine article,” he enuciated meaningfully. 

The older man took it in his hands. “And this is what you say it is?”

“Yes. My previous work, the Fractal Engine, was a triumph... but those simple AIs will take dozens, maybe hundreds of years to fully mature. This? This is better. A fully functioning human brain, converted molecule by molecule, into a system of loose granules that burn into an engram network of true consciousness. No Artificial Intelligence- real intelligence. Real human thought... in a machine.”

“Excellent.”

~(_)~

Another security feed.

Both men are older. Tired. Weary.

“We’ve racked up quite a body count,” Dr. Toussaint said. “People are asking questions.”

“Do I look like I’m concerned about that?”

“No, and that’s what concerns me,” he responded impatiently. “Do you know what a 100% fatality rate does to your name?” He looked around, anguished. “The newspapers call me ‘Doctor Necropolis.’ It is beyond parody,” he hissed.

“Would you rather they learned the truth?” The other man asked. “That you’re sacrificing the terminally ill to your research with promises of immortality? Tch. A huckster could have done better than your pitch.”

Dr. Toussaint huffed and smoothed out his suit. “I just need to know that I won’t have the police kicking my door down. You know I’m here on a visa, and this country is wretched to people who look like me.”

“You won’t have to worry about that. I haven’t merely collected the boxes you’ve given me- I’ve got a purpose in mind for them, that will make all of our problems go aw-” the door opened. A small silhouette stood in the doorway; a girl, dressed in a long shirt, holding something in her hand. “Jasmine. Why are you out of bed?”

“You did it, didn’t you.”

“... Jasmine, listen to me-”

“All you had to do was let her die but you couldn’t help making her one of your sick projects!”

The old man became quite flustered. “Jasmine, this is for your- AUGH!!” A sickening crunch was heard as she bashed a metal baseball bat into his leg. He crumpled to the floor, shuddering in agony. 

Dr. Toussaint gasped, then set upon her, grabbing the bat. “You listen here, you little- NNGFAAHUH!!” He found himself launched against the wall by an invisible yet mighty force, and landed in a pile on the floor; he shivered in terror as Jasmine walked toward him slowly. “P-Please! Don’t be upset! Christine is happier now! She’ll never feel pain again! Sh-She-”

Jasmine brought the bat down on Ricardo again and again and again with unrelenting, vicious fury. “CHRISTINE. WASN’T. HER. REAL. NAME.” She brought it down on him one last time, splattering blood all over the wall in an absolutely brutal swing. “A-Ahhnh...” Her vision swam, and she held her head as she failed to maintain her balance. The girl left. 

The old man shuddered. Crawling along the floor, he checked Dr. Toussaint’s pulse. “... Still in there?” He took on a look of grim determination, gazing over to one of the boxes. “I’m afraid I can’t let you go just yet.”

 -
- -
 -

“GAH!” Gren woke up whilst standing at a slight lean, back against the recharging bay. She looked around at Aren, who also just awakened. “Did you-”

“Yeah,” he confirmed, haunted by what he’d seen.

Before they could share another word, a piercing alarm sounded, and a jolt of power awakened everyone in the recharge bay. 

Widget popped off of the wall with a start, having not taken a bay spot. “What’s going on??”

“Oh no...” grimaced Ferro as he ran toward the entrance to the base. 

Gamma looked fearful. “H-How did they find us?? We were all powered down...”

“... Shit!” Widget swore. “My fusion core. I can’t shut off the reaction so they must’ve- oh, dammit! Fuck, fuck, I’m sorry!” she anguished.

The other denizens of the base looked at her with pain in their faces and tried to cope. “Well... I guess he’s coming now...” Gamma said miserably.

“Who’s coming??” Aren asked.

“Raverous...” Gontak shuddered.

Before their eyes, a 2D projection of a very large, very cutting figure appeared. He was full to the brim with integrated weapons, and had what appeared to be a stylized raven’s head. Even in the image, he looked merciless.

“So are we gonna evacuate or what??” Aren asked the obvious question.

“There’s no point,” Tartina stated. “Nobody on earth could possibly outrun him. Everyone who tries is eviscerated.”

“What the heck!” Gren cried. “You’re a rebel resistance! I thought you were s’posed to be good at fighting!”

“Sure,” Gontak agreed. “We can fight troops, or enforcers if we have time to prepare.” He looked gravely at her. “But Raverous has a one hundred percent fatality rate...”

“Oh my god...” Widget stared at her feet. “... No. You know what, no! How long until he’s here??” she demanded.

“Minutes,” Tartina responded.

“Right! Okay!” She ran to the stairs, disappearing down them. “Just give me a minute! Gren, Aren, I need time!”

The kids looked after her, then at each other, and nodded unsurely as everyone else scrambled.

The door was already being handled when they arrived in the entryway.
~WHAM, WHAM~
Resistance soldiers lined up behind their weaponry, most of which was installed into the building. They were shaking, betraying their terror.
~WHAM, WHAM~
Ferro was up front, closest to the door, and only he showed enough determination not to visibly tremble- though he gripped his pistol with white-knuckle tightness.
~WHAM, WHAM, WHAM~

Silence hung in the air. The tension was palpable. A few unsure soldiers leaned to and fro, unsure what was happening.

The door was a hot missile that slammed into Ferro, sending him into an artillery cannon and taking out both him and a hapless skinny soldier in one blink-and-you-miss-it moment.

“FIRE!!” cried another soldier, and they did just that- the entire place fired on the door immediately, bombarding it with a haphazard assortment of explosive, ballistic and energy weaponry. It was a deafening procession of violent report, blasting holes and chunks out of the wall and doorway.

When the smoke cleared, everyone looked around pensively. “... Did we get him?”

Four. That was how many rapid steps it took, audibly, before the hapless Gontak was picked up by his neck and run through with a large talon-like knife. The dwarf-like automa had his blue blood sprayed all over the wall behind him as an intimidatingly tall avioid twisted their neck to watch it drip out of him with morbid fascination. Before he could so much as breathe a word of defiance, Raverous pick-pick-picked the plugs from his head and sloughed the man off of his talon in callous disregard. The now motionless Gontak fell like a sack full of bricks, and everyone present gasped at the cruel efficiency of the display.

“Y-...” Gren shook with fear and rage. “You’re just a big bully!!”

Raverous fixed his gaze on them.

“Well guess what!” Aren called out, grabbing his friend’s hand. “A big bully deserves-”

“BIIIIG VOLT!!” The tigergoat cried. “Try that again, I dare you!”

It was terrifying how fast Raverous was. They’d scarcely noticed him moving before he was picking them up as well and shoved two feet of knife right into their gut.

“Hhhgh... AAAHNGH!!” They cried out in pain, feeling the sensations Voltaus did. They weren’t used to feelings like this, to being hurt this badly. It felt awful and they struggled not to writhe in agony.

Raverous turned their head and went for the plugs, but... there were none. He made something akin to a puzzled caw.

“Nngh...” Big Volt grabbed Raverous’ top beak; he attempted to get away, but his proximity and entanglement made that impossible. Big Volt’s other hand made a fist and plunged down the avioid’s throat- or whatever approximation he had of one- and sent a huge blast of electricity into him. Being made of metal and circuitry, Raverous did not respond well to this- sparks flew, joints spasmed and a bolt, now red-hot, flew out of its casing and across the room. The avioid slumped to the floor, smouldering. “Ha... hah... did we do it...??”

“Watch out!!” Shelly shoved Big Volt out of the way as hard as she could, catching a blade from the very much not dead Raverous. He’d sent two outward, one of which sliced a glancing blow into Big Volt, the other of which stabbed into Shelly’s glass body. However, instead of cutting into her or breaking her fragile shell, the knife poked a huge, distended tent of lava lamp out the back of the butterfly. The frustrated avioid stabbed, jabbed and sliced at Shelly, pushing the incredibly sharp blade into her over and over and finding no purchase. In fact, she began to coil her arms around him the harder he tried to gut her, frustrating his attempts as he began to get caught in her spaghetti-like mass of stretchy butterfly body.

Big Volt attempted to help, but there was no way to get a clear shot that wouldn’t hit Shelly as well- and all that stabbing had taken a toll on poor Voltaus, whose membrane was destabilizing under the stress of it all. “S-Sorry guys, that lightning bolt took a lot outta me...!”

“Nnngh... like... I dunno... if I can do this forever, guys!” Shelly warned, struggling against the deadly droid while trying to remain unsevered. Other soldiers ran up to try to subdue him as well, but every one of them that wandered too close got a taste of that selfsame blade, slicing them to terrifying effect. Raverous’ ability to lay low resistance soldiers while so entangled was sobering. “Nnngh... anh... NYAHH!!” Shelly found herself thrown off and splatted against the wall like a gatchapon sticky-hand.

What followed was nothing less than a slaughter. Hapless soldiers tried their best to run, fight or get out of the way, and one after another they were grabbed. Stabbed. Picked clean. WHUMP went their lifeless bodies as they hit the floor, the birdroid’s terrifying indifference on full display as he moved from one to the next. The kids watched with horror, at once wanting, needing to do something, but simultaneously just barely keeping themselves together with such low reserves. And it was then that they saw something that made them understand how bad the situation truly was: a series of rectangular metal boxes hung from the back of Raverous’ chassis, clattering as he methodically destroyed their allies. “Oh no...” Big Volt realized. “Those are-... they have to be-...!” If they had come here as those, these must have been their friends. He must have gone to the same place they’d been to investigate, and collected these sandboxes. Their friends, their entire pack was hanging from the back of this murderous monster, and once he was done killing the resistance, he was going to throw them into a compactor along with them. “Uuuunhhh, w-we’ve gotta stop him...!” They anguished. 

Raverous didn’t even hesitate. He grasped a stunned Ferro by the neck, slapped his gun away and extended the talon. Ferro, for his part, looked down with a sense of terror... not for himself, but for all these people he’d promised he would protect. They weren’t fighters, none of them were. A gaggle of scared citizens from one of the scattered good times before, led by him, the only one of them with any battle experience. This had been a mistake, and now all of them were going to pay for it. His only respite was to be on the chopping block before he had to see the rest of them get it. Gamma cried and stamped and pulled on Raverous’ leg in a pitiful attempt to stop the inevitable.

In an extremely dissonant moment, Raverous found himself lurching forward, a huge black metal box having ~THUNKED~ against the back of his head. He dropped the man and let out a confused caw.

Widget stood next to Big Volt, her arms out to the side, two large boxes at her feet. “You got to the count of three to leave, or I pop you like a light bulb.”

Raverous tilted his head. The voice that came out was inhuman, like a corvid trying to speak. “How stupid do you think-”

“ONE.”

He flinched, his head pivoting back in surprise. “Your little friends aren’t going-”

“TWO.”

This incensed him. “I will kill you slowest.”

Widget sneered. “Good luck. POWER ON!”

The beetle borg popped apart as if she’d been bisected. As far as threat follow-throughs, it seemed a bit on the weak side- at least it did until she and the boxes clasped over Big Volt’s body like a suit of living techno-armor: Two large legs and a codpiece on one end, two long arms, a chestplate and a head unit on the other. Voltaus’ form bridged the two ends as a torso, their head, legs and arms pulling in instinctively as they integrated with the electric contacts fitted just for them- it was at once bizarre, yet completely intuitive. As a metal mask fitted over Widget’s face, a shock of Gren-like hair made a second, spikier ponytail to her original on the other side of her head, and finally her eyes, hair and lights all shifted from blue to yellow. Widget, Gren, Aren and Voltaus stood well over seven feet tall as one gestalt being. “Whoooaaa...” Voltaus marveled, looking at themselves through Widget’s eyes.

Gamma’s eyes went wide. “It’s like that paper picture book I read about the super soldier... Shockbuster.”

“Shockbuster, huh?” They mused. “I like the sound of that. WHOA!!”

Raverous had not respected their unspoken call for a time-out. He was going to kill them, cool new body or no, and his talon embedded in the wall two inches from their head proved it. “You are a waste of power.”

Shockbuster grabbed the knife and sent a surge of electricity through it, jolting the bird droid with a start; he ripped himself away from the wall. “And you’re a waste of space! Eat it, lead head!” They reached behind their back and pulled out what looked to be a yo-yo the size of two roombas stacked on top of each other, throwing it in a big arc.

“Nngh, NO!” Raverous leapt into the air, now utilizing his wings. “Argh! ACK! CAW!!” He dodged the buzzing electric toy as it swept around in big arcs. Seeing an opening, he dove suddenly, talons out.

Shockbuster’s feet were lit up by firing thrusters as they hover-sped backward at the same pace as the murderous crow. Objects whizzed by as they circled the huge room, Raverous trying to close in. Shockbuster spun as they retreated, swinging the yo-yo in increasingly erratic orbits until finally, in one unlucky swoop, the avioid got it wrapped around his foot. “GOTCHA!”

The surge of electric power was as sudden as it was powerful. Raverous lit up like a Christmas tree, fell out of the air and crashed to the ground, bouncing once, twice, then slamming into a storage unit, his parts scattered everywhere.

Shockbuster came around, sliding in to pull the ring of sandboxes off of him... then lifted him up bodily. “Not so easy, picking on someone your own size, huh?”

His head creaked as one broken, blasted-out eye tried to look at them. “Why are you here with this garbage? What for? You could work for the Administrator and get all the power rations you wanted.”

They closed in and narrowed their eyes. “I. Am. Power.” And with a wrench of the neck, they pulled Raverous’ sandbox out the back of his head, to the absolute delirious cheers of a disbelieving army of misfits.

 -
- -
 -

“That’s the second time I thought I’d never wake up!” Gontak bellowed with a laugh, gazing down at his wound one last time before merrily walking off to join the many other resistance members celebrating their victory.

“I can’t believe the... guess I’ll call it the ShockBox... that actually worked!” Widget admitted, relieved all the same.

“But it did!” Aren cheered.

“And we totally kicked butt!” Gren fistpumped.

“I can’t believe you guys did so well,” Natalie remarked supportively and, for that matter, holographically. She and the others had been hooked up to a central projector, which showed their forms in the room via flat, dull, and gray images. 

“Aw man!” Aren exclaimed. “I wanna hug you so bad!!”

“I can’t believe I’m stuck in a box,” Carrie groused. “When am I gonna get a robot body??”

Widget laughed. “Calm your massive tits, I’m workin’ on it!” She put her hands on her hips. “I’ve got the data on Mixer and co’s frames, so I should be able to set you up soon, I just gotta feed the data into the autoforge.”

“Ooooh, I’m so excited!” Samantha clapped. I’ve been wanting this so badly, and now it’s here!”

“Wow, I really didn’t peg you for a transhumanist, Sam,” Erwin mused.

“Yeah dude of course!” Max retorted. “I can totally relate. I wanna be a hundred feet tall and breathe radioactive fire.”

“I’m amazed,” Kei marveled. “But I don’t understand how this is possible...”

“Oh, oh, I know!” Aren enthusiastically raised his hand, bouncing on one foot. “There’s this thing called a Sandbox- it’s where your brain is molecul’r’ly changed into an artificial one! They were invented by this old guy named, uh, Twocent, I think? He had a cooler name, Doctor Necromorpholopolous or something!”

“Doctor Necropolis?!” Natalie burst. “Are you serious?! That fan-theory turned out to be right, and not just in the comic but in real life??? Holy cow, I’m freaking out!”

“More like geeking out,” Carrie quipped. “Where’d you learn all that, squirt?”

Aren realized in that moment Gren had been trying- and failing- to motion for him to shut up, and Widget was staring at him in shock.

“... Yeeeah, Aren, where did you learn this?” The beetle borg questioned.

The plastic tiger winced. “... U-... Uhm.” He looked around, gathering up his courage. “V-Voltaus showed us a dream. It had two old guys, a girl with long black hair... and... and I think... you....... Christine?”

Widget looked like she’d been struck in the chest. “That’s... that’s impossible...”

Voltaus looked off in the distance, mentioning thoughtfully, “Robots have electric dreams...”

Natalie looked surprised. “Are you saying... you weren’t always Widget?”

The beetle stood there, disarmed, staring off into the distance. Slowly, her form shifted to that which Jacent had met with all those weeks ago, underneath Locksmouth: a young teenage girl with freckles, a too-large shirt hanging off one shoulder, skorts and leg warmers ending in light-up sneakers. She didn’t sport blue hair this time, however, her bleach-blonde sidetail ending in dark roots and trailing over her shoulder. “No. I wasn’t always Automa... but I was always Widget,” she said defiantly. “My parents both worked in real estate in Los Angeles, but moved to New York when I was nine to work for a big firm. It was there that I met my two best friends...”

“Jacent... and Jasmine...?” Natalie wondered.

She nodded, slipping on a leather jacket now. “I was the oldest of the three of us. It was through Jasmine that I also met the man who would ruin my life.” She sat on the console. “A few years into living there, Nhilus tested me for psychic ability. Used me as a guinea pig. I didn’t have any... but his experiments gave me cancer.” She shifted to a version of herself without hair, in a hospital gown. “Just like all the others.” She turned to Gren and Ten. “We didn’t have a cure for that back then, all you could do was treat it and hope. And, well. It didn’t work for me. I was getting ready for the end, when I was approached again. He said he could preserve me, stop me from dying. I didn’t know what he meant, but what could it do, kill me harder?” She shrugged, and the hologram melted away, showing her robot form. “Toussaint had the vision, the science, and Nhilus had the tools. They transformed my brain and I’ve been a robot ever since.”

“Wait.” Carrie stopped her. “So... the other Automa. They’re... human, too??”

Widget nodded. “There are some genuine AI among us... but there’s a reason we make so many jokes about being undead.” She smirked and shrugged. “Die, get raised by an evil guy, have to do what he says until he dies. You get the idea.”

“Ohmigosh your serial numbers are your obituary dates?!” Gren exclaimed suddenly. “That’s so cool!!”

This surprised her. “Wait, so you don’t think it’s weird that I’m a robot zombie?”

Aren instinctively hugged Widget, his tone caring. “No! We think you’re cool!”
Gren aggressively followed suit. “Yeah!!”
Natalie smiled. “You’re the coolest robot I know.”

At facing a chorus of agreeing sentiments from the rest of her friends, Widget smiled, a little embarrassed and pleasantly surprised. She ruffled her little friends’ hair and chuckled. “This isn’t how I pictured this going at all...”

Natalie grinned. “Everyone in this pack is weird. It’s kind of our thing.”

Gamma tottered into the room in a hurry, flapping her too-long sleeves. “Widget Widget Widget! We’re in big troooubllle!!”

Widget flinched. “Uh. Hang on, I’m coming!”

 -
- -
 -

Gamma hadn’t been exaggerating. The thundersnow clouds that hung in the sky were breached, one by one, by very large shapes. 

“What’s that??” Gren asked.

“Those are ships...” Gamma said gravely. “We haven’t seen them in a long, long time. They were used several wars ago. I think they’re going to do now what they did back then: carpet bomb until they reach their target...”

“Am I right in thinking the Administrator controls these?” Widget asked.

“Oh yeah. The Administrator protects itself from the bottom of its tower in the ocean. That’s where it commands all of its enforcers from.”

Aren frowned. “So we’re not gonna be safe until we go there and stop ‘em.”

Ferro nodded hesitantly. “The idea that anyone could do that is unbelievable to me... but then, so was beating Raverous. I know we brought you into this fight that isn’t yours, but you really are our only hope.”

Widget flinched. “Whoa, whoa, no. Not a chance. I made Shockbuster to protect Gren and Ten, not to put them in the most danger possible on a whim. We’ve done you more than a few solids since we arrived, and this is way too much to ask.”

“Why hasn’t Jacent ever talked about you being old friends?”

Widget looked over to Shelly with great confusion, having had to shift into reverse at full speed. “Uh. Is this really the time??”

The glass butterfly was unmoved. “You already totally said you’re not going to intervene, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since you said it. So, why hasn’t he mentioned it? Why doesn’t he act like it?? That seems weird.”

Natalie blinked. “Oh. Oh, yeah... that’s true, isn’t it. In fact, the way he told it, it was like he didn’t know you at all when you met underground.”

Widget was feeling especially cornered. “God. You know what? Alright. Fine. Jacent... he... he doesn’t remember me,” she admitted bitterly. “Alright? Because Jacent’s not okay. He hasn’t been okay, for a long time.”

Nat looked concerned. “What do you mean?”

“You have to have noticed it,” Widget insisted. “The flashbacks, the weird hang-ups. When Jasmine died, it crushed him, and he spent the next six years homeless, starving and fighting for his life. Did you know that when he thinks I’m not around, he talks to her like she’s still there??”

Natalie and her friends frowned, trading worried looks.

“Yeah. I’m afraid to bring it up! I’m afraid of anything that could remind him of Jasmine, because he might... god, I don’t even know what he might do! But every time he’s in a situation he can’t handle, he goes absolutely apeshit and crushes everything around him like nothing I’ve ever seen. Of course I want to connect with him better! ... But I’m scared of what might happen,” she admitted painfully, tears in her eyes.

“Wow...” Gamma said sadly.

“Can you see now??” Widget asked desperately. “Do you understand?? I lost my best friend, and then for five hundred years I kept my memories unraked- I resisted the urge to wipe and start clean, just for the chance to see my next-best friend again... and he doesn’t even remember me. In a way, it’s worse than if he died. I can’t... I can’t lose anyone else. I won’t have any friends left...” She sobbed, dropping to her knees.

It was almost impossible not to feel sorry for her. All of her actions up to this point, all of the things she’d done to help, were painted now in a tragic light. It was hard to overstate the degree to which none of them had known her inner feelings.

“That ain’t true.”

Widget looked up at Carrie, who stared down at her resolutely.

“You only lost the one. You can get the other one back.”

She winced. “But how...?”

She leaned on a large ammunition box, exerting no weight on it. “You said it yourself. He’s a damage case. But that doesn’t mean you put him in glass.”

Sam nodded. “It means you heal him. Give him the support he needs to get better, and face the pain head on.”

Kei smiled supportively, and shook his head. “Nobody’s too far gone, I promise.”

Carrie folded her arms. “We’ll do it together.” She thumped her chest. “I can make sure nobody gets hurt no matter what happens.”

Natalie closed her fist in front of her, even in a hologram her smile as bright as the morning sun. “You’re not alone, Widget. You just need courage, and a little help. You know.” She gestured to everyone else. “From all your other friends,” she emphasized.

Widget leaned on her arm, legs splayed on the ground. “You’d really just... help me with something this difficult, when it doesn’t even involve you? Something you weren’t even around for?”

“Yeah, duh!” Gren retorted, grabbing one of her hands to help her up. “What do you think a hero is??”

She seemed reluctant. “Not me, certainly. I can’t even face my friend; I’m definitely no hero.”

“Maybe not!” Aren pulled her other hand, helping her up and showing him that big, boyish grin of his that translated even now. “... But Shockbuster is.”

 -
- -
 -

The old abandoned highway, covered in glowing green snow; it was a scene of serenity, albeit an alien one. 

A serenity which was shattered when a wall blew out in an explosive burst of concussive force, out of which a yellow and black robot leapt, landing on the highway. 

“WOOOOOOOOO~!!!” cried the electric amalgam, pumping and coasting like an inline skater, hovering just above the snow as they accelerated at high speeds down the way.

“This is awesome!!” Aren cried.
“Hell yeah!” Widget agreed.
“I love being Shockbuster!!!” Gren cheered.

Turrets lifted as their proximity gave them away; they poured on the speed, leaving them in the powdery dust. No amount of artillery mattered as they raced down the road, powered by Widget’s fusion core and Voltaus’ mastery over electricity. Together they sung in synchronicity, nearing the burned coast.

“There they are!” Widget pointed to the many ships in the sky floating toward their friends. 
“We gotta stop ‘em!” Gren acknowledged.

Yet again, they accelerated, boosters carrying them at speeds that forced them to lean forward against the wind resistance. The highway took them over the burgundy sea now, the giant, intimidating tower in the distance. 

“WHOA!” They had to shift away at the last second as a large energy bolt ripped through the road where they’d just been. “AH!!” It happened again. “WAAAAUUUGH!!” A very large explosion rocked the highway and threw Shockbuster into the sea.

They managed not to be submerged, floating just above the surface of the water underneath the crumbling highway. “It’s those ships,” Gren noticed. “They’re shooting at us from the sky.”

“Hmmm...” Aren looked down at the dome-like indentation their thrusters made in the water. “Heeeey. Wait a second, I’ve got an idea!”

The shots got less focused, more erratic and less prevalent as Shockbuster failed to show up to the ships in the air. Suddenly, a bright flash blinded them from below. “YEAAAAH!!” they cried as they sped along the water, using the concave surface as a flashbulb for a small electric element. Targeting was unable to keep track of them in the giant glut of blinding light, and they raced along the waves at breakneck speeds, Voltaus having to work to keep herself together as the wind buffeted her exposed parts.

“Guys, are you okay out there??” Natalie called through the speaker, trying to be heard over the massive thuds of artillery hitting the water. “We’re coming to help as soon as we can, but the autoforge can only work so fast!”

“We’re okay!” ~THUPF!!~ “We can’t afford to wait around though, the ships will be on you in no time!”

“Right! We’re focusing on protecting people here, then once we can move out, we’ll come to help! ... Hey where’s Shelly...?”

“Gotta go, Natalie, good luck!” Widget said as they neared the tower, looking up at a ship that was shining with intent. “... Oh, shit.”

~KA-THOOOOOOOOOOM~

Shockbuster flattened themselves against the ground of the small island as car-sized chunks of metal and concrete flew by at speeds high enough to pull a vacuum, making them slide several feet along the sand. When they finally looked up, the base of the tower had been blown wide open. “Oh thank god we don’t have to start at the top, let’s go!”

 -
- -
 -

The inside of the tower was, somehow, even more alien and terrifying than the outside. Uneven platforms stood above gigantic open drops, at the bottom of which were countless automa who had tried and failed to breach the tower’s defenses, their powerless bodies now impaled on cruelly long spikes. The floor, as much as it existed in the towering islands that followed no recognizable architectural philosophy, were hot-orange perforated metal sheets that looked hot to the touch. They were also the only lighting in the entire place, other than open macro circuits operating in the walls.

“This place is a nightmare...” Widget marveled from the artificial ledge created by blowing a hole in the extremely thick wall.

“How’re we gonna get through here??” Voltaus worried.

Widget grunted in acknowledgement. “It’d be a real problem... if we couldn’t fly.” Shockbuster hopped up and the backpack on their back activated in earnest, working in tandem with their foot thrusters and keeping them aloft above one of the massive pits.

“We can fly?!” Gren and Ten cried in unison.

“Surprise!” Widget laughed. “Now focus, we gotta hurry!”

With remarkable dexterity, Shockbuster maneuvered through the various openings between hot plate floors and bottomless pits, using their thrusters as verniers to navigate the increasingly tight spaces. A flamethrower opened up underneath one of the floors, and they just managed to thrust out of its range. An electric contact tried to shock them, but Voltaus just held a hand out and drained it of power until the unit shorted, burning a dark spot in the plate it was fastened to.

They emptied out into another floor, which held a series of pistons which raised and lowered the floor and ceiling for each section of the hall. They were ordinarily for various industrial uses, but at the moment, they were mashing into each other wildly.

“Oh boy...” Widget remarked. “Okay. I got this, guys, but I’m gonna have to clock a little.”

“I thought you said clocking was bad!” Aren protested.

“It is! But I can do it, just a little, if I’m careful. Ready?” She braced, focusing on the pistons and their patterns. Time slowed down as she carefully chose exactly the right moment to boost forward, then back, then forward three spaces, then back again, roll under a piston, then rocket forward. Shockbuster went into the entryway for the next level, stumbling down the stairs, holding their head. “Nnrgh... RAAAHHH!!!” She opened fire on the stairwell, blasting bolts of lightning into the concrete with reckless abandon. “Die, die, die, DIE, DIE.”

“Widget! Widget, stop!” Gren hollered.

“Hrnnh...??” Widget lurched, ceasing the barrage. “Ungh... ah... sorry, guys. That bit’s hard-coded in there...”

“It’s okay, it’s okay!” Aren comforted her. “You don’t have to explain. We still trust you!”

The beetle borg let out a relieved sigh. “I think I’m alright, now. Thanks, guys... really.”

“Of course! Now let’s get going! We’re almost there... I can feel it!” Gren said with anticipation as they opened a door into an access hatch. The hatch opened into a long ladder- longer than they could actually see down. “... Welp!”

Shockbuster jumped down the hole, ignoring every ladder rung, pumping their boosters as brakes occasionally to stop from reaching terminal velocity. “Yeeeeeah-OOF!” They landed a bit harder than expected once the ground caught up to them, absorbing the blow on all fours. Still, they hadn’t broken anything, thanks to the sturdiness of Widget’s parts and the flexible give of Voltaus’ body. When they finally arose, however, gravity became the least of their problems.

One end of the hallway terminated in a blunt dead end. The other end of the hallway held a large vault. And between these two ends, stood six large enforcers just like Raverous. A giraffe, a rhino, a tiger, a dog, a wasp and a horse stood together, gripping their weapons, staring them down with murderous intent.

“Oh god!” Widget cried as they fell backward in surprise. They were terrifying. Each one of them promised the power and lethality of Raverous, times the overwhelming numbers they had on them. 

Still. It didn’t matter.

Still, they had to fight.

Shockbuster rose to their feet, opened their leg panels to reveal micro missile launcher arrays, and cried “I won’t be afraid!!”

Explosions. Blinding light. Backdrafts. Absolute chaos. Smoke clouded the entire area for a long, anguished moment...

And at the end of it, all of the enforcers were standing there, untouched. Unmoved. Unimpressed.

“What?!” Widget cried, looking around at the destroyed room. “That’s impossible!! W-... How?!”

“Wait a minute.” Aren took control for a moment, grabbing a stray piece of debris, hefting it in their hand... and threw it right through the group of guardians.

“Wha...?” Widget blinked. “They...” They crawled forward, coming to a stand, then reached out to touch them. Their hand went through. And what’s more, none of them reacted. “They’re not... real??”

“It’s just a hologram,” Gren marveled. “They must be somewhere else doin’ stuff for the Administrator.”

“Or maybe they never existed at all,” Aren wondered.

“Right.” Widget nodded resolutely. “It’s time to go inside. Time to end this.”

Shockbuster grabbed the mechanism on the vault door, pulled with all their might, and pried it open with a loud, rusty creak.

 -
- -
 -

Aren and Gren weren’t sure what they were expecting when they reached the Administrator. Some larger than life robot sitting in a giant chair? A terrible god voiced holographic avatar, perhaps?

The Administrator was none of these things.

It was a sandbox sitting on a pedestal in the middle of a greasy, dusty room with one old lightbulb suspended above it.

“Wow. Is... Is this it?” Voltaus asked.

“This is it,” a mature male voice said over the crackling intercom system.

“Wha!” Shockbuster jumped back, startled. “You’re the Administrator?!”

“I am he. Choose your next words carefully.”

“... Heh.” Widget chuckled. “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain, right?”

They paused for a moment. “... I... haven’t heard that in ages. Who are you...?”

At this moment, they separated. Armor came off, inkling coalesced, then released two more robots. 
“We’re not from around here. As in, this universe,” Voltaus explained.
“We’re heroes from another world!” Aren proclaimed.
“A spark in the dark! Shockbuster!” Gren finished.

“So, basically, we’re mysterious strangers,” Widget said. “But the real question is... who are you?”

There was another pause. “... Once, my name was Josue Faucheux. The Flesh Virus had overtaken the world. I had just been named Prime Minister of my home country, France, due to everyone else with more political talent than me dying bloody, gasping deaths. I was three weeks into realizing I was managing the unstoppable extinction of all human life when we were approached. The Nhiloids. We’d forgotten all about that man, his legacy, but here they were in front of us, offering us a way out. A way to beat this creeping death once and for all: Become as they were.”

“... The Automa...” Widget grasped. “Dr. Chu must not have existed in this world. So they offered to sandbox you.”

“We welcomed them as saviors. We were ready to agree to anything, and a fair few of us were even excited. We’d beaten the germ. We had won.”

“So what happened...?”

“What always happens. We found new things to fight over. The Russians insisted they were receiving defective units, creating civil unrest. The Chinese suspected they were having their thoughts slowed down on purpose, and began overclocking themselves. The Americans began abusing treaties to sell access to increasingly scarce power resources. Before I knew it, everything was out of control and tensions were flaring harder than ever. I was weak... feckless. I didn’t know what to do. So I blamed those who had come to help us. Made them out to be the villains. When the bombs dropped, I knew I had made a mistake.”

“Okay, so you messed up!” Aren said. “Make up for it now! Stop the attacks!”

“I cannot.”

“What?! Bull hockey, why?!” Gren demanded.

“Before they left for Space, the Nhiloids punished me for my treachery. They put me in charge of not just France’s portion of the European Bloc, but the entire world. And they tied me to a subroutine that I can never disobey. A campaign promise I made when I was young, and stupid: that no one will ever go hungry. I must ensure no living being is without power. If I fail, shut down or stop before I accomplish that goal, everything suboordinate to me will go berserk.” He paused. “This existence is hell. Anyone who stops me digs their own grave. There is no way out.”

Widget and the kids looked at this inoccuous box like it was a ticking time bomb. The amount of danger they and everyone else were in was proportional to how insurmountable the problem seemed. Voltaus could do a lot, but she couldn’t provide power for the whole world- not now, not ever.

“Finally.”

Shelly walked into the vault room, soot-covered and exhausted. 

“Shelly?! You followed us all the way here???” Gren asked, incredulous.

“Yeah. Because I knew you couldn’t fix this without help.” Shelly hefted a large suitcase-sized box.

“What’s that??”

“This,” she explained, “Is a fusion generator. It’s so effecient that it’s essentially free energy. I started making this last night, when I realized no amount of fighting was gonna fix the underlying problem. I’ve sent the schematics to everyone within the data network. Everyone has free energy now.”

Widget shook her head slowly in awe. “Shelly... I have one of those and I don’t even know how it works without instructions. How did you make a fusion generator... from memory??”

“OhhhHHHHHHhhhhhh.......” The intercom system filled with the relieved groans of the Administrator as the entire building powered down one level at a time until, click by click. Every little machine in the entire place wound down in an almost organic release of tension and angst, until they were left completely in the dark. Not a single volt of electricity flowed through one component in the entire place.

All that remained was a lava lamp butterfly, glowing in the darkness, her eyes dark with untold depths of thought. “Goodnight, Prime Minister.”

 -
- -
 -

It was quite something to see a place which had been chosen for its incognito location turned into a beacon of flashing lights and loud music.

The Resistance celebrated like it never had before. Decades of increasingly arduous guerilla warfare had evaporated in two days, thanks to the arrival of a bunch of weird-looking strangers from beyond reality- and they received every bit the savior’s welcome upon returning.

“Whoa! WHOA~! Ahahaha!” Aren giggled as he was thrown up into the air via an emergency landing parachute that the soldiers had turned into a trampoline by holding onto the ends of it.

“Yeah~! Woo!!” Gren bounced, doing a flip in the air. “Widget, do a flip!!”

Widget was most definitely not going to do a flip. Overwhelmed by being the center of attention, all she could do was laugh nervously and whoop when she was thrown up in the air. “Hahaha, you guys!!”

Far from the celebration, a bunch of newly-minted Automa stood around, musing on the situation.

“What’s wrong, Big Bulbs?” Carrie asked, folding her arms and smirking at Shelly. “I thought you’d be over there, soaking up all the kudos.”

“Oh, uh, I was; I got overstimulated,” she smiled apologetically. 

“Sure,” Cat acknowledged. “Is that it?”

“Well. No,” she admitted. “I... when I was younger, my SDD made me act a little cold toward people, so sometimes I got told that I should’ve been born as a robot.”

“Ohhh,” Erwin acknowledged. “So you don’t like being one now.”

“No, that’s the thing,” Shelly pivoted, looking embarrassed. “I actually really do like being one. Something about it feels really good, like, it works, I just can’t explain it.” She looked away. “I guess I hate to think they were totally right...”

“They were wrong~!” Samantha announced in a sing-song voice, spinning on one leg and traipsing about before stopping in front of her. “A ‘robot’ is an unfeeling machine, dear. An Automa, as we all have learned, is something much more.” 

She twirled again, holding out her hand, from which Mhend appeared, as if she were the other dancer in the routine. “Indeed... even like this, you do give off a very small amount of prana. Just enough that one might survive on it. It’s the most curious thing.” She looked wryly at her. “I wondered what would happen to me when you got your dream body. Why, if I wasn’t already joined with you when we arrived, I would hazard to guess I’d have been ejected immediately.”

“Goodness!” Sam remarked. “That would be terrible. Anything I do, I will make sure we can stay together, of course.” Her inkling smiled at her, and they joined again, with some effort.

“Honestly, Shelly,” Erwin interjected. “You saved this whole world by being really smart. You should be proud of that. You have nothing to apologize for.”

Natalie grinned. “Yeah! Take the win, Shells! You were the most important player in this!”

Shelly bashfully hugged herself and wriggled- something she did when she was overstimulated. “Like... okay. Thanks, you guys.”

“NATALIE GRAYSWIFT.”

The robotic wolf jumped, seeing a portal having opened behind them. “Geez! Yeah, I’m not deaf! Hi, Pathos.”

“Your tasks are finished.”

“What??” she asked. “Really?? We can finally go home???”

“Yes. You must.”

Sam perked up. “Can I keep my-”

“No.”

She pouted.

“Oh! Oh! You’re leaving??” Gamma asked, running down the ramp. “Okay, well, thank you for everything!”

Ferro followed her down, the trio formerly known as Shockbuster going as well. “I can’t tell you how much what you did means to us. I don’t know if we’ll ever get the trees back, or the animals, but...” He looked up and smiled. “Now? We have a chance. And that’s more than we ever dreamed of. Especially thanks to you, Shelly.”

She smiled. “Yeah, like. Whatever, you’re welcome,” she giggled with embarrassment.

“And of course, thanks to Shockbuster!!” Gamma cried excitedly.

“Shockbusterrr!!!” Gren and Ten yelled with enthusiasm.

Once everyone had said their goodbyes, Natalie’s pack stepped through the portal and into unknown horizons. But it was Natalie herself who was stopped in Pathos’ realm before she could finish her journey home. 

The wolf stood before the giant goat woman, or whatever that image stood for, inked and in human form once more. “Do you have something to tell me?”

Pathos gestured with one of her many hands, summoning a very thin, damp sheet of tissue paper suspended in midair, then placing a couple of marbles on it. “You may be tempted, now, to rush into action.” She highlighted a marble with Echelon’s colors, and one colored like Emnas. ”Armed with the knowledge you now possess, you will wish to marshal your now considerable forces to resolve your problems immediately, with maximum force.” 

Natalie tilted her head, peering at the game. “But I shouldn’t?” She pondered this for a moment, thinking about the worlds she’d just been to. “Killing Emnas... using Grendel to destroy the invasion... blaming human problems on the Automa... it was all the quick, easy way out, wasn’t it?”

Marbles of familiar colors began to drop onto the cloth, crowding around the Emnas piece: Arus, Karalo, Animis, and oddly two Comet-themed marbles. The moment Emnas’ marble was surrounded, the entire cloth gave way, sending all of them plummeting into the infinite vastness of the void, and out of sight. “Indeed.”

“Oh, I get it,” Natalie realized, as the Emnas marble was placed on a sheet anew. “The kind of power we’ve got now... we could do a lot of damage without meaning to.” She plucked an icy marble and placed it on the sheet; upon touching, they both dimmed. “So the right problem needs the right solution... at the right time.” She looked up. “Okay. So I get what I need to do in general, but.” She glanced aside. “Can’t I get a specific hint??”

Pathos leaned to one side, considering this. She thought about it for what felt like a small eternity, glancing about the endless void. Finally, she turned again toward Natalie. “...Cowardice kills. Destroy the Dragon.”

She blinked. “What does that m- Wait! Hey!” The portal began sucking her in. “No, wait, what do you mean by that?? AaaaaAAA-”

And once again, the void was empty, as voids tend to be.