Exodus Part 2

Though the Scyrians have been freed from the Simulation, the identity of the intruder is revealed to be the Stonewellium strand of enhancelement that survived in spite of the death of Edwyn Stonewell that calls itself Stonewellium Prime has evolved a conscience of its own based on Stonewell himself and has taken over the Exodus Spacecraft, completely infesting its systems and is intent on flying it to Sydus, a planet that has not been charted on any maps and has been selected to be a new colony for the modern Scyrians. With all the Exodus Spacecraft has produced including that which is the Stonewellium's creation, the Loungers have to find help as soon as possible to wipe away the infection before it arrives on Sydus, and meet some new friends: an old friend of Santrago named Iuego, a Chromon who wants to make Sydus into a better world than what the Stonewellium wants from it, and two new friends: a Finkur pre-teen, an expert VR gamer and former soil scientist named Noda, and an Ohrugan former rarium miner with loads to make for himself named Gable. With the Stonewellium beginning to turn the spacecraft into its own experimental craft and on its way to spread across the AUU with its influence starting with Sydus, it's up to the Loungers and their new friends to finally cleanse the Stonewellium plague from existence once and for all.

## Scenes

#### **Stonewellium Prime**

* (HL-1): HANG, ON! CAN'T SEEM TO FIND YOU!!
* (Maxy): WELL FIND HARDER, BECAUSE OUR STOMACHS ARE GONNA ERUPT SOON FROM ALL THIS BODY HORROR WE'RE SEEING!!! (Everything was in ZongueBob's POV as he saw the Loungers being dragged into a mass of flesh through tentacles)
* HL-1: Oh, there you go... Yikes, those have got you guys good. No worries, just, let me handle this.
* Sau: YOU'RE STILL USING MY BODY!
* HL-1: THEN LET ME DO SOMETHING WITH IT!
* Siri: Just let ME handle it! (She disintegrated all the tentacles freeing the group)...
* HL-1:... Why don't you let ME do something, just ONCE? Ahem. Anyway, glad you're all okay.
* Mr. Tetrus: Really? (Two of his arms were missing)
* HL-1:... MOSTLY okay. So, quick update, this isn't the simulation. We're back in the real world. On the Exodus Craft.
* Commander: Well, no kidding.
* Cadet: Is it weird to say I wanna be back in the simulation? Sounds MUCH less scary than where we are now.
* ???: (More eyes opened) Oh, hello there. You made it. NOW what are all you little misfits up to? This is to be MY world! The first of MANY!
* HL-1: Ugh! STILL not used to his needless banter. Just tell us what the hell you are!
* ???: You may call me, Stonewellium Prime.
* HL-1:... Okay, but what are you SPECIFICALLY.
* Stonewellium: You're looking at it. I'm everywhere on this ship-
* Xoriago: WILL YA TELL US ALREADY?!?
* Stonewellium:... (Sighs)... I am not Stonewell. Rather, I am his creation. Enhancelement given identity. Awareness. A will to live. I'm the strain he created for his own conquest... Until the Lodgers and Heroes Act, Heili and her little friends RUINED it! I was lucky to even SURVIVE. Gazelle was TOO dangerous, and he could never avoid her. But as for me? With her absence, I shall finish what he failed to do. I'll spread myself across Sydus, and beyond.
* Jimson: Uhhh... Why would you tell us that?
* Stonewellium: Because, I know you can't STOP me, FOOL!
* Timothy: HAHA! He called you fo- (Jimson pointed a blaster at him)... I'll shut up. Instead I'll do this. I WISH- (Cos and Waya were trapped in cocoons)
* Stonewellium: Uhuhuh! NO SHORTCUTS THIS TIME! (He captured Belmen, Voidis, Pheng Bung, Wilby, and Anthropodzillagod)
* Ruke: OH YOU CHEATING DADDY F\*\*\*\*R!!!! (They were all seized again, but Siri once again used her Astral Princess powers to save them and fight him off)
* HL-1: Okay, time to get away from all these tentacles and prying eyes.
* Brittany: HOW?!? AND HURRY UP AND SAY IT! I'M TOO PRETTY TO DIE!!!! ESPECIALLY NOT LIKE THIS!!!
* HL-1: Oh, hush up, puppy! (Brittany was cartoonishly angry for a split second) Alright, Siri, can you clear this flesh off the floor?
* Siri: Yeah? (She did that and they found it was a teleporter)
* Archindarce: Well good, we can still teleport out!
* HL-1: Better hold on and take turns now.
* Stonewellium: OH NO! I'M NOT DONE PLAYING WITH YOU YET!!

(Later...)

* HL-1:... Is everyone okay?
* Mr. Fursies:... Well, mostly.
* Brittany: I, have seen things... That I can NEVER unsee! And THIS time, it's not from Fursies.
* Fursies: Yaaay!
* Jeeper: Frankly, I may never see anymore vore porn again. (Everyone looked at him weirdly)... What? If anything, that's good.
* HL-1:... Ignoring that. On the bright side, the Exodus Craft is still as intact as it was when we got on it. Stonewellium hasn't COMPLETELY taken over its systems yet. But, he's working to do just that, as we speak.
* Alpha Rolf: Then let's tear our way in!
* (Stonewellium): Gohohood luck. I've forbidden access to ANY entry to my location.
* Alpha Rolf: Oh REALLY?! Well, WATCH US GET TO YOU ANYWAY!!!

French Narrator: A few... Disturbing... moments later...

* Alpha:... Okay... That... Was too much!
* Commander: Okay, so, he outsmarted us the first time. Took away our greatest weapons: comical hijinks and superior tactics combined with stubborn stupidity, and turned it against us. That ain't gonna happen twice!

Later...

* Commander: (They were chased by a plethora of monsters inside a cave of innards) IT HAPPENED TWICE! **IT HAPPENED TWIIICE!!!**

Later...

* Commander: (They were mostly disturbed)... So... Dark... Monsters everywhere!
* Cadet: The eyes! They didn't stop staring at us!
* HL-1: So, you want to try that again?
* Commander:... No!
* HL-1: I can't hear you!
* Commander: NO!
* HL-1: Good. Then I have a better plan. We just head to the nearest uplink pads, and interface with the ship's various subsystems. Through a virtualized representation of those control systems, we can challenge Stonewellium's efforts. If we can do that to enough of them, we can weaken him enough to confront Stonewellium himself, on the ship's main bridge.
* Georgina: Really?
* HL-1: Well it's a longshot, but if anyone can do it, it's you guys.

#### **Who Is Iuego?**

* HL-1:... Hmm... Looks like we finally found information on Santrago's 'netpal'.
* ZongueBob: You mean Iuego?
* HL-1: Yep.... And WOW! He's a Chromon.
* Sonny: You mean them bizarre fish-cats we've been coming across in the Stonewellium Ring?
* HL-1: Yep. I mean, the documents on Scyrian history DID say that they experimented with sentient animals for various reasons, but-
* Sau: That doesn't really MATTER right now!
* HL-1: Right right, sorry, forgot I was sharing a body with you. (They began to read the documents)
* (Iuego): Really, really hate these neural uplinks. Last thing I need's a record of all my unconscious thoughts. Guess I better review all my entries before committing. Okay, okay... Begin. So here I am, on site for Exodus. Led my share of teams before, but this project is... Yeah. How do I describe an attempt to recreate everything and everyone that ever lived on Scyria? This one's so big, it's recently got many of this 'cultivated staff' in harmony, regardless if they were from USRA or UIS space, which apparently for a long time got along as well as water and oil. Damn, that probably sounded sarcastic. Whoever's accessing this, I know how important this project is, how serious things are. We've barely got time to cram our message in a bottle and pitch it overboard before the end. It shouldn't come as a shock that both sides are similar to those sides of the Enhancelement War, which now that I think about it, could still team up in the face of a global extinction event before things went to the morgue, or in the case of the USG and the Sydus Feds, their minds turned to monsters. Just wonder why I was born to be a part of such a big worthwhile cause.
* Sonny:... I have a very weird feeling about this cat.
* Sau/HL-1: Me too... Hey!... Uh... Okay, this is awkward, we managed to speak at the same time... AND WE'RE STILL SPEAKING AT THE SAME TIME!!
* Sau:... Let's keep reading.
* HL-1: Yeah, let's keep reading. (They did so)
* (Iuego): What made me and my family think I could help lead this project? Sure, I'd only had an overview of what they're trying to do here thanks to my family's generations of support, but you'd have to get a lightyear away to start taking it all in. I've been trying to catch up by speed-scrolling through all their documentation, and it's making me wish I had Udma's processing power. Oh yeah... Forgot to mention I'm working for one of them now. A transbeing named Udma. Apparently one of the first of the Exodus Craft's original staff ascended to ensure things stayed as planned. If only the me of over a decade ago could see me now. I know much of us have been at peace for a while since we got over the fact we were based on sides that hate each other for understandable reasons, but it's still sort of hard to take in how fast things have changed and how much has been learned and... Well, everything really. I mean it, I can barely remember how I ended up where I am now, working for people who were once trying to kill each other not so long ago after being cultivated from people who ALSO tried killing each other MUCH so long ago. It took until it was too late for the stubborn bastards running the United Scyrian Government to accept what the Sydus Feds were telling them: that their planet is terminally ill. The evidence must've been damned convincing, for them to let the transbeings help them with their getaway plan. It took me and many others who aided in the Spacecraft's workings convincing them why they existed for them to make peace. But it's still peace that's lackluster. I swear, these two sides BETTER behave themselves, or I'm gonna blow my brains out and HOPE Udma resurrects me.
* ZongueBob:... Wow... He actually stopped USRA and UIS cultivated beings from fighting?
* Sonny: Yes, I mean, they WERE created for the same purpose, and if they WERE to continue that s\*\*\*, then history would no doubt repeat itself.
* HL-1: Precisely. Someone HAD to do something about it. Clearly Iuego was the right choice.... Let's hope he continues doing well.
* (Iuego): The scale of this thing, I dunno... I keep getting caught in spirals, trying to picture all the variables for when I start making decisions around here. My parents believed in me after I stopped the feud, but is that enough? How do you even start a list of essential items you need to make a backup of nature? What do you pack to relocate to another planet for a race that fought SO hard to rejuvenate what it lost ages ago? I mean, we barely got far enough out into the dark to bring back evidence of much wilder areas that have yet to be discovered with more bizarre alien life to argue about: a few amino acids, traces of something like chlorophyll... Nothing like definitive proof what the UUniverses already knows is not the only show in town. If we'd found that proof, I wouldn't have to feel like it's on me to save the only things that ever looked up and thought about all those lights in the sky. Heh, guess our transbeingist friends would argue differently. Sorry... Never been superstitious, or religious, whatever the term should be. I'd, uh, better search the right term before uploading this.
* HL-1:... Like I said, let's HOPE!
* (Stonewellium): Ohhhhohohoho, we BOTH know he didn't.
* HL-1: UGH, DAMN, I THOUGHT I LOCKED YOU OUT!!!
* (Stonewellium): Oh, hogwash. Nobody's ever REALLY gone, you know. I'm living PROOF of that.
* HL-1: ERRRRGGHHHH!!! (She used Sau's functions to put a soundproof shield around them)... I can't STAND his constant taunts! The SOONER we cleanse this infection, the BETTER! (They kept reading)
* (Iuego): At first, transbringism seemed like a mirror version of those old-timey crystal-healing nuts who rejected modern medicine-wackos grooving on the energies of the miracle discovery powering all our shiny high-tech junk. Used to think I was just as big on Scyrian reverse-engineering tech, back when I was hacking media feeds and jailbreaking police bots in the favelas. But when they started with all their brain modification and neuroprosthetics, I stopped understanding 'em. Not that I agreed with the fed crackdown... If someone wanted to disappear up their own interface port and commune with the infinite, I figured that was their business. Who'd have thought we'd all end up going to war over something like that bulls\*\*\*? My project partner Udma would keep saying that what's done is done, and races or people in general are always looking for things like that, and did so GREATLY during the Teadr 1 Era. She said that enhancelement was the proof of a higher power out there somewhere, trying to help the Scyrians reach it since their primal need to survive a world where everything was out to get them, and as for the case of the USRA and the UIS, well, it's for independence and keeping worlds from relying on a central peacekeeping alliance too much and therefore becoming weaker. Funny how one great thing can become a detriment in time. If it really was a sacred gift or one that claimed to bring peace, we've wasted it burning down our own home around us, or even turn a great world into a great big dump. Hell, I personally designed weapons powered by the enhancelement itself. Part of me fears that the Scyrians using the substance that caused their downfall is hypocritical, but, others say that enhancelement is not inherently evil. It's just an artificially-created silicon-based lifeform made from DNA strands weaved into a fabric of liquid metal and simulating life itself. It's a living thing that has evolved on its own, for better or worse.... I swear, it's hard to be mad at it.
* Sonny: Yeah, it kinda is since we know it's not restricted to Scyria anymore.... HOW it got to that Permiana world, I got no idea.
* HL-1: Best guess is the same endeavors of the Adytum Project. The same one that made Scyrian wildlife invasive on other UIS worlds. Enhancelement must've spread to other worlds, and not JUST Permiana Minor... Or was it Major?
* ZongueBob: Who cares? We have work to do here!
* HL-1: Right. (They continued reading)
* (Iuego): Udma's been after me to choose some team leads, so I've been scanning her shortlist for standouts. Alescas' thesis work, "Environmental Transport of Energetic Compounds," jumped out at me... It keeps me up at night knowing I designed munitions similar to those that permanently poisoned battlefields on Scyria, so I'd love to promote someone into central planning who understands how to keep that enhancelement junk from polluting our biomes. Her high-level military clearance with the Sydus Federation doesn't hurt either. I'd feel better with that whiz kid Yogne running our engram reconstruction project, too. He's a sentientist zealot, so I think it's safe to assume his genius is all-natural and not from enhancement. Nothing against Udma or the rest of them, but I'd rather have a regular sentient being building our brain bank. Yeah... Better hold this upload. In fact, keep my journal local-only going forward, unless I say it's okay to commit any new entries.
* HL-1: Hmm... Looks like he had a LOT of good support going for him. (She opened HoloID files)... The ones called Alescas and Yogne are Alescas Homecome, and Yogne Hong. Alescas was a chemist who studied enhancelement on this spacecraft longer than anyone else, and helped the people learn to adapt it into their communities, while Yogne was a young Holozan simulation engineer who helped create immersive simulations INCLUDING the... But died because he went rogue.
* Sonny: How come?
* HL-1: That information has been deleted.
* Sonny:... I gotta bad feeling about this.
* ZongueBob: Me too. Maybe the documents here will tell us.
* (Iuego): Even the name of this project bugs me, if I'm being honest. 'Exodus' sounds like what someone with something to lose would call it: just begging for the same kind of fear and hate transbeingists got, once they started LOSING things. If this goes any more public than it had to, since I only had to break the news to those in the cultivars who were higher-ups and not the common people, and we'll have mobs organizing to shut us down. Many people in those cultivated rings didn't react well when they found out that their ancestors' bones had been dug up and gene-sequenced by researchers, Scyrian or otherwise, with no cultural sensitivity... What happens when it completely gets out that we want to build an archive of everyone that ever lived on Scyria and even bring infinite minds from people of past and present to help us?
* Sonny:... You know, when you put it that way... The whole prospect sounds pretty insane to grasp. I can see why the people bred in the Adytums were ALSO bred to be unaware and used to it all. I mean, the only reason people like HEILI were aware of such anomalies in the Adytums' ecosystems was because of interbreeding with OUTSIDE colonists.
* HL-1: Indeed. But this Spacecraft has been separated ENTIRELY from UUniversal interaction since the Teadr 1 Era, so, they had NOTHING to work with outside of the staff keeping in touch with recent events.
* ZongueBob: So, in other words, they basically had no idea what they were or what their purpose was, nor were they allowed to know?... Sounds like a miserable existence.
* HL-1: It would if the rings weren't made to simulate as many worlds as possible.
* ZongueBob: Yeah, that's true.
* (Iuego): I've been trying to understand the transbeingist mindset because something occurred to me... If we want this project to work out, we'll need to convert zealots of our own to the cause: true believers who'll raise their kids to believe. After all, people on both the USRA and UIS sides are STILL butting heads with each other, and if they keep it up, we're NEVER going to go anywhere but up... Straight up into flames. How else will we convince people to give up lifetimes, their children's lifetimes, for this pipe dream? It's like we're laying the foundation for a cathedral so our distant descendants can pray in it. By the time that day comes, this plan to restart life on Earth or elsewhere could be the last religion left around, because if we're not careful, it could all backfire. So many things can go wrong with a project as big as this, like if some nosy zealot spy discovered what we've been keeping from them since the truce. In fact, it may be happening right now and we won't even know until it was too late. If ONE person was to learn about the greater project and tell everyone about it, everything will be compromised. I'm sure I'll never live to see the launch of any interuniversal colony ship or satellite adytum swarm, whichever ends up being our final choice for relocating our archive, if any of that happens. So I need to make sure the project is set up for the future, with people dedicated to seeing it through no matter what that takes, before any disorderly zealot ruins it all for us.
* Sonny:... Suddenly it got more hectic for them, FAST.
* Sau: Yeah, if I was in that situation, I'd no doubt worry or freak out too.
* (Iuego): I've been stuck for weeks with our vivarium team, trying to get them to reach a consensus on ecosystem inclusion. What's the least amount of terrestrial lifeforms you'd need to recreate nature? If all you had left were a handful of the most successful survivors of the Enhancelement War like the Scyrians' Intelloraptor ancestors, fgakens, sodos, zees, a very few amounts of fish, algae, mammals, and some edible Scyrian crops, to name a few, could you say you'd saved life on Scyria? We don't honestly expect to be able to preserve every form of life on Scyria ever existed. Hell, SOME of them were able to spread to other worlds, but thankfully they were restricted to UIS space, and now they're all classified as part of UIS fauna. But it only seems smart to back up as much as possible, extinct or otherwise, in case there's a possible balance that we missed out on the first time. What if the mighty pterosaurs of Scyria were around when the humans started domesticating animals during their Storm Age? Maybe that could've led to a civilization better equipped to survive ecodisasters... That's the same approach our antecedent group is using to archive every sentient mind and body that ever lived. Scyrians cultivate sentient beings in order to teach the newborn clones harmony, and the Adytums internally did that by introducing USRA and UIS beings often in the same domed land. Say things didn't work out so well for some warrior queen. What if she'd been born with better eyesight, or a stronger immune system? What if she had a pet Mammothericus, or a friend from another world? I'd say things would've been SO much better. Buuut, we'd rather not go the way of Pharagu and recreate the same scenario that got the Scyrians functionally extinct in the first place.
* ZongueBob:... At least his crew KNOWS what they're doing.
* Sonny: Yeah, for how much longer? Stonewellium WOULDN'T have corrupted this ship if they were successful. We're STILL trying to piece together how in tarnation this craft hadn't gone ANYWHERE all these eons.
* HL-1: That question STILL buggers me. Almost anyway, let's keep reading.
* (Iuego): I finally realized the only way to solve our deadlock over biome conservation was to ask Yogne to model variations for us in the Exodus engine. I knew there'd be a cost to running his team ragged to get us rough simulations way ahead of schedule, but that's nothing compared to the cost of building physical versions. His sims will let us rule out the more extreme suggestions, and find a balance of habitats almost everyone can agree on. I'd probably still be nursing a migraine while experts screamed at each other, if Yogne's team wasn't pulling off the impossible. I really owe the kid. Even in early development his sims are really immersive, and you can see the potential for training colonists while they're still in hibernation. Ideally, they'll wake up with all the skills necessary to hit the ground running on their new home planet. In fact, it also solves my zealot problem. If we can have the entirety of the common people hooked into this simulation, we can teach them to unify better and help us finally complete this project. It's a risky move that has a lot of questionable ethics, but sometimes you have to break a few rules if it means it works for everybody.
* Sau: So THAT'S where the Exodus Simulation came from.
* Sonny: Yep. It was meant to help teach the people on this ship how to coexist without compromising the project.
* ZongueBob: Wow. But that still doesn't answer why Yogne went rogue.
* HL-1: Then keep reading, mate.
* (Iuego): Udma actually seemed glad to see me back in my office again this morning. She asked if I'd give her a full situation report on our biome decisions over dinner, and I was only too happy to cut out early for a fancy meal. Figured I'd earned that much, breaking up all those arguments over microbial diversity in the vivariums. Udma even grinned when I shared my pain over pepperberry-rubbed steaks and wine. Hadn't even been sure one of them could smile, so that felt like a win. I spotted Yogne drinking by himself at the bar, and called him over to ask if they'd solved their perceptual foregrounding problem. The kid seemed jittery around us. He's been working with transbeings longer than me, so what was that about? Couldn't tell if Udma didn't notice him squirming, was too polite to say anything about it, or didn't care either way. You know what? Better follow up on this.
* ZongueBob: Well that's convenient, I get the first steps to my answer the MOMENT I ask for it. (Laughs)
* Sonny: So then let's CLIMB that staircase. (Laughs)
* HL-1: (Laughs) You two are SO much like SpongeBob and Sandy, I almost can't take it. Ahem, yes, let's climb the staircase.
* (Iuego): Yogne kept on acting weird all day. Once I caught on that he was ducking me, I tried to put myself in places where we'd have to cross paths. When we did, he kept conversations so professional that it felt like he was messing with me. Whiz kids like him can be twitchy... I thought maybe I just couldn't read him, any more than I can guess what kind of complicated data crunching Udma's doing at any given time. So I opted for the direct approach. I said he'd hurt my feelings, and just when I thought we'd had a good vibe going. That got him to laugh and loosen up a bit, so I offered to buy him a round at the canteen and build on that. A few pints later, I had him sharing pics of his husband and kids. Never would've figured a young guy like Yongki for a family man. I thought about the all-nighters he'd been putting in, and pulled rank to order him home for a few days.
* ZongueBob:... Okay, that's a little daunting. The guy was a father.
* Sonny: Yeah, so... He had a LOT going for this.
* HL-1: Darn, wonder why that wasn't in his HoloID... Whatever. Let's keep reading.
* (Iuego): Well, Yogne made me regret pushing him to share what his deal was with me. Dunno what I expected, but it sure wasn't some conspiracy theory about my background... I could see the kid was still on edge even after the time off with his family, so I dragged him back to the canteen for another one-on-one. It only took a couple rounds of shots for him to open up. First he told me he'd heard a rumor that I was based on some guy who helped cause the chaos of the war to begin with, but he was too wasted to remember the guy's name, but he WAS a Scyrian. Then he admitted to trying to access my personnel file in the Holonet for proof of life, only to find himself locked out in the same way as civilians are locked out of sensitive information. Even though he'd admitted to crossing a serious line, I laughed it off and pointed out I was sitting right there next to him. It was clearly drunk rambling, I thought. But, I stopped laughing when he told me he'd found a listing for my engram in his archive that was non-accessible, even at his security level, and something involving... This guy and me sharing... Identical brain waves, before passing out. That was news to me.
* ZongueBob:... Ooooookay, THAT'S more daunting.
* Sonny: Uncomfortably so. This Iuego guy has a connection to some dead Scyrian? How?
* HL-1: I don't know... But we're going to find out. (They kept reading)
* (Iuego): I know the kid had no business trying to peek at my personnel file, but I get why a true believer like Yogne would have a hard time trusting his former enemies. After all, I was on the UIS side while he was a Holozan on the USRA side. Maybe I understand his paranoia a little too well... I'm no patriot, but it is hard to let go of all the wartime propaganda about transbeings wanting to make us into hosts for some invasive hivemind. I wanted to prove Yogne wrong, but when I brought up my own file, I got stuck on the part where it summed up my post-feud activities. Pretty much everything it said I did just before joining Exodus felt wrong. Then I realized that my own service record didn't sit right with me. Sure, I remembered the things my record said I did near the end of the feud since I was just gaining my footing well enough to remember it even being recorded on the Holonet, but I didn't feel anything about those memories, one way or the other. In fact, it feels as if I was in a state of negative visualization, like the false memory effect or something. I don't like the implications of that. Feels like something had changed in my life that caused this anesthesia.... I have to get to the bottom of this. Maybe Yogne was onto something and he wasn't rambling from intoxication.
* ZongueBob:... I think I can feel my nonexistent muscles tensing up a bit.
* Sonny: I think I can feel MY EXISTENT ones tensing up.
* Sau: Well I think I can feel MY nonexistent muscles tensing up too.
* HL-1: Let's just suck it up and keep reading, and let's TRY to stop treating it like it's a soap opera or something.
* (Iuego): After I looked up my own record last night and freaked out, I tried to cover my tracks with a few hours of random searches through the database. I stumbled across the first major screw up by Yogne's division: between emulation and archiving, they somehow got two distinct historical identities entangled. The dominant personality, a rarium prospector from Ocollo, was also given the memories of an Arcatan occultist from the Arcaterran Pre-Arcanium Principate Era. It'd tie up resources to unravel and recompile them, so I flagged the whole mess to fix if or when we ever have any downtime. Mashing up two sets of genetics would just give us a new offspring that never organically happened, but this is like we stitched a random pair of souls together. Hope my warning flag keeps that poor bastard from ever getting incarnated. I can't picture an AI ever glitching out enough to resurrect an aberrant engram. This one's legitimately gonna haunt me, though honestly wish I could just erase my ever knowing about it.
* ZongueBob: Wow. What a cover-up.
* Sonny: Yep.
* Sau: So, what exactly is going on here? I seem to have lost my train of thought with it.
* HL-1: Essentially, Iuego and Yogne have discovered something either of them didn't know even as crewmembers on the Exodus Project. It's no doubt gonna ruin them, but something's gotta happen, and strewth, I have a feeling it's not going to be the NORMAL kind of unpleasant.
* (Iuego): Yogne offered to resign over the mangled engram I found in his archive yesterday, but instead I ordered him to knock off early and come drink with me in the canteen. I don't like that the kid's my only sounding board for my paranoia, but he gave me these doubts to begin with! He's also the only one qualified to tell me if what I'm afraid of is even possible. I knew his team already had a zillion engrams in their brain bank, including my own. I made my joining the project conditional on their agreement not to emulate and archive me for resurrection, especially since my family wanted to help with the project without ANY resurrection whatsoever since doing so would just be overreliance on the prospect of immortality, and it would just be like playing Gods. Clearly they had that capacity anyway, over my objections. What if that rumor Yogne heard was true, that I was not really my own self? Was it so crazy to imagine that the transbeings just booted up another mental copy of me from this Scyrian person, after editing my memories to fill the gap? Could I be Iuego 2.0?
* Sonny: Ohhhhhh boy.
* HL-1: Well... Oh dear. It's true. He is. Look here.
* (Iuego): So I confronted Udma, and she confirmed that I'm a mental clone of a Scyrian scientist for the USG named Doctor Genison, a former friend of Sydus herself who... Was reported to have been killed via enhancelement poisoning, but... As of recently, it was discovered that he merely ejected his consciousness into the engrammic matrix after copying it who knows how many times. And yeah, they gave me false memories to cover for the time it took to back up my personality and put it in the body from a family of close friends to the Exodus staff. When they discovered this, Udma couldn't say since it was deleted from her database. Wish I could say she seemed remorseful while confirming my most paranoid fears. Udma just stood back and waited while I flipped out. Once I'd worn myself out, she pointed out that we were trying to save the Scyrians here. In Udma's mind, the ends justified whatever means were necessary. They'd already restored me from a backup of someone else's mind by the time I was born because my family was long part of Exodus on the condition that they didn't put me in their archive. She said I'd been given a leadership role as important as any sentient being ever had, all because my father was one of the finest and knew within his soul that I would be far better.... And in a way, they were right. There were politicians and military commanders who dreamed their whole lives of being able to make a difference or leave a legacy like I would. Was she expecting gratitude? Imagine that.
* Sonny:... So... This Iuego guy, is a mental clone of this Genison guy?
* HL-1: Seems so. According to the ancient files I dug up from Scyrian history, Doctor Genison Tenn Centuris was a good friend of Sydus before she founded the Sydus Federation, and he was the one who created some of the USG's finest weapons and war machines before and during the Enhancelement War. But when he refused to believe or listen to her warnings about what enhancelement was doing to the planet and the Scyrians... They went their separate ways, and Genison responded to her desertion and betrayal by enhancing his designs. This only accelerated the enhancelement poisoning and genetic madness it brought, and in the end, it helped add to the cataclysm that resulted in Scyria's downfall.
* ZongueBob: So, by extension, it was all HIS fault?
* HL-1: Maybe, maybe not. But... Perhaps this is his way of correcting his mistake. Maybe he backed himself up in people like Iuego to have a chance to fix everything.
* Sonny:... That's actually hardcore dedication right there. I applaud his persistence.
* HL-1: Well let's see if Iuego succeeds.
* (Iuego): There's not much I can do about this extra life I've been given, especially knowing that they can just bring me back again from their archive, even if I don't want to... But since I'm THIS important, I have to. If Sydus was still around, she wouldn't approve of it since she never had the chance to forgive Genison, but... Darn it all. In a way, the transbeings in the Sydus Feds sort of got their revenge on Gen by extending his life using their damned technology through people like me, whether it was of his own will or not. Some people would be glad for another chance to get things right, but I had my time in the sun. Udma tells me Gen died a hero his first time around, and that he helped end the war when he learned too late that Sydus was right all along. I guess I'll have to take her word for it, since they didn't let me remember how that went down. I remember a childhood in the First Ring in Sopotolo, a life spent designing high-tech enhancelement gear and munitions for the UIS side, but I'm not really that guy anymore, am I? If my engram is cloned again, mentally or physically, to colonize some uncharted world in the far future, that Gen wouldn't remember this version of him either. Me. Maybe he'd be better off that way.
* Sau: Well at least he's trying to cope with this revelation.
* (Iuego): When I told Yogne that Udma confirmed everything, I reminded the kid that, unlike him, I'd always had clearance to look up my own file. Yogne told me then that he'd searched the database for his own name and found his husband and daughters there in the archive. It looked to him like they'd been scanned and emulated from the moment they arrived here to live and work, consent or not. He said he shouldn't have expected any less from the enemy, and I had to remind him that we weren't enemies anymore, and we were all just helping the ones who created us to save themselves from their own genetic madness and pollution, and so feuds between whoever sides didn't matter anymore because we were all made for the same purpose. The poor kid looked haunted and desperate, but I think, I hope, I managed to talk him off the ledge and back into the fold. We need him to help us finish Exodus if we're going to save Scyria.
* HL-1: Whoo boy.
* ZongueBob: Why is he taking it so hard?
* Sonny: I think I know why. The same reason the people in the Adytums were bred to be used to the abnormalities of their homes' ecosystems.
* Sau: Mmmm, pretty sure depending on the individual it's more than that. Let's keep reading and make sure it doesn't get worse enough to be a detriment to our mission.
* (Iuego): Never saw Udma as the impulsive type, but this morning she cleared our schedules and took me on a day trip to see the Grange. We borrowed a plane from the project fleet, so we could hop a shuttle into one of the Adytums built and circling the 8 rings. I hadn't left the surface of the ring in years, and embarrassed myself with a bout of zero-grav sickness. If Udma was disappointed in me, she didn't let it show. The Grange was over the Third Ring's Sengai Desert when we caught up with it. After all the time I'd spent arguing with biotechs over species inclusion, it was strange to walk through some paddocks and see the genuine article up close. I stopped to touch a newly-cloned Mammothericus calf, and it wrapped its trunk around my wrist. Wasn't expecting to feel a connection to some lab animal, but it felt like neither of us wanted to let go. Two lost souls dragged back from oblivion, holding onto each other in orbit...
* ZongueBob: Awwww.
* (Iuego): While we were up on the Grange, I tracked down Alescas to ask if there was any way to decontaminate all the soil and rock being hauled into orbit since much of it on the rings of this ship is Scyrian in origin. She said I was asking her for the impossible. Of course raw enhancelement was going to be raised from the surface, along with veins of every other metal. There's no existing technology available to us for removing xenotoxins from that volume of material, at least not in the timeframe we're dealing with. That got me thinking about using mechs to clean up our biomes over the long haul. We really had no idea how long it was going to take for our colony ship to find that Sydus planet. It could end up jumping around the UUniverses for millennia. It has been looking for it since the Teadr 1 Era. Sydus herself only discovered it by accident, and yet the coordinates were lost thanks to enhancelement toxicity. Decontamination would be a huge job, calling for herds of machines roaming the ship's interior. Before I knew it, I was sketching a tech version of the Heedens we'd seen striding across one of the Grange's pastures....
* Sonny: Hmm. I guess that's where the giant Granger machines out there came from.
* HL-1: It is, actually. Take a look at the schematics on the next page.
* ZongueBob:... Coooool!
* (Iuego): The Grange is a prototype for the artificial biomes in the Exodus rings and for Udma's ARK network. Oh right... Forgot to mention that on our way back to the First Ring, Udma told me the transbeings are going ahead with my concepts of a 'granger'. A giant Keeden robot that can harvest and cleanse. She even said that I wasn't the only one in the staff to think of such ideas. Alescas had some other pitches already. So I guess they figure a diversity of plans gives the best long-term odds for everyone's survival and the Scyrians' revival. Alescas created the Adytums circling the rings above as a means of environmental control since she saw the enhancelement toxicity in the ground before anyone else thanks to her own enhancelement research. I was also surprised to hear about how prepared Alescas even was with all this. Not that it surprises me that much, she looked like the crazy chick who'd do something like that. She helped me understand how enhancelement works so I could apply it to my inventions. But... Some part of me is concerned that she may enter a genetic madness of her own. But... I shouldn't worry about her too much. She's gotten THIS far without being poisoned by the stuff after all.
* Sonny: Heh. Again, he must've been happy to have a reliable staff at his beckon call. Surprised this hadn't stopped Stonewellium's infection.
* HL-1: Actually, yeah. I wonder how THAT happened if there was an expert on enhancelement in the staff.... We'll find out eventually, I'm sure.
* (Iuego): Our research and development machinists were already hard at work building out tools and gear for our future generational crew, so I felt bad piling on. I wouldn't have bothered them if I didn't think my design was worth adding to the R&D workload. There's no way a sentient crew, no matter what shape or size variation, could find and remove every trace of raw enhancelement contamination from the biomes on our colony ship without automation on a massive scale. What good is authority though, if you can't abuse it for a worthy cause? Besides, I have to admit it feels good to design something that's not some kind of military tech. I like the idea of these things scrubbing away every trace of the toxin Gen once helped pollute battlefields with. I probably shouldn't have kept my idea off the books for now, but I feel like Udma won't shut this down once she sees a real world prototype of my Granger concept.
* ZongueBob: Not gonna lie, even though it didn't help with Stonewellium's arrival, it sure helped keep it from getting any WORSE than it is now immediately.
* Sonny: You're telling me.
* (Iuego): Shared my Granger idea with Alescas over a secure channel, and she gave me some great feedback for improving the concept. She suggested tricking out my mech workhorse with interchangeable instrument arrays for more functionality, and to throw in manual control, in case our ship's crew wants to saddle 'em up for any jobs in the future. Good thinking. I swear, her IQ has to be off the charts by now because that feedback came almost instantaneously, like her mind was an actual supercomputer. I definitely made the right choice to stop fearing she'd become addicted to enhancelement. Though I winced when she said she wished she had one of my Grangers back when she was sampling battlefield contaminants. But she probably has no idea I designed a lot of the weapons that caused the damage she used to study in a previous life. At least, I hope she doesn't. I signed off after promising Alescas a Granger or two to try out on the Grange. I'm curious if something that big clomping around will disrupt the artificial ecosystem they've got going up in orbit.
* ZongueBob: Mmmm, I'd like to have faith, Iuegy.
* Sonny: Mmmm, I don't think faith worked in THIS situation, hon.
* Sau: Can you NOT call him that right now?
* (Iuego): Still can't believe I managed to talk Udma into taking the day off to try hoversailing with me. She claimed she'd never been on one, but she picked it up without my help. Didn't need me to show her how to keep her balance, or how to lean back against the wind when she designed her physical form... Maybe she can just download any skill she needs, on demand. What would that be like? Over dinner, I was telling her how I'd ridden the windward wall of Evtollen Gorge in the Fourth Ring, when she just sort of blipped out on me. It was like someone else was looking at me through Udma's eyes. She asked why I'd been diverting R&D resources for a mech prototype, and I wriggled like a germ under a microscope. I must've managed a convincing defense of my Granger idea, because Udma was back again just as fast as she'd gone away. She nodded and went back to spearing her food with her fork like nothing had happened. Maybe she's gotten a little TOO comfortable in her new physical body. Sometimes cloning tech is gross and mysterious.
* ZongueBob:... Hehehe. I have a hunch the two are gonna hitch.
* Sonny: Me too, but... I don't know. We all know how this all played out in the end because... We're TRYING to fix it.
* ZongueBob: That doesn't say they're dead, does it?
* Sonny: Well, no, but... Let's just keep reading.
* (Iuego): After that weirdness with Udma last night, it's obvious I've never really gotten to know her at all. All the conscious stuff we people do in our waking lives must be autonomic for transbeings: listening to each other, shooting the s\*\*\*, making plans... I doubt they have to think about any of that unless they want to, any more than we need to concentrate on breathing. I'll probably never get how she, or any of them, really thinks or feels. But I feel like I've been wasting my time even trying. It was their idea to bring me back and stick me here in the body of another! Have they only ever noticed me when I've managed to annoy them? Maybe I'd finally have their full attention if I went to central processing right now and deleted their precious archive. It'd serve them right if I just walked in there and set off an EMP right in the middle of the whole damned thing.
* Sonny: Yikes.
* ZongueBob: Nepiton!
* HL-1: Relax, it was sarcasm.
* (Iuego): Okay, I've calmed down. Hurt feelings aside, I'd never do anything to risk this project. I've totally bought into our mission here. I’ve spent too much of my life breaking things, and it matters to me that I've been given this chance to make amends. I owe it to my species to try to help us escape extinction, and especially to Gen himself. If our shot at survival means I have to swallow my dumb pride, then it's no contest. I'm only mortal, more or less. Gen cloned his own conscience and put it in me against my will, if I even had one to begin with, and gave me a bunch of fake memories to cover that up, but supposedly because they needed me, and my inner Gen, to be a part of this. Udma more or less said I was a natural leader, so that has to count for something. Maybe I actually envy my transbeing benefactors a little... It must be great to be able to set aside all their feelings and really focus on what it's going to take to save the Scyrians.... Seems that Udma has been aiding me in my feelings a little too much lately... Maybe BECAUSE of said feelings... Is... Do... Does she like like me? Or rather... Do I like like HER?!... Questions about that for later.
* HL-1: See?
* ZongueBob/Sonny: Yeah, we see!
* ZongueBob: And I guess I was right about them having feelings for each other.
* Sonny: I'd SAY it's an AI, but an AI based on a sentient being who just got her physical form. Plus, all AI are based on a sentient mind, and machines are by proxy like brains, so it is possible for them to develop emotions.
* HL-1: Quite... Alright, let's continue, mates.
* (Iuego): I was nose down again in orbital manifests when Yogne asked me to come try some new training sim he was running in the Exodus engine. I hadn't checked in on the kid since he figured out that he'd been archived against his will, so I dragged myself across campus to his lab. He plugged us into his sim, but it just looked like one of the same arctic scenarios he'd already run by me. Yogne dialed something in midair, and the wind started howling louder. Then he leaned in so our fur hoods were almost touching, and said he needed a place to talk where no one could hear us. He wanted to know if Udma had 'gotten to me.' I told him he was way out of line. After a long pause, he asked if I'd sit in with him when he confronted her about the recording thing. I said sure, and he killed the sim. On the way back to my office, I wondered if he might've left me on the ice otherwise.
* ZongueBob:... And I'm back to concerned.
* HL-1: We all are.
* (Iuego): So the three of us met this morning, and Udma admitted that they shouldn't have recorded Yogne for the archive without his consent. Then she gave him the same pitch I'd gotten, about how vital he was to everyone's survival and the ends justifying the means. Yogne called Udma inhuman. I don't know why, but that made me a little angry inside, and so did what happened after. She asked how she could prove to him she cared, and the kid challenged her to come out drinking with us. All night, Yogne kept clumsily trying to pry information out of Udma. That backfired on him when she finally got tired of his constant bitching, and let us know how little time anyone here or anywhere else of Scyrian origin actually has left. After we absorbed that news, Yogne said he’d rather spend his remaining years with his family. She told him she'll accept his resignation only if he still feels the same when he sobers up. He swore he was going to stumble back on site and resign at the crack of late afternoon tomorrow, but I really hope he doesn't.
* Sonny:... Oh boy.
* ZongueBob: You said it. This is going to go downhill fast.
* (Iuego): This morning I spotted Yogne walking through headquarters, looking pale as a ghost. I could see he wasn't just hung over. I knew the look because I'd been there myself, just recently. He was wandering in the direction of the archive until I steered him into my office instead. Yogne looked past me, muttering about how he'd just quit. I hugged him to show I understood. Then he whispered something for my ears only, something I knew I wouldn't forget as long as I lived. Which it turned out was only about half a second longer, as long as it took for his vest to blast us into superheated plasma. But now all those chunks of us are reversing direction and reintegrating, so Udma can lean in and try to hear Yogne's last words. And now we're flying apart again, passing through her like she isn't there, because of course she wasn't in my office when this actually happened. I stopped existing at the point of that explosion, or really, really soon afterwards. I'm just an emulation of the late Iuego 2.0 now, that Udma's running in her damned Exodus engine. Sucks to be me, huh?
* Sonny/Sau: Arbasus!
* ZongueBob: Nepiton!
* HL-1: Strewth!... Uh... Last entry.
* (Iuego): Udma reintegrates me one last time in the simulation of my ruined office, so she can ask what Yogne's last words were to me and finish her post-mortem. I think I feel sorry to disappoint her... There wasn't time for my neural interface to record whatever the kid said. I throw the question back at her, and ask what he said when he resigned. Udma says Yogne hated that he couldn't stop her kind from resurrecting his family in some strange future. A future that wasn't theirs. There's no recognizable sentient emotion on her avatar's face, but maybe that's just a glitch in my emulated perception. Then Udma surprises me by apologizing, for keeping secrets, for constantly replaying my death and the pain I went through, and for failing to keep me safe. She thanks me for all the work I've done for Exodus, and wishes future versions of Gen better luck when and wherever they wake up. I tell her, "Don't worry about me. I'm a survivor." That actually gets a smile out of her and... Out of the blue, or black, whatever, she kissed me.... I try to hold onto this feeling as she shuts me down. But she told me one last thing... "If you should ever awake and need aid in saving this ship... Seek out another Gen mental clone I discovered. The one named... Santrago An Sanct." (Everyone was surprised)
* ZongueBob:... You mean... Santrago was a... ANOTHER Iuego?
* Sau: No. He was another Gen.
* HL-1: Aw man. That's going to give him quite a mind-blow.

#### **Who Is Noda?**

* Seara: Hey, guys? Check this out!
* Teo: What's up, Sears?
* Seara: Well... I found some incredible personal Virtnet files on a person named... Noda Pfisher.
* Biromon: What about her?
* Seara: Hmm... Seems like she had a LOT going for her. Must've had a LOT of free time on her hands.
* Qizz:... That's weird. It says in her files that she's a Finkur, 13 years of age, 14 years next month, she's a second-class agricultural engineer, AND... According to her vital files... She's still alive, and somewhere on this ship.
* Ochremon: Seriously? I never thought ANYONE would even last THIS long after what Stonewellium did.
* Qizz: Well, luckily for her, I managed to discover her personal log. We can figure out where she went, and hopefully, we can got some assistance. She may know more about the infection than we do.
* Plasmymon: Good thinking. (They brought up the files)
* (Noda): Pesra started in with another sermon about our sacred mission today when she found me modeling creature behavior for my latest sim. I tried to explain that I was on break, that I wasn't doing anything wrong, but she wouldn't hear it. As if I haven't had it drilled into my head over and over that the survival of all life from our technical homeworld depends on our sacred efforts... I work as hard as anyone on the ship, so why do I keep getting shamed for having a hobby? It's not like a half-cycle spent away from soil sampling is going to jeopardize everyone's hopes of re-establishing itself on a new planet. Besides, I know from the server logs that Pesra played my last sim along with most of the crew. What's wrong with dipping out off-shift and immersing yourself in some harmless escapism?
* MJ: Mmmm, she's not wrong.
* Joh: Well, not completely. Technology these days are like a virus.
* MJ: YOU'RE like a virus sometimes.
* Pagnimon: MJ, be nice. (They continued reading)
* (Noda): I used to think it was pathetic that our creators couldn't come up with a better name for our destination than someone else's name. But a lifetime spent digging around in synthetic loam kind of makes you appreciate how amazing it must have felt to feel solid ground under your feet. We're told in historical UUniversal media that people have always dreamed of sailing between the stars. After thousands of generations of people having done just that, including us, I'm here to say their dream is wearing thin. I guess it's like that old saying about the grass looking greener on the next ring over, people on Scyria must've been sure there was a better world out here someplace. Maybe that superhabitable world they learned about is out here, but we haven't found it yet. In the meantime, I like to doodle around in the margins of Exodus, so my crewmates can plug into a simulation and experience an actual sunrise now and then.
* MJ: Heh. As one of many who love the Virtnet, I guess we can all agree she had SOMETHING to pass the time. A customizable realm? What more could you ask for?
* Joh: A LOT of things really. You really can't waste time in another realm that's not even real.
* Matson: Wow, Joh, what turned YOU into a total treef\*\*\*\*r lately?
* Joh: Hey, watch it! And look at what happened to Scyria! I think you can guess what.
* Gobmon: Well, yes, technology is bad sometimes, but that does not mean it's good for nothing. Look at what it's done for worlds. The Scyrians DID succeed in restoring themselves, with some minor setbacks in the grand scheme of things.
* Teo: Yeah, come on, Joh, get out of that technophobic corner and into the opposite corner, will ya?
* Joh: I will when I'm good and ready. (They continued reading)
* (Noda): Life on this ship is an endless, monotonous routine. All of us were raised in this place to be drones tending a hive of cocooned future colonists. I mean, they DID say that we couldn't JUST have machines doing all the work, because there HAS to be sentient minds to see it getting done correctly and that no space debris screwed everything up. We've been told everything has to be just right when it's time for the colonists to hatch and start training for planetfall on Sydus, so day after day I service the capillary irrigation systems and monitor trace gas fluctuations in the atmosphere for the good of the people here. I know I should be grateful to even be alive, given that all life on our technical homeworld went extinct. But I also know I can't be the only crew member who daydreams about faking my own death to escape this tedium. Even if that meant hiding in the superstructure for the rest of my days, at least I'd be living for myself. Shame on me, I guess.
* MeMe: Deary me. That must sound miserable.
* Joh: Well at least she has something to appreciate.... Or at least, HAD something to appreciate. We all gotta be careful what we wish for.
* (Noda): Working in the dirt was what I was born to do, at least according to my engrammatic aptitude test. An AI weighed my soul and decided it saw a future soil scientist. I do have to grudgingly admit I'm good at my day job, but my real passion is coding convincingly randomized events and reactive social intelligence simulations. So that's what I'm tinkering with when I'm not feeding soil probe samples into a chromatograph. I know, I know, my work to confirm nutrient transport and healthy geochemical cycling by microbial soil communities is an important part of maintaining this vital biological archive of ours. The fate of everyone and our future homeworld depends on our success, blah blah blah. It's just that I envy having the kind of freedom people seemed to have in the past to follow their dreams, at least according to our library of historical media.
* Joh: Again, careful what you wish for, kid. It might come true... Which it did.
* (Stonewellium): Hahahahahaha. It SUUUURE did.
* All Dictitydestinors: SHUT UP!!!!
* Cactamon: Ugh! I CAN'T with that hiveminded pestilence!
* Garrmon: We ALL can't. (They continued reading)
* Qizz: Hmm... Looks like we weren't the only ones who got intervention from HL-1. Look at this.
* (Noda): I know what I saw, but I don't blame anyone for thinking I made it up. I mean, I do come up with simulated fantasy scenarios in my free time. But that's the thing... If I hadn't been reverse-engineering Exodus Simulation code, I never would have noticed these anomalies in the system. We've been visited by something transbeing. I saw the evidence inside Exodus. Maybe I shouldn't be leaving a record of this, but I think someone left a superluminal link open back to Eriret Prime that one of them used to find us out here. One of the... Sentia Deus. There, I put a name to it. Guess there's no harm now in admitting that I've been trying to hack my way into a semi-forbidden cache of information about them in the archive.
* Joh:... Sneaking into critical files? Isn't that asking for trouble? Especially if a rogue strain of enhancelement is able to travel through networks?
* Gobmon: Give her some slack, she didn't know Stonewellium existed, and we can't say for sure SHE was responsible for Stonewellium getting onto the ship. Even if she was, she shouldn't be blamed for it. Accidents happen. I mean, there may not really BE accidents, but that doesn't mean we should pretend they don't exist, and people should ALWAYS be punished for it. That's ludicrous.
* Joh: Well, let's see if I'm right about this. (They continued reading)
* (Noda): We weren't kept completely in the dark about our estranged transbeing creators and their higher-reality cousins, but I think there's been a concerted generational effort to repress those memories. Maybe our ancestors were afraid we'd see some appeal in the idea of accelerating our own evolution if we learned more about Sentia Deus. If so, that seems silly, because there are kiloparsecs between us and the refined xenomaterial they needed to do it. Historical archives say the Enhancelement War was fought over the dangers of enhancelement on genetic makeup and the ecosystem, and that the President accused Sydus of suggesting they stop using what made the Scyrians who they were immediately and forever, calling it something akin to blasphemy or heresy. Our technical ancestors in the Sydus Federation thought they'd finally found a clean source of power for their grand geoengineering schemes to hack and repair the planet. The USG wanted to hack themselves using that same power, and survive by becoming more than sentient. In the end, neither side was right because all it did was divide them, like it divided us before with the long-standing USRA and UIS division and feuds. No peace can truly be obtained if there's no unity.... Maybe I'm just saying this through a quote, but, it's still poignant to me.
* Teo: Well, she's not wrong about THAT.
* Joh:... Indeed not.
* Teo: HEH!
* (Noda): Here's how I discovered we'd had a visitor... I noticed a really sophisticated AI running in Exodus that wasn't native to our engine. So I boxed it up and plugged myself into that box to say hello. Our intruder turned out to be friendly, and curious about me. It called itself HL-1. I asked where it came from, and it told me its creator was what I would've called a Sentia Deus. That might've made my crests stand up on my avatar's head, if I'd bothered with that level of simulation. I asked the AI if it'd been hiding onboard since before we launched, and it claimed it only came online within the last three thousand cycles or so. Wasn't into calculating measurements of time, but I can only guess it's a RECENT amount of time. But how, I wondered? I asked if that meant its creator was still with us. All I got was some cryptic answer about how she'd left a part of herself behind as a gift. Then I got kicked from my own sim.
* Seara: Huh? Why didn't HL-1 specify who she was?
* Qizz:... I think this next entry is the answer to your question, Sears.
* (Noda): After my one quick chat with HL-1, I couldn't seem to track her down again inside the Exodus Simulation. It's like she'd learned how to conceal herself since our encounter. Of course no one believed me. For a while there, I wasn't sure I believed me. Then the glitches started showing up in Exodus. Patching the simulation code seemed like a low-priority concern, though it was definitely unusual. But before anyone could address that situation, we started seeing cascading faults in our real world systems. Things got bad enough that we had to evacuate and seal off biomes in the forward ring! I'd like to think that my crewmates would circle back to taking my close encounter with a transbeing-created artificial intelligence seriously, if there was time or resources to investigate further. But everyone's in full-on disaster mode now.
* (Stonewellium): Ahhhh, it was just in time for my OWN arrival. What a coincidence.
* Seara: I THOUGHT WE TOLD YOU TO SHUT UP ALREADY!!
* (Stonewellium): What're YOU gonna do about it? YOUR carbon-copy Uniter Princess doesn't have the power to wipe me out like the REAL Uniter did to my father.
* Seara: Better watch it. She's learning.
* (Stonewellium): Hahahahahahaha. I will NOT go down like that. My foes are now BEYOND my underestimation.
* Teo: Yeah, whatever, why don't you go taunt someone ELSE for a change?
* (Stonewellium): Good idea. (He was gone)
* Teo:... Well at least we're not the ones being taunted. (They continued reading)
* (Noda): I assumed at first that HL-1 was causing the system failures spreading through the rings. We'd been raised to believe that our people's ancestors had barely escaped a Scyria overrun by transbeing and enhancelement pollution. It seemed logical to assume the AI I'd found embedded in our simulation engine by a transbeing entity would try to sabotage our mission. Now that I'm looking over eyewitness reports from the affected areas, I'm less sure. Why would HL-1 contaminate biomes with weird new lifeforms, like tentacles that use bioelectricity to hack into the matrix around us, or these weird tumor things that contain what look like fetuses waiting to emerge into something I'm afraid to imagine? How would an AI, even one created by a Sentia Deus, be able to rearrange the framework of the ship at the molecular level with these biomasses? However or whyever these things are being done, we're in serious trouble. I thought I'd done a good job of firewalling any access points out of Exodus, but clearly I wasn't able to shut out whatever is running wild through our systems. I can't believe this is really happening.
* Matson: Wow. That must be rough to go through when Stonewellium was starting his conquest.
* Joh: I'm STILL convinced SHE was the one who brought him here, accident be damned.
* Teo: Joh, for the love of Gods, if you're not going to say anything positive, don't say anything at all!
* (Noda): We're losing people trying to stop whatever it is that's invading our ship. I want to join the fight to retake the forward ring, but I keep getting told I'm needed back here, to maintain and monitor our remaining ecosystems for contamination. I know the real reason they don't want me fighting is because in their eyes, I'm still just a kid. At least it wasn't the racist excuse of me being a UIS-oriented being, because in the end this is EVERYONE'S home. Thank goodness that Iuego guy was able to fix our bad relations before his passing. But even with this... Mostly-stable unity, no one would even know we'd had an intruder if I hadn't discovered it. I'm almost convinced this is my fault because of that. But I shouldn't worry about that. I keep turning that and others over in my mind while I'm maintaining autosamplers or waiting for phase analysis results on soil biota: how and why would a transbeing's artificial intelligence disrupt our shipboard systems? Would this entity really resent our mission enough to reach across thousands of lightyears and try to scuttle our ship? That just seems unusually vindictive for one of them, especially after all this time. I can't make this make sense.
* Teo: See, Joh? She fears she's responsible for it. You REALLY shouldn't judge her for feeling guilty.
* Joh:... Alright, fine, I'll give her points for being aware of what she MIGHT'VE been responsible for.
* Gobmon: Proud of you, Joh.
* Joh: Don't push it.
* (Noda): We've all given the Exodus Simulation's 'survive as long as you can while taming an unfamiliar and hostile environment' scenario a spin, if only to see what that's like for our colonist cargo. One of my more popular sims turned Exodus inside-out, with alien megafauna rampaging through a simulated version of our ship's biomes. I never expected to experience something like that firsthand. Aberrant, wild creatures are prowling the forward ring, and tearing anyone apart that dares to enter their territory. This is no simulation. Out here in the real world, my crewmates aren't ever going to respawn. I've never felt fear like this before. At least the adrenaline is keeping me hard at work even though I'm beyond exhausted. I've been able to confirm that the biomes in the other seven rings haven't been contaminated yet, so that's something.
* Joh:... Wow. That's... Actually impressive. She managed to simulate herself a scenario like this in advance?
* Seara: Heh. I can see WHY she's still alive. That's one of the benefits of the Virtnet. It serves as a means of being prepared for the unexpected. In a multiverse as unpredictable as this, that's saying, a WHOLE lot!
* Biromon: Indeed it is.
* Joh: I agree.... That's why I even got into the Virtnet AND Dictymon in the first place after all.
* Teo: We know.
* (Noda): They're talking about detaching the infected ring if things keep getting worse, to try to keep our other biomes uncontaminated. I hope it doesn't come to that, but we have to do what we can to preserve the remaining biomes in the face of our rapidly dwindling odds. I've been working on a whole system of backup automation to hopefully keep everything running as long as possible when- I mean if- we're all wiped out. Yeah, machines in an entirety won't be a reliable source of aid if the space debris that bombards the ship regularly have anything to say about it, but it's at least going to give the system time... For what, I can't say. But anything on this ship in the middle of nowhere space is possible. Our ship holds the last archival specimens of life from Scyria and many others that no doubt died out after the Teadr 1 Era, and there's an extinction-level event in progress. I got nauseous just now while I was running microbial gas exchange models, because any stupid mistake I make could suffocate all the remaining interuniversal lifeforms in this very lifeboat. If I forget to carry a number someplace, it could mean that no flower will ever push up through the soil and bloom again. I have to get this right.
* Seara: AND she's got the focus to boot. No doubt she lost NO time with what she does for a living.
* (Stonewellium): Not that it helped her in the end. Mwahahahah!
* Teo: GRRRHHHHHHH!!! (They continued reading)
* (Noda): I can't just keep running through the same research tasks while my crewmates are fighting an invasive force. This morning while I was in a trench checking on our irrigation capillaries, I impulsively pried open a hatch and dropped into the drainage and reclamation system. Below the bedrock, there's a maze of pipes and tunnels that extends throughout the entire ship. I used to sneak down there as a kid and wander for kilometers trying to get lost. We had to memorize the schematics for these subsystems as part of our training, in case we had to repair some catastrophic failure deep in the network. I remember resenting all the times I had to draw maps of those tunnels in timed tests, but all that rote memorization may end up saving my sorry life. At any rate, I finally got a firsthand glimpse of what we're dealing with. Not sure how I'll sleep again after experiencing it for myself.
* Joh: Well not that I blame the poor teenager. I'd be terrified in that situation as well.
* Ochremon: ANYONE would.
* (Noda): They've sealed off the invaded areas of our ship, but I still have my clearance to access the maintenance subsystems. I know how to get through a series of airlocks into the first ring without contaminating the other seven rings. Once I popped up from under the dirt, I found myself in some kind of unrecognizable surrealist landscape. What could have changed everything there so much, so fast? I was glad I'd brought a sampling kit and even more glad I was wearing a clean suit up there. The flora and fauna had been mutated to a point where everything looked potentially lethal, and it was reactive to my presence. I have to admit, the sights, though dangerous, are interesting to see. I've made some CRAZY scenery in my sims, but this? This is impressive. Grasses had become these thin tubules with bulblike structures that undulated hypnotically. Glowing pinkish brain mushrooms, treewers with spiral tentacle-like trunks, mobile pod plants, brain-like cacti, fountainflowers the size of mountains but irrigating this strange red stuff like blood, brains on large roots all over the ground, and a higher level of more-evolved planimals. I flinched when one of the stalks brushed my glove and left a sticky residue, though. Inside my clean suit I started shuddering all over, and wondering why I'd worked so hard to sneak into that place.
* Joh:... Not that I blame her. That place felt hiveminded.
* Seara: Really creepy.
* Qizz: Yeah, terrifying. (They continued reading)
* (Noda): It's an understatement to say that being in the contaminated forward ring shook me up. I've spent my whole life trying to simulate alien environments, but the first time I found myself actually inside one, I couldn't wait to escape. I was having a panic attack, a rush of xenophobia, and severe vertigo all at once. It was like every cell in my body was screaming that I didn't belong there. As soon as I had some samples bottled up, I rushed to get back into the access tunnels to get the hell out of there. That was when I saw one of those things... At a distance, you might mistake it for a Chromon, like that Iuego guy. But it was much different. It was bigger. It was also more dracthonian. It had a dracthon's tail, its flaps were like dracthon wings and the armor flaps on the Chromon, but they seem more useful for gliding, it had large colorful Chromon frills that more resembled those of a sonag or frillter, or maybe even every frilled animal ever, and its gaze was weirdly aware. I was afraid to break eye contact while I felt desperately for the hatch. A second and third creature appeared in my peripheral vision as I dove into the tunnel and sealed it tight behind me. What was even more horrifying was that they breathed and emitted red fires that mutated instead of burned. I was looking at perhaps cats from hell.
* Qizz: Must have been many of those Mutadons.
* Cactamon: Yeah. Nasty critters. If we weren't so powerful, they'd all have ripped us all apart like animals... Which they are.
* Plasmymon: That added by their insane enhancelement fires that can mutate anything they come in contact with.
* Qizz: MORE terrifying.
* (Noda): I spent a frantic few minutes hyperventilating and waiting for the first of five underground airlocks to cycle after leaving the contaminated zone. Even after I'd run through three levels of decontamination and had shed the personal protection equipment I'd worn in the hot zone, I felt unclean. The entire time I was crawling aft through kilometers of ducts and accessways, I felt like there was something at my heels. I expected to get in all kinds of trouble when I got back to our ring, but no one had time for that kind of thing now. Pesra surprised me with a hug when she saw I was still alive, and I surprised myself by breaking into sobs of relief. At least it wasn't for nothing. I guess I was the first to bring back samples of the contamination to test.
* Joh: OH THANK GODS! Uh... I mean... Way to go.
* Teo: Yeah, like we're gonna ignore THAT.
* (Noda): Xenobiology isn't really my thing. I generally do biochemical work at the micro level, and the creatures I DO make are just measly code. I know how to run samples of the invasive flora and fauna from the contaminated ring through our array of analytical equipment, but when it comes to interpreting the results I'm mostly at a loss. Anyone could see that these invaders are wildly exotic and demonstrably hostile, but beyond that, I'd just be guessing at what I'm looking at. That said, I'm relatively sure that a lot of what I sampled were genetically-modified organisms, like our platywings, possibly created using commandeered equipment in the other rings. Unlike platywings, all of these organisms seem to have been created to establish an aggressive perimeter defense. Defense of what, I'm not exactly sure... I'm back to suspecting our Sentia Deus visitor is responsible, but I haven't even mentioned the most damning evidence. I think I'm seeing traces of enhancelement in these samples, the same alien material that poisoned Scyria. Enhancelement, incorporated into living, mutated tissue. If I'm right, this is extremely bad news.
* Matson: Well, no kidding. Look at how much that place grew. Given the images on this file, seems like it evolved FURTHER!
* Garrmon: I'm scared to imagine how much further it can go.
* (Noda): My findings about the invasive lifeforms I sampled in the other ring set off a full-on panic response in the crew. The means of which this could happen was clear. There was large traces of enhancelement in the soil, and so it stands to reason that this invasion used that to control the biosphere... Or... Bioring, of the first ring. That meant this invader, whatever it truly was, could do anything to the ship with it. Our engineers are speeding up their plan to detach the infected ring from the ship entirely, hoping to keep our biological archives from being contaminated upon realizing what this invader could truly be capable of with this stuff. Everyone's afraid to talk about what might be happening to the Scyrian colonist cargo in our sister rings because that's too horrible to think about. Whether the transbeing entity that visited our ship is still with us, or whether the artificial intelligence she left behind took over half of our systems, something is using the ship as a petri-dish for engineering exotic and dangerous new lifeforms. For the first time since our ancestors left Scyria parsecs behind, we might be fighting, and losing, a war with a hostile transbeing force.
* MeMe:... Yikes. It scares me to think that, through enhancelement, this ship was SO easy to conquer.
* Biromon: Tell me about it. It's a waking nightmare to say the least.
* (Noda): So I did something else impulsive, maybe even treasonous. Hey, someone had to try something! While almost everyone else was preoccupied with retaking the ship, I tried to reestablish contact with HL-1, that invasive intelligence I'd found in the Exodus Simulation. This time I used a sort of process of elimination. Assuming it managed to create a digital blind spot to hide in, I figured I could find it by establishing where it wasn’t. Like using infrared to search for a heat signature against a snowfield. Once I'd colored in all the negative space, I jumped into that void in the simulation and found myself immediately pleading with the AI to stop the corruption of our ship systems. I should've sent someone braver in to negotiate...
* Teo: Eh, what else were you gonna do on short notice? Ship's going to Fondsmithian hell, people are dying or being mutated, and all you can do is what you CAN.
* MeMe: I do hope she's STILL alive, in entirety.
* Qizz: She is... Mostly.
* MeMe: Mmm, can't expect full health from her at this point. We'll find her. We just need the right clues.
* (Noda): I logged out of my second close encounter with our rogue artificial intelligence more confused than ever. If its creator really wasn't here with us anymore, what exactly was invading the First Ring? Wait, what was it that HL-1 said, about colonists being woken up prematurely? That's something I can check out... Sure enough, colonists are stirring all over the ship. I can only confirm a few instances of anyone outside their pods and loose in the rings so far, but we definitely have a new disaster in progress. What's worse is that I can't seem to track down anyone in charge at the moment to report this to. It looks like the rest of the crew has gone to ground, and I'm thinking I should probably seek shelter for myself at this point.
* Ochremon: Yikes. The world around her is coming down quickly.
* Teo: I know. It's so sad.
* (Stonewellium): Whatever has to be done in the name of survival. It's kill or be killed out there.
* Teo: Nobody ASKED you, asshole!!
* (Noda): I packed up everything I needed to keep an eye on our automated environmental maintenance, and dropped into the subsurface tunnels and ductwork to hide. Good thing I know my way around the superstructure. I can hold out down here indefinitely if I have to. Even if I don't feel like it's safe enough to pop my head up for fresh food, enough provisions and stores are accessible for several lifetimes. Won't be much of a life to look forward to, though. I've spent what seems like cycles down here trying to raise anyone else from the crew, but the whole com system seems to be on the blink. I can't even reach Exodus anymore to kill time in a sim. After all my years spent studying soil biota, guess I know what it feels like to be a burrowing insect hoping to escape notice. Turns out it kinda sucks.
* Pagnimon: It really does... I mean, I'm guessing.
* MJ: I'm sure she'll figure something out. Maybe even get lucky.
* (Noda): After a lot of crawling around conduits and splicing cables together, I was able to not only hook myself back into the Exodus Simulation, but not exactly enter it yet, but I also patched into surveillance feeds to get a topside view. The experience wasn't like watching archival records, but it was definitely educational. For one thing, I confirmed that some of the crew were still alive up there. I called out when I saw Pesra working on a terminal junction before I remembered that she couldn't hear me. Closer to the junction with the core, it's obvious that progress stalled out on the engineering project to detach our First Ring. It looks like the crew had to abandon their work sites, though I'm hoping that's not for good, that sort of thing is way beyond my abilities, and these biomes can only stay uncontaminated for so long if we can't put some space between us and whatever's taking over our sister ring.
* MJ:... Well that's a LITTLE bit of luck.
* (Noda): I managed to get back full access to entering the Simulation, and hope to at least do something about the infection. But I also found some documentation on the engineering plan for ring separation, and I tried teaching myself the procedure. Really, I did... I just can't picture myself risking our other rings like that. If I screw up, I could send us careening back into the fuselage, tearing open these biomes and spilling everything out into naked vacuum. I'm no hero, I'm just a dirt scientist. Or I was, before all this happened. Now I'm just another grub tunneling around underfoot and waiting for some predator to dig me up and make a meal of me. Down here in the dark, I'm just trying to survive as long as I can. It's been too long since I've spotted anyone else from my crew in topside surveillance footage. Still, I've been lying awake thinking about who I did spot in the gardens up there. A colonist. Ohrugan by species. Alone and out in the open... What if I'm the only one that knows about this?
* MJ: Whew! Good. She at least had company.
* Pagnimon: Yes.
* (Noda): I couldn't live with myself if I didn't try to help that lost colonist. I realized that I was the one who booted him out when trying to hack my access to the Simulation back, and... Well... It's an additional benefit. I keep picturing what it'd be like for someone like that Ohrugan to wake up from Exodus in one of those tanks, with no support staff to greet or orient him. Squinting in the artificial sunlight, wandering around strange forests and meadows with no idea what's bearing down on you, no matter what the simulation tried to prep you for. While I'm working up the nerve to make a rescue attempt topside, I've relocated to a spot under the last sector I spotted him in on live surveillance feed. I'm pretty sure I'm within a half kilometer of where the colonist is, or under that location at least. Now I just need to come up with a plan to get his attention...
* Teo: Hmm. She's got a lot of guts inside of her. Too much for her to do with.
* Matson: I know. Pretty admirable to say the least.
* (Noda): A GODDAMN idiot! That's what I am right now! I wasted a bunch of time trying to come up with a way to hack into a terminal on the surface so I can flash a message to the colonist wandering around our ring, and then it hit me. They had on an exosuit, which means a visor with heads-up displays. I realized I can broadcast directly into that helmet, and put information right in front of the colonist's face! I decided to try beaming a line-of-sight message at them by hacking a nearby infrared laser cluster. I'm no communications expert, but the risk of a free space optical signal being intercepted seemed minimal and I figured it'd be hard to jam at short range. What if doing this gives away my location, though? It occurs to me that our invader might be using this colonist as bait...
* Joh: Just try SOMETHING ALREADY!!!...... Um... Ehehe... Please?
* Teo: Heeheehee.
* (Noda): Once I made contact with the stray colonist I explained where and when we are, and tried to describe the threat we're facing. I'm guessing that was probably a lot to absorb, depending on information recall from the Exodus Simulation. I beamed over some schematics of the local subsurface crawlways and conduits, hopefully with the access hatches clearly highlighted. Then I shut it all down and waited. I had a long wait. Almost half a cycle passed before something tripped the silent alarm I'd set on the hatches in this sector. My heart was in my throat. What was I going to do if one of those monstrosities found its way down here to me, wave a soil probe at it? Lucky for me, it was just my new friend, the Ohrugan colonist. I took it as a good sign that my colonist friend was conscientious enough to seal the hatch again. Plus, I wasn't alone anymore.
* MJ: WHEW! He made it!
* Pagnimon: HOORAY!!
* Teo: Wonderful! Glad she's got backup of her own.
* (Noda): We sized each other up for a while before my new friend popped his helmet off to frown at me. He wanted to know why a 'Finkur kid like me' was risking my neck for him. Even though I was sick with relief to see another person's face, his tone set me off. I reminded him that I was the one who led him to safety. He apologized for being short with me, and offered to shake hands. I took his hand, hoping he wouldn't crush mine with that gauntlet he was still wearing. We introduced ourselves. He said his name was Gable. For the first time, I was glad for the training we'd had in colonist reintegration. I could fall back on those conversational prompts, and remember to offer Gable food and drink from our stores. And it felt good to play host.
* Matson: Gable, huh?
* Ochremon: Sounds like the guy's got charm with a name like that. I believe it's Ohrugese for 'charm and grace'.... Right?
* Qizz: Don't look at me! I FLUNKED Ohrugese, remember?
* (Noda): My new friend Gable turns out to have been a prospector in his previous life, during a time that was known as the Rarium Rush of Ocollo. He's been exhausting me with questions about mineral distribution on the rings, and he got really excited when I brought up the mining capabilities of our Grangers. I'm starting to appreciate the unlikelihood of the two of us winding up here at this moment in time. It's like the beginning of a bad joke: "A miner and a soil scientist meet on a spaceship, at the end of history..." Gable wants to rustle up some Grangers to ride into the contaminated ring like some kind of cavalry, and it almost feels like we're living in one of my simulations. Now if only I can convince myself that I've got what it takes to play the hero in real life...
* Joh: Sounds rough you have to be a hero of a story you didn't want made.
* Seara: Well, it's the UUniverses. It's SUPER unpredictable. Not many could predict something like THIS infecting the ship.
* Joh:... Yeah... Sucks.
* (Noda): Gable asked me not to call him a colonist. He resents being cast in that role, which I can respect. Exodus Simulation aside, the last thing he remembers before waking up on a spaceship was being waylaid and killed by a mob of 'Rarity' bandits for his mining claim. Impressive, to hold a grudge for almost a millennium, across thousands of parsecs, or longer. No wonder I spotted him wandering a riverbank in the foothills. The setting must've reminded him of his native Ocollo territory. I wonder if he'd already tried panning the river for rarium flakes. He really lit up when I described how we could fit Grangers with a pulverizing beam rig for excavation. If I'm being honest, he seemed almost too interested in that configuration of the quadruped's head. I guess a strip-mining rig might make a useful weapon against the kind of intrusive contamination that I'd seen in the other ring, like laser surgery to cut out skin tumors. Maybe worth a try.
* Qizz: Mmmmmm, I doubt that'll be enough, but at least it's a good pitch.
* (Noda): I don't think I trust Gable. And that's not just because it was disappointing to finally meet one of these people, as well as being a USRA being, after dedicating my life to keeping their glorious future alive. I don't know that I expected gratitude exactly, but I sure didn't expect one of them to be so irritable and self-involved. I'm trying to remind myself that he never asked to have his memories reconstructed and jammed into a new body on some generation ship in interuniversal space. All of that aside, something is just off about Gable. I know that our systems are breaking down, but it feels like he was rushed through the Exodus Simulation without time for any of his orientation to take. And how messed up are our protocols that this is the first guy who got revived, out of all the personalities we have archived? Guess I'll just have to fall back on my training and hope for the best.
* Qizz:... That was the last entry. She must not have felt there was anything else worth writing about.

#### **Who Is Gable?**

* Zhensi:... Hey, Noda?
* Noda: Yeah?
* Zhensi: You might wanna take a look at this. It's... Gable's personal logs.
* Noda: REALLY?!? (She went in and saw it)... OMG! WHERE DID YOU GET THIS?!?
* Bongki: We just found it.
* Noda: HOLY SPACE WHALE S\*\*\*!! I NEVER THOUGHT I'D FIND ANYTHING FROM HIM AGAIN!!!
* Hud: Weerrhh, errrsee thrre, guurr!
* Noda:... Seriously, you NEED to find a way to understand what that guy is even SAYING!
* Zhensi: Oh, you can't even BEGIN to imagine how many times we TRIED! The guy was dropped at birth.
* Noda:...
* Zhensi: At least, I THINK he was!
* Noda: (Sighs) Whatever, I'm just glad SOMETHING from Gable is left. Maybe he left something behind we can use to help him.
* Bongki: Don't get your hopes up, kiddo. (She began reading)
* (Gable): I remember the days spent working my claim. With my own two hands, I dug my fortune from the soil of Ocollo. 6000 millites worth of rarium. People in the country side, including those UIS nutbags, were jealous of my prospect, but they just had to get over what the Prospector Code says: Any find belongs to the prospector, fair and square. Rules are rules. But then... The Rarity Stragglers took that from me, along with my land and my life. And so I fell into darkness, only to rise again in purgatory. There I found myself beset by monsters and demons in a delirium of otherworldly domains. While I struggled toward my expiation, an angel joined me and called out words of encouragement with a woman's voice. She asked me to join her in mortal combat with her adversary, but I chose to follow a second voice that promised me reincarnation and restitution. And so I woke again in a celestial garden, with a shining gem set in one of my new forearms. The voice of my deliverer returned then, to guide me to a set of the same magical armor I'd worn in the afterlife. I knew then my trials weren't over.
* Noda:... Huh. I guess when I released him from the Simulation, I put him through some kind of existential crisis. Not that I blame him. He was reconstructed for the colonization of Sydus. ANYONE would have an existential crisis with an origin like that.
* Zhensi: Not to mention it would make them more easily manipulated.
* Hud: Weerh! Terrt ruurry suurks!
* Noda:... Well, THAT one I understood. It really DOES suck. (They continued reading)
* (Gable): I wandered lost in that garden of paradise and salvation for some time, transfixed by its impossible sky... I could see that everything around me lay on the inner rims of gleaming wheels that arched overhead, from horizon to horizon. There were eight wheels in total, and together they rolled through the firmament. The sight of them brought back something I'd heard slaves singing in the Rarities' rarium mines: "Esid saw a wheel, way up in the middle of the air." Then I recalled an old image of a constellation depicting some space snake looping around to devour itself. Where had I seen that...? In my adult life I figured anything spiritual had long since been ground out of me, but that was before I'd been banished to purgation. I quieted my mind to listen for the voices of the exalted, only to hear from another soul lost in that garden. My magic helmet showed me a hidden door in the ground nearby. Did I dare enter?
* Noda:... That was me.
* Bongki: No s\*\*\*!
* Noda: Okay, listen here, bucko, I am NOT gonna take that kinda talk from even HEROES like you! Got it?!
* Bongki:... Alright, fine!
* Noda: I MEAN IT!!
* Bongki: I JUST SAID FINE!!
* Zhensi: Don't take it personally, that's how he prefers to talk.
* Noda: (Sighs and continues reading)
* (Gable): I'm not proud to admit it took me a long while to work up the courage to venture underground. The trapdoor led down into a sort of mineshaft, shored up with not just rarium, which to my surprise was synthetic but still worth value, but also the same kind of smooth metal making up the wheels in the sky overhead. Again I felt fear, before a young Finkur girl spoke to me from across the chamber. At first I had trouble understanding her, but somehow her words gradually became sensible. I thought I heard her call me 'conquistador', which confused me until I remembered my helmet, and removed it to set her at ease. As I did that, I realized she'd said something more like 'colonizer'. I resented being cast in the role of villain, but I saw that she wasn't afraid of me. I told her she shouldn't have risked leading me to her hideaway, since she was alone and unarmed. She waved away my concern, and introduced herself as Noda before offering something to eat and drink. Normally I wouldn't trust a UIS being, but... Feuds don't matter to me anymore when everything else is trying to kill you.
* Noda:... Wow. I can't believe I'm actually starting to see our union in his perspective.
* Zhensi: Lucky you, huh?
* (Gable): This Noda claims to come from a long line of caretakers who lived out their lives tending their gardens in the sky. She says we're under attack by some kind of invading Fondsmithian force. I was shown visions of creatures and lands twisted out of shape in the first garden-wheel. Tentacles twisted the landscape and struck the ground with the thundering sounds of lightning, and it seemed to stimulate the life inside it. I felt pathetic and weak, once I understood how far outside my own time and place I truly was. Noda told me my trials in the netherworld that she called Exodus should have prepared me for our coming fight, but I was less sure. Then she showed me the colossal mechanical behemoths the caretakers use to work the land, how those can cut through solid rock with spears of light as bright as the sun. And I saw how we may not be as powerless as I'd feared.
* Zhensi:... No doubt that's when you found your Grangers.
* Noda: You know it. We even tamed more than two. We got dozens of them because they can be outfitted with an entire number of mods. They WERE created to help with the landscape. Harvesting, defense, shielding, cleansing the enhancelement from the soil, not sure what good that did in the end, and blahdy bleedy bleh. And it sure helped us in the long-run in our charge against Stonewellium.
* (Stonewellium): BARELY!
* Malfils: SHUT UUUUUUP!!!!
* (Gable): I finally asked Noda about the strange metal that is surprisingly more valuable than the rarium I collected digitally and hoped would come in handy later, which I doubt since this place looked potentially ruined. She calls it 'enhancelement'. I've been unable to keep my eyes off it. She said it was among the strongest artificial substances ever discovered, and that it powers nearly everything around us, from my magic armor to her giant, mechanical Grangers. It was also 'alive' since it was genetic material weaved into a fabric of sorts, making it a composite of living and nonliving material, and it could enhance anyone greatly provided the right DNA. Astounding. I felt foolish for having risked and eventually given my life for a few pounds of rarium, now that I see what can be done with this metal. Not even GOLD rarium could surpass its potential. It's hard not to covet such wonders, though Noda said that their miracles came at a terrible cost. She claimed enhancelement polluted the world their colony ship hailed from, and that now it was polluting the sky-gardens of the first wheel. I asked if the invasive force taking over the wheel had brought this pollution with it. Noda seemed surprised by my question but agreed that did seem like a strong possibility.
* Noda: I did. After all, I had no idea what Scyria itself was like. I never had a chance to see it myself. I never knew it was actually cured until you guys showed up. I knew the soil in these rings had enhancelement inside it since the soil CAME from Scyria, and that's what the Grangers were built for, but... I never knew how much worse SCYRIA had it.
* Zhensi: Well now you know. And, as the Lodgers would tend to say, knowing is half the battle.
* (Unknown Voices): GI JOOOOOOOOEEEEE!!
* Noda:... What was that?
* Zhensi: Don't ask. Just keep reading.
* (Gable): That night I dreamt I was heating Noda's enhancelement in a crucible, fixing its volatile form into material with endless potential. I poured the result into a mold to cast a blade, hammering to fold the metal again and again, to strengthen it and work out its impurities. As I lifted my blade to inspect its edge, I saw an unfamiliar reflection in its mirrored surface. The face of a sorcerer or cultist. I looked around myself and saw that I was in a vaulted chamber of some dark catacomb, the center of its ceiling open to the bright, full moon overhead. From the shadows of the chamber, a disembodied voice from some tentacled silhouette praised my work on the blade... Then I woke in the warren of chambers under the garden, unsure of myself. Was I a prospector bushwhacked by a Rarity mob in the country of the Mother Lode, or an ancient alchemist honing his mystic arts under Ocollo's Grand Rariterranean Shore?
* Noda:... Yikes. That... Was intense. I'm surprised he even REMEMBERED a large portion of that dream. Normally people BARELY remember details of their dreams.
* Zhensi: Must've been the gem implant in his arm.
* Noda:... Yeah, I mean, HL-1 and Stonewellium could BOTH access the systems of the ship, so that makes it plausible.
* (Gable): Noda's been training me on the workings of the Grangers wandering the gardens above us. She says they follow their own will but we can break them like gigantic wild work beasts, and use them to storm the infected wheel. I try to remind myself she's a clever girl from a time long after my own, but still it irritates me when she talks down to me as if I’m some nisñho tono.
* Noda: Just so you know, in case you don't, that's Tulvioran Ohrugese for 'child-idiot'.
* Bongki: Thanks for the language lesson! Uh... Really, thanks.
* Noda: Hmmph. Good save.
* (Gable): Maybe that's why I'm not convinced that I need to help fight her invader. On the other hand, I sat out the war to defend the ranchos of Golten from Rarity Invaders, and those maldoros ended up killing me for my property. I have here a rare chance to revenge myself on an occupying force, even if I have no claim to these gardens or their mineral wealth. Maybe I can earn a larger plot of land on whatever world we eventually settle...
* (Stonewellium): Well, I sure promised him BETTER where he is now.
* Noda: YEAH! BUT FOR YOURSELF!!
* (Stonewellium): What else is there for me now that I lost my father?
* Bongki: Just ignore him. We always have.
* (Gable): We ventured above ground to look for Grangers, and spotted two right away, roaming toward an outcropping of rocks. It was a long hike to reach them, and Noda insisted on doing it by night. For the first time, it occurred to me to wonder how there could even be day and night on these wheels. Did her precursors take the sun with them, when they flew off into the stars? Before we'd come topside, Noda showed me how to use her magic gear to look around in the dark. It was distracting. I'd keep stopping to gawk at things I shouldn’t be able to see at all. I took the lead since I was the one in armor, but the girl managed to keep pace with me. We caught up with the Grangers while they were standing snout-to-snout, as if they were conversing somehow. They were so massive, it took my breath away to be close to them. Now I just had to trust that the girl knew how to tame those mechanical hulks.
* Noda: It wasn't really hard. You just need some mutagenic paste from the soil. It's sort've a byproduct of Stonewellium's efforts, and it's how he infects the rings. I managed to use the job skills I required from... Well, my job... And find a good use with the stuff. It can make the machines hackable.
* Bongki: Good for you, girl. You're WAY better at original ideas than your own race.
* Noda: I know... Tell me about it. Makes me feel self-racist at times, too. Glad I wasn't raised among them.
* (Gable): Noda stood at the feet of the colossal four-legged machines, and fiddled with some device in her hand. One of the Grangers dipped its head toward the ground and I made a fool of myself by jumping in front of her. Even though I knew it was a machine, I'd still half-expected it to snatch her up in its metal jaws to eat her alive. She shook her head at me with a smirk, and then she turned to grab handholds to haul herself up onto its neck. From there, she was able to scramble up onto its back, where a sort of saddle platform folded into place seemingly from nowhere for her to stand on. After a moment, the second Granger dropped its head for my benefit, but I opted to follow the girl up to where she was standing on the first one. It seemed wiser to learn from her how to tame and ride these behemoths before attempting it myself. From there, we worked the magic with this... Strange flourescent gel she found from the soil. Then the two behemoths were ours. Had to say, it was whimsical to ride a giant machine like this.
* Noda: It really was. I had one myself before this mess, but it was destroyed by an accident. Sure it was already a rusty machine, but it still had uses. These days I miss poor old rusty Saeturnine.
* Zhensi:... I'm sorry.
* Noda: Someone has to be.
* (Gable): I spent the better part of the next one or two days, or cycles as Noda called them, learning from the happy-go-lucky-at-times girl, as she put a Granger through its paces. High on the machine's back, we rode it uphill and into what looked like scablands riven by channels she hoped were deep enough to conceal us from view. She showed me how to coax the machine into spearing canyon walls with a light bright enough to blast away rock. I knew mining wasn't the point of her demonstration, but I couldn't resist asking Noda to drop the Granger's head low enough for me to climb down and inspect the rock cut for valuable ore. We could always use more synthetic rarium for more resources. I didn't find any trace of it in the rubble pile, but a bright red shard caught my eye. Something made me snatch it up and hide it away before Noda could notice it.
* Noda:... (Shrugs) THAT'S where he found the damn shard of enhancelement?
* Bongki: Huh? So you eventually found out about it?
* Noda: Yeah, it was... An ordeal we had to get over when it came to surviving.
* (Gable): In my dreams that night I found myself back in the necropolis under... Alessdaro? No, Aleandras, on the Vampsten Coasts of Egypher, that crazy world of vampires, transfusion tech, and what have you. Even that deep under the city, I could smell the sea that had the repulsive stench of blood. My torch lit sculpted images of double-crowned snakes, carved from the bedrock walls around me. I was carrying dead weight over one shoulder: an orphan, taken from the steps of the Serateum above. The deepest halls of the catacomb were partially flooded, and cold saltwater tainted only a small amount of natron tugged at the trailing folds of my cloak. A groan of confusion, and the child at my shoulder struggled in vain against the effects of that rejuvenation root Ancient Egypherans used to make their own natron. I was confident in my dosage, she wouldn't be able to rouse herself from her delirium in time. No, what was I doing? I jerked awake on a canyon floor, staring up at our Grangers standing watch over us, flashing their blue lights into the darkness. I swore I could still feel the dream-dagger strapped to my leg.
* Noda:... Arbasus! That was the most surreal and scary dream I've heard him remember so far.
* Bongki: Probably because it's the SECOND one you heard.
* Noda:... No comment.
* (Gable): All through the next day, the unease of my dream sat with me. I couldn't focus on whatever Noda was trying to tell me about the dire threat to her garden and its noble purpose at the time. We were riding giant machines across a landscape her people had managed to launch into the void, and still I was fretting over some occultist's scheme from thousands of years gone. I couldn't be sure it was just a dream anymore. But even though months have passed, and we managed to gain more and more Grangers to obtain as much resources we needed to build our own fortified base, one which could've stopped the Rarity Stragglers that murdered me ages ago in their tracks, since Noda said we needed time to gather our strength and stop this threat, the thought still disturbed me. I had similar dreams many times in those past few months, but that was by far the most discomposing. Even when we were heavily fortified, I still didn't feel anymore safe than that previous life. I'd returned to that man's skin twice now, seen the light of another time through his eyes. His life seemed no more remote, no less my own than the one I'd lived by the Roio De Cos Ocollonos. Which of these men was I? Both? Neither? Had I really been dragged back from oblivion to fight for the people of this undreamt-of future? Was I damned to skip like a stone across history for my barely-remembered mortal sins?
* Noda:... Whoa... That... Just, wow. I had no idea he felt like that our entire time together. All that time I never trusted him... I had no idea THAT was what made him so shifty.
* Bongki: Mmmm. I'm sure he didn't want to scare you with those stories.
* Noda:... True, I guess. I wouldn't want to be spooked away even with all the progress we made.
* (Gable): Near dark, the girl was excited to show me something. She'd pried open one of her hidden doors and pressed her magic device against the machinery inside. I didn't follow what she tried to explain to me next... Noda said I was wired to connect to a sort of game she'd made, from my time in the shadowland she called Exodus. Then she did something, and all at once I was on another world, in a new body. There were no wheels overhead, only a setting sun scudded with clouds. I struggled to understand. Had I ever truly been in Noda's sky-garden? I called to her, but instead heard the voice of the angel I'd met in Purgatory. The angel told me something important. Then I was yanked back into reality, if this was actually reality. Noda grinned at me and asked what I thought, and I got sick all over the canyon floor.
* Noda: Oh, he's talking about when I first introduced him to the Exodus Simulation. I had FINALLY regained control of it and managed to use a bypass and alter the security server with a matrix adapter by reprogramming the graphic subproccessor.
* Hud:... Err?
* Noda: In lament's terms, I rewrote the security system to work like a VR game. That's how I managed to keep Stonewellium from regaining complete control over the Simulation's servers. I was like some kind of virtual warrior. I was able to use my own VR designs, to combat against him. Impressive if I do say so myself... But... It took Gable time to get used to it.
* Bongki: You are just FULL of surprises, aren't you, kid?
* Noda: You have NO idea. At least that makes me DIFFERENT from my race.
* (Gable): It wasn't too late to let go of the malice in my heart. That was what the angel assured me in the dreamworld that Noda dropped me into, the one with the setting sun. Speaking of Noda, the girl pouted for hours after I reacted poorly to the hallucination she forced on me. I couldn't understand why she seemed to expect praise for what she'd done. She said she was working on keeping the other 'colonists' like me from succumbing to our enemies' control, especially the 'critical' ones, particularly by 'turning it into some kind of VR game', but it didn't make me feel any less daunted. I don't trust my own sensations, my own memories. I wonder if I've ever left perdition, if these rings of gardens might not be another breaking wheel for my infernal soul. In the dark I lie awake, afraid of what I might dream again, and wonder if this girl is some demon assigned to torment me. And then his voice whispers to me, the one who woke me from Exodus and led me to my armor. He tells me the angel lied.
* Noda: Ugh! Dammit, Stonewellium!
* (Stonewellium): Hahahahahaha.
* Noda: DON'T YOU 'HAHAHAHAHAHAHA' US, YOU SLIMY SHAPESHIFTING TURD!!!
* Bongki: We SAID to ignore him!
* Noda:... Oh God, THIS is when I discovered his enhancelement shard.
* (Gable): I was careless, and the girl found the treasure I'd been concealing. I had taken out the shard of enhancelement while she was sleeping, trying to remember what my other self had done in my dream to fix its volatile form into workable metal. I turned it back and forth in the dark. Its glow was mesmerizing. I must have fallen asleep trying to recover my dream-memory, and left it laying out by my side. Noda warned me that the metal was dangerous to human flesh in this form. Unstable. She demanded to know what I was planning to do with it, if I'd cut myself with its sharp edges. She scolded me like a child caught toying with fire, and I snapped at her like a wounded dog. Neither of us spoke again for a long time after that.
* Noda:... (Deep breath)... I tried SO hard to forget that argument.
* Zhensi: What did he say?
* Noda: (Sighs) It doesn't matter. It was something painful.
* Bongki: Did it have something to do with, say, comparing you and your people to the precursors that made you? People meant to tell us what to do with our lives?
* Noda:...
* Bongki:... WOW! That was a REALLY big guess. I'm almost impressed with myself.
* Zhensi: Look, Nod, it's nobody's fault. Not even yours or his. You were struggling trying to stop Stonewellium however you could, or even just survive long enough to hope for the SLIGHTEST miracle, and HE was just a colonist awakened too soon to see this hell. You two had no idea how to live with all of this and you only had yourselves.... And I KNOW he'll figure that out for himself given what it says in this next entry.
* (Gable): Many more months have passed since our argument. We were still struggling to build ourselves the strength we needed, and we did manage. We obtained an entire army of Grangers. Noda said the day before the argument that an army of Grangers could be decisive in purging the tainted hiveminded jungle in the infected ring and destroying the monsters within. Then practically overnight, we gained it, and all the essentials needed to make it through. It was time. But then, that other voice whispered to me again while Noda and I rode in silence toward the edge of the wheel leading to that hellish jungle. It reassured me that the enhancelement I'd recovered was my own to keep and asked why I'd let this girl draft me into fighting for a cause that was none of my concern. Was I really in such a hurry to die again, after so little months back among the living? We stopped to rest and eat in an alpine meadow. The rarium I had on hand turned out handy after all, as the digital stores that were intact had the food and drinks for the trip, which even Noda doubted would last a day tops. While Noda was gathering berries I saw my moment. I took advantage of the training she'd given me over the previous days to take one of the Grangers and ride it away on my own for the canyonlands. I wasn't sure if she'd be able to call the Granger back at a distance, but it's also possible that she decided to just let me go. I was free now to use the power of this great machine of hers to my own ends.
* Bongki: HE ABANDONED YOU?!?
* Noda: Yeah!... And he was right. We never spoke for the last few months. We trained in the Exodus Simulation and improved on it. We mastered the seven uninfected rings and protected them from Stonewellium, and yet we never saw eye-to-eye, especially when I was forced to dispose of that shard for his own good. He was angrier than ever, and... \*Sigh\*... It was painful for both of us, but I let him go because he needed to realize that we were all we had left, and thus we couldn't go on without each other.
* Zhensi: Was that from one of your simulations?
* Noda:... Maybe.
* (Gable): I rode my stolen Granger back toward where I thought the canyons might be, searching for the vein of ore we'd found before. I was still angry at Noda for getting rid of that shard. Prospector Code and all that. It was mine! The thief. She was just like those Rarity Stragglers that killed me, I said, especially the one that was UIS-oriented. That really tore into her, and... I think I went too far on that one, but... Well, it had us stop talking entirely. Every so often I'd stop the mechanical juggernaut and force it to blast at the rock outcroppings, dismounting to dig through mounds of rubble looking for the telltale red glow of pure enhancelement. I only found one shard, but it was bigger than the one before, and I managed to weld it to forge into a special new dagger. I hoped it would come in handy. But that was only one small victory. It didn't take me long to realize that all my methods of reckoning direction or distance were useless in this place. By night there was no polestar to follow north. In fact, all the stars were strange to me. By day their miraculous miniature sun threaded the wheels on its odd, straight track with no regard for east or west. I was utterly lost again in the garden. I wondered if the girl was pressing on without me, to fight the invader in the other wheel. If she ever tried to find me in the immensity of that landscape, I saw no sign.
* Noda: See? He's realizing he's lost without me.
* Zhensi: So it WAS from a simulation? A nerd's way of recreating a conflict in a work of fic.
* Noda:... You're all so weird, you know that?
* Zhensi: You have NO idea how many times we got that.
* (Gable): My dreams were fevered by regret during the time I fled from Noda. In the dark I relived the helpless rage that set me after the claim-jumping Rarity Stragglers who followed me to search my prospect range. Those men, the UIS-based one I compared Noda to specifically, said I had no right to stay in their new peak state, nor did I have any right to hoard much of the rarium in the region. When I explicitly told them the rules of the Prospector Code are not to be violated, and that they are my find and therefore belonged to me, they threatened to bring me to the local authorities to hang for some invented crime, their word against mine. I broke away and circled back through the forest to kill them by dividing them. But they saw me coming and ganged up on me. I spat at them, gave them ideas by telling them what I'd have done to each of them if only I'd managed to catch them alone. And they made me regret that. With my last breath I cursed them, promising them that what they'd stolen from me would only bring them sorrow and torment. But a voice told me it didn't, because it was only my avarice that became my undoing. 6000 millites of rarium. That kind of wealth belonging to one person and being tons more than the prospect of other good people in the region was simply unfair. As much as it would have pained me to hear long ago, I died because of my own pride and greed.
* Noda:... THAT'S how he died?
* Hud: Duuuuurrrrmm!
* Noda: Damn right durrrm! I... Think that was HL-1 trying to make him realize how wrong he was.
* Zhensi: Talk about divine intervention.
* (Gable): By daylight I fumed at myself for running off on my own. My pride and stubborn self-reliance has only ever brought me ruination. I turned my Granger back toward where I'd left Noda, near the edges of this wheel. I set aside my own desire to recover the mineral wealth that was taken from me, and my half-memories of a previous life's pursuit of greed, wealth, and power. There was only this moment, and this chance to do something right, for once in my miserable existence. I pushed the machine to its breaking point, urging it into a full gallop toward the girl I'd abandoned to an unfair fight. As I recrossed that landscape shame gnawed at me, for the way I'd reacted to the dream she'd painted for me. She'd only wanted to show me a sunset on the world I was destined to tame, far from these gardens she and her people had kept alive for a future they never thought they'd see. She wanted the best for me, and I neglected to see that. I had to set things right.
* Zhensi:... You are REALLY diabolical if you put your mind to it, Nod.
* Noda: You have NO idea.
* (Gable): Fear gripped my heart as I caught up with Noda near the edge of the infected wheel. I had to fight my overwhelming urge to retreat again. This close, I could plainly see how thin the glass was holding back all the land, water, and air from the cold void beyond. The girl had dismounted her Granger by some sort of metal podium, wondering just how she was going to transfer every since portion of her army to the ring. I climbed down off of my machine to join her. She paid no mind to my approach, and went on tinkering with something near the base of the podium. I fumbled through a pathetic apology directed at the back of her head, with no sign that she'd heard me. Eventually, Noda stood up and touched a switch on the podium that opened a huge, circular door in front of us. The girl climbed back onto her Granger without a word, and headed through the doorway. I scrambled to catch up and follow her into that infected wheel.
* Zhensi: Wow, really?
* Noda: I had to make sure he truly learned his lesson. You don't just see that through apologies.
* Zhensi:... Okay, I guess that's true.
* (Gable): All manner of steam and blinding lights played over us as we passed through a series of antechambers astride our colossal machines once we finally discovered how to cross the void. At last, another of the circular doors opened and we passed through the portal into the befouled gardens beyond. The sickly sweet stink of this place was nauseating. We were confronted immediately by a vision of desecration-corpses of the sky-people hung on spikes and scattered about the entrance. A warning for any remaining interlopers, no doubt. At my distance from Noda her expression was unreadable, but I could imagine the girl's horror. This might prove to be all that was left of her crewmates. I dismounted to join her on the ground after she climbed down from her Granger. Her face was wet with tears, but she radiated a righteous fury that I identified with all too well. In silence, we buried her friends in the poisoned ground while our mechanical mounts shifted nervously above us on their bechromed hooves.
* Noda:... (Sighs) He was right. They were everyone I worked with. Pesra and her entire crew... They were all... Gone. (She softly sobbed)... They died fighting a battle they couldn't win... It was just... Cruel!... Cruel that I wasn't there for them when they needed me!... (Sobs)
* Bongki: It's alright, girl. We'll avenge them. We WILL!
* Noda:... Yes we will!... We just need to get Gable back. No doubt he knows something about Stonewellium we don't.
* (Gable): Every moment spent in that unhallowed Fondsmithian hellscape was a struggle to remain sensible. What I experienced was beyond trepidation. The place pressed on me, like skeletal fingers were squeezing my scalp. What had been done to the lands in that first wheel was profane, a debasement of creation itself. Noda said that these jungles were alive and bred to act as a kind of 'perimeter defense garden' for the entity. Monsters were acting as wild servants. Giant fountainflowers were fertilizing the ground with the enhancelement in liquid form. Tentacles were creating lightning flashes that simulated the landscape like some kind of nervous system. Something was unmaking the natural order, melting it to fix into unholy new forms for some unknowable end. It was entirely aware, or so it felt, and so Noda confirmed. She said it was all hiveminded in a very unnerving way. Bad enough that those poor sky-people she cared about had been massacred, but we could see now that all their generations of endeavor had been undone, from horizon to horizon. Noda was inconsolable, not that I was in any shape to give comfort. Not with that metronomic drone in my head, throbbing against my resolve. You know what you need to do, it said. I brought you back into this world. I can make you whole, if you just do as I command.
* Noda:... Indeed. That place was a hell incarnate. It's what hell's gardens WOULD look like... In a way.
* Zhensi: Kid, we've BEEN in the Boundary Cluster and seen BOTH sides, believe it or not, and HELL'S gardens are MUCH more disturbing than that. TRUST me!
* (Gable): I forfeited all awareness of time and location in that toxic wasteland, no longer sure why we were there or what Noda thought we could do at this point to roll back catastrophe, even when we successfully transferred our entire army to the infected wheel and converted our base into mobile form for the time to fight back. The thunder in my head exhausted me with demands for obedience, and at some point my waking mind fell into reverie. I was lost again in the flooded labyrinth under Aleandras, shouldering my terrible burden to her final destination. There was an eerie light in the darkness ahead, a sanguine glow from a secret sepulcher. I dropped my guttering torch into the oily seawater of natron lapping at my legs, to get a tighter grip on the insensible child I was carrying. In that hidden chamber, I offered her up as sacrifice. My lord promised vengeance against the cabal for banishing me. Was its intonation coming from the shadows in that remembered vault, the glowing red blade I'd forged, or the defiled wheel that was carrying Noda and I into the void?
* Noda:... Yikes. Those dreams DEFINITELY were Stonewellium trying to coax him into servility, just like he did to the others in the simulation.
* Hud: Weehh nerr ert urrr deeh turrrme!
* Noda:... Still can't understand it, but it sounded something like a 'no s\*\*\*' statement.
* (Gable): I had no peace from the unceasing demands echoing in my mind. They seemed to be coming from everywhere. If Noda heard, she paid no mind. The girl was locked into some unknown course of action and too busy commanding our entire armies that were nevertheless pressing on with great vehemence. Why wouldn't she share what she was planning with me? Couldn't she see I'd joined her to offer what aid I could? At the same time, our unnatural surroundings seemed to be pulsing a warning at us: YOU ARE UNWELCOME HERE-DO NOT INTERFERE. Still the girl didn't react. She must have seen, how could she remain so fixed in her purpose? Finally I couldn't abide the tension any more, and signaled for her to stop and confer. We dismounted and met at the feet of our Grangers, though Noda kept her distance. I asked what she was planning, and she asked why I was shouting. She really didn't hear all the yowling. That was when those strange finned creatures attacked us.
* Noda: Yeah. That's when he finally got firm with me. But again, I wanted to make sure he was with me all the way through. This was his chance to prove it... But then Mutadons ambushed us when we were distracted.
* Zhensi: Glad he was at least TRYING to prove it.
* Noda:... Me too.
* (Gable): Just ahead of the attack, our Grangers sounded a shrill warning from on high. I was glad that Noda had shown me how to rig our mounts with weapons at the ready, because they were able to open fire on the incoming predators while we scrambled for cover. Explosions erupted all around us, spraying us with gobbets of the slimy groundcover. Noda began to run to our right, then changed her mind and ducked back to the left. She got to her hands and knees to dig in the muck underfoot, then turned to ask what I was waiting for. I helped her rip away mats of gluey sludge to uncover a hidden hatch, just as the pride of attacking creatures crested the ridge above us. The weird, spiny frills covering their entire bodies thrummed with excitement as they spotted us. Nida pried open the hatch and we dove into the darkness under the landscape before some, unholy red fire of the same color as the shard I discovered transformed everything that hit it. Noda reassured me that she had programmed all the Grangers to exact her entire plan without us.
* Noda: Yeah, and I saw it all when I got out of there alive.
* Zhensi: Really?
* Noda: Yep. I was able to regather what was left on the surface battle and make it back to the safety of the uninfected rings... Barely.... Anyway....
* (Gable): The tunnels under that defiled garden wheel were pitch-dark and fouled with sullage. I lost my footing and we sloshed helplessly into cataracts of sleetch and putrescence that carried us leagues away from our dracthonian-feline attackers. We scrabbled for purchase or handhold to slow our descent into the immeasurable depths, to little avail. We slid further and further into that muculent ductwork, bits of flotsam devoured by a stygian monstrosity. It felt like untold miles of malignant vasculature were crushing out my instinct to survive, overwhelming me with dread. My wits caved in and I became desperate, mewling and clawing at the lining of those guts to escape. I remembered the enhancelement dagger I made, I took it out, and tore through those thick membranes, discharging the girl and I onto the floor of an abysmal chamber. Exhausted beyond reason, I fell into unconsciousness.
* Noda: TRUST me! The caverns beneath Stonewellium's Garden, are like walking through the internals of a monster. Antibodies, beasts, acidic pits, tentacle defenses, the works.
* Zhensi:... Define 'antibodies'.
* Noda: They're basically like tentacled flying eye-flowers. The BIGGER ones can use their bioelectricity to project a shield and they can produce monsters. Then there's the smaller ones that can act as swarms, biting at you from all directions. It's a NIGHTMARE to even get THROUGH their alive.
* Bongki:... Ew, cool, and WOW!
* Hud: Durrng! Fuurndsmmerrh berh duurmmed!
* (Gable): O Serateos, King of the Dead, Giver of Wealth, may my voice reach you in the depths of your chthonic dominion. I am your humble servant, I who renamed myself Ixition. Surely you are aware that all I have done was always, always in your honor. The other adepts cast me from their circle, forced me to steal their papyri, so that I could build on their incomplete understanding of your arts. In dreams, you told me how to refine the purpureal metal that would grant me divinity, with your blessing. I ask you now to lend me the power to escape this indignity. I gave you the girl, bled her at your altar and burned her in your hearth. I freed her from her mortal tegument to reveal her holy energy. Soldiers of the empire have me surrounded in your temple. I beseech you to grant me the transcendence I sought from your arcane knowledge when they find me and cut me down.
* Hud:... Dur furrq?
* Noda: I know this is weird, but this is why Stonewellium had to look up historical files. He NEEDED to put colonists in the simulation to scenarios that prove their servility in hopes of being a part of his 'new dominion'. THIS was clearly him putting Gable through a simulated scenario involving Egypher's famed fictional story 'Serateos' by famed Egypherologist Geon Trines. The one that involved a man named Ixition sacrificing and making what he needed to bring the woman he loved back from the dead.
* Zhensi: Arbasus Kraan! That's grim!
* Noda: I know.
* (Stonewellium): Whatever it takes to get worthy servants.
* Noda: (Sighs) We're STILL ignoring you! (To the Malfils) But, that moment was not good for either of us. While he was exposed to that simulation as a last-ditch effort, I was... I was off to confront Stonewellium with safeties off. I had all the animals I had contained in cryotainer pods released and went to confront him in his 'throne room'. As for him... He found me eventually...
* (Gable): Life returned to me with a shrill brightness. Weakly but with increasing desperation, I pulled out the tubes choking my airway. I was drowning in viscous plasma, and then a lid opened so that I fell from my metal cocoon, blinded in the unaccustomed glare. The diamond in my forearm glowed brightly. I didn't understand. A moment ago I'd been in an afterworld populated by monsters. Now I was in some metal nursery of cocoons like my own. I wiped at the glass of one after another, to see people of many species suspended in fluid and shot through with tubes and wires. What was this place, and how did I come to be here after making it into some hellish domain of internals with Noda? And where was she? Then there was a voice in my head, guiding me to another stronger suit of supernatural armor. I put it on, and the voice said, "Go now and find her."
* Noda:... That... That was HL-1 freeing him to save me.
* Bongki: Yep.
* (Gable): Wheels chasing wheels. A cosmic serpent devouring its own tail. Oblivion swallowing awareness. I arrived in the infernal throne room of my deliverer, his titanic excrescence exploded up one of the cavernous walls from floor to ceiling with too many deformed faces to count, taunting me. Every part of this place was him, eyes bulging from ulcerated flesh to gaze down on us, wounds become rictuses of triumph grinning from on high, tentacular limbs reaching for us from all sides. There were too many sides in that vertiginous cavity, an impossibility of angles that never met. I found Noda and yelled to warn her, but of course she'd already taken it all in. As her tamed creature forces fought against his defenses, she was shouting her defiance up at the monumental face of our tormentor. His voice came from all around as a deafening chorus. He demanded that she submit and help him nurture his monstrous children by giving them new dreams. He demanded that I help him mine the garden for a precious resource he called 'Stonewellium'. Of course we refused.
* (Stonewellium): BIG MISTAKE!
* Noda: GRRHHHHHH!!!!
* (Gable): In the sarcoid cathedral of the antigod, we endured his seismic wrath. Thunderous peals of his fury buffeted us and swiftly slaughtered Noda's entire army of beasts. Who were we to defy his cosmic malignity? He promised we would submit one way or another, as something crawled up my back and attached itself to my head. I felt my will to resist being drained away, and fell to my knees as the entirety of our environment roared in triumph. It assured me I would go now to dig up more of the prima materia that belonged to him. I remembered the enhancelement dagger clutched in my fist, and recalling what it had done for me on my way here and how much it could do, I threw it to the girl. "Go!" I croaked with my dying strength. As darkness overwhelmed me, I heard indignant howls follow Noda as she fled. I hoped she would cut her way out and find a way to reverse this cycle of destruction. Creation deserves its rightful turn in the sun.
* Noda:... THAT'S IT?!? NOTHING USEFUL?!?... ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!? THIS WAS ALL JUST A WASTE OF TIME?!?
* Bongki: Not quite. This also contains his HoloID.
* Noda: HoloID? He's a colonist created for the arrival on Sydus. He HAS no HoloID!
* Bongki: No, but at least this is some kinda... PERSONAL one. It says that he still has some of his own mentality inside. Maybe we should bring this to the others. We MIGHT get somewhere with him after all.
* Noda:... Not sure if that'll do any good, but... I trust you.