Did you ever—will you knock it off? No, I never, whatever you were about to ask, if it has anything to do with anything that has happened to day, the answer is no. Obviously. Today has been the weirdest shambling rambling jaunt through hell that anyone has likely ever taken. My right eye twitches when I catch shadows moving out of the corner of my eye, despite the stagnant lightsource.

Would be nice if at least the shadows would freakin’ behave. But no. Not a single normal thing at all. Not my beloved’s form, she looks like a glitchy gif or a college student’s first animation project for special FX. Not my senses, because they’d been all being overridden by freakin’ gustatory nonsense from the depths of the worst hells. Not the war, with Terrorzin throwing plasma balls, that, oh, hey, requires him burning out these very broodmothers here. Broodmothers who are, and I quote, trapped pan-dimensionally, only able to be moved between vaults in which there are tears in space to other realms.

Nothing is normal! Not a gorram thing! Your arguing with yourself is. No it isn’t! Oh. Okay. Maybe it is. A rueful smirk creeps up the left half of my face and I shrug embarrassedly at myself. Teuila cackles delightfully as she hears me berating and arguing with myself. Okay, our love is still normal, our bond is as tight as can be. We’ve spent lifetimes together in accelerated time, in slowed time, in one world, in another, and on and on. Just… just let that one thing remain true. Always.

Who’re you even making that request of Reggie? Uh, well. Hell if I know. I just, well, it’s just something I want to be true. Alright? Sure, no skin off my nose pal. Or is it back? Maybe both. Eugh, why’d you have to go and use a skin metaphor. Blrghl, it just reminds me that my entire epidermis tastes everything it’s touching. I want to just cry it’s so awful and foul. Eugh. Alright, alright, enough wallowing. Focus up putz. You just pledged to break reality.

Yeah, and I gorram meant it too. Okay, so where do you start? Well, first of all, I start like this. I take in my assets, my allies, my liabilities, and I let the pieces sift around a bit, seeing what sorts of angles they fit against each other with. I just, y’know, have to be careful to not fit the right, or, well, wrong pieces together. So that my brain doesn’t—according to Luni, *literally*—explode. I have to keep Teuila from doing the same thing too. Especially with what Shaylon, Gresog, and Revinth found. Sorry Te, can’t tell you. Please don’t ask. I really don’t want your brain to explode.

So how’re those pieces fitting together pal? Shush, I’m working here. We’ve got an inter-realm-realm bleedthrough, a realmway tear to the ‘Twixt, we’ve got Te, Nyssa, and their offer of dying to give up their dragonforce—which I in no way am going to allow to happen—and a, um, what’s the nicest way I can put this so I can avoid adding more cosmic horror to my mental monologue? A big lady. One conjoined broodmother, trapped across multiple dimensions.

We’ve got some permanently enchanted magic item assets, though most things with charges are low or out entirely. The few that aren’t, are mostly my evasive maneuver ones, since I was intentionally facetanking a ton of stuff to keep foes interested in beating on me. Sure ya were pal. Sure ya were. Oh come the hell on, you know I was, it was your plan! I’m just giving you a hard time. Yeah, gee, thanks, the time is hard enough on its own already, thanks! Chill Reggie, chill. Heh, haha. Telling Reggie Shellcracker the Frosty Fel Changeling-Fae to chill. Rolling my eyes, I can’t help a half-amused sigh at coping-me.

Those sounds that these poor souls make, the, the fleshy, no, just no, please. Someone plug my ears. Every squish is like its own mournful wail, souls crying out from the agony of compression. Y’know, like being in an ancient dragon’s throat as their esophagus tries to crush and swallow you. Okay, great, thanks Reggie. Sure, we can empathize with the squish of the doomed soul sounds. Wonderful. Really helpful.

Y’know something Reggie? Oh for the love of crap, what? I think you leveled up your sarcasm game in here. My right eye twitches so hard my cheek spasms along with it. You… interrupted my thoughts, to express that you think my sarcasm is getting better!? Yup. Oh Em Eff Gee. I could strangle you! Well, don’t do that. Obvee. Grumble-grumble. Ugh, you are the absolute worst. Takes one to know one pal. Pft. Hahaha. Hahaha. I’m cracking up so bad.

Okay, there’s a backup plan I don’t want to subvocalize, that’s already coalesced, but I don’t want to worry Te. So it’s just a backup plan, and nothing for her to worry about, since I’m still planning. Got that Te? Let’s see how these pieces can fit together. If I remember right, I know where one, two, three, four other temporal zone anomalies are on Rayileklia. Don’t you mean two? I said what I said. Too bad. That’s one of the things you’re not supposed to know.

What? Ow! I, I, Ow, oh gods. I can feel little explosions about my gray matter. The spattering inside my skull is audible. Blood, just, just keeps pouring. From, from orifices. Weakly, I stagger, and my improperly perceived Teuila catches me as I topple. The terror I feel from her is… flavorful. Eugh. Why. My eyes roll about in their sockets, coating with red as I bleed. Are you done trying to know things you’re not supposed to yet?

Yes! For the love of—crying out loud, yes!

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There, all better now. And look, the physical damage, even done to your brain, is recovering swiftly, in rapid order. Yeah, because the bleedthrough on this realm makes me regenerate like crazy for some reason. Oh. Duh. Void Dragon. Latent, “Nothing,” and the bleed-through is a realm outside space, between spaces, the nothing, the void between realms. Are you really me? Who else would I be? You’re creeping me out. Know—don’t start. Okay, okay. Fine. New tack.

As I lay here, catching my breath after nearly dying from self-induced brain explosion, Teuila cradles my head in her lap. Of course, all I see is a strange semblance of the absence of where the white vertical lines end. Or rather, I can sort of guess Teuila’s outline, because the lines seem to hit the edge of her outline, then wrap back around. Oog, my head. I’d rather not have high commander Nyssa’Lina see me being coddled, but at the moment, I’ll take the affection.

The voices whose whispered words mean, “the way is shut, and the dead keep it,” say “empty and hollow and thud,” disconcertingly, somehow still meaning, “the way is shut, and the dead keep it.” It’s the *way* they say it, in some altogether alien diction, that can only be translated as, and mean only one thing, no matter what it sounds like they’re saying. Brr. Shivering, I try to place it out of sight and out of mind. The out of sight works, easily enough. Out of mind? Not so much. The voices aren’t coming from outside our heads after all.

Alright, let’s kinda get back to it. A bit. Maybe if I take another try to analyze things from a different perspective, instead of one of memory and knowledge, one of science and research. Experimentation and understanding.

Trying to help me out, Te offers up, “So, I’m not sure how much you already know, but there’s some science for tears in space, wormholes, realmways, whatever. If we go with Einstein-Rosen, where ER=EPR, the value of quantum-entangled particles is equivalent in realmspace, no matter where the bridge, or realmway, is. So, theoretically, one could move a tear like this, without adverse effects. It’d take some manipulation of the Higgs field, which I can do to start, as prep.”

Blinking, I follow along with Te as she continues, “I’ll actually start the prep right now. Doesn’t hurt to have Higgs ready to rock. Precise control over the forces of attraction, gravity? Check. One thing to keep in mind is the tachyons.”

Teuila pauses, allowing me to digest her statement, at which I raise a curious eyebrow. She explains, “Since these bridges, these realmways, cause temporal distortions, there’s faster than light particles active in the nearby vicinity. Those I can help deal with too, increasing their mass and slowing them down. That’d regulate some of the time-distortion, temporarily. Until my Latent wore off of them. So I’ll do that in a second when I’ve got the Higgs primed.”

Phew. I understood most of that on a basic freshman level, but wow. Never underestimate Teuila and her secret science side. She looses a Shellcracker Family Squee, while wearing her mile-wide closed-eyed smile, rocking her head side to side. Her pride in being able to utilize her particle physics knowledge is quite apparent.

Before I have time to go down rabbitholes of appreciation for Teuila, she conjectures, “Another thing to deal with is inertia. Because it’s the sum of the product of the mass of each particle with the square of its distance from the axis of the rotation. The whole thing has a mass that’s undefinably off the charts. That’s what the Higgs field prep is for, in some regards. But I can’t un-warp the fabric of spacetime that’s been stretched and distorted by its density. So I can’t regulate the axis of rotation, or the distance from it.”

To simplify, Teuila analogizes, “So it’s like, like a golf-ball sitting in the bottom of a deep divot. Or kind of like a bowling ball resting on stretched-out lycra. Either one is almost impossible to try to move by swinging a club at it. You’ve got to bend down, and pick it up. Reset it on a tee somewhere. How to get there is something I figure your void stuff can maybe do. From that point though, everything is mystic woowoo mumbo jumbo to me. That’s your area of expertise.”

Hm. Teuila’s explanation makes sense. Reaching out with no actual, “sense,” I let, “Nothing,” be my guide. The voices, the whispers take up more space in my head, while simultaneously seeming quieter. It causes my eye to twitch, so I try to ignore it.

The problem with Teuila’s proposition, is that we’re not just moving the tear. We’re moving people who’ve had a magic ritual bind them in place across multiple dimensions, and distorted such that they simultaneously exist across several realms. I’d have to reach into, and be in each of those realms, simultaneously, to interact with them.

Sighing, I can guess one way around that, but that’s in the backup plan. I’d rather not worry Teuila if I don’t have to. But it’s harder and harder to think at all, as the voices become more and more insistent. No matter their volume. Alternate solutions fade from my grasp as the ideas begin to percolate, because the stupid voices, and horrible tastes of my every-sense being gustatory, continue to pervade my thoughts.

Deciding to try motion to distract myself from the various unhinged parts of this non-reality that keeps trying to insist itself upon my psyche, I get up and pace around. Teuila frowns, but she stands nearby, watching worriedly. Nyssa has been in quiet contemplation since I swore to break reality. My shadow looms, stretching and bending towards Nyssa as I think about them. I growl at it to get it to stop that. Thankfully, it obeys.

That’s… just one more odd thing to add to the pile. Yeah. True. Suddenly the insistent whispered voices… have faces. Or rather, pareidolic mimicry of faces. Somehow each of those faces—the size of human heads—bumps into, and squirms its way into my ears. Eugh. Warghleblargle! They insist harder and harder that the way is shut, and the dead keep it.

Grr. I! Can’t! Take! This! Shut up! Loosing my titles under my breath and manifesting my Honoris Causa as large as will fit in the room, I let it roar. Gripping the edges of reality, the space between spaces, the absence, the non, the lack of reality and lack of sense, I tug. Hard. My Latent, “Nothing,” responds as I pour more and more of my willpower into it. I feel something moving. Something is happening. Something… is tearing. Is that a good thing, or a—.

Plop.