Entry 17 Page 444 Continued

Now that I’ve generated gravity I had to do some remodeling, although not that much really. I just stuck my base onto the ball of iron and steel with a bunch of rods, upside down. So that the “floor” faced outside and so that above me was the planet. In the future, a lot of things will be placed on the planet, but if I want to preserve the unique environment of my base it can’t have too much gravity. Especially since I rely on there being no weight for a lot of my transportation. Although this does make me wonder, could I throw some items into orbit? If I got the trajectory right they would just keep spinning. But although that would look cool, there’s no real reason to do that. I’m going to move the steam engine to the planet soon, with gravity I can just have a massive tankard of water that slowly feeds into it. But I’ll need to make a new one down there so that I don’t fuck up the one up here it’s the key to me being able to produce so much. Either way, TARA IS OUT!

Entry 18 Page 449

I’ve been fiddling with a sadness technique since my last entry. Specifically, one that would stop me from moving quickly. Right now it works but it’s not very efficient, and since I need to use it to be more efficient and I can’t do it for long, without efficiency or large stores, this technique will most likely be in the works for longer. I overflow and go catatonic pretty quickly on sadness it’s one of my weaker areas, so despite the fact that technically I could make a technique about anything using any emotion, using the ones that I have more of allows me to make it quicker, perfect it, and then be able to use it more often. Anger is so – *CRASH*

---

I jolt, my writing on the throne disturbed by a sickening crash. The sickening shrieks of twisted steel ringing from behind my throne. My whole base shakes from the impact.

“Shit, I need to check that out!” I say with panic in my voice and dread in my heart.

What the hell could it be!

I try to wiggle off my throne, the emergency not allowing me enough time to untie the strips of fabric. As my mind panics I think wait, I might not have a knife but I do have magic.

So I grab my shoulders, invoking sadness, and a sphere of cold bursts from my heart freezing then shattering my bonds.

From there I push off the iron floor, a remnant of my past base, the old floor of my base turned into a single room.

I grab the bars ubiquitous in the base. and pull myself to the location of the crash coming upon my Chillax room.

But the room is no longer a junk drawer mixed with a couch, it now looks more like a car crashed into a truck filled with packing peanuts in slow-mo.

Items scattered everywhere slowly falling onto the tiny planet above. Water floating in the air the mechanisms of the tankers are usually hidden by steel thrown about like confetti.

My couch now nothing but shreds of colorful fabric among a crater of twisted metal.

And at the center of it, all is the cause of all of this mess. The rotting corpse of a ginormous ant the size of a car.

The ant beyond its size is quite strange, it’s bright rust-red chitin almost seems twisted, and malformed. But the malformation doesn’t seem to hurt it. It’s mandibles enhanced by the swirls of chitin, looking wickedly sharp.

The thing in general looks fantastical its eyes are ginormous in proportion to its head like the anime version of an ant. I blink struck by the bizarre sight of a magical ant taller than I am.

And the ant doesn’t even make sense, ants if grown to massive proportions wouldn’t work, and they would be too heavy. They can’t survive at this size.

But as I feel a headache coming on, I realize something. There is no weight here, we float the only gravity I’ve found is the one that I’ve made myself.

And that gravity is most likely the problem as well. I was hoping for other things to be drawn by my self-created gravity, not the corpses of magical ants!

Ugh well, I should drag this into my experimentation room for study. Who knows what weird adaptation ants would make in reaction to living in this bizarre place?

I shrug as I pull the ant into the direction of my lab because well the more pertinent question is where are the rest of them, ants don’t fight alone.

Was it a scout, that died on route, or just some unlucky bastard whose corpse drifted too close to the crude planet I built?

But as I ponder I see another ant corpse speeding toward me like a comet.

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I lock eyes with the dead ant as its corpse rockets toward me.

I squeeze shut my eyes, almost unwilling to believe it before snapping back to reality. I quickly grab my shoulders, and invoke sadness, as a Shiver comes over the world.

And as the corpse reaches me it slows down as if a swimmer dived into molasses.

Taking that opportunity I wave my hands holding my expectations in mind, and a gust of strange wind bursts out from my hands and knocks the creature off course.

The body bounces off the wind as if it hit a brick wall, and stalls a bit in the air before falling almost as if gravity suddenly remembered it. The corpse slowly gains speed as it falls up and crashes into my little planet. Skidding on its welded smooth surface an ungodly clang ringing out

I stop, my eyes fluttering in disbelief. FUCK! What do I do now?

I can’t sustain myself like this, I’ll eventually overflow and go catatonic in all the emotions useful to stop the flying corpses if the current situation keeps on happening.

And I can’t exactly hide in the base I don’t want what happened to the Chillax room to happen to me.

I need to do something right now! I grab my head and shake it, alright first I need to protect my shit first.

I grab some broken tankards of water, the leftover bits of water streaming out, and kick, my legs swimming towards the steam machines attached to the outside of the base. Then once I arrive I dump the tankards and come back for more.

Eventually, I gather enough shitty broken metal to cover the whole thing. I don’t have enough time to make it from powder so what I’ll do is just weld a protective cover on top.

I pull out the hair braces, go through the familiar steps to turn them into a laser, and start melting the metal at the edges of the items. Making a thick shell filled with holes formed from a bunch of junk torn apart by the ginormous corpse of an ant.

I sigh and wipe my forehead, it might look like a piece of a playground but with all the empty junk between it and empty threats, the steel will crumble before wrecking my beautiful machines.

But now I should make a solution for the entire base. So I grab the mountains of steel dust constantly produced by the machine and stuff it into bags of fabric and start swimming toward the film. Strapping the bags to each other to carry more. One of the many advantages of next to no gravity.

The white film that covers my home would be a great place to put up a barrier, now that I’ve got the important bits covered.

I drag along a train of bags filled with ground-down steel dust, my body undulating like I were a dolphin as I use all I have.

I quickly approach the white film and pop through to the other side.

I shiver as I reach out, the warm protective embrace of home no longer protecting me. The feeling of constant warmth in this abyss is something I’ve grown used to.

Anyway, I need to focus on the current threat.

So I look and see the usual astounding sights but I also see something else something strange. Like a jagged cloud of uneven black pieces

I squint and I see it. 1, 2, 3, 7, 12, 27, 36, 68, 159, 342, 1241, 2642, 6742, 23418. My eyes dart as I try to count them all, but no matter how hard I search I see no end in sight.

Because it seems like a couple of ants isn’t going to be my problem, it’s going to be all of them.

For I see a grotesque battlefield covered in the dead mutilated bodies of countless ants, and they are all falling towards my home.

Gathering together in a twisted procession not for the dead, but of the dead.

My face falls into a grim frown. They might not exactly be speeding toward me right now but they’ll gain momentum.

And while I might be able to stop a couple, maybe even large swaths with the properties of a wind wave, the splashes of a child in the water cannot turn back a tidal wave.

There’s nothing I can do about the full weight of an entire dead colony falling onto me. The sheer number of dead in this strange war that I was forced into a bystander of mind-numbing.

—

My mind running on autopilot I grab a bag and fill it with the essentials first my binder, the IPA robe, the laptop, my notebook. Then with hesitation in my eyes grab my best needles, a strip of cloth in each cloth, some steel dust, thread, and an assload of copper wires.

But as I grab things I drift into my closet, and with pain in my eyes turn away. I need to get out of here fast I can’t take with me all of my clothes. Plus with a shaky smile, I reassure myself it’ll be alright I can make new ones.

But in the end, I can’t resist taking out the ones with unique fabrics like the fluffy shirt. I try to stuff them inside but it doesn’t fit. I shift the items around to jam them inside, before realizing that would ruin the point of bringing the better fabrics. And ultimately I can’t remove tools for future use, for clothes no matter how rare or precious.

So I grit my teeth and swim away. I should be fine eventually, it’s not like there’s an infinite supply of corpses, I just need to wait out the impacts by getting the hell out of here.

The corpses will most likely stream in a couple at a time, for a while as the corpses closest by make it to the rudimentary planet.

As I turn to leave I sniff, my sinuses might not be clogged but my heart sure will be. My base, the thing that I’ve spent so much time and effort building will soon be torn apart.

And for what? Why did bugs apparently lose a war right next to my home? Why were the ants warring at all? What were they warring for?

All my efforts brought to ruin by my own folly, and pure fucking luck.

I laugh a wry laugh containing no humor at all, for well that’s how it always is.

Plus who knows I could treat this like a vacation you know. I put my arms through the straps of the backpack and sweep my hands over the landscape. Go sightseeing in the Astral, for a 3-month vacation.

Ugh, that mention of time reminded me of something. I won’t have a goddamn clock anymore.

Or an engine to crush my nails, or a bed to turn to, and I abandoned all my clothes.

If I want to see them I’ll have to find them again someday. I will have to dig them out from under the corpse of a bug, and even if I did they would be stained by the blood.

And at the thought of my pride, my joy buried under a mountain of bug corpses I begin to sob.

Curling into a fetal position as my head swims with the unfairness of it all. Cause I’ve worked hard, really hard. I doubt anyone, ANYONE I knew back home could have done what I’ve done.

Forced their dreams into reality as I have.

And yet what has it all resulted in? Nothing of worth, all my blood sweat, and tears ripped to shreds.

My cries ring out bouncing off the dead bodies that have caused my sorrow. My tears fell onto my folly, no longer sticking to my eyes, as they would if I had never built up that stupid planet.

It sickens me to think that the things that caused all of this are most likely the thing that will come out of this the most unscathed. It’s just a sphere of melted iron a couple of miles wide. It’ll live but my art won’t.

And the sobs that barely started to stop, start again. The process repeating itself as I find more and more worth mourning. only stopping when another ant corpse fell in my direction.

My raggedy eyes burning with grief I easily invoke the anger necessary to cut the stupid ant in half with a heat beam.

And with the sign of my home's impending doom, I take a deep breath and sort of pull myself together. A chuckle came out, 'cause well did the ant have to interrupt my moment.

I rub my nose wiping away my tears as the tears subside.

Today just isn’t my day is it?

My eyes burn with the refusal to give up, even after I leave behind my home. Because no day will be mine until I seize it.