Across the wide open seas of Errera sailed a ship waving a black flag with white skull and bones. Behind the pirate’s vessel a glowing hunk of red bled grey steam into the evening sky.
Yarko manned the prow in full regalia. She tipped back her booze bottle into her maw and drank greedily. She mounted aftsmanship starboard side or whatever, donning a tricorne hat she stole from the last, dead, captain she also stole the ship and his crew from, Yarko emptied the rest of her booze. Tucking herself to the butt of the ship away from her crew, she found a spot of harmony and peace to watch the ship she sank burn into ashes. She sighted an iceberg within the horizon as she admired her latest conquest up in flames.
Chucking the bottle into the sea, an explosion of white peaked out, an octopus cast out of the water landed straight in Yarko’s hand.
She cooked the octopus alive with fire magic.
“This smell. Smells like salt.” Yarko sniffed the blackened octopus. She’d put too much heat on. Biting into the blackened flesh, she chewed heartily. Maybe it’s better this way.
“So, what’d a brown old twintail rat like you come all the way out here for, huh?” Yarko spoke to the little girl behind her.
The girl in a small brown outfit with brown twintails slid out of the shadows, a blue grey dagger at her side. She handed it handle first to Yarko.
“A sample. Take it as an offering of my goodwill. Say, don’t you notice how we’re speaking? It’s strange.” Stehy said.
Yarko glanced at the sky above, testing the [Yumicite] dagger in her hands. Above, sighting the sky half full of the Moon City, half full of stars, before cutting away at her burnt octopus.
“Wizard’s done something stupid again.”
“Isn’t that the usual?”
“That’s the usual.”
The sea buckled the ship under them. Shouts from the crew as they settled the ship and maintained its course toward plunder.
“Must be some special type of mess she made for herself for you to come calling.”
Yarko tossed the remains of the octopus to the sea below. Sitting cross-legged on the prow, she turned to face the little girl.
“And you want my help. To save her.”
Stehy nodded.
“The first seal is broken. Why Wizard would break the seal, on a spell she herself cast, and what effects those seals will have on the spell [Anime Girl],” Stehy mumured under her breath, turning her head to her left. “I can’t predict it.” Stehy held up her phone. “And I can’t reach Anime Girl. She always has her phone on her. This isn’t good.”
Yarko grinned. “I want a phone.”
“You’ll spend all our money on microtransactions, no. Please, I need your help. It’s a sealed space. I can’t enter, but, well, maybe you can. Because of, what you are, with the tentacles and chaos-ness.”
Yarko grinned. “I get a phone.”
Stehy groaned. Yarko upped the ante. “With internet access. I spend on gatcha when I feel like spending on gatcha. Don’t chain me down.”
Stehy’s eyes went wide. She didn’t like the sound of Yarko with internet access, and their poor budget… Stehy was the only one who bothered looking at the budget, and only one who knew such a thing as a budget for [Yume Nasai] existed. Those maids need paying.
She barely kept Niji away from the internet, fearing bad influences would incite her to even more mayhem. And Anime Girl couldn’t see it as a problem the way Stehy did. “Let them have phones, why are you against it?” She said before.
Stehy traced one of her twintails along a finger. This won’t end well. Yarko swiveled on her butt, facing the empty blue sea.
“Wizard can stay in that sealed space. We’ll be better off, I’m sure. Maybe Wizard will be, too.”
Stehy sweat. Wizard happened to break the seal right after her first move against the Moon Elves. Selling [Yumicite] weapons to the 2D realm, intent on having them invade the Moon City and overwhelm it from within.
But now her asset became a liability. With her sales of [Yumicite] weaponry booming, it took all her workers aboard the Twintails Rising just to keep production up with demand. If she slowed down even a bit, the 2D realm might turn against her.
At this rate, [Yume Nasai], and she herself, are vulnerable. The two most powerful beings are missing in action. Soon there would be a ragtag army full of [Yumicite] weaponry parading around the streets of the Moon City. And, if the Moon Elves found out that she, Stehy was behind it all, where could she run?
“There has to be, something else. I can’t give you a phone. You’ll destroy everything I built with your rabid spending!”
Yarko shook her head. “It’s because you work so hard that you don’t see how tight those twintails have become. Did the Moon Elves ever knock on our door? Since when did they become our enemy?”
“How did you—”
Yarko waved the dagger in the air to silence Stehy. “Anime Girl thought it was a sensible idea to let the Psychic Assassin who attacked us escape. I disagreed.” Yarko stabbed the wooden railing, piercing through it with one shot. “And then, after good ol’ Yarko taking the trouble to cut off that one loose end, Wizard somehow manages to squeeze a pack of Moon Elves onto [Yume Nasai]. Along with who knows what else from Nephilz. And you, where did all those homunculi and that assassin girl go? Away on your ship. Your space ship.”
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Yarko turned around, snatching Stehy by a twintail, she pulled her close, bringing the blade near the bands holding the twintail separate from the rest of her hair. She threatened the delicate existence of the twintail, with but a twitch of the blade Stehy would become just a single side-tail.
“And,” Yarko growled. “You never offered me a ride. You never even offered me a single ride on your spaceship!”
With that, the dagger slipped from Yarko’s hand, mock crying, she collapsed to the ground, her tricorne hat swept off into the wind over the sea.
“I just want to be friends. And spend tons of money on gatcha. And find the holy grail of porn doujins strong enough to corrupt any mortal soul. And drink. And be a space pirate. Is that so wrong?”
Stehy’s dead fish eyes upon the cretin above her shined as Stehy reconsidered her life decisions.
“I’ll give you a phone.” Yarko brightened up. “But I’m limiting the bandwidth and allowance.” Yarko’s face darkened as the dagger rose in her hand. “You can kill me, but then, you’ll never see out from the bridge of the Twintails Rising. You can spend the rest of eternity sailing the seas with all the smelly old fat men you want for all I care.”
Yarko’s enthusiasm came out half-baked. She sheathed the dagger next to a stolen cutlass under her sea captain’s jacket, leaning over the railing.
“How did it come to this…”
“It’s called negotiation, Yarko. I’m being reasonable. I have, like,” Stehy let her fingers pass each other and interconnect into joined hands. “I’m holding us all together. With Wizard off doing his whatever-ness, what was I supposed to do? We were attacked.”
“That didn’t mean you had to do anything. Let Moon Elves sit on their moon.” Yarko sneered out over to an iceberg, devoid of life, something caught her eye. A shade of blue flickered in the distance there. Her imagination?
“It’s not responsible foreign policy! You made the first mistake! What about diplomacy? You didn’t have to murder the psychic assassin Anime Girl let go!”
Yarko’s brows heightened. She turned. “I never saw it that way. With this, you’ll let go of those petty restrictions you’re placing on my phone usage, right?”
“There’s no relation between those two conversations.” Stehy flatly stated.
“But, if you limit my bandwidth and allowance, then I won’t be the Yarko you know and love.”
“I don’t remember us having any relation of that sort.”
Yarko hugged Stehy close. “Why won’t you support me? I’m always there for you!”
“I had to teleport all over various port towns across Errera collecting information on your adventures,” Stehy laid her hand pushing against Yarko’s bulk. “Before happening to see smoke billowing in the horizon.”
“And that’s how you know it’s love that brought us together again!”
“I’m only even considering giving you a phone because it’s possible we’re all in danger from being invaded by Moon Elves when our strongest combatants are missing in action.”
Yarko dropped Stehy. “Well. If that’s how it’s going to be, forget it. Give me the location. I’ll go check it out. But! I won’t do a damn thing until you accept my demands.”
“You’re that petty?”
“Who’s the real petty one?” Yarko growled at the little girl.
Stehy conjured a small beacon. “With a push of this, it’ll teleport you to the first seal. The area is distorted, but luckily, I still have plenty of time. When the Moon Elves come knocking on Anime Girl’s door and you’re not strong enough to protect her, you’ll have no one to blame but yourself.”
Yarko spat, snatching the beacon from Stehy’s hand. “And who brought the Moon Elves knocking? Our relationship starts from zero every time we meet. You dirty brown little twintail rat.”
Stehy sighed at Yarko’s childness, teleporting away. On a lone iceberg, Stehy bunkered down as her hand rubbed the root of the twintail Yarko grabbed. Tying and retying the twintail to make sure the ribbon held the hair secure, Stehy plotted her next move.
But, she didn’t notice. Her smartphone bounced from the butt of her as she sat, sliding across the iceberg. There, a shadow descended across the small plastic rectangle.
~~~~
Anime Girl mounted the summit of Everest. Leaning onto an icepick, several space dwarf miners followed behind her.
“Shan’t weit ’Ee gittn’ gud mah drank when wettin’ ‘I’s whistle backs on thee barge, fanciee dat, ma’am Girl?”
“Stop calling me that. And I know you speak normal english, I can’t make out a word of that fake accent.” Anime Girl’s boot tapped against a chunk of ice, drawing her eyes down. “Oh, another corpse? Why are there so many?”
A space dwarf miner cradling a flamethrower directed her to the long line of people waiting to take a selfie. It’s not well known, but modern Everest has a line to the ‘summit’. And yes, corpses are there too, strewn across the ground. It not like people stop dying on the way to the top of Everest, even if you’re waiting in the selfie summit line.
“How much did it cost me to get here…” Anime Girl wondered. She hadn’t looked at her bank accounts herself for years. The convenient plot amenesia she gained ridding her knowledge of all things Wizard and Autist Isekai related, triggered by Kumagawa’s [All Fiction], left her stranded. On Earth.
Luckily her good looks and high social ability allowed her to become a highly famed twitch streamer in League of Legends, taking her to the top of e-sports hall of fame and conquering Hollywood in a single movement. Numerous ludicrously generous offers from major corporations followed, praising her family friendly cooking channel which also broke multi-million subscriber numbers.
By 2025, she calculated, she could easily surpass 50 million. The events of Covid-20, the American Cold-Civil War, the 2nd Boxer Rebellion, and the rise of a strange new global cryptocurrency, ‘Chia’, all events sliding the world’s power into her grasp.
Though, when she became a Chia Timelord herself it was something she barely understood. Just what is a VDF(variable delay function)?
Fortunately, only a few linux commands were necessary to set it up. Anime Girl thought her intelligence wasn’t bad at all, but when it came to cryptography and cryptocurrencies, she found herself at a complete loss. After that, her Timelord status snowballed with vast investment from her youtube and twitch channels, compounding her fortune into the one cryptocurrency that replaced all money on earth.
Though barely understanding her position as a ‘Timelord’, she had a huge data center in the middle of Estonia, doing, doing what Timelording does. Her total net worth is now a state secret of the American Government.
And this is why she is guarded at all times by space dwarf miners from the future out for an extra credit at all costs. The balance of Earth depends on her personal financial holdings!
“Ha~ , it’s almost like my life is an anime…” Anime Girl sighed. She had no idea why Anime was so popular among her fans, why they kept bringing it up and drawing pictures of her in the style during streams. Anime Girl didn’t speak a word of japanese, didn’t understand the appeal of anime. It bothered her from time to time why her name is like this, but she shrugged it off and got back to life.
Anime Girl reached the summit, the dwarves crowding around her for the picture. She showed her brilliant smile that charmed the human race as a whole to the camera, and as it flashed, a blue police box phased into existence behind her.
From the blue police box ran a man in brown coat. His appearance could be a famous actor, who recently took on lesser roles as a villain as time wore on, but right now, he introduced himself to Anime Girl and the dwarves, flashing a blank wallet like a police badge.
“I’m the Doctor. We need to get out of here, they’re coming!”
“Wait, who, wha-” Her hand pulled by the Doctor, the dwarves pulled out their guns taking aim at the man. “Doctor? Doctor Who?”