On the summit of Mount Everent, the space dwarves fired at the blue police box. It flickered, as if fading from reality itself.

“He took her! He took Anime Girl into that thing!”

A dwarf with big glasses and a small machine gun gawked at the flickering blue box. Before his eyes, the police box faded from existence.

“Damn. I want one.” He whispered. Sadness creased his face. His fellow pulled a filled beer mug out, offering it to the depressed dwarf.

“What’s this?” The sad dwarf questioned, only a moment before quaffing the drink.

“Wormhole Special.” Fat grins lined the other dwarves faces as he passed around full mugs to the other dwarves.

“Drink up. Wherever they’re going, maybe we’ll follow. Maybe we’ll choke to death in open space, Wizard’s in his heaven,” the dwarf drank deep. Blasting out fire on his breath, he choked out a surly chant. “All’s right with the world.”

And one by one, time-space around the dwarves shattered. An atomic blast triggered as an atom split, annihilating Mount Everest into thick ash. Within minutes, Earth fell into darkness covered by soot.

It took awhile for humanity to go extinct, but the dwarves, and Anime Girl, sure weren’t around to see it.

~~~~~

And so with humanity safely wiped out, the dwarves landed in a locker.

“Wait a second, I’ll show you, I can prove it! I’ve got it right here.”

A dwarf recognized the voice. “That’s that Doctor Whoever guy. He’s coming, I’ll get him.” The dwarf readied his gun pointing at the door.

“Should we shoot?” Another dwarf questioned. The other dwarves looked at him for a long moment. The door swung open, Doctor Who taking full free auto fire from all the space dwarves.

“Bullets are faster than talking. Look at how dead he is.” The other dwarves nodded in agreement as they crowded over his corpse, ignoring Anime Girl who froze in shock from their Wormhole Special ambush.

“Wait, what’s this light?” The dwarves eyebrows switched positions, confusion dancing on their faces. Below them, the Doctor regained another human form, free of bullet holes and flame marks.

“That wasn’t nice.” The Doctor told the dwarves, taking a quick glance at Anime Girl, flashing her a smile and giving her a thumbs up.

The space dwarves drifted away from the Doctor as he dived into the closet. “Should we shoot him again,” one whispered, “it ain’t the same,” another responded with a sigh.

Anime Girl crossed her arms, staring down the dwarves whose height reached her shoulders. “Why? Why shoot him? How’d you even get in there?”

“Beer.”

Anime Girl narrowed her eyes. “Beer?”

“Beer. And the answer to the other question, is also beer.” Another dwarf added, “and he captured you!” He took a punch to his gut.

The Doctor strode out the closet, carrying a device in his hands. Anime Girl recognized it.

“A… smartphone?”

“This is yours.” He handed it to her, giving the dwarves a snide glance.

“But,” Anime Girl checked the smartphone. Yes, she knew it was hers, but turning it over, she couldn’t find any buttons. Her clogged memory jogged, thinking of how she used to use the phone by using a mana strand. The concept felt foreign to her. [Yume Nasai], her battles with comrades she made in the 2D realm, how to use magic, it all fled her memory. But, looking at the phone, she remembered placing one just like it near the side of a girl.

“…nee-san?” Anime Girl remembered her. “I have to, I know now. Wizard. In another world, I was created by Wizard. Her shield against reality. To protect her, I went to any lengths, I built an entire world using her bottomless mana, I discovered a method… to edit souls. I was going to rid her of her troubles forever. She would be able to rest, eternally. No longer would she have to fight against herself, or struggle to grow.” Anime Girl’s voice softened. “There is nowhere you need to go, Nee-san. I’ll finish this cruel reality for you.”

The Doctor and dwarves stared at her in unified shock. “Deep.” One dwarf said to the others. “Should we shoot her?” “She’s the one paying us, dimwit.” “Oh, I forgot.”

The Doctor swept to the head of the group, a small pointy device in his hand. He waved it over Anime Girl and it made small noises like it was doing something important and valuable to the plot.

The Doctor pulled the device to his face, screwing up his muscles like the damn thing was relaying important information, and then stared dramatically at Anime Girl. “That, that wasn’t my point. I got the smartphone from a girl named Yuyuko. She said to hand it to you, and you’d be able to help me track down the ‘Bad Wolf’ in this dimension.”

Anime Girl shrugged. “Like the Big Bad Wolf from the fairytale of Red Riding Hood? I have no idea. Now that I know who I really am, maybe the next clue to finding the ‘Bad Wolf’ is taking me home. You don’t mind, do you, Doctor?”

The Doctor nodded in agreement. Taking to the helm of the reTARDIS, he fiddled with a variety of switches and nozzles that did strange things only he understood.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“You don’t happen to remember where ‘home’ is, do you, Anime Girl?” The Doctor twisted a nozzle, staring at screen.

Anime Girl shook her head. The Doctor glanced at the dwarves who were making themselves at home amongst his books, then returned to searching space-time for an answer.

“The reTARDIS was able to locate you because you registered yourself as a ‘Timelord’. A Chia Timelord, that is, see, I’m a real Timelord and—” He glanced over at Anime Girl, noticing her disinterest, he stopped himself. “Anyways. The Earth in the timeline we just left disappears in the near future. Humanity doesn’t progress into the stars like in other timelines, so it’s unlikely to be anywhere in the future…” The Doctor touched a lot of buttons very fast to express how much intelligence and thinking he is doing to figure all this out.

Anime Girl wandered the reTARDIS. Bigger on the inside, she thought. That was a nice feature. She stepped over the dwarves who had gone starry eyed over some shoujo manga they found and paced along large book shelves.

Stacked in rows were great human tomes, full of dusty names and foreign dialects. Anime Girl couldn’t make out most of them, and some of them, she was sure, had to be alien in origin. She glanced at the Doctor. “Who is he?” didn’t matter in the least to her.

She traced a slim finger across the titles of books, thinking to herself. “I was someone. I was important. I had everything there is to desire in the world. Youth, beauty, power, status, peace of mind. I sought out challenge for the sake of challenge, not knowing who I really was… looking back, it’s really weird how I never had to eat or use the toilet. That should have been a tip off, right? That I’m… Anime Girl.” She glanced at the Doctor fussing over the reTARDIS console. “An alien.”

Her body froze. Anime Girl’s finger stopped at a certain title, by one ‘Richard Feynman’.

Without turning, she talked to her fellow Timelord. “I’ve got it, Doctor. It’s not ‘where’ we need to go.” She pulled the book from the shelf, showing the Doctor the name, “but who!”

~~~~~~~

Yarko stood over the shredded corpses of a thousands lycan-zombie. Ouji, a small presence slowly dying under the bulk of corpses, got pulled out by a thirteen year old boy who rushed him away with the healers. He was safely delivered into a hefty bosom, and the boy returned to face Yarko. A small girl with a kitchen knife joined him.

Yarko licked her bloody dagger. Her usual bat shattered early into the ambush. She didn’t expect these two to be in the Geofront. She didn’t remember either of them.

The boy, Negi, whispered to Imouto, the small girl with the kitchen knife. “I’m just in the way, aren’t I?”

Imouto shook her head. “There’s something weird about her. I remember every customer who comes into my bar, and I served her that tentacle meat that drove people insane. She survived, somehow.”

“Didn’t Ouji eat that stuff, too?”

“Yeah, but he can’t die even if you kill him.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

Imouto grinned. “It’s not sense. It’s feeling. The logic behind this world, it’s far too complex for simple minds to understand. So, they use feelings to simplify vast amounts of information. Even if I were to hear a thousand times, ‘Ouji died’ I’d never believe it, as the very next day he’d pop up like nothing stabbed him.”

Negi stared down Yarko. “That’s some heavy talk. I’m going. It’d be great if I had the same amount of invincibility as our young king.”

Imouto held out a hand like a guard rail, keeping Negi back. “Use ‘that’.” Imouto told him. She strode forward meeting Yarko above the thick loam of corpses.

“Well, well,” Yarko chuckled, “if it isn’t another little girl. I didn’t expect this kind of surprise party to be waiting. I wonder what the sense is behind all this, I really do,” she pointed her dagger at Imouto. “But don’t blame me for having a little fun before I get you to squeak out the answer, jou-chan.”

The two clashed. With the little girl turning the dagger out of Yarko’s hand in an instant, a few solid cuts were all it took to dismember her.

Yarko’s diced body collapsed into the corpses. “Wasn’t I supposed to use ‘that’?” Negi threw in. Imouto stood at guard, wielding her kitchen knife, she searched with her ears. She felt a stand of errant mana speed under the earth toward Negi.

“Now!” Imouto yelled. She turned, the boy hung pierced through his chest by a tentacle. His dual swords ready to launch Amaterasu no Hikami Sharingalamadingdong fell point first, digging graves for themselves. Both of them stood like flagpoles in the field of corpses.

The tentacle swept under the ground, Imouto ran after it, reaching the treeline where a Moon Elf and his party waited. A sea of tentacles swarmed into the trees, chuckling distracting Imouto.

Her kitchen knife flew at high speed dicing through the spaghetti monster encircling her, hearing death cries from those behind her.

She turned in shock in the thick of the melee hearing her brother’s voice. “Onii-” and a tentacle gutted her in the same instant.

Bodies fell to the ground. Imouto’s brother, and Imouto herself, her kitchen knife clutched in a death grip. And too, the moon elf who ordered the attack, Gaileo, ripped into pieces.

Gaileo set up a well thought out sensible plan to kill Yarko and seize [Yume Nasai] for himself, using King Ouji as his pawn. His life ended here, unable to ever snicker at Stehy for her attempts to mind control him with her gavel in the garden. Stehy got intel on the moon elves for free. In this moment, even though Yarko didn’t realize, she wiped out one of Stehy’s most powerful threats.

But none of that mattered. The true opponents were still standing. A girl with wings on her head, looking bored as she stood by a moon elf girl. Blasts of cold air froze the tentacles instantly, but Yarko burst from one the frozen limbs with a dagger upraised and flame clothing her body. A quick stab to the moon elf’s gut rattled her, then, the dagger inside her body burst out flame. Her body evaporated.

Cheru, the girl with wings on her head, filled her heart with disappointment. “I thought you were quicker than that. To lose against an aberration like this, and fall here. I expected greater from an ambitious type who kept to herself. I see I was wrong.”

Yarko closed in on Cheru. Tentacles came from every direction, along with Yarko’s dagger. They all phased through her body. Yarko’s grin widened. Expanding her senses, she could see different dimensions, and although it fooled her in the chaos of the melee, the girl was never here.

Cheru walked out of the tentacles to maintain her appearance, flipping her hair for good measure. The wings on her head wiggled. “I’m not the type for combat. My real body— you’ll never find it. Now, I know better than to make an enemy of you, and your kind. Please, send my regards to Wizard. I’ll be expecting her.” Cheru’s form evaporated.

Yarko grunted and withdrew her tentacles, wandering off with a bored face. It’s no fun if they tease like that, come at me if you’re going to come at me, why are you waiting, coward? Do you want to live forever? Her thoughts danced along those lines.

In the distance, she saw the retreating party bearing that Ouji guy. Her mood spoiled, she didn’t feel like hunting them down. In the first place, she had little clue why an army descended on her when she came to inspect Wizard’s latest blunder. And, she had little care for reason anyways, so battle and slaughter felt like a pleasant surprise.

She stopped over Imouto’s body. Looking down at the little girl, she grinned at Wizard might say about this. Then, Yarko reminded the girl’s smile, and how awesome her tentacle dish tasted. Yarko felt regret and sorrow for the girl, with a flash of tentacles digging into the ground she buried her corpse. Kneeling, she prayed a god of food and little girls she invented.

Rising, she felt cleansed of suffering, born anew, she stalked towards the distorted space of the first seal.