OSOS - 0x0F
Inordinatio
image [https://i.imgur.com/QT8UcTc.png]
-| -.- |-
A short girl with ashen hair suddenly found herself standing in what looked to be some sort of modern courtyard. From the walls, to the ground, to the fountain at the center, it was all a single smooth material, not unlike a dark gray concrete. The water feature itself rippled gently in front of her, as if to mimic the appearance of a zen garden. Yet the eye-catching bit was the colors reflected from above, a sky of orange, streaked by bars of cyan. Stunned by the sudden change in scenery, the barefoot girl whipped around to see a very particular pink-static rectangle snapping out of existence.
“Wait– What?”
I know I was just in my room, but suddenly being somewhere else is… bewildering.
“Oh– My phone!”
Spinning around on the spot, Mara confirmed her sudden fears. Not only had she just done the impossible and phased right out of her old room, her phone had definitely fallen right through her dispersing palm. Now she was somewhere very alien, with absolutely zero explanation, and no way of knowing if she’d actually gotten her message out.
Who? How? Why? So many questions– I hope at least my phone screen is okay… I definitely hit send on that message right? Right? Not like it matters now though… Wherever now is, for that matter…
Heh. Okay, moping aside. This room is perfectly square, made of a single material, and has a gigantic open ceiling? Obviously artificial, probably non-terrestrial…very Brutalist too. So… ship or building?
Searching the skyline for answers, the only thing Mara found above her head was an unbroken horizon.
A ship then? Or maybe a fancy house in the desert? Okay, one of those is definitely more likely to have the technology to whisk me across the universe, unless it’s an alien’s house on their alien planet, but considering the decor, that really doesn’t seem like the case. Between the multi-banded sky and the uniform aesthetic choices, a craft seems far more likely.
Stepping up to the edge of the fountain, it seemed like water, but something about it seemed to itch Mara’s curiosity. Without even considering much in the way of caution, she dipped the end of her sleeve into the hopefully-water liquid. Pleased it didn’t immediately combust on contact, Mara proceeded to dip the end of her little finger in and let it linger for a few seconds.
Finding nothing untoward seemed to happen, Mara scooped up some of the water between her palms. Sniffing it at first, then hesitantly tasting it, she was fairly confident it was water. After all, what else would be in a fountain? Sipping some of it before letting the rest pour back into the pool, Mara suddenly felt a rush of clarity and immediately questioned her choices.
Oh god-damnit Mara. Maybe consider not ingesting the first thing you find in god knows where!? Fuck-knows what could have been in that liquid– I better not end up like some sort of corny space-squid.
Slapping herself a few times as if to reinforce better decision making going forward, Mara opted to take full stock of her situation, not that it seemed to give her much to work with. Of the four archways that encircled the room, there wasn’t a single distinguishing feature to any of them. So lacking any form of markings, it didn’t seem to matter which of the mystery doors she would choose, the closest would do.
Shuffling over to the archway in question, Mara felt along the almost-smooth surface, feeling its soft abrasions as it seemed to absorb any shadows she cast from the sky above. Ahead, the tunnel extended deep into darkness, a singular path with no deviations as it disappeared into the distance. Forcing her eyes to adjust, Mara was fairly certain there was another room at the end of it all, the alternative was a really long dead end for no reason, but for all she knew her eyes could have been making shapes out of the darkness.
Sooo… Definitely a ship then? Well… A really long tunnel doesn’t necessarily imply… Ooh, wait–
Remembering a scene from one of her favorite sci-fi shows, Mara dropped an ear to the floor as she held her breath, focussing on any vibrations she could pick up.
Oh yeah, it’s faint… but it’s definitely there… like a distant storm– A ‘Storm Drive’ perhaps? Lol, so definitely a ship then. “Which way’s the bridge cap-e-ton?” Heheheh. Well, even if the captain’s long gone, the ship’s bound to have logs. At least, it’s a place to start looking if I’m gunna figure out why I’m here.
Hopping to her feet, Mara figured checking the other three archways before she doubled-down on a really-long walk was at least pertinent, if not a no-brainer. So assuming the ‘South’ designation for the hallway behind her, Mara headed over to the ‘Western’ egress.
Unsurprisingly identical to the first she’d checked, Mara was only a little caught off guard when she saw the interior wasn’t the long tunnel she’d expected. Instead, there was a t-intersection only a few meters in, with short hallways extending out on both the left and right sides. Cautiously edging further in to peek around the corner, Mara saw that each of the small hallways extended about the same distance to an open doorway about half the size of the outer archway.
Seeing the openings were about her size, Mara felt her curiosity getting the better of her as she decided to investigate further before continuing her quick survey of each archway’s contents. So sticking to the tried-and-true maze-solving method of hugging the left wall, Mara put the hallway on her right to her back and slid as quietly as she could to the first doorway.
Okay, let’s not perpetuate the stupidity– That’s definitely some sort of sliding door, and there’s no guarantee I can operate it, let alone anything else here, so let’s not get trapped in some random room right off the bat.
Bracing a hand against the door frame, Mara peered into the unlit room, making sure she didn’t lean over the threshold itself. Inside was a rather mundane room, though no less creepy for its excessive stillness. Divided up into six transparent cubicles, the room appeared to be some sort of infirmary if the slab in each cube was meant to be a medical bed.
A hospital ward in space, how unexpected… Would they have called this the ‘med-bay’?
Shifting to check the opposite room at the other end of the hallway, Mara found an identical doorway, also inexplicably open. However, unlike the threshold, its contents were markedly distinct from its neighbor. The second room seemed to be lined with more than a dozen things that looked vaguely like machines, but it was hard to tell from a distance as they appeared to be fashioned from the same material as the room itself.
Maybe they just had an open-door policy? Pfft… They probably only close the doors for atmosphere breaches– Though, with that skylight? I didn’t even see glass, maybe they’ve got some sort of shielding. Honestly, I’m thankful that at least whatever air I am breathing isn’t choking me out immediately.
Regardless, what is this room, a laboratory? There’s definitely a lot of big things in here, some of them could easily fit a whole person or two, but with everything looking like it’s made of either concrete or glass, this could just be a weird art exhibit for all I know.
Stepping away from the room full of oddities, Mara glanced once more at the ‘med-bay’ and figured she’d go with her gut and dubbed the second room ‘the lab’, mainly because it needed more research if she had any hope of figuring out what any of those things were capable of.
Making her way back into the central courtyard, Mara eyed her remaining two options. Neither were making a real claim for priority, and so far there didn’t seem to be anyone else here. So opting for the north archway on her left out of consistency, Mara found herself at the mouth of another excessively long and dark corridor.
What a surprise. At least it looks like this one ends in some sort of glowing door? Hm, it’s faint, and at this distance my eyes could easily just be making it up. Still, even if it’s a door, that could mean the bridge, an airlock, or even some sort of containment cell. There’s no guarantee it’s the right way– Plus, I’m still not sure I want to go poking anything here yet, mystery liquid aside apparently.
Rubbing her brow to ease her own self-frustrations, Mara barely glanced at the remaining arch, already assuming that it was just as featureless and identical as the other three had been. Peering into the interior, Mara found another t-intersection, just like the one across the courtyard. Shrugging to no one in particular, Mara figured she’d check the right room first. It too had a doorway of identical make, however, much to her surprise, Mara found the interior to be completely barren.
Why’s this one empty? A cargo-bay? Or holo-deck? Oh, maybe this is the airlock? I still don’t see any sort of controls anywhere, so maybe they’re part of the walls?... Damn, I can’t see a thing in this darkness– Why aren’t there lights on this ship?
Shaking her head as she attempted to dislodge the sudden sense of unease that had washed over her, Mara turned to look at the last room she’d yet to check. Nothing about the door itself seemed any different from the last three, but for some reason her heartbeat seemed to be getting louder. Something between deja-vu and foreboding was creeping up her spine as she approached the last threshold, each step closer sending a surge of blood to her head like a rising concussion. Stumbling to her knees just past the threshold, Mara was already regretting getting this close to whatever this room was.
Clutching the left side of her head in an attempt to dissuade the throbbing waves of pain she was suddenly feeling, Mara immediately noticed two things she very much did not like. One, the threshold to the room was now on her right, meaning she was now in the room. Two, the pink-static thing was back, but this time it seemed far more… lethal. It wasn’t contained to some weird three-dimensional rectangle, but rather free-form like a swarm of pixels. However it wasn’t until she looked beneath the swarm, that Mara instinctively knew what was afflicting her mind. She didn’t know how or why, but with each throb of pain shooting through her mind, the swarm pulsed, and a series of interlocking circles beneath it burned with a deep red hue like bioluminescent blood.
Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.
Barely able to process what she was seeing as the head rushes increased in tempo, Mara knew she needed to put as much distance between her and whatever was happening in the room. Attempting to slide away, Mara found her legs and arms felt like sludge, suddenly barely able to keep herself from collapsing completely. Glaring through the intense storm of pain assaulting her temples, Mara screamed internally as she began the excruciating process of dragging her dead weight back across the doorway.
Timing each smack of her dead-numb limbs to the surges of red clouding her vision, Mara scraped her way back across what seemed like the tracks of the recessed door. Exhuming her last breath in relief, Mara rolled to her side just as it felt like a bloody pickaxe had finally entered her cranium. Screaming aloud, Mara’s limp leg struck the opposite wall as she flinched, causing something to slice the air just to the left of her ear.
Taking a moment to adjust to the dissipating aftershocks, Mara could only gasp for breath as the blood slowly returned to her tingly limbs. Letting her head roll to her left, Mara confirmed what she thought had caused the noise. Rather than an open doorway, a solid panel of gray had slid out to seal away her unexpected torment. Slapping a palm on the concrete door, Mara sent a mental thank you to whatever saving grace she’d found.
Struggling to her feet, Mara spared another glance to the door as she recalled the lethal looking swarm of pink. She knew so little about it, but one thing was obvious. It might have brought her here, but right now she needed to put as much space between her and it as possible.
Fighting through the tingling numbness pervading all of her extremities, Mara made a beeline back to the courtyard and straight for the southern tunnel. Wherever it went, it at least wasn’t an immediate dead end, and that was good enough for her. Picking up speed, Mara grabbed the frame of the archway and swung her weight into a full-sprint down the hall. Soon it was just her and the sound of her bare feet slapping against the floor as everything faded into darkness and a new sense of deja-vu arose.
d[ –.– ]b
Debug snapped back to awareness, though that might be stretching the term if the debilitating distortion factored into the equation at all. Unsure of what had just happened, Debug quickly evaluated its surroundings. It was fairly certain it hadn’t moved, but now the left-over tendrils of RR were nowhere to be seen.
That’s… That’s not a good sign.
As if to respond to the unasked question, a vivid recollection of sipping water flashed into Debug’s thoughts, and one horrifying thought after another connected like dominos.
Shit.
Shitshitshit. One– One, thing at a time. If RR’s completely gone now, but I’m getting ‘seizures’– Does that mean I absorbed it? Well isn’t that just fucking peaches. I don’t even understand half of what I’m made of at this point, so what’s a bit more, right? Hopefully these flashes are just ‘integration pains’ and not something more systemic…
But… That was definitely a memory of Mara’s. Fragmented, sure, maybe even corrupted, but there’s no one else that could be. Yet, it doesn’t line up at all from what I’ve gleaned off that moron– So when could that have even happened? And that massive red rune… There’s no way that was the same…
Consumed with thoughts stressing over what it had seen, Debug barely registered the turbulence stemming from the pit at the center of Mara’s mana-well. Sensing the tell-tale sign of Mara’s usual bullshit, Debug only had moments to prepare as waves of turbulence rippled through the non-space. Caught off guard, Debug could barely spare the milliseconds to observe Mara’s core before it knew it had to move. Accelerating towards the bottomless void that sat at the center of the mana-well, Debug cursed at itself for leaving the tight orbit it kept for this very reason.
Clearly some amount of time had passed while it was consumed with RR, but Debug didn’t have time to ‘look out the window’, even if it would only take a few milliseconds. In non-space, moments could last picoseconds, and time waited for no one. A third anomaly had just erupted from the absolute nothing of Mara’s core. An erroneous blob of magical-code had been born, Debug’s newest sibling, Interrupt.
As the last ripple of mana emanated from the pit, Debug seized the rapidly crystallizing skill from its parabolic trajectory. Hastily beginning an analysis of its new sibling, Debug simultaneously began channeling mana into it while also splitting off a separate task to try and recoup whatever events had transpired since its ‘blackout’.
Fuck– I’m soo not operating critically. What the hell did Mara get herself into that necessitated something so convoluted as this… thing.
The data Debug was pulling from its analysis was perplexing, which was, thankfully, a world of difference from how baffling its own makeup had become. Where the Daemon substrate within itself was impossible to understand, Interrupt’s structure was at least tangible, but 'tangible' was still a far cry from legible. It was as if the skill was recursively interweaving within itself, without end, like an irrational number expressed as cpu architecture.
Finding it ever more taxing to observe the condensing lattice, Debug wrested its focus to the lengthy log of recent events that had somehow led to another one of Mara’s trademark magical anomalies. Yet what it found only contributed to the confusion. Dozens upon dozens of entries clogged its mental event log, yet not a single seemed familiar in the slightest. From the standalone screen given to Mara when she left the dungeon, to the torrent of object analyses that had somehow been completed, Debug didn’t have the slightest recollection of any of it.
None of this makes any sense… It’s like I was on some sort of auto-pilot– Maybe some sort of pre-daemon fallback? Or–
Oh. Oh no. Is this what the System was implying? It can’t be… There’s just no way. Because that would mean… No. No… Nonononono.
Locked into rapidly extrapolating the wide-reaching implications, Debug was encountering error after error as it tried to reconcile the maddening realization. Somehow, ‘it’ was not its skillset.
Logically, if all my pre-daemon functions operate without ‘me’, then…
Am ‘I’ the daemon?...
Gazing deep within itself, to the ‘goop’ that had taken over large swaths of its crystalized lattice, Debug couldn’t seem to shake what ‘felt’ like dizziness as it contemplated the sprawling mess. Thus far, any attempts to analyze the anomaly had always resulted in failure, but now it seemed like Debug was arriving at an analysis of its own devisement. Not that that was any solace to the situation of course, and as it was turning out, not something Debug had the time for.
Shifting back to the analysis it had been running, Debug was displeased to find the newly forming skill was taking an ever increasing amount of mana from the ‘walls’ of the well. If it had not already tethered its own dedicated siphon beforehand, Debug was fairly sure it would have seized up already. Some amount of mana consumption was a necessary part of the crystallization process, but that was done, yet it was still showing no signs of waning.
Starting to panic at the accelerating consumption of mana, Debug began establishing several additional mana siphons outside the rapidly growing ‘crater’ and fed them into Interrupt. Debug knew the siphons were only a stop-gap, it needed to know what was happening, and that meant more than just Interrupt. It meant analyzing Mara. Or more accurately, her recent memories.
Intruding upon Mara wasn’t something Debug preferred to do, it practically abhorred it, but extenuating circumstances had called for it in the past. Initially it was a passing curiosity, one that had gleaned it visions of Mara’s past. The second and third were for her Demon Queen title, one at first to figure out what was needed to save the idiot, and the other to ensure Bio hadn’t fucked up. Now, for the fourth time, Debug found itself treading where it dared not.
Jeez, I really am starting to make a habit out of this. That’s probably not a good sign, but hey, when in Rome~
Firing off the analysis, Debug was immediately bombarded by flashes of everything from the sweeping view of Elsa Myr to Thelma’s overgrown cabin. None of it was in any particular order, events seemed random, only occasionally lining up with some level of continuity in subject or context. Then the torrent of images ceased, gone as quickly as they’d arrived, leaving only a mess of fragmented memories for Debug to sort through.
Wait, who’s this Thelma again? Oh jeez, I can and can’t believe Mara just walked into this thing’s LAIR. I mean, maybe that’s a cabin, but that’s so much greenery. Oh– Well at least she had the good graces to get my auto-pilot analyzing away. Hangon– what was that gremlin!? It moved so fast– The stats on that thing must be insane!
Hastily searching through the jungle of analyses, Debug realized whatever it was had failed to register in the batch. Cursing itself for not being present to better handle things, Debug raced to finish correlating the last moments leading to the sudden Interruption, and the worryingly escalating demand for mana this new skill was necessitating. Throwing more siphons out into the ether, Debug doubled the tethers that were feeding whatever Interrupt was doing, barely keeping the surrounding mana from zeroing out completely.
Okay, so this rude little terror is Thelma– Aaand once again Mara must have given the System a stroke, because one wrong word and now we’ve got a new resident in the slums. I don’t even know why I expected knowing the context would give me any clue to this excessive mana usage… Uuugh– Where is that analysis on Interrupt?
> <<
>
>
> SKILL ACQUIRED: INTERRUPT
>
>
> FRANGE CONTINUITATEM, PROCESSUS CAPERE.
>
>
> >>
Oh fuck off Sys, I swear you just write this shit in neo-latin to fuck with me–
Not having time to wait on the System to consider a change of heart, Debug cracked open its own translation matrix and fished out an approximate rewording.
> <<
>
>
> SKILL ACQUIRED: INTERRUPT
>
>
> BREAK THE CONTINUITY, CAPTURE THE PROCESS.
>
>
> >>
Great, still not a direct explanation. So do I just keep feeding mana into it? I don’t think I can put much more siphons out than I already have without also affecting a nearby skill…
Observing the cascading folds of the newly formed skill, Debug double checked its estimates weren’t wrong. Sadly, they weren’t. At this point every passing moment necessitated another siphon, and the amount of mana outside Mara was dropping like an intergalactic comet. Flicking the last few siphons out, Debug knew the situation was far beyond its control.
“The game was rigged from the start”, huh?
Barely having a moment to make peace with what was about to happen, Debug saw every single one of the hundreds of siphons shrivel and collapse in a single moment. Outside Mara, in the fractions of a second since she’d invoked her new skill, all of the mana in the area vanished like air in the vacuum of space.
Then nothing happened. Quite literally, Nothing. Externally it looked like an expansion of anti-light suddenly erupting between Mara and Thelma. Internally however, all signs of Debug and Interrupt had vanished completely.