OSOS 0x15

Limina

-| –.– |-

As her bare feet finally carried her out of the near-endless tunnel and into a room brightly lit with dozens of blue lights, the girl with ashen hair slumped over, hands on her knees as she took her first chance to catch her breath.

In between her bangs, the girl scrutinized her blurry surroundings for any sign of pink as her chest heaved back and forth and fresh oxygen propagated to her brain. Thankfully, the room was blue, and just blue, and for now, that was fine. She hadn’t run like that in years, and if not for the adrenaline surging through her veins, her legs would have given up half-way. A fact making itself ever more present, now that such a crucial chemical was beating its way out of her system.

Exhaustion hit her in waves as she shuffled to a waist-high cube of concrete protruding from the floor. Bracing herself with one hand on the edge of the construct, she half-crouched, half-fell as she slumped down against it, desperate to regain some feeling in her limbs. However, as the minutes marched on, the siren call of sleep seemed to snowball in strength.

Rolling her head to one side like a limp corpse, the girl looked towards the deep, dark, and looong hallway. Normally, under more lucid circumstances, she’d definitely want to go over and try to close it. But perhaps it was the lack of vital fluids in her brain, or just exhaustion in general, but the archway seemed ever so far away, and sleep just seemed sooo nice…

M{ -.- }RA

As her wall-clock softly beeped to announce the midnight shift to a new day, Mara continued to bore a hole in the ceiling with her unblinking stare. She had figured she’d get tired at some point, but if anything, she felt even more awake as the hours flipped to the AM. Where it was all coming from, she didn’t know, but she was certainly going to drive herself crazy trying to force herself to sleep any longer.

Sliding out of bed, Mara weighed her options. Normally, if she found herself up in the twilight hours, she’d just hop on her computer and work on whatever project had her attention. However, as the alternative at the moment was fixing her broken computer, Mara shrugged off the idea. She had a feeling it would probably take a full rebuild, and she certainly didn’t have the parts on hand.

Though, as she stepped out of her bedroom, and the sheer state of her home hit her, Mara was pretty sure she found her task for the night. Even looking past the mess she’d left in her living room from her ‘dinner’, and the quagmire of grime deposited in her bathroom post-shower, the whole apartment needed a general touch-up after so many months of her absence.

So, after putting her hair up and fetching supplies from beneath the kitchen sink, Mara opted to tackle the layer of grime in her bathroom first, then moved on to cleaning up the disarray of her living room. As she cleaned, Mara found that both scenes left her similarly astonished at her own ‘footprint’. If she didn’t know any better, it looked like a half-dozen people had come through, eaten their fill, and made the biggest mess possible between the living room and her shower.

But, she did know better. All of it was her mess, and hers alone. Though, that really didn’t answer any questions. Rather, it begged more to be asked– Between the four whole chickens and two gallons of veggie juice she’d guzzled for dinner, and the tar-like grime she’d coated the shower with after her arrival, she was left with two peas in a question pod. Where’d all that food go, and where’d all the grime come from?

Coupled with her oddly enduring levels of midnight-energy, Mara had a lot of questions about her situation bobbing around in her mind as she finally returned her cleaning gloves to their home beneath the kitchen sink. She’d killed several hours cleaning, the clock reading quarter-to-four as she threw herself back onto the couch, but she was still brimming with a level of energy bordering on mania.

Obviously, several things about her were abnormal, but without Debug, Mara didn’t have much of a wedge to pry, and there was zero chance she was going to see a doctor after everything she’d just gone through.

Let’s make some hasty assumptions– Bio’s probably keeping everything hunky-dory, so the food intake was probably due to it, which means I can probably chalk this up as a one-off from traveling back here. And conjunctly, all the grime was probably from whatever that ‘reverse portal’ was, black-grime from black-space.

Mara wasn’t completely sold on her own theories, but they paved enough pot-holes for her to at least move on for the moment. She had a lot of things on her plate, and prioritization was important.

Logging into the global sat-net with her new Noto, Mara downloaded a few things she needed to set up her old development environment on her phone, then hopped back offline as quickly as she’d arrived.

Mara was no stranger to the lack of privacy one had in the modern age, real privacy was a luxury, afforded to those without the need of a middle-man. It had started as a curiosity for her when she was young, but by the time she got to high-school, her talents had found a market, and she was the middle-man for others.

As she started up her coding environment, the first thing she opted to recreate from her black-hat days was also her first ‘product’ that found a market. Now part of a larger class of viruses called ‘Tunnelers’, it was effectively a mobile-vpn built on the back of a low-level network worm. It would bloom across networks, establishing hundreds of access points that could be hopped between dynamically, obfuscating the user as they accessed through different locations at random.

However, the trick to a good tunneler was two-fold, the hardest being the ‘worming’ itself, but the important bit being the auto-clean. If your payload couldn’t get around firewalls, you wouldn’t have the nodes to work with, but if you didn’t clean up after yourself, someone would eventually find you. So top-tier Tunnelers were always clever one-offs that self-terminated as the user finished their session. A standard that Mara herself may, or may not, have set in her black-hat ‘hayday’.

The pattern wasn’t all that complex, and while it did take some time for Mara to recall everything she needed, by the time the clocks read seven, she had a workable reconstruction of her old personal Tunneler, and after compiling, she was back online by eight in the morning.

By its very nature, Mara didn’t know where her worm was spreading, and hopefully, the nodes it spread to had little idea it was there at all, piggy-backing packets off the backs of their internet connections. But, as evidenced by the stable streams she was getting in both directions, it appeared she hadn’t lost her touch– Statistically, it seemed her worm wasn’t getting wiped by anti-virus off the bat, which was the important bit– Because that meant she’d be long gone by the time her little trouncing garnered any significant attention.

So, setting a timer on her phone for one hour, Mara loaded up a few archival e-pub sites, and repeated a few queries into each. Pulling from her several months of ‘vacation’, there were a few areas of interest that she would have really appreciated having a bit more knowledge in. And, now that she was back in a world flush with access to information, she was going to take full advantage of that boon.

-| –.– |-

“[ Final Cycle Complete, Beginning Descent ]”

Stirred from her catatonic slump by the sudden intrusion of a robotic voice, the ashen-haired girl stumbled onto the shores of consciousness once more as she blinked away the layers of crust welding her eyes shut and willed her body upright with a cacophony of creaks and pops.

Rubbing the remaining sleep from her eyes with a half-limp arm, the girl struggled to recall what she’d just been awoken to. She really only caught the end of it, but, if she’d heard right, ‘Beginning Descent’ was a starkly terrestrial choice of words to be found on an alien space-ship.

Sighing as she asserted her footing on half-asleep legs, the ashen haired girl tossed her hair out of her face and took a look around the room proper. She wasn’t sure what had caused her sudden sleepiness, and it could have just been sheer exhaustion, but the rest had done her good.

No longer a blurry, hazy mess, she could see the room had three other waist-high cubes to match the one she’d slumped down against, as well as a large ring mounted on the far wall. It wasn’t much for such a large room, but she was at least thankful there wasn’t a floating pink thing hanging around.

Lingering on the thought, the ashen-haired girl glanced back to the archway she’d entered through, still agape to the unreasonably long pitch-black tunnel. She wasn’t sure how long she’d been asleep, but she thanked the graces she did have, and half-staggered over to the archway.

She wasn’t sure what this room was for, or how long she’d have to be here, but the one thing it did have was a strong lack of pink, and that was enough for now. With a free hand, and a wary eye, the ashen-haired girl felt along the archway for a similar ‘touch-sensor’ for this door. Albeit, she wasn’t entirely sure the archways had doors, but, without warning, her finger found the sensor, and the two halves of the archway’s door snapped together with a whisper-quiet *whhshht*.

Stepping back, the ashen haired girl spun around, shifting her focus back to the room filled with questions. Of what little was in the room, not a single bit offered any sort of context clues through their environment. However, the closest association she could pull was from an old sci-fi show about wormholes, given the giant ring mounted on the far wall.

image [https://i.imgur.com/L4RhKZf.png]

Opting to investigate the smaller objects for supporting clues first, the ashen haired girl walked back over to one of the four ‘terminals’ she’d fallen asleep against when she first arrived. The surface of it was angled up at a slight incline, and the center had a rectangular recess set into it, similar to a large drawing-tablet, except, like everything else in the ship, it was all made of the same gray material, even the ‘screen’.

However, as she poked the indented surface, a smile wormed onto her face as her assumption bore fruit. The ‘display’ flickered to life like shaking sand art in reverse, sending a surface layer of multi-colored grains rushing to-and-fro.

The whole process only took a few seconds to fully render, but once it did, the ashen-haired girl found her hopes dashed near immediately. The right-half of the screen was empty, and the left-half might as well have been. On-screen were several buttons, captioned in a script or language she had zero chance of deciphering on her own.

Exuding a heavy sigh, the ashen haired girl selected the first of the five buttons on the screen, causing the other half of the screen to leap into motion, shifting and morphing grains until an array of inputs and sliders appeared, with even longer labels of indecipherable alien script.

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Grunting, the bare-foot girl prodded the second ‘tab’ in the list, then the third, and continued the rest of the way down as she found a similarly difficult learning curve on each ‘page’. The only screen that was remotely readable was a graph with only the small legend beneath it being in alien-script. And while it was largely useless to her without understanding what the readings represented, it offered the most context off the bat, and she might be able to make some sense of it with more context clues.

However, finding very little headway on the first terminal, the girl shuffled to its twin on the right, then the terminal in front of that, yet found the same unintelligible interface on each. Glancing to the last terminal on the back-left of the room, the ashen-haired girl figured she’d find the same, and shifted her focus to the more ‘central’ feature of the room.

The ring was massive, spanning the full height of the three-story room; it was easily large enough to drive a whole bus through. Dimensionally, the inner radius was only about a half-meter smaller than the outer, and was only about a quarter-meter deep. Aside from the, relatively small, two-meter wide ramp that sat at the foot of the ring, the whole ‘construct’ was as barren as anything else in the ship. Just unadorned gray concrete with nary an engraving or clarification.

However, between the ramp leading up to the inner ring, indicating that it was traversable somehow, and the four terminals in the room behind her, it was clear there was some method to the madness.

How it all works though…

Looking back to the terminal she’d skipped, the girl strode over and poked it as she mulled over ideas. As she’d assumed, the fourth terminal was indistinguishable from the others, which meant that either all four were needed, or any one would do… But, since it was only her, the ashen-haired girl opted to assume the latter and course correct as needed.

Everything at this point was guess-work, a potentially deadly game of trial and error, but, as she glanced back to the closed-off archway she’d come from, the bare-footed girl knew her only other avenue was to head right back to ‘Pinkie’.

So… That’s the gambit.

Taking a very deep breath as her grip tightened on the edge of the terminal, the girl doubled down on her decision. ‘Fuck around’ was a lot better than ‘finding out’.

Spinning back to the screen, she quickly ran through between each of the five ‘pages’ and made mental notes on each, looking for common characters or patterns, and trying to pull any associations from order and layout.

However, as she got to the graph on the fourth page, she froze. The first time she saw this screen, all the readings were treading a neutral midline, evidently status quo, but within the last few minutes, they’d become a mess. Half the readings were shooting up, the others, crashing down.

Oh… Fuck.

image [https://i.imgur.com/Cp619VG.png]

Regardless of the specifics, such a radical shift in the readings was clearly not a good sign. Hopping back to the first terminal she’d looked at in the room, the ashen-haired girl found the same readings on its graph, at least confirming they were all identical, but doing nothing to allay her concerns.

However, no alarms were blaring, and no lights were flashing, so either this was expected, or no-one was watching. Sighing as she looked over the ever-progressing disparity in the charts, she had to acknowledge that whatever was happening, wasn’t in her arsenal to “fix”.

Without knowing the language, she wasn’t even sure if something was wrong, but a shift this severe at least spoke to some level of urgency. And, worst case, if this was the work of the pink-swarm, then it was still making moves, while she was wasting time.

When it first brought her here, without direction or introduction, a part of her wanted to shrug it off as a cosmic fluke, an eddie in space-time. But after their second, heart-rending encounter, it was clear that she was at best an annoyance, and at worst, prey. So if it was still doing things, then her time was ticking– She needed a way out, and fast.

{ √Δ }

Merlin shook his hood, dislodging the debris left in it, as he found himself standing exactly where he’d just been, except now he was in an unmarred bit of woods. Raising his eyebrows in exasperation, the old man tilted his head back and groaned at the heavens before falling flat on his back, arms spread wide.

“Confounded, meddling, blithering BOLLOCKS.”

Glaring at the sky with all the hate he could muster, Merlin dared one of those so called ‘Deities’ to come down here and–

“FRAGGIN DO SOMETHING FOR ONCE.”

Leaping upright, the foreigner had decided that he’d finally had enough. It had been one loop too many, one blind ignorance too far. Summoning up a combination of spells, Merlin began casting them off one by one, not even giving his recipients time to recoil from his onslaught.

First, he opened a dimensional door to the higher plane, the recipients of his ‘strongly worded message’. Next he composed his introductory statement, that being three-hundred-and-twenty-two lighting bolts, which would hopefully convey the urgency of the situation.

Not to be outdone of course, the main body of his argument was a thought-bomb of telepathic bullets for each and every entity on the other side of the door. Though, to conclude his, hopefully compelling, request for council, he thought a bit of context was in order, so he picked out an array of visions from his previous lives to be broadcast.

He’d been around this little ‘merry-go-round’ more than a few times, and while at first he had appreciated the addition of such a dynamic actor in his otherwise mundane lives, it was at this point that he had to concede his powers alone were child’s play in comparison to the titan he faced. So packing up the important bits, he loaded each of the mental-rounds with the spark notes and fired the salvo, burning up most of his remaining spell slots.

As he motioned to end the spell sustaining the dimensional door, he could hear that his message was received, quite loudly and quite clearly. Ideally, they’d recover from their ineptitude within a few hours, and start arguing amongst themselves by dinner. So clapping his hands, Merlin warped himself to the nearest town in this time, which just so happened to be a small fishing village on the coast of what would become Redonia.

It took less than the blink of an eye for space to fold and bend around the wizard, the art of spatial magicks more than habit by this point, and then the salty air found his beard once more as it buffeted him in the face with the inescapable taste of fish.

“Ah, Ol’ Karel… How I’ve not missed thee.”

Making his way off the creaky groans of the wooden dock, Merlin had his sights set on the mead-hall, an old haunt he’d grown fond of over his many, many years of ‘restarts’. Lately, it seemed to be his first stop, without fail, and this time was certainly no different.

Something about talking to that thing always gave him a headache, which shouldn’t be possible considering he was supposed to be starting anew. However, much to his growing dismay, his day only got worse as he entered the village’s social hub and found he wasn’t the first visitor of the day.

Merlin staggered to stop, stunned and off-balance. Of all the things he held constant in this world, he never expected his ‘home village’ to be infected by The Delta. Yet here it was, made manifest in a woman no more than a meter and half in height, and surrounded by all the children of his village, the same way they were supposed to surround him, when he walked through those doors.

None of this made sense, The Abacus was all out of whack. To Merlin, it was one thing for a forest to grow through iterations, and another to be invaded by outer-worlders, but to come into his home and take his place? That was foul, downright unfair. He’d made his bargain, so who was this woman to come in and disregard his sacrifice?

Grinding his teeth as he sought calm, Merlin looked for the Matron of the village, who was thankfully tending to the hearth, and not wrapped up in the other newcomer. As he approached her, she seemed to finally take notice of him, or at least pretended that was only when she’d noticed him– But he knew better of her, even if she didn’t know him yet.

“Greeting miss, the kids tell me you’re the head mother of the village?”

It was his normal greeting, one he’d make every time he approached her, but the differences abounded around him, and her suspect reaction was amongst them.

Cocking an eyebrow as she scrutinized him further, the eldest woman in the village had no need to rely on her decades of intuition to know the man in front of her had just lied to her face. She’d watched him walk in, and at no point did any of the children approach him what-so-ever. The question was why he would lie– Did it have something to do with the lost girl? She wasn’t sure, but he was hiding something regardless, and she’d rather be direct about it.

“No you didn’t. So speak plainly or I’ll have your ilk barred from our home forthright.”

Taking a step back as he wished he could take back his words, Merlin grappled with the changing narrative he was facing. Macro events were trackable, researchable, but micro ripples like these were alien, and something he was going to have to relearn it seemed.

“I’m dreadfully sorry, I had simply assumed and was trying to be polite. My name is Merlin, and I’m a wandering mage. As such, I’m in great need of a meal and bed for the night, if your hospitality can spare such grace.”

The elder weighed his words as she glanced over to the bustling group in the center of the hall, one visitor was a rarity, two was a sign.

“Then I must apologize, Merlin. A meal I can offer, but I have no bed for you this night. Yet you may still have your choice, here in our hall.”

Graciously bowing his head, beard dangling loose beneath him, Merlin was grateful he’d found his footing again.

“That’s more than an old man could ask for. Thank you, Ms…”

“–Mrs.Greer to you old man. I am Nessa Graham, lover of Sholto Greer, and Matron of Karel. As a visitor, my home is your home, so respect thy thresh’ld, and sh’ll respect thee.”

Silently acknowledging her hybrid greeting and warning, Merlin found himself a spot to sit as his heart rate finally started to drop. He was not prepared for such differences so early, and on an empty stomach, coupled with a raging headache? ‘Hangry’ was just a minor inconvenience away, so his gratitude was purely genuine when Nessa brought out a bowl of piping hot stew and a chilly flagon of mead, the perfect combo to nurse his ‘hangover’.

Eager to fill his depleted slots, Merlin did his best not to appear too famished as he leaned into his bowl. It was only when he was about half-way through that he found he could tear his gaze away from immediate sustenance. As this was the hub of a village of roughly three-hundred, people would come in and out at fairly regular intervals. However, the only true constants were the Matron, two other wives, and the crowd of children still encircling the mystery guest across the hall.

Merlin knew every inhabitant of this town by name, and future. He knew that the small dark-tan boy would become a renowned alchemist, and that the shy blonde would end up a pirate queen. He even knew which of them wouldn’t make it through the incursion destined to decimate their village in three years. These were the butterflies he walked on, yet here was someone disregarding eons of unrelenting effort.

He didn’t know who she was, or why she was here, she seemed to be paying him very little mind, but newcomers were highly abnormal, at least to him. However, he didn’t want to bother the kids, so he did his best to ‘politely eavesdrop’ from where he was. Information was power after all, and the old man knew that best.

However, what he was hearing was far from what he was expecting, yet he wasn’t that surprised. The girl was a ‘Lost Girl’, a legend that had been passed down from matron to matron, which was something he’d never heard of before. More than intrigued, he did his best to put together a coherent story as she described her weeks of travel in the forest, hounded by shadows that sought to tear her limb from limb.

Almost finished with his bowl of stew, Merlin had done his best to appear uninterested from across the room, but the mention of the shadows made him drop his wooden spoon, interrupting the entire room with its highly-audible clacking.

He knew the mana-hounds better than most, he was prime rib after all, but the fact that she’d been pursued so thoroughly meant she wasn’t just a visitor. She was a powerhouse of potential dangers, far too early into his campaign.

As he slowly looked over to the group, who were now looking at him, he tried to read the woman’s face, unsure of her intentions. As he watched her, and she watched him, she leaned over to the kids and said something before standing up and making her way towards Merlin.

She stopped on the other side of the table from him, and without saying a word, reached down to pick his spoon up from the floor, and looked it over, almost as if she was more curious about its handiwork than him, but then she looked past it, right into his eyes, and took a seat opposite him.