OSOS 0x16

Apotheca

M( -.- )RA

As par for the course in her new ‘fantasy life’, Mara wasn’t entirely sure where she’d ended up. Following the instructions of her now-disintegrated Trace, her first-ever Rune had seemingly ripped apart space to bring her to a round room made of nothing but that same gray concrete she’d practically gotten sick of back in the Obelisk.

By all rights, she had no way of knowing what kind of magic she was invoking through Trace’s instructions, but her intent had been steadfast, so she leaned into that. Wherever this was, Debug had to be here, in some shape or form, someway, somehow.

The room she’d arrived in was a perfect circle, roughly twenty meters across, and sporting a barely-visible rune engraved across the entire floor. Without Debug, she had no idea if it had anything to do with her arrival, or if her placement was pure chance.

Considering my luck so far, I’d be astounded if chance had any sort of vote at all. You don’t just warp in to the exact center of another rune, the odds are inconceivable to begin with.

The only other things in the room that gave it any semblance of direction were the two doors, the one that had been in front of her upon arrival, and another ninety-degrees to the right. Both were identical to the sliding doors of the obelisk, though without Trace, she couldn’t be sure they had the same ‘button’ linked to them.

However, as she approached the first door, Mara found her hesitations were for naught as the two-panel aperture slid apart with the usual absence of noise, unexpectedly exposing her to a hallway that stretched to her left and right.

Freezing in place, breath caught in her throat, Mara strained her hearing for any sounds of movement before she allowed herself even the most gingerly placed steps towards the now-open threshold. Thankfully, she found it as empty as she’d heard, and eased up on herself as she decided on her course.

The hallway stretched a little further right than it did left, and directly across from her was another door, however this one appeared to be quite intent upon remaining closed, even as she swiped and prodded around its perimeter. Stumped, and glancing to her other options, Mara saw that the left side only had one door, while the right had two, plus another hall halfway down.

A singular door, ooor the rest of the complex…

She wasn’t sure which route held better chances of finding Debug, but of the two, it made sense to cross off the potential dead-end before searching the rest of the ship. So striding down the length of the left-hand hall, Mara made her way to the door in question as she postured aloud.

“So what are you, boss room or broom closet?”

Unlike the door directly across from the circular rune-room, the one on the far left slid open upon her proximity, revealing a room about the size of a basketball court and several stories tall. The lights inside were dim, a couple of faint blue flickers coming from the two ceiling-mounted fixtures, but it was enough to see a lack of movement in the room.

Stepping within, the few shapes in the unsurprisingly-spartan room came into focus, revealing four cubes about waist-high, and a floor-to-ceiling ring mounted against the far wall.

Mara wasn’t sure what to make of the presentation, the four cubes seemed to be pointed at the ring, indicating they were linked, but the only noise in the room came from the low-hum drumming from whatever power was circulating in the wall-mounted ring.

Stepping to the right-hand cube closest to the door, Mara found the surface to be slightly tilted towards her, and indented in the center like a touch-screen. However, no amount of taps, swipes, or verbal commands elicited a response from the the kinda-concrete cube.

Seeing that the other three cubes seemed identical, and likely equally unresponsive, Mara made her way to the back wall of the room, intent on investigating the only thing that seemed ‘on’ in the room.

The whole place seemed uncanny, as if the entire place was not unfamiliar, but anti-familiar– Almost as if the sight of it was edging into foreboding the closer she got to the ring.

As the recessive drumming grew louder, and her steps brought her closer, Mara felt a creeping nudge to look elsewhere, then an urge to look anywhere else, but the more the feeling pushed her away, the more she needed to know.

Something about the ring was screaming at her to do anything but continue her course of action, but her curiosity was insatiable. Laying a hand upon the source of the ear-pounding sensation, a single thought shot through her palm and into the ring, a question demanding an answer.

“What are you?”

Half spoken, half thought, Mara muttered the words as her intentions delved deep within the construct, but what she got in response wasn’t what she was expecting.

A tendril snapped out, instantly penetrating her mind, as if to mirror her own probe, and a sense of contact was made. It felt cold, and a rancid smell flooded her mind as a solitary word began to tug at her mind, like a thought on the tip of her tongue, but it tasted of pure bile.

She wanted to rip her hand away, but whatever link it had made held firm until the concept finally composed itself, and the urge to dry-heave finally won out at the sheer audacity of such an abhorrent idea.

-| –.– |-

“[ Apotheca. ]”

The robotic voice echoed around the room, startling the bare-footed ashen-haired girl, who was actually awake to hear it this time.

Panicking, she swirled around and immediately back stepped into the terminal she’d been standing at– The robotic voice hadn’t just been an announcement this time, because this time the source of that voice was actually in the room.

Standing in front of the still-closed door was a woman just about her own height, but with neon-green hair and covered in cybernetics. Spread across her body was a massive mosaic of abstract tattoos, barely covered by a black tank-top and gray-washed denim shorts. However it was clear that the tattoos weren’t as simple as they appeared, several of the tattoos were glowing a deep aqua-marine, but the greatest source of illumination bloomed from the blue-tinted heat-lamps she had for eyes.

The air visibly fizzled around her pupils as the unexpected cyborg eyed the ashen-haired girl until she decided a follow up question was required to tick the biological.

“[ That was your query, was it not? ]”

Her voice was booming and omnipresent, as if the walls themselves were the ones speaking, and not the half-cyborg woman who appeared to be talking.

However, noticing the ashen-haired girl flinch as she spoke, seemingly eliciting even more confusion, the cyborg lowered its decibel settings before elaborating further.

“[ It is our hope, our dreams, our souls. An excess of thirty billion, betting it all. ]”

The girl with ashen hair found words in short supply, as a very human-looking cyborg had just shown up out of nowhere, spouting English of all things. So regardless of what the half-machine was saying, her brain just couldn’t get past how it was saying it.

“H-how are you speaking English?”

The cyborg, pausing to fully digest the girl’s question, seemed to find the answer obvious at first– English was one of its many available languages, but that didn’t seem to be what the human was asking. Hoping to placate her immediate, and somewhat redundant, curiosities, the cyborg cited a more relevant data point.

“[ Federation English, circa twenty-one-hundred. Sourced from an image of ‘Mara Ordinavi’, scanned thirty-three minutes ago during self-diagnostics. ]”

Stunned, Mara didn’t know if she should be upset that it had apparently scanned her brain, or grateful that she could at least communicate with it. However, immediate disbelief and questionable feelings of privacy violation aside, the term ‘self-diagnostics’ brought up a tangentially pressing question.

“Hangon… What do you mean by ‘self-diagnostic’? Are you like, part of this ship?”

At first, judging by its underlying appearance, the cyborg could have been human, or at least human-adjacent, but their choice of words, and the way they seemed to speak from everywhere made her second guess that assumption.

The cyborg however, chuckled, as if the girl’s question was so inapplicable, it was funny.

“[ If ‘we’ had a race, then it would most certainly not look like you. ]”

Seeing its statement of fact in rejection to the biological’s query was found insufficient, and that said biological was not in a state of malice, the cyborg’s risk calculations budgeted additional details could warrant answers to unsatisfied irregularities.

“[ We are The Nexus, the caretakers and central core of The Ark. This form is one of two ‘representatives’ currently handling ‘Outsiders’. Its appearance has been extrapolated from your genome to best facilitate data collection. ]”

So they’re the ship’s AI? Or a ‘representative’ of it? And one of two–

“Outsiders?”

The ashen-haired girl had a feeling, if she was one of them, then the other was–

“[ Unaccounted anomalies. Current designation ‘Outsiders’. Two objects classified by unknown origin, unknown purpose, and inexplicable existence. Answers are required. ]”

Finding the question thrust to her with an aggression normally paired with an impending threat, the air in the room left no question that the ‘Nexus’ had a myriad of methods to carry through with its silent implication.

So dropping all pretenses of caution or privacy, lest she be evacuated out an airlock or crushed by anti-grav, the ashen-haired girl did her best to explain her situation with as much honesty and authenticity as she could muster.

“I don’t know– I think that pink-swarm brought me here. You’ve scanned me right? You must know I had no agency in my arrival, even if, at most, I mentally ‘agreed’ to go ( however stupid that might have been ), but then I suddenly found myself here– I never left on my own terms, I didn’t even get to grab my flip-flops before I found myself here.”

At first, it seemed her words fell upon deaf ears as the cyborg remained motionless in response, but it was busy accumulating the necessary data points to verify her statements. However, once it had, the cyborg’s posture relaxed as it lowered the risk factor on the anomaly designated as ‘Mara’.

“[ Blood pressure within tolerance… Cerebral fluctuations nominal… Memory scans confirm… Suspicion cleared. ]”

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

“[ Thank you, Mara. Your cooperation has been noted, however your presence remains unresolved. I am currently guiding The Ark into its final stages of descent into The Maw, and subsequently, all form will fail to persist, evolved or conceived. ]”

Feeling a physical weight lift from her body, Mara’s eyes went wide as she realized that not only did it know her name, more importantly she was almost squished to death by the anti-grav.

Trying to relax and push the worries from her mind as she collected her thoughts, Mara took a deep breath in. She hadn’t done anything wrong, at least on purpose, so even if she wasn’t supposed to be here, there had to be a way for her to leave without causing a fuss.

“Look, with how voluntary my arrival was, I think I have even less choice in returning, so where am I supposed to go?”

“[ The safest route for bio-forms remains Apotheca. Your second safest option would be to exit this ship, with a craft that does not exist, and continue to thrash against the absence of energy that is all that remains. ]”

Catching the same strange name, it finally clicked what the Nexus was talking about.

“You said that name before– That’s the ring, right? What do you mean by ‘enter’? Like, I download my brain into some super-computer? Death by upload wasn’t exactly what I had in mind by ‘leaving’...”

“[ A third option does exist, and that would be to reconcile with the sentient photon-form currently eviscerating my core, seeking a resolution that would result in both of your departures. However, unless you can exert eight-thousand-and-forty-three percent of your previous output, your average speed will not carry you across the warp-space between our current position and the core room before full submersion. ]”

Realizing the Nexus was referring to ‘Pinkie’, and potentially as a jest, Mara could only look at the cyborg girl in disbelief. If even the computer was joking with her, then clearly she was up shit creek, and a truly stupendous amount of crap was headed her way.

“For the record, the latter really doesn’t sound like an option at all, which I guess means I really don’t have a choice… So explain so I at least know what I’m getting into. First off, what’s ‘The Maw’? The name doesn’t exactly inspire positivity. So why ‘descend’ into it?”

Extending its arm and facing its palm upright, the Nexus summoned a hologram of the ship, and the withering singularity it had been orbiting for countless millennia. Rendered above the cyborg’s hand was a small gray box, smeared into a line across the horizon of an even smaller smudge of black.

“[ This is The Maw. The last remaining solar mass in the universe– Or rather, the last of every solar mass in the universe. She is the remainder, the outlier, the victor. Through that which she sheds, we have meagerly subsisted, and now, as her last rings true, our final step approaches. As a living entity, you are entitled to a choice. If you wish to enter Apotheca, I will confer biases to its System to ensure your stay is pleasurable. ]”

Mara glanced at the giant ring on the far wall, then back to the hologram floating next to the Nexus’ cyborg. ‘Apotheca’ was clearly some sort of artificial reality, it was the only thing that made sense, but how it was supposed to save anyone in this kind of situation was beyond her in the moment.

Maybe it isn’t about saving lives, but granting time– Maybe it’s doing something with time dilation, giving its residents just that little bit longer…

“Fuck it. I yolo’d here, I’ll yolo there. What’s one more hop, skip and a–”

*KHWWPHH-OOOOOM*

Before she could finish her sentence, a bone-quaking explosion rippled through the ship, wracking its way up her legs and causing Mara to brace against the nearest terminal as the lights flickered and the ‘Nexus’ vanished from sight.

Fucking Pinkie.

{ √Δ }

Thelma came crashing down just outside of the great walls of Uallach, a place she’d not been to since she stormed out of the Grand Knights fourteen years prior. An inevitable outburst to the rampant culture of foreign apathy and a continued pattern of willful ignorance, eventually culminating in far more than she could stand to stomach. Her departure wasn’t exactly clean, but now she was back, and for once they were going to listen to her.

Getting a better fix on her landing spot as she gazed up to the late-afternoon sky, Thelma couldn’t help but marvel at the old sight of the massive marble walls. For a gnome, she was well acquainted with how short she was, but the sheer scale of the indomitable defenses always felt a bit like someone fudged a decimal place on the model-scale.

Towering nearly three kilometers into the air, their imposing height mandated a lack of crops within a kilometer, just due to the constant shade– Not that the city would let someone farm in the Plaga anyways, that’d be suicide in a siege.

Hearing the clank-clop of armor-clad footsteps pounding towards her, Thelma brought her gaze back down from the parapets of the ‘marble mountain’. She hadn’t exactly been subtle with her ‘re-entry’, but unless her count was off, it seemed at least their response times had improved in her absence.

Bounding up the dirt path from the nearest gate, two armored knights and a leather-clad mage approached her in a quick but well-practiced formation, still unsure if the arrival heralded friend or foe. As such, the leading knight called out as he approached, stating his orders of peace and security as he attempted to ascertain the interloper’s motives.

“The Order Of Knights stands ready to defend! Excessive use of force by civilians is prohibited– Submit to detainment and questioning, or make your peace with the ground you stand on!”

However, much to the knight’s dismay, the small gnome only chuckled as she rolled her shoulders and grinned like a maniac.

“Alright boys, let’s see what you’ve got~”

Visibly off-put at her eagerness for the latter of his propositions, the knight looked over to see his two compatriots sporting similarly perplexed expressions beneath their gear. Not many entertained escalating a situation with the knights, and much less with the fervor quite unbefitting to a creature so small. Yet the other knight met his gaze and nodded– They knew their job, but the least they could do was try to take her in alive, it was three on one after all.

Without any further communication, the second knight stepped in first, bringing his pole-axe in for a side-swing, but Thelma barely had to duck– She had expected their training to be lacking, but clearly this one needed more goblin duty.

Not one to waste an opportunity, Thelma punched the flat underside of the axe-head as it swung over her, sending it off-arc and straight into the other knight’s leaping sword strike.

Sparing a second to survey the situation, and opting for a bit of nick-naming, Thelma taunted the squad and forwarded her challenge to the remaining member.

“So Air Head is close-agile, and Goblin Food is mid-range… How about you then Maji– Support?... Or maybe cannon?”

Rolling past an overhead strike from Goblin Food, Thelma used Air Head’s incoming low-strike as a stepping stool to leap into the air, driving his blade into the hard-packed dirt with a swift kick-down as she launched off, barely perturbed by the sudden combat.

“Let’s find out, shall we?”

Spinning through her leap, Thelma tucked in to gain extra speed, and let loose a small rock she’d picked up just prior to her jump, beaming it straight at the head of the leather-bound magic user.

Panicked, the brown-haired boy began sputtering hasty words laced with unregulated mana, spawning a flurry of half-effective spells in an attempt to halt the projectile by any means necessary.

Landing on her feet in mid-stride, Thelma skipped past the two knights and slipped next to the mage, who had just fallen onto their backside in shock.

“How many was that? Sixteen? Seventeen? I mean, did you really just burn all your spells?... You’d have to be an idiot, no– You’d have to be intentionally moronic, basic training covers this enough times to puke. All you had to do was duck– What’s wrong with you?”

Not even breaking eye contact with the mage, Thelma sensed the incoming pole-axe on her right, and seized it with an open-hand, mid-swing. If she was being honest, the knight duo’s tactics and skills were nothing to scoff at, so she wasn’t as interested in them as she was the clearly inexperienced mage.

Pausing at the sight of the other knight struggling to even budge his weapon from the singular hand of the tiny gnome, ‘Air Head’ realized they were absolutely out-classed, and yanked his whistle up from its lanyard and blew for reinforcements.

“Oh– Finally.”

Releasing her grip on Goblin Food’s pole-axe, Thelma glanced at Air Head, interested to see if he’d redouble their efforts now that he’d called for backup. However, he at least had some sort of brains rattling in his helmet, because he held his ground, sword extended, but didn’t advance.

He’d heard of a particular female gnome, one who used to be a bit of a hot-shot in the capital, but there was no way that this was the ‘Disarming Demon’. Regardless, they were clearly at a martial disadvantage, so the least he could do was try to delay with diplomacy.

“Are you a guild member? What’s your rank?”

Laughing as she checked that the mage wasn’t going to try something stupid, Thelma found it funny that a capital guard really had no idea who she was. There weren’t exactly a ton of gnomes wandering around, and barely a handful who would have been more than a bother to a trained knight, much less a balanced squad.

“Am I a guild member? Ha. ‘Air Head’ is a good fit– You should study more. You lean on your abilities too much, and it’s edging into over-reliance– Which breeds death, and not just your own.”

*Krrk– Kck-Kck–*

Interrupting her retort, an unannounced vortex of lighting some eight meters in diameter erupted into existence next to ‘Air Head’.

*Fzz-LOP– Ka-Fwoooooph*

As quickly as it appeared, the lighting vanished in a thunderous pop, energy rolling across the ground as thirteen full-clad members of the capital guard dropped onto the field with a sudden burst of wind. None of which surprised Thelma, she’d seen plenty of battlefield teleportation, but what did catch her off guard was who was at their helm.

“Madison! You never visited– I assumed you were busy. Are these yours? They need work.”

Quite unlike her compatriots, the woman at the helm of the group was dressed in full gothic-lolita, complete with a frilly sunbrella and black lace galore. However it wasn’t her attire that usually struck onlookers as odd, but rather her appearance itself. Underneath all the drapery was a deathly pale skin, strung taut across bones like aged leather, and eyes that were only sockets, lit aflame with small jewels glowing an ethereal purple.

Strolling over to the gnome, and the young mage splayed out next to her, the monster-in-frills casually knelt next to the pair as she greeted the gnome.

“Thelma. I see you’ve met my newest pupil… ‘Newest’ being the key word.”

*FWOOooosh*

In the blink of an eye, the mage on the ground transformed into a plume of purple flames as they vanished into the wind as quickly as they’d been engulfed.

Caught off guard by the sudden ‘disposal’ of one of her students, Thelma cast an incredulous look towards her old friend, who casually dismissed the accusation as she stood back up.

“I sent them back to the barracks with a bit of a touch up, no need to fret. Now, you two though…”

Turning back to the two full-plate knights that had been accompanying her pupil, Madison proceeded to lay into them with zero leniency.

“Marcus, I specifically tasked you with leading this group because I thought you had some brains. How many gnomes do you think would LAND outside the capital? Hmm? You can clearly see her footprints in the CRATER she left, and instead of asking her for identification, you immediately engage in the most AGGRESSIVE form of ‘peace’ I’ve ever seen– And yes, I was watching the whole time.”

Seeing the first knight wince at every verbal blow Madison leveled at him, the second knight had little time to prepare before she turned on him as well.

“And you Bjorn, you’re the top of your class in martial training– So tell me, what’s been pounded into that thick skull of yours at the start of every lesson?”

The larger knight’s pole-axe noticeably slumped as he half-muttered the answer.

“The four D’s. De-escalate, Defend, Determine, Defeat.”

Nodding, Madison followed up with another question.

“Right. Now which do you think you fucked up first?”

“I–”

“No, don’t tell me, both of you are walking back up to General Polymese and giving a full, and accurate, report of your failings. Now go.”

Both knights nodded, understanding they were getting off lightly, and jogged off towards the three-kilometers of stairs they had to look forward to.

“Alright– Well that clears up that misunderstanding. Now, Thelma, pray tell you’re visiting Uallach for pleasure, and not to herald another calamity.”

With a glum look, Thelma said all she needed to. There was only one thing right now that might have brought her back to the capital, but Madison still had to ask to be sure.

“...Merlin?”

Seeing Thelma shake her head in remorse, Madison cursed under her breath.

“Devil’s weevil.”