I almost exploded in fury on the spot when Urist made it clear that he had leveraged the lives of the children against me in order to save his own skin. Almost. I internalized the anger instead.

Urist had to wait. I had other things to worry me. Even if Urist and I died, the murderous ghosts would kill everyone in the fortress over time, including the children, if they didn't have new memorials to replace the ones Urist had shattered. Right now, Urist was the only one in the fortress who might conceivably create twenty new memorials rapidly enough to please twenty extremely angry ghosts.

On top of that, I could see the S9 carefully but rapidly heading in my direction, Crawler, Siberian, Burnscar, Shatterbird, and Mannequin were all working together to set off traps on Crawler, or disable, disarm, or avoid traps that Crawler couldn't simply set off with no risk to others. All of the 'crunchy' S9 were staying very close to Siberian. Once every fifteen seconds or so, Cherish would point in my direction, and Jack would nod. I had about two or three minutes before they arrived.

A brief moment of melancholy took me. Danielle, if Urist's insane plan doesn't work, then I'm sorry I didn't avenge you and the rest.

I needed the anger. I could feel connections to the dwarven ghosts beginning to form. I had to have the strength of rage, and I knew where to find it. Just looking at the S9 made my blood turn to ice in hatred. The talkative ones were chatting between themselves. Cherish and Burnscar were trying to talk Bonesaw into doing her hair into pigtails, cajoling the girl who was hesitant about how she would look in them. Almost like a family conversation between sisters. Almost like some conversations I'd had with my sister.

That thought turned the ice in my blood to liquid helium, and I was able to begin sapping the rage from the children who were still trying to mine up from their bunker. They were still desperately unhappy, but they calmed down, organized themselves, and began digging faster. Nowhere near as fast as even a single adult dwarf would though. They would take days to dig what Iton could have finished in a matter of a few hours.

Thinking of Iton, my senses found his body. The wounds were horrendous. I couldn't tell what had caused them, but it didn't look like it had been a blade. Piles of mangled bodies everywhere. Those wearing steel armor, like Tikon had been, were in worse shape. Crawler had been able to shred them terribly. The ones in Adamantite had simply been dismembered, pulled apart at the joints where the armor fit together. A few pieces of adamantite armor had suffered damage, presumably from Siberian.

I could feel the children and Urist responding to my rage, drawing it away from me, instinctively taking it into themselves and drawing it into themselves. I couldn't allow that. I needed my rage, all of it. I blocked my rage from leaving me so I would not lose any of its preciousness to the dwarven children who couldn't effectively do anything with it, or Urist who didn't deserve it. I blocked them off from my emotions, reducing their connections to me to the narrowest that I could. I felt Urist trying to force the connection open, but ignored him and he stopped trying.

I started reciting names of the dead dwarves out loud, so I cound get twice the impact, once from thinking them, once from hearing them. I fed each recited name into the cold flame of my rage twice. All of them would need headstones too. If I could enlist the ghosts. If they could kill the intruders. If they would allow Urist to live and create headstones.

If. If. If. Dad used to say that if frogs could fly, they wouldn't bump their butts. I almost broke out of my carefully constructed rage as my thoughts slipped to parents. Dad and mom would be devastated by the loss of Danielle, and if I died too, it would leave them no children. I wish the stakes were as low as a bumped butt here Dad. I wish you and mom were here, in a way, but I'm glad you're not.

An image of Bonesaw dragging Danielle into my field of view, with piles of my horribly dismembered friends flew into my mind's eye, and I fed that image to my rage.

I then had the thought that my parents might have seen the video Jack mentioned, they might have actually witnessed with their own eyes how Danielle had been killed, and perhaps then seen her body being used as a prop to mentally torture me. When I fed that image to the rage, black spots floated in front of my eyes for several seconds as the rage flared and coldness crept deeper into my mind, seeking more fuel.

I cast about in my mind for more sources of rage. I imagined the panic state my parents would now be in. The possibility that my parents might still be hoping and praying that Danielle was really still alive and I might survive enraged me even further, adding another strong measure of sweet, glorious hatred to the arctic bonfire growing ever more brightly in my mind.

My sight was marred by large bright and dark spots, and I was having difficulty standing. My body was cold, and shivering, wet from the bucket of water used to wake me. I could feel liquid running over my lips and across the front of my chin, and saw a steady pattern of crimson droplets falling through the air and splattering on my light blue chest armor. Crimson and light blue. The color of love and ice.

With the mental connection of love and icy hatred made in my mind, the hate within me jumped across the mental bridge and my hatred blazed to levels beyond what Cherish had managed to subject me to, and I gloried in it, even as I went to my hands and knees, and the crimson drops fell to the ground, instead of onto my armor.

"Now would be a good time, Overseer." Urist whispered, as he stood beside me.

I fed my irritation at Urist to the hate. Barely worth the effort of thinking about it. I analyzed what he had said, hoping to find more fuel, but there was nothing else to be angry about in his statement.

I had started out collecting the hatred to help me gather strength to try to deal with the murderous ghosts Urist's actions had created, but now it was no longer something I needed to try to do. I was wallowing in my hatred now, enjoying it, finding everything I could to feed to it. I recalled memories of holidays and birthdays shared, and linked them to holidays and birthdays that would have been shared, but now never would.

Ravenously, I cast about in my own mind for more fuel and found none. Instinctively I sought out connections, hoping for any bits and scraps of rageworthy memories. Then I felt them, the watchers. While I had been basking in the glory of hatred that I was drawing from my own memories and visions of the world around me, I had gained an audience. I couldn't see them, but I could feel them. Twenty connections, tightly held, barely more than what I would get from a stone.

Even with the tiny connection available to me, they leaked glorious hatred. So much beautiful hatred. I had to have it. I tugged on their connections, dragging their attention to me. I could feel them coming closer and closer, encircling me, curiosity tinged their rage. They stopped, several feet away. They refused to open themselves to me. I could taste their rage, lives that had ended in rage. They wouldn't share.

My muscle tone went to water and I collapsed from my hands and knees to my side, bonelessly. The position on my side was irritating. Blood was dripping the wrong way now, across my right cheek to the ground, carving a new crimson path across my cheek made muddy by sweat, water, dust and dirt. All of the ghostly apparitions that I could see through the bright lights and dark spots swirling through my vision as I lay on my side were staring down at me. "Please, help me. I need it. To save the children. Some of them are your relatives."

I heard Urist curse, and then walk away, muttering something about pathetic humans and it being a good day to die. He didn't understand, and I fed my anger for his misunderstanding to the hatred.

I tugged on the connections of my ghostly friends, gently, cajolingly, trying to encourage them to share their glorious hate with me, seducing them with offers to share my own hatred. I could feel their attraction to me, like moths to a flame, and it was growing stronger as trickles of rage passed between us like lovers' notes. They drifted closer and closer to me, almost within reach, had I been able to move my arms.

Ulok's ghost reached out to me, hesitantly poking towards me with the club-arm that Crawler had ripped from him when I first summoned my dwarves. He was clearly preparing to make a physical connection.

Time Stopped.

A small, metallic device had intruded into my sphere of influence. I examined its composition and shape. A long tube of steel and aluminum, with strands of copper and hinged flaps on it's sides and tail like a fish. Silicon and highly conductive metals of various sorts. Extremely complex chemicals wrapped around a sphere of uranium. Uranium.

Fucking humans! I raged, uncontrollably, as I recognized that I was being attacked by a nuclear weapon. Based on its angle, it was targeted so that it would fly straight into the open entrance to my fortress. I had watched images of how precise guided weapons could be. I had no doubt that it would go exactly where they wanted it. A nuclear weapon aboveground was terrible. Below ground it would be a hammer of God, the enclosed space in the fortress entrance containing the blast, preventing it from pushing its energy into atmosphere as the path of least resistance. It would certainly cause a failure of the magma systems and free the nascent volcano under the fort to bleed out to the surface. If the explosion were sufficiently powerful, it might even crack the stone around the children's bunker and allow the newly formed volcano to slowly cook them all alive as the magma slowly pushed its way down to them through the cracks.

Making everything I'm trying to do now meaningless. Second triggering won't save me from a nuke. Fury struck like a lightning bolt and I ripped the missile out of the sky and forced it into my amulet while greedily consuming the succulent fury and distilling it into a profound expansion of my hate. I felt something snap in my mind as the ecstasy of hatred grew too great to bear. Vaguely I felt my arms and legs thrumming against the ground.

Distantly I heard a murmur of a score of voices, muttering in admiration. As blackness began to claim me, my body jumped time and time again as massive jolts of hate thrilled through me. I heard Ulok's voice in my mind as the light at the end of the tunnel grew dim. "We gladly join ourselves to you, Overseer."

**

"Are you sure this is a good idea, Jack?" A girl's voice spoke, next to me. "I've repaired the aneurism, but..."

A mellow voice laughed, interrupting. "We never got an answer earlier, Bonesaw. I hate asking questions, and not getting answers. You think she will be able to speak?"

I recognized the girl's voice. Bonesaw. I was pretty sure I should be hating her, but I was a little fuzzy on why. It sounded like she had saved me. I listened as I floated upwards into consciousness and light, and within seconds a face in front of me began to come into focus. "Probably. The damage was mostly confined to her emotional centers. The stimulants will bring her up, but she'll probably stroke out no more than a few seconds after regaining consciousness as the stimulants raise her blood pressure again. You'll have to ask quickly, and she might not be quick to answer."

My heartbeat was growing faster, and the light was getting brighter. I blinked.

A kindly man's face looked down at me, smiling gently. There was a striped hand touching his shoulder, and over that shoulder I saw a woman in a naked zebra-striped suit that was incredibly lifelike. I needed to ask her where she got it. Danielle would go bonkers over it, I knew.

My eyes snapped back to the man's face as he started speaking again. "Young lady, I'm afraid we don't have much time left to talk. Where were we when we were so rudely interrupted before?"

"I'm not sure, sir." I answered, trying to remember what he was talking about.

My heartrate was going up, faster and faster. The light was getting painfully bright and I squinted a bit. A spot on my head felt weird.

The man frowned, slightly. "Oh, yes. I remember where we left off. Was your sister your identical or fraternal twin? I think you said her name was Danielle?"

Danielle. Images of pillow fights and birthday parties.

Danielle. Playing twin games with guys in bars.

Danielle. Walking in on her when she was in the middle of sex with one of her conquests.

"Oh, I remember now. Danielle was my identical twin." I was pretty sure I was still forgetting something.

Another memory clicked into place.

This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Danielle. Her body being dragged in front of me like a carcass in a PITA horror video.

"Good, good. Thank you. That was all I wanted to know, dear." He raised himself from one knee beside me, his hand patting my cheek gently before he straightened fully.

Another memory danced across my mind, and then several more in rapid succession. The light was so very bright, and my heart was beating so fast, so fast. I wished that the girl holding fire in her hands would put out the light.

Then it struck me. How silly of me. "I remember something else, Mr. Slash. I almost forgot."

"What was that, Krakatoa?" He smiled, and this time I could tell he was taunting me, but that was OK. I could tell there was something broken in my head, but I remembered what I needed to do.

I patiently explained, "I promised myself that I would kill you."

Mr. Slash responded with a look of mock surprise, accompanied by an open palmed hand across his chest. "Dear me, that is such a compliment." He bowed to me with a flourish. "I am flattered that you were able to remember that after all you have been through." I heard chuckles from various directions around me, and turned my head to see who was where.

"I'm afraid that we need to go now, Krakatoa, and Bonesaw says you won't be with us much longer." He flicked his fingers at me as I sat up, then did it again.

"No, Mr. Slash, I won't be with you much longer" I said as I stood, carefully, staggering a bit as I regained my balance.

Another memory clicked into place, and I remembered Mannequin creating a rather poor quality engraving about me. Ah, perfect, I thought as I smiled brightly. Smiling just seemed like the right thing to do for some reason. "Mannequin figured out the basis for my cape powers, I remember that now."

They were all staring at me, slowly moving towards Siberian, except for Crawler who was muttering "Oh boy, Oh boy, this is gonna be soooo awesome, I know it!! Volcano time!!"

Jack made another flicker of motion with his fingers and his eyebrows furrowed a bit, but he kept smiling.

It only took a couple seconds for all six of the fragile ones to reach Siberian and touch or be touched by her.

I could feel emotions beginning to form again, and was glad for it. I'd hate to do this and not have fond memories of it.

Crawler was dancing back and forth, practically bubbling with joy as he pranced from side to side on his spiked legs. I smiled at him. I wasn't sure why. He got even more animated, spinning around like a child's toy and singing some old song I didn't know.

Bonesaw was looking at me with wide open eyes. "Jack, she's healing. It's not me, and it's happening piece by piece, instantly, like a jigsaw puzzle."

Jack flicked his fingers at me again. I smiled at him and he flinched. That felt good. I smiled again, even bigger. He furrowed his brow.

I looked at the white mechanical shell of a man who had just touched Siberian's shoulder. After a half second of thought, I asked him a question that I was pretty certain would get the reaction I wanted. "Mannequin. Do you know what raws are?"

There was no warning at all, no sign that he was going to attack me. The white-shelled mechanical hand that wasn't gripping Siberian shot out at an amazing speed, and struck me, two fingers extended. One finger struck my right eye, the other my left. The hand fell to the ground, and quickly reeled back in by a thin chain.

I blinked, and laughed, then shook my head and spoke to them in a conspiratorial tone. "I feel like such a cheater, you know. For years and years I played vanilla Dwarf Fortress. I never used any mods. I never save-scummed. I really loved the game the way Toady made it, warts and all. I learned the game and knew it better than anyone else I knew. I knew all my dwarves by name, I could draw my entire fortress on paper without having the game active."

I mock frowned. "Now though. Now, you have finally made me a cheater." I raised my arm and touched my forearm to my forehead, looking away with a dramatic pose. "Alas, it starts with altering one human's body and making them invulnerable, then erasing wounds."

Cherish was staring at me. "Jack. I can't feel her."

I barely heard Bonesaw muttering to herself, while staring at me like a bug on a stickpin. "Second trigger. I knew it. I really need to cobble together some sort of monitoring equipment and try to see if I can force one."

I continued complaining at them, my voice raising until I was yelling out loud in a mock-disgusted voice while barely containing my joy. "And then, THEN, I have the gall to start removing special abilities from other entities, so they will be easier to kill. Can you imagine that? Such a tragedy."

None of them looked afraid.

After a moment, Crawler said "Bored, bored, bored. C'mon, get on with it. Villains are supposed to soliloquy, not victims. Where's the volcano?"

"Fuck you, Crawler." I gestured at him, and he exploded into gibbets.

Siberian smirked at me. The first expression I had seen on her face. Then I noticed that she wasn't looking at me, she was looking at where Crawler had been.

"This isn't as fun as I'd hoped it would be." I commented as shattered pieces of white armor exploded away from the remains of Mannequin.

Siberian and all the rest jumped, and stared at me.

"Oh, that's better." I walked around them, slowly, and they turned in place, all of them trying to keep me in view. Siberian looked a little confused. Jack's fingers were twitching constantly. Bonesaw was watching one of her mechanical spiders crawling across the ceiling, trying to get close to me. I smiled at her, then her spider-thing exploded in gibbets, chitin, and shards of metal.

I cast out my mind and found Urist nearby. He had been terribly mauled by Crawler or Siberian, but he was still alive. Vampires were damn hard to kill. I erased his wounds and repaired his armor. After a moment of indecision, I gave him his left hand back.

I stopped circling them. "I'm really not that much into torture though. I'll be happy to just kill most of you." I paused. "Except you, Jack. You, I think deserve a little torture."

I gave Jack Slash invulnerability like I had already given to myself and Urist, and then raised the body temperatures of the rest of the other surviving S9 to about four thousand degrees. Scorched bone and vaporized blood billowed out from the epicenter of the explosion

Wheee catsplosion. That was one thing I had always wanted to try.

When the shockwave passed, I repaired the damage to the headstones and fortress walls and ceilings. As an afterthought, I cleaned up all the bodily remains. It wasn't polite to leave trash in a graveyard. The dwarves would certainly not approve.

Jack was wide-eyed, a knife in each hand, slashing wildly in every direction, muttering under his breath while breathing hard. "Illusion or a trick, has to be."

I checked the ambient temperature around us and returned it to normal, then took away Jack's invulnerability, and his ability to move. "No, Jack, it doesn't have to be. You're in my world now." I gave him a real big grin as I saw him realize he was paralyzed. This is more like it.

Urist walked in, from where he had been peering around the corner of the doorway, looking at what was happening. "Are you done blowing things up yet, Overseer?" He asked, shaking his new left hand and making fists with it, like as if it had just fallen asleep. I stared at him. He was not faking nonchalance. He really was that calm. I was impressed. Killing 36,163 other sentients over 1043 years probably had something to do with his nonchalance towards death and mayhem.

After nodding my head to answer his question, I said "All done with exploding things." I glanced at Urist with a smile, remembering a conversation with him while we had been discussing the individual members of the S9. "Urist. I believe I remember you saying that you wanted the chance to tell Jack what you thought about him. Feel free to do so, then kill him, please. I'm afraid I'd enjoy it too much, and I want you to have a bit of fun too."

Urist tossed his axe into the air with his right had, and snatched if out of the air with his left, almost fumbling it. He looked back at me and said "You didn't see that."

"See what?" I smiled.

"Nothing, never mind."

As I hoped, Jack had actually grown angry again, as we bantered and treated him as a nobody. His ego was such an easy target.

Urist walked up to Jack and started talking, like he was instructing a particularly dull student. "Jack, after reading all about you and hearing how terrible and fearful you were, I was shocked and dismayed to discover that you only had a few thousand confirmed kills to your name. Such a waste. I looked, and I saw no evidence that you had fully depopulate any urban centers. Not even any small towns. Not even one!" Urist turned his back on Jack for a moment, shaking his head slowly in disgust. "You were trying to be some sort of nightmare to the people of this world. But you're pathetic. No vision."

Urist turned back to Jack. "Over the last thousand or so years, I've slaughtered entire six towns by myself. Four of them because I didn't like the beer. The last one because I thought someone had stolen one of my socks. After I got to the next town, I realized that I had put both of my socks on one foot. I was so amused with myself that I decided to celebrate and kill everyone in that town too. Funny, eh?"

I didn't release his paralysis. I didn't really want to know if it was funny to him or not.

As he slowly dragged his axe through Jack's immobile neck, Urist smiled. "Tell Armok you're a loser for me, Jack."

As the head fell to the ground, I breathed a sigh of relief, cleaned up the mess, and then I stared at Urist as I repaired the gravestones he had broken. There had been about twenty voices inside my mind that had been enjoying themselves greatly over the last couple minutes. As I was repairing gravestones, they had started clamoring for me to kill Urist. As the gravestones were repaired, I felt the spirits depart me.

I removed Urist's vampirism. "Don't say a single word, Urist. I'm not going to let you eat the children, and you would have been forced to, eventually.

Remembering the missile, in my mind, I reluctantly adjusted a setting. [INVADERS: NO]

My shoulders sagged. That just felt so wrong, somehow.

I consoled myself. It's for the children. I can turn it back on later.

**

Mannequin stood motionless, watching the rest of the group as they stared at each other in confusion. For the first thirty seconds or so after arrival, everyone except Siberian and himself had stood motionless, checking to make sure all their body parts were still there. He had already done an inventory without needing to move wastefully, of course, and was missing nothing.

Siberian was walking around the boundary one way like a mime against an invisible wall. Crawler was going the other way, looking like a scorpion trying to climb the glass side of a terrarium. Mannequin was certain that the two of them were even more idiotic than he had previously thought, if they wanted to go back in there. The game had been an interesting challenge at one time, until he discovered that it was intentionally designed to be impossible to win. Still, it had been a fascinating simulation and had provided some amusement in his graduate student days, just seeing how the game evolved over time. Some parts had even been inspirational for his own early simulations.

Jack Slash finally popped back into existence after everyone had gathered, and ones that would talk had started talking a little.

Everyone went silent as he arrived. Nobody even moved as he rapidly checked himself for missing body parts, paying close attention to his neck. He looked up and beetled his brows while looking around at the rest of us, saw he was surrounded, and very clearly noted that nobody was in a good mood.

Raising his arms in a shrug, Jack turned and stepped past Bonesaw, into the bus. "Well, that was certainly invigorating, wasn't it? "Cherish, please close the back door after Crawler is back in the bus."

Nobody moved. Jack stuck his head out of the bus door. "She cheated. Let's not play that again. After you guys left, Urist had some very inspirational words for me. I want to share them with you all, and see what you think."

Slowly, everyone started to move, looking at each other and nodding or shrugging. Even Siberian nodded. Mannequin was certain he was the only one that noticed Jack release the breath of air he had been holding.