"Are you sure?"
"One hundred percent."
"Not enough."
"Jump princess, or are they afraid to dirty their royal attire, highness?"
Krogar stood at the edge of a high cliff, looking down to the depths below, noticing the blue tinge in the air, while arguing with Lucy in his head.
"Huh, where is that smartass humour of yours coming from tin can?" Krogar asked, not failing to register how Lucy's behaviour had changed.
"Just a mysterious quantuum fluctuation." Lucy responded immediately.
"So funny." Krogar kept gazing at the The Blue Stream, still hesitating to jump. "Can we just throw there something first?"
"Something more than eight stones or a pan? Or do you want to catch another rabbit to throw in there? By the way that was the only pan that stone age people had, it was unnecessary." Lucy rebuked Krogar sternly.
"They should have paid more attention to their belongings instead of just copulating all the time!" Krogar defended himself. "Completely their fault!"
"By the way, it had no experimental value as it was made of stone, like all the other stones you have thrown in there." She reminded him further.
He left it without response and took in a deep breath.
And exhaled deeply afterwards.
Taking another deep breath . .
"Are we going to need a plastic bag?" Lucy asked seriously.
"For what?" Krogar said absentmindedly, while breathing like a fatigued horse.
"Excrements."
Krogar just coughed. "HERE I COME!"
"Oh boy, where have I put that plastic bag, quick." Lucy stated coldly, while Krogar stepped forward and began to fall off the cliff.
In fact, it was not just off the cliff, but he was falling down along The Blue Stream, a path that supposedly led deeper, to the center of Kronos. Picking up speed, he could see the mass of earth flashing in front of his eyes, as he sped up along the side of the continent they had been previously stationed on.
As seconds passed, the air resistance slowly began to equal the pull of gravity and his acceleration stopped.
Interestingly, there was not much excitement, as there was no adrenalin entering his veins, due to his body being non-organic, having only an organic facade. Looking calmly about, Krogar noticed a white fog in front of him that neared with considerable speed.
"What is that? It looks like mlik foam!" Krogar began to feel uneasy, wondering what would happen next to him.
"Correct, the truth is the world have been created by a giant and right now, we are falling into the milk he has for breakfast today. It will be with cookies, try to land on one."
Krogar began to worry about Lucy's mental health, or rather about the integrity of her circuits. "Damn, she is so fried, what am I gonna do with her?"
His thoughts did not reach far as the terror-inducing milk foam was closing on them with incredible speed.
Soon, Krogar's body entered the foam and the next moment, he slammed into straight stone surface, creating a web of cracks on it.
"I am lucky to have this body, else . ." He did not want to even think about the alternative. He stood up slowly and looked in front of him, and behind him in quick succession and two intense sensations appeared in his mind.
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One urged him to laugh madly and the second to suppress throwing up.
The first one he saw was himself in his demon form.
The second one he saw was a face, no, it was not just any face, it was THE face.
"WHAAAT?" He shrieked, his voice very close to a women finding out she got lost, even though she went according to all maps the whole time, but not quite the same, because if he had made that exact sound, it would have been genderly inacceptable.
* * * *
Wallace fidgeted in his seat as he saw his counterpart folding her hands on the table in a calm, collected manner. Although her body was humanoid, he refused to think of her that way. In his head, she was just a ruthless, disgusting insect, like all the others of her kind.
"What do you want?" He barked without a shred of diplomacy in his voice. It might be considered rude in ordinary diplomatic circles, but after the long-drawn war with Yan, all the good will had long since evaporated.
"Do not act like a fool human, you know who has the higher groud in this negotiation." The humanoid creature scoffed, a dangerous grin appearing on her face
"Out with your demands."Wallace continued, his manners unchanged.
"You may bark as you like, for you are just a rabid dog with no teeth." The diplomat of the Yan empire could not be bothered with his tone, knowing her stronger position. Most of the Yan race had humanoid bodies, while bearing insectoind signs, while being heavily enhanced with high-tech implants. "We would like to share information about the annomalous world of Kronos and other similar places."
"I see, this is yet another poor attempt to sabotage our research."
"Drop the act human, there is no research to speak about," She leaned closer to Wallace and continued one word at a time, almost whispering. "We. Know. You. Know. Nothing!"
"Then what is this farce about?" Wallace did not bother to contradict her, the case of Leonard still fresh in his memory.
She sighed, shaking her head.
"Let me enlighten you. The general theory known to most is correct, the space is tearing, not able to stretch infinitely, if you go to the center of annomalous places like Kronos, you will find pure nothingness, devoid of space."
"Nonsense, if there is nothing, what is there?" Wallace interrupted her rudely.
"Is that hard to hear what I am talking about? There is no space, no nothing, all things that fall there will get compressed into the already existing space in some way. It is like when you eat a piece of meat, but you cannot fit it in your stomach anymore and throw it back on your palte. The plate will get more cramped in order to fit the little bit changed piece of meat back in."
Wallace cringed, utterly disgusted by the strange comparison.
"Is it more clear?" She asked, as if her explanation was the best possible.
"Perfectly." Wallace gulped."What is the problem? I am not a nutrition expert."
"The problem is that the places of nothingness continue to squeeze matter that falls in to some other existing space, it tends to be places connected to the trespassing object, creating dangerous hyperdense matter that is not perfectly stable or has unpredictable properties. " She looked almost like a teacher explaining a new principle to a pupil.
"And? If some rocks fall in, it will just squeeze it somewhere else. Even if it explodes, it will hardly wipe out a galaxy right?"
"Of course." She said ironically, tapping in the air in front of her. With a decent beep, a video began to play in front of Wallace, where he could recognize two object slowly nearing each other, apparently on a collision course.
"What are those two? Presuming the first is some annomaly, what is the second."
"Oh, just a galaxy with quite a big supermassive black hole in its center and no, it is impossible to move either of them."
Wallace just opened his mouth not knowing what to say.
None of them knew that another pair of eyes was watching a similar video at that moment.
* * * *
Sabra looked at the video concerning her new assignment while grooming her hair, her red eyes shining passionately. She was sure that her reassignment had been a punishment, but in the end, the head of the department was quite nice. She even suspected, he had a fetish for white-haired ladies like her, becuase after some work over time, she skyrocketed, gaining the post of a supervizor of higher level than before.
Her first assignment was simple, she had to repair a complex world, were there were some tears in reality and some patches of hypercondensed matter.
"Ha, that is easy." She skillfully deleted the tears and hardcoded the borders of the world to be fixed, not floating borders like before. "Tear fixed, check."
Smile appeared on her face.
She wanted to adopt a similar quick approach to the pockets of hyperdense matter, but paused, recognizing the multitude of worlds from before.
"They are just a tiny part of this one? Oh boy, how pathetic I was!" But a particular demon still was in her memory. "No boy, you will not have it easy and just vanish on me in the termination process of some simulation, no, no!"
"How should I do it and not mess up too much?" Her fingers hovered in the air, unsure what to type next, but in the next second, a reassuring feeling flooded her as she remembered the idiotic smile of the department head during their last meeting.
"It will fly for sure!" She let her fingers rest on the table, commanding the computer with her voice.
"Allocate separate space for all virtual reality constructs contained in the world! Execute migration of the worlds!"
"Warning, exceeded standard available space for a universe."A System notice sounded in response to her command.
"Ignore warnings, allocate it from the reserves."Sabra smiled.
"Allocating completed. Migration completed."
* * * *
"Something has changed." Krogar looked at his hands and at the face again, it felt like the world gained a new quality.
"Crap has changed, wake up Neo." Lucy retorted poisonously.
"Just at least try to act like you are an AI and not a bratty sister!" Krogar grumbled and looked at the second Krogar.
"Great, now I am two times here." The second Krogar was in its original demonic form and was as much surprised as he was.
" What is the girl doing here? It is . ."His younger self began to speak.
"Silence, fiend!" Krogar shouted, acting upon reflex the moment he saw the fourth mage, who stood near his younger self, open his mouth.
"S-Silence." He stuttered and silenced his younger self as per usual. letting Krogar steal his exact words from his mouth.
"Ah, you know the drill, exactly as I have foreseen." Krogar grinned, looking at the stupefied mage.
"Have you seen the horse shit already? You have six seconds." He turned to his younger self, intending to help out a bit.
"Ah." The younger Krogar grumbled, unable to speak.
"Don't move!" Akir shouted, alerted by the extraordinary situation, but Krogar was already throwing his younger self in the direction of the window, shielding him with his body.
"Thanks." His younger self said and hurriedly jumped out of the window, Four had apparently messed up the silencing spell because of his shock.
"Wait!" Krogar's eyes widened, charging towards the window. He reached the window right in time to see his younger demonic self splatter upon reaching the stones down below. The horse was naturaly doing its thing a few meters down the road.
"Idiotic myself, you should have seen it doing it! Why have you . ." Krogar lifted his hands in the air in a gesture of futility.
No, he did not nod.
"I have just committed a suicide, crap." Krogar scratched his hair as the demon-hunters began to pop up behind his back.
"Good work man, you have really deceived it." Ross kept slapping his shoulder approvingly.
"Thanks. Glad to help."Krogar answered bitterly.
"Come with us." A strict voice commanded and Krogar had no intention of resisting, following behind the mages.
"This place should not exist." Lucy remarked dryly.
"How do you know?" Krogar asked in his head his trusted AI companion.
"I have seen it in my logs, this simulation should not exist."
"Well, do not ask me, maybe we are at a different timestamp now?" Krogar speculated, not knowing what to think either.
"In that case it should be deleted in hours." Krogar shrugged his shoulders in response, but the next morning, they woke up in a small cell, the estimated termination still not in sight.