“...and we were working on restoring functionality to the capacitor arrays, when one of the engineers literally ran away from…” Tanya frowned down at her phone, before turning it around to face them. “Terrorist attack?”
Kitsune glanced at the screen, then back to the person carrying her. “...no?”
“Yep! She’s a terrorist, but like the destroy-the-multiverse kind!”
Tanya very deliberately did not look at the eldritch terror tucked neatly into her shadow, instead keeping her focus on the sidewalk in front of them. “I don’t know why I keep asking questions. Anything else you want to reveal to me? Don’t, preferably. I liked it when I pushed a button on a test we barely understood.”
“Nope!”
“The shadow’s too cheery. Do you have to deal with this every day, fox?”
“Kitsune.” Tanya glanced at her with narrowed eyes, to which she responded with a soft shrug. “It’s my name- Kitsune.”
“That’s… unoriginal. Doesn't that just mean fox?”
“My Name is, could be, fire, but that is who I am. I decided, once, to name myself- and I named myself Kitsune.” She leaned into the juxtaposition of warmth and cold- biological existence shivering in the cool night, divine presence decrying so weak a flame- and just let herself relax. “Your name probably means something random and unoriginal. At least mine has intrinsic value.”
“You’re a-”
“Unlike yours.” Tanya scowled, Kitsune laughed, and Eaera wrapped them both in a hug that caused the human to shiver and the deity to laugh all the more. “What’s a bit of fire to do with humans like you?”
“Burn! Fire burns things, and…” Eaera looked at the scowling Kitsune, then sheepishly pet her twice on the head. Which, of course, fixed everything. “...not Kitsune? She’s nice, and her fire only annihilates things she wants to annihilate?”
“You’re the worst friends I’ve ever had,” and it was true, probably- but she was also smiling, if just a bit. A transient and something more than absolute- but together, if only for no time at all, they had their moment.
A few days more, in peace, before they’d the others would make things… hectic.
………
Space burnt inwards with a crackle of fire and the incomprehensible sigh of nothing burning up as a fox stepped into a room, grabbed the scruff of a kitten’s neck, and dove back into the fires of annihilation. Everything twisted, the fire interspersed with an infinity of cracks that tried to shatter its essence under the cycle of order and chaos, to change it into something different. The fire responded by- shockingly- burning everything. The fractal cracks of chaos and unknowable deviations of order shifted within the fire, and a complex conversation was carried out in no time, infinite time-
Which meant nothing as they finished their sojourn across the void and materialized in an empty, unstable demiplane. The kitten glared at the fox, but nonetheless exerted her will over order itself, repositioning the demiplane back into the metastable position it’d clearly been in before. “Kitsune?” Her voice positively flowed with saccharine sweetness. “You better have had a good reason to take me from my planning.” Kitsune opened her mouth to speak, before being immediately overrun by Tabs. “Trick question. There was no good reason. Prepare to suffer: Infinite-”
“Nope!” A tendril of darkness and unrealized space bopped the kitten on the head, touching on the interaction between chaos and order and destroying its stability. It then proceeded to reach out and destroy a large number of cleverly placed portals, and a few pieces of advanced technology that would have probably blown up the demiplane. “You’re here for a reason! It’s important!”
A flare of gold washed across them as a bundle of wings and eyes manifested above them, looking both incredibly frustrated and bored at the same time. “My annoying little siblings' alert went off. So did the bullying Tabs one, for that matter.”
Tabs and Ajinan glanced at each other, then turned to glare at Kitsune and Eaera with acrid annoyance. She spared a glance for Sara too- “If you actually came to bully me, then you’re about to have wet feathers for the next thousand years. It will happen.” The seraph’s widened in shock and not an insignificant amount of fear as it bobbed up and down to indicate assent. “Good. Now, fluffy, angst, why did you grab us all? It hasn’t been more than a few years since the game you two won, you’re already letting it get to your head.”
“I resent that! I won the game because I was the best, and not due to your terrible luck at all.” There was just something viscerally satisfying, Kitsune thought, in accusing Tabs of having bad luck and just watching her twitch in barely suppressed rage. “Anyways, your loss to the superior Seraph aside, we have a problem.”
“I also happen to have a problem.” Ajinan had given up on trying to portal out with both Eaera and Sara breaking whatever he tried to make. “It’s name is Kitsune. I was in the middle of a critical magitech research phase for ISON-II, and isolating the concept of caution was right there. You’ve ruined a hundred. Thousand. Years. Of careful planning.”
Kitsune winced- time may mean nothing for them, but it certainly did for whatever they happened to be working on. “Sorry, but it’s important. Just…” She glanced around, then decided on supermajority vote with herself- a lot of her argued rather eloquently for a year or two of mischief- to just… tell them. “Worldhopping Sija.”
Ajinan nodded with widened eyes, suddenly serious, Sara appeared to have completely forgotten about her plans to bully Tabs, and Tabs had a particular scowl that told them she was trying to figure out how to keep blaming them for everything ever, and failing spectacularly.
A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
Of course, once that parsed, the kitten only got even more mad. “That’s going to ruin so many plans! All the plans. Every plan. It’s all worthless. You won the game, and now you have to go and inconvenience me like this? Classic Kitsune.” A faint worming of fear was present in the banter that normally just… wasn’t there. Not much was to be feared at their level. “What can you tell me about them?”
“What do you notice about this demiplane?” Sija. The taint of Sija was still present. “She was here, suspended between every timeline before we started investigating, which slammed the demiplane into our branch. There was a huge battle, and she used the typical celestial concepts as well as something that reached out and tried to form a… bond? Connection, disrupting my… control? I don’t know what she did.”
“Concerning indeed.” Ajinan’s silver eyes spun again, silver tears, like blood leaking across black scales, a flickering of shattered space wreathing him in a hundred runic circles. “This is an overview.” He sounded almost awed. “It’s extremely impressive- clearly something normed into the universe, but nonetheless I can see from here into every branch.” A grimace flickered across his face, only to be replaced with a furious scowl. “ISON and I agree- she’s no longer here.”
“Branchhopping capabilities at the least. Clusterhopping at the worst. That would be a nightmare.” Tabs gestured to Ajinan and machinery filled in around them, blank demiplane overwritten with some of the most advanced technology ever to be produced. “So, we’re going to have to search the entire cluster. That’s a large infinity- so…” she was silent for a moment in contemplation, a few seconds, infinite plans discarded unvoiced- “Sara, you look through the adjacent variants. Eaera, Kitsune, search the rest of the branches in the cluster. Ajinan, go crazy with ISON. Maybe include some ISON-II features, if you feel confidant.”
“Please keep in mind that everything there is experimental-”
Kitsune snorted. “Translation: ISON-II is not, and never will be, ready.” Both of them scowled at that, which- victory! “I’ll be off then. Meet again in… two trillion years Seraphim time?” A quick acknowledgement of assenst, and then they each fled from the demiplane and into the space between existence, past sanity and into incomprehensibility, fire and destruction, rebirth, order, chaos, creation- and the faintest hint of Sija.
………
Two days after the fox and shadow had gone- literally just… disintegrating into nothing in front of her- Tanya woke up to a kitten and a dragon sprawled out in her bedroom. “So… deities? Anything more to tell me?”
Much to her consternation, they completely ignored her, slumbering away on her floor as if her house was the home of the gods and not whatever deific palace they had somewhere universes away. She’d just gotten over the fox- no need to throw this at her… sighing, she made some breakfast and packed for work, wondering how much trouble she was in this time.
A lot, as it turned out. Everyone wanted a piece of her, if only just to blame. The mayor of the city they’d fought in was on her heels with criminal charges, the governor wanted her sacked, the prime minister wanted her to fix the facility yesterday, and the military didn’t even make sense with all the contradictory requests. It took all her willpower to get through the double shift, especially now that people had managed to work up the courage to approach her without her friendly eldritch mantle.
It was exhausting, but at least there was steak cooking when she got home.
She hadn’t done that. Nobody lived here except for her… and the occasional Seraph, she supposed. “You’re cleaning the dishes!”
“Ajinan’s cleaning the dishes! I’m sleeping!” A youngish looking girl with a mop of vibrant blue hair stumbled out of the kitchen and onto the couch. A gust of wind blew open the window, catching a potted plant on the border of the thermostat and causing a bundle of blankets in the closet to fall, tumbling just right to neatly tuck her in.
A scaled tail snaked around her wrist, pulling her into a room that filled ten times the space the closet there had before, guiding her to a dining table she hadn’t owned. In fact, the whole room was far fancier than anything she had any right to be owning. “Ignore Tabs, if you would. We’re just really tired- haven’t gotten more than a few hours of rest these past few trillion years.”
That was far too much time for her to comprehend, so she just didn’t, focusing on the perfectly cooked steak and greens professionally plated before her. “Uh… how?”
“Well, although my manifestation of the steak from nothing may look effortless, it relied on an intricate understanding of how to build a good cooked steak from the subatomic level. Chemical changes occur when steak is cooked- but it’s not so simple as directly copying a template-”
“No, I understand how to cook a steak.” She quickly parsed the speech with a frown and amended that with a- “maybe. I was wondering more about the… spatial expansion.”
“I was bored and you had a free closet, so I threw together a sub-dimension with a few hundred thousand square miles of space and built a small house.” He waved a wing to a window, and there was an entire forest outside that definitely hadn’t been in her closet before. “Manipulation of space tends to fall within the bounds of physics, so it usually doesn't have major ill effects on universal stability.”
“I’ve noticed your kind don’t really tend to do anything… small.”
The dragon winced at that, looking at the realm he’d constructed with a vague apologeticness. “We tend to lack a certain… subtlety when it comes to expression. You’ll never see us truly working, but single-minded devotion to a task for thousands of years gets boring.”
“I can imagine. It’s… incredible, seeing the things you can just do- hearing the impact of it all.” She sighed- terrifying would be a better description. Terrifying and exhilarating. “This wasn’t much effort for you at all, was it?”
A smile washed itself across his face as he shook his head. “On the contrary- the base structure might have been simple, but putting this together- manifesting each and every part of a unique ecosystem- it’s an artwork. Creation, to me, is something I can find a moment of relaxation in. Tabs likes her planning, and Sara is always searching, enhancing the soul. Eaera is unfailingly friendly, and Kitsune seeks to slip seamlessly into everything with as little change to herself as possible. We do have our hobbies.”
It had been said without any arrogance in the slightest, but still Tanya found herself holding back laughter. “Subtlety. It’s not present. Not present in the slightest-” and then she lost the battle to laughter.
In the end, it was a good dinner.
………
A few weeks later, after the two had left, Tanya’s financial agents were faced with the peculiar case of how to properly tax an extraplanar space. Everyone who’d already been on her case took note of this peculiarity.
To put it simply- they were not amused.
She was.