Miss Possible spiraled upward through the rock, her crystalline drill carving a smooth tunnel as she ascended. Inside the control bubble, Vespera hummed cheerfully while manipulating the controls with electrical currents from her feet.
"Must you be so... chipper so early in the morning?" Cinder grumbled, her feathers shifting through irritated oranges and tired gray-blues. She was curled up in one of the crystalline seats, leaning onto me for support.
"Early bird gets the interdimensional worm!" Vespera clicked. "Also, I'm totally not chipper. I'm sleep deprived-hyper, freaking out about many things.”
“Things like?” the Quetzi asked.
"What this dastardly human-tater is planning," Vespera clicked. “Obv’sly.”
"What's he planning?" Katherine grumpily muttered from her corner of the tank.
"You'll see in about ten minutes," I said. "You should all learn from Io."
Above us, Io swayed gently in his hammock, completely oblivious to the complaints below. The moth had somehow managed to tie a hammock to the crystalline ceiling and was now snoring softly.
"He's only so chill because he's high on questionable things and full of interdimensional snacks," Katherine rolled her eyes.
"Or," I suggested sagely. "He knows that nothing terrible is going to happen."
Miss Possible's crystalline drill burst through the ground next to Larry and Nilli's farmhouse, sending burning wheat stalks and molten rock flying in all directions. Steam billowed around the massive tank, creating a surreal landscape of golden waves and crystalline reflections.
Master Mortrdem stood waiting, dressed in a fanciful, new dark gray cloak that seemed to absorb the daylight. Beside him stood an ancient white crowkin mage in a white cloak, his feathers so pale they were almost translucent, leaning heavily on a gnarled staff made of what appeared to be intertwined bones and living wood.
The old crow's eyes–sharp and pale silver–locked onto Miss Possible as she settled into the wheat field. "What manner of beast is that?" He asked.
"That is our Master's carriage, fear not. Lord Protector is right on time," Mortrdem commented with a wry smile.
"Good mornin’, M'Lord!" Mortrdem called out as we emerged from Miss Possible. "Lord Protector, may I present Archmage Ovijus. He's quite interested in your... unusual construct."
“I hope you paid him well,” I smiled
“Well enough to gate me to the provinces from the Capital.” The crow-man nodded.
"What contract?" Kat asked, turning to me. "Did you hire a portal mage or something? I thought that the locals couldn’t make interdimensional gates.”
"We have a portal mage," I pointed at Io.
"Who can't open portals to anywhere except for disasters," Cinder yawned. "Are you going to orchestrate a disaster back on Earth or something?"
"Yes," I nodded.
"You better not blow up Cradlefall just so we can avoid using Zalimar's gate and keep this damn tank!" Cinder growled. It was clear that she wasn't a morning person.
“Oi, lay off my baby,” Vee hissed, swatting at Cinder.
"Relax, there will be no blowing anything up," I waved her off.
The Quetzi frowned at me, not believing in my words.
"Io," I turned to the moth, who stood behind Katherine. "I've been engineering horrific disasters for you on Arx this entire week. Every catastrophe I've caused? It was all to feed your gateway abilities so that you could be primed for this pivotal moment."
"Oh?" Iogann tilted his Snufkin hat forward.
"Remember our little experiment with The Day After Tomorrow?"
"The disaster movie clip gate?"
"Yep," I said, pulling out my phone. I'd set up a specific clip from the film - a tsunami scene paused at 49:47 and half a second. "This exact screenshot is currently on display in my van on Earth on this exact phone model. I want you to open a gate to it."
Io stared at the paused tsunami scene.
"Got it?" I asked.
He nodded. I turned the phone off. “Gate away.”
Io pulled out his harmonica, its brass surface gleaming. He placed it to his lips and began to play, mentally focusing intently on the frozen tsunami scene from the movie. Dark spots and flickering lines danced around him in the air for about a minute, then the harmonica's melody wavered, creating a dissonant sound that made everyone wince.
"It's not working," Io muttered, lowering the instrument. "I don't think that I can open a gate from Arx to our Earth."
"Wanna try it together?" I asked, pulling out the lighter Zee Captain had given me. “With some amplification?” The steel surface caught the sunlight. I turned the wheel and held the little flame between us.
As it flickered, I offered Io my hand.
"Together," I said as Io stared at my hand. "Omnid and human best friends, yin and yang, like an ever-spinning engine of magic. It worked with Vee and Cinder. Focus, bounce your skill off me, empower yourself.”
The mothman nodded and grabbed my fingers with his fuzzy paw. The moment our hands touched, something shifted in the air. The lighter's flame danced between us, building up the mana. I slowly felt a surge of... something. Energy. Potential. A calling.
The song of doomsday.
As mana poured from the lighter and spun around us invisibly, Io's eyes changed–from their usual drowsy state to sharp, focused intensity. He once again produced the eerie music and the dark spots around us began to coalesce, swirling like ink dropped into water.
"Focus on the van," I murmured, picturing the scene myself. "My bean bag chair. The Winter-See-Mass lights. The sound system. The clip of the Day after Tomorrow paused on my phone. You can do it. We can do it. Together. You and me.”
The harmonica's brass surface began to vibrate, creating a low, resonant hum that seemed to bend the very fabric of reality around us. The wheat field wavered, like heat rising from hot pavement.
I pictured the frame, the phone, Uncle George’s van in all of its beat up glory, tracing a line in the air, my eyes closed.
A dark tear appeared in the air as the gateway spell bounced between us, resonating and building up, devouring the mana spilling from the little flame. At first, it was just a hairline fracture, barely visible. Then it widened, wobbly with a gray shean. Io swiped at it with his antennae and the gray membrane popped, revealing a familiar interior - my beat-up van, parked in the Skyfall Academy student lot.
The bean bag chairs looked exactly as I'd left them.
"Holy shit," Katherine breathed.
"A gate to Earth!" Cinder smiled, recognizing the interior where I had confessed my human-ness to her nearly two weeks ago. “That’s your van!”
Vespera's talons crackled with electricity. "Yass! You actually did it! Great job, Io and Lexxy! Go team!"
Io looked equally shocked. "I... I've never been able to open a gate this precisely before this far away!”
The gate stabilized, showing a perfect slice of my van's interior. Sunlight filtered through the slightly dusty windows, catching motes of dust that hung suspended in the air. The phone I'd left paused on the tsunami scene was hanging from the dashboard, held in a plastic arm embrace, its screen frozen in that perfect moment of disaster of New New York citadel drowning under a wave of water.
"One problem–we can't go through that," Vee yawned. "Or even send Possy through. Out there time is basically nearly standing still. The gate is too thin, not set up like Zalimar's wide-ass gateways. We'll basically shear ourselves and shatter Possy from the temporal dilation shift."
"Ah, that's where this man comes in," I said, waving to the white crowkin.
I turned to the Archmage who was staring at the gate we’ve made curiously. "Master Ovijus. I'd like you to slow us and our engine down eighty four times using your time-stopping skill, to match the time dilation inside this gate."
Ovijus raised a pale eyebrow. "Eighty-four times?"
"Approximately," I nodded. “You can feel the difference between time here and inside the gate, yes?”
Archmage Ovijus nodded, chanting an incantation as he probed the gate with his staff. His staff began to glow. A pale silver Kitlix rushed up his shoulders, eyes lighting up.
"Take care of our Guild," I told Mortrdem. "Katsburg is yours to manage for a year and six months, maybe less, depending on how things go! This tunnel we just dug to this farm leads straight to Gloomkerr, you can give it some stairs and use it to move men and goods past the blockade. Maybe setup gateway points and hire gate mages for faster transfer. Anyways, you know what to do."
"Thank you for your trust, M'Lord," Mortrdem nodded, his speech accelerating. "I shall watch over Undertown for you, make it shine in your name!”
Ovijus chanted louder, slamming his staff into the ground, slowly circling us and Possy. I watched as the world outside our time bubble began to blur and shift. The sun over Nihilim seemed to rush around the black hole, clouds racing in fast-forward, distant waves of the Chasm Sea smashing rapidly into the glass pebble beach.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Mortrdem and Ovijus blurred, moving quicker and quicker, until they vanished altogether.
"Io! Increase the gate!" I ordered, imagining the gate getting bigger, pulling on whatever Omnid magic was currently flowing through me. "Let’s move the gate of the van into the parking lot beside it!"
The mothman nodded, gripping my hand.
[LV 3 skill gained: Sundergate] Blue sparks flashed across my eyes.
The gate moved backwards out through the van’s window, still pointed at the phone. It expanded outward, stretching wider and taller until it encompassed a section of the Skyfall Academy’s parking lot. The edges wavered and rippled like heat mirages.
"Forward! Homeward march! Stay together!” I declared, keeping my grip on Io's hand as we walked through the dimensional tear.
The transition felt... strange. Like walking through a soap bubble, a moment of resistance followed by a subtle 'pop' as reality and air pressure shifted around us, aetheric density dropping way down and making my chest ache.
The morning sun of Earth felt different–less intense, the sky overhead finite and more natural than Arx's alien supermassive cloud patterns.
Vespera, Katherine and Cinder followed close behind. Miss Possible's crystalline form emerged last, her massive bulk stretching and squeezing through the dimensional gateway, crystalline legs pounding into the parking lot’s pavement.
“Everyone’s through!” I looked behind us and let go of Io's fuzzy hand. The dimensional portal rapidly began to shrink. Io turned and stared at the shrinking gate, lowering the harmonica.
"I did it," he uttered with a shaking voice. "I actually took a party from one world to another!"
“Hey,” I turned to Kat. “Can you shove Miss Possible into the deep for me?"
Katherine nodded. She grabbed my hand to amplify herself and reached out with her Stollwurm powers, gradually wrapping Miss Possible in pulsating shadows. The massive crystalline tank began to sink into the deep, vanishing from the physical, dissolving into wobbling darkness.
In another minute it was gone. I waved a hand where it had stood. “Aww yus, one concealed tank.”
Katherine rolled her eyes at me.
"Well," I stretched, looking around the familiar parking lot. "Home sweet home. Damn, the world looks so much smaller."
"Everything looks smaller after Arx," Vespera yawned.
"Yulia," I said. "Send the email to Zheng Xing Ker."
"Email?" Vee spun towards me. "Oh." Her face lengthened. "You're actually going with that. Right now? Ugh."
"Email sent," Yulia replied cheerfully.
I checked my phone's clock - exactly two hours had passed since we left Earth. Perfect timing.
Katherine exhaled with a weary groan and pulled her wheelchair from her back. She unfolded it and sat down and pulled her dark goggles over her eyes, digging for her flask.
"No," I turned towards her.
"What do you mean no?" She looked up at me.
"You're staying upright," I said.
"The Abyss I am," she said, unscrewing her flask. "Do you know how bad my body hurts, you jackass?”
"No!" I growled, prying the mana-rich alcohol from her hand. "Chew on this instead."
I pulled a large beast core from my pocket.
"You... hrm," she said. "You do realise how fucking expensive these are?"
"It’s fine. We liberated thousands of them from the bank," I said, putting down Lance's bag and digging inside.
"Plus just chewing on a single core won't up the aetheric density of this entire damned planet," she growled, lobbing the core into her mouth.
"That's why I had an Arx Seamstress make this for you," I said, pulling out a box from my backpack and shoving it into her hands.
"What?" Katherine accepted the box, pulling out a folded dark leather outfit, eyeing a thousand small beast cores shining on black strings of its surface. "I... what?! Is this a dress?!"
"I got Vee an overpriced tank," I grinned. "And Ci got a massive farm on Arx for just as much. This is probably the most expensive outfit on Earth, made up from three thousand three hundred and thirty three mini beast cores put together by seamstress Silenerra!”
I watched Katherine's reaction carefully as she examined the black dress. The dress was more than just fabric–it was a carefully engineered garment designed to help her manage her degenerative condition.
"This is..." she started, then stopped. Her fingers traced the delicate patterns of shimmering, pearlescent cores.
"Dress, pants, boots, collar, earrings, goggle headband and gloves," I said, pointing at the box. "Specifically designed to help stabilize your condition by maintaining a consistent high aetheric density field around your entire body. The leather straps are adjustable. It's the same design Sovereign Astra uses to keep herself alive and focused as living Shadow Sentinel. She gave me the idea during one of our Voicecast chats over the week.”
Vespera and Cinder watched our interaction, Vee with a tilted head, Cinder with her feathers shifting through curious blues.
Katherine looked up at me, her irate expression softening momentarily. "Why would you make something like this for me? I'm not your girlfriend."
"No, you're not," I said. "You're my best friend. I want you walking upright. I want you to smile."
"I helped," Vespera said. "Scanned your exact dimensions with the tower! Plus, I checked that the coverage was even after it was made. This should match Arx's aetheric density, wherever you go till the cores run out of mana.”
“You can’t just gift me…” Katherine began.
"It's not a gift," I fired back. "It's an investment. I need you at full strength. It comes with a condition."
"What condition?" Kat demanded.
"That you let me and Vee into your dreams," I said. "That you let Vee scan you. So that we can maybe help whatever is hurting you. The dress is just a crutch."
Katherine stared at me, her emerald eyes narrowing. Then she pulled her goggles on. "You want to dive into my dreams?"
"Not for fun," I said. "To help you. Your degenerative condition - it might be tied to something deeper. Potentially soul damage. Something in your past, maybe?"
Kat pawed at the dress, her body language shifting between curiosity and defensiveness.
"Why do you care?" she asked softly.
"Because you're part of our team," I said. "Our clan. You’re our Knight. And in our clan, we take care of each other."
Vespera stepped forward, her black and white feathers shifting subtly. "We can totes help you, Kat. But… you gots to let us in."
Cinder watched silently, her feathers creating soft prismatic reflections and little rainbows in the afternoon sunlight.
"No," Katherine said, shoving the box back into my arms.
I sighed and then shoved it back into her hands. "Fine! Take the damned dress. No strings attached!"
She grabbed the box, her claws slightly trembling. For a moment, I thought she might reject it again. But then she hugged the box close to her chest.
"Not gonna get into my head?" She asked, looking back at me with dark goggles.
"If you don't want our help, we won't pry," I said. "You have to want to let us in, trust us. It was an accident with Ci and we found a horrid Outsider in her soul. I just want to make sure it's not inside you too."
"There's nothing outsidery in me!" She answered far too quickly.
"I didn't say there is," I said, squinting at her.
“Whatever,” she turned away.
I turned to Io. "Sorry, I didn't have time to get you something outrageously expensive."
Io adjusted his hat and shrugged. "I'm just happy to be here. First successful intentional gateway without a disaster! That's enough of a gift for me, bud.”
Vespera's phone buzzed. She glanced at the ID. "Hoooboy," she let out. "Really don't want to deal with this. Way to fookin' sleep deprived for this shit, can’t even pretend it's funny."
"Gimme," I said.
"Aight," she shoved her phone into my hands. "Have fun. Imma have a nap in the coliseum office. Thankfully there are no classes after Arx delving so students can adjust their schedule back to Earth time."
She rushed off into the school, wobbling slightly, leaving me with the phone.
I picked up the Omnigram video call.
"Sup frogman?"
The green, moist, round cheeked face of the Jin Chan appeared on screen.
"Why do you have my fiance's phone?" The Prima-son of Golden Star Industries snarled, his gold evening robes shimmering in the Kitlix’ lit opulent bedroom.
"Sorry, my frog dude. You missed a couple of special wednesdays. She's my soul-bonded fiance now," I said. "Got my email? You're cordially invited to our engagement ceremony at the Triumvirate Slayers Cathedral!”
I grinned at the rapidly swelling and darkening face of Zheng Xing Ker, his golden robes trembling with barely contained rage.
"You're... what?" he sputtered.
"Soul bonded," I repeated cheerfully. "Or engaged as the poor people say. To Vespera Simmi. Lovely girl. Beautiful. Zappy. Brilliant. Constantly in my thoughts. Love her to death."
"You impudent cur!" Zheng barked, red eyes digging into me. “How dare you?!”
"Sorry," I grinned. "Not sorry. What are you gonna do? Send mooks to put concrete shoes on me? Like some middle-class gangster? If you want your precious waifu back, I suggest you come to Skyfall in person. In accordance with the ancient Firstborn Clans Omnid blood-laws, I challenge you to a duel to the death for the hand of Vespera Simmi!”
The silence on the other end of the phone was electric. I could practically feel Zheng's rage radiating through the screen, his entire body practically vibrating with contained fury as his cheeks inflated comically, drawing air in.
"You," he finally said, each word dripping with barely controlled venom, "are nothing. A pathetic mostly-human, Level Three mixed-blood scum, according to my Probability Engine. How DARE you challenge me? How dare you bond yourself to my promised Primo-wife, you… pitiful, pink cockroach!"
I glanced over at Cinder, who was watching me with concern.
"I dare quite easily," I said cheerfully. "Shall we set the terms? I'm thinking… something dramatic. Something that really shows off our respective capabilities."
"WHAT CAPABILITIES?!" The rotund frog snarled. "You picked the wrong Highborn Prince to antagonize, knave! You have no skills, nothing to oppose me! You realize you're challenging a Prima-born heir of Golden Star?! With access to the world's best Probability Engines that can calculate millions of potential scenarios of your demise?"
"Then you shouldn't be scared of facing me in a fair magic duel to the death at Skyfall's Coliseum," I said. "Unless you're chicken. I offer simple terms - if you manage to kill me, you can throw my bracelet into the ocean or whatever. If I kill you, then you let me keep Vespera and find yourself a new Primo-wife. Bring as many high-level mooks as you want to vs me and my team of five Arx Delvers. Look, Thunder-Princeling, I'm a very wealthy man, I don't have time for poor people like you with your probability engines or whatever.”
The frogman gritted his teeth.
“Either you get your ass here and pound me with your chonky fists like a genuine and proper Firstborn Clan Scion, or we can both hire an army of assassins and waste our valuable money and time,” I shrugged. “Feel free to predict which is more optimal. I can afford a lot of assassins these days. Likely, more than you. I just spent about 22 million O-bux on a dress for my bestie.”
Katherine swallowed beside me.
I waited, watching the frog-like face on the screen, enjoying the way his cheeks wobbled with rage. The silence stretched between us, pregnant with tension.
"You," Zheng finally hissed, "will regret this."
"Probably," I agreed cheerfully. "But right now, I'm enjoying watching you turn several hilarious shades of green. Shall we set the duel date? My weekend is open!”
I could see the calculations happening behind his eyes–potential outcomes being analyzed, him tapping something into his golden artifact probability watch with green, fat fingers.
"Skyfall Coliseum," he said finally, eyes burning like two rubies. "Sunday. High noon."
"Perfect," I said. "It’s a date! See you in two days, froggy-snookums! Toodles!”
I sent him a kiss and hung up before he could hurl more insults at me.
Cinder, Kat and Io stared at me.
“What?” I asked them. “I already beat up an immortal Koshei Archmage. Beating up a rotund Thunda-Prince frog-man and his overpaid army is like a downgrade at this point.”
“A very angry, wealthy Prince who can predict the future,” Cinder pursed her lips, glaring at me with an expression that promised all sorts of things, wings flashing in irate and worried colors.
"Ah! That reminds me," I said. "We should probably wake our sleeping angry dragon and Co. Io, you want to zap ‘em awake with one of Lance’s batons?"
Io nodded. He climbed into Lance's bag where a trio of Omnids were snoozing, forced into deep, dreamless sleep by Vee's machinations four days ago.
“Ci,” I turned to my girlfriend. “Go help Kat put the dress on. The back corset is finicky.”
Cinder nodded.
"Right. Thanks for the… outfit. I'll… go change," Kat let out. She rapidly rolled off without another word in the direction of the academy’s entrance. Cinder followed the wheelchair-bound Stollwurm, wings flashing orange and violet. They rapidly hissed something at each other, probably discussing me and my recklessly suicidal ways.