The LOW were avid travelers and seekers of mysteries. Long ago, even before the Tela came to power the LOW discovered a mystery seemingly only occurring in our region of the cosmos.

The mystery of the skism.

Skisms were created by ancient devices that, still to this day, no species had managed to replicate or understand the science behind beyond being able to push the button that activated the ultra-rare devices. When activated, the devices created a region of space that, for all intents and purposes, had to be considered desolate and unusable for the rest of time due to the field's permanent effects.

All skism fields, when created, were stationary and unmoving.

Save one.

One skism field moved, seemingly randomly between galaxies. In the early eons of it being discovered the LOW had followed it and had attempted to study it at length. They tried to communicate with it, restrict or alter its movements, and even attempted to destroy it.

All to no avail.

They couldn’t do anything to it, but they did discover and note three strange traits that made it different from other skisms only found in this region of the cosmos.

One, being the most obvious, was its ability to move.

Two, discovered multiple times during the eons of study, was its ability to vanish and appear elsewhere, demonstrating an ability to teleport immense cosmic distances.

Finally, the oddest trait that they found was that it did not speak and try to sing a siren song, as the other stationary skism fields were known to do, thereby tempting space-faring aliens to certain doom within the mysterious field.

Skisms were an oddity, an anomaly that defied the very laws governing the cosmos, and one of many priceless treasures that the LOW awaited patiently for the keys to unlock. They maintained teams throughout the galaxies dedicated to studying and cataloging any rare and ancient relics until someone came along who could crack their secrets.

One such team, known only by the sector of space they monitored, was observing the roving skism when something finally happened.

“Grand Elder Gleg-dooong, the roving skism has teleported again.”

“Understood underling. I will alert the other teams to scan for its new location.”

“Grand elder, there was a suspicious anomaly detected before it teleported. A mere flicker of light was observed intercepting it and immediately the skism reacted and left.”

“Oh? Bring up the detailed scans,”

The scientists slowly replayed their recorded data, observing closely as a mysterious and previously uncataloged entity, a squirming and glowing worm-like creature, sped through the darkness of space before coming into contact with the surface of the slowly moving skism.

For the first time, the scientists saw the skism react, its normally random undulating surface suddenly becoming perfectly shaped geometric patterns centered around the point of impact.

“How odd…" the senior LOW commented aloud. "Why did that transformation appear as though it was a vessel that lost its active camouflage? It makes me suspect that it was only imitating what a skism field would look like…”

“Elder… look at this!” the underling nearly shouted in excitement before remembering its place.

In the bare, briefest of instances, before the skism teleported away, it seemed to fragment, almost as though it was splitting itself into smaller skisms. They didn’t get to see it fully divide, just the briefest of moments was all they managed to catch, just a flicker of a hint of it pulling itself into several separate parts before vanishing.

In its place was the smallest recorded skism. A small warping of space only large enough to contain the speeding light entity.

“Underling, enter hibernation.” The Grand Elder commanded, noting the instantaneous obedience as the underling slumped.

“Ship Bly-on-det, connect to Homeworld.”

“Verification is required. Please repeat your last command.” The living LOW vessel spoke to the Grand Elder. No one was allowed to contact the Homeworld under penalty of death.

“Ship Bly-on-det, connect to Homeworld.” The Grand Elder repeated, knowing full well that it was about to die. It had to be done, however, as any prized information regarding class 2 artifacts were to be uploaded immediately.

“Connecting to Homeworld.”

“Transfer knowledge.” A voice said as the living vessel and Grand Elder complied, uplinking and merging their mind with whatever or whoever waited at the other end of the connection.

“Perish and purge.” The voice commanded in the instant that it finished absorbing the data of the two entities.

Like a massive puppet with its strings cut, the huge form of the Grand Elder crashed to the deck of the vessel. A second later the underling awoke, its hibernation cycle ending upon the presence of its elder counterpart no longer living. Without a hint of distress the smaller, multi-eyed underling slithered from its wall pod and began to devour the genetically modified corpse of its previous elder, absorbing and taking on its larger immortal traits for itself as it became the new Grand Elder.

“Ship reintegrate.” The new Grand Elder commanded a short while later as the vessel accepted its change in command and began awaiting new instructions. In addition to the massive mass of the elder having been dealt with, a blob of glowing mind matter could be detected just outside the ship, rapidly and systematically being destroyed by the vacuum of space as this change of command practice took place. This blob, purged by the ship as the former Elder died, had been the memories associated with the ship's brief, but very thorough, connection to the Homeworld, destroyed so that no one could ever find the origin region of the LOW.

“Incoming additional global directive update: Research the glowing lifeform. Trace its origin.”

Across the cosmos, all LOW vessels received the message and directed their focus to comply with their newest directive: Finding the source of the glowing organism that set the skism off. This could be the key that they were looking for.

---

“I still think it was bogus that he killed Sublimis’s avatar. She couldn’t get a word in edgewise.” Invicta said as she sat on a high stool while playing Atari’s classic Centipede game. For some reason, she had taken an interest in playing all the games that Kevin had grown up with and was making her way through them one at a time. The team was back in VR and had decided to take a break after spending hours running from the cataclysmic doom that the Leva King’s rage presented.

“I still think that we should have used cr propulsion to knock some sense into him.” She muttered as she expertly beat level after level.

“Nurse was very firm on how much of a bad idea that would be. What the Tela managed to do with technology to their matter is as foreign to that dimension as cr was to this one. It is a perversion of the natural order and would have caused everything, practically anything considered to be living matter, to have been drawn towards Sublimis the moment she used it.” Tutor said through the air from her villa where she was thinking up new training regimens for the distraught Leva. They would be trying again soon but had decided to try to let the Leva King cool down for a bit before sending another expedition to him.

"Get Kevin off of earth!" One of Meditati's clones tasked with monitoring alien communications screamed as she intercepted the communication replay that each LOW vessel had received, showing the skism intercepting the void seedling's spread, and the subsequent directive to trace its source.

Nurse obeyed instantly, moving the avatar housing Kevin and the void seedling rapidly out into space, blasting through the roof of the mall where he had been pretending to shop and causing the locals to panic from the sudden explosion of sound and debris as the ceiling and roof exploded upwards.

“What has happened?” George asked as he rushed out of his workshop where he had been building prototypes of spacefaring vessels suited for humankind. Tutor and Invicta both manifested on the travel disks, reading the severity of the situation as they all swept through the data that Meditati’s clone had intercepted.

Their faces paled as they went over the data. The LOW investigating earth was one thing, but catching the attention of an unknown and deadly mystery that the roving skism posed was something else entirely.

Nurse didn’t manifest as an avatar, she was solely focused on pushing the limits of the swarm carrying Kevin as it moved away from Earth. She had understood the danger even just as Meditati’s clone had received the data, her need to protect her Monarch taking over.

Stolen story; please report.

She was too slow. Earth's solar system already had a visitor.

Hovering like a new planet off in the distance, a gigantic fragment of the skism sentinel had appeared seemingly out of nowhere, having teleported to the exact location in space where the void seedling's eruption of light had originated. It was fortunate for Earth that nearly three months had passed since the event where the void seedling had spread, causing Earth's natural orbit around the sun to take it out of harm's way. The oddly warping surface of the skism sentinel absorbed and reflected the light of the sun in unpredictable ways, causing it to flash and sparkle and allowing many observant humans across the rotating earth to easily spy the stationary invading celestial object as the seconds passed since its sudden arrival.

Kevin’s AI were quick to notice the fact that if the skism sentinel didn't move, in less than a year, Earth's progress around the sun would cause it to gradually collide with the strange ancient relic. Just the thought of the skism field slowly sterilizing all life on Earth as the planet slowly orbited the sun was frightening.

As fear and uncertainty gripped Kevin's AI and swarm collective, only one conclusion could be reached: they needed to act preemptively before the skism occurred and stole what limited choices they possessed. Already, even just bare seconds after its arrival, it seemed to be doing something, as the chaotic patterns on its surface began to ripple and organize into smaller and smaller, more orderly patterns.

“Run!” They all agreed and shouted together, willing Nurse haste as the odd object started to morph and transform. Quickly, as though it was manifesting a porcupine’s quills under its fractal surface, spikes started to form all around the surface of the skism.

“What is it doing?” Tutor managed to ask just before tiny droplets of even smaller skism fields formed on the tips of each of the quills. Droplets that detached and vanished in the next moment.

“Did it just do what I think it did?” Tutor asked as she magnified the scans of the main massive skism object against the tiny droplets, finding them to be exact copies of the earlier smooth skism that had arrived. “I think it just sent out copies of itself to hunt down all of the void seedling’s spread.”

They all watched in awe, quickly manifesting maps in the air above their heads as they tried to plot the trajectories against the records they had of when it all happened to Kevin months earlier. A little red dot, Nurse with their precious cargo, was also tracked as it sped through the solar system and towards deep space.

“Ummm… guys… I think it is moving.” Invicta noted once the spikes began to slowly retract and leave the surface of the skism spherical and smooth again. Slowly, the skism was following in the path of Earth’s orbit, the fractal patterns on its surface rippling the most on the side that faced where Earth traveled around the sun.

“Whew, at least it isn’t faster than Earth. For the moment anyway…” Meditati whispered as she calculated its speed.

“Is it hunting Kevin now? Following where he has been?” Invicta asked, wondering aloud and bringing their fears to light. The skism seemed to have Kevin’s scent, or at least the scent of the void seedling, and appeared to be tracing Earth’s orbit.

“I think so,” Meditati said as she split into hundreds of copies of herself. “I have to think.” was all she said before she moved herself and her copies off into her own domain, leaving the other AI to their own devices.

George and Tutor stared at each other for several seconds, wondering and worrying about Kevin’s current status and their future if he died. Kevin’s latest transformation had changed himself and Nurse in unpredictable ways, would the older version of Kevin meet or match what she thought her monarch should be?

The sound of tiny knuckles being cracked brought them both out of their dark thoughts and made George yell “Wait Invicta! I need to put up a barrier before you do anything!”

Invicta had manifested a tiny Volus dreadnought’s gunner chair, suiting her smaller form, and was busy going through pre-battle status checks as she drew from the stores of cr and swarm that Nurse had been studiously amassing from nearby star systems. The Volus had been wiped out ages before by the Tela and had been known widely for their overwhelming weapons of war. Due to their singular, unrelenting, warlike mindset, once they found an enemy, no Volus were reported to exist to this day—leaving only the histories and legends behind. The fact that Invicta had chosen their race to emulate meant that she was about to unleash hell on the slowly hunting skism.

George quickly drew from the collection of cr, choosing to completely surround the skism with a shell, offset and very much like the Tela did to stars with their cores, rather than to leave any openings. “Better be safe than sorry.” He muttered as he knew that Invicta tended to go overboard and had been delving into the new weapon designs that Meditati and Nurse had gleaned/stolen from their extensive hacking runs.

Tutor watched the byplay, feeling lost. Sure, she had Sublimis, Kevin’s leva to take care of and educate, but she wanted something that would help Kevin as well. “Nurse, are you doing ok?” She asked, wondering what the mindset of the swarm entity was. Instead of an ant manifesting, as Tutor had begun to recognize her as, Nurse chose to manifest in the form of her human avatar, the one with the oddly colored eyes. Tutor had to look down at the floor to see her, finding the dark-haired girl hugging her knees to her chest as she stared off at nothing.

“I am lost if Kevin dies. We are lost. Meditati and I have already tested my acceptance with the older version of Kevin recorded inside Silver’s Alpha cube. We… Kevin’s current swarm included, are incompatible. We have become bound to the Kevin who changed us by absorbing the concepts of the creators.”

“Oh.”

“What should I do? I have applied slight curves to my path, in case the moving skism can predict straight lines of travel like it seemed to do with the void seedling spread. At least, that is what I think it did, I have no proof. I don’t know what to do or where to go. Space is a horrible place to hide when we know nothing about how the skism sees or hunts.”

“Indeed. It got here incredibly fast and somehow knew the paths taken by all of the spread.” Tutor said as she thought about its actions. “What doesn’t make sense is why it is moving so slowly now. Something must be different between the spread and the shell that is still surrounding Kevin.”

“What was that?” Meditati said, appearing next to Tutor as though a copy had been standing nearby and invisible the entire time.

Tutor didn’t seem startled, she just repeated her thought and continued to wonder aloud as she put together all that they knew from Kevin about the seedling.

“The skism hunted down each of the seedling’s spread like they were broadcasting a trail or a signal. What if the void seedling is a colony of creatures that sends experiences to the other seedlings? What if, Kevin’s merging with the new concepts fed the seedling enough experiences for it to try to spread? Again, this is all just conjecture. And what if, hopefully, whatever he did had made all of the spread living within the seedling shell leave and go off in search of whatever it needed to regrow into the black true void creature, thinking that they had enough food options to risk it? I mean, as far as I can see, Kevin practically gave them a platter of experience when he absorbed the creator’s concepts. The shell might still collect and feed off of Kevin, like an open wound that allows the void to feed on their prey. From the actions of the skism, it appears as though it can only trace Kevin when it moves and can’t predict ahead what his movements will be. It seems as though the shell leaks residual traces, like a path of blood made up of Kevin’s experiences. Probably allowing the void seedlings a scent to return to, if and when they managed to find what they left in search of. The skism is acting simply as a line follower and hasn’t seemed to notice or even care what George and Invicta are busy setting up around it.”

“Dark predictions.” Meditati’s clone said as it simulated a result of the hypothesis. “If true, regardless of Nurse’s accumulated speed, the skism will always be three months behind her, bearing that she never stops moving. That is if the skism truly has no speed limit and can move as fast as she can. This hypothesis is hopeful but there are more troubling packets of news coming in that may change everything.” The copy said before it was replaced by a more attentive-looking Meditati.

“I have bad news. We only have a small fragment of the main roving skism body. There are reports of at least seven other sightings.”

“Seven?”

“Yes, six all showed up individually in different empires, throwing everyone into a panic, and they all have one common theme: they are all hovering around a planet that holds one of the Lost Ancient Pods that the Last Engineer spoke of wanting to try to open. Every empire is moving as fast as they each can to get the pods as far away from their home planet as possible, lest the skisms decide to move and wipe out their homeworlds where they were on display.”

“And the seventh?”

“That is the worst news. It seems that the largest portion of the skism went to investigate the supernova event where Time’s arm is located. Everyone is… oh.” She said before she paused as though listening to something.

“The six just left and have teleported to rejoin the one monitoring Time’s severed limb. It will take time but with that final piece of tension, the fact that a legendary object of mystery is paying attention to whatever Time was holding, just shoved its importance in everyone's minds to impossible heights. Due to this, I predict that total war is imminent.”

“Total war? As in, every alien race going to war with each other?” Tutor asked.

“Indeed. Originally I thought that the weapon that the Blidda had developed was just an outlier. That was until I discovered that nearly every race had been secretly researching ways to defeat the Tela’s technology. They are all fed up and want to be the ones in charge of the cosmos. All it will take is someone to fire the first shot.”

“Are we in position then?” George asked as he brought up a map of space surrounding the supernova. Fleets and armadas continued to show up and to raise the tension in the area surrounding the event. The Tela must have suspected that something was afoot because they also had more cr ships arriving all the time. Normally, they looked down on other races simply because they believed their technology to be superior to anything that anyone else had. The increase in presence had forced them to do something they hadn't needed to do in ages: they had started to open lines of communication with the alien armadas."

“Yes.”

“Good… but I also think that we should gather those Lost Ancient Pods as well. Just the fact that the skism singled them out, makes me think that they are important and will cause other races like the LOW to try to collect them as well. If they are something that Kevin can use as a bargaining chip, it is in our best interest to obtain them.”

“Agreed, Nurse is already on that.” Meditati said as she relayed the news reports of two of the artifacts having been “swallowed up by darkness” mere moments after the roving skism vanished. “We were fortunate that she already had swarm in the area, the remaining four will take slightly more time to gather.”

“Just make sure you set a tracer on them. You already played your hand by taking those first two before you had enough swarm in place to take them all.” George said.

“Yes, that was a risk. The reason why we had a presence in those solar systems anyways was because they had strong Tela and LOW representatives already in place. The other four are more remote and don’t have as high of a probability of being such an issue to gather. In fact, the reason why we moved so fast was because of intercepted communications where orders were given to have the artifacts secured. We just got there faster.”

“So now what?” Tutor asked as she glanced over at Invicta’s digital setup. The little AI had gotten off of her small chair and was muttering to herself as she built a weapon from schematics hovering in the air. Her mutterings were worrisome at best as the little figure would question just how much “spacial damage” could be caused if she increased the power beyond preset limits.

“Are you sure that is safe?” She asked George in a whisper.

“Sure? I mean, the technology was developed on this side and doesn’t use any cr as a base. Everything should be contained within the cr shell. Umm… I see what you mean… I will have Nurse on standby to cut the power if something grows too out of control. Hmm… In fact, I will have her test that “spacial damage” one out somewhere else first.” He said as Invicta turned to glare at them over her shoulder before going back to her work.