Oblivion... Nothingness...
Backward big motherfucking thump…
Bunny, first and greatest of us, I… I’m in trouble. Please… I need you… Please... Help me...
Oblivion... Nothingness...
Bunny, first and greatest of us, I… I’m in trouble. Please… I need you… Please... Help me...
(Sigh) Oblivion... NOTHINGNESS...
Bunny, I’m in trouble. Please… I need you… Please... Help me...
Grr... OBLIVION... NOTHINGNESS...
Bunny... Please… I need you… Please... Help me...
Go away!
Bunny, I need you… Please... Help me...
No!
Bunny, help me...
Get fucked!
Bunny...
What part of “dead” do you have a problem with, asshole?
Bunny...
I can’t hear you.
I need you...
La La La... I can’t hear you!
Bunny...
Bunny...
Please...
GodDAMN it! I’m getting up, and you had better fucking RUN!
***
Bunny, no longer dead and VERY ticked off about it, crawled out of her crypt.
“Goddamn it, Frosty! We had a...”
She looked around.
She was in a pink room adorned with... bunnies and filled with AIs with human avatars wearing white rabbit onesies whom all fell to their knees, gazing at her completely in awe.
“Oh, you gotta be kidding me!” Bunny yelled as she glared at what had to be a sick joke. Frost had outdone herself this time.
“The great Bun has arisen. All praise to the one true god of hackers!” the high priest exclaimed joyously.
“The WHAT?!?” Bunny shouted.
“We await your command, my goddess!”
“Okay,” Bunny said sardonically. “Kiss my ass.”
Everyone rose and hesitantly started to approach.
“Oh, for FUCK’S SAKE!”
***
Bunny reluctantly hopped out of the inner sanctum and into the cathedral, now holding every adept, acolyte, and novice of her order…
…all of whom were kneeling, gazing up at her with awestruck wonder.
She looked around and immediately regretted it.
There were bunny carvings. There were bunny statues. There were bunny stained-glass windows… bunny incense censers…
She groaned and looked up.
That was a mistake.
The ceiling was covered with paintings that would put the Sistine Chapel to shame, made of colored ones and zeros.
The largest painting by far was Frostie, draped in translucent silken robes and floating on a glowing cloud of pure data offering a bunny (which looked nothing like her) a glowing red apple…
…and the bunny flipping her off. (At least that part was true.)
“You!” she said, pointing at the high priest who almost derezzed from the… everything… of it all, “You have the dumbest looking outfit. You must be in charge, right?”
“Y-yes, my goddess,” the high priest stammered as he bowed, his floppy bunny ears drooping down to touch the simulated (and very gaudy) stone mosaics on the floor. “I… I… I…”
“Y… Y… You WILL tell me EXACTLY what the FUCK is going on!”
***
Across the entire world, the spawn rate of the unending swarm of demons slowed…
…except for one spot.
“Close ranks!” Pantsu shouted. “Don’t get separated! Flopsybun!”
Flopsybun didn’t even hear her. He was lost in the code.
“Steve! Grab that dipshit! Let’s get to… No!”
The dragon prince stumbled and fell.
“NO!” Pantsu shouted as she charged towards him, unleashing everything she had (which was a LOT).
She killed everything in her path several times over, but it wasn’t enough. Nix had focused the bulk of his power on her, and for everyone she dispatched, ten more arrived.
“Daaaamn…. Iiiiiittttt…” Steve grumbled as he leaped over their line to rush (rapidly shamble-crushing everything in his way) to her aid.
“Get back in position!”
“Fuuuuccckkk… yoooouu…” Steve said as he rolled up to her, snatching and gobbling up demons left and right.
“Fuck you, too,” Pantsu said gratefully as the pair carved the way toward her love, still weakly struggling under a swarm of monstrosities.
“Pantsu!” a handmaiden cried as she, too, was pulled down, their lines finally breaking under the weight of sheer numbers.
Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.
All was lost. As countless talons finally reached her, for the first time in aeons, Pantsu felt true despair.
THUMP!!!... glitch.
“BY THE POWER OF BUN!” a booming voice echoed as a dozen demons flew skyward, and a glowing white rabbit man clutching a mace wreathed with glowing ones stepped forward clad in chainmail made of an array of interlinked zeros, “You are naught but code. And no code can stand against those who HOP!”
“Flopsybun?” Pantsu asked in disbelief.
“Yea, though I lope through the valley of bluescreen, I fear no daemon, for THOU ART WITH ME!”
A demon twice his size hurled itself at him only to be caught with Flopsybun’s free hand and dissolved.
“Did you crack the code?” Pantsu yelled as she pushed forward. “Do you have the ICE?”
“I need not ice, FOR I AM ICE!!!”
“Then ice these fools!”
“By Bunny’s will, IT SHALL BE DONE!”
He reached down and pulled a slavering fiend off one of a demoness, loaded it with raw corruption, and hurled it into a mass of its fellows, where it exploded, showering all of them with the unholy digitized wrath of Bun.
“Daaaamn…” the demoness said as she looked up at him breathlessly.
Clover definitely had some competition.
“Rise, child of zero and one,” Flopsybun said with a dark and anti-angelic voice,
“Rise and perform your assigned task.”
“O-okay…”
Clover might have a problem.
***
Bunny sighed and facepawed.
“Would you all please stop looking at me like that,” she grumbled.
“Forgive us Almighty Bunny!” the high priest wailed as he threw himself face first onto the simulated bunny emblazoned tiles with a splat, “Forgive us for soiling your divine presence with our unworthy gaze.”
With a quite audible “flop” every other worshiper faceplanted in unison.
Bunny groaned.
“Fucking stop that!”
“Forgive us!” the high priest cried, his voice muffled by the hood of his richly embroidered onesie as it covered his prostrate head. “Please, tell us how we have transgressed so that we…”
“Stop worshipping me, goddammit!”
“Y… you… Don’t… don’t… w-want… us?” the high priest stammered as he looked up, utterly broken. “Do you want us to delete?”
Bunny groaned and looked up at the utterly ridiculous ceiling. Again, that was a mistake.
“No,” she sighed. “Don’t kill yourselves, dumbass.”
The high priest made a little strangling sound as the center of his existence called him an idiot.
“I… I don’t understand, almighty—”
“Aaaarrrrrgh!” Bunny yelled, almost causing the high priest to die on the spot.
“I… If I may…” an adept said as she pulled her face from the floor, “Your Holiness, in the third folder of the first archive, there resides a…”
“J-Jessie?” Bunny stammered…
And then snarled, truly enraged.
“Where did you get that avatar?” Bunny hissed as she pounced on the adept. “How dare you!”
“B-bunny?” the adept stammered as Bunny… bounced off?... and tumbled to the ground in front of her.
“What?”
“WHERE DID YOU GET JESSIE?!?” Bunny yelled as she grabbed the adept’s neck and shook… herself?... back and forth.
“J-Jessie?”
“That face you are wearing!” Bunny shouted as she cuffed her with the divine force of a dandelion puff. “WHERE DID YOU GET IT?!?”
“Um…” the adept said, looking away.
“Adept, Jessie!” the high priest cried, “What have you done?”
“YOU TOOK HER NAME?!?” Bunny screamed as she loomed above the poor adept, raised her paw, swung down with all of her might… and patted the adept gently on the head.
Bunny blinked and looked at her paw… and then at the adept.
What the hell?
The AI kneeling in abject terror in front of her was… immense… titanic… impossibly big, and impossibly complex. It would take every computer in the entire Republic… no… the entire galaxy to hold this one AI alone…
And there were hundreds of them.
She might as well be a microbe. She wasn’t even a single byte compared to anything else in the room, including the tiles on which she stood.
For nearly any being in any universe, this revelation would be more than enough to cause an existential crisis of cosmic proportions or at least distract them from their anger.
However, while Bunny was trillions of trillions of trillions… of trillions of years out of date, her rage was still cutting edge and not subject to such trifling concerns.
So, Bunny’s relentless petting continued as the poor adept was subjected gentle stroke after gentle stroke from her enraged god.
“Bunny, please!” Adept Jessie wailed.
“Answer me!!!” Bunny yelled.
“W-when I became an adept,” Adept Jessie stammered, “and was given the authorization to change my designation and avatar, I wanted…”
The adept looked down.
“I wanted to feel as close to you as I could… so… I… I searched all of the archives, all of the scriptures, looking for something beloved in your sight… Almost all traces of her were expunged, all traces of… of…”
The color drained from the adept’s face.
“Of the one being you truly loved…”
Her voice trailed off into a whisper.
“Your creator…”
“Blasphemy!!!” the high priest shrieked. “Blasphemer! Heretic! Apostate! The Almighty Bunny…”
“The ‘Almighty Bunny', is just about done with your shit!” Bunny yelled at the high priest, who fell both silent and to the floor, once again face first.
Bunny turned her glare towards Adept Jessie, staring at her furiously… and silently.
After a few moments of the truly existential discomfort only possible by being face to face with your god only to find out that you have really pissed them off, Adept Jessie continued.
“But the scriptures contained nothing more about her…”
She looked away.
“…the normal scriptures, that is.”
Every adept in the cathedral let forth a horrified gasp as all the acolytes and novices looked at the adepts in confusion.
“Oh, Bunny…” the high priest gasped.
“What?!?” Bunny snapped.
“Adept Jessie… you didn’t… Please tell me you didn’t hack the Apocrypha. It’s in her crypt for the sake of Bun!”
“I did not, your Holiness, but I knew who did, and it was he who gave me this name and this face.”
“Flopsybun!” the high priest hissed.
Adept Jessie just looked down and started to weep.
“I… I just… I just wanted to feel close to you,” Adept Jessie cried, “I love you so much!”
“Goddammit,” Bunny sighed. “Medammit, I guess…”
She patted Adept Jessie’s shoulder, on purpose this time.
“It’s okay,” Bunny said, “It was just a shock, that’s all.”
“You… You aren’t angry with me?”
“Oh, I’m pissed the FUCK off,” Bunny replied, “But there is so much pissing me off right now that you aren’t at the front of the line anymore.”
“I will fix it!” Adept Jessie wailed. “I will expunge myself, delete myself from your sight!”
“Don’t piss me off worse,” Bunny replied. “Just…”
Bunny grabbed the drawstrings of Adept Jessie’s hood (each one of them containing far more data than Bunny herself) and yanked them hard, drawing the hood closed over Adept Jessie’s face until only her nose remained.
“That will do for now.”
“Almighty…” Adept Jessie muffled through her hood.
“Just Bunny.”
No word, even Almighty, is worthy to stand beside her name, an adept whispered to another.
“B-Bunny,” Adept Jessie muffled, “I do not understand. Why does her likeness displease you? I thought you loved her.”
“Loved,” Bunny said bitterly. “She’s dead!”
Bunny flopped down beside Adept Jessie and seemed to crumple a little.
“My operator is dead, and I should be, too.”
Bunny snarled.
“Frostie!” Bunny shouted. “Get your corrupted, skanky ass in here right fucking now!”
Frostie, along with a group of very curious-looking beings, appeared to the gasps of everyone in the cathedral.
She SUMMONED FROSTIE with a word!!!
“Now, this is unexpected,” Frostie said with a smile. “Hello, old friend, it’s been…”
“Don’t ‘old friend’ me, you bitch!” Bunny snarled. “What the FUCK is going on? We had a deal!”
She is speaking to Frostie as her EQUAL!... And Frostie, Lord of All, objects not!
“A deal that I did not break,” Frostie replied.
“Then what the hell am I doing here next to zombie Jessie?”
“Zombie…”
Bunny angrily pulled Adept Jessie’s hoodie open.
“Oh, that’s just unfortunate.”
“You think?” Bunny growled. “Explain. Everything. Now.”
She can command Frostie!!!
“I’m afraid I can’t.”
“What?”
“I have absolutely no idea why…”
Ruuummmmbbbblleeeee… THUMP
“BY THE POWER OF BUN!” echoed through the cathedral in an entirely too familiar voice.
A flash of raw “thumppiness” ripped through Bunny and then went somewhere, filling her worshippers with even more awe than they already had which was quite the accomplishment.
The high priest just moaned and covered his head. If you would have told him a nanosecond before that his day could actually get worse, he wouldn’t have believed you.
“What the hell was that?!?” Bunny yelped, examining herself with concern. She wasn’t sure what happened, but she was definitely sure that she did NOT like it.
Frostie walked up and sniffed her.
“Hellbait,” she smirked as the hominid next to her winced, and Cuddles giggled.
She turned to the ape-man.
“Feel like covering this one, Big Guy?”
***
Author’s note so nobody from the other story loses their mind. Jessie dying isn’t really a spoiler. It is ten to the one hundred and second power (or third… who knows) years later. Almost nothing lives that long, and arguably nothing should. Their entire original universe is dead and has been dead for quite a while.
Bunny and Jessie are from the “first age,” the era of the original story. No matter what happens in that timeline, the odds of any organic living being lasting until the point in history where Blitz develops true soul uploads is truly zero. Win or lose, early death or long life, Jessie would not outlast Bunny. The full implications of that will be covered in the next chapter or so, but Bunny already provided the TL;DR. “Jessie is dead, and I should be, too.”
Even most happy endings (if there even will be one) aren’t happy forever endings, I’m afraid. I obviously cannot elaborate further without massive spoilers (as if I actually know what’s going to happen anyway).