The little crab reached down and picked up another scrumptious bit of little food.

It was something called an “iron star.” He chewed thoughtfully as the little star crunched pleasantly in his mandibles. He liked this little food even better than snail eggs!

It was so good!

It wondered if the universe was truly food if iron stars were still around, not that he was complaining. I mean, they would eventually collapse into neutron stars or black holes or something, right?

It shrugged a crabby little shrug. It’s not like they always waited for food to stop moving, anyhow.

It picked up another iron star and nibbled it while he watched two much larger crabs wrestling over a quite tasty-looking supermassive black hole. He thought there wasn’t going to be any fighting. But, as he watched with more than a little concern, he heard them laughing and realized that they weren’t taking off each other’s bits.

They were just playing.

While they were, a huge claw appeared and snatched up the black hole like it was little food.

Okay, now that was a little impressive.

Ooh! This iron star actually had some planets around it!

There was so much to taste and so much to learn!

He stopped sightseeing and got back to work.

***

Back on Nolta, a huge crab awoke and nudged its little not food.

It was still empty.

It wasn’t worried. Its friend would notice that he was missing his crab sooner or later. It munched the food that it brought back to its home and chatted with their little not-food friend. Their friend didn’t respond, but that was okay. It was still nice talking to them.

After another nap and another meal, it was out of food.

It gave its friend a little hopeful shake. Nope. Nothing.

Well, this was a pickle. It needed to go look for food, but it didn’t want to leave its friend because it might be mistaken for food, which would be sad. After a brief ponder, not knowing what else to do, it put its friend on its head.

It wasn’t entirely unthinkable. I mean, crabs rode around on each other’s backs all the time. I mean, this was a little different, but the moon wasn’t close to making this awkward.

It was okay.

With its little friend perched on its head like a jaunty little hat, it ventured forth.

***

Velanora examined the large crystalline and metallic structure in the center of the valley with a sad little huff.

She understood absolutely nothing. It might as well be as magic as anything else in this strange world.

She couldn’t even understand what the displays were saying. Never in her very long life had she ever felt as completely backward as she had since she met Frostie and F10w3rchy1d. She might as well be a naked savage scratching in the dirt.

When F10w3rchy1d offered to explain things, she always loudly insisted that she wanted her people to develop it by themselves. No cheating. The truth of the matter was a little different. She desperately wanted to know how they did what they did…

…the problem is that even with F10w3rchy1d patiently trying to explain, she still didn’t understand. She felt so stupid in their presence. Even the mortals scurrying around her, scanning and occasionally making adjustments knew more than she did.

Perhaps “mortal” wasn’t the right word. Some of them could very well be older than she was with their damned uploads… Something else she couldn’t replicate with enough confidence to ensure they didn’t wind up like those Noltans F10w3rchy1d were talking about. That’s why it was an “abomination”. Every single time her people attempted it, the result was digital undead. Phantasms that would fool the eye (and mind) but were as cold and dead as the circuits that held them.

It was a lot harder than it looked. To digitize a consciousness was easy enough, but how do you upload a soul?

No matter how many times F10w3rchy1d tried to explain that, it was like trying to drink from a firehose. Oh, F10w3rchy1d was nice about it. She wasn’t condescending or impatient. She knew how tricky these concepts, ones they had mastered so long ago that it might as well be forever, were. She was just trying to teach FTL to someone still in the bronze age.

Before Velanora met them, she thought she and her people were masters of physics, spacetime, and all the rest. Now, she knew they hadn’t even started in earnest yet. Once, she was a god. Now?

Now she was a little ignorant savage following real gods around like a skorl, eagerly nibbling at their shit.

It was enough to really get to you sometimes.

It used to be just a painful thorn in her side, an almost welcome reminder that there was still much to learn, a spur to goad her from complacency. Now, it was a dagger seeking her heart. Their universe was dying. Oh, they had time, plenty of it, but the universe was becoming darker and more desperate every million years. Genocidal total war had replaced joyous first contact long ago.

It was kill or be killed now and their foes, sometimes species they had never met before, were every bit as advanced as they were. She was scrambling between developing better weapons, better ships, and better defenses and jumping that last big hurdle…

…the barrier between universes themselves.

Even then, she was undaunted. She was Velanora, the goddess of technology. She had never failed. But, she just found out that she and her followers had been wrong. They had been wrong about the fundamental nature of reality itself.

It had driven some of her followers to suicide, including her beloved avatar. She acted like she didn’t care too much. That was what gods did…

…but that was her child.

Yes, it was mortal and doomed to die in the flicker of an eye, but she liked that one, dammit. Unfortunately, it was too smart. It realized what his “discovery” actually meant.

That billions of years deadline? It just got a lot tighter.

If they were wrong about things that they held as fundamental truths for this long, what else are they wrong about? They had spent billions of years growing and developing as a race, and at the deepest and most fundamental levels, they knew nothing.

The Planck constants weren’t the limits. They were just the beginning, more of a speed bump if even that. Those “undefinable” things, things that “didn’t matter”? Well, guess what?

They fucking mattered.

Besides, they had them wrong, anyway. Not by much. They could dance between stars as easily as crossing the street…

…but that was as far as they would ever go. That was it. They had hit the last great filter hard, like start over hard.

And F10w3rchy1d?

F10w3rchy1d thought it was funny. She thought that Velanora and her people were being cute as their very existence was quite possibly at an end. F10w3rchy1d probably had no idea how much she twisted the knife. She probably thought she was being encouraging and even helping.

She wasn’t. Not really. Their intense conversation at Sk’athor’s?

Velanora understood precious little of it. She pulled out the bar napkins and looked at them hopelessly. It might as well be… Well, she didn’t even know what it might as well be. That’s how bad it was.

Oh, F10w3rchy1d tried. She really did. She kept backing up and “dumbing down” and backing up… over and over again until the one thing that Velanora simply could not stand started to show up in her eyes…

Pity.

Then, as they sat there, F10w3rchy1d just had to say it…

“Don’t worry, you’ll figure it out in time. We did. Even if you don’t, we will bail you out.”

Velanora died a little inside when she heard that. F10w3rchy1d didn’t really expect her to figure it out. She fully expected to have to save her poor pathetic, and doomed people. She expected Velanora to fail. The worst part…

…Velanora was actually grateful. That was what really cut. She knew she wasn’t going to figure it out either. If it wasn’t for meeting Blitz, a truly cosmically infinitesimally improbable event, they would surely perish.

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Two of the technicians were lounging nearby, sucking on vaporizers and exhaling intricate geometric forms in what appeared to be some sort of leisure activity. Even though they were from a different universe, the vibe of two weary techs taking a breather was the same.

“The [untranslatable] is going to pop.”

“Yep. {REDACTED} is playing hell with (incomprehensible). The #something?# can’t handle the temporal flux.”

“(Snort) But what do we know, right?”

“Heh, Yeah, fuck them. I can’t wait to see the look on that asshole’s face when he has to tell Pantsu that we lost redundancy.”

“She’s going to eat him alive.”

The pair laughed a bit.

“We have the repair parts, right?”

“Of course. I’m not going to actually risk the mission. The fail-safes are more than up to it. It’s going to get really trippy in here, though.”

“Ooh! I love it when that happens! I hope we get some coalescence. I collect those.”

The pair returned to inhaling something weird and blowing even weirder shapes.

“Excuse me,” Velanora said as she approached the pair.

“Hey there,” one of them said, “You’re that technology entity, right?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Neat! Must be so cool discovering things for the first time.”

“Yeah, it’s a real blast. Can I ask you something?”

“Sure!”

“Is the temporal effect related to the Planck constant?”

“Ha! Good one!”

Velanora blinked in confusion.

“Dude, I think she’s serious.”

Velanora just turned and walked away.

“Hey, wait!” the tech called out. “I didn’t mean to… shit.”

“Asshole,” the other tech said.

“I didn’t know, okay?”

***

Velanora, now even deeper in a funk, decided that another drink would help. So, she started heading away from tech she couldn’t understand to something that she could, beer.

“NO! It’s mine! I found it!” a shrill voice screamed.

“What do you have, you little sneak?” a burly dwarf shouted as it wrestled with a small blue-green naked humanoid with scraggly black hair.

“You threw it away! I can have it! You said so!” the little thing screamed as he held something tightly in its hands.

“Give it here, you thieving little bastard!” the dwarf yelled as it finally managed to get the naked little thing to the ground.

“No! No, no, no!” the thing cried as the dwarf finally prized the thing’s fingers apart.

The dwarf laughed as it held up part of a broken whetstone.

“Give it back!” the little thing yelled, almost in tears.

The dwarf casually tossed it back, and the thing grabbed it out of the air and ran off.

“What the fuck?” Velanora demanded, fearing that she was about to get rather angry.

“The cave monkey?” the dwarf asked, “Thieving little idiots, but you can’t stay mad at them.”

“It was just a piece of whetstone.”

“This time,” the dwarf chuckled. “It could have just as easily been anything else, like a good hammer, or worse, something that could get the little idiot hurt. Some of the things we carry might not be healthy. Not a mean bone in their bodies, but you have to keep an eye on the little shits.”

The dwarf looked over at a passing elf.

“Isn’t that right, tree hugger?”

“Isn’t what right, rock licker?” the elf asked with good humor.

“We’re talking about cave monkeys.”

“Oh, the ancestor spirits?” she asked, “Sneaky little things, but what can you do? I love them to death, but they are such a menace.”

He smiled at Velanora.

“We call them ancestor spirits because when they showed up a couple of years ago, some of them found their way into one of our most sacred groves where we leave food and other gifts for our departed ancestors. Well, we started to notice that they were going missing. Nature consumes the gifts we give it, but some of our tributes had some decidedly non-natural teeth marks, and the droppings we found were not left by an animal we knew of. We thought it was some kobolds or something. This was… annoying. While we wouldn’t kill someone for the slight, it would be quite unpleasant for someone disrespecting our traditions in such a fashion.”

“What? You would tie them to a tree, again?” the dwarf chortled, “That’s what you do about everything else.”

“We… We might do something else…” the elf grumbled. (They were totally going to tie them to a tree.) “Anyhow, instead of kobolds… or dwarves… we found those poor little things, naked and shivering. While not “animals” or of “nature,” they were close enough, so we continued to leave the offerings. They would have starved otherwise. They had no idea how to even survive.”

The elf smiled.

“Of course, once they realized that they weren’t going to be slaughtered, again, they started showing up everywhere. They’d just climb up into your home, help themselves to food, and then start sweeping and tidying up. Or, you would wake up in the middle of the night with one curled up at the foot of your bed, the little fiends. You can’t become too angry with them, though. They are simple and will take anything that you leave unattended, but they are as kind as can be.”

Velanora frowned.

“I think I heard that they were homunculi,” the elf continued, “created by a human alchemist and were pretty popular as slaves and, from what I understand, minor sacrifices and sources of some of their foul ingredients. The alchemist sold a bunch of them. Of course, they just had to make a female version for reasons that do not need explaining. Well, it turns out that the ancestor spirits are capable of reproducing. For some reason or another, that was not acceptable, and they were almost wiped out. A few managed to escape and managed to make their way north. I suspect that they were helped. Most humans are decent sorts, after all. It’s just their kings and champions that are vile.”

“Some of them showed up in our mines about the same time,” the dwarf said. Food and random things started going missing. We also thought it was the kobolds,” he laughed.

“Yeah, blame the kobolds,” a kobold in nicely made leather armor said as he ambled up. “We are always the ones responsible.”

“As we are both aware,” the elf said, “This time, however, we are talking about the ancestor spirits.”

“The grublin?” the kobold asked, “That is their name, by the way. Great guys. A little clueless, but what can you expect? They only have existed for five years or so. Let’s see how you do if you were stripped naked and dropped in the middle of human lands, point ear. We have no beef with the grublin. They are good people. Their fingers are properly sticky, and they are tough as a boot. I got a family or two in my tribe. Dumb as rocks but as nice as can be. You know that guy you just hassled, Keb? I gave him a pair of nice pants I made out of a cape that a kind elf generously ‘donated.’ You know what he did? He gave him to another grublin because they were cold.”

“I’m surprised he didn’t try to plant them,” the elf smirked. “And you are asking to get tied to a tree… again,” she added in an oddly friendly way.

“Tell her about the clothesvines!” the dwarf laughed.

“Oh, that was priceless,” the elf laughed in their musical way. “We had a bunch of clotheslines go missing, and since the clothes weren’t taken as well, we knew it wasn’t the kobolds,” she said, glaring at the kobold.

“Forgive us for appreciating fine textiles.”

“Asshole,” the elf muttered (with a little smile), “We paid a visit to our sacred grove to find little mounds of dirt, each with one of our clotheslines at the bottom. They actually thought that our clothes grew from the clotheslines and were going to grow enough clothes for everyone.”

The elf and dwarf laughed.

“It is so adorable!” the elf laughed, “They have just made the ‘discovery’ that you can plant seeds, and they are now trying to plant everything!”

Adorable… The word echoed in Velanora’s mind over and over.

Her eyes started to blaze. The elf and the dwarf looked at her curiously as the kobold somehow managed to disappear without anyone noticing. (It seemed a good thing to do.)

Without a word, she stomped off.

Using her absolutely not divine powers, it did not take her long to track down Keb, who was surrounded by a group of mostly naked grublin.

“Try rubbing it harder!” one of them exclaimed as Keb furiously scrubbed a stick with the whetstone.

“I think it needs to be some of that met-al,” a grublin woman (wearing some rather nice pants and nothing else) said. “Do we have any met-al?”

“Hello, there,” Velanora said as she walked up.

“We didn’t steal it!” Keb shouted.

“Oh, I know,” Velanora smiled, “Besides, I don’t care what you steal as long as it isn’t from me, of course.”

Bump…

Keb smiled at her uncertainly.

“So,” Velanora asked as she squatted down among them, “what are you trying to do?”

“We’re going to make swords and stuff!” Keb exclaimed, “So we can help protec!”

“Yeah!” the woman exclaimed, “They said that everyone could play parts, and that would help, so we came to play parts!”

She frowned.

“But can’t play parts much. We want to help because it’s bad, but we don’t know how.”

“We can play some parts!” another grublin said happily, “We help! We do! We can carry stuff, and help sweep, and in the kit-chen! We do important stuff!”

Velanora heard a little snicker as a richly dressed goblin holding a thick tome walked past.

“We do!” the grublin yelled at the goblin. “We are helping!”

“Why don’t you plant that stone?” the goblin smiled, “maybe it will grow more of… (hurk!)”

He clutched at his abdomen.

“Where did my wet-stone go?” Keb asked as he looked at his empty hands.

“I have absolutely no idea,” Velanora smiled, “Hey, smarty pants,” she yelled at the goblin, “Let me know if you find it.”

“You… You…” the goblin moaned with both anger and no small amount of discomfort.

“Run.”

After a brief moment, the goblin decided that was probably the right thing to do and waddled off as quickly as he could manage.

Velanora looked at the little group of literally naked (mostly) savages.

They were exactly the same as she was, utterly clueless and desperate to help with no idea how…

…and people thought they were adorable.

“Oh, that’s it!” Velanora roared, shaking the whole valley, knocking the poor grublin flat.

“You want to know about clothesvines and wet-stones and met-al?”

The grublin all nodded excitedly.

Velanora ripped off her clothes.

“Then let’s go and figure it out together.”

“Figure what out?” Keb asked.

“Everything.”

Bump motherfucking BUMP!!!

“Come on!” Velanora called out, naked and happy. “It all starts with twine!”

“Twine?”

“I’ll show you! Let’s go!”

“Okay!”

Velanora led her little band of naked savages towards the woods.

“Actually, it starts with rocks,” Velanora smiled.

“What does?”

“Everything.”

(bump)

“Oh my gosh!” Evaraxxus, the chipmunk of destiny, exclaimed as he sat on his sister’s head. “I can’t believe it! I am witnessing the birth of the Grublon Technocracy! I… I… Wow! The scriptures were true a goddess did cast aside her clothes and her treasures to lead them, as naked as they were, into the woods and…”

“Veeeeellllllaaaaaannnnnnooooorrrrrraaaaaa!” Evangeline shrieked, cutting him off.

“What?” Velanora asked happily, not even slowing down.

“Stop!”

“Nope!”

“You are wrecking the timeline!”

“Don’t care!”

Evangeline ran in front of her blocking her path as Evaraxxus and Faun hurried to catch up. (Faun was loving this!)

“I’m not letting you do this!” Evangeline exclaimed. “We are here to stop… him… not do… whatever it is that you are doing!”

“You are here to stop him,” Velanora replied, “I’m here to take these wonderful beings who are actually at tech level zero and start anew!!!”

“What are you talking about?” Evangeline shouted, “Have you lost your mind?”

“No. I think I finally found it.”

“Well, find it somewhere else,” Evangeline said firmly, “You are NOT supposed to be here!”

“It’s fine!” Evaraxxus, the butterfly of the heavens, said as he fluttered up, “This is exactly…”

“Shut up!” Evangeline snapped, waving him off. “And you,” Evangeline said to Velanora, “Are either stopping this madness or going home.”

“To borrow a phrase from you, kind mentor,” Velanora replied, “Suck my dick.”

“You don’t have a dick!”

Fwoomph

Faun giggled.

“Okay, I asked for that,” Evangeline said. “But fun time is over.”

She reached for Velanora…

…who was suddenly not there anymore, along with her followers.

“Where the fuck did she go?” Evangeline said as her eyes glowed and she looked around frantically.

She turned to Evaraxxus, the Pelican of Mystery.

“I’m sorry,” he replied as he preened, “I cannot tell you.”

“I can and will beat it out of you.”

“No, I mean that I am unable,” Evaraxxus replied. “According to the ancient texts, the naked goddess and her followers disappeared for years, and the bitch goddess could not find them. So I strongly suspect that the question isn’t where but when.”

“I’m going to kill her,” Evangeline seethed. “I’m going to fucking kill…”

Bump