Revenant has to admit that waking up with Onslaught in your bed was an extremely enjoyable way of starting the day. Of course, she considered being awake to be a perfect reason to restart the evening cuddling session, ready to completely ignore the world in favour of more important things.
Naturally, Revenant being the calculative mastermind that he was, made sure to wake up earlier than he was supposed to, foreseeing exactly this.
They didn’t do anything other than hugs and some kisses in the morning, because they were on a restrictive schedule. They also didn’t do anything more in the evening, because Onslaught considered finding out absolutely everything she could about Chronoshift to be an existential priority.
Surprisingly chaste for a supervillain and his villain lieutenant/love interest, but… yeah, they were just being weirdos about it.
It was made painfully obvious soon after the breakfast started when Clockmaker came in. With a slightly more dreamy look on her face than he remembered. And then, when she sat on the chair, he noticed that she was wobbling to the sides a tiny little bit as if sitting perfectly straight was somewhat uncomfortable.
It was probably much more uncomfortable than she made it visible, but she was doing her best to pretend otherwise, in a completely foolish attempt to make Revenant not notice it.
Who does she think he is?
Revenant sighs internally. That answered the question of ‘who is wearing the pants in that relationship’. He always thought that Clockmaker was of purely heterosexual orientation - at least before she fell in love with the concept of sexbots - which does feel kind of odd seeing Humility’s vaguely feminine built, but…
Robots, am I right? That takes absolute precedence.
He then promptly decides to ignore that subject in its entirety, because he has more important things to dwell upon.
“Wow, boss,” Decay says dryly while trying to put butter on his sandwich. “You sure do look way better than last night. Sleeping with someone must be serving you well.”
Revenant blinks at him over the table, wondering what it is about. Because Decay looks uncharacteristically grumpy, even for him. As while he always looked grumpy, now he actually was grumpy.
“Yes, it’s quite comfortable.” Revenant replies cautiously. “What are you talk… oh.” Decay is giving him a very irritated stare now. Onslaught doesn’t even see it, but she still ends up chuckling at Revenant’s reaction. “Look, we can only bring so many people here, your wife is deadly in melee but more conventionally deadly. She’s pretty low on the list, and you know the reasons for that.”
Decay grumbles something to himself, but decides to not escalate. Revenant makes a mental note to get him something of a hobby to do in his spare time. How hard should it be to find a working videogame console in this worldwide mess of a dungeon?
Wait, do those still exist?
“What about our Canadian friends?” Onslaught then cuts in, prompting everyone to stare at her questioningly. She reads their reaction from the length of the silence. “You know how the saying goes. In Socialist Canada, the sexbots fuck you.”
Oh. Oh, wow. That was blunt. Blunt enough to almost make Clockmaker choke on her food while trying to stammer something of an answer.
“We’re doing very fine, please and thank you.” Humility replies, with her best and most expressionless voice. It really adds to the comedy. “You should watch Clockmaker when Vermillion Gamma forces are around, though. Her readiness to fully and completely submit to the will of an AI overlord is slightly worrying.”
Clockmaker, the person who cheerfully and enthusiastically advertised her newest model of neurotoxin in an internet commercial for supervillains, ends up blushing furiously while desperately trying to say something, except what comes out are half-formed words that no one knows how to interpret.
“Sorry, I don’t speak bottom.” Humility, somehow, makes it even more hilarious. Revenant has nothing but respect for whoever programmed it to be this human.
Clockmaker is clearly down for the count. Yeah, another person who is now busy doing something they never expected themselves to be doing, making them highly confused and as a result, act out of character.
Revenant had that with being reunited with Onslaught, and Clockmaker had that with being railed by a genocidal rogue AI from the far future.
“You should really stop impersonating Cripple so much, though,” Revenant says towards Onslaught, who immediately shows him her tongue. “I’m serious. What would your dad say if he heard you being influenced by the head of the Socialist Party’s Vanguard Action Unit of all people?”
Cripple was a bit of a dick, but the amount of socialism-themed jokes and idioms they had at their disposal was nothing short of inspirational. Even Revenant had to admit it. Although that one was just a modern iteration of ancient jokes about the first Soviet Union.
“Knowing him, he would probably decide that it’s time to embrace socialism himself, just so that his little angel was happy.” Onslaught replies. Honestly, Revenant couldn’t discount that option. He was a… really doting father, his supervillain career aside. “So, what’s the plan for today?”
“We’re speedrunning the neolithic revolution.” Revenant replies. “Namely, establishing agriculture, because eventually we’re going to run out of food and I don’t want to be forced to eat anyone.”
“Well, while I’m sure that some of the people at that table would enjoy being eaten out, I guess that we should really avoid resorting to cannibalism.” Onslaught says with a completely serious look on her face. Revenant actually stares at her in shock, this being very direct, even for her.
“I think that the right word for what’s coming to you, boss…” Decay comments from the other side of the table, his sandwich already devoured. “... is ‘death by snu snu’. Good luck.”
This breaks Onslaught’s serious face and sends her into a laughing fit. Revenant sighs painfully before staring daggers at Decay for a moment (he clearly doesn’t care, he never did) and returning to doing his job.
“Right.” He surrenders, before sighing loudly. “Humility, did you find the open space I asked you for?”
“There is something like that nearby, even if in the direction of Vermillion Gamma’s nearest capital ship.” The AI replies. “A hall about fifty meters by twenty. Or, well, one hundred sixty-five feet by sixty-five feet, for you imperial heathens.”
Everyone at the table flips it the bird in an instant, excluding Clockmaker. The sole heretic among the VAA leadership that was consistently using a metric system for absolutely everything.
“That should be fine enough.” Revenant then adds (there are jokes and there is work he has to do). “Thorn can do some accelerated agriculture, although her individuality requires sunlight and water to keep working to its maximum effect.”
“And how will we cover that?” Humility asks. “Humidity appears to have been set to more or less one level consistently throughout this whole mess, thanks to Visitor’s meddling no doubt, and we do have water in the faucets even if I have no idea where it’s coming from. But sunlight?”
“We’re getting Virtue next.” Revenant replies. “She is going to be the strongest combatant we have here thus far and can generate any amount of sunlight we need her to. Actual sunlight, a full spectrum of it, meaning that plants won’t notice the difference. The next is probably Hypothermia.”
Yes, he does notice Onslaught freezing for a millisecond, but he isn’t bl… Damn, this almost came out wrong.
“Since the air around us for some reason appears homeostatic in nature…” He continues narrating his plan.“... she should be able to produce any amount of water we need by freezing the moisture in the air and then letting the ice melt. So, reasonably clean water that can also be used for Thorn’s crops. “
“Homeostatic?” Onslaught decides to ask. Right, Revenant forgot to explain that part.
“We’re very deep underground, and we have spent a night in a relatively small room without a ventilation system and with a closed door.” Revenant replies. “The air in the morning should be at least somewhat worse in quality than it was in the evening. The fact that it was perfectly fine implies that whatever the Visitor did set not just gravity to a comfortable 1g, but also made it so that the condition of air returns to the default setting after a while.”
Clockmaker nods faintly, looks like Revenant wasn’t the only human party member to notice that fact. But it’s Humility that speaks first.
“That seems to be the case, yes.” The AI says. “In fact, it’s not just air and gravity. It’s extremely slow, but it seems that even the walls we’ve damaged are at least somewhat repaired. Not the hole in the wall that the initial scout team did, but the decay marks that we’ve made while fighting off the investigation unit partially disappeared. No, I don’t know why.”
Confusing. Shouldn’t the hole in the wall start recovering first? Except, that’s when Decay realizes something.
“It’s a battle royale,” Decay says, mostly to himself, and with a tone of surprise. Everyone is suddenly looking at him, so he looks back at Humility. “It’s a goddamn battle royale.”
“Eh?” The AI clearly failed to see the same thing. Then again, so does Revenant.
“How many of those ‘threats’ could be in a single star system?” Decay asks. “And it’s just one part of the gigastructure. Wanna bet that wherever we’ll go, we’ll find even more horrible threats unloaded there by the Visitor?”
And now Revenant realized what he meant. It was just the sort of video game logic that normally shouldn’t be applicable in the real world, but…
“It made the star system into an arena, set it up to be consistently livable even though it technically shouldn’t be, and then dropped competitors that it collected for who knows how long into it.” Humility says. Its voice lacks expressions, but somehow Revenant knows that if it did have a face, it would display a look of pure shock. “This is… insane, but it also makes sense.”
“The Nightmares, those, errr, discount Wishgranters, can do that?” Revenant asks. Because honestly, that sounds way too… human-like for eldritch abominations as far as the motivations go. Not like he has a lot of experience with them, but… his stepsister was technically a prophet of a religion worshipping one.
It’s hard to not learn everything that Mankind knew about the Wishgranter in the process. She was very talkative about it.
The logic he presented makes sense for humans, but not exactly for eldritch abominations.
“It didn’t have to perceive it that way.” Humility replies. “It might have simply been collecting the small moving things, namely starships like a child would collect colourful bugs until there was enough of them to fill their pockets to the brim. So, the child made a storage container out of some conveniently placed soil, wood stone and metal, before emptying its pockets into it. Completely unaware that the bugs are going to start killing each other. Or that some of that soil was inhabited by even smaller bugs.”
Ah, yes. Cosmic Horror Story vibes. How lovely. Truly the best genre to wake up in.
“Sounds like whatever he did to the system was either permanent or long-term, then.” Revenant decides. “Because it made it to store its collection until it returns, but… well, it did gather a said collection for years, right?”
The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.
“That it most certainly did, yes.” Humility agrees. “But the problem is something else. If you are right, then this whole compressed star system is now a gigastructure-sized wretched hive of scum and villainy. We’re right in the middle of the Human Space-wide collection of human, alien and extradimensional monsters. And I’m fairly sure that the perimeter fleet already figured out that it’s here to stay. You know what that means?” He doesn’t, so after a moment more it keeps speaking. “That they might be holding the perimeter to avoid anyone escaping from this place… while waiting for the local equivalent of a Death Star to arrive and wipe out the entire gigastructure together with everyone inside.”
… well, this is a big ‘oh, crap’ moment.
“If that’s true…” Revenant says, squinting his eyes at the AI. “... then how much time do we have?”
“That depends on many factors, most of which I simply don’t know the value of.” Humility admits. “I don’t have any solid intel on the fleet, aside from the fact that it’s there. Judging from when it apparently showed up and how many ships are up there, it’s most likely a local detachment of the Explorers’ Guild. That would…”
“Look, I know that you’re thinking aloud, but offering at least a basic background while doing that is considered to be a sign of good manners.” Decay, of all people, cuts in. “The hell is the Explorers’ Guild?”
He is probably interested because of the word ‘guild’. The chances of local MMORPG guilds being capable of fielding space fleets were rather slim, though.
“The international organization dedicated to stellar cartography, exploration of potentially colonizable worlds, and securing exotechs.” Humility replies. “Officially, that is. Unofficially it does all of that while also being Confederation of Mankind’s black ops division. Making sure that the public doesn’t find out that the entire Nightmare category of threats exists is among their jobs.”
“Sounds like perfectly nice and empathetic people with no history of war crimes whatsoever.” Revenant replies. Asking ‘why exactly are they hiding that?!’ is left for another time. “You may continue thinking aloud.”
“They probably don’t want to risk orbital bombardment of this whole thing, if only because they don’t know if it won’t explode or something when they do it.” Humility does as told. “So, they are most likely waiting for a weapon that can destroy the whole thing in one salvo, erasing it completely and instantly. In short… they are waiting for a ship carrying a weapon system capable of obliterating an entire star system in one activation.”
Did he mention that Future Mankind scares him a little? Well, it certainly does. It also makes Clockmaker into something between excited and horny, and he is fairly sure that he doesn’t want to know anything about that. Ugh.
“But there aren’t many of those.” Humility continues. “And unless one of them was conveniently close, which is extremely unlikely due to how much in the middle of nowhere this system is, we talk about a long time before its arrival. Especially as while the FTL travel technology is common, fairly cheap and more or less reliable, it’s also slow. Slow as in ‘you’d need at least two weeks to get from Sol to Alpha Centauri’.” That’s… very slow for an FTL in a science-fiction world. Then again, it’s not exactly fiction, now is it? “There are also no FTL communications aside from courier ships, meaning that the ship carrying the call for the big guns has to first get to their position, and only then will they start moving.”
That sounds increasingly better and better if he is to be honest. But… he needs to ask.
“So… weeks?” He says, Humility pausing its thinking-aloud session for a moment. “Months?”
“I’d say six months is a reasonable estimate.” Humility replies. “ Even with Guild’s priority access to the jumpgate network, they first need to establish a proper cover story for parading a superdreadnought armed with star-killing superweapons alongside the interstellar shipping lanes without making local human polities anxious. Might up to a year if the ship in question is busy with another assignment, if the Guild decides to focus on locating and killing the Visitor first, or if they decide to take the merciful option and attempt to recover at least some of the civilian population of the system before blasting it all to kingdom come.”
Six months then. That’s either a lot of time… or very little of it, depending on how you look at it.
“How hard would it be to construct an FTL-capable ship once we get to the surface?” He asks the AI. “Assuming that we have all the parts we need.” They could just use Demiurge for that. Her individuality makes her a living goddess of logistics and resource production.
Goddamnit. He realized it now. They escaped their superhero comic book just to start playing real-world Rimworld. Ugh. And there are no unwashed savages around that they can lord over akin to gods… angry gods.
Decay’s tendency to play old videogames regularly comes useful. Who would have known?
“Not hard at all.” The AI surprises him. FTL must be really common and cheap, indeed. “However, making an FTL-capable ship that can get to the edge of the system without being intercepted by the containment fleet is going to be much harder. And that’s if the fleet won’t detect launch preparation and doesn’t send a few smaller ships for a strafing run before we even get off the ground.”
Ah, yes. It would be much easier if the enemy was stupid. Unfortunately, the enemy was seldom stupid.
“Then it’s going to be a plan B, if we don’t find a conveniently placed pre-existing ship, right under the surface of the planet.” Revenant decides, making Humility nod. The others have, clearly, mostly excused themselves from active participation in the talk, even if they are still listening intently. “You probably don’t have a conveniently placed database of blueprints of all we need for constructing a ship stored in your hard drive, am I right?”
“I had to abandon most of my precious data to fit into this body.” Humility replies. “There were more important things to preserve, like my personality and ego. My original plan was to use the clones to achieve your plan A, namely securing a small and fast ship buried right under the surface. I didn’t need to have a full technological process of spaceship construction stored in my head for this.”
Fair. It makes their job a little harder, but fair. He doesn’t ask if there’s an option to come back for what it left behind, because… he still remembers the part where it passed by a mass cargo vessel inhabited by something scary. That ‘hopefully’ didn’t follow it here.
He isn’t touching that. Besides, if that was an option, it would most likely mention it.
On a side note, Revenant has enough self-control to not laugh over Humility ego’s taking so much space on its hard drive that almost nothing else fits there. Sure, it makes perfect sense (as an AI, it had to take a lot of space for itself on a hard drive), but with just how much pride it tended to have, it was still a bit hilarious.
“Hmm, I think I can figure it out on my own, though?” Clockmaker decides to speak, Revenant giving her a questioning look. “Look, it’s all science, okay? Give me enough time, assistants and a few ships to dissect and I should be able to figure the technology out. Get me a good creative mood centred on ‘I want to escape this hellhole’ and enough resources and I should be able to build a working starship.”
Boastful. But she actually did build some spaceships, back then. It was all a matter of figuring out what changed in that craft in the meantime and figuring out how to produce an FTL drive.
Should they be able to scavenge it from somewhere? He has no idea how they work or how big they are.
“Sounds like a plan,” Revenant says, before clapping his hands. “Alright then, folks, I think it’s time for the next session of the Existential Crisis.”
Once again, they pick up the clothes on their way to the resurrection chamber. Thorn would probably kill them if they didn’t.
***
Thorn is a young woman, about his age, with long, straight, dark green hair dotted with a handful of naturally-grown flowers, and a body build that was, honestly, perfectly average. Not even nearly as much of a waistcut as Clockmaker had, breasts that were somewhere between Halworth’s bountifulness and Onslaught’s cuteness, and…
… well, to be honest, that’s it. Not much more to say about her, aside from some freckles here and there. She never really cared all that much about her looks or clothes.
“Close your eyes, especially Decay,” Revenant says when Humility starts preparing the tube for release. Then he stops seeing anything because he, too, closes his eyes. “We don’t want her to be too… angry.”
He even put the clothes on the floor right next to the tube, as if an offering to an angry god.
“What, is she a prude?” Humility asks. At least that one doesn’t have eyes to close.
Revenant sighs.
“Calling someone a prude is like calling someone a slut, at least in my eyes.” He says. “It’s unnecessarily confrontational and insulting. She isn’t a prude, she just doesn’t enjoy being seen naked and sees no issues with making it known. Which is a perfectly valid position and behaviour unless she goes physical about it.”
“Nice of you to remember that, Revenant.” He hears Thorn saying. Uh-oh, he missed the sound of the tube opening. Now that he does focus on hearing, he can hear her putting her clothes on. “Care to elaborate on what exactly happened for me to wake up… here, wherever it is? And… wait a moment, is that Onslaught?”
Yeah, seeing dead people was a shocking thing. Especially to someone of her religious beliefs.
“Yep.” Onslaught replies. “That’s me. I’m a ghost. A ghoooost.” She says, in a bit of a … mockingly haunting voice.
“Onslaught, please, you’re not helping.” Revenant retorts, just to hear her giggle. Yeah, making him react was probably the point. “Thorn, err, can I open my eyes now?”
“Yes.” She replies. In her typical stern and serious tone. She was… always rather serious.
The clothes she’s wearing are a very conservative flowery dress reaching almost all the way down to her ankles. It’s… not her villain uniform. Then again, like Decay, she took the Retirement option before the conclusion of the Second Villain War.
Like him, she had kids now. Except hers were adopted. She was pretty much running an orphanage.
She was also staring at him, her eyes squinting with a combination of irritation and slight anger. He slightly dreads the latter. She was a perfectly nice and kind person unless you really pushed the wrong buttons.
“Look, I know that this is going to be a shocking revelation, so I’m going to blitz it,” Revenant announces. “The world we all lived in was false, we were all characters in a superhero comic, but apparently some reality mess that totally isn’t magic with extra steps brought us to the actual world.”
Thorn gives him a thousand-yard stare. Yeah, that was… err, actually the normal reaction, he has no idea why the other dumbasses (himself included) reacted differently.
“Humility, by the way, religion is still around, right?” He quickly asks, taking advantage of Thorn being out. The AI nods. “The Roman Catholic Church didn’t, like, disappear or anything?” He can scarcely imagine an apocalypse that can uproot an organization that was around for more than two thousand years and had holdings on every continent, but… you never know.
“No, it’s still around.” Humility replies. “Although they took a bit of a step back in their ways. To how things were earlier.”
“Oh? Like what, masses in Latin?” Revenant asks, ignoring Thorn for a moment and focusing on the AI.
“Crusades.” Humility replies. Revenant whistles loudly.
Father Dread is going to love the real world. Well, when - or, rather, if - they resurrect him. He might be the United States’ most dangerous supervillain, but Father Dread is one of the most infamous vigilantes. And he is actually rather terrifying.
“Wait, she’s a Roman Catholic?” Humility connects the dots finally. “Despite being one of your previous villain lieutenants?”
“I’m not a villain.” That wakes Thorn up. “I’m a hero by profession, and a sidekick by position.” Yeah, she always made it clear. Even now, despite the shock sandwich she was just served, her voice is still rather confident when she says those words.
After a few seconds of awkward silence, Humility glances at Revenant. Despite the robot lacking a face, he can still feel the accusatory glare.
“The People's Liberation Front had many sympathizers and full-blown members among the heroes.” Revenant replies before Humility gets a wrong idea and does something stupid. “Even years after the First Villain War ended, they consider themselves to still be heroes, just loyal to a different government of the United States. And acting as an urban guerilla against the ‘legal’ government.”
“So, spicier vigilantes.” Humility summarizes it. Not entirely wrongly, they were straddling the fence between vigilantism and villainy, but…
“Heroes.” Thorn replies ardently. “He-roes, you overly talkative toaster.” She then adds, dragging the first word longer. Did she figure out that Humility was an AI, or was she suspecting it of being someone with a very weird individuality?
But then she’s back to the existential dread moment, covers her face in her hands and says loudly that she needs to sit down for a moment because this is a bit too much for her, Decay rushing forward to help her.
Shouldn’t be that bad, she is mentally strong and the worst impact should be lessened by Decay’s quick reassurance that they should be able to get her adoptive kids into the real world too, once they figure out the basics.
Humility leans over Revenant’s shoulder right after Thorn leaves the hearing range.
“Wait until she discovers that the present pope is an alien machine intelligence from a friendlier branch of MENACE/VERMILLION.” The AI states, making Revenant wheeze loudly.
He now has questions.
***
Another character, this time Thorn.
Say what you what, the AI generators are getting scary.
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