Reincarnated in a Lonely Universe

The world of Darien was not large, when you were looking at it from orbit. When you had a jump drive. When you were thinking in terms of galaxies and solar systems.

Well.

I had just been reminded, most unpleasantly, just how verylargea world was when you had to get around with your own two feet and using sail boats when I had asked Thirsha and Lokken how long it would take to get their siblings, the nominally 'heroic' Elisn and Kirenna, to arrive for a discussion of what to do next: Merely getting either monarch a message would take weeks, days if we used a magically enchanted flying creature, and then getting them here or us to either of their throne rooms would take weeks or months more.

And we didn'thaveweeks or months. Hell, every hour I spent in this strange construct and away from dealing with the Dark Lord made my skin feel itchy, my fur tingly. My tail lashed as I stood in the bridge of theMenagerieand tried to think through all the possibilities.

Right now, the Dark Lord could have dispatched his other fleets to other solar systems. How many people had been killed?

Well, maybe a dozen,I thought. The reminder felt like a serious kick to my pants - I was used to thinking, at the end of the day, of scales that matched sizes. Like, if someone destroyed aplanet, back in my universe, that would mean wiping out literally every single human being that had ever lived. Ever. It would be the total end of my species, of the history of my race, all of it from the beginning of time to wherever we could have gone. Meanwhile, inthisuniverse, destroying a planet had a twenty percent chance to have ruined a single person's summer house.

So, I didn't need to immediately panic.

"What is taking them so long?" I asked.

Kanagoraga, who was sitting with Keke, the two of them bent over a large, leather bound tome full of ornately scribed pages in a language they were translating entirely through magic, jerked her head up. "Probably scheming," she said. "A man like Lokken seems like he's never happy if he's not scheming."

I pursed my lips. She had a worryingly good point there.

The door to the bridge hissed open and Thirsha ducked her head, frowning up at the metal doorframe as she moved through it. She had doffed her plate armor and was going about in what she thought was a fairly normal, modest set of clothing for the interior of a flying battlecarrier: A thin loop of cloth over her breasts and a loincloth. If I had not gotten used to hanging around with a girl like Ara Ara, I was pretty sure that this would have been entirely arresting, as opposed to merelymostlyarresting.

"Lokken believes that the lodestone infusion will work," she said, her lips curling as she slowly tilted her head around the whole bridge. "I still have a hard time believing that you prefer to live in this metal coffin."

"Who said anything about preferring?" I asked, sitting on my command throne. "I mean, I don'thateit, but at this moment, I'd trade theMenageriefor a nice house in the suburbs and a chance to retire with Keke, Kanagoraga, and Alin."

Thirsha nodded, curtly.

A sudden shudder went through the entireMenagerie. I felt it not just in my body, but in my soul too - it was as if some great weight had shifted atop my shoulders, as if my belly had just done a triple flip. I wobbled, even in the command throne. Thirsha frowned, her nose wrinkling and her long, pointed ears twitching up slightly.

"Ough, that felt bad," Kanagoraga wheezed, while Keke bent over and vomited onto the floor, clutching her belly. I was on my feet and at their sides in a second, kneeling down. The acrid smell of Keke's sick was almost as unpleasant as the greenish expression on her face - which was impressive, considering her features were so chitinous for an elf.

"Are you two okay?" I asked, stupidly. Mentally kicking myself, I added. "What's wrong?"

"It felt like all my nerves and cells started to go bleh," Keke whined.

As if summoned by my angry thoughts, Lokken came through the door, followed by Alin-1, who walked into the wall with a thump, fidgeted to the left, then stepped into the bridge properly. Lokken was looking rather annoyed. "Your construct-"

"My girlfriend," I said, my hand on Keke's shoulder, gently. "All my girlfriends are sick."

"Zep-blorp twillip woom!" Alin-1 said.

"She appears to be under some kind of disjunction," Lokken said, leaning his fire-tipped staff against the wall with a click. His fingers stroked his long white beard as he regarded Alin-1 curiously. I frowned, and then it hit me. The whole idea behind the lodestone infusion was to try and replace theMenagerie's reliance on arcanite with the inherently magical energies of Darien, to essentially allow us to kick ourselves off planet, into orbit, and beyond the warping field that made Darien possible. Once there, arcanite would resume its normal functions and...well...we'd be able to start getting to work again.

"The lodestone infusion," I said. "All of these girls used arcanite to enhance their bodies - in Alin's case, arcaniteruns her brain. Can you insulate them from the infusion and it's effects?"

Lokken looked quite irritated. "You ask me to do a great deal in a very insolent tone, child," he said, his eyes narrowing to slits. "You come from a world without much in the way of respect for monarchies."

"My ideological ancestors had their monarchs put into guillotines," I said, irritated enough to forego the recent Franco-American disruptions in positive relations to harken back to the two centuries of fairly study cooperation between America, Britain's most restive colony, and France, Britain's most intractable enemy.

"I have no idea what that is," Lokken grumbled under his breath as he reached out, touching Alin's forehead as she spoke.

"Zip-lop fop- chop's your head off, it's very efficient," Alin said, her voice becoming understandable midway through.

Lokken sighed. He turned to face me, his eyes glittering - and there was a note of sheer hopelessness in them. "Your pets are, as always, quite amusing...but I believe that this flying castle should be able to take off now and move me away from a reminder that everything I ever cared about doesn't matter and onto something important."

I shook my head. "Lokken, your origins may be fictional, but you're real right now. That has to matter for something."

"You'd be surprised at how little comfort that facile statement grants me," Lokken said. I had talked to arrogant, huffy elves for a while here, but Lokken's tongue had a silvered edge that made Kanagoraga's most adorable snits seem like warm bubbly cuteness.

Thirsha, who remained standing in the corner of the room, unfolded her arm and did something that genuinely shocked me.

She reached out, grabbed onto the Necromancer of Tarous, the lord of undead, the man who had reshaped a continent and had been poised to thrust the whole world of Darien into a conflict of unimaginable scale and violence, and twisted his ear fiercely. The elderly man yelped and leaned into the twist in the exact same way that I might have - and the expression on Thirsha's face was pure older sister. She leaned forward and muttered.

"Stop whining, Lokken," she said.

Lokken grabbed for his staff and snarled - a crackling wave of flames exploded around his body, throwing Thirsha's hand off. She regarded the display of magic with little emotion, her ears showing the only real affect by twitching up and backwards a little. She smirked at him, while Lokken growled. "You are not my older sister," he said. "For we aren't anything at all - just contrivances for some entertainment, dreamed up by-"

"Stop whining, Lokken," Thirsha said again. "You always thought too much. That was your biggest problem."

"Ah, yes, your strategem of running off into the woods to play with the beasts-" he started.

"Animals don't care how they got here. They know only the moment, and that's enough," Thirsha said. "It takes a human being to be so utterly foolish that they might get upset over things that have already happened and can't change anything. Yes, you were written. Now you walk. Do something about it."

Lokken glowered at her. Then he glowered at me. Then he turned and stormed off the bridge.

"I thought that was a good way of putting it," Alin said, nodding to Thirsha.

Thirsha grunted, which was how she seemed to indicate thanks. Or. Maybe I was reading a bit into that tone. She turned towards me and asked: "Can this thing fly?"

"It should be able too," I said, sighing. "Once we're in orbit, the transfusion will switch off." I didn't mention to her that there was a tiny possibility that leaving Darien would alter reality so thatsheno longer thought. Or, at a less dangerous level, she might lose access to her magic. But since Thirsha was an ancient being, easily as old as Kanagoraga or Ara Ara, it was entirely possible that losing access to her magic might lead her to age rapidly into dust. We just didn't know.

I didn't want to mention it to her.

But...I had to, didn't I?

"There is a risk, Thirsha," I said.

"I am aware," she said.

"But do you know your magic-"

"I am aware," she said, again. "Lokken is aware as well. We'd both rather take steps as living beings than to try and remain written ones." She leaned against the wall, crossing her arms before her almost bare chest.

"Right," I said, then sat down on the command throne. "Lift off. And make it gentle, I don't want to disturb anyone."

"Yeah, we'd hate to throw El and Chirp across the room while they're sissoring," Kanagoraga said, grinning playfully.

"I'm more concerned about the fusion torch drive immolating the jungle, but that too," I said, shooting her an equally wry smirk. Kanagoraga blanched - clearly, she hadn't been thinking about the consequences of setting off that much energy either. Thirsha tensed...then relaxed as theMenageriestarted to slowly, smoothly lift up into the air. The jungles surrounding the immense craft started to tremble and quiver, leaves rustling away...but it was more like a thick buzzing noise was shaking them than anything else. And as we drew up and into the air, even that shaking faded as the hover engines carried us up and away from the jungle proper. Clouds started to waft by, while Alin smiled down at her console. "Arcanite infusion still holding - those magical lodestones work excellently."

"My brother's head swells," Thirsha said, dryly.

Zhon spread beneath us. I could see the few remaining CORE structures, glittering like bright ribcages jutting from the water. I was already thinking about the possibilities of what having El and her abilities to construct CORE structures and buildings on our side might mean. I leaned back in the command chair as the atmosphere darkened above us, thinning as the stars came out to play. Thirsha let out a quiet gasp as we finally broke through the highest level. The moon hung visibly in the sky, and the world of Darien spread out beneath us.

"I..." Thirsha blinked. "Zhon is so small and fragile, from up here."

I nodded.

"I...wonder if the Kandrian magicians saw it like this," she said, quietly. "And that's what kept them so wise, so focused." She trailed off, then glanced down at Alin. "Have we left the limit of the, um, change?"

"We will, in five, four..." Alin counted down. I reached out on impulse and took hold of Thirsha's hand, squeezing her gently. Thirsha tensed and did not move at all. Her fingers remained still.

"...three...two..."

With a tiny twitch, Thirsha twisted her hand, moving her fingers to interlace through mine. There wasn't anything romantic in the gesture, no growing heat of passion between us - I couldn't feel even a spark. It was something more simple.

She was afraid. And she wanted that hand to hold.

"One..."

I gulped.

Thirsha remained standing.

She snapped her finger and a spark of lightning buzzed around her fingers.

"Is that good?" Keke asked.

Thirsha grinned. "I remain alive, and I have magic," she said, her voice soft. "What now?"

"Arcanite is online again," Alin said, grinning. "Our sensors are picking up...something...um..."

"What is it?" I asked.

"There appears to be a strange-"

And that was when I vanished.

***

***

The translocation reminded me a lot of how a jump drive works. One second, I was on the bridge, surrounded by the girls, by Thirsha, by my plans for the future, by some mysterious reading at the edge of the solar system. The second, I was standing in a featureless black plain. The floor had the kind of hard solidity of obsidian, and it swept out in every direction, while the sky overhead had a sense of total openness. A cold wind blew along the back of my neck. I pursed my lips, and considered the possibilities.

"Dark Lord?" I asked.

Nothing.

I turned around, and to my surprise, there was something behind me. Sitting there, lit without any source of visible light, clearly visible against the starkness of the surrounding environment, was a simple plastic chair and one of those tables made of cheap wood surrounded by a thin wrapping of plastic to keep them intact. Sitting on the table was an old beige box computer and one of those thick monitors with the old aspect ratio, before everything became widescreen. I smirked slightly, walking towards it, putting my hand on the side of it.

The sense memory of being in aplacewas so intense it was like being struck by a wrecking ball. When I had been in...early high school, there had been one of those LAN dens, where a bunch of relatively beefy computers had been hooked together and you could drop your allowance on the chance to play video games with friends for a while. I couldn't even remember the specific friends - I was sure that some of them were the ones that stayed with my social circles through college, but...were Mike or Lucas either of the people in those LAN halls, playing Battlefield 1942 or Counter Strike?

Or...

Galactic Conquest 2.

I sat down at the chair and turned the computer on - regarding myself in the black screen. I was still my gnollish self, still in my uniform. So I was fairly sure I had actuallybeenteleported and not just yanked somewhere mentally. I wasn't sure if that comforted me or frightened me more. The softbleepas the computer started to come on was another hit of pure nostalgia - but as the DOS readout skimmed along the side of the screen and Windows started to come online, I wondered what exactly I was doing here.

Playing along.

Yeah. That was basically it. Something had brought me here - and I had a few guesses what it might be. And since I was not currently being immolated or crammed with inhuman thoughts and turned into a walking meat puppet, I supposed I should try and learn what was happening here.

Besides...

There was no sense in panicking. That single thought managed to keep the rising shriek that was trying to crawl itself up and out of my brain at this alien landscape and this impossible computer. I just focused on the nostalgia and the mystery - I didn't think about anything else. Because the last thing that I needed to do was to start screaming my head off.

Windows came online, but rather than bringing up a normal desktop, the computer instead immediately launched into the boot screen of Galactic Conquest: Origin. The 1994 DOS game had been the originator, as the title indicated, of the Galactic Conquest series, even if it hadn't really kicked off into mainstream popularity until its remake's sequel in the 2010s. I had played it fairly religiously, it was part of why I had gotten into Galactic Conquest 2 and gotten into RTS games and...well, had ended up doing so well in this universe.

My hand rubbed my muzzle, thoughtfully, as the chirpy chip tunes bleated out the theme. The screen came up and we were already in a game. It showed the somewhat simple representation of a galaxy in all thirty two possible colors that a 16 bit color system could generate. Okay, I wasn't...actually sure if it was that many colors. I wasn't exactly an expert in the old back end of primitive computer technology...but Iwasan expert in Galactic Conquest 2. Even taking into account the differences between GC2 and the original game and the changes that took place between the two, the galactic map I was looking at was pretty dire. There were a few star systems circled by the indicator that my faction owned them, and there were dozens with the tiny indicator that the other side, the computer player, owned them.

It wasn't animpossiblesituation. But it was pretty tricky. Since the old GC games were turn based, I had plenty of time to click onto my worlds and see what I was working with, and the worlds that the enemies had.

They had a lot of fortifications, ship factories, and research bases. Meanwhile, I was working with a piddling collection of colonists and scrap. Fortunately, there were ways to cheese the defense. I slid my hand to my mouse and started to cede the worlds I couldn't defend, falling back to the worlds with good choke points. The resources I got back from scrapping, I put to building fortifications that I knew were a little busted, a little overpowered.

One of the fun things about turn based games?

People always said they wereslowerthan real time strategy. But in truth, a turn based game could go real damn fast, especially if your computer was beefier than the game's requirements and you had certain extraneous, annoying animations turned off. And GC:O wasslickand fast. It didn't have nearly the complexity of, say, Masters of Orion 2...but it wasn't quite as simple as Star Control, so, it was a nice middle ground between the two. The turns flew by and my fortifications came online just in time. But rather than doing what the AI wouldnormallydo, the computer instead sat beyond the range of my fortifications, on the far ends of the jump points connecting solar systems together.

See, the defense cheese against the AI worked by the fact that the AI didn't cheat resources - it had to mine like you did, and it would send units to attack you as quickly as it could. So, if you were a turtler like Kanagoraga, you could drain their coffers and then hit them backhard. It was one of the things future Galactic Conquest games wouldfix, usually by stealing ideas from other games - for example, they took the idea that colonies could make infinite numbers of ships without running out of resources from Masters of Orion 2.

But...with the AInotattacking, what happened was that I produced my fleet to its maximum, and they produced their fleet to their maximum, and both fleets sat on either side of their wormholes.

A stalemate.

I pursed my lips, crossing my arms over my chest. "Okay, very cute," I said. I clicked around - trying to find the quit button. It was where it was meant to be - but when GC:0 turned off, it just came right back on, with the same galactic map, in the same situation I started at. I frowned, then tried clicking forward without doing anything.

The computer's fleets came through the jump points. My planets were obliterated in really quite charming pixel art movies, showing generic ships moving into orbit over the faint outline of cities and then obliterating them with orbs of light representing their detonations. Then, when my last planet had been utterly glassed from orbit, then game complete screen flicked on. I clicked end game.

And we were back where we had started.

I rubbed my jaw. The thing about turn based games is they were there until you clicked next turn - caught in eternal stasis. There was time to think.