The Last Account of the Argentville Witches by M Rob Stewart
The Last Account of the Argentville Witches by M Rob Stewart
In the long road of reality, many lives have come and gone. The struggle against the encroaching flow of time is as endless and resolute as time itself. Once an entire civilization rose and mastered the very stars of the universe, becoming masters of time and space, but even they vanished. From the apocalyptic world of Irth a group of witches, displaced in time, sought a new purpose after saving the world they landed in from destruction. Unable to return home, they gathered new friends and forged a new life adventuring among the stars. They left behind a recount of their final adventure before the dissolution of their coven. The rest of the logs were intentionally deleted, likely by the witches themselves.
Captain’s Log, Elizabeth Magie, Stardate, August 3rd, 2015
Oh my god! We finally did it, we did the impossible. And we’re fucked. At least I think we’re fucked. Let me go back for a bit. We’ve been back and forth to the Sesshoumen system a half dozen times parlaying with the peoples there, and we finally came back with something they wanted, yada ya da, doesn’t matter, get this, we finally got down to Sessh 4, which is not orbiting Sesshoumen, in fact it is orbiting its closest neighbor, a red dwarf they call Sessh S-E3. But Sesshoumen space, permissions permissions.
Whatever, but this was great. Mid gravity, high atmospheric toxicity, something about the fungiform life. Usually is when there’s something alive there, but the Sessh are all mechanical and don’t really care about the atmo. Hostile fauna, bigger problem. Okay, backing up further again, we got there and the first thing we notice (apart from the four hundred meter tall purple trees) is – hostile primitive apes. With blasters. How’d they get blasters? Stupid answer. Someone got here before us. Turns out before the Sessh took over this system some scouts or researchers set up an independent base here. Big deal, right? Except they lost the bit to the apes and the apes learned how to use their guns.
This had to be some hundred years or so ago. Some of the systems in their derilict were still intact, old language old tech. Didn’t matter, the apes had to be dispatched and we did. Scared more of them off than we had to kill to be honest. Nil got a crack in her ventilator and went back to the ship. Casey and Atty were already staying behind, safety teams. Nothing big, no injuries, took some flora samples for funsies but I’m burying the lede here. Listen me now.
Okay so last year we were touring in the Oshana system and saw that ancient vault on Osh TE 6, research base nearby said its just a novelty, one of those precursor structures that are dotted around the galaxy. I mean people theorize about them but they’re all orbiting dead stars. Kind of hard to study. Sometimes life figures it out, though. Either that or all the flora and fauna here is imported. I don’t know, the derilict’s logs weren’t exactly easy to translate. Not for lack of knowing, just the data was so fragmented its down to speculation. Well since we know now it was sealed with genuine magic, we think we finally found the damn key. Something ancient and divinely powerful sealed that vault and none of our spells were the right kind of ticket to open it.
God I miss Dolly. She’d just dance and boom, the damn thing would open. But now we know it was something divine. Get this, okay, we were digging through the rock and found an old structure. It still had some juice, this shit was precursor! It was over a billion years old and some of the panels were still lit up! Well we had the symbols of the vault drawn down to a micron accuracy I swear, and we saw the same symbols here. After Eufie did some *real* magic trying to decipher the holocron, she got a repeating pattern that looks like an enchantment key when you look at it like magic. And here we thought we were the last magic things in this universe. Not that the Galactic Civil Circle would believe any of this crap anyway. But what’s better, it came with a message. Turns out the gods from our original timeline weren’t as much a myth as we thought. I choose to believe the translated message is telling the truth, but here’s what the alien in the holocron said: “My name is Pragma, and I am alone. I am the last of the Pangerrans, the last god. I am the last living thing in this universe. Or at least I was. Know that this message finds me now gone too, and so too are you alone. This is all I have left, and I am afraid I have left you an impossible quest.”
This definitely isn’t the whole message, cause decoding the key and the weird little dongle we got out of the machine can’t be the “quest” she’s given us. But we know where we’re going anyway. Back to Osh TE 6. We’re gonna open an ancient, billion year old alien precursor vault and see what’s inside!
Captain’s Log – Amily Piper, Stardate February 12, 2014
Okay, I talk into this? -*yes*-, okay… what? My name..? I already gave it my name, get lost! Okay. Putting this in for Liz since she doesn’t want to do it, she’s exhausted, fair. We’re back from Osh TE 6 and you know, life just isn’t interesting when it’s peaceful. Shit got wild in orbit, son! As soon as we approached, gravitic anomalies started rocking the boat. I had to run to maintenance and hold the engine together by hand almost. Once we got stabilized and beneath the anomaly, got into it’s gravity well, no atmosphere to speak of. I mean, there is an atmo, but its was so thin as didn’t make a damn anyway.
Well we already knew a couple of mega-corps’ve been snooping for the hidden *edge* in ancient alien tech and somebody paid somebody, somebody followed us, somebody followed them, who, who knows. Point is, we touched ground and in front of us? Thaliyan tech crews on clearance loan or whatever from Oshana, corporate license and everything! Said the area was now off limits, but the anomalies didn’t arrive until we did. Turns out once we got in range the vault started freaking out, and ancient mechanical guardians started crawling out of the ground and blasting their crew. They fought back but weren’t well equipped, bastioned there on the surface.
Was even worse behind us, Thaliyan way-station got straight blasted. Piano Syndicate ship moving in on their game, *our* game! Two mega corpos biting our style hard. They landed and tried to hostage us and the Thaliyan scrubs and we said go ahead, go see the vault! Half of them came back injured and screaming, the other half didn’t come back at all. Told the bitches to move over, witches taking charge, and me and the girls, and Casey, started moving in. I punched about two dozen guardians in half while the girls stuck to their guns and range magic. Eufie gets it. She uses a mech but she still punches, she gets it. And Atty with the hair, whatevs.
We got closer and the guardians got madder, and we started hearing psychic echoes, this was the worst part. Dying screams of the ancient civilization. Starting to get the idea that whatever happened to the precursors, it was bad. Starting to think there’s a really nasty reason they’ve all been gone a billion years. Vault had some long dead info in it. Couldn’t get much between the fragments and poor translations, but we think we know where to go next. There’s more vaults like this one, and they’ve got some kind of instructions in them. Here’s the next part of Pragma’s message, I’ll play it: “I cannot call myself divine anymore. No realm, no mortals, no one left to guide, to love. My world is gone, my kin, the gods, are gone, my mortals are gone. I remain as a whisper of this reality, and how I lived this long when my kin could not escapes me still. My domains are unchanged, I am little different than I was before, but what a god is means less than nothing.” Haunting shit.
Well we’ve got some math to work on, turns out it looks like the next vault is in uncharted space, because of course it is. Hoping the enchantment key works on all of them. Thaliyan and Piano told us to give them the key when we left and we said get fucked, boys. Texas Piper, out! What do you mean I don’t need to say anything to end it, shut up!
Captain’s Log – Eufemia Magie, Stardate July 8th, 2014
I feel gross. I guess everyone does, but I had to go in first. You’re the one with the mech, Eufie. Fuck you. Everything was sticky. Or slimy, both somehow. I was in a vacuum sealed machine the *entire time* and I still needed three showers. The vault was on an asteroid orbiting a gas giant. I say *was*, because it was not. We followed the math to the tiniest picometer, and we knew where it was supposed to be. Some quick math and the gravity well of the planet was even affected by this thing, and it was straight missing.
Well Moby my Dick, we thought! And fuck me we were right, an actual space whale ate it. I wanna say space jellyfish would be closer, but even then that doesn’t describe the weird that was this thing. Sleeping in the atmo of the gas giant after snacking on a damn asteroid. Probably trying to get a fix from the energy of the vault. This thing was as big as a planet itself, had its own living ecosystem in it. And fuck was it warm in there! We flew into an anus, no kidding. Thing was covered in all kinds of pores and had entire clouds and weather inside it. Did not like the readings on the internals, all corrosive gases. Of course, always a toxic atmo. Whole ecosystem of weird flying things inside this all breathing corrosive gas.
Fun.
So I had to go down and find the asteroid. Had to go back because there the vault was, and there were those guardians again. Starting blasting holes in my mech I had to amp my shields to max and retreat. Once I front loaded the guns I was able to punch through, but called the girls to follow in. They did not like this. The internals of this thing had started fusing to the asteroid already, like it was digesting it. But the vault was intact. I ran the encryption on the key into the door and it slid open into a clear chamber. Starting to think these vaults were data centers on colony ships. Or independent structures left for this purpose alone, like we’re supposed to find them. As hidden and well guarded as they are, we were supposed to find them.
The tech was pretty downbeat, but we still got what we came for. Another message fragment, another piece of the puzzle, and another part of the map. This one goes back to civilized space. No one shooting at us we had time to work on it already. The puzzle instructions are about some kind of road or construction in open space, not sure what yet. Here’s Pragma’s message fragment: “Long before it started, before the time they measured with vanished, the end should have already been clear. They fought. A mortal ascended and my kin killed her, and they fought. The Kulpa came, shattered our world, and even as our grip on this reality slipped, they still fought, and we were all so blind.
The mortals turned against us, broke our realms as eggs and slaughtered us. Ages of petty infighting over a single planet soured their opinions of worshiping us. My last sister died bolted to a pillar of mortal making. The gods you felt in your dreams were once real, but no longer. I fled into the stars, cold and alone, all the while the Kulpa continued it’s machinations.”
Shit got real for them. Who the hell is Kulpa? How many gods were there? What realms were they in? I feel like there’s an entire history we’re completely blind to.
Captain’s Log – Casey Cleary, Stardate December 19th, 2014
Amily was injured pretty severely. Lost her left leg in a building collapse. She’s stable. The girls are doing the math to enchant her a replacement, but she’s in a horrible mood. I can’t blame her. The guardians did not spare local structures. Let me start from the beginning.
After we decoded the math the next vault was on Hogeates. But Hogeates 1. Not a derilict station or hidden planet under a dead star, but one of the most populous ecuminopoli in the galaxy. As it turns out, the construction used to be as such, hidden on a station in local space. We haven’t figured out where the next vault is. Eufie’s done some work on the message and got another fragment out: “Once this universe flourished with an energy called aether, and from it came life. I am made of it, and the mortals were too. Life depended on it, we used it to shape reality around us, the mortals could call on it to create magic. I know now what a universe without it looks as. You… will never know the look of a world that does.”
I don’t know what this means. Maybe she missed something? The girls and I know we aren’t from this reality, and figured that’s why we can do magic when no one else can. We knew this world didn’t have magic but we knew… somehow, that it used to. Now a question got answered and it only raises more questions. What happened to it? Why is it gone now? Eufie figured out more about the construction, too. As it turns out it was literally a physical object they were building, but the scale looks impossible. I guess we need more.
Anyway, the people of Hogeates discovered the artifact generations ago and moved it into their city as a tourist trap. It fell out of favor and got literally buried under layers of the compounding city. The government officials hardly even knew what we were talking about when we asked about it, and had to call local specialists. Mendel and Gurm, nice fellows, they were. We warned them severely of what was coming, and the anomalies started pretty much as soon as we hit atmo. A whole city started shaking and evacuating. Officials got cold feet pretty much immediately, but, well, Liz… doesn’t take no for an answer. They were afraid to follow us into the anomalies and spent all their resources evacuating people. I am certain there were injuries and deaths. The girls are all mourning.
The city started collapsing as we fought the guardians, and we had to take refuge in the vault itself, that’s how Amily was crushed. We got the information out of the vault at least, but I’m afraid for what’s to come. Hogeates declared their space hostile to us and we fled arrest. We’re now wanted outlaws in the Hogeates system. Hope we never have a need to return. I’ll miss it’s birdlike people. At least I can catch their songs still on the Inter-verse. Little consolation for the harm we’ve caused. I know Liz will keep us spirited up once we get the location of the next vault. But I am afraid of whatever this construction was. Something tells me its conception was born of a need related to whatever happened to life and aether in this reality. We cannot stop now.
Captain’s log – Elizabeth Magie, March 3rd, 2015
First thing I think of is I miss Hogeatian food. I ordered it when we last swang by Mercy Station in the Fareda system. The lakefish from their planet is divine. I still wish we could say we’re sorry to them. Well we’re fucked. Still. And again, or whatever. Just gonna drop Pragma’s message before I go further. Fragment, that is, here: “Ages later, the Kulpa’s influence returned. Make no mistake. The entropy of this universe is alive! Their sun, the firstborn of the gods, was consumed by the Kulpa’s silent and invisible light, extinguished. For all the bickering of gods and mortals over a single fragile world, and its light was in an instant, gone. Millennia of history and culture suddenly blinked.
It wasn’t over yet. The mortals found me there in the stars. They had done the impossible. In my absence they had escaped their cradle in a ship built of metal and energy, and discovered me hibernating among the stars. When their sun was extinguished, they escaped. I taught them their history, they taught me their tools. Their worship gave me light, and my love drove them to purpose. We would oppose the Kulpa.”
I was right when we started I’m right now. I don’t know what or where the Kulpa is but its starting to really look like it won whatever this war was. I mean, if you believe Pragma then the Kulpa is literally entropy. Seems to me she stopped being a goddess and just lived with the mortals forever in space. I mean, oppose the Kulpa they did but, well, look around. Whatever they were’s been gone for a billion fucking years. They lost. Eufie and I’ve been working on the puzzle some more, hate calling it that. Hate that Pragma roped us in on this sick cosmic joke of a quest. Kinda love it too, to be honest. But we’re still fucked.
So that construction was real, the math didn’t add up because well, we’ve never had to scale up that far before. We had to bust out some novel equations I’m not kidding. But apparently… it’s out there. I mean it should be. Some endless plane of exotic matter exists somewhere out in the universe. Or they were working on it at least. Sadly, it looks like the map doesn’t lead us to it. Not yet anyway, a girl can hope. The last vault was honestly easy. We’ve hardened the ship to the anomalies that start when the key gets close to a vault, and we’ve gotten used to the guardians that surround them. We’ve even hardened ourselves magically to the horrifying psychic screams of an ancient dead civilization! The map from Hogeates led us to an unloved little red dwarf called EP-121542-GX2. Lovely mouthful. Nobody lives there, nobody ever been there, the vault was pristine, just buried under a billion years of volcanic activity! After a few days of tedious drilling we got in there and got what we needed. Next stop is pretty far out into space.
I got a lead on a guy who can get us a working prototype wormhole key, should be able to get us that far out into space. We’ve checked the math three times, we know where we’re going, hopefully. All goes well we’re going into a completely unexplored arm of the Foam Spiral. Shit like this keeps up and we’re possibly going extragalactic soon, if this exodus doesn’t get us killed. Godspeed, I guess.
Captain’s log – Nil Demacio, Stardate August 29th, 2017
What a road, what a road! Whew! We’re back in colonized space, we’re alive! We found the vault in arm 2 of the Foam Spiral! Okay, okay, so, backing up, SARK, the robot guy who made the wormhole key, absolute genius, boy does he have some crazy stories to tell of fringe space on the rim. You think we’ve seen some shit you should hear him sometime. Well anyway we landed on an alien planet we called Grenel. Life found a way even out there, and we think it was the precursor vault that was responsible!
So its starting to look like these vaults affect living things on a genetic level. We haven’t had much data because we usually find them on dead worlds and well, Hogeates didn’t count it wasn’t there for long. Plus, civs in the GCC have a pretty handy control over their own genomes anyway, it’s simple science. We took some samples its just speculation at this point, but no kidding there was some primitive sapients on this planet. Little ratlike folk who were building fires on purpose and using tools. We kept clear of them. First off its bad form to mess with primitive life, regardless of how it got there, and second, well, we remember the apes with the blasters. Not going through that again.
But the craziest thing is it seems like they worshiped the vault, seriously. It was buried pretty deep underground but they had paintings of the guardians, like they’d seen them before but had peaceful relations with them. This was altogether confirmed when we went there with the key and the guardians attacked us, and only us. Thank the stars, honestly, but we can’t help but puzzle why they left these critters alone but didn’t care about the Hogeatian infrastructure. I feel like… I don’t know, exhilerated, we’re back, we’re safe and alive! We’re orbiting Structure Veridigarn right now, a station in Ratrocan space. Oensenshin system. They do not have an extradition policy to the Hogeatian Hogearate peoples. We checked.
So that construction the Pragma’s precursors were making, still no idea what it was for. The math is still weird, the structure seems to go on forever in both directions. But still a finite amount of material? Even weirder, upon completion, it would begin “spinning”. It’s a straight object according to the math, but the translation was pretty deliberate in meaning “spinning”. We’re still working on it, crazy stuff. But the next part of the map… well, Liz was right again. I hope SARK’s machine can do what it says. It got us to a different arm, but now we’ve got to leave the galaxy entirely for the next part. Oh, and Pragma’s message fragment, from the last vault: “Together we forged the stars, defying the entropy. They built ship after ship of metal and energy, keeping them safe from the horrors of the void. We carried their tools from world to world, spreading life everywhere we could. The universe became our paradise. And we were still blind. The light of the Kulpa still consumes.”
It’s sorrowful but it doesn’t give us anything. To be honest right now it leads right where we thought it would, things got worse. At least they made something interesting before they fell. Don’t know if that makes it better or worse, given what’s left. But for all that’s left, they at least left us something to find. Next stop is the Marigold Nebula, 800 lightyears away from the Foam Spiral, our home galaxy. What’s out there is anybody’s guess, but for now, what’s next is some pizza, hot damn.
Captain’s Log – Kelly Miles, Stardate January 11th, 2018.
I have never felt more alone in my life. I’m here with my girls, my babe Amily, my bestie, and I have never felt more alone. We’re in the Marigold Nebula. Eight… hundred… lightyears… from home. It doesn’t at all look like the pictures from school or the star charts from the GCC. I guess it wouldn’t. Nobody’s ever been out this far before… and lived to tell the tale. If wormholes ever tossed anyone out this far then they’d be screwed. SARK’s wormhole key still functions, it shook a lot when it got us here, made some scary noises, but we made it, it’s intact, we’re intact.
And we’re farther away then anyone has ever been. I can’t get over it. This rinky dink little tub held together with flexor-cord and friendship separates us from the coldest, deepest void anyone has ever seen. It’s beautiful out here. The clouds are much more sparse this up close but you can still see them in every direction. We’re still orbiting the little planet we found the vault on. Its so quiet down there. It wasn’t so quiet a bit ago.
When we got here we’d been out of the wormhole for a few days now, kind of disoriented. But this time the planet showed itself to us. It lit up when we got to within a parsec of the damn thing. Started going crazy, nebula gases lit up and started swirling around it so intensely we felt like we were passing through an event horizon. In atmo it looked like the entire sky was its whole sun, it was *bright*! We had Casey casting us in near total darkness and we could still see like a flourescent hallway. The guardians were nasty. Not the usual plasma energy beams they cast this time but massive photic bursts that exploded like grenades, blinding flashes we had to take all our magic to adjust.
And well, I’m from this reality I’m not like the other girls, my magic is weak. I’ll admit its gotten stronger since we started hunting vaults, but my eyes still hurt. Well the biological one does, the bionic one is straight broken, I need it fixed. Casey’s shadows being intense enough to shield us but allowing us to still see was a feat. Eufie went blind, Nil went blind, I went almost blind. Liz and Casey are gonna fix us all up, already got Eufie.
I didn’t actually go blind in my biologic eye so I’m low priority. Anyway we got into the vault and got Pragma’s message. Here’s the fragment: “World after world was extinguished by the Kulpa. The very aether that created me and my kin, the energy of life was consumed by the Light. Piece by piece, life was extinguished, and so the mortals built. Their marvels exceeded my wildest expectations for most of my entire existence. And we had at least one idea left.”
We’re all thinking this idea was regarding the spinning plane structure cutting through reality we keep finding instructions for. Escape, a weapon, whatever some kind of super dimensional thing they were doing, we don’t know yet. Hell the math alone translated is confusing as all get out, no idea how the girls do that kind of math in their heads on paper, or at all. Liz and Eufie stand in front of the holo-board rubbing their chins like Renaissance painters with all these bonkers equations and I wonder sometimes how I ever got here. I was born on a planet that hadn’t gone farther than their own damn moon. This ship was built with reverse engineered alien technology, these girls just figured it out, like Plymouth University rocket scientists.
Its all pretty fascinating stuff to me. Not even close to what I thought my life was gonna be like. But then again my planet also had a zombie apocalypse I didn’t plan that either. Life is funny sometimes. Then I get into space and meet people who’ve been through even worse. Its hard not to think of the scope of things when you’re this far out.
Eufie said the next vault is even further away, past the local supercluster. The wormhole key barely got us here, how the hell are we supposed to go further?
Captain’s Log – Alix Gold, Stardate December 1st, 2018
We’ve been trapped in the Marigold nebula for nearly a year. You wont believe this, but strangers sacrificed their lives for us. Not on purpose, of course. Liz said it was literally divine providence. But the divine are dead and so were the crew that went through the wormhole.
Without a key, trying to go through an unstable wormhole is a recipe for death. To be fair, this trip was doom, too, and we went on purpose. Coincidence or fate, regardless, a ship and crew got sucked through the wormhole we went through on purpose and arrived dead. We held a vigil for them not bringing foreign corpses onto the damn ship, rites be damned. I hesitate to call it a “space burial” since we didn’t bury shit. We loaded them into body bags and ejected them into the void. What else were we supposed to do?
Serendipitously though, they had a working ship, and we started scrapping the entire thing. Bit by bit, every scrap of food and metal we took, every wire of gold, copper, and pearlite, every nanosheet, every processor, we dismantled ilfe support, beds, monitors, the engine, parsec drive, solar sails, fuel cells, everything.
Me and Eufie got to work on the wormhole key. SARK’s idea was novel and brilliant, but we took it a step further. Long-distance wormhole skipping is now totally possible! SARK was worried the device would break down going this far, and he was almost right. It shut down and rebooted, almost fell to pieces. We had to do a lot of work on it getting back into order. The girls (and Casey) were all horribly bored. The Cleary II is not a huge boat. Comfy enough for the eight of us, and well I don’t need sleep, I’m a machine. I only have to do a charge cycle once a week or so.
Eufie actually calculated I cost less energy than the food production to feed anyone else so no concerns about me draining power excessively. Doesn’t matter, like Liz would say I’m burying the lede. You thought 800 lightyears was far? Try one hundred *million*. And you won’t believe how we did it. Eufie used the tech from the vault, repurposing it, like she did with the alien tech that made this boat. What a genius.
She said the energy of the vault was a “pure baryonic force” that could alter gravity with the right application. Fucking with gravity is some real reality bending stuff, I know, but we forced the vault to open a wormhole. Believe it. Using the map, energy from the vault, some very nonlinear magic, and I’m giddy about this, a copy of MY own processors!, we forced a wormhole open that led us to the next vault. Not directly, mind you.
Shit hit the fan immediately on arrival. Some spatial anomaly so violent it almost shredded us into an accretion zone surrounding… the structure…
Fast magic and good piloting we whipped around to a nearby star and got a better look at what almost killed us. Some screaming, endless plane of exotic matter whipping through space at near complete light speed. We can’t tell what damage the Kulpa has done to it. Hell, it’s next to impossible to get closer than an entire parsec to it, it’s so massive and fast that it’s warping space-time around it. We don’t know how to get near it. The vault nearby on an abandoned station all but confirmed it. Pragma’s message fragment: “If you’re hearing this message you’ve no doubt witnessed the construction that encircles the edges of your reality. It is no barrier. I am certain it still spins even now, generating the anomaly in the center of reality we called Gateway. If you’ve discovered it, know that it does not function. Do not use it. We had finished and activated the marvel, but the Kulpa targeted it.”
Looks like they got it started before the Kulpa went to business on it. Or targeted it how? Maybe the “targeting” is more nebulous than directly attacking it. Or its structure is so alien and violent how could we even approach it? The guardians and anomalies at the vault were nothing, and this isn’t even close to being figured out. First of all, how is this thing a barrier anyway? It’s straight as far as we can tell. Measuring it’s been a trip, but it does have edges. Twelve fucking lightyears across. We still don’t understand the “encircling” or spinning part, it’s just moving straight. It does seem to go on forever in both directions but to be fair, it’s twelve lightyears across at its thinnest. Measuring anything else has been impossible. Even things like the spatial anomalies are constantly in flux, we can’t make out a pattern in anything. And, well, if it doesn’t “function” then why is it still “spinning”?
This is messing with our heads. Better yet though we did find more instructions for the structure and more of the vault map. Believe it or not, the next vault is only a few lightyears away. Still isn’t over. Feels like even once we have all the answers, we’re still screwed. Nobody wants to say it out loud but we’re all thinking it. The Kulpa is still alive and still out there. Maybe we don’t see damage to the ring because it’d take several lifetimes to travel far enough to find it. How the hell did they build this?
Captain’s Log – Elizabeth Magie, Stardate January 9th, 2019
I don’t know where to start. Okay, first off, holy shit… *sigh* Okay. Well, we’re no closer to figuring the ring out. I mean, maybe a little. Let me try to recall this in order. Our ship blew up! We’re stranded on an unnamed planet that hasn’t had life touch it in like, a billion years, and sure we got three whole years of working life support in the pod, energy to support away teams and their vac suits. Eufie’s started working on reengineering vault tech to keep us alive *indefinitely* sure, but bigger problem is getting the fuck out of here. Wormhole key is busted. We may just die here. That… would really blow.
We can still see the stupid fucking thing from here, that ring. I wanted to call it a plane cause it sure looks like no ring, but hey, guess what, I lied. We did figure something out. So it turns out reality is three-dimensional, who knew? Obvious jokes aside, what this *means* though is that the “edges” aren’t something you can find from within. Not because they aren’t traditional edges, but because evidently, according to the map, the universe is a torus. The ring is a ring because the entire fucking universe is toroidal. This ring is apparently across an entire edge of it. That’s how it’s endless, straight, and yet finite! But this knowledge does nothing for us! Who the fuck cares! It doesn’t change anything except deepen the scope.
They figured out how to find and even purpose the literal edges of a universe that has no edges. This reality is finite and toroidal and they exploited both of those truths to oppose the Kulpa and… well, now we know just how it went down. The vault was easy again. Not for lack of trying to stop us, the guardians here used gravity waves to break our ship and pull us from orbit. Miraculous that we’re all fine. Eufie is building out of spite alone. I’m helping, since I’m math-minded, too, but I’m with her on the spite. Guardians didn’t want us to go any further and we’re stealing their lifeblood to say eat shit, we’re leaving. Hope too, anyway. Shit degrades, no matter how advanced it is, and Eufie already can’t exactly divine the meaning of the tech she’s assaulting right now. Precursor shit is still wild. I mean, we can literally see the ring from here. The temperature flux on this planet is bullshit.
It’s not tidally locked or anything, it’s just the thing about six parsecs that fucking way is so violent and bright we don’t get nightfall. We’re setting alarms and have rigged a door on the vault we’re just gonna sleep in there to keep our sanity and circadian rhythm intact. The girls don’t realize how hard I’m working to keep the damn voices out of our collective heads. If Pragma wanted us to find this shit, well she isn’t helping. Here’s the message we dug out of the vault: “The last of all life was on a single colony ship. The Kulpa had snuffed out all, and still consumes. I sent the ship to the Gateway, but before it could cross the threshold the Kulpa came and destroyed it. It was swallowed whole in the invisible light, vanished. The last of all life. The Kulpa then began to consume the ring. With any luck it keeps it busy still, giving you this chance.”
Chance to what, exactly? Stick around long enough to watch Kulpa kill us instead of time? I’m right sick of this journey, I’ll tell you true. Novel space anomalies keep me entertained but only for so long. And well since Amily lost a leg on Hogeates, we lost the wormhole key in the Marigold nebula, kinda. It doesn’t work now, that’s for sure. Then it got crushed by the gravitic nonsense the guardians were throwing at us while trying to land…
I can’t stop thinking about that colony ship. Pragma’s people were so advanced they… they literally mastered time and space. You’d fucking have to make a structure like that. It’s literally impossible according to everything we know, and damn it if it isn’t right fucking there! Millions of years of effort to save one last ship and it really did fail. What hope do we have? Fuck you, Pragma.
Captain’s Log – Eufemia Magie, Stardate… uhh.. October… 3rd. If the update is correct.
Welcome to the Cleary III. We made it, bitches! Back in civilized space again, woohoo! Me and the Liz are un-fucking-stoppable! Look out, Kulpa, you’ve pissed off *witches*! And we found the craziest anomaly in all of spaaaaaace!
Whew! Okay! Eufie Magie, Stardate blah blah blah. We’re currently at Station Maximus in the Verto system which, yes, is Thaliyan space. Let me go back a bit. Also, I’m ordering takoyaki delivery at the current moment. Holy SHIT I missed fresh food, the synth only makes nutrient paste. I’ll love Casey forever for suggesting a spice rack on the ship, but hey wouldn’t you know it it didn’t survive the destruction of Cleary II. We’ve been eating flavorless paste for nearly a year nothing made me want to die more.
Whew… okay. We jury-rigged our own wormhole key out of the remains of Cleary II, ancient precursor tech, and I’m gonna be real here, my photographic memory of everything SARK ever said about the drive. I so I built… I built my own damn wormhole key combining it with parsec whip drive engineering and made the *drum roll noises*… Eufie Drive! This baby can fold spacetime and go wherever the fuck I want it to, woohoo!!! I can generate my own wormholes, bitch! Not that it can just jump whenever, the power output is insane we really had to make a battery out of vault tech and drain the facility to make it work. Also magic, not gonna lie did not interpret all the vault tech. Biggest hail mary since it ate all the systems keeping us alive. But my baby Cleary III take us straight to the home arm of Foam! We’re currently breathing air from Maximus Station’s life support!
Oh, and the Thaliyan, we’re on good terms now! Piano’s been working on the vault for a while now. They re-entered the one in the Oshana system after we broke its guardians and have spent that time decoding the map. They haven’t gotten anywhere but this recent vault, however, and hadn’t managed to open it either. We got to the anomaly and the nearby vault and found Piano and Thaliyan having a genuine space battle over it. Piano threatened us, Thaliyan didn’t, so we blew up Piano ships. Casey suffered a mild burn, we’re peachy. So, boom boom, then Thaliyan corpo on site, Sigura something, said you know what, thanks, y’all go ahead. So we did. Guardians were pretty easy to deal with, no tricks this time. Oh and the big reveal, we’d wondered if all life was gone on that colony ship where’d the GCC come from? And now we know, hahahahahaha, every religion is wrong! Here’s Pragma’s next fragment: “The gifts the mortals left me were their science and tools. Absent the aether that gave me power, that is what I used. So the mortals toiled for countless generations, as did I toil. With their tools, I searched the remaining stars for as long as I could. I seeded world after world with life. Barely bigger than molecules, single cells on each world. If you’re from this reality, understand this. I created you.”
There’s a remarkable irony that the one peoples who found these messages aren’t from this fucking reality. Oh well… *takes several minutes to eat takoyaki as it arrives*…
Oh my fucking god yes… That… I’m ordering more. So now we know what happened to magic fully, I guess. It needs aether to work, and Kulpa ate it all. The vault map points us to some distant star not on GCC charts again. I mean it’s technically on the broadest map point of the observable universe, but there’s just nothing out there, it has no name, just some pointless string of numbers adjunct to another string of numbers. Not in the Foam Spiral but at least in the same galactic supercluster. By the gods, I can’t believe I’m saying these kinds of things. That’d be an impossibly monumental task for anyone in the galaxy and here we are just doing it. I say that like every trip outside of the third arm hasn’t been lethally dangerous, but we’re all still intact!
The sad shit is, all this hope and rigamarol isn’t answering the damn question. How do we stop the Kulpa? I’m really thinking maybe it just can’t be done. But if I fixed ancient precursor tech and repurposed it into a better wormhole key than SARK’s, then well maybe there is some kinda chance for us. Maybe it’s not what Pragma envisioned, but I’m gonna be real here it seems she couldn’t even envision a damn starship until mortals showed her it could be done. I guess a multi-billion-year life doesn’t make you smarter. She was right about one thing, though. She left us an impossible task. Well, witches do, sucker. Witches do.
Captain’s Log – Atilla Clades, Stardate, who fucking cares. It’s 2021.
I… gave up… I guess. We all did. I am not on the Cleary III. I don’t know what to do next. I’ll be courteous and finish this log, but we’re just… done. We don’t know what to do anymore. *speech is slightly slurred. She can be heard taking a drink*. I’ll back it up. We couldn’t find the vault at first. The map was correct we didn’t doubt that but… the star it was orbiting was swallowed up by the Kulpa. It was the first world, the Pangerran world. It’d been floating in the void for a good billion years but the shock was how we did find it. Well first here’s Pragma’s final message: “If you have any idea what a god is, know this, you are one already. You’ve discovered my message in this void, you’ve discovered the Gateway ring. I am sorry I couldn’t do more for you, you are already so much greater than I. All I had was time, and here you are again, now absent my influence. But you are not absent the Kulpa, and life deserves another chance. The ring is not beyond you. You can still repair it and escape. And if not, then fight back. The Kulpa is alive. Do not let it take you. Let life continue. I am Pragma, Goddess of Spring. And I love you.”
*She can be heard drinking during the message. She sobs quietly.* So she just stopped, I guess. She landed here and fell asleep. We actually found her remains in the vault. It was… creepy… It looks like one other god survived, too. And she didn’t even know. This one didn’t leave any messages, no instructions, but something much more terrifying. The ring doesn’t work anymore. It was a one-shot… the anomaly can’t function again, and guess what? There’s not enough material and time left in the universe to repair it. The Kulpa crossed the threshold of consumption, it’s eaten more than is left. We lost… This vault didn’t even have any guardians in it. It’s like Pragma gave up at this leg too. Anyway, what the other god left was… an aether pool… When the Kulpa started eating aether this god started storing it here on purpose, hiding in the void long after the mortals jumped ship to the stars. I guess they never found him either… go figure…
The aether pool is bound to a stellar machine, turns out whoever he was didn’t believe Pragma’s new mortal peoples were gonna win. The stellar machine isn’t meant to repair the ring or restart it and fix the anomaly gateway, let life escape reality, and free itself from a malevolent living entropy… nah… No, instead this machine is built and ready to do one thing. Collapse the ring. If you’re wondering why or what or how? Well here’s what Eufie told us before she… well… I’m not gonna say. The ring is bound to the edge of the universe. It’s kind of… the seam of reality. When it collapses, reality goes with it. Boom, singularity, all of reality down to a single point. I guess after that time just… restarts? Or it doesn’t, I don’t know. We figure the point is to trap the Kulpa here, lest it escape and start doing its thing to other realities. That’s our last contingency. Keeping the fucker from doing it again to someone else. That’s all we got. Reality’s last fucking hope.
We’re not gonna activate it. We’re leaving this log here and abandoning all hope, ye who enter here and shit. We’ve compiled the remaining logs that regard the anomaly and the vaults and put them together here for whoever the fuck YOU are to find. Good luck. If there’s any justice then whoever finds this does so decades after we’re all gone and we don’t have to think about this bullshit anymore. I don’t know what the hell I’m in this universe for anymore. I don’t know why I’m here.
All Pragma gave baryonic life was the chance to kill itself for good and take the Kulpa with it. This is the entire reason I exist. I’m… not playing this game. I’m leaving. I don’t know where, and you’re probably never gonna figure it out, and I don’t care. I… I’m done. Goodbye, universe. At least I’ll die before you. I’m… sorry.
* * * * THE END * * * *
Copyright M Rob Stewart 2024
