Project: Ashes 003

 Chapter 3 Encounter

“They won.” Glorious Idiot said, “They won…”

“Yeah, I noticed.”, she said.

“But the back-up plan worked!”, he beamed at her. She wasn’t sure, could teeth glow, she and the Endless Sea were pretty sure that teeth weren’t sources of light, but Glorious Idiot’s grin was irradiating.

“For what, it’s worth…”, she said. His reaction, combined with her reaction told her that this had been Glorious Idiot’s plan.

“For what it’s worth? You saved the entire universe!”, he looked around again. “In a way at least. Where are we anyway? This place doesn’t look familiar. But it feels… secure?”

“Your guess is as good as mine. As far as I can tell it just appeared when I returned. It seems to be a mostly potential place that seems to crystallise when I interact with it.” The Boss had to push the Philosopher and the Explorer back with force. Both of them were fascinated by the idea of a place that became real by interacting with thought and the wishes of the sentient beings it interacted with.

“What if I interact with it?”, he asked.

“How should I know?”

“Hmm…”, he rubbed his chin, then looked at her, his eyes suddenly ablaze with a gleam that ignited a reaction in her she wasn’t happy with. He smilled, pointed with both hands to her and let him self fall backwards to the floor. She was alarmed, did he suddenly lose consciousness, had she failed to bring all of him back? With a floooomph sound he was caught by a big, soft comfortable chair.

“Niiice!”, he said, “It’s not just you, its both of us.” For a moment he seemed lost in thought. “I could really use something to drink right now!”, he exclaimed and started to stare. She thought that he looked slightly constipated.
“It worked!” he held a glass in his hand filled with a weird looking liquid the colour of a sunrise. What was a sunrise?

“How did you do that?”, she asked.

“I really, really needed a drink.”, Glorious Idiot said, “And this might just hit the spot.” He  took a bog sip. His eyes went wide and he started coughing. “Oh this is really strong stuff…”
After he recovered he took another sip. “ ’tis good though.”

“What is that anyway?”, she asked.

“I have no idea. I really like it though.”, he took another sip, this time only a very small one. “Ahhh much better…”

She rolled her eyes. It was typical for Glorious Idiot to have a drink at a time like this. The universe apparently had ceased to exist and the remnants of it where slowly evaporating and the first thing he did was summon a big gaudy chair and a drink…
She looked at her eternal, connecting it to the streams of… what ever the streams of of what made the universe the universe were made off, to the Glorious Idiot, his glorious drink and his idiotic chair. The device showed her that what ever he was sitting on was sadly not an illusion, but rather another strand, that had been pulled out of the repeating echo of what was left of the universe.

“That reminds me,” she said, “the silly spiral thingy… that was your thing, right?”

“Spiral thingy… Oh! The cascade spiral! That is a principle and it was kind of my thing, I build the… machine… the spiral device… the… I forgot its name…”, his face had lost all joviality, his brow was furrowed and he was squinting as if that would make is hazy memories sharper.

“Well I think it worked… see this?”, she asked turning the Eternal towards him, which started projecting the information she had reconstructed so far into the space between them. Glorious Idiot didn’t seem surprised at all by that, in contrast to her, at that moment she discovered another shard of herself called Brilliant 4 Hours to Late, Usually While Almost Asleep, Sometimes Under The Shower. A very good friend and often times companion of the sisters I’m A Failure and Why Am I Always So Embarrassing.
While the Boss struggled with the trio, the Observer pointed out that Glorious Idiot hadn’t noticed and maybe the investigation department should take over.

“So that in the middle is us?”, Glorious Idiot asked.

“Yes.”, she answered.

“And that shifty stuff all around?”

“Presumably all that’s left of the Universe.”

“Fascinating,” he said his eyes starting to glow again. “So the cascade worked… wait… was that a glitch in your programme? Something just happened.”

“That’s the reset. It happens in regular intervals. See that number over there? That’s how often it went through the cycle since I came back.”

“Forty-eight times? That’s a lot.”, he said.

“No idea. It might be. Do you see this colour gradient?” He nodded. “The deep blue stuff is still stable. But as you can see in the fringes and where the… strings?… are thinner how it turns slowly red? Look closely.”, she pointed at a part far from the centre where an out lying spiralling arm had split into several thin filaments, the outermost the deep red of a dying ember. As she pointed it came into focus and the picture expanded so that they could see it up close. ‘Yeah… it does that too…’, she remembered this time with a close to, but not quite zero amount of shame.

He looked closely. Before their eyes the outermost filament turned into little red motes, glowing one final time in a clear white light before dissolving into ash and then into nothing.

“Yep.”, he said nodding again. “The cascade spiral, takes all there is, siphons the energy of the annihilation, uses it to amplify what’s left of… everything and keeps it going for as long as possible. But something is always lost in every cycle, because…”

“The ring is broken.”, she said, her heart almost stopping, the warmth leaving her body, leaving her with cold terror.

He gasped, eyes wide. “The ring is broken.”

“What does that mean?”, she asked him, trying to get her self back under control.

“I have no idea,” he said his voice hoarse and breaking, “but I know it´s horrible.” Tears were now streaming silently down his face. “We were to late… This shouldn’t have happened.”

“No.”, she said, the Boss back at the front again, “Not everything is lost. The last resort, it worked. I am here. You are here. And all that?”, she pointed and the moving map, floating between them, “All that is still there. And we can save it.” She tried to remember someone, his name but almost everything about him apart from the knowledge that is was all his fault had vanished, so she decided to improvise, “Reprehensible Fuck, may have broken the ring, but with your cascade machine and my knowledge about the threads, we can bring back at least some of it back.”

“But so much has been lost already…”, he looked at the map in front of him noticing all the beautiful shining motes of light, which he had thought rather pretty only a moment ago. “I don’t even really remember how I am, or even my name… What if there isn’t…”

“Could you please stop?”, she said interrupting him, “You got your horrible chair and what ever it is that you are drinking there, right? Right now, its not the time to be a weepy idiot, it’s time to be a glorious one.”

“Yeah,”, he said, focusing for a moment, his face relaxing again. He stood up squaring his shoulders taking a sip of the burning but delicious liquid. “So where do we start.”

“The first thing would be bringing back your machine, I know this will help us pull things back into being. Then we can see who and what else we find out there, and with a bit more help, who knows we might be able to bring a whole universe back.”

“Right, let’s do that.”, he said now full of drive again. “Wait… did you just call me an idiot?”

“Maybe.”, she smiled.