Chapter Six: Roll that Search Check!

        Bex Thresh, of the Singularity Principalities, knelt low and touched his snout to the obsidian floor of the Pulsar Castle of House Xosh’s freehold. His palms spread and despite hardening his scales for the kick, the impact of the Bryaugh bruiser that stood to the left of him still felt like being hammered by a gravity-drill. Bex rolled and tumbled, then came to a stop. He clutched at the place where his scales had been fractured and broken and gasped in ragged pain as he tried to regenerate as quickly as he could.

        “Explain again,” the dark voice that came from the Neutron Throne sounded like a mountain grinding against another mountain. The dragon perched there was remarkably skinny and angular for a blue – his elbow spikes had grown long and he had let his forehead plates extend upwards and outwards, flaring into something more akin to a ceremonial headdress than a normal crest. His body was clad in nothing, save for a single glittering ring with a pale emerald set in the center of a swirling mass of quark-soup that had been hammered into a solid shape. It was the signet ring of House Xosh - the last subatomic gemstone in the galaxy.

        Their forgers, the star-fey of the Tiamat Clouds, had been wiped out by Xosh enforcers, to punish them for their failure to deliver tithes.

        That thought filled Bex’s mind as he knelt before Xosh. That and the ache from the kick to the stomach.

        “I...” Bex closed his eyes. “I lost the control egg, Lord Xosh...”

        “In a game,” Lord Xosh said, quietly, his thumb claw rasping around the emerald on his ring.

        “I thought-”

        “You didn’t ,” Xosh snarled, thrusting his finger at Bex. The Bryaugh bruiser that was the only other person in the throne room stepped forward, his claws clacking on the ground. His hands grabbed onto Bex’s shoulders and he hauled the other dragon to his knees, then slammed his knee into Bex’s jaw, before punching downward. The impact sent Bex sprawling and his teeth scattering across the obsidian floor. Blood dripped – and where it fell, eldritch runes flared to life for a moment, before fading. “You bulled ahead and thought that a basic understanding of Hackmaster rules would let you just slaughter your way to victory. You couldn’t even play to your fucking alignment, you-”

        The bruiser kicked Bex in the belly, managing to match the timing of his master’s words to a T.

        “-fucking-”

         Thump .

        “-red-”

         Thump .

        “-idiot!”

        The last blow was hard enough to send Bex skidding backwards, almost bowling him into his half-sister. Gimtesh stood perfectly still, her eyes wide as saucers. Bex lay upon the ground, wheezing heavily. His mind swirled with questions - how did Xosh know of the pathetic human’s game? He looked up through slitted eyes at Gimtesh.

        Lord Xosh rubbed his jaw with one finger. “Did you try to dissuade him, Gimtesh?” he asked.

        A flare of hope began within Bex’s breast.

        “Of course, m’lord!” Gimtesh said, bowing low. “But Bex never listens.”

        Bex groaned, low in his throat. But no one was paying him any heed.

        “Oh, he can listen ,” Lord Xosh said, grinning slowly. His teeth glittered. “That was why I wanted him on the Prismatic Throne, married to the last survivor of House Castrovel, to the only breedable feathered dragon in the galaxy. Those who sit atop that throne tend to be targets. And I’ve not lived this long by drawing targets on my chest, Gimmy-” he paused. “May I call you Gimmy?”

        Gimtesh nodded, quickly.

        “You have one chance to save your brother’s life,” Lord Xosh said.

        Hope flared again and Bex lifted his head, trying to catch Gimtesh’s eyes.

        “Oh, fuck him!” Gimtesh said, quickly. “He’s a shithead!”

        Lord Xosh blinked. Then he shrugged, spreading his hand.

        “No, no!” Bex gasped as the bruiser stepped up. The black dragon lifted his arm – and unfolded a sleek silvery blade from his forearm. It was unlike anything that a dragon had demonstrated before. For the black dragon wasn’t simply a black dragon. His outer layer of skin and muscle and bone were actually the genetically engineered muscles and skin and bone of a second dragon, with its mind blanked and slaved to his own. He merely needed to think and activate his favored weapon.

        Unfortunately for Bex…

        The shrike catapult was neither swift…

        Nor painless.

        Gimtesh walked out of the throne room and into the corridors leading to it, her back ramrod stiff. Her servants – tongueless and meek – moved to follow her. She snapped a pair of fingers and the silvery orb of an automated servant flew up from behind her. She snarled to it.

        “Go and tell my crew. Prep the ship. And tell my arms-master...” she looked directly at the orb. “Get guns. And get nukes. Lots and lots of nukes.”

***

        First, there was nothing.

        Then, with a scream of dimensional energies, there was something . Smoking and sputtering from dozens of plasma impacts, shedding armor like a dog with mange and spinning on all three axii, the Talon-9  tumbled into the infinite blackness that was the Plane of Negation. On the bridge, Merton coughed and waved his hand under his nose, looking around himself at the low red lighting that had replaced the normal hues. His wife was sprawled on her belly, her arms flung out before her. Merton hurried to her, but before he had even knelt next to her, she groaned and started up.

        “Merton,” she said, her tail lashing from side to side. “Remind me why I married you.”

        “You kidnapped me and threatened to blow up my planet,” Merton said, smiling slightly as he took her wrist in his hand.

        “Yay!” Brash landed on Merton’s head. His tiny, clawed hands gripped at the front of Merton’s face, and Merton froze, remembering the many times the had played with kittens. He could distinctly remember the intensely painful experience of tiny, needle like kitten claws. As he remained still, Brash hugged his head tightly, his claws drawing fine, threatening lines of pressure along Merton’s face. “Youuu saved the day!”

        “Hatchling, be quite gentle with that,” Relix said, her voice harsh. “That’s my husband’s face. I have grown to...tolerate it!” Merton could see through Brash’s enthusiastic hugs - which had begun to include the small dragon’s wings - that his wife had her hands on her hips.

        “Tolerate?” Merton asked. “That’s not what-”

        “What happens in our bedroom is proprietary information!” Relix squeaked. Then, bustling over, she grabbed Brash and yanked him off Merton’s head, provoking a loud ‘whee’ from Brash and a scream of pain from Merton.

        “Oh, don’t be such a baby,” the gobliness - Pyria? Pyroia? - said. She had been bustling around the bridge with a small wand, but what the wand did had been a bit unclear. Merton, after all, had been just a little bit distracted at the time. And now he had his hands cupped over his face, and his eyes were screwed up tight.

        “Owwww!” He whimpered. “I think I’m bleeding.”

        “Sorry!” Brash squeaked.

        Pyria slapped Merton’s thigh with the wand. A sudden burst of energy filled him and he drew his hands away from his face, blinking. The pain was gone. The feeling of the energy that had coursed through him was very familiar. Focusing on the sensation, he had a ghostly deja-vu memory. Floating in space. Dying from being too healthy. Right. During the Ouster attack, the reactor had breached and basically swamped him with healing energy. He looked at Pyria, who was now prodding Gunner with her wand, causing a chunk of carapace to regrow over the burly World War 2 veteran’s shoulder.

        “Hatchling,” Relix said. “I am very disappointed in you.”

        Brash shrank from her tone of voice. Literally, his body actually began to grow smaller and smaller as he tucked his head underneath his wing, coiling his tail around himself. Merton bit his lip. “Relix, it’s okay-”

        “Dragons need to learn that their claws don’t get used on anything unless they want to hurt it,” Relix said, her voice quite firm. “Or unless they have scales too. Understand, hatchling?”

        “...yes…” Brash mumbled from under his wing.

        “There,” Relix said, nodding fimly. She looked so proud of herself for laying down the law that Merton had to fight to hide his smile. Even if he did want to sweep Brash into his arms and spoil him with head pats. As he warred against his urges between being a good parent and getting to pet  Brash, the door to the bridge open and in bustled Speccy. Speccy was dressed in slightly more clothes than she normally wore. In addition to her bondage style mixture of wraps and straps, she had added an impressive, hip hugging belt that looked like it was stuffed with every wrench known to man or dragon.

        “Whose fucking idea was this!?” she asked, her normally ice calm voice tinged with pure rage. “Whose idea was it?”

        The entire bridge crew pointed at Merton, save for Brash, who instead lifted his hand above his head like he was in class. “Oh! Oh! Oh! Me! Pick on me!”

        Speccy scowled, drawing a huge wrench that looked like it had been used on at least one Ouster’s skull. She aimed it at Merton. “The portal engines aren’t made to transport the whole ship, you simpleton , you mage-blind oaf, you…” She snarled. “Ugh!”

        “Damage report, Spectral Timeweaver Compounding the Infinite,” Relix said, her wings folding behind her back like a cape. The familiar order seemed to snap Speccy out of her tantrum spiral - good thing, considering how close her emphatic waving of the wrench had gotten to Merton’s head. She sighed and slipped the wrench back into the pouch she had pulled it from.

        “It’s bad, my lady,” she said. “The Talon-9  realspace engines got slagged by several high energy impacts. Gauss and railgun rounds blew through the armor and pierced the demiplane, hitting several vital systems. The computer cores are half melted from the EMP produced  by quasi-nuclear impacts. Oh! And some idiot ripped a hole into the planar equivalent of a black hole and jumped right in. So our PDS and slipstream drive are both bubbling piles of slag.”

        Relix nodded. “How long do you think it’ll take to get our wings back?”

        Speccy rubbed her chin. “Well, since it’ll take going EVA in Prime Negation…” She said. “Forever.”

        Merton started. “Forever?” he asked. “I...how fast does this place kill you?”

        “Oh, the actual plane is perfectly safe for biological functions, so long as you remain within the life shell of the ship,” Speccy said. “The problem is that it drives non-dragons insane to even look into it.”

        Brash gasped. “I’m a dragon!” he said, perking up immediately. “I can do the work! I can do the work ten times!”

        “Does it drive humans crazy?” Merton asked.

        “Hmm…” Speccy pulled out yet another device from her pouches. This looked like something between a magical wand and a tricorder from Star Trek . She held it up and aimed it at Merton. Brash leaped from Relix’s shoulder to Merton’s shoulder, and Merton had to admit, the weight of the little dragon was nice and comforting. Brash waved excitedly at the wand, but Speccy was more focused on the screen of the device. She adjusted a knob, then nodded.

        “Right,” she said. “Humans and dragons share several alpha and beta wave patterns in their cerebral cortex.”

        “Really?” Merton asked. It was less of a shocked sound. And more of a ‘ah, another clue’ sound. Before he could elaborate on it, Relix let out her most haughty of a snort.

        “Oh? What could they possibly share with dragons?” she asked.

        “The ability to find anything sexually attractive,” Speccy said, her voice flat and brutally honest.

        “Ah,” Relix said, her muzzle darkening. Several members of the bridge crew were all grinning. Relix spun around to glare at them, her hands clenching tightly. “Get back to work, you lot!” She said, cracking her tail like it was a whip. Everyone hurried to start tugging apart smoking machines and pulling out broken components. But they were still smiling. Relix nodded, satisfied that her work here was done.

        Merton slipped an arm through hers, drawing her close. She looked at him, confusion in her eyes.

        “What?” she asked.

        Merton grinned, then lazily reached out and tugged a wrench from Speccy’s hip holster. Speccy scowled at him, until she saw him press the wrench into Relix’s chest. Relix whimpered.

        “Can’t I...oversee...things?”

        “Sorry,  Princess,” Merton said, already dragging her for the door. “But your administration position is in another castle.”

        Brash followed after, padding along on all four legs, the biggest wrench he could find in his jaws.

***

        Calling the elemental plane of prime negation black was inaccurate.

Blackness implied a substance, a possibility.

Black is a color – a color of beauty and profundity and terror. Black had a soul.

The Talon-9 didn’t float upon anything nearly so comforting. But the human mind and the dragon mind shared a similar immunity to the effects of this infinite, existential nothingness. Where other species might have taken one glimpse into that endless absence  and realized just how futile and small they were and then immediately cracked and gone full H.P Lovecraft protagonist...humans and dragons could both look into the space and take comfort in their own immense, overweening egos.

Either that or the fact that they wanted to, at some subconscious level, fuck the infinite nothingness. That was the similarity, wasn’t it?

        Merton shook his head as he turned away from the nothingness to Carlos. Carlos grinned at him through the thick plastic faceplate of his space suit. “Hey, you know what I think of at times like this?” he asked.

        “No, what?” Merton asked.

        “At least we have Rick and Morty !”

        “We what?”

        Carlos laughed, pausing in his waddling along the hull of the Talon-9 .  Carlos’ one super-power, his ability to make any suit of clothes no matter how well tailored and designed for him, look rumpled and disheveled was on full display for the space suit that Speccy had thrown together for him: The helmet looked slightly off center, one of the gloves seemed to have fingers a full inch longer than his actual fingers, and his pants looked slightly twisted. Despite this, Carlos had a huge smile on his face, ill fitting clothes or not. Meanwhile, Merton was dressed in his skinclothes, which responded to minor magical impulses like a collection of the world’s most helpful puppies, giving him a spacesuit that he could move around in with as much ease as his T-shirt and jeans.

        For some reason, Carlos had still insisted on being the one to carry the plates of adamantine hull plating. His left arm was stretched to the limits to keep the plating tight against his chest. His right arm was fastened to the grapnels that the Talon-9 had helpfully extruded to help them walk around on her wounded skin. He looked back up the grapnel and started to walk along the skin. They were in microgravity, so the ‘walking’ involved a lot of careful placement of the magnetic boots, an act that Carlos made as awkward and flailing as he made everything else.

        “I was just saying,” Carlos said, puffing as he dragged himself up to stand on one of the flanges that spread outwards from the upper right ‘shoulder’ of the Talon-9 . It was the part of the ship where one of the whale-fin “wings” that spread around the engine connected to the normal hull. The ship was deeply beautiful from the outside, and Merton felt an almost physical pang at seeing the dozen or so holes that railgun slugs had punched through the armor here. He shook his head while Carlos panted for a few seconds. “I was just saying...the TV reception is great for the fact we’re floating in the fucking plane of negative energy.”

        Merton laughed.

        “Though, just saying, the guy who wrote Planescape should sue ,” Carlos said. “Chris Avelon, right?”

        “That’s the guy who wrote Planescape Torment ,” Merton said. “Planescape as a setting was written by...Cook, something.” He paused, thinking.

        “David Cook,” Lisa’s voice cracked over their radios.

        “Right, right,” Merton said, nodding.

        “Soooo, is anyone going to talk about the fact that a Dungeons and Dragons supplement from the nineteen fucking eighties accurately described the makeup of the polycosmos?” Lisa asked. “I mean, yeah, it’s called the City of O and not Sigil and there’s some kind of evil alternate version called the Night City-”

        “Huh?” Merton and Carlos asked at the exact same time, in the exact same tone of voice.

        “Yeah, we got a map!” Julia said, her voice breaking into the conversation. “Since we finished our part of the repair jobs, you bozons.”

        “You’re a bozon!” Carlos said.

        “Dude!” Merton said. “That’s my transgendered internet girlfriend slash partner in crime. Only I get to call her a bozon .”

        “Something unprintable,” Carlos muttered under his breath.

        Julia giggled. “Anywho, we bugged Gunner to bug the Princess to get us a map of the multiverse. Or polycosmos. Or whatever . Did you know that there’s another dimension with a dragon high school ?” she sounded delighted. “Oh, and another one with freaking robots with lightsabers !”

        “That’s great, Julia,” Merton said, chuckling. “But do you have any useful information?”

        “Noooo I donnnn’t!” Julia sang.

        “Though, uh, I have some information here,” Lisa said, her voice growing grim. “We’re getting news feeds from the whole galaxy. The attack on House Yeltanzo is lighting up all the bands. Imperial Legions are mobilizing.” As Lisa spoke, Carlos held out one of the chunks of adamantine armor. Merton took it with a quiet grunt. “And we’re stuck out here until we fix this ship up.”

        “Right,” Carlos said, then turned, looking out at the vastness surrounding them. “It does creep me the fuck out.”

        “Which puts humans one step above everyone but the dragons,” Merton said as he laid the armor plating down. The rectangle of hardened adamantite started to unfold as magic worked itself into the skin of the ship. The replacement hull plating slipped into the jagged line of damage and started to glow with a brilliant heat that was nearly comforting when compared to the vastness of the plane of negation.

        “Lisa, Julia,” Merton said, then paused. “Where’s Trevor?”

        “I’m working on the engine fins back here,” Trevor said, his voice tight with annoyance. “Stop fucking distracting me.”

        “Distract Trevor with fucking, got it,” Julia said, cheerfully. Then, less cheerfully. “Merton, I’ve been doing some rough matheguesstimation, and it looks like the Five Talon Empire has enough armies and ships to explode the Earth, like, ten times over.”

        “No offense, but fucking duh !” Trevor snapped. “They’re a galactic fucking empire .”

        “Buuuuuuuuut!” Julia sounded like she had just thrust her finger into the air. “Most of those fleets and armies aren’t controlled by the Emperor. We got space feudalism in full force here. It’s all collections of personal merc armies with fealties to individual dragon dudes and dudettes. Meaning that House Xosh can only throw House Xosh - and their allies, I guess - at Earth.”

        “Don’t their allies include a legion of super-dragons?” Carlos asked.

        “Did someone say... snuggle dragon!? ”

        The voice that called to the two humans didn’t come through their space suited helmets. It echoed through the plane of negation as if it was just an ordinary room. Brash flew directly into the small of Merton’s back, shifting as he impacted, so that he went from his full dragony form into a humanoid form that could more properly glomp onto someone. Merton nearly went flying off the side of the ship as Brash’s arms  and legs wrapped around him. Meanwhile, the replacement component that Speccy needed to get the Talon-9  ready to fight another space battle started to drift off in an erratic direction, floating deeper into negation.

“Super, Brash,” Carlos said, casually.

“Brash!” Merton squeaked. “Dude!”

“Oh, sorry!” Brash said, then shifted. Through his thin space suit, Merton could feel Brash shifting from bishonen fuckboy to something considerably girlier . And less hung. And...girl. His eyes widened and he stood perfectly still.

“I meant the component !” Merton said.

“Oh! Right!” Brash grabbed onto his shoulders and launched his - er, her  - self up and away. For a single moment, Merton’s faceplate was filled with the sleek, hairless folds of the cutest, most fuckable pussy he had ever seen, nestled between two sleek, pale thighs, which themselves were attached to a peach shaped, spankable rump. All quite human, save for a tiny patch of black scales where her pubic hair should have been, and a single whipcord thin black scaled tail. Then Brashette grew out her wings, flapped once, and slammed into the component. “Get back here, component!”

Carlos whispered. “Dude. Your son-daughter is hot ,” he said.

“Carlos!” Merton hissed.

“Thanks!” Brashette called down to them.

“He’s...she’s…”

“She!” Brashette said. “Oh! Now I’m a he!” He giggled, his voice definitely sounding slightly deeper. “Now, I’m a she! She, he, she, he, she, he, they!” Brash sang out the changes, his/her voice modulating tones with each word.

Merton shook his head. “Brash is less than two days old.”

“Didn’t he say that dragons age to be eighteen years old three seconds after they hatch?” Carlos whispered. “Also, we’re in space, fighting evil space dragons. Is now really the time to have moral quandaries about whether or not one can dibs on a cute dragon’s butt?”

“You are aware that I can hear all of this, right?” Lisa asked, her voice a low growl. “Carlos, if you touch Brash, I’m breaking your arm.”

“ Thank you!” Merton said.

“Awww!” Brash said, shifting into his full dragon form to grip the component more securely. With a single beat of his wings, he shot towards the rear of the Talon-9 .

        Merton shook his head, slowly. All of that was a new scale of weirdness and provoked weirder feelings. He decided to pack all those questions away for future Merton to deal with. However, out of the corner of his eye, he noticed that Carlos had laid down the last of the armor plating...and then reached up and flicked off his radio transmitter with a click. He gestured with one hand for Merton to get close. Merton figured out almost immediately. He flicked off his radio and started to walk forward. If you shouted in a helmet, you could be heard through the vibration of plastic and glass. And if your radio was off, it made for a nice and private conversation.

        “So, are we going to talk about the fact that Planescape is real?” Carlos shouted - his voice sounding like it was coming through a thick wall.

        “Not sure what there is to talk about,” Merton said. “We’ve got nothing to say beyond ‘gee, that’s fucking weird.’ Also, seems a bit lower on the scale than you checking out my adoptive daughter . And the fact that I have an adoptive daughter, who is sometimes, an adoptive son, slash adoptive...puppy...dragon thing. ”

        Carlos blushed. “Yeah, sorry. I...that might have been a bit far. Like, off color jokes at the D&D table are one thing, but…” He shook his head in his helmet. “Sorry.”

“Apology accepted,” Merton said, smiling.

“But, on the subject of the whole multiverse thing, it’s fucking weird! ” Carlos said, his chubby cheeks shining with perspiration. Merton had to admit he was right. He sighed.

        “Okay, here’s my current theory,” Merton said. “Dragons learn stuff psychically, right? Maybe they broadcast it too, like some kind of big psychic field, and the human race has been picking it up?”

        “Why has no one else picked it up?” Carlos asked.

        “We don’t know that they haven’t. Every other race we’ve run into has either been magic, which might fuck with the reception, or they’ve been enslaved by the FTE long enough to have their original culture buried underneath the draconic one.” Merton shrugged, then stepped over to the many patches that he and Carlos had been laying down. It had gone from white to red hot, and as he watched, even that heat faded, leaving a perfect patch-job. He gently patted it with the toe of his boot, to ensure that the material was hardened properly. He grunted, then flicked on his radio.

        “I’m just saying,” Julia was saying. “We should get some allies with the metallic dragons, right? So, priority one should be warning them that House Xosh is the big bad.”

        “Any draconic house is a threat to Earth. Any of them,” Lisa said, her voice flat.

        Merton smiled, glad to hear the brain trust was working on the bigger issues. He adjusted the dial on his radio, clicking through the frequencies until he finally heard Speccy saying: “Checking engine thrust nozzle four-B. Okay, we’re good, shut her down and move onto five-B.”

 “Yo, Speccy!” Merton said. “We’ve got one zone patched. How many more damage zones we got?” He closed his eyes, remembering how many times Speccy had gritted her teeth at the diminutive of her name. “I mean, uh, Spectral-”

        “Two more,” Speccy cut him off. “And I...am given to understand by Princess Relix that-”

        “-piece of murder fuck shit crap damn tail eating scale rotting-” Relix’s voice was filled with more anger and fury than Merton had ever heard in his entire marriage. Which, to be fair, was not very long. But still .

        “-that I am to accept you calling me...Speccy...” Speccy sounded less than pleased.

        “Awesome, Speccy,” Carlos said.

        “I better check on the waifu,” Merton said.

        “Don’t you fucking dare call me that !” Relix’s voice boomed over the radio.

        “Sorry, snoogums,” Merton said, grinning as he demagged his boots, kicked off the ship, then turned on the cold-jet thrusters on the back of his suit. He skimmed along the ship, leaving Carlos behind. It wasn’t until he was nearly at the snout of the Talon-9  that Carlos realized Merton had left him with the hard job of getting more patch plates, then lugging them to the other damage zones, then applying them. Merton saw the instant that Carlos figured it out: It was when Carlos started to shake his fist furiously.

        When Merton cleared the nose of his ship, he found his wife floating next to one of the exposed railgun barrels that she was trying to fix. A collection of parts were floating around her, glittering like stars in the light shining from the front of the Talon-9’s bridge, and she was using a wrench to try and undo a screw. Her muscles bulged as she gritted her teeth, braced her clawed feet against the hull, then strained even harder. Merton put his palm against the ship to slow himself down, and felt the low groan of stressing metal.

        “This railgun shall bow before me!” Relix snarled.

        “Honey, honey!” Merton started. “It’s-”

        In the three way battle between Relix, the wrench, and the bolt she was working on, the wrench surrendered first. It bent with a squeal Merton could hear through his palms and the sudden relaxing of pressure sent Relix flipping back into space.

        “-righty tighty,” Merton groaned. “Lefty loosey.”

        Relix beat her wings, demonstrating why this place wasn’t a true vacuum, and flew back into the nose of the ship, where she wrenched the wrench free and started to shake it. “Traitor!”

        Merton pushed himself down to float beside her, putting his hands on her shoulders. He pressed his space-suited helmet against her ear and whispered. “You do know that you don’t need to help, right? I was mostly kidding. ” His voice was soft, and it made her tense up as she lowered the wrench down, letting it fall from her fingers. Which meant it started to float away from the ship, gently carried away on the invisible forces that seemed to determine the drift in this place.

        “I know,” she whispered, her voice husky. “A-And if I truly didn’t want to, I could have stopped you. I’m stronger than you.” She smiled for a moment, but it faded like a nuclear explosion in space. “I’m not just a spoiled space princess. I can help. If Brash can help, I can help.”

        “Brash seems to be preprogrammed with the engineering data on a worrying number of weapons,” Merton said, smiling as he squeezed her shoulders. “You, meanwhile, spent most of your youth learning magic and politicking and stuff.”

        “Mostly dance,” she said, quietly.

        “What?” Merton blinked.

        “Dad’s been on my tail-scales since I came of age to attract a mate, honestly,” she said, shrugging as she glared at the bolt that had forced her wrench to surrender. “And I resisted him for so long.” Her voice grew bitter. “I didn’t just want to be a brood mare. Kellen…” She stopped.

        Merton put a gloved hand on her muzzle, then flicked his radio off. He pressed his helmet against her again, speaking quietly. “You can tell me, Relix.”

        Relix tossed her head. But her arm still slid around Merton’s back, drawing him close to her. Under the nose of the Talon-9 , they had privacy. They had quiet. The vastness of the nothingness that surrounded them felt, for once, like a comfort. In the stillness, Relix could speak.

        “Ten years ago,” she said. “I had a harem, to quiet my father. W-We never tried to actually make eggs, though. They were all people I saved from various chromatic nastiness.” She shook her head. “Gladiators. Slave miners. People who...I...d-don’t tell anyone, but I...I don’t like seeing people in pain.”

        “Your secret is safe with me.” Merton took one of her hands, squeezing it. He was being honest - he had seen only a sliver of how the FTE worked, and he knew that it could not be a kind place for the gentle. The meek. Relix looked into his eyes, her eyes narrowing as if she was trying to spot some kind of mockery. Her nose almost bumped against his faceplate, and her breath fogged it. She smiled, shyly.

        “Even metallic dragons, who aren’t in favor of hurting others...they’re not soft about it,” Relix said, her voice very quiet. “A silver can slaughter a million villains to save his people. And he won’t cry himself to sleep.”

        Merton nodded.

        “B-But...the problem with helping people?” Relix licked her muzzle, the movement nervous. “You make enemies. And you show that you care. I-I still don’t know who sabotaged the airlock. But they...all of them…” She shook her head slightly. “And that was when I realized I needed to be hard .”

        Merton smiled, slightly. “So that’s why you kept all of their families on your demiship?”

        “W-Well-”

        “And why you blustered and bragged about glassing my planet, but rather than doing it, you just left?” Merton grinned.

        Relix blushed, her feathered crest rising in affront. “I would have. Maybe. Don’t push me, husband.” She grinned, slightly.

        Merton snorted, then leaned his faceplate forward, bumping her nose with his. As best as he could. Relix giggled, quietly, then shook her head. “I admit, part of me wasn’t sure about rescuing Brash, when he was just an egg.” She smiled. “But it was the right decision.”

        “And not just because he’s a super weapon?” Merton asked.

        Relix giggled and rubbed her forehead against his faceplate, her eyes closing as she hugged him with arms, tail and wings.

        A faint thump thump thump  that he could feel through the soles of his boots made Merton look up. Up meant looking at the upside-down face of Lisa, because space . Lisa had clearly moved to the bridge of the Talon-9 , and Gunner had activated the forward window screen now that the battle had finished. Technically, Lisa was a few demiplanes away from the skin of the ship, but thanks to the magic of portals and advanced visual projections, she looked as if she was right there for Merton to talk too. She mimed flicking at her ear, her face pure irritation.

        Merton and Relix moved apart as quickly as they could, and Merton could see that Relix felt as flustered as he did. He reached up and flicked his radio back on.

        “You’re not going to fucking believe this,” Lisa said, her voice firm over the radio.

        “What?” Relix asked, looking up, her eyes narrowing.

        “We’ve detected something on wide-band scrying,” Lisa said. “We confirmed it with the telescopes and LIDAR. It’s...” she made a face. “It’s a castle .”

        “You gotta be fucking kidding,” Merton whispered. Then he swung his head around. He was getting the hang of asking his skin-suit to do something using his magical connection to it. But even so, it took a few tries to get a vision enhancing augment online. It zoomed in on the infinite blackness that wasn’t blackness and, there, on the edge of vision, he could see a grayish spec. It was definitely coming slowly closer.

        “What is it?” Relix asked. “I was told nothing can survive in this plane. We’re only alive because of our reactor and the life bubble.”

        “It’s...” Merton paused. “It’s...”

        “What?” Brash asked, landing on his shoulder with a rustle of wings. Fortunately, he had chosen to be in his small, cat-sized form. “Is it candy!?”

        Merton scooped Brash into his arms and started to rub his belly. The tiny dragon immediately forgot all questions and started to bat at his fingers while giggling.

        “It’s the Fortress of Regrets,” Merton said, looking at Relix.

***

        A light brighter than the sun exploded into being. It cast shadows both jagged and curved with the starkness that only a truly bright light could provide. Dust swirled in the sudden heat-vortexes created where that point of brightness appeared. Then the point swept in a circle about a meter wide, leaving a cherry red line along a wall that had been untouched for uncountable years. As the red light throbbed from the line of sliced metal, a muffled conversation could be heard.

        “Can I knock?” A youthful voice.

        “It’s not a d-” A gruff, clicking voice.

        “Knock knock!”

        The hammering booms that filled the Fortress of Regrets echoed off of the walls with such force that they almost obscured the crash of the wall falling inwards. Brash the Dragon hopped onto the center of the meter wide circle, singing: “A candy gram made of actual candy who also has sex with you named Pinkie Pie!”

        “I told you you shouldn’t have shown him e621,” Carlos said.

        “Who showed him e621!?” Lisa shouted from behind Gunner and his two armsmen, who hurried forward into the fortress, their laser rifles at the ready, sweeping them about to cover the large chamber that they had cut into.

        “What’s e621?” Brash asked, then cocked his head. His eyes whirred and he went. “Ooooooh! That’s what e621 is! ”

“Carlos, stop corrupting my son-” Merton started.

“Boom! Daughter!” Brashette said, exploding from small cat-sized dragon to sleek, svelte looking girl. A svelte looking entirely naked girl. Her small, a-cup breasts bounced perkily, while a fine patina of scaling was clustered around her incredibly adorable belly button and right above the cleft of her pussy, like shimmering pubic hair. Her hair was long enough to hang down to her rump, but was brushed entirely back, so her pale chest was completely exposed. She started to bounce happily, which set delicious jiggles through her whole body. Well. The parts that could jiggle.  Merton clapped his hands over his eyes.

“Brashette!” he yelped.

“Why bother looking at cuckoldry pictures if you’re just gonna complain about it?” Brashette muttered. “Also, blacklisted! Blacklisted! Blacklisted...”

“Brashette, clothes !” Merton snapped.

“Oh, right!” Brashette said. Merton uncovered his eyes and saw that Brash had returned to his cat-sized form. Now entirely non-sexual, he started to walk in circles, singing out.

“Blacklisted! Blacklisted!”

        “What’s he doing?” Trevor asked, stepping onto the door with Merton. “Also, dude, why is your face so red?”

        Merton paused, thinking it through. By now, he was starting to get used to Brash’s thought processes. It went sex, snuggles, sex, candy, pet, sex. In order from most to least important. With that in mind, he nodded: “He’s blacklisting kinks on e621.”

“Ah,” Trevor said.

The rest of the group stepped finished striding through the door. Thanks to the Ouster attack, the Talon-9 was really low on armsmen. That was why Gunner, despite his grumbling, had given impact armor and laser rifles to Trevor, Lisa, and Carlos. Of the three, Lisa was the only one who should really have been given a gun, which was why she was covering their asses. Relix brushed some dust off her cufflinks as she swept into the mysterious castle.

        The first chamber they had cut into was clearly an entrance. It was a hall, grand and alien in its design. Several ‘statues’ loomed throughout the area: Jagged and snarled looking things that looked more like energy cannons than anything decorative. Their barrels aimed into the ceiling or at one another. There were broad stairs that swept up towards landings that loomed almost twenty feet higher than the rest of the chamber, while broad doors made of metal thorns and flowing quicksilver were set into frames studded with black gemstones. The entire place was only illuminated by the circles of light that spilled from their laser rifles – giving everything a jagged, half finished look to it as the pools of light swept here, there, everywhere.

        “What is this place?” Relix asked.

        “Uh, if my information is right, a solidified fortress made purely out of the regrets of a very bad man,” Merton said.

        “And how would you have information?” Relix asked, narrowing her eyes slightly. “Your people are mage blind. You don’t even fly in space.”

        Merton licked his lips. Carlos and the others had every reason to not trust Relix, or any dragon. She had kidnapped them after all. He looked at Julia, to see what she thought. His girlfriend was leading up the rear with a four legged hamper that followed after her, waddling along like a rectangular dog. She was holding a tablet in one hand and what appeared to be a plastic wand in the other. Merton was about to ask before she said: “We’re honestly not sure, Princess.”

        Relix crossed her arms over her chest. “Fine, give your suspicions.”

        Merton sighed. His hands slid into his pockets and he shrugged. “Human culture seems to have...guessed...a lot of what is going on in the galaxy. The split between prismatic and metallic dragons. The existence of this place. The layout of the multiverse, if not their exact names.” He pulled out his hand, waving it at the castle for emphasis. Then his hand went right back into his pockets. “I think that humans are picking up some psychic backwash from dragons. Like, a side effect of how you learn.”

        “That’s not possible.”

        Speccy had entered. She had her own four legged hamper following her, and was holding up something that looked like a rectangle with a glowing crystal orb set into the middle of a hole cut into it. She held it up like a Nintendo Switch and started to look through the crystal orb at the surroundings. “Dragon learning,” she continued. “It stops after they hatch.”

        “Maybe Earth sits on a ley-line,” Trevor said, shrugging.

        Merton looked at his most taciturn friend.

        Trevor shrugged again. “Hey, if Planescape is true, Rifts might be.”

        “God, I hope not,” Lisa said, shuddering.

        Speccy lowered her device. “This place is clean. If anything lived here, it stopped a long time ago. I’m detecting several purely arcane portals linking to the Outer and Inner planes, though. Give me a day, maybe two? I can re-target them.”

        “We can go home!” Lisa said, her eyes widening.

        “Those portals are connecting right to House Castrovel holdings, their allies, and the Prismatic Throne,” Speccy said, her voice firm. “We have to get the warning to the Imperial House immediately  that the attack on Yelnatzo was no pirate raid, no exterior invasion, but treachery.”

        Carlos coughed. “If this place has multiple portals, you can spare one for us. Right?”

        “No,” Speccy said. She crossed all four of her arms over her chest. “My duty to House Castrovel is clear.”

Merton felt a hand slide over his shoulder and squeeze. His hand cupped it and he looked at Relix, who was looking as if she was marshaling her thoughts as she looked about the castle. Relix met his eyes and smiled.

        “Get to work on the portals. Cite one on Earf,” she said..  

        Speccy’s teeth audibly ground  together. Like boulders.

        “Earth,” Merton whispered.

        “No, I believe that it was pronounced Earf.” Relix lifted her nose. “Your concubine showed me the proper pronunciation by Earth’s mightiest warrior while we were flying to the castle. He was very brave in the historical documentary. By the way, you never said that humanity stopped such a horrid race!” She shuddered.

        Merton shot a look at Julia, who gave him two huge thumbs up.

        Gunner sighed and stepped up. “Ma’am, before you do anything, I want to do a complete search. Lisa, set up the guard perimeter around this door.” He pointed a chitinous finger at Merton. “You? Suit up.”

        Brash gasped excitedly. “Yes!” He leaped and before Merton could ask for him to not too, Brash had landed on his face like the world’s most adorable facehugger. Merton’s arms cartwheeled, but it was too late. Brash’s body shapeshifted into the skintight power armor that he had been genetically engineered to form. Once he had finished, Merton felt the faint sting of the connections clicking in, and suddenly, he wasn’t wearing Brash. He and Brash were one thing, fused together in a level so deep that Merton wasn’t sure where one started and the other began. He looked down at his scales and felt a curious thrill .

        He was…

        “Uh, dude,” Carlos said. “Pants.”

        Merton looked down. Brash’s body had covered and subsumed his clothing. End result? Brash was showing off what a draconic schlong looked like. And the raw power that crackled through every single one of Merton’s nerves was having its natural effect on his manhood, meaning that he was popping almost eighteen inches of hard, red dick. He coughed and thought: Brash, can we have internal genitalia?

         “I’m sorry, I don’t understand your request,” Brash said in his ears and Merton felt his balls grow slightly. Lisa was covering her eyes with her hand, but Brash helpfully highlighted her hard nipples in Merton’s HUD. Julia, meanwhile, had pulled out her cellphone and was tapping the picture button with the regularity of a metronome.

         Brash! Merton thought.

        “No hablo inglis!” Brash sang.

        “Okay, we’re searching!” Merton said through Brash – his voice sounding deeper and more masculine than his normal voice did. He strode forward, hoping to find something to punch. He strode up one of the stairs and to one of the doors that looked like thorns and quicksilver and found the door opening for him automatically. Once he was out of earshot of the others, he whispered to Brash. “Seriously, dude. We need to work together.”

        “Yeah, but sexy stuff is fun,” Brash said, cheerfully. “Also, as a dragon prince, you kinda lacked some of the abilities of a dragon... until now .” He said those last two words like a movie trailer announcer. As he spoke, Merton noticed something else had changed. In his defense, his dragon dong had been a little bit distracting - but now that he was looking around the interior of the abandoned castle, he could see that Brash had refined the HUD slightly.

        For one thing, he had a pair of bars in the upper left hand corner of his vision. One of them was red and had a small red cross as a capstone. The other was blue and had a small blue shield. On the lower right hand corner of his vision, he had a white circle that was flecked with several blue dots, each one standing in the rough position of his friends. And, of course, the upper edge of his vision had a series of small, numbered boxes.

        “Brash…” Merton said.

        “Oh! You like the HUD?” he asked, cheerfully. “Focus on the boxes! Dooo it!”

        “No, wait, before...any of that, what the fuck else did you give me?” Merton asked. “I already got the augmented donger.

        “Oh! Uh, you can now secrete lust pheromones, add psychotropic precum to your cock, and can flavor your scales to taste like whatever! Chocolate! Butter! Bacon! Oh! Oh! Oh! Can we have some bacon!?” Brash asked. Merton laughed. He couldn’t not . It was nearly impossible to do anything but.

        “Once we get back to the ship, I will feed you a whole plate. If you give me an internal genitalia.”

        “Aww...” Brash sighed. But he did retract the massive donger, which made a tiny knot of embarrassment loosen in his gut. Merton shook his head and started to walk towards the edges of the room. He focused on the letter F - on a hunch - and was pleased when a beam of light shone from the side of his head, like a flashlight had just turned on. “See, I knew this redesigned interface would work!”

        Merton chuckled. “It’s pretty swanky. But what’s the shield?”

        “Armor spells,” Brash said. “Oh! Oh! Focus on the numbers!”

        Merton stepped up to an angular doorway that led off the edge of the main chamber. It opened into a narrow room that looked as if it might be some kind of bedroom...but Merton wasn’t entirely sure. That could have been a mattress, or it could have been a very oddly shaped rock. But he decided, hey, why not? He focused on the 1 box. It unfolded, revealing his options for 1 was claws and water cannon .

        “Two is short ranged weapons - the spinfusor and the shrike catapult. Three is the medium ranged weapons, the plasma beamcasters and the vol-tech ray emitters. Three is the long ranged weapons: The anti-matter bowdarts, the goblin sphere catapults, the death wands…” Brash said, matter of factly.

        And that was when Merton turned around and came to face with a three meter tall, four armed walking blender made of evil, hate and spikes.

***

        Lisa and Relix walked together. Technically, Relix was being guarded by Lisa. But Lisa was uncomfortably aware that she was less strong, less tough, less fast and less magical than the princess. The princess who was forcing Lisa’s opinion of her up, despite everything Lisa felt about being torn away from her husband, her cats, her comfortable apartment, her long running Facebook feuds with that neo-nazi, and her planet in general. For one thing, Relix wasn’t complaining, even though she was the one carrying the heavy magical machine that was apparently required to begin modifying one of the portals.

        The conversation before the two of them had been sent off had been simple.

        “We shall begin modifying the nearest portal,” Relix had said.

        “We haven’t secured the castle,” Gunner had said. “Your husband is still-”

        “The nearest portal is fifteen meters down that corridor. We’ll be in line of sight the whole time. And I want...my...husband’s friends to get home and safe,” Relix had said while patting Lisa’s head.

        And lo, they had been set off.

        “So,” Relix said. “Are you going to join Julia in my husband’s harem?”

        “What? No!” Lisa exclaimed.

        “But you’re an attractive woman, and he’s the head of the household!” Relix said, scoffing.

        “I...no!” Lisa shuddered. “Ugh. No. Fuck no. Jesus fucking Christ, absolutely not .”

        Relix looked bemused. “Then-”

        “ No ,” Lisa said, with such finality that it put Relix’s feathered crest back against her head. She snorted out twin rings of steam, then thrust her snout into the air.

        “Pff!” she said. “As if I wanted to sleep with you anyway.”

        “Fucking dragons,” Lisa muttered. Then she paused. She spun backwards, lifting her rifle – and the flashlight slung underneath it swept across a plain brick wall that had not existed five seconds before. Relix looked back over her shoulder, then snapped out her wings in shock. She spun around, setting the magical machine on the floor. She stepped up to the wall, then put her ear to it. Her eyes narrowed.

        “I can’t hear them through it,” she said.

        Lisa lifted her wrist. This part of her suit, she had been told, was the communicator. She tapped at the screen, then said: “Gunny? Gunny, can you hear me?”

        The faint buzz of static was all that reached her. Lisa frowned. “Of course...”

        Relix punched the wall. Her fist smashed into brick like a cannonball, and smoke filled the corridor, causing Lisa to jerk her hand up to shield her face. A few fragments pattered off the chest piece of her combat armor, falling to the floor with a sound not unlike rain. Coughing, Lisa said: “Did you get through?”

        Relix frowned, then jerked on her arm. “I seem to be stuck.”

        Lisa blinked, then swung her flashlight around to aim it at where the dragon princess had punched the wall. Her fist looked as if it had merged with the brick. Stone and motor pressed up against her wrist and she jerked back, trying to tear her hand free. But either she couldn’t get enough leverage, or the brick wall had decided to get its revenge. She gritted her teeth, her wings beating in agitation. “Come on...” She flashed with pale white light, and when the light faded, she had become a tiny kitten. Said kitten had its paw stuck in the wall. She transformed into an earth-worm, and that was half stuck in the wall. She resumed her normal humanoid form, looking a bit worried now.

        “What do we do?” Relix asked.

        “Shoot the wall?” Lisa suggested.

        Relix looked at her. “Like a wall that can withstand my strength is going to be stopped by an anti-personal laser!”

        “Uh...” Lisa paused. “We...could...uh...” She looked down at the laser rifle. Then at Relix. She squirmed internally. She hated the monarchy and everything it stood for. But looking at Relix’s widening eyes made her stomach flop.

        Then a loud roar of gunfire, echoing from elsewhere in the castle, jerked Relix’s head up. “That was a spinfusor.” she snarled. “Cut it off! Cut it off!”

        “But-”

        “Merton is in danger!” Relix snarled. “It’ll grow back!”

        Lisa nodded, then dialed the laser rifle from pulsed fire to a cutting beam.

        “Wait!” Relix said. She closed her eyes. “Let me…” There was a faint slurp noise and suddenly, her wrist looked like a limp sock. “O kay. Now.”

        ‘What did you do?”

        “I removed the bone, most of the nerve cells, and as many blood vessels as I could. No need to actually have it hurt,” Relix said, flashing a toothy grin at Lisa. Lisa, despite herself, smiled back. Then she shouldered the rifle. She thought to herself: It’s just like cutting a rubber chicken in half with a lightsaber. She still closed her eyes as she swept the beam down in a smooth arc. The smell was intense – a stink of burning lizard – and when she opened her eyes, Relix was pulling her arm free. She flicked her wrist and a new hand grew out of the smoking stump.

        “Jesus,” Lisa said.

        “Oh, that’s not regeneration,” Relix said, turning and starting down the corridor – leaving the box behind her. “I just shifted the wound somewhere else. Come on! Let’s find another way to them!”

        “Wait!” Lisa hissed. “Get the box!”

        Relix glared at her.

        “It’s an irreplaceable magical dongle that we’re going to need later. We bring the box, and I guard it when you fight-” Another rattling boom echoed out. “-whatever that is.”

        Relix snapped her teeth, but picked up the box with a grunt. She heaved it onto her shoulder and started to charge forward. Lisa sprinted after her – her heart in her throat. And despite the fact that they were probably going to die horribly, part of Lisa had to admit…

        She’d miss this adventure.

        But not nearly as much as she missed her cats. And her husband. And her comfortable apartment.

***

        Merton and Brash stood stock still as they looked at the thing that stood before them. It had two legs and four arms, but other than that, it bore no resemblance whatsoever to Speccy. For one thing, its body was made entirely out of midnight black obsidian. It was like someone had taken the jagged rock-flats that surrounded an active volcano and given it malignant life. Jagged blades of paper thin rock made up the shoulders and the elbows and the knees and the chest of the thing. Its eyes swirled with the blue-purple light that Brash’s HUD identified as Hawking Radiation. It was standing stock still. Not breathing. Not moving.

        “Should we say hi?” Brash whispered to Merton.

         Brash, how many weapon systems do you have online? Merton thought.

         “All of them! I grew them when I ate all those metal pieces in the engineering bay!” Brash said, cheerfully. “That’s why they’re in the numbers bar!”

         That’s where the spare metal went!? Merton asked.

        The creature cocked its head. It was a strangely insectoid motion, like a spider uncoiling a limb. It had the same terrible deliberateness of a spider too. Then, between moments, one of its arms slammed towards Merton’s chest. Merton reacted as he had to the Ouster, bringing up his forearm and the obsidian blade plunged into a glowing green replica of Captain America’s shield. Rock and magical energy made a sound like a gong played by a methhead in a death metal band, and the impact transmitted kinetic energy through Merton that sent him flying backwards. He crashed into the wall, rebounded, then landed on his feet. He skidded as Brash growled.

        “Fink!” he said, in the same way most people would say fucker. “He’s messing with time!”

        The obsidian blender proved this by appearing behind Merton – like a soap bubble popping.

        Merton ducked an arm blade and spun around to face the creature.

        “Fortunately, I’m as awesome as I am sexy,” Brash said. “Hit it!”

        The unmistakable record scratch sound, followed by driving bass themes of the song Spybreak by the Propellerheads started to play in Merton’s ears.

        “Seriously!?” Merton asked.

        “Yeahhhhhhh boooyyy!” Brash whooped as the obsidian blender started to run forward. He was moving incredibly fast – but he wasn’t moving ‘literally faster than the human brain could comprehend it.’ So, Merton lifted his arm, selected ‘spinfusor’ and watched the knuckles on his right arm unfolded and three disks of glowing, blue-white plasma appeared.

An obliging crosshair snapped up in the center of his vision. Merton grinned, fiercely, then thought of pulling the trigger. The disks zipped out in a barrage of flashing death. The obsidian blender unfolded its upper arms, knocking two disks aside, then twisting to evade the third, which struck the wall behind it and exploded.

        The obsidian blender smashed into melee range.

        And it turned out, Brash had been a very well designed dragon.

        The monster swung two arms in a downward, chopping motion – with all the grace of an industrial logging machine – and Merton found himself stepping backwards. He willed a sword into his hand, and his magical talent was all to obliging. A sword made of the same green energy as the shield appeared and he swung at the creature’s chest. The creature parried with fingerblades, then opened its mouth. It had the same kind of horrible, chomping teeth as the animations from Freddy Frazbears, and used the same relentless desire to chomp on human faces. It stepped forward and crashed into Merton’s shield, reaching with three arms to try and sink scalpel fingers into him.

        “Fuck off!” Merton snarled, then selected something he had always wondered about.

        He felt rather than saw his ankles unfold. A pair of piton guns snapped out of the black scales where his Achilles tendon would be, then fired off a pair of red-tipped darts of silvery metal. The glowing metal sunk into the ground with a pair of hisses, and then auto-screws whirred as the pitons affixed themselves to the floor hard enough that they’d need to be cut free.

        Then Brash beat his wings of his own accord and sent Merton sailing down the corridor.

        The obsidian blender stepped after them.

        And the two spikes went off with the force of two very very very tiny nuclear bombs.

        Because that was what they were.

        The roar of hot air was like a physical wall, and it sent Brash and Merton tumbling down the corridor, into a more literal wall, through another equally literal wall, and finally, through the air. He smashed into the ground on his back and skidded to a stop next to Gunner. Gunner looked down at him. Merton groaned, and didn’t even try to figure out the geometry of this place.

        “So, I take it, the place ain’t secure?” he growled.

        Merton hopped to his feet, shaking his head as he looked at the smoking hole that he had been flung from. He looked back and saw no Relix. No Lisa. No Julia. His eyes widened. “Where the fuck-”

        “Fire in the hole!”

        Julia’s voice dragged his eyes to a doorway that looked as if it had been replaced with a brick wall. Julia was standing next to it, guarded by one of the armsmen. She had just finished inscribing a rune on the wall – a series of runes actually. Brash’s HUD helpfully translated it to: I prepared explosive runes to-

         And then Merton flung himself flat to the ground.

        The wall exploded inwards with a roar and Julia whooped, thrusting her fist into the air.

        Merton saw the Hawking Radiation before anyone else did.

        “Julia!” he shouted.

        The second – or maybe the first – obsidian blender emerged. It casually swung its arm out.

        If Merton’s life had been Game of Thrones, Julia would have been decapitated.

        But Julia had clearly been studying. And, as her scribing of magical runes proved, she had been studying very hard . Because that bladed arm smashed into a magical force field, which shattered into a thousand pieces and sent her tumbling back and away from the obsidian thing . It stepped fully into the room, eyes aglow, arms spread.

        Merton selected close ranged weapons, then the hellwhip. His wrist unfolded and then shot out a small, lightsaber like hilt. He grabbed it, using the enhanced reflexes that Brash gave him, then flicked on the tiny switch at the base of the hilt. A crackling roar exploded from the hilt as a shimmering loop of coherent fire slid out, skittering along the obsidian ground with a spray of sparks.

“Ah,” Merton whispered. “It’s literally a whip made of hell . Got it.”

He lifted the whip, then cracked it hard. The hissing, spitting end of the whip wrapped around the obsidian blender’s malformed head, releasing a series of whirrs and hisses as it completed its wrap. Merton snarled, fiercely, as he dragged his arm to the side as hard as he could. The motion translated to flinging the obsidian monstrosity off its feet and smashing it into the wall with an explosion of stone and metal and chips of obsidian.

        Julia sat up, looking shocked. “Did you just Ghost Rider whip an off brand Shrike to death!?” She paused. “I almost died, holy shit.” Her hand went to her chest, as if she was checking to make sure her heart was still beating.

        “Get back here!” Merton shouted.

        Other doors were opening. And he was realizing that that was the second obsidian blender. Because almost three dozen of the things were emerging from every doorway, every shadow, every corner of the room, their eyes swirling with emotionless focus. Their blade fingers snicked to the ready.

        Merton gulped.

        “Well,” Brash said. “Um. Pants to be darkened, I suppose.”

        Merton had already selected the anti-matter darts.

***

        The castle shook. Shuddered. It pitched and yawned, as if it was a ship under a terrifying storm. Or, to Lisa’s mind, like California during an earthquake. Relix drove forward with remarkable dexterity, her feet skidding only slightly under herself as she kept the box on her shoulder. As she ran, Lisa held out one hand to try and keep herself upright. But it was hard. Every shake and shudder made her legs want to drop out from under her. She gritted her teeth against the faint sea sickness that threatened to overwhelm her.

        The two of them came to the end of a corridor – the doorway opened into a circular room that, unlike every other room they had rushed through, was actually bright . This was enough to make Relix and Lisa slow down and look around, their eyes wide. The chamber was illuminated by a pool in the center, which frothed and bubbled with pure white energy, the water arching upwards almost three meters before falling back into the pool. Standing before it, Lisa felt her aches and her pains – most of them the minor aches and pains that anyone who had hit the big three oh got used to feeling – fade away.

        “It’s...it’s some of the plane of positive energy,” Relix said.

        Lisa was about to respond – but then she saw a rectangle of cardboard flip through the air from behind the frothing fountain. It landed in a rumpled hat that had been set out on the ground.

        Another card flew out a second later, landing in the hat again.

        A third card followed – this one skittered along the ground.

        A female sigh came from behind the fountain. “I’m still absolute trash at this...”

        Lisa lifted up her laser rifle, glancing at Relix. She went left. Relix went right. The two of them converged on the far side of the fountain – flanking the woman who sat there. She was…

        Human.

        A human who had aged and aged and aged some more. She had aged to the point where her age had gone around the other side of age and become a strange, exotic youth. Her hair was pure silver and hung down to her shoulders, while her face was a near uniform brown and the wrinkles were so fine that they became invisible. Her skull pressed to every thin part of skin, giving her the facial features of a cheap alien from one of the shitty episodes of Voyager, while her body was rail thin and clad in only a simple loincloth and breast band. There, the ravages of age were easier to see, writ large on her body and her legs. She showed no shame of her sagging breasts, her strangely folded belly, her pruned thighs.

        Instead, she looked at Lisa, then back at Relix, then snorted. “Figures.”

        “Who...the flying fuck are you?” Lisa asked.

        “What she said,” Relix said, imperiously.

        “Quiet, scaly,” the woman said. “The adults are talking.”

        Relix spluttered like a teapot. Lisa decided that she liked this old lady.

        “You can’t speak to me like that!” Relix snarled. “I am Princess Relix Castrovel of-”

        “Blah blah blah!” The woman said. “Why do you think I trapped your hand. I wanted you out of this conversation, because you’d distract me with irrelevancies. A stolen throne only matters to carrion birds.”

        The castle shuddered - but the distant explosions seemed extremely muted in this room. The water did slosh and splash over the lip of the fountain, soaking some of the cards. The woman pursed her lips in irritation.

        Lisa blinked. “ You  blocked off the passageway?”

        The old woman inclined her head, spreading her arms wide. “That’s me.”

        “Did you attack my husband? My people ?” Relix snarled, her hands clenching as she took a step forward. Cold energy crackled around her mouth and she actually looked as if she was becoming larger with every moment, her muscles hardening. This made the woman blink. Slowly, she looked back at Relix.

        “You care ?” she asked.

        “I...what?” Relix spluttered. “Of course I-”

        The old woman stood so fast that Lisa could hear her knees popping. “You don’t merely care! You’re worried !”

        “I heard spinfusors! Of course I’m worried!” Relix snarled, her claws flexing, her wings flaring out. “My husband is out there with a hatchling to-”

        “Oh praise the gods!” the woman laughed, then flumped backwards onto the side of the pool. Her head rolled backwards and she closed her eyes, grinning. “I won. I told you I’d win, you cynical bastard .” She snapped her fingers with a lazy, languid motion. The whle room shivered for a moment, then was still.

        Lisa looked at Relix, then at the woman. “Okay. Um, maybe you should explain, and fast, because-” she paused. She realized she couldn’t hear, nor feel, the combat going on in the rest of the castle. “I really hope that means they won.”

        “Oh, that battle is on hold for now,” the woman said. “I tucked us into our own little demiplane a few seconds ago.” She waved her hands. “Come, sit, my children. And let...” She chuckled. “Let Granny Goodness tell you a story .”

        It was a good thing Lisa was not Merton.

        Merton would have shot the woman right then and there.

        Lisa was more of a Marvel girl, after all.

        Sitting down before the old woman, Lisa set the rifle next to her. Bathing in the radiance of the pool felt astoundingly restful. ‘Granny Goodness’ cracked her knuckles with a series of bangs and pops nearly as intense as the spinfusor fire from earlier, then started to speak. “In a time before the fall of Atlantis. Before the rise of the sons of Ares and the spread of the Hellenic Way. In a time before the Ming domesticated the great wyrms of old, and the Great Count was new, and the fourth world was young...” She sighed. “It was a time of magic and wonder and terror the likes of which you could not imagine.”

        “Where?” Relix asked. “I’ve never heard of-”

        “On Earth ,” Granny said, reaching out to rap on Relix’s head. “It’s bloody obvious , innit?”

        “What!?” Relix asked.

        “B-But we’re-” Lisa looked at Relix. “Mage blind!”

        “Says the woman with the eyes plucked from her head,” Granny said. “A great wealth of magic flowed through Earth, like a river. A feature of the mantle and the moon was the theory. A large moon. An active mantle. All developing when the early buzz of the Big One kept roaring.” She shrugged. “Who knows. Maybe that’s the case. Maybe not. What matters is Earth had a glut of wonder.”

        “What happened to it?” Relix asked.

        Granny slowly turned her gaze on Relix.

        Relix didn’t get it for about thirty seconds. Then every single feather on her head drooped.

        “Oh...” she whispered.

        “Oh. Indeed.” Granny frowned. “The dragons were the first of our inventions. We took the best here, the best there, of all our favorite animals. The wings of the bat. The splendor of the great lizards. The intellect of the parrot...” She grinned, wickedly. “The fuckability of the ewe.”

        “Ugh!” Lisa made a face.

        Relix started spluttering like a teapot again.

        “And things were good,” Granny said, quietly. “But do you know who fucked it up?”

        “Men?” Lisa asked.

        “Of course humanity would force our hand!” Relix said, sounding defensively.

        “No, not man. Men.” Lisa shrugged. “For the past three thousand years, men have been responsible for the massive share of humanity’s incredibly piss poor decisions. Nearly every war, genocide, spree shooting-”

        Relix blinked, then looked at Granny.

        Granny nodded. “It was a man. A terrible man named...” She opened her mouth. But no sound came out. Instead, there was a blank spot in the world, a blankness that felt as off putting and discomforting as nails on a chalkboard. Relix and Lisa squirmed. “...and his weaponized dragons. He made the chromatics, you see. It was a proof of concept - some macho bullshit, showing off what nice toys he could make. And he was right, they were really good at killing people. And fighting. And planning for fights.  The wars they started were devastating and decisive and left him in charge...but when the killing was done and he had his empire , the chromatics realized they had a taste for it. And the killing began all over again...”

        “Why couldn’t I hear his name?”

        “It was struck...” Granny looked down and to the side. “Struck from the annals by the strongest magics there were.”

        Relix bristled. Then she sprang to her feet. “Not all men!”

        “Hashtag what?” Lisa asked.

        “You both are so eager to throw down an entire gender because of the mistakes of some of history’s greatest monsters! But...but...but...” She trembled. “But that’s throwing aside every gentle heart and strong soul. Every Merton and every Brash and Carlos, and even Trevor! There’s so much passion  in each of them, and when they harness it they can do amazing things! It’s easy to be cynical, but...but...” She closed her eyes, her snout glistening. Tears gleamed in her eyes. “But if we don’t believe in them , then what the fuck are we doing anyway? If we cannot love, then why even fight?”

        Lisa smiled, slightly.

        Granny looked as if she had been clubbed in the side of the head. “Which breed of dragon are you, missy?”

        “Feathered,” Relix snapped. She jerked her head to the side, wiping at her snout with her forearm. Her tail lashed. “And open a damn portal to my husband, or-”

        “Wait...”

        Granny and Relix both looked at Lisa.

        Lisa looked at Granny.

        “What cynical bastard were you talking about before?” Lisa asked, watching Granny.

        Granny sighed. “If there’s a Granny, there’s a Grandfather.” She shrugged. “I control the castle. He controls the shadows inside. They’ve kept me here.”

        Lisa paused, thinking through what Granny had said so far. And she thought of what she had seen - of magic and of dragons, of the universe writ large. She took her time, considering it from every angle...save one. But when she allowed herself to look at it from that angle - from the angle of a tabletop roleplaying game - she immediately saw the hole.

Lisa grinned. “I don’t buy it.”

        Granny looked at her, her brow furrowing.

        “Every other human with magic like yours is dead. Any human left, like this Grandfather, they wouldn’t have spent thousands of years just keeping you prisoner. And if you guys didn’t build dragons with failsafes, then I’m a monkey’s uncle.” She stood slowly up. “Grandfather would have taken over the galaxy millenia ago.  So, that means, either Grandfather is hiding among dragons...or there’s something you’re not telling us.” She looked around the room.

“For example, you could be not telling us how how you can control a fortress made of solidified regret with your mind .” She looked right at Granny, her eyes narrowing.

        “You think you’re a real smart bitch, don’t you?” Granny asked, her voice sour.

        “Nah,” Lisa said. “I just always know to look for obvious plot twists.”

        Granny looked obstinate. Relix, though, looked like her patience had run out. With a snarl and a streamer of smoke from each nostril, she grabbed Granny by the throat. She lifted the incredibly elderly woman up and snarled, her voice a low growl. “Explain. Now . ”

        Granny’s feet kicked. Her face purpled.

        “Humans can’t talk while you’re holding them up like that!” Lisa exclaimed.

        “Oh, right,” Relix said, looking abashed. She set Granny down. Granny coughed, rubbing at her throat.

        “Fucking gods ,” she gasped. “I forgot how dim dragons can be...”

        Relix’s growl was loud enough to shake the room.

        Granny rubbed her shoulder. “Fine...” she looked down. “I’m him. I’m...” She spoke the name again – and again, Relix and Lisa shuddered. “I was the only one left, after the war, save for the slaves.”

        “Slaves...” Lisa whispered. “You didn’t mention the slaves earlier.”

        Granny scowled, showing her blackened teeth. “Hey, bitch, nostalgic editing!”

        “So, you made chromatic dragons,” Lisa said. “And after the genocide, you fled here, the last place in the multiverse anyone would look for you.” She shook her head. “Surrounded by your own self hatred, sustained by your own stubbornness...”

        “Why did you become a girl?” Relix asked. “Beyond us being the clearly superior gender.”

        Granny shot her a look .

        Relix scoffed. “Just because not all men are terrible doesn’t mean that women aren’t clearly better. Duh.”

        Granny sighed. “I thought if I changed...the castle would let me out. Back then, I thought it was someone else. It was one of the good gods, or Ethosa, or the the Judges of O, something, someone. I thought it had to be someone keeping me here, someone who wanted vengence, who couldn’t recognize my genius .” She slammed her palm against her chest, her eyes flaring.  “I tried every form, every spell, for years and years...until…” She trailed off, her eyes closing. “Until I realized that it wasn’t the form. It wasn’t them. It was just...me.” She spread her hands, slowly. “And that I would never leave.”

        Relix nodded.

        Lisa looked down at her rifle. “Is there a failsafe?” She asked. “Some kind of magical self destruct that works on dragons?”

        “If there is,” Granny said. “I’m not sharing it.” She looked at Relix. “Some of them, at least, deserve the chance to prove they’re better than their creators.”

        Relix’s muzzle flushed. Lisa closed her eyes. She breathed in, then breathed out. “All right.” She shouldered her laser rifle, swung it around, and fired into the pool before anyone could stop them. The pulse of laser light smashed into something deep within the water, sending up gouts steam of blessed heat. The pulses kept pouring from the rifle, causing a stuttering drum of steam bursts, until the pool flickered, then went out. Granny gaped at her.

        Lisa looked back. She smiled.

        “An exit, ama sani, ” Lisa whispered.

        Granny smiled as the light faded more and more. Darkness surrounded them. Then the door opened – and Lisa and Relix stepped out into a courtyard of slagged glass and smoldering piles of ash and scorch marks and spent shell casings and still humming spinfusor disks and a discarded hellwhip – still crackling with heat. They walked slowly past a shadow of past regrets that had been sliced cleanly in half.

        Merton sat on a pile of obsidian bodies, still sheathed in Brash.

        “Hey,” he said, panting. “This dragon is OP as balls .”

        Relix tackled him with delight.