[TFW] Chapter 375 - Auntie

Notes :

Since it had been a while, I decided to come out swinging in the plot, emotional and silly departments.

I hope you'll enjoy !

Chapter 375

Red Sands Desert, Archduchy of Rebirth

City of Darthar

Starvak sat back into his chair.

It was falling apart. It was all falling apart.

First the ill advised reveal of his power. Then the attempted assassination of Crystal.

Turning against the UDC hadn't been an unspeakable mistake only because it was clear, with the rapid string of high profile guildmaster assassinations, that the council had been preparing to stab them in the back regardless.

The breaking of the brands...the dungeons were refusing to speak clearly as to what was happening, but something had happened to their monsters. Many had closed their doors while they worked on solving it, others had restricted delves. The guild's revenue was plummetting fast, and the adventurers were getting restless. There was now an appetite, and very real support for an alternative to the guild. The foolish idiots, unable to articulate their grievances or get a grip on the problem, were simply turning on the closest source of authority they could blame for their woes.

Cretins.

And now this. This...'summit'.

The guild had guessed what was happening. They'd seen the pattern. But even with everything they'd seen of Crystal, of her breakneck speed, they had not expected it to be this quick.

And the worst part was, their own intelligence showed that people would cheer the creation of such a new Empire.

A superpower, puppeteered by a dungeon core. Were they mad?!?

No. Not mad. Just ignorant.

He closed his eyes.

There was only one solution now. If you couldn't smother a fire...

You burned it out. Fed it oxygen until it destroyed itself.

May the Gods have mercy on our souls.

*****

Alexandra paced back and forth in the shipyard, her armored boots clanking on the catwalk.

The vampires' ship couldn't just land here, sadly. Not if they wanted to keep their second summit, the one with the dungeon advisors, even remotely discrete.

Thankfully, what with the need to get her old party down there on a semi regular basis, she had to develop a new way of smuggling people in that didn't rely on them just vanishing mid delve.

The solution had been remarkably simple. Due to the massive amount of hardware she'd sent out, she was having to move around a truly staggering amount of spare parts, ammo and all the necessities of warfare. That meant that sneaking a few people in some specialized crates wasn't very complicated.

She stopped pacing as the outer airlock of the mesa fortress opened, and alarms blared.

"At last!" Emilia jumped up from the crate she'd been sitting on, closing her notebook.

"Not yet. Still a few minutes to get all the way down."

The vampire huffed.

"Why did you have to make it so complicated? Three airlocks, multiple blast doors? What are you expecting, an Erisian Armada?"

"Eventually? Yes. But this isn't what this is for."

"Then why?"

Alexandra gazed at the massvie set of blast doors inlaid into the ceiling. If you dug beyond the rock you'd find several meters of armor plating and arcane energy deflectors, the latter learned from the archmage she still held captive.

"I built this to survive orbital bombardment. Or nukes, for that matter. Remember the Hammer of Eternity? How it vaporized the fortress?"

Emilia seemed to deflate at the mention of orbital bombardment. There was only one source for that.

"Yeah."

"Well, no longer. Even a megaton range warhead wouldn't penetrate all the way here."

Emilia whistled. Thanks to their little memory kerfuffle, she actually knew what that represented.

"Damn."

"Of course, if we're attacked, they won't send just one."

"Well, there's that." Emilia looked at Alexandra, then cleared her throat. "Hey, I wanted to talk about something..."

"Shoot."

"It's about the whole, you know..." She gestured at her head, then Alexandra's.

The dungeon core raised an eyebrow.

"The hivemind?"

"Yeah. Or more accurately, the bits left behind. This whole memory thing is so weird...like, I remember your first name, but not your last. I can recall exactly how a TLV-1 thermonuclear fusion plant is put together but for the life of me I can't tell what any of the individual components do. When you were talking about yields, I could tell you exactly how many megatons a trebuchet missile warhead outputs, but I don't even know what a trebuchet missile looks like. I know the taste of wasabi even though I don't even know what it is!"

"And I remember the feeling of biting on someone's neck and drinking them while knuckle deep down low, but I can't recall who it is. We all got parts of the other's life. So full and yet incomplete."

Emilia blushed.

"Don't you start! Do you want me to talk about Arcadia and the catgirl android she made you-"

Alexandra held her hands up, blushing furiously. Damn it, why did that particular memory have to carry over?

"Okay! Okay! Point taken. Truce?"

"Truce." Emilia sighed. "But yeah. It's just so odd. It feels like I know you better than anyone could and yet I simultaneously know so little."

"It's by design." Alexandra shrugged at the vampire's look. "Partially. The dynamic connections that allow it to happen don't contain all of us at once, and while it is possible to expunge it all, the process is long, messy, and is more about repressing memories than removing them." Ghost and her being the perfect examples of that. When Ghost said she 'knew' about Arcadia making use of the EFSN's Final Contingency cruisers, she didn't mean getting a briefing she meant having fragments of memories of another node working on the data and preparing it for transmission to Arcadia's secret, deep space yards. "The reason why is simple. The second you're part of the hivemind it is also part of you. Removing all the memories and emotions of the rest of the hivemind would either kill you or make someone wholly different." Which it had for her. Ghost and her shared a lot but they were no longer the same person. Never had been, truth be told. They had many, many similarities, but also great differences. "It's why I'm reluctant to use it unless absolutely necessary. At the same time, getting into the hivemind doesn't make you me. Or make me you. Not fully. I don't know how to explain it better, but nodes are still different from one another, even when they have live connections to each other."

Emilia frowned, and nodded.

"No, no. I think I understand. We talked about it a while back, with Arcadia. When you were part of her you were still...you?"

"Kind of. It's part of why Arcadia is so strange to most. Individuality and uniqueness is a...complicated concept once you get into hiveminds. You don't have my full memories because that would make you someone else entirely. Might kill you, actually. Human beings, er, probably vampires as well, can't deal very well with someone else's entire personality matrix. There'd be a very real risk you'd start losing yourself in who I was."

"Is that a risk? Could that overtake me?"

Alexandra bit her lower lip.

Shit. How could she put this?

The dungeon core sighed, walking over and grabbing Emilia by the shoulders.

"Emi. It already has. Your mannerisms have changed. So have mine." Hers less, because even if most were suppressed, she already had so many fragments from so many others in her. "A few weeks ago you wouldn't have hopped onto that crate to read, you'd have asked me to make a chair or you would have stood."

The vampire stared at the Earth-born in shock, then at the crate, and she started to shiver.

"What...I...How...Am I...Am I me?"

Alexandra hugged her girlfriend.

"Yes honey. You're you. You've always been you." She breathed in deeply, burying her face in her girlfriend's hair, heedless of the sirens becoming more insistent as the inner airlock began to cycle. "You just have a bit of me in you."

She felt the vampire shake against her, and her heart sank. Was the vampire crying?

Alexandra pushed Emilia away a little bit, moving her hand to dry the vampire's tears, before stopping.

Emilia wasn't crying, she was trying very, very hard not to laugh.

"I think...I think that came out a bit dirtier than you meant." Finally let out the vampire, and Alexandra let out a chuckle as she realized what she'd said.

"Perhaps."

"But yeah, if it's just that...I am, after all, very used of having a bit of you inside me. Have repeatedly asked, and ordered, you to do so, with great enthusiasm if I recall."

Alexandra rolled her eyes, trying, and failing, to keep her face from coloring.

"Okay, get it all out of your system."

"You're never living that down, you know that?"

Gods, hadn't Ghost said the same thing a few months ago?

"You don't want to start that kind of battle with me. I'll win."

"Oh really?"

Alexandra smiled as the airlock finished its cycle, and the inner doors opened, letting the supply ship descend into the docking area.

"Of course! Unless you want to bet that your aunt is absolutely not going to embarass you in any way, shape or form?"

Suddenly the vampire looked a lot less sure of herself.

"Uh..."

"Come on! Let's find out!" Alexandra cackled as she walked towards the extending docking ramp, the vampire running after her a second later.

"Now wait a minute! I'm sure we can-"

"MY ADORABLE NIECE!" Screamed a voice, ringing and echoing through the cavernous space.

They both looked up, as a figure in a resplendescent -and voluminous-, midnight black and silver dress just jumped off the ship, holding tightly onto an umbrella as she plummetted to the ground, opening it a second before hitting the floor, a burst of magic cancelling her momentum and allowing her to land as delicately as a feather.

The two maids that followed didn't bother slowing down, making large cracks in the ground as they hit the floor like cannonballs, not even caring about the fact that by all rights, they should be liquid.

The woman in the dress collapsed her umbrella back into its compact state, and picked up her dress as she ascended the stairs to the catwalk, the maids following behind her, throwing any form of decorum to the winds, if there had been any left after that entrance. Though the maids compensated that somewhat, looking utterly unconcerned with their drop and just calmly walking a few steps behind her.

Alexandra could see when the maids noticed the defenses.

They went from 'cool, collected confidence' to 'holy shit is that an entire artillery battery' in a single second. One of them clearly reached out to grab her charge and stop her stair climbing, but thought better of it at the last second.

"Auntie!" Squeaked out Emilia, as she went to meet the woman. "You came!"

"Of course I would dearie!" Both met in a flutter of embroidery at the top of the stairs as the older vampire lifted Emilia into a bear hug. "It's so good to see you! Ah, it has been far too long! Look at you! Last I saw you, you were an adorable young mage, barely in your forties, and now you're a respected dungeon advisor in your prime!"

Alexandra came next to them, and looked at the tangled mess. Emilia basically disappeared within that hug.

"Ah!" The older vampire let go of her niece. "And you must be Crystal, correct? Alexandra Rousseau?"

"Yes, pleased to-"

Alexandra made the critical mistake of extending her hand, only realizing too late that getting anywhere near that vampire could only have one result.

Her arm was grabbed in a steel vice grip, and she was unceremoniously dragged into a hug, sputtering as she found herself face full of lace and whatever the hell that dress was made out of.

"I have heard so much about youuuu!" Said Emilia's aunt, practically squealing. "From everyone! Even my sister! Who, you should know, is a tight lipped woman with a surgically removed sense of humor! You must have implanted it back in somehow!"

She let go of Alexandra and the dungeon core stumbled back, still stunned.

"I, ah, yes." Shit, she couldn't even-

There was a polite knock, and they all turned to see Jared, a towel folded over his right arm as he knocked with his left hand on the elevator door.

"Ah, yes! Please, come with us. We've had a collation prepared for your arrival."

"Oh, of course! Lead the way dearie!"

Alexandra looked at Emilia, who was smiling widely and very toothily.

Oh she hadn't been warned on purpose. Is that how it was going to be?

Alright then, game on.

First things first though: get Jared between her and the aunt on the elevator.