B3 Chapter 21 - Return

Desperate times created desperate magicians. Desperate magicians could do just about anything.

It came at a cost, of course. Every magician who had sought to go beyond the boundary of what was humanly possible at the time ran the risk of destroying themselves and everything around them in the process. There was a reason that even the relatively safe, controlled atmosphere of the Aurian Magical Institute had produced yearly casualties. There were always those who sought to go above and beyond, and while amibition could lead to greatness, it was also the quickest path to a closed-casket funeral.

Jennifer had been conscious of this. When she’d started experimenting with the data she’d receivedfrom the inside of one of the machine-created Gates, she had done so by deploying drones programmed with a very specific set of instructions. It had proven prudent to mitigate her risks—though she had ultimately managed to get a functioning protoype, it had involved a lot of what she would not consider to be good science, including several tens of millions of dollars of destroyed equipment.

From prototype to functional had been another long, dangerous process. She had been less careful then, and it had nearly cost her. Aware of the risks of hurrying her research up, Jennifer had nonetheless conducted direct experiments before she could even get started on understanding the theory of what was supposed to be happening.

The trick lay in the tuning. While the engineer now understood the process to actually manifest the portal itself, trying to ensure that the gate opened itself to a result and not the equivalent of a dead intranet frequency was still a game of chance. There were ways to add certainty, of course; there always were. After extensive experimentation, Jennifer had roughly hacked together enough information about the science of the Gates to get an idea as to what some of those methods were.

Alignment was the most obvious one. It was well-known in literature regarding them that Gates tended to reflect their real-life surroundings. It wasn’t too far of a leap to then conclude that opening one required finding an area somewhere in what Jennifer had temporarily termed “Gate space” that matched—the only problem was that they had no map to that space. Thus, somewhere with a less exotic landscape was much more likely to open into a valid space than, say, a devastated wasteland riddled with thousands of different exotic flux effects. Unfortunately, the latter described much of the Earth at the moment, so testing had been limited.

There were a number of other factors, but over the course of their violent tests, Jennifer had discovered one factor that was almost certain to result in a successful connection—being inside a Gate.

The problem there was that tuning was essentially impossible and thanks to the random floor resets, there was no way to consistently get the same result, nor was there a way to customize it. That said, once Jennifer had a usable Gate device, she’d sent Uriel and Gluttony into Towers with said device to fish for a Gate that could connect them to wherever the machines had sent Syl.

And wasn’t that a fucking trip. She had barely gotten used to having one Sinner on her team, and that had been when said Sinner had been a student that she’d known before he’d revealed his true power. Seeing Gluttony, who was a Cascadian and a practical myth who’d been terrorizing the world for decades, act as a glorified mercenary caused such dissonance in her that she chose to pretend like the Sinner didn’t exist for the time being.

Things had gotten bad. Towers didn’t link them correctly, and while they found a great deal of Gates like those never explored by humans before, they were largely useless and cost incredible amounts of time and power to create.

But Jennifer had learned, and she’d experimented. It might have cost almost every drone remaining in Incarnate’s inventory as well as the lives of one or two technicians who went in to do manual maintenance on what she had told them was a potential energy source to keep them sustained through the war, but that was a price she was willing to pay if she got results.

And she had. The path had been bloody. She’d stopped taking the high road when Uriel had confronted her. Jennifer Viridian was no longer the same flesh and blood she’d been before, the powers of other now-dead magicians further fueling her and keeping her moving. It wasn’t the prettiest job, and she knew it would need to be updated eventually given the incompatibility betwen her and the people she’d implanted into herself, but it served the purpose for the time being.

Ultimately, while there still wasn’t a perfect fix, she had gotten to a point where her tech was good enough to find a valid Gate some sixty percent of the time. With Aaron’s help, she had been able to surreptitiously commandeer one of Incarnate’s industrial fabs, hurrying the process to replicate it along.

From there, it was a numbers game. Days of retuning, replacing burnt-out parts, containing explosive failures.

Their success had been by no means inevitable, but it wasn’t a surprise when the drone they sent into the 1,672nd successful Gate opening out of 2,548 attempts returned what they wanted.

Jennifer: If anyone’s listening, you should get back. All hands on deck, inasmuch as we’ve got hands. He’s back.

The Gate hadn’t opened anywhere near one of Viridian-Incarnate’s facilities. As a matter of fact, it was nowere even near the continent. Somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, a peaceful, uninhabited artificial island had just gained a population of two.

In the last week, Jennifer herself had accidentally destroyed two dozen islands just like this one. The cost of doing the job, really.

As such, Uriel, Gluttony, Aaron, and Avery arrived first, each of them besides Gluttony using one of the repeated-use teleportation artifacts Syl had created that they’d bound to an anchor in Viridian headquarters.

They weren’t kept waiting for long.

Sensors didn’t even notify them to the presence of their new visitors. Instead, without warning, Syl and Bianca were inside their headquarters, not a trace of flux announcing their arrival.

Something was off about them. Jennifer had her protective lenses on, keeping her from being overwhelmed by whatever magic it was they were putting off, but even through them, something seemed strange. She couldn’t tell if it was just with their magic or if it was also the way they carried themselves.

It was both, she decided. They didn’t look like they’d been gone for a few weeks. The slight disorientation in their eyes, the noticeably different mannerisms—something had happened.

Then she turned her glasses off, and she realized just how correct she’d been.

Both Syl and Bianca shone brighter than the midday sun. That wasn’t a high bar to clear right now given how dusty the atmosphere still was, but they outshone what it had been like on the clear days before this apocalypse. Comparing them to even a paragon-class was like trying to put a ton of iron and a single feather on the same scale. Jennifer flinched, squeezing her eyes shut, but even that instant left an afterimage burned into the back of her eyelids.

“What happened out there?” she asked.

“We did what we had to.” Syl’s voice synthesizer sounded significantly scratchier than it had been when they’d left, as if it had undergone the equivalent of years of wear. Given their surroundings out there, it probably had. “It’s good to see you again.”

“Likewise,” Uriel replied flippantly.

If that isn’t the understatement of the century, Jennifer thought.

“You’ve continued growing,” Syl said. “Good.”

“Jennifer. Uriel. Aaron. Avery. Katelyn.” Bianca nodded to each of them in kind. “I trust the situation hasn’t gotten much better since we left?”

“Pride,” Gluttony replied, amused. “No. It has not. You have imitators now.”

“Do we, now?”

“Sorry.” Uriel didn’t sound very sorry. “Like you said. Did what we had to.”

“I have a mountain of reports for you whenever you’d like some, Syl,” Aaron said, looking up from the screen he’d been tapping away on. “Lots of data. What do you want to do next?”

There was an expression on his face that didn’t sit quite right with Jennifer. It almost felt religious.

“I’ll look over them.” Syl looked across the room. “We have some discoveries as well. We also have a plan, unless someone would prefer to announce theirs first. Priorities have shifted.”

Jennifer shivered.

#

Auria had ceased to exist as a country practically the moment the fourth world war had started. The Cascadian large-scale offensive had brought it to its knees, and the fragmentation of the prismatic families in the capital had pushed it down further.

As a result, even with Viridian-Incarnate claiming a fair amount of territory, there was no formal ruling body occupying either it or Cascadia. As the death toll from fragment drops and Gate breaks stabilized thanks to the efforts of paragons around the world, chaos continued to propagate from a more human side. Many people wanted to help each other, yes, but the few who wanted to take advantage of the situation were often those with power.

The ruling minds behind Viridian-Incarnate now had a reason to change that.

Unbeknownst to all but a select few elite magicians, Syl and Bianca had experience far beyond their age. That extended not only to combat magic but also the lab, where despite technically only barely being an adult, Syl had decades upon decades of experience both lived and remembered.

To Syl, it had already been more than five years since he’d developed the first replication of an artifact, finally approaching his goal to create a pre-programmed FCD that didn’t require a flux charge to activate. It would have been embarassing to not be able to build on that.

It had taken only a bit of explaining to convince everyone in that one room that Pride’s path was correct—or, if not correct, as close to it as anyone was going to achieve.

In the first place, more than half of them were already convinced. Aaron was a member of Incarnate and thus deferred to his superior; Uriel believed she owed almost the entirety of her current strength to the Sinner; Gluttony was just interested to see where Pride was going; and of course, Bianca had created the plan with him.

“Let me get this straight,” Avery had said. “You’re saying that you think aliens exist and that the machines want to use us as living experiments so they can break open other planets?”

“Exactly correct,” Bianca said. “Except for the think. Extraterrestrial life exists, and from my observations, a large chunk of it has had magic for a significantly longer time than us. I tuned our portal into inhabited planets once or twice. Each time, it was shut down on the other end.”

“That doesn’t exactly change what we should be doing here,” Jennifer argued. “We’ve been trying to keep ourselves and the people around us intact through this. I don’t see how world domination jives with that. We discussed this possibility before, and we agreed that doing it would just be stretching our resources too thin.”

“Things have changed.” Syl’s voice was as deadpan as ever, the synthesizer making him sound even less human than he already was. “We know what they want. We know that there are more worlds than we once thought. Contexts evolve. Even if we survive this, there’s no telling whether or not we will survive what comes to enact revenge upon the machines.”

That was what had given Jennifer pause. Their problems on Earth did start to seem small in comparison when she considered that. She had yet to see physical evidence of the aliens that Syl and Bianca claimed to have encountered yet, but she was a logical magician. She could follow something to its conclusion.

“Then it’s your call,” she reluctantly agreed. “Politics was never my game, though. If you’re sure you can manage it…”

“I’m sure,” Bianca said. “It was mine, but this won’t be politics. This is kill or be killed. The time for politics is long behind us.”

“I don’t see how we’re supposed to say no.” Avery was the one magician in the room who seemed to still disagree with the bent of their actions. “We’re not giving anyone a choice. It doesn’t seem like I have much of a choice here either.”

“No,” Syl said. “You don’t. But you will have more of a choice than you would if a fragment crashed on us and absorbed you into the machine collective.”

“Like they did to Polaris,” Gluttony said. “Beautiful, really, if wasteful. I wish I could have found a way to do it myself, if only so I could try it once.”

“When you put it like that…” Avery still didn’t sound convinced, but the expression on his face made it clear he didn’t like the alternative any better. “I can put what little formal weight I have behind this too, then.”

“Good,” Bianca said. “Any legitimacy will help. Inform your people. We start today.”

#

On February 1st, 75 AFI, preparations reached a head. Intranets had stayed down or limited since the war had started, making it harder for communications to spread, but Incarnate distributed enough extenders to get the entirety of what had been Auria online, though even they couldn’t get unlimited coverage.

On that day, a message spread, alerting everyone with an FCD or even a non-casting device. Word spread quickly, even with how limited comms were.

The message was simple.

My name is Crown Princess Bianca of Auria. I was disowned by the king for being who I am and for daring to question the rule that plunged us into this new dark age.

Today, I claim the throne.

Await further communication, Auria. The storm has not yet abated.