Chapter Text
Considering how the simulated universe was currently breaking around her, code stuck inside of some sort of self-perpetuating bug, Stelle probably should’ve been worried. Or anything on the wrong side of nonplussed.
And yet she was not even plussed.
The simulated universe was stuck in a ripple of repeating code or whatever and instead of being worried or dismayed, she was one very, very happy trailblazer.
After all, the best thing about testing Herta’s simulated universe wasn’t the fact that she got to learn more about the Aeons or test her might in battle. (Though of course, the battles did scratch an itch at the back of her brain in all the best ways). It wasn’t even the rewards that Herta dished out following each run in an attempt to have instant gratification bring Stelle back another time.
No, none of that.
The best bit about testing the system, with its advanced coding and intrinsic detailing on a cosmic scale, was the fact that sometimes, on occasion, despite everyone’s best efforts, the system broke in such fantastic ways that it left her grinning wildly for days.
Considering how many genius society members worked on the project it was a very rare thing to witness.
But oh boy, oh mama, whenever the simulated universe broke? Literal shivers ran down her spine and Stelle felt herself ascending to some heavenly plane.
Perhaps that was why, at first, the break was so utterly satisfying.
It was an unfolding thing. At first glance, it even seemed to be a simple break. The kind of error that was intentional, entered by Stephen Lloyd in the hopes of making the entire game more fun. Another negative curio perhaps, or maybe, if highlighted under Stelle’s gleeful eye: a positive one.
Because when Stelle had taken her trusty baseball bat to the Xianzhou vase in the game’s current domain, the vase had simply… pieced itself back together again a few seconds later.
Perfect! Ten out of ten!
If this was intentional then she’d order room service - er, whatever equivalent delivery service existed on Stephen’s planet (wherever that was) - and send the man several litres of watermelon parfait.
This meant that she could destroy the thing a second time. In her books this was a complete score. It was basically like winning the lottery except kind of sadder and with a whole lot more chance for kintsugi. She’d get double the credits, a little closer to buying some higher star blessing the next time she reached the store, and then go on her merry way into the next domain.
You know, the whole shebang.
Stelle lifted her trusty bat and swung a second time.
Eh. It wasn’t as good a hit as her first. Probably wouldn’t have made it to second base even with her skill as a baseballer. Kind of disappointing, actually. The shatter had been more muted - not too many shards left behind. It was kind of like both she and the vase simply didn’t have the energy to go full pelt in the whole destruction process.
Oh well! There would always be the next one.
Stelle shrugged and rolled out her shoulder. There was no point taking any of this too seriously.
Then she blinked. And the vase was back to being in one piece again. And maybe it should’ve been strange but wasn’t there a whole saying about how good things came in threes? Clearly this was a sign from some higher being - or, probably just four geniuses - that she should try again.
So she did.
It was a hit that truly resembled her role as the galactic baseballer. From the ease of the hit to the swing of her arms. A thing of pure asymmetry accumulating in the most spectacular smash of varnished pottery. The hit sent a ricochet along her bones and shards scattering across the floor in the way that only a truly delightful smack could. The smash sounded damn near angelic.
It wasn’t just a hit.
It was a whole fucking homerun.
“And that, ladies and gentlemen,” Stelle said, voice practically dripping with self satisfaction as she swooped her arms into a majestic bow, “is how it’s done.”
Silence.
It was nice to see that even the smartest minds across the cosmos knew to take a moment to bask in the truly amazing things that life offered. She felt like a cat that had successfully swiped a glass off of the counter.
Then she blinked.
And the vase was back in one piece.
Alright… so maybe now even she was thinking about how that was a little weird. Usually the geniuses put a limit on this kind of thing if it were intentional. And if it wasn’t, then they’d have fixed the error by now.
…Maybe breaking the vase a fourth time would help?
Stelle raised her bat and went for a second homerun. It was less impressive the second time though still a thing of art. But that was fine. Now she could be doubly sure that the geniuses had seen her act of awesomeness.
She blinked.
The vase was back. Together.
“...Huh.”
Maybe the geniuses were distracted by something else? If they weren’t fixing the problem then they must’ve been. Maybe one of them had found the Genius equivalent of a really cool bug and were currently busy pointing it out to the others. Like… oh, she wasn’t sure. Something even smaller than an atom. Or whatever smart people found more interesting that the tests they’d asked her to carry out for them.
Ahem.
No, yeah, Stelle was totally cool. She was chill. If anything, she could keep farming credits like this until they got back. Might as well make the most out of the break. Maybe it was cheating the system, but was it really, when the system was letting her do this in the first place?
She broke another.
Then, because the broken pieces merged back into one full thing all over again, she did it again. Though this time, instead of using her bat, she simply stomped her whole foot through the middle as if the thing were made of cardboard and—
And it wasn’t broken. It was in one piece.
“Ughhh…” She was getting bored, now. “Well, this was fun an’ all, but I was promised an adventure domain and Mama’s ready to swing at a couple of trotters so…”
She turned—
—and she was looking at the same reconstituted vase.
“Whoa,” Stelle murmured, eyes widening like dinner plates. “That’s trippy as fuck.”
It was becoming pretty clear that whatever this was, it was more than a simple break in the ones. It wasn’t just a little error in the zeroes. Stelle broke the vase a couple more times, as if shattering the damn thing an even twelve times would fix the issue, tried (and failed) to run from the vase at least five times and then started yelling at thin air in an attempt to get the genius’ to notice her plight.
When they didn’t, she checked her credits. She must’ve been loaded after all of this, right? It might’ve been a looping hell of broken vase that wasn’t freeing her but at least she was getting paid for her efforts.
…
…Or she fucking wasn’t??
After all the broken vases she should’ve had a whole lot more than 262 credits, right? She’d shattered so many! She was stuck in a perpetual loop of code that wasn’t letting her go. She deserved monetary payment for how much this actually sucked.
Was she getting a minimal amount of credits? Was she even getting any at all?
This time, when she broke the stupid thing again, she kept her gaze on the little bar to the side of her vision that displayed her credit count. Net gain of 54 credits. Yeah, that was more like it. Maybe this was just a small error applied to the rest of the systems issues.
The stupid thing reformed itself.
And before her eyes, Stelle watched the credits she’d gained disappear as if they’d never been accumulated in the first place. Back down to 262.
“What the actual fuck.” She breathed. “These geniuses are trying to short change me!”
Rather embarrassingly, it took her three more broken vases to realise that she was caught in a time loop. Which sucked way more than being perpetually broke. Stelle didn’t want to be in a timeloop. She had first hand knowledge that being in one fried your brain and made your thoughts all gooey and nonsense-like!!
No thank you, Sir.
She’d been all too happy leaving the time shenanigans to her friends on Amphoreus. She hadn’t signed up for this. No terms and conditions had been signed. No waivers. No disclaimers. None of it!
Absolutely. The. Fuck. Not.
It felt like she’d been stuck in this loop for forever by the time Herta’s avatar appeared and her voice echoed in her ears.
“We’re ending the test here for today,” Herta said. Her avatar was frowning. Stelle hadn’t even realised it could do that. “We’re pulling you out.”
Ten minutes later, Stelle was sat in the world’s best spinny chair watching as the geniuses talked about temporal distortions of Aeonic proportions over the world’s most holographic Teams call.
Surprisingly, she’d yet to be kicked out. She’d kind of expected to be waved to the door and sent on her merry way.
Instead, one of Herta’s puppets had pressed surprisingly firm hands on her shoulders until she’d plopped herself down on her current chair and began spinning. She’d been spinning for long enough now that she was beginning to feel a deep sense of vertigo. The dizziness was almost as insane as the time loop.
Or, er, well it wasn’t but that was fine.
“We’re not just talking about a single photon, people,” Herta said, her lips pulled thin. “Rewinding the quantum state of a few photons is child’s play. Anyone could do that. What we just experienced was the rewinding of multiple pockets of space.”
“Query,” Screwllum said, from beside her, “multiple pockets of space indicates this phenomenon was centralised to set areas of the cosmos. Compiling current synchrotron radiation reports from the network will allow for defined locations to be sourced.”
“Stephen says he’s already looking into them,” Herta said. “According to the reports—”
Yeah. It was all a lot of technobabble that kind of went over Stelle’s head. She didn’t even know what synchrotron radiation meant. They were trying to source the time loops and stuff, right? That was all she needed to know right now.
She’d ask Herta for the simple version when they were all done geeking out over this entire Time thing.
For now, she was going to catch up on her sweet, sweet screentime. Silly memes and texting friends from across the cosmos sounded much better than trying to make sense of all the sciency stuff.
She was just about to put on Guinaifen’s latest stream when an incoming message caught her attention.
Cas~
33,550,336???
Oh wow. Consider Stelle impressed. She’d really not thought her precious partner capable of taking the first step into telling the truth. If anything, she was expecting to have to tell everyone the truth herself when the Astral Express returned to Amphoreus.
Galactic BB
oh wowza
phai-boy told you guys already??
The response was not immediate. Which probably should’ve made her feel a sense of foreboding but well, she’d just gotten herself out of a different foreboding situation so it didn’t really register.
Cas~
Um. Well…
Not quite.
Another pause. Stelle continued watching the three dots of doom jump in synchronised waves as Castorice continued typing. Yeah, something had definitely happened while she was gone.
Cas~
It was Cyrene who told us. (Us meaning Mydei and I.)
I thought you’d be able to confirm the number since we weren’t sure how truthful she was being at the time.
Galactic BB
phainon didn’t confirm it?
Cas~
Uh.
No.
He did not.
Galactic BB
figures
man’s too fragile to admit that number right now
i told him he was a silly bean for not telling but you know how it is amiright?
…just make sure to give him all the hugs
babygirl needs hugs and love
maybe a boop on the nose too for being so silly
silly bean gonna bean. u kno??
Cas~
I don’t think he wants hugs and affection right now but I’ll keep that in mind.
Galactic BB
that’s a load of shit
my boi always wants hugs!! he’s like the supreme lover of hugs
man was absolutely a koala in another life
Cas~
I don’t know what a koala is but do they ever get so enraged they try to attack their fellow koalas?
Stelle paused.
Frowned.
And stared at the screen.
She was seeing the words but they didn’t make any plausible sense. Phainon was crazy as fuck, yes, but not in the way of outwardly attacking his friends.
…
Okay, so he had killed them millions of times but that was within the cycles. He wasn’t the type to get so openly angry that he’s start attacking people outside of the need for deliverance. And even if he were the type that was the kind of thing that people scaled up to! It didn’t just happen.
Stelle had literally spent her afternoon talking to him.
He’d not been fine but he wasn’t losing his mind with anger. He’d been disassociating pretty badly, but he’d been hanging in there. Arguably, he’d even made progress!! He'd realised things were shit and that he was living the life of a meme. How could things have gotten so fucked in such little time? It hadn’t even been a day.
Galactic BB
Tell me everything that happened.
Twenty minutes later, Stelle clicked her phone onto standby and looked up at the geniuses. They were still going at it except now their technobabble felt far more relevant to her specifically than it had before.
And more urgent too.
“—Not many powers capable of reversing time for the entire cosmos. With such a lack of technique the sheer power required was—”
“Uh,” Stelle said. “Herta? Screwllum?”
Herta waved a hand in her direction, dismissive.
Not one to be dissuaded by this, Stelle tried again. She said, “I actually have an update on all of this that might help?”
Screwllum turned to her first. He’d always been the most lenient of the geniuses. Always ready to hear out the words of those who hadn’t quite ascended to the levels of genius. To indulge Stelle whenever she spoke up.
If only because her partner had turned, Herta did too. She said, “Oh this had better be worth it. Yes, little one?”
“Okay,” Stelle said. And told herself to get straight to the point. (She didn't). “So, I maybe have good news for you. But… well, maybe it’s the type of good news that very quickly morphs into bad news? Depends on how deeply you think about it actually. You could make rabbit holes out of this kind of news. It’s kind of cosmically fucked, if you think too closely about it—”
Herta scowled. “Out with it. The adults are talking.”
“I know who did the whole messing with time thing.” Stelle said. “Do you remember Phainon?”
“That delivery boy who merged with Irontomb. You think he did this?”
“Um, I mean, he did do it.” Stelle licked her lips. Her throat suddenly felt very parched. “Uh. So he kept all the coreflames, in the end, and I guess he’s strong enough to rewind time? And he’s like... batshit on the insanity meter so he’s also crazy enough to actually try to do it? So, yeah.”
Herta narrowed her eyes.
Then she said, “How interesting.”