"Ow… my head…" the girl groaned as she rubbed her temple, "five more minutes…"

"Wake up… sister… please wake up…"

"Yes, I'll have more Captain Blanche's Sugar Seeds, thank you."

"Wake up!"

"Huh… wha… what? I'm awake, awake. I'm awake! What's happening? I'm awake!"

The girl's eyes sprung wide open, only to be immersed in a strange sight. A bizarre environment greeted her, on top of being greeted by a bizarre child in equally exotic outfits. She was a little girl, no older than seven, maybe eight. She had kelp green colored hair, which upon closer inspection showed they were made of a curious ooze-like substance. Not like any ordinary hair anyone had ever seen before.

Her eyes glowed green of childlike innocence, and her dress told of a civilization beyond the stars and galaxies, with the strange green fabric being lit up by plasma and electrical circuits expertly woven into the silk, as if symbolizing some sort of futuristic web. It was difficult to even comprehend what kind of clothing it was, what it was made of.

"Oh, brilliant," the little girl cheered, "you're awake."

The girl glanced around the dark boiler room that all hemmed in around her. It was surprisingly clean and quiet for a room one would normally expect to be full of loud steam. The pipes were lined up against the walls, secured tightly and digging deep into each corner, all going off into different directions.

Some of the gauges and meters were still seen to be functional with their little hands fidgeting inside the apparatus, so clearly these large machines here were still operating as they spoke, and yet at the same time the room couldn't be quieter. Nothing but the sound of the two girls' breath silently echoing and bouncing off the metal pipes.

"I was beginning to worry there, sister," said the little girl.

"Huh… what? Wha… what's going on?"

"Well, allow me to introduce myself," the little girl extended her hand. "My name is Penny, Penny Spiderbite. What's your name?"

"Huh? What? Oh… um… my name is… Star…"

"Nice to meet you, dear sister."

"Um… yeah, likewise," Star shook her hand.

"I'm looking for my friend, Orion," said Penny. "Have you seen him around? Last I saw of him he came running down the hall this direction. I figured since you're here you might've seen him."

"Wh… where exactly… am I? What is this place?"

"Don't you know?" Penny tilted her head, "I thought for sure you would know. But um… you're not from around here… are you, dear sister? I certainly haven't seen your face around. Though, mom always said I'm bad at remembering faces."

"I… I… don't know…" she stuttered. "My head is still a little fuzzy. I feel like there was something I had to do, something important, something… I just for the life of me can't remember what it was."

"You don't know stuff, too, huh?" Said Penny. "That's okay, though. I don't know stuff, myself. Not all of them anyway. Mom always said I should know more stuff, but knowing more stuff is exhausting. It's a lot of responsibilities."

"What are you talking about?"

"Oh, I know," Penny's eyes lit up, "we can go ask the pens."

"The… what now?"

"The pens know everything. They'll tell you what you've forgotten, I'm sure. I go ask the pens whenever I don't know something. They always tell me everything. Come on."

"Hekapoo… where are we?" Star asked.

"This… is the veins between the universes," Hekapoo spoke through Buff Frog's body. Her voice merged with his with bizarre holy vibration. "We'll be safe from his prying eyes here, he has no jurisdiction over this place, or he'll risk violating the treaty."

"You invoked your old name," said Star. "Prometheus."

Hekapoo nodded:

"Full fusion and new change would've taken too long. You and Delivering Truth have already taken massive risks traveling through the flow of time. There was no way I was going to follow you."

"So you manifest in the body of an alternate past the hard way," said Star.

"I cheated," Hekapoo shrugged. "Using old gods' names in the new era is dangerous."

"Is everybody alright?" Star shouted across the plane of bent space, where sound could visibly be seen traveling across the atmosphere. Like a calm sea with quiet waves traversing the vastness of its surface.

"We're fine, dear," said Moon, as she and Janna dusted themselves off, letting glittering cosmic lights fly all over.

"Wait… where's Dennis and Ludo?" Star looked around, desperately scanning the environment for their presence.

But nothing. As far as her eyes could see there was only the vast darkness of the broken space.

"I… I don't see them anywhere…" Moon muttered.

"Shouldn't we go back and get them?" Janna asked.

"No," Hekapoo cried, "it's too dangerous! We're traveling at decillions times the speed of light in an unstable quantum state. Turning back in this current fragile state of the space breaking apart could instantly disintegrate you."

"We can't just leave them!" Moon shouted.

"It's fine, it's fine, it's fine," Star cried out desperately, "I'll just get Mariposa to fetch them again when she gets back."

"What?" Moon cried out, almost disgusted, "You're talking about these guys like they're mere lambs ready to be slaughtered and sacrifice."

"Don't – talk to me about sacrifice, mother…" Star snapped, clenching her fist, but managed to stop herself before she got even angrier. She took one deep breath, and shot a serious look at Moon and Janna. "By the republic, Ludo and Dennis will NOT be harmed under my watch. That is a god promise."

"I hope for all our sakes," Janna crossed her arms, "that you keep it."

"Look, look, dear sister," Penny said excitedly. "Here we are, the pen that knows it all."

"Whoa… what is this place?" Star marveled at the scene all around her, "I… I can't see any… why does everything just look like shapeless blobs made of colors?"

Penny giggled:

"You're funny, sister. This is one of the control rooms. See all the screens and computers over there? Mom said I'm not supposed to go in here. But Orion always dared me to go in, so I was always curious. I never realized there are just old boring machines and computers inside."

"Yeah I have no idea what you're talking about."

"Ah here we go," Penny handed Star a blurry object. She couldn't quite make out the details of the object, but up close it took a more definitive long oval shape, almost like a small stick of some kind. Shaking it revealed to her ears the vibration of some of the inner cogs and springs. So she deduced it must have been a mechanical device of some sort.

"Go ahead," Penny smiled.

"Um…" Star scratched her head, "what am I supposed to do with this?"

Penny giggled once more:

"You're really not from around here, are you? Here, come. I'll show you how the pen works."

The little girl yanked the shapeless blob from Star's hand. She started typing in some strange combinations within the innards of the device, combinations that Star could not decipher from where she was standing. It felt too abstract, as if she was just poking her fingers into the air.

"Cloudy, tell me where Orion is hiding, pretty please," Penny spoke into the pen. "I've been looking all over the place. I can't find him anywhere."

"Cloudy?" Star raised her eyebrow.

"Mom said it's what we call the A.I inside the pens. Pretty neat, huh?"

"Good morning, Mistress Penny," the shapeless blob answered back with an uncanny mechanical voice. "Master Orion is currently in this room this very instant. Would you like me to fetch him for you?"

"Oh, that little rascal," Penny cried out in delight.

A vague giggle echoed from afar, emanating from behind one of the grey blobs over to Star's left, which Star still couldn't for the life of her make out. And it was only getting worse from there, as Star felt her visions were getting even blurrier by the minute.

"You know I can hear you, right?" Penny smirked, "You come out here right now or I'm going to tell."

Out from the shadows swallowed by the colorful space came a child giggling with wondrous glee. Much like Penny, the boy wore some peculiar clothing with a disc-shaped collar lit up by some very specific line patterns, as if it was wired by inner plasma tubes of some sort. His silky golden shirt lit up almost as bright as a star, and his neat combed hair was glimmering with smooth chestnut colored strands with a singular bright golden streak laid out right in the middle of it all.

The boy was young, perhaps a little younger than Penny. But his pair of sky-blue eyes were familiar to Star. She just couldn't put her finger on what it was and how.

"Something's wrong," said Star. Her gaze tightened, glaring beyond into the deep space as they traveled.

"What?"

"Keep them safe, Hekapoo," Star commanded. "I'm going up ahead."

"Where are you going?" Moon shouted.

"Someone's just entered the republic without authorization, I need to find out who and how."

"How did you even know that?" Janna asked.

"Nothing goes on in my republic without my knowing."

And thus, she sped off into a place beyond thought at a pace not comprehensible by the mortal brain.

Meteora was right, Moon thought to herself, Star really was faster than Delivering Truth.

"So… I just… ask this so-called pen and it'll just tell me the answer?"

"Yup," Penny nodded. "The pen knows everything. It can do almost anything. So just ask what you want to know, and it'll answer."

"Alright," Star stared at the strange grey blob with reluctance, "I suppose… it can't hurt to try."

"Heh, you look familiar, lady," said Orion. "You sure you're not from around here?"

"Hush now," said Penny, "don't be rude. Let her concentrate."

"Okay… here goes nothing…"

Star took in one deep breath as the shapeless walls closed in on her. At least – that was what she felt. She couldn't actually tell for certain. She still had difficulty making out what the shapes were. But that did not matter for that one brief moment. Only one thing mattered then, one thing on her mind, burning with curiosity:

"Pen… um… tell me – what have I forgotten?"

"Meteora?"

"Star!"

"You did as I asked?"

"Yes. I told Janna everything, just as you commanded. I saw you coming from afar, so I ran here as fast as I could. What's going on?"

"No time. The republic's been infiltrated. Come on."

"Right."

"Error… error… invalid command – file conflict. System reboot required."

"Hmm… might need to refresh the pen," said Penny. "Let me have a look. Sometimes this happens."

"Wait, I change my mind," said Star, "maybe this isn't such a goo…"

Before she could even finish her sentence, her mind became immediately flooded and overwhelmed with amazing cosmic forces and imageries that came crashing through every senses of her body. Knowledge, power, truths, revelations, all came through her eyes, powering up her pain receptors, letting her into secret pains she did not know even existed, secret sorrows of godlike creatures of the universe. Pains of the heart, pains of the soul, the trillions of ways one could be tortured – everything. All the worst pain imaginable, now multiplied beyond eleven, beyond the eleven dimensions to a point it was no longer merely just the pain, but an experience.

Amidst the agony however was power, power she had never felt before in her life. Power she had only read about in old books and did not think was possible, at least for her.

Power of gods.

She began to smell things she had never smelt before, taste things that never existed. Her teeth ached of absolute zero, and her forehead burnt hotter than supernovas, and she even began to remember memories of the future. It was too much, too incomprehensible. Under normal circumstances she would've turned mad by this point. But by Destiny's decree she was to remember what she had forgotten, even if it meant experiencing a thousand years of pain and knowledge, knowledge she might not even remember, or will actively choose to forget, a thousand years squashed down in just a mere few seconds. And then, in a brief moment of cosmic flood of knowledge – she remembered.

When you cry out in your nightmares, looking for answers, it is I, your god and master, that you see.

"Marco…" she whispered, in utter disbelief. "I… I know what I… I remember the…"

"Um… are you okay, dear sister?" Asked Penny. "You look kind of pale."

The shapeless blobs of her surrounding were starting to concentrate, taking more focus within Star's pupils. She still could not quite see everything. But she could better make out what it was that was surrounding her. All the cold metal, and the idle machinery. And in her palm the long oval blob began to take shape, she could now see the golden shine of the pointed tip at the end, attached firmly to its black handle, finally understanding why the kids called them pens.

In that moment, Star remembered, and she was determined. In one decisive motion, she held the pen towards her lips. Asking it the most important question on her mind:

"Cloudy – I need to know… because I refuse to believe it. Who is the God of Evil?"

At that moment, the two kids stood back in shock, hands covering their mouths. And the device in Star's hand began to shake.

"I'm going ahead," Star commanded. "Fetch Janna. The republic might be in danger!"

"Roger that, ma'am," cried Meteora.

"Please…" Star muttered to herself, "please, let me make it in time."

"ERROR, ERROR… invalid command. Please rephrase the question. Be more specific."

"Hey, I thought this thing was supposed to know everything," Star turned to Penny, only to find her still in shock, holding dearly to Orion.

Star was mildly confused, but she disregarded it and continued:

"Alright, let me try something else. Cloudy – tell me the name of the God of Evil."

The pen began vibrating even more violently this time, with the inner circuitry rupturing sparks of plasma, oozing out of the metal casing.

"Error, error… too many names… free up memory space to complete download."

"What? No," Star snapped. "I just need one name."

"Insufficient," said the pen. "Evil has approximately 23 quadrillion names in this multiverse alone. Here are just a few of these…"

With a violent burst of energy, the pen shot out a powerful beam of light onto the murky wall in the distance, revealing to Star a screen with a wide column of straight horizontal lines that seemed to scroll down at an absurd speed. Upon closer inspection, Star realized these weren't just lines – these were names, names written in the smallest of fonts to squeeze tightly into the space given by the beam of light radiating from the pen.

"What the heck are these names?" Star muttered to herself as she scanned the wall, "Satan… Old Scratch… Darkseid? Set? Dragon… Lich… Orochi? Beast… Xltot? Moar… Ygrzl? Are these just a bunch of gibberish and random words mashed together? You know what? I have an idea. You want specifics? How about this? Cloudy – last question…"

Once again however, before she could finish her sentence, the door of the room opened up behind her, revealing a path of blinding light, and consumed by that light a shadow of a powerful figure.

The figure stood up tall, riding on top a strange mechanical vehicle painted pink that was somewhat oval, almost like some sort of bulky hoverboard. From the bottom of the vehicle came two levers that were long enough to reach up to the torso. She stood firm, gripping the handles of the long levers with both hands, controlling the device with absolute authority.

The figure wore a peculiar skin-tight outfit with silky green fabric woven beneath a thin layer of golden leather. At least Star thought it was leather. Star wasn't even entirely sure what material the outfit was made of, and she had a gut feeling the materials might not even exist. There on her head the woman wore an unusual mechanical headgear that almost seemed mounted to her chin and the sides of her cheeks, going all the way up to a different rectangular piece secured above her forehead like some kind of tall vertical ceremonial folding cap. It was a peculiarly shaped helmet, seemingly intended to be two pieces capable of disassembling into separate parts.

The woman wore thick mechanical pauldrons, painted of green and gold, and underneath all that metal, a lab coat worn over the skin-tight suit, let flying in the wind as she rode by on her vehicle. But by far the most eye-catching feature of this entire gaudy attire was the circular emblem of red and yellow fixed tightly at the very center of her chest. Star was actually uncertain of whether it was an insignia or an actual piece of circular metal implanted deep into the rib cage of this woman.

"What in Mewni's name is going on here?" The woman cried, "Who let you kids in he…"

She paused the very moment she glanced at Star holding onto the pen.

The woman squinted her eyes, staring in disbelief:

"God-Mother?"

"STAR!"

A different voice boomed by the hallway behind the door, and a massive shockwave shook the very moment the voice reached the room. There bolting into the chamber from behind the woman standing on the strange vehicle – the God of Republic.

"Son, get behind me," she waved her hand towards the children, "Penny, go back to your mother."

"Would someone please for the love of corn tell me what is going on here!" Star cried.

"Please, listen to me," said the God, extending her hand, "I know what you're trying to do. And trust me when I say you don't want to know the answer to that question you're about to ask."

"Who are you?" Star asked. "And how do you even know what I was going to ask?"

"Give me the pen, Star," the God commanded. "This will not end well if you proceed."

"No!" Star yelled back in defiance, "I need to know. I need to know! I remember what I have forgotten. And I need to know. I refuse to believe it. So I need this pen here to tell me I am right."

"Star, no!"

"Cloudy," Star puffed her chest, inhaling one massive final breath, "tell me the identity of the God of Evil."

"NO!"

In a moment, faster than a split second, perhaps even faster than an attosecond, the pen shone its powerful beam of light onto the wall. There it revealed something Star had been anxiously waiting for this whole time – a profile photo. The truth she had wanted so badly. It was clearer than even Rhombulus's crystals. The face was unmistakable.

The pen read out loud:

"The God of Evil – is Toffee of Septarsis."

"YES!" Star cried out triumphantly, "I knew it! I just knew it. I was right. I was right all along. I knew it was not possible for Marco to…"

"The God of Evil…"

The pen had not finished.

The beam of light grew stronger.

And now – it began loading a second profile picture.

"… is Seth of Septarsis…" said the pen.

"What?" Star stared at the screen in disbelief.

"And finally…"

Still not done. The light of the pen grew mightier than ever.

And thus – it loaded one final photo.

Uttering a horrifying answer, shattering Star's world into a million pieces.

"No…" she gasped with a final breath just right before she lost consciousness and passed out, "not… possible…"

"The God of Evil – is Marco Ubaldo Diaz of New Earth."

And there on the screen, three photos lined up next to one another. With the two monstrous lizards by the side, grinning, laughing, baring their sharp fangs dipped in crimson blood.

And in the middle of the two – a boy, with grey skin fractured like dead trees robbed of its life source.

A boy in a black silky suit, crowned with a bloodstained red hat. Hiding away a black pair of eyes beneath the shadows that lit up with an even more vicious red.

A boy smiling from ear to ear, laughing a cosmic laugh that could be heard all the way across the multiverse.

Hosanna.

God save us all.