Chapter Text

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Contact Team 13, Volo Ingenium

Moments after the truce period ends

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Holy shit holy shit holy shit. Sergeant Matt Cooper, formerly of the RCMP, now of Contact, sheltered behind the newly grown shield over the portal gateway and screamed to keep his ears from popping. And I was worried this was going to be one sided. Around him thunder like he’d never heard before was splitting the air. Flashes of heat and blasts of air were coming so fast that he couldn’t even distinguish which side was doing the firing. Looking up, he saw another bright-red figure in bronze armor swooping down at them, a shimmering heat aura promising instant immolation if it got too close- Charlie’s charred husk was a hundred feet in front of him on the massive branch, a reminder of what would happen. Matt and Nina levelled their weapons and unloaded, emptying their clips and managing only to score the armor and inflict what looked like glancing wounds on the giant. It ignored the hailstorm and kept coming, readying a giant flaming halberd before another crack of thunder sounded and the monster just came apart, punched into a mist by rounds traveling at speeds too fast to register, speeds that Matt didn’t think should be possible in an atmosphere without leaving streaks of fire. Another of Shamutt’s drones buzzed by- this one looked like it was built around a canon- and threw them a thumbs-up with a vestigial limb. Matt smiled weakly and thumbs-up’d back at it before it flew off. “We need some bigger goddamn guns,” said Nina, surveying the carnage. Matt couldn’t help but agree- they weren’t going to last ten more minutes in here. He had Roy’s holdout, still- but that was for a rogue dragon or possibly deity. Did it apply here?

As his team watched, the Extras hadn’t wasted the hour they’d been given. Their whole goddamn society was robots, it seemed, and within minutes they’d had self-assembling artillery and flyers and drones pouring out of just about every hive in a hundred miles. But they hadn’t fired a shot, no- even as the armies of Efreet mustered and the cities spread their ruinous lava, the infomorphs had held deathly silent and still. Matt imagined their radio networks must be alive with chatter, but it had been damn eerie seeing thousands of their drones, millions, taking to every surface and simply staring at the great flaming cities, silently.

At the hour mark the gates of those vast fortresses had opened and a horde of giant warriors had descended- Matt’s jaw dropped when he realized the flight wasn’t mechanically powered. They could just fly. They were twelve feet tall, they wore brass armor and clothes made of fire, and they could fly. Still the infomorphs held their ground and their fire. Their discipline was awe-inspiring. Matt had turned to Shamutt’s nearest drone, finally, and asked. “What are you all waiting for?” The drone simply shook its head and pointed at the furthest city, and Matt was forced to wait alongside his two comrades in arms for the infomorph response.

They didn’t wait long. The first efreet touched the ground of Volo Ingenium and simultaneously ten million drones raised their weapons and took flight. Matt and Charlie were nearly blinded when the city they were observing was struck by something from one of the hives, moving so fast it left a trail of nuclear fire as it heated the air with its passage. The entire structure of the city visibly rocked, the mass of downtown Manhattan being thrown back through the air as something punched into the heart of it and detonated with the heat of a star. “You might want to cover your ears” said Shamutt, helpfully producing (self-assembling) something for the task. They hastily strapped the mufflers on and when the shockwave reached them, along with the follow ups from the subsequent shots, they didn’t quite lose their hearing. Throughout the war zone efreeti giants fell with great holes punched clean through them- whatever their armor was, it wasn’t rated for gravitic and rail technology. Or at least, not at first.

The efreet didn’t take any of this lying down. As the first of their great sky citadels crumbled in flames, storms and walls of fire sprang up throughout the cities. These were clearly magical- they raged with an eerie purple light, and the efreet were obviously well versed at using them both offensively and defensively. It seemed like every single genie could summon them, but the truly elite units had other powers as well. Some raged like the berserkers in the Conan movies Matt remembered watching as a child- others were slinging much more advanced and powerful spells. Thousands upon thousands scattered throughout the fight simply turned invisible, vanishing only to appear moments later amid clusters of drones, reaping great tallies with giant-sized flaming weapons.

The drones gave as good as they got. It was impossible to tell if the infomorphs even took losses, from Matt’s perspective. With one consciousness potentially controlling a hundred or more of their bodies, they could afford suicide charges and heroic last-stands at virtually every turn. The only real losses they might suffer would be their data centers where their civilians were stored, and the portal network, and between those and the two remaining citadels the fighting raged. The nuclear lances didn’t work a second time- whether through wishing or simply adaptation, the flying mountains manifested great shimmering fields that absorbed the shots before shattering, returning fire at the source of the ballistics with tremendous gouts of lava that engulfed whole city blocks.

Nina had turned to Shamutt and asked “Are we winning? I’ve got no clue what’s going on.” The little drone still accompanying them was preparing to answer when they’d all three heard a warning shout from Matt, and then a scream. They hadn’t even seen the invisible giant as he’d flown in and landed on their branch, until his heat aura had caught Charlie and he’d begun to catch fire. Somehow the man still had the presence of mind to raise his rifle and unload into the towering figure, pinpricks that he apparently barely even felt as he clubbed Charlie aside with the blunt end of a giant axe made of solidified fire. His body flew through the air to land on the branch, already dead before he’d hit the ground, and Matt shouted in fear and anger for his friend.

Shamutt simply flicked open one side of his little drone torso. Something fired from him, near-silent and too fast for Matt to track, and the giant lost a hand and that enormous axe in the ensuing explosion. He roared and began to rush them, his eyes literally sparking with rage- Matt and Nina threw themselves backwards, already feeling the wash of heat from the aura of flame that surrounded him. Nina had the presence of mind to throw a flashbang, and Matt covered his eyes and trusted to the ear protection he already had as it went off directly in his face. Stunned and injured as it was, the enormous genie didn’t raise a defense as the small drone flew directly at his face and detonated its remaining munitions stores. The headless torso of the giant flopped lifelessly to the ground and another drone of Shamutt’s strained to shove it off the branch before returning to them, bobbing cheerfully. “Whew! Sorry about your friend. You guys are backed up, right?”

They glanced at each other and the drone grew more distressed. “You mean that was final death? Oh man! Oh no! Why are you guys out here? You could be killed!”

Matt shook his head, unsure himself. “I’m-” he stuttered. I’m not sure why I’m here, except to open this envelope. And to stand by this door and wait for the rest of my team. Is it worth it? He watched the fight raging, the infomorphs dying to protect their new home. Even if it wasn’t final death- well, the world had gone straight to hell in the last month and he was glad someone was fighting against that. He could make peace with risking his life under those circumstances. “You’ve stood by us, we’ll stand by you. And our unit.” The crowd of drones surrounding their tree had visibly thickened after that, and no more enemies had managed to get through. Until now.

“We really need some bigger goddamn guns,” Nina repeated, watching the second Efreet tumble in two pieces to the forest floor below. The portal network was clearly an objective of theirs, though so far they had not turned their lava canons on it. Matt was captivated by a Dragonfly as it swept past, clearly overmatched in the air by half a dozen flying efreet and one particularly large red woman who appeared to be some kind of spellcasting variant. Their little branch seemed to catch her eye and he felt his ass clench. “Incoming!” he shouted, grabbing Nina and throwing her behind the cover of the Portal shield. He threw himself after her before a wave of cold from the genie turned everything in the vicinity to ice. Around them Shamutt’s drones shattered, metal frozen into brittle uselessness in an instant, but Matt felt alright- until he looked at his legs instinctively. The right one was gone- busted off below the knee and frozen over. “Oh, shit.” The pain would come within seconds.

Drones were swarming back in but the giantess was going to be on them before long. She laughed darkly as she landed. “Oh, I didn’t think she was going to leave us any humans to play with. Care to make a wish, little darlings? Don’t worry, I’ll take extra good care of you.” Even as she sauntered closer, the heat of her scorching the path underneath her feet, she continued in a stage whisper. “You won’t even have to choose. We’ve got our slaves wishing for resurrections, today. But tomorrow?” She put a finger to her lips even as she cast another spell. “Oh, I think tomorrow I’d like a few words with a certain dragon. Call me pure evil, will she-” a stillness was coming over Matt and he didn’t know if it was the blood loss he was surely experiencing, or a spell she’d cast. Everything was going grey and silent and he was beginning to slip away-

And then Nina stepped past him, with the single LG 440 grenade launcher they’d managed to salvage. “I’ve got a wish for you,” she said, unloading the weapon into the giantess. She must have swapped out the riot cartridges for high explosive because the first shot detonated on the efreet’s torso, throwing her backward and releasing a hail of shrapnel. Matt saw Nina take a couple of shrapnel impacts from the backblast but she didn’t look like she minded, pumping a second shot and then a third into the downed giant before she could react. The detonations briefly restored color to his world, long enough for him to sit up and empty his final clip in the efreet’s general direction as well.

For all that, she didn’t die. She pushed off the smouldering ground, clearly injured, but even as he watched her wounds were closing, knitting back together. What I wouldn’t give for that superpower, he thought dimly. “Disgusting little apes,” she growled, “Maybe I won’t keep you after all.” Nina’s next shot simply popped off an invisible shield she’d raised at some point. “Looks like Protection from Arrows works just as well against your guns, but still- a lovely try, my dears.” Nina howled and fired the last two shots but the efreet ignored them- she casually raised her hand and from each finger a thin line of fire sprang, carving Matt’s teammate apart as if she’d run into a storm of concertina wire. He screamed once again as the bloody mess settled to the ground and the efreet simply laughed, just as at ease as if she were taking a walk in the park. She looked like she was about to say more, but then cut off- something on the ground below caught her attention and she frowned for the first time since Matt had seen her. She was paying him no attention at all. He glanced in the direction she was looking. It wasn’t Shamutt, who still hadn’t mustered enough drones out of other fights to take a charge at her-

On the ground, at the grand portal hub where Haley’s stadium should have been, a group was coming through. He couldn’t see much about them from this angle but they looked- human? “No,” he croaked. “No, stay away!” This was no place for his kind! Try as they might, what good could they do here? What would a heroic final stand over the portals even amount to? This was a place for gods and monsters.

But there was something off about these people, he noticed, something wrong with the way they were moving, something that disturbed his opponent even more than him. She cursed under her breath and then took off, not even sparing a glance for him or his slaughtered teammates. For his part, he stayed focused on the humans. He couldn’t see any details about them but something down there had bothered the efreet enough for her to abandon tormenting him. But he couldn’t let them wander into this. His consciousness was beginning to slip again- the momentary surge of adrenaline brought on by the death of his last comrade was fading.

There was nothing else for it. He pulled out the envelope. “Last resort,” Roy had said. He doubted Roy had intended the last resort to come within mere hours of the handover, but it was time to face facts- if he didn’t pull a miracle out of this manila folder it was actually possible that the entire world might end then and there. He pulled it open- inside was a tiny circle, the size of a ring. Looking through it he could see another world. Another portal? But what good is- Before he could drop the thing or do anything with it, a woman appeared in front of him. It was Haley, again. “But we left you on the other side of the-” he stammered before she cut him off.

“Different Haley.” She glanced around. “Well, this certainly went to hell even faster than we anticipated. You opened the envelope. Public Haley’s either nuts or unresponsive?” He nodded. “Are you willing to put your life on the line to- no, scratch that.” She saw what remained of his companions. “You’ve clearly been doing just that. Congrats, you pass the preliminaries. Come inside.” Without waiting for another word from him she bent down and grabbed his arm, and Matt’s world went black.

Even as they raced back in, Shamutt’s returning drones pulled up abruptly in puzzlement- but they’d seen her, briefly, so everything was probably fine. He resumed his fight. Below, the humans and infomorphs with the blue-glowing eyes began to spread from the portal, carrying their banners and projectors.

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Matt woke to find himself in a soft bed with bright sunlight streaming through the windows. A handmaiden in casual wear was standing near him, apparently on guard or observation duty. She nodded when she saw him sit up, blearily. “Good- let me get the others.” Before he could ask what was going on she swept out of the rather large room. It was a surprisingly cozy and pleasant chamber, made of that same woven-wood aesthetic as the cities in her odd dimension, and the bed was amazingly soft. If it weren’t for the war going on and the deaths he’d just witnessed, he might have felt content to lay in it for hours. As it was, he swung himself up and out, realizing belatedly that he was missing a leg. Or was he? Two solid feet thumped to the floor and he stumbled for a minute, thrown off balance.

“You got your leg back” said the first of the six identical twins coming through the door. He started labelling them in his head to keep track. The one in charge had a clipboard and her hair tied back- she was clearly their coordinator, so he mentally noted her as Haley Prime, of this council of Haleys. The one in jeans and t-shirt who’d been standing near his bed would be Guard Haley. The others- well, he’d have to see. “Welcome to the contingency plan, Mr. Cooper. I’m sorry about the other two in your squad. Wish-based resurrection’s still not working for us. It’s possible that- well, nevermind. I don’t want to get your hopes up about that.”

He shook his head to clear it. This was all too confusing- but he had one burning question right now. “Wait, aren’t there like, a million of you guys? Why aren’t you out there fighting that invasion? People are going to die. Are dying, right now.” A heat was rising in him. How can you sit here in a warm well-lit hospital if you have the power to heal and teleport at will?

They glanced at each other before Prime answered him. “There are some things you aren’t cleared for yet. The low-security version is that we’re part of a plan Haley put in place in case she couldn’t save the world again, in case she got killed or lost her mind. She handed a key to it over to Roy yesterday- though she may not recall. Whatever we got up to, she wanted it to be a surprise. Even to her, if necessary.” She swung her arm out to encompass the room and, Matt assumed, the world beyond it. “A priority beyond immediate threats. This is the surprise we’re preparing.”

He was firmly on his feet now and took the opportunity to walk to a window. He was used to the sights and sounds of the world-spanning forest-city, but what greeted him here was different. It looked like someone had transported a factory to the middle of a park. Instead of vast cityscapes, there were hand-tooled construction lines as far as the eye could see across the sweeping grassy field. Ten thousand men- human men- were out there at work, putting together pieces of gleaming metal into statues- or robots, he supposed. There were Haleys as well, moving in the distance. Most were human-sized for the fine work, but some had shifted to their draconic forms to move heavy equipment and they were titanic - the size of skyscrapers, or larger. Bigger than he’d ever seen the real Haley, that was for sure. “What is this?” he breathed, but his anger hadn’t subsided. “How is any of this helping?” He peered more closely at the men on the lines. Their uniforms were familiar- “Are those the men who fought for Aslan, last month?”

Prime answered him, as the Council of Haleys spread out and sat down on the various bits of furniture within the room. “Yes. They wanted someone to follow, and we needed them sealed up with something to do. As for what we’re doing- do you want the philosophical answer or the practical one? And let me state up front that no matter how fast this conversation ends, you aren’t going back out into that death trap, so relax.”

He couldn’t relax, but he did want to understand. These women would be able to subdue him without trouble, of that he had no doubt, but they seemed to want his approval. It wouldn’t come easy- whatever they were doing, it had better be worth their total absence from the immediate battlefield. “Practical.”

Prime nodded. “When she tasked us with this a month ago, we’d just spent the week using wishes to supply people’s immediate needs and fight fires, but it was becoming evident that the wishing wasn’t sustainable. The genies were actively searching for a way out and we knew they’d find one, or make a convincing enough ethical argument, with time. We had our candles still, but every wish was only empowering the efreet further. Still, we used enough to make this place and begin our process, away from prying eyes. With a new plane to work from we were able to accelerate to double time, as well as find… other efficiencies.” She gestured at the men out in the fields. “With their help for manual labor we were able to begin the crafting process ahead of schedule- the first batch should be coming off the line today. We’ll get back to what they’re making in a bit.”

Guard Haley held out a hand and an illusionary whiteboard sprang to life, with a cyclical series of illustrations flashing on it. A dragon turned into a squirrel with confused question marks, and then a brain exploding, and then a healing symbol, and then the dragon again, repeating. “The first thing we needed to do was decouple from the wish economy, or at the very least become self-sufficient with wishing. Luckily there was an exploit that she’d been putting off, and we could tap into. A hole in the rules for a Pathfinder spell called Awaken which was meant to let a druid turn his chipmunk friend into a talking animal companion, or something. But in practical terms it adds two hit dice and 3 charisma every time it’s cast on an animal with low intelligence. I’m not going to bore you with the details of the Polymorph-Awaken-Feeblemind-Heal loop. Suffice to say that a few hours after creating this place, our progenitor followed that loop until even us half-stat simulacra had reached the maximum growth for which a Pathfinder dragon has any kind of stats written down. Now we’re all capable of casting Wish many times per day, with another spell called Blood Money replacing the material costs with a trivial strength penalty. Infinite wishes, again. No more efreets.”

His blood was up and all this rpg shit wasn’t calming him down at all. If they had the Charisma of god or whatever, they sure weren’t actively using it on him right now. “Great. So now you’re all bigger than the original. Bigger than Godzilla and you can shoot thunderbolts out of your ass, or whatever. And you have thousands of robots for some reason. Why aren’t you out there helping? ”

One of the other Haleys put her hand on Guard Haley’s shoulder and she subsided, letting the new version walk up. They all subsided- that was odd, they seemed to treat this one with a special deference. He couldn’t see anything different about her- same amazonian build, same human face, save for the long horns and cat eyes. No, scratch that- unlike the others her right pinky finger was missing, ending in a ring. “You need the philosophical explanation.”

I really don’t, I need to save the people I saw from the genies. But what could he do? These crazy women had him trapped until he’d heard them out. “Fine.”

“Before I built this, I’d spent the last two weeks running out and throwing myself at every fight that came my way, and it wasn’t getting me anywhere. We know that because all of us share the memories, up to the time I cast the copy of Simulacrum that split us away. We here in this room are the most recent copies- you could say I’m the most up to date of all. We could power up, and run back out the door to save the whole world again and again. Likely there are lives we could save today, assuming we didn’t destroy more of them in the process. More likely still- we’d ultimately be handing more resources to the threats you haven’t heard about yet.” He shuddered at that but she had a point- he’d seen the kind of power being thrown around by foot soldiers in this newest war. “But we’re all gradually adjusting to a new narrative reality- one that makes unbounded heroism very dangerous. Every time I escalate the stories seem to come back at us with something worse. And every escalation makes it harder to keep the rest of you safe- I was worried I’d transcend and leave you behind, or worse, get you all killed if something happened to my mental state. There will come a point where I can’t physically defend you anymore, at the rate I’m scaling up. It would simply be too dangerous. So I abandoned the fight today, made a conscious sacrifice of lives and time to prepare for a more permanent solution. A return to Haley’s roots. I wasn’t exactly of one mind about it. The other Haley’s still out there, fighting the battles that need to be fought. Alone, as far as she knows.”

He crossed his arms. “I can’t believe this. You’re in here arguing over possible future disasters while actual disasters are rolling in right now, and you could stop them. Ten of you could stop them! It wouldn’t even impact your population!”

Philosophy Haley continued, undaunted. “One of me is out there, and look what happened.” Her eyes went unfocused for a moment before she came back. “Trapped out of contact on a hostile world, she’s no more use in the current crisis than we would be. If we walked out there, something would neutralize us, you understand? It will come down to her, and Sean. In here, we can build the plan that gets revealed in the critical moment.”

She walked up to him with real pain in her eyes. “I understand your objection but you’re thinking like a person in a real disaster scenario, not a story. It’s a habit I’m still working to break. This is a story and even though the Haley out in the world right now won’t accept it, at least in part it’s a story about her. I have- she has- an ethos that we’ve been neglecting. There are people in this world who will do anything to climb the ladders of power, to reach the next rung, to leave their mark on the wall of civilization as high as they can reach. She’s been behaving like one of them, for the last few weeks, purely out of necessity. Setting herself above and beyond, reacting. We’ve got a moment of character growth coming.”

He scoffed at that. “And you’re not? It sounds like you’ve been climbing ladders in here even faster than she has.”

Philosophy Haley shook her head. “No, I’m not. I was given access to an enormous rule set but not a character class, in a game about characters. Why?” He shrugged- like he had any idea? She stood a little straighter and suddenly there was something about her- a gravity that she hadn’t been bothering to emanate before. It felt like she occupied the room, towered above him and to all sides. The others in the council didn’t seem to notice or care. They really were suppressing it.

She smiled, and for some reason the mysterious cast of it sent a trickle of fear through his heart. “Because whoever gave it to me never intended me to be the player, once I’d grown big enough.” She struck some kind of drill sergeant pose. “We don’t climb ladders in here, we are the ladder, extending back down to the rest of civilization. That’s a twist the Haley out there won’t see coming, because she’s lost sight of it as she rushes from crisis to crisis. If we enable it, every single person on earth can be a player in this game.”

He began to back away from the mad god, alarmed at the implications, but she followed, relentless, the gleam of real enthusiasm in her eye as the others looked on bemusedly. “This is the second Ingenium. The Hero Engine. Our first batch of ethically sourced experience point golems should be rolling off the assembly lines today. And you-” she stuck a finger at him- “are my first hero. My name is Haley, and I’ll be your Dungeon Master for the evening.”