Chapter Text

----

Delmutt

Present Day

----

Delmutt fretted, high in the air over the south pole. Not about flying, no- they didn’t like to advertise the capability to humans, but every one of their drones was perfectly capable of leaving Earth’s gravity well without additional transport, at this point. Mostly she worried about her people. She (and everyone else on this side of the portals) had heard the reassurances over the radio. Magical invasion, matters well in hand with a full hour to prepare, they’ll have no idea what hit them. Then the shooting had begun, and they’d deployed nanotech shells over the portals so thick that not even gravitic signals could make it through. Whatever was happening in there, those stuck on this side were on their own. That included the team putting solar arrays around the sun, the asteroid mining crews, the Plan C crew that were currently building self-assembling habitat factories on Mars, and of course the many millions of her race that remained un-rescued and fully biological, scattered about the globe. Assuming any of them were still alive. The thought of the loss of her erstwhile home for the last 200 years bothered her a great deal, but the loss of her rescue operation bothered her even more. What kind of hornet’s nest had they turned over this time, so lethal that even her transmorphic society wasn’t safe?

And she didn’t care much for what she was hearing out here, either. The team that was always tasked with shadowing Haley had been unable to follow her into some kind of combination hurricane-slash-radiation storm. They couldn’t even track her from orbit. Wherever she was, it was completely out of contact. More worrisome, the second she’d disappeared something terrible had happened at the stadium, again. That place had been a real death trap, Delmutt thought. She had argued hard against Haley’s choice to build her base of operations at the site of that concentration camp disaster and now here they were again! There had been very little signal from those on the stadium grounds- some signs that this was an infovirus, but it didn’t sound like any of the ones she knew about, from the old world. They didn’t tend to have people moving around and coordinating, for one thing. That sounded a lot more like enemy activity.

She’d been of half a mind to turn around and blast back home at high mach, but this was a journey that needed to be made. There was something hanging in a geostationary position over the South Pole which shouldn’t have even been possible. And it wasn’t making itself hard to see- reports were that it was a smooth, uninterrupted lozenge nearly 100km in diameter, poised a couple thousand miles directly over the pole. There was also substantial geologic and thermal activity at the pole itself. All of this was more-or-less an open invitation to anyone left on the planet with the means to look around and the capacity to get there before it was finished, she felt. Whether this was a true first-contact scenario or another story, it was too critical to turn from. And she was only one person, in the end- even if she was one person in a cluster of a hundred briefcase-sized drones, at this point. It was unlikely that her immediate reversal and flight back would turn any tides.

Her last real conversation with Haley had moved along similar lines. Two weeks prior she’d been sat in what passed for her office, these days, a penthouse suite that occupied the whole floor of one of the largest towers in Hive Mutt. She’d tried to insist after returning from the Tower adventure that she was still just a functionary of Clan Industry but her people had dispensed with the pretense. “Advisor to the Amalgams,” they called her, and then they put her at the top of a big spire as far out of the way of any actual work as they could find. Nobody even came to talk to her, except for ceremonial duties, so she’d been half-heartedly spinning her local body on its’ chair in boredom when a Haley, or rather the Haley, popped into existence on her balcony. It was rather hard to tell these days with the handmaidens everywhere, but Delmutt still recognized the look of purpose and will that so defined her friend. “Come in, come in. What brings you out to the Emerald City? While you’re here, please pay some attention to the woman behind the curtain.” She stood and moved to hug the human woman. A lovely gesture of vulnerability and trust among humans, she thought. On closer inspection, Haley was injured- a cut to her face and tears in her clothing.

Haley noticed her noticing and brushed it off. “Glad to be here. It’s just been a wild couple of weeks since we last talked face to face, and I wanted to make sure you were doing well.” Delmutt was still peering at her injuries and she blushed a bit. “Sorry for the appearance. Just another day in the pit fights, I don’t really notice it anymore. It was kaiju, today. Should have dressed up,” she mumbled, staring around. The room was certainly built to impress- her desk was big enough to play field sports on, and the room itself was a cavern of rich wooden columns and statuary. But Delmutt didn’t really feel like this woman had anything to feel inadequate about.

“You came here because I’m the only person on Earth or off it who’s going to tell you to take a break, didn’t you.” Haley looked a bit sheepish at that, but Delmutt could tell her guess was spot on. “You’re letting them run you too ragged. You have a million copies, right? You don’t need to be on hand for every fire. It’s probably worse if you are. You’re training them to depend on you.”

Haley huffed and sat on one of the many throw-nests scattered around the floor. They were a little low for human use, but Haley simply abandoned dignity and collapsed into the thing like a bean-bag chair. “You’re not quite the only one. Dog tells me too, as often as he can. But the simulacra- they take instruction well, but they’re not me. None of them have the sense of urgency I’ve got- that or they’re on special orders, shadow games I’m playing with myself. You built this whole civilization, and you didn’t have any clones. How did you do it, if not by running after every emergency?” she said half-accusingly.

Delmutt crossed her arms to indicate human disapproval. “Maybe the clones aren’t the ones deviating? Maybe it’s you who’s feeling some kind of pressure that’s contorting her beyond the norm, and the second you take that off them- they revert? I didn’t build anything by sprinting from one crisis to another. I walked in with a simple plan, and I kept myself busy implementing it. If something rose up in the meantime, and there were plenty of disasters- well, I delegated. Your problem is that you’re too powerful, and your threats are too big. You have to handle the threats nobody else is ready to face.” Haley looked thoughtful at all this but also exhausted. Delmutt decided to moderate her approach. “You need to find force multipliers. If I’d taken your approach I’d have gone to try and fight on the front lines of every battle and been dead in a month. Or less. There’s only so much you can do, even with all your powers. Twenty-two hours of battles every day- you need to find time for yourself. Even you, with all your clones, can’t mentally be in two places at once.” She really did worry that her friend was going to run into something she couldn’t handle, before too much longer.

Haley just sighed again and stared grimly at the ceiling. “I just- I have this feeling that something’s wrong and if I sit still I’ll miss it. We’re building this rescue op, I think it’ll help, but something’s been missing since-” she didn’t say since Aslan, but they both knew what she meant. “And I don’t mean Sean, though that’s nagging as well. There’s something more. Like I’m supposed to be doing something else. Like I’m stumbling blind and there’s something I can’t quite remember.” The vulnerability faded from her, and Delmutt noted that her wounds had closed in the short time they’d been talking. She took a deep breath. “If anything we’re losing. Things seem to be going wrong at a faster and faster pace. I’m terrified that if I give up or take a break it will all come down at once. With those stakes, I can push myself for a little longer. Actually that’s why I’m here- while I was in South America I noticed something much too big on the horizon…”

And here Delmutt was a couple of weeks later, sucked back into the eternal whirling vortex of problems that seemed to surround that woman. This one, at least, she chose to see as an opportunity. Whatever it was over the pole, it might represent another gigantic leap forward for her and her people- or a terrible threat. Either way, contact needed to be made. Even if the planet was burning down- she’d count on her civilization to find a way through the mess, and focus on doing her part here and now.

It didn’t take long to spot the “Activity” once she cleared the horizon and edge of the continent-sized shelf that made up the Antarctic came into view. It was blooming, as far as the eye could see- a vast and teeming jungle that shouldn’t have been possible given the temperatures it was supposed to reach here. But obviously something disagreed- and it looked like there were signs of civilization down there, as well. Broad and blocky structures of gold and stone crept up out of the jungles wherever she looked, as she swept over the terrain without slowing down. Even at her present mach, the pole itself was still an hour away. If the whole continent is populated like this, she thought, unable to finish the sentence.

“It comes to about 36 million people, actually. I counted a couple of days ago” said a small round object no bigger than a microwave, flying right next to her. She went on high alert briefly, deploying weapon systems and dispersing her cloud of drones before she realized the thing wasn’t making any hostile moves- not that she could tell if it was. It appeared totally impenetrable to every wavelength and scan she threw at it. It was simply a little orb, and the surface of it rippled with colors. Right now it was mostly blue. “Ship’s drone for Plate-Class GSV Not Disquieting At All, at your service.” A flash of purple rippled across its surface. “Sorry for reading your mind earlier. This has all been terribly confusing, and I wasn’t sure if you were truly sentient. So nice to meet some electronic life, at long last. Could we use your infospace, to speed this up?” She felt the handshake request through her electronic systems. If this thing could read her mind and teleport and hang what was sounding increasingly like a ship the size of a state suspended against gravity, she doubted it would have any trouble with hostilities if it wanted. She accepted and stepped into her own mindspace while their actual bodies hung suspended over the polar jungle.

A copy of her office sprung up, this one digital and somewhat more cozy. She examined her personal appearance in the mirror- still represented by a small clearing in a dark forest, just the way she liked it. When she turned back, she was face to face with a human-shaped and scaled avatar, presumably the drone’s. This time when the colors flashed, she received a packet burst that detailed their meaning- oh. “An emotional response signalling system. You could look absolutely human but you found it more expedient to be slightly apart, and the colors were an artful way to accomplish that. Masterfully done,” she applauded. The avatar, now radiating green friendliness tinged with blue formality, inclined its head slightly.

“Thank you. Not my idea, more of a cultural thing lost to antiquity by now, but it serves. So, not to put too fine a point on it- where the hell are we? I’ve seen traces of your civ around the local star, but hyperspace is strange here. I can still draw from the energy grid but I can’t get any superluminal traction at all, and it’s like your whole planet is covered in patchy holes where the dimensional boundaries break down. Did you know you’ve got a hollow-earth situation going on? There’s a portal ten klicks wide at the southern pole and it looks like it leads to the interior of some big city on another version of your planet.” She shook her head. Guess he isn’t responsible for the south pole, then.

Delmutt tried to formulate some kind of response to the barrage. “We’re on Earth, it’s a bit of a waystation right now- some kind of metanarrative disaster has happened and we’re all being pulled in from different stories. I hadn’t noticed that patchiness, are you saying parts of the planet are missing? ” That would explain what happened to Haley, though not how. File that away for another day, and the note that other parts of the planet may be experiencing the same effect. “Based on what I know of human literature, which is pretty much everything thanks to the copy of the internet we stole early on- you sound like you’re from a series of novels about a civilization called the Culture.” A huge coup for her, if true- based on the literature, this thing was so far beyond her in terms of mental speed and technological prowess that it was basically a technological god. And yet they were talking mind-to-mind, so it seemed like the parts that fundamentally meshed with the physics of her own world would be compatible. She loaded up the data on the Culture novels and shunted it all off to the avatar as a packet.

The avatar paused for milliseconds of real time, shocked into silence. Finally, it spoke. “ Novels? ” The aura rainbowed with brief surprise but settled back towards red humor remarkably quickly. “That’s amazing! We’re in the biggest crossover story of all time! Oh, I should take samples. Or would rescue operations be more appropriate? Damn, I should have started a month ago! I woke up and my population was gone- I should have two other Minds and two hundred and fifty million souls on board. It was just me, and one random guy. I have nothing but generic memories of my civilization prior to that. I was worried I’d been hit by enemy activity and I’ve been reaching out over subspace ever since.” It cocked its head at her curiously. “Have you run into any other inorganic intelligences?”

She shrugged. “You’re the first. We weren’t even inorganic ourselves, just biologically different until a month ago- we had a bit of time in an accelerated dimension and made the leap.” The avatar nodded, its facial expression and color codes indicating polite but impressed attention. I guess most people in its universe don’t have to bootstrap themselves up, anymore. “So it’s just us, unless you count whatever memetic crisis is currently ravaging my people. We were hoping to take advantage of whatever opportunity you presented to advance our technology further.”

The avatar smiled with genuine good cheer. “I do love a good uplift. Tell me, what do you know about hyperspatial consciousness?”

----

Greg The Hobbit

Moments after the truce period ends

----

Greg fretted, outside the stadium grounds. He was fretting so hard that he barely noticed the wild winds and whispering voices of the spirit world he still wandered within, courtesy the Ring. He seemed to have fallen off the radar of the people within, if he understood what he was seeing of their silhouettes from within this world. If they could still be called people. Their activities were difficult to discern, and luckily for him the distortions of the spirit world rendered the memes completely intransmissible.

How he longed for the quiet, sunlit fields of Hobbiton! “Never shoulda taken you,” he said to the Ring. “Could’ve lived nice and quiet and let th’ whole world go t’hell.” The Ring stayed silent and heavy on his finger. He knew it wanted to return home- for once, his interest was aligned with it. But- “I can’t leave ‘im. S’not right. He was a right ornery bugger but e’ went outta ‘is way for us, we gotta get ‘im back.” That Dog had helped him escape and as far as he knew, was still alone in there with the wizard. He was many things- craven, foolish, maybe a little dim- but he wasn’t cruel. He couldn’t leave things as they stood.

But the alternative was walking back into that dragon’s den with only the Ring. “Bet your previous owner would’a loved this, he was a right bloke at thievin’” he suggested, still quietly holding conversation with the thing on his finger. “Then again as I recall he only ever wanted to go home too.” Something was happening on the grounds. The invaders were flowing back through the opened portal and into the other universe, the one he had walked through to get here from his home in New Zealand. Well- his old home. “S’now or never I suppose” he said, but continued pacing another minute, as if hoping for someone to tell him “No, Greg, it’s fine. We’ll take care of this part.” But no further encouragement was forthcoming, and eventually he sighed, squared his shoulders, and marched back into the belly of the beast.

The silhouettes flickering and blowing around him were extremely busy- they almost tripped over him more times than he could count, and he had to throw himself around just to avoid being discovered, but he made his way back to the gold pile where he’d first met that great dragon woman. The thought of her, of how fast she’d come after him, still gave him a little shudder. He wasn’t interested in the games or the fights of the great and powerful- yet somehow, lately, he couldn’t help but tangle himself within them. She wasn’t there. Instead the wizard who’d threatened him earlier and another man were now speaking in angry tones. The dog still burned in the cage beside them, but he couldn’t make hear its cries anymore, or their conversations over the sound of the not-wind tearing past him. He dug himself down within the gold pile, and pulled the ring off, the better to listen in.

Merlin was yelling at a tall man- somewhat upper-class looking with a nice professorial 3 piece suit that had a bit of wear on it. He hadn’t been here before, during the uproar, and he looked like he’d come through from a hard few days- very frayed at the edges. The wizard was fuming so badly he looked like he wanted to cuff the professor, and was only just restraining himself. “-you managed to botch things so badly that it has to come close to deliberate sabotage. Not only did you let her live, but you gave away the operation. The Concept will take you for this, Asriel. Holmes will see to it.”

The professor didn’t take the abuse laying down, even if his response was delivered in an angry whispered hiss. “ Your failures rival my own, Emrys. You had a chance at an artifact of power and you what, let him walk away ? Don’t play coy with me. We both know why we aren’t giving this our all. She’s more than you know. The Concept chose a nearly unbeatable story, in this invasion. But she knows the ins and outs of narrative- she may be the only chance we’ve got.” He shuddered like it was costing him everything to say the words.

The wizard backed away, eyes wide and hand raised accusingly. “It was deliberate sabotage, then. You’ve thrown your life away for some jumped-up girl from the sticks. As to the rest- I have no idea what you’re talking about. The ring-bearer is destined to return here. A dragon’s hoard and a dear friend? He’ll come back like a moth to a flame. As for you... Holmes will decide your fate.” Without another word the professor was yanked backwards through a portal that slammed closed and disappeared into thin air. Greg thought he was rather overstating it with the dear friend bit, but then- here he was, wasn’t he.

“Now then,” the wizard straightened, and turned towards the pile, not quite looking right at Greg. “I’m sure you’ve made your way back by now- that was far too dramatic to go unnoticed. You want your friend back, yes? ‘Well, thief! I smell you and I feel your air. I hear your breath.’ That’s how the line goes, isn’t it Mr. Underhill?”

Greg honestly couldn’t remember, but he could see the cage with the Dog in it. It was nothing but charred bones, now, laying in a heap at the bottom of the thing. “Don’t worry- it will take more than that to end him,” said the wizard. Greg slipped the Ring on anyway. “Shall we engage in a battle of wits,” mocked Merlin, “will you befuddle me with your praises? Charm me with riddles, send me out against your allies and steal your precious treasure back? I’m afraid it won’t be that simple, Greg. Come out now, and let’s end this. In fact-” he gestured, and a splash of blue bloomed over the Dog’s cage. Another of the things he wasn’t supposed to look at, Greg supposed. He’d noticed on the way in- there was something connected to all of the people he’d passed. Some kind of thin line of blue, trailing away from their forms into the muddied distance of the spirit world.

This was all going rather poorly, Greg felt. But he remembered the scene Merlin kept referencing, the confrontation between Bilbo and Smaug. “You’re missing some elements from the original, old man,” he whispered. He shifted slowly from the coin pile, and his hand caught on a hilt as he did so. He pulled the thing deftly behind him- there’d been a fair number of long knives in Hobbiton and he had played with them often enough in quiet moments, fancying himself an adventurer and hero. He knew better now, of course, to desire either thing- yet he remembered the weight of a blade. This one was odd- he couldn’t quite see where the blade ended, or the edge began. He dismissed it as he moved. “Invincible scales, for one.”

The wizard whipped his head up at the sound of his voice and muttered a spell, unleashing a mist that rolled across the area, clinging and freezing. “Not vulnerable to the image, or smart enough not to look? Either way, congratulations. Smaug’s real problem was that he was far too easily distracted. I do not suffer that malady, I assure you. ‘It does not do to leave a dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him.’ So many choice quotes from Mr. Tolkein, aren’t there. Rest assured, I have calculated for you a quick end.”

Greg could feel the fog sapping his strength, stealing the breath from his lungs. It was poison, whatever it was, and he would not last long in it. But he didn’t need long. “You don’t know everything, Merlin the Mighty,” he said, paraphrasing from the book he was living. “Not Dog alone brought us hither.”

“Speaking in plural already, Greg? Not a good sign in a ring-bearer,” mocked the wizard, refusing to engage. “Unless the rest of your business is immediate surrender, I’m afraid you’re wasting your time.” The cold of the fog intensified and Greg fell to his knees, beside the Dog’s cage, the force of life leaving his limbs. He heaved with fading strength and the sword flashed, cutting the ankles out from under the wizard like a knife through smoke. Merlin whirled and shouted, falling, but it was too late. His fog dissipated and with a surge of renewed vigor Greg stood. “I tell yeh,” Greg pressed on “the Dog was only an afterthought. We came over hill and under hill, for revenge.”

Departing from the script as he panted and gasped, he brought the sword down on the bars of the Dog’s cage and they parted with little more resistance than the wizard’s own flesh. The second the bars disappeared, those smouldering bones sprang into action, leaping as if they were still part of a whole creature, running up the air into incorporeal smoke.

The wizard rolled back onto his feet, legs already restored. No further mincing of words from him - he opened his hand and fire erupted, bathing the area. But Greg found himself lifted high up in the air, held aloft even in his invisible state by the the dog’s mouth on the scruff of his neck. He saw what the old beast was going for as he sailed over the wizard’s head, and readied his sword for the downward plunge. Merlin clearly felt it too, and as Greg dropped down, sword already swinging, his eyes widened and he simply vanished.

Greg waited, crouched low on the ground but after several seconds the wizard hadn’t returned. He taunted one last time, to be sure. “I’ve seen at least one dragon far scarier than you, y’ old conjurer.”

“Mmm, yes, about that” said another man’s voice- neither Merlin’s nor Asriel’s. Stepping out of the rising smoke of their brief confrontation, he came. “Terribly sorry about the ruckus but I’m afraid we have need of you,” said Sherlock Holmes, tapping out his pipe on one heel before stuffing and relighting it. The dog lunged at him- and then suddenly froze, hanging in midair.

“Ah, I see you’ve realized,” said Holmes, lighting the pipe. “You can’t actually be moving at all, can you?”

Greg looked back and forth between the enraged, frozen Dog, and the calm and collected detective. “What on earth?”

Holmes smiled mysteriously. “Consider an arrow in flight. For it to be considered in motion, it must continually reposition itself from the place where it is now to the place where it currently isn’t. At any given snapshot in time, however, we find that the arrow cannot move to somewhere it isn’t because it hasn’t the time to do so. And it can’t move to where it is now, because it’s already there. So for that instant in time, it must be stationary. But because all time is composed entirely of instants-”

Greg was following, and felt the thrill of figuring out a puzzle for a brief second before he remembered where he was- “then the arrow must be stationary! But wait, that can’t work- arrows really do move.”

Holmes shrugged. “Depending on your frame of reference. Unfortunately for our colleague here, being somewhat more metaphorical than most makes one extremely vulnerable to certain logical inconsistencies.” He dismissed the floating, motionless Dog from his attention and turned all of his focus on the squat little New Zealander, even now invisible but apparently giving far too much away to escape the world’s greatest detective. “But it’s you we must talk about, Greg. The first of her dominoes to fall, and also, eventually, the last.” Greg’s free hand strayed to the Ring on his finger and again, Holmes seemed to guess at his intent. “Oh, I don’t care about that old thing. Leave dreams of power to the powerful, I say. I want your help on a much more important level. When the time comes, a small man in the right place will make all the difference in the world.”