Merton had stopped worrying about the overlap between Earth’s fiction and this reality. He had no time for it. He glared at the pilot and, as the head of House Castrovel, husband-prince to Relix Castrovel, he snarled: “Do it.”
The pilot grabbed onto the controls, while the defense station started to chirrup – Pyria stabbing at buttons with her fingers. The portal snapped open, revealing a place of infinite blackness. It was something worse and deeper than the stars. Something that said, in every language of the body and soul and heart, to never enter. To flee. But behind it, rushing towards them through real space, was an army that had reduced a world to ash and longed to spill their blood. And so, the pilot slammed down on the accelerator and the Talon-9 plunged.
Into blackness.
Into negation.
Chapter Six: Roll that Search Check!
Bex Thresh, of the Singularity Principalities, knelt low and touched his snout to the obsidian floor of the Pulsar Castle of House Xosh’s freehold. His palms spread and despite hardening his scales for the kick, the impact of the Bryaugh bruiser that stood to the left of him still felt like being hammered by a gravity-drill. Bex rolled and tumbled, then came to a stop. He clutched at the place where his scales had been fractured and broken and gasped in ragged pain as he tried to regenerate as quickly as he could.
“Explain again,” the dark voice that came from the Neutron Throne sounded like a mountain grinding against another mountain. The dragon perched there was remarkably skinny and angular for a blue – his elbow spikes had grown long and he had let his forehead plates extend upwards and outwards, flaring into something more akin to a ceremonial headdress than a normal crest. His body was clad in nothing, save for a single glittering ring with a pale emerald set in the center of a swirling mass of quark-soup that had been hammered into a solid shape. It was the signet ring of House Xosh - the last subatomic gemstone in the galaxy.
Their forgers, the star-fey of the Tiamat Clouds, had been wiped out by Xosh enforcers, to punish them for their failure to deliver tithes.
That thought filled Bex’s mind as he knelt before Xosh. That and the ache from the kick to the stomach.
“I...” Bex closed his eyes. “I lost the control egg, Lord Xosh...”
“In a game,” Lord Xosh said, quietly, his thumb claw rasping around the emerald on his ring.
“I thought-”
“You didn’t ,” Xosh snarled, thrusting his finger at Bex. The Bryaugh bruiser that was the only other person in the throne room stepped forward, his claws clacking on the ground. His hands grabbed onto Bex’s shoulders and he hauled the other dragon to his knees, then slammed his knee into Bex’s jaw, before punching downward. The impact sent Bex sprawling and his teeth scattering across the obsidian floor. Blood dripped – and where it fell, eldritch runes flared to life for a moment, before fading. “You bulled ahead and thought that a basic understanding of Hackmaster rules would let you just slaughter your way to victory. You couldn’t even play to your fucking alignment, you-”
The bruiser kicked Bex in the belly, managing to match the timing of his master’s words to a T.
“-fucking-”
Thump .
“-red-”
Thump .
“-idiot!”
The last blow was hard enough to send Bex skidding backwards, almost bowling him into his half-sister. Gimtesh stood perfectly still, her eyes wide as saucers. Bex lay upon the ground, wheezing heavily. His mind swirled with questions - how did Xosh know of the pathetic human’s game? He looked up through slitted eyes at Gimtesh.
Lord Xosh rubbed his jaw with one finger. “Did you try to dissuade him, Gimtesh?” he asked.
A flare of hope began within Bex’s breast.
“Of course, m’lord!” Gimtesh said, bowing low. “But Bex never listens.”
Bex groaned, low in his throat. But no one was paying him any heed.
“Oh, he can listen ,” Lord Xosh said, grinning slowly. His teeth glittered. “That was why I wanted him on the Prismatic Throne, married to the last survivor of House Castrovel, to the only breedable feathered dragon in the galaxy. Those who sit atop that throne tend to be targets. And I’ve not lived this long by drawing targets on my chest, Gimmy-” he paused. “May I call you Gimmy?”
Gimtesh nodded, quickly.
“You have one chance to save your brother’s life,” Lord Xosh said.
Hope flared again and Bex lifted his head, trying to catch Gimtesh’s eyes.
“Oh, fuck him!” Gimtesh said, quickly. “He’s a shithead!”
Lord Xosh blinked. Then he shrugged, spreading his hand.
“No, no!” Bex gasped as the bruiser stepped up. The black dragon lifted his arm – and unfolded a sleek silvery blade from his forearm. It was unlike anything that a dragon had demonstrated before. For the black dragon wasn’t simply a black dragon. His outer layer of skin and muscle and bone were actually the genetically engineered muscles and skin and bone of a second dragon, with its mind blanked and slaved to his own. He merely needed to think and activate his favored weapon.
Unfortunately for Bex…
The shrike catapult was neither swift…
Nor painless.
Gimtesh walked out of the throne room and into the corridors leading to it, her back ramrod stiff. Her servants – tongueless and meek – moved to follow her. She snapped a pair of fingers and the silvery orb of an automated servant flew up from behind her. She snarled to it.
“Go and tell my crew. Prep the ship. And tell my arms-master...” she looked directly at the orb. “Get guns. And get nukes. Lots and lots of nukes.”
***
First, there was nothing.
Then, with a scream of dimensional energies, there was something . Smoking and sputtering from dozens of plasma impacts, shedding armor like a dog with mange and spinning on all three axii, the Talon-9 tumbled into the infinite blackness that was the Plane of Negation. On the bridge, Merton coughed and waved his hand under his nose, looking around himself at the low red lighting that had replaced the normal hues. His wife was sprawled on her belly, her arms flung out before her. Merton hurried to her, but before he had even knelt next to her, she groaned and started up.
“Merton,” she said, her tail lashing from side to side. “Remind me why I married you.”
“You kidnapped me and threatened to blow up my planet,” Merton said, smiling slightly as he took her wrist in his hand.
“Yay!” Brash landed on Merton’s head. His tiny, clawed hands gripped at the front of Merton’s face, and Merton froze, remembering the many times the had played with kittens. He could distinctly remember the intensely painful experience of tiny, needle like kitten claws. As he remained still, Brash hugged his head tightly, his claws drawing fine, threatening lines of pressure along Merton’s face. “Youuu saved the day!”
“Hatchling, be quite gentle with that,” Relix said, her voice harsh. “That’s my husband’s face. I have grown to...tolerate it!” Merton could see through Brash’s enthusiastic hugs - which had begun to include the small dragon’s wings - that his wife had her hands on her hips.
“Tolerate?” Merton asked. “That’s not what-”
“What happens in our bedroom is proprietary information!” Relix squeaked. Then, bustling over, she grabbed Brash and yanked him off Merton’s head, provoking a loud ‘whee’ from Brash and a scream of pain from Merton.
“Oh, don’t be such a baby,” the gobliness - Pyria? Pyroia? - said. She had been bustling around the bridge with a small wand, but what the wand did had been a bit unclear. Merton, after all, had been just a little bit distracted at the time. And now he had his hands cupped over his face, and his eyes were screwed up tight.
“Owwww!” He whimpered. “I think I’m bleeding.”
“Sorry!” Brash squeaked.
Pyria slapped Merton’s thigh with the wand. A sudden burst of energy filled him and he drew his hands away from his face, blinking. The pain was gone. The feeling of the energy
that had coursed through him was very familiar. Focusing on the sensation, he had a ghostly deja-vu memory. Floating in space. Dying from being too healthy. Right. During the Ouster attack, the reactor had breached and basically swamped him with healing energy. He looked at Pyria, who was now prodding Gunner with her wand, causing a chunk of carapace to regrow over the burly World War 2 veteran’s shoulder.
“Hatchling,” Relix said. “I am very disappointed in you.”
Brash shrank from her tone of voice. Literally, his body actually began to grow smaller and smaller as he tucked his head underneath his wing, coiling his tail around himself. Merton bit his lip. “Relix, it’s okay-”
“Dragons need to learn that their claws don’t get used on anything unless they want to hurt it,” Relix said, her voice quite firm. “Or unless they have scales too. Understand, hatchling?”
“...yes…” Brash mumbled from under his wing.
“There,” Relix said, nodding fimly. She looked so proud of herself for laying down the law that Merton had to fight to hide his smile. Even if he did want to sweep Brash into his arms and spoil him with head pats. As he warred against his urges between being a good parent and getting to pet Brash, the door to the bridge open and in bustled Speccy. Speccy was dressed in slightly more clothes than she normally wore. In addition to her bondage style mixture of wraps and straps, she had added an impressive, hip hugging belt that looked like it was stuffed with every wrench known to man or dragon.
“Whose fucking idea was this!?” she asked, her normally ice calm voice tinged with pure rage. “Whose idea was it?”
The entire bridge crew pointed at Merton, save for Brash, who instead lifted his hand above his head like he was in class. “Oh! Oh! Oh! Me! Pick on me!”
Speccy scowled, drawing a huge wrench that looked like it had been used on at least one Ouster’s skull. She aimed it at Merton. “The portal engines aren’t made to transport the whole ship, you simpleton , you mage-blind oaf, you…” She snarled. “Ugh!”
“Damage report, Spectral Timeweaver Compounding the Infinite,” Relix said, her wings folding behind her back like a cape. The familiar order seemed to snap Speccy out of her tantrum spiral - good thing, considering how close her emphatic waving of the wrench had gotten to Merton’s head. She sighed and slipped the wrench back into the pouch she had pulled it from.
“It’s bad, my lady,” she said. “The Talon-9 realspace engines got slagged by several high energy impacts. Gauss and railgun rounds blew through the armor and pierced the demiplane, hitting several vital systems. The computer cores are half melted from the EMP produced by quasi-nuclear impacts. Oh! And some idiot ripped a hole into the planar equivalent of a black hole and jumped right in. So our PDS and slipstream drive are both bubbling piles of slag.”
Relix nodded. “How long do you think it’ll take to get our wings back?”
Speccy rubbed her chin. “Well, since it’ll take going EVA in Prime Negation…” She said. “Forever.”
Merton started. “Forever?” he asked. “I...how fast does this place kill you?”
“Oh, the actual plane is perfectly safe for biological functions, so long as you remain within the life shell of the ship,” Speccy said. “The problem is that it drives non-dragons insane to even look into it.”
Brash gasped. “I’m a dragon!” he said, perking up immediately. “I can do the work! I can do the work ten times!”
“Does it drive humans crazy?” Merton asked.
“Hmm…” Speccy pulled out yet another device from her pouches. This looked like something between a magical wand and a tricorder from Star Trek . She held it up and aimed it at Merton. Brash leaped from Relix’s shoulder to Merton’s shoulder, and Merton had to admit, the weight of the little dragon was nice and comforting. Brash waved excitedly at the wand, but Speccy was more focused on the screen of the device. She adjusted a knob, then nodded.
“Right,” she said. “Humans and dragons share several alpha and beta wave patterns in their cerebral cortex.”
“Really?” Merton asked. It was less of a shocked sound. And more of a ‘ah, another clue’ sound. Before he could elaborate on it, Relix let out her most haughty of a snort.
“Oh? What could they possibly share with dragons?” she asked.
“The ability to find anything sexually attractive,” Speccy said, her voice flat and brutally honest.
“Ah,” Relix said, her muzzle darkening. Several members of the bridge crew were all grinning. Relix spun around to glare at them, her hands clenching tightly. “Get back to work, you lot!” She said, cracking her tail like it was a whip. Everyone hurried to start tugging apart smoking machines and pulling out broken components. But they were still smiling. Relix nodded, satisfied that her work here was done.
Merton slipped an arm through hers, drawing her close. She looked at him, confusion in her eyes.
“What?” she asked.
Merton grinned, then lazily reached out and tugged a wrench from Speccy’s hip holster. Speccy scowled at him, until she saw him press the wrench into Relix’s chest. Relix whimpered.
“Can’t I...oversee...things?”
“Sorry, Princess,” Merton said, already dragging her for the door. “But your administration position is in another castle.”
Brash followed after, padding along on all four legs, the biggest wrench he could find in his jaws.
***
Calling the elemental plane of prime negation black was inaccurate.
Blackness implied a substance, a possibility.
Black is a color – a color of beauty and profundity and terror. Black had a soul.
The Talon-9 didn’t float upon anything nearly so comforting. But the human mind and the dragon mind shared a similar immunity to the effects of this infinite, existential nothingness. Where other species might have taken one glimpse into that endless absence and realized just how futile and small they were and then immediately cracked and gone full H.P Lovecraft protagonist...humans and dragons could both look into the space and take comfort in their own immense, overweening egos.
Either that or the fact that they wanted to, at some subconscious level, fuck the infinite nothingness. That was the similarity, wasn’t it?
Merton shook his head as he turned away from the nothingness to Carlos. Carlos grinned at him through the thick plastic faceplate of his space suit. “Hey, you know what I think of at times like this?” he asked.
“No, what?” Merton asked.
“At least we have Rick and Morty !”
“We what?”
Carlos laughed, pausing in his waddling along the hull of the Talon-9 . Carlos’ one super-power, his ability to make any suit of clothes no matter how well tailored and designed for him, look rumpled and disheveled was on full display for the space suit that Speccy had thrown together for him: The helmet looked slightly off center, one of the gloves seemed to have fingers a full inch longer than his actual fingers, and his pants looked slightly twisted. Despite this, Carlos had a huge smile on his face, ill fitting clothes or not. Meanwhile, Merton was dressed in his skinclothes, which responded to minor magical impulses like a collection of the world’s most helpful puppies, giving him a spacesuit that he could move around in with as much ease as his T-shirt and jeans.
For some reason, Carlos had still insisted on being the one to carry the plates of adamantine hull plating. His left arm was stretched to the limits to keep the plating tight against his chest. His right arm was fastened to the grapnels that the Talon-9 had helpfully extruded to help them walk around on her wounded skin. He looked back up the grapnel and started to walk along the skin. They were in microgravity, so the ‘walking’ involved a lot of careful placement of the magnetic boots, an act that Carlos made as awkward and flailing as he made everything else.
“I was just saying,” Carlos said, puffing as he dragged himself up to stand on one of the flanges that spread outwards from the upper right ‘shoulder’ of the Talon-9 . It was the part of the ship where on
e of the whale-fin “wings” that spread around the engine connected to the normal hull. The ship was deeply beautiful from the outside, and Merton felt an almost physical pang at seeing the dozen or so holes that railgun slugs had punched through the armor here. He shook his head while Carlos panted for a few seconds. “I was just saying...the TV reception is great for the fact we’re floating in the fucking plane of negative energy.”
Merton laughed.
“Though, just saying, the guy who wrote Planescape should sue ,” Carlos said. “Chris Avelon, right?”
“That’s the guy who wrote Planescape Torment ,” Merton said. “Planescape as a setting was written by...Cook, something.” He paused, thinking.
“David Cook,” Lisa’s voice cracked over their radios.
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