The Endless War That Never Ends

by Christopher Brimmage

  In the middle of the room, the High Commander hammered down upon a piece of metal shaped like the Scatter Guns that the B.I.T. had used to disintegrate the blue and pink armies on Earth 616,000. Sparks flew in all directions with each successive stroke. Even bent over at the forge, the High Commander was nearly twelve-feet tall. His shaggy gray beard was bound in leathern bands and tossed over his shoulder so it would not get in the way of his work. Soot covered his face in dark black patches.

  Officer-Art stepped forward without hesitation. “Chairete, High Commander!” he called.

  The High Commander glanced up from his work, obviously annoyed at the distraction. “Agents 27142 and 29333. This is a surprise. What brings thee to my forge?” he queried.

  “We’re under emergency protocols, sir, and I thought you should hear it from me,” said Officer-Art.

  “And why are we under emergency protocols?” asked the High Commander.

  “Sir, it turns out that your new weaponry did not quite permanently relieve us of the cosmic bears. They have reconstituted themselves somehow.”

  The High Commander pursed his lips. “Damn,” he muttered. “I assume this means they will also be reforming their invasion cults. Didst thou prepare a new assault team to intercept them? If thou art seeking an even newer piece of gadgetry to give thee an advantage in the battle, I have yet to develop one, as I was unaware of the need. Thou shalt need to give me a few days to invent something.”

  Officer-Art shook his head. “No, sir, we did not prepare a new assault team.”

  The High Commander peered at Officer-Art through squinted eyes. “And why is that? Hast thou lost thy nerve for this job?”

  Officer-Art removed his checkered hat and tucked it under his arm. “No, sir. Nothing of the sort. As you no doubt recall from my progress updates to you, I sent a batch of your cybernetic scarab beetles to track the traces of teleportation residue from the cosmic entities in order to locate and eradicate the remnants of their armies.

  Officer-Art continued, “However, when the beetles tracking the pink bear’s residue caught up to their target, we discovered that the pink bear had reformed itself and has now raised a new army orders of magnitude larger than the one we vanquished. It and this army are on their way here to Earth 55,777.”

  The High Commander frowned. “That is dire news. Any word on the blue bear?”

  Officer-Art looked down at his feet. “Not as of yet, sir. We chose to alert you of the pink invasion force rather than waiting upon confirmation of the blue bear’s location.”

  The High Commander nodded. “Well, these types of paired cosmic beings always think alike, even if they represent opposite ends of a symbolic spectrum. I would wager nearly everything in the Multiverse that the blue bear will have also raised a new army and will soon be on its way here. Call in all available forces and activate our shield. I have upgraded the shield’s amplification conduits so that if anyone touches it, they shall suffer consequences identical to those of a Scatter Gun. Stay outside the shield’s limits and eradicate the invaders as best thee can. Whatever thou do, thou must protect this building to buy me time. I will work as quickly as I can to invent new weaponry that will remove this threat in a more permanent fashion.”

  Officer-Art nodded. “As you say.”

  The High Commander stroked his beard. He seemed to notice Normal-Art for the first time. He pointed at Art. “What is that?” he demanded.

  Normal-Art shrugged. “I’m not a what. I’m a who.”

  The High Commander limped over to Normal-Art and towered over him. He bellowed, “I know who thou art. Thou art another version of Agent 27142. My question was: what is that?”

  The High Commander reached down into Normal-Art’s shirt and pulled out the piece of onyx dangling around his neck. Normal-Art glanced down at it. He said, “Oh, that’s my necklace. Made from a sword I found on the caper that dragged me into this mess.”

  The High Commander glowered. “It was a black onyx saber covered in millions of microscopic runes. It was not just any sword.”

  Normal-Art looked into the High Commander’s eyes and stammered, “I-I-I never noticed any runes.”

  “They’re there, if thou were to look hard enough. I should know. I created it,” said the High Commander.

  Normal-Art stood in silence. The High Commander continued to tower over him. Normal-Art looked left and right over his shoulders, and Officers Art and Ginny stared at him and nodded their heads at him slightly, obviously signaling to him that he needed to respond. So, he responded by gasping the loudest gasp he could muster, since shock and/or awe seemed to be what was expected of him at this moment.

  The gasp sounded incredibly fake to Normal-Art, but it must have done the trick, because the High Commander continued, “Art,” he muttered, turning the name over in his mouth like a draught of fine wine. “Thou may not recognize me by my title of High Commander, but thou mightst know me by another name: Hephaestus.”

  Normal-Art stifled a groan. God damn if he didn’t hate gods and their arrogant grandstanding about their names and deeds. He made no sound. However, Officers Art and Ginny nudged him into a response. He gasped again, since it once more seemed to be the response expected of him.

  “Of course, I am not the Hephaestus of thy reality. Thou hast all the markings of a backwater earth that still has not discovered interdimensional travel. I originated on Earth 24.”

  Hephaestus raised the piece of onyx to his face and stared intently at it. “This artifact is so many ages old that I had all but forgotten it, and I certainly will not remember how to recreate the spells woven into it without time to study it. This artifact saps cosmic power and turns it into solid blackness, which is then imprisoned within a magical core that I embedded into the center of the blade. I used this artifact to bind those pink and blue cosmic entities to Earth 1,000,000 eons upon eons upon eons ago, back when they were in the form of facial tissues rather than bears.

  Hephaestus tapped the small piece of onyx with his forefinger and continued, “Hmmm. I think this little hunk of rock will be the key to our survival. I shall use it to forge a new saber, and I will create a new Reality Lantern to contain it. And then, once we have these cosmic beasts safely impaled on the new saber and imprisoned within the new Reality Lantern, we shall locate a backwater reality that is cut off from interdimensional travel in which to store the artifact.”

  “B-B-But I need that piece of s-s-sword to keep myself safe from the god-version of m—” Normal-Art began to stammer in response, but Hephaestus glared an annoyed glare, and Normal-Art shut his mouth. Officer-Art smacked Normal-Art upside the head for good measure.

  Hephaestus then turned to Officers Art and Ginny. “Maybe it shall be good that the bears are on their way here. It shall save us the effort of hunting them across the Multiverse to bind them with the reforged saber that I shall create. But I need time at my forge. Thou must keep this building safe until my work is complete, or all hope is lost.”

  Officer-Art nodded. “We shall do so or die trying. Chairete, High Commander.”

  And with that, Officer-Art clicked his heels together, saluted, and grabbed Normal-Art by the arm, dragging him back toward the elevator. Though a new hope had just arisen for the B.I.T. home reality, a sense of dread filled the pit of Normal-Art’s stomach.

  Chapter 11

  A PINK INVASION

  As with every invasion, Regular-Ginny was the first to emerge from the barrier between realities. For this incursion, she found herself ejected from a black bubble high above Earth 55,777. As she glanced about, she noticed that darkness blanketed the sky, a cloudless and moonless night lit only by the skyscrapers—each at least sixty stories tall—that stretched in a perfect grid unto the horizon, each with different colored neon signage on its top that announced the building’s name. Ginny noticed signs for a Fairy Mound, a Kilimanjaro, a Zion, a Barrows, and a Great Pyramid before she grew bored of reading and turned her attention elsewhere.

  The air up
here smelled fresh, a light crispness that reminded Ginny of her favorite season, Autumn. She had invaded enough earths to have conquered at least a few dozen planet-sized cities similar to the one below, so she knew that down there in the crowded streets between the skyscrapers, this fresh smell would be drowned by heat and humidity and dirt. She sighed.

  She plummeted toward the city like a pastel comet. She closed her eyes and concentrated. She felt every pore on her skin tingle. She smirked as her blob began expanding. It grew around her to a height of fifty stories. As her fall brought her within reach of the skyscrapers, she grew a gigantic tentacle and stretched it toward the nearest building, grabbing the antenna that extended a hundred feet straight up from its top.

  The introduction of her mass at this speed ripped the antenna from its restraints. Ginny felt it give, and like a monkey swinging from branch to branch, she released this antenna and flipped toward the antenna atop the building on the opposite side of the street. As Regular-Ginny gripped this second antenna, she swung in a circle around it and then let go. Her pink membrane formed tentacles that extended out in front of her and broke her fall on the building’s rough asphalt roof. The antenna from which she had initially swung tumbled from the top of its skyscraper, falling end over end down toward the street far below, so far that Ginny barely heard the carnage when it finally crashed to the ground.

  All about her to the north and west, black bubbles appeared in the sky and pink puppets dropped to the surrounding rooftops like humanoid rain, crashing to a stop and then immediately bouncing back onto their already-dead feet. They scrambled inside these buildings from rooftop entrances and began fanning the flames of chaos and destruction.

  Regular-Ginny glanced across the street to the building from which she had knocked loose the antenna. She noticed a group of men and women pressed against the glass windows of the top floor. They had vacated themselves from the cubicles that covered every spare inch that was visible to Ginny and had gathered at the windows to stare and point at her in confusion. A pink cocoon gripped her heart and injected it with hatred. She grunted and smashed a trio of monstrous tentacles into the skyscraper. Its steel girders screamed in response. And then they gave. The building toppled sideways in an eastwardly direction and crashed into the next skyscraper over, creating a domino effect where the next five buildings also toppled one after another as each fell into the subsequent one.

  Regular-Ginny watched dust and debris launch into the air as the buildings toppled, clouding the already dark night sky with even more darkness. Regular-Ginny ignored the dust and stared out at the city with a numbed look upon her face. She had been ordered to spearhead an attack southeast of her current position, her target the B.I.T. headquarters—a skyscraper named Olympus that towered fifty stories above all others in the endless cityscape. The Pink One had granted her this boon for her loyalty, though Ginny had not asked for it and cared not who was responsible for the task, so long as it wasn’t Arthur the Putrid—simply because if it were him, she would have to listen to his gloating for the rest of eternity.

  Ginny spotted the building marked Olympus in the distance and glanced from it up to the sky above. One of the fearsome B.I.T. airships hovered high in the sky just south of the building. It was the size of an aircraft carrier from Ginny’s home reality, and it floated dark and black against the empty night sky. Pink stirred in her heart, and she decided that upon ripping Olympus from its foundations, she would swing the cursed building at that ship like a baseball bat and see if she could hit some sort of interdimensional homerun.

  Movement from her peripheral caught her eye, and when she turned to look, she realized it originated from Arthur the Putrid. She sighed in annoyance, as he was no doubt lingering near her so that he might join in demolishing the B.I.T. headquarters with her to steal a large chunk of the credit. If the Pink One were not so fond of his usefulness, Ginny would crush him between her tentacles and feed his corpse to some of the more carnivorous members of the Pink Marauders.

  He floated alongside the other forty-three members of his flying Death Cavalry and waited for Ginny to speak.

  Regular-Ginny stood her blob to its full height atop the skyscraper and wrapped her tentacles around the building’s antenna, looking for all the world like King Kong atop the Empire State Building, if King Kong were reimagined as some horrid, twisted blob of an octopus with the tendency to get lost in thought and stare voyeuristically for long periods of time at people she hated. As she glowered at this particular person whom she hated and his lacklusterly-named-but-highly-lethal squadron, she found herself admiring the shining pink jewels in his eyepatch and how they reflected sometimes the glowing green light from his hands and other times the oranges and reds and blues of nearby explosions. She decided that when he was eventually no longer useful to the Pink One, she would murder him and take the eyepatch for herself.

  Before she wasted too much time glaring at this cursed Art, a titanic bubble of solid lightning appeared in her peripheral, emanating from atop the building marked Olympus. She looked over at it. From this vantage, the bubble’s crackling energy distorted and discolored the thirty-story tall, red neon sign atop its roof that spelled out Olympus. Faster than Ginny could fathom, the bubble expanded to encompass a good hundred square blocks of the city, its electric edges halting their expansion on the street just three blocks south of her.

  A noise that sounded like a cracking tortoise shell erupted behind Regular-Ginny, and she frowned. She glanced over her shoulder and saw that Arthur the Putrid had contorted his hands so that the joints on every finger poked in different directions. Meanwhile, he shouted something in a language she did not understand. Suddenly, five members of Arthur the Putrid’s Death Cavalry disobeyed the Pink One’s direct orders to not surpass Regular-Ginny’s position as leader of the vanguard on the southeastern point of the pink hordes. The five flying Arts and Ginnys—one member of this group being the thunder-god-version of Art—flew directly at the lightning bubble. They crashed into it headfirst at full speed, obviously attempting to use their brute force to blow through it. Unfortunately for them, they disintegrated completely—including the god of thunder’s hammer, a weapon that was supposed to be indestructible and that bent lightning to its controller’s whims.

  Ginny cursed. “Arthur, you fool! You wasted our stronges—”

  She was interrupted by a booming throat-clearing that filled the sky. A bolt of lightning flashed from the floating airship that hovered near Olympus, crashed into the antenna that rose from the top of the building, and blasted back up into the sky in the expanse of blackness between the Pink Marauders and Olympus. The lightning took shape, and soon Ginny found herself staring at a hologram version of Art that stood at least sixty-stories in the sky above the city. This hologram version of Art wore a uniform similar to ones she had seen British police officers wear in movies from her home reality, complete with a checkered hat, a B.I.T. badge on the chest, and a holster carrying a wide array of objects that looked sterile and foreign to Ginny. A grand eagle with a pair of drooping antennae sat perched on this Art’s shoulder. The hologram stood at attention and would have made a terrifying visage had the lightning-hologram version of the man’s eagle not chosen that exact time to shit, a ball of hologrammed lightning that splashed atop the hologram-Art’s shoulder. He ignored it. Ginny guffawed. The Pink One appeared and floated into view near Ginny, her face contorted in anger and rage. But Ginny ignored the beast and continued guffawing.

  She stopped guffawing when this Art’s voice boomed loud and godlike across the vast expanse of the city. The hologram version of Art said, “This is Bureau of Interdimensional Travel Agent 27142. You have encroached on our reality. You are more foolish than you look if you thought we would not be ready for you. You are not the first cosmic threat to think it a novel idea to attack us in our home dimension, nor shall you be the last.

  “As I’m sure you have experienced by now,” he continued, “you shall find yourselves unable to bri
ng your incursion bubbles within our shields, as one of their functionalities is to cease all interdimensional travel within their confines. So bring your worst, and enjoy breaking yourselves against our defenses.”

  The hologram-Art then reached his arm to the side. It disappeared, moving in a motion like he was pressing something. “Captains, you may commence your attacks,” his voice ordered as the image of him disappeared.

  Regular-Ginny blinked. When she opened her eye, her vision shifted, transforming from regular reality to that of a Claymation scene. She watched with a frown as the Pink One balled her fists and roared. Inside the Claymation version of the lightning-shield, little black teleportation bubbles appeared, but each had a gigantic red X embedded through it. Regular-Ginny blinked once more, and her vision returned to normal. She glanced over at the Pink One and nodded in understanding: the hologram-Art was not lying. Something about the lightning-shield prevented the Pink One from jumping within it.

  Regular-Ginny then felt a furious tickle in the back of her brain. Pink flooded through her veins like an overwhelming tsunami. The tickle ordered her to attack the shield with every ounce of fury within her, to bring it down in a cascade of pink blob or die in the attempt. She gulped hard and refused to give in to the Pink One’s wrathful, shortsighted frustration at the lightning-shield. Instead of launching herself at the shield bodily like those flying fools in Arthur the Putrid’s Death Cavalry, she instead launched a dozen balls of spiked pink ooze from her blob. They crashed into the shield wall and immediately disintegrated. She gulped, thankful for her own prudence. The tickle grew stronger, demanding she attack, but she fought the feeling. To distract herself, she bit her lower lip so hard that she drew blood.

  Behind her, three-dozen thunderclaps sounded out across the sky, and when she turned to see what the commotion was all about, three-dozen carriers nearly identical to the one that floated over Olympus filled the sky, and thousands of fighter jets poured forth from them like ants from a hill freshly kicked over. Ginny groaned in apprehension. The Pink One screamed in fury.