BECMI Chapter 263 – Back to Another Time
My Sims brought up Runes of Divination Gold, Dimensional Platinum, Arcane Silver, and Temporal Copper to form the interwoven framework as the blobby mound of flickering dark crystal, which looked like nothing less than opening into the depths of the sky, began to flow and move like water under the guidance of my Rune.
It flowed up, broadened, stretched out to the forming framework, and the metals latched onto it, syncing into the Isotopic resonance smoothly, Temporal Copper helping tie it to the Inn’s uniquely regenerating temporal field. In less than a minute, it formed a completely unbroken field of glittering stars of fantastic depth and subtlety, actually testing the focus and minds of any who gazed upon it and forcing them to look away, swearing at the power moving through it.
It also fully survived the ‘precious materials’ goldweight cost required to make such a thing, so now there was only the Infusing process, which didn’t need me to start progressing… although it was going to take steady months of work to get it fully operational, even with Master Artificers taking 25% off the time required.
That was fine. When it was done, we would have a massive Portal that could handle much larger amounts of men and materials moving through, and we could move the current Mirror to other locations where it might be useful.
It was going to come in very handy indeed when it came time for the mass evacuation of Darkmoor, and dispersing the people.
I was going to be swapping back and forth years vs. months from Darkmoor to Nown and so forth, a slow exodus on one side that would prove to be a constant and strong surge on this side. Done right, surges would come through every ten minutes on this side, once a week on Darkmoor’s side, and then I would come through, spend a month here, and once everything was caught up, head back again.
It was fine. The Greens and the wizards and artificers being trained up were considering it nothing more than a logistical challenge, rolling up their sleeves and getting to work with gusto and the knowledge that sufficiently advanced self-replicating technology could handle this with no problems.
The eligible populations of Elb and Darkmoor alone exceeded half a million people, spread across multiple races. This was also not something we were offering to everyone, as I wasn’t going to be transporting Evil people to another timeline to save them, and even the greedier Neutrals weren’t going to be coming through with the first wave. What they were going to give up in order to come with the final rush was something we’d figure out at that time, but they’d literally be starting out with nothing, so they’d better have something to contribute!
The training of the population in the North over the coming decades was going to be important, but we had no end of those already eager to learn some of the Galactic Federation science, and the Greens were throwing stuff up around the Barshund with great speed, just daring the dragons in the area to get uppity about it.
My Sims and I were going to be very busy, not the least because it wasn’t just going back to Darkmoor that I’d be taking trips to. My Sims had locked down Thanatos’ positions at multiple points in time, and I was going to be paying Him visits He wasn’t going to see coming OR going.
It was with a quiet lack of fanfare that I led King Antius and his fellows back through the Portal to Darkmoor, accompanied by Cirru and Duum and nobody else.
From the perspective of my Marked here, I would be popping in and out over hours and days, with a minimum of ten minutes between visits, the minimal elapsed time between time shifts.
On the other side, volunteers would be built up, then sent on through, while I worked on whatever projects were meant to be worked on.
And… my first stop was going to be the Crimson Cataclysm in our true history.
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Location of the wreck of the Barshund, circa -2000 BC (Before Crowning)…
I knew right where it was, and the secrets that slumbered within it. Immortals were going to be messing around with it, and the elven tribes were already following retreating snows north… and among them was an Avatar of something very non-elven that nonetheless looked and acted like a noble elf, and was leading them to disaster.
Cirru flew about in the air, disguising her unique markings with minor magic so as not to stand out among the dragons here. I had to be here at least ten years ahead of time, and it was best if I stayed here the whole time rather than trying to pull hi-jinks with the Portal.
Amusingly, that meant I was going to be out here for the whole forty years my younger self was trapped inside the Inn, as well as ten years before.
That was absolutely fine. They were years I could work with
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Shaping my way down into the ground, I made my trap, the Runes of Time I Cast making sure I was disturbing nothing serious as I did so. If an Immortal suffered a loss… so what? They were fifth-dimensional beings not beholden to Time, and so Time did not care about them at all. It wasn’t like I was actually going to kill one here.
Catastrophe was the perfect place to hide an assassination, after all.
My trap was really quite simple. I erected three smaller Pyramids around the buried wreck of the Barshund, which had first sent to the bottom of the new sea by the incendiary force of the Doom of Darkmoor burning away the land, then lifted back up out of it by Immortals flexing and remaking the landscape.
Immortals of Energy had plans for the wreck, now saturated with magical and quantum energies like nothing else they’d ever seen, and they were planning things to do with it.
I also became aware that there were still hundreds of members of the crew still trapped in cryostasis in this timeline, some of them still having managed to endure through the eruption of the Doom simply because the ship was just that powerful and obdurate.
They were not going to survive the leaking and tampered-with Core going nuts with Thanatos sabotaging it.
Buried below the ground, I studied the readings of the tubes containing innocent explorers and scientists out to explore the galaxy, doomed to die helplessly by the combined machinations of their Captain who, without my help, had slowly gone mad, and Immortals who didn’t care that they were trapped here.
I looked at the rows of cylinders, about a third of them broken and the inhabitants within slain during events of the Doom or thereafter. But still, the majority were still winking in the darkness, awaiting the command to awaken and start doing the jobs they’d risked their lives to do.
I could not let them die here. Nor could I bring them back to my time, as temporal doubles of them would already exist there, and the Rune of Time made it very clear that was a no-no of the highest order.
If I saved them, it would have to be in this timeline.
So not only was I going to be making a trap for a very powerful Immortal’s Avatar, I was going to be plundering this ship!
Seeing the Barhund like this was very painful. I’d taken tours of the whole thing, and I could identify every corridor and section. To see them smeared with the filth of a thousand years of being first broken, flooded, and then lifted back up and drained away over the centuries, all the while the self-repair systems glitched and couldn’t make any real headway against the damage done here, was painful to see.
Seeing the valiant crew abandoned to die in coldsleep was like a knife in my guts, too. Noticing that there were twisted lifeforms here and there in the place, altered by radiations that didn’t exist elsewhere on the planet, and magic equally bent, was also a teeth-grinding experience.
But I couldn’t just TAKE them. Dread made it very clear to me that Immortals were touring this place every now and then, perhaps to study, perhaps to gloat, often to fuck up something, as demonstrated by the fact Engineering was almost completely intact and the fusion core was cooking like an engine of chaos, waiting to erupt. Runes were scrawled onto computer housings and odd things stuck to the walls here and there around the core, turning it into something else slowly but surely.
I never went inside Engineering, because there were multi-limbed Constructs of shiny metal moving about in there, animated by shreds of Immortal spirits and maintaining the place to the best of their ability. They made sure nothing living intruded in there, keeping it spic and span, and only jumping a little bit when things sparked and sizzled because these idiots didn’t know how anything actually worked. They probably thought they were being clever and trying to make the things look like cyborgs, robots, or androids, and instead they just looked like metal skeletons more than anything else, with no signs of working technology about them.
I recorded all the Immortal power signatures that I could, recognizing none of them right off from personal experience. Doubtless some of the Sims had, but they’d kept a careful distance from this place due to Immortal attention.
I couldn’t do that, so I would have to count on the fact this place had been mostly abandoned for a thousand years. There wasn’t going to be anything new for the Immortals to see because they had hidden the ship so well, and that meant I could operate in sections of it away from where they were working because they wouldn’t be looking in places that were worthless to them.
Accordingly and very grimly, I went treasure-hunting for tech, and I started to put down my contingencies.
Among other things, that involved a Rune on every single coldsleep capsule. Since I could only do six Runes a day in that manner, and there were hundreds of capsules I had to treat by scribing the Runes out of sight on the back of the capsules, it was not a small effort I was putting forth. All the while I had to be aware of random wandering Immortal sparks animating Constructs wandering around when bored, maybe to get into a fight with a clawed, tentacled mutant flying anglerfish from the lower decks looking for something bigger than a scaled rat-fish to munch on, or some alien vine that was spreading and had to be cut back and burned out of existence before it spread in a killing wave across the world.
Most of the xenoforms were already dead, of course, their stasis chambers neither so durable nor protective as the cryosleep capsules, nor had powering them been as much a priority. Waking up in time to be cooked by the heat of an antimatter bomb, then falling to the bottom of a new sea and rather impolitely drowned inside a steel cage, was indeed an effective means of population control… but magic and genetics and radiation is an unholy cocktail at the best of times, and those genetics still got out into the world… and some of the Immortals definitely harvested some of the creatures for fun times in the future, too. The genetics got out, native creatures caught them, magic took hold, and lo, there were some crazy weird things in the depths of the ship, where things infected with alien genes ate other things with even weirder genes, and bred even stranger things in the depths.
They were all going to cook and die in the Crimson Cataclysm, so all the Immortals had to do was make sure none of them got off the ship, which wasn’t that hard to do. Park some monstrous golems at all the chokepoints, seal the breaches in the ship’s hull, and they were good to go.