Stupid Sexy Cryptids: [135-138]

135: Fox Watches the Watchers

The fox-shaped shark exploded out over the bubbling Jacuzzi water and claimed my lap with supreme confidence of a flag planting conquistador claiming a new continent. Rainbow-nail tipped hands braced my shoulders and ocean-blue eyes struck me like a comet plummeting into the sun. Judging by the intensity of her stare, I wondered if her fox skulk was currently calculating the square root of my soul or somesuch thing that Skinwalkers did before they nommed someone’s soul.

“Righty-o,” the Skinwalker leaned closer, nipping my earlobe. “My question time. We know why you picked T-bun. She was lonely and sad and made puppy-dragon eyes at you. We know why you picked me. I am irresistible and amazing. Shady is your childhood BFF. What about Nexxali? She's a bit of an oddball, not being an Omnid like us, yes?”

“Nexxali’s useful kitten,” I replied. “I guess I seduced her… on purpose.”

“Ohhh. A tale of prad seduction! Tell me more,” the fox on my lap purred.

“Seducing the invaders became my plan from the moment the Admiral dropped a chunk of the moon on us,” I said. “It was quite obvious from first sight on TV that the Frontenachii prad force was made up of thirsty female soldiers. It was also obvious that a certain segment of the human population would be naturally, irresistibly attracted to the… unique prad characteristics.”

“Lotta fox girl appreciators out thar,” Sage agreed. "Ye."

“Dax and I simply took advantage of the situation, organizing the people who would assuredly offer the aliens absolute, pure love and pushed them in the direction they would themselves soon go into,” I finished.

Galateya pursed her lips beside us.

“If I had a million bodies instead of just two,” I said, “I’d seduce a million prads.”

“Really now? Four girls isn't enough for you?” Teya huffed.

“Someone's a subscriber to the ‘humans are space bards’ geddit thread?” Sage asked with a playful tone.

“I'm a subscriber to the ‘prevention of humans from getting chopped into wall art’,” I said. “For this goal I'm willing to do anything and everything.”

“Hrmm. Do you even love… Shady?” Teya prodded.

“Love,” I mused with a sigh. “Love is… a nebulous thing that's kind of hard to pin down. It's why it makes such an effective weapon, one that the Frontenachii failed to expect humanity to implement.”

“Not hearing a definitive yes,” the dragon girl said.

“It's been a week,” I said. “I definitely enjoy her company. There is certainly… something between us. She's absolutely my childhood best friend whom I lost thirteen years ago and re-gained this week. I trust her with my life.”

Galateya looked contemplative.

“However,” I added, “her Omid Wendigo-ness was a barrier of sorts between us which neither of us was willing to cross. Honestly, if it was just me and her, we’d probably get to making out in a month or two. Maybe longer. Shady’s a natural predator.”

“We all arrrrrr,” Sage agreed, showing foxxy chompers, “even if someone likes to pretend that she's a harmless wooden log.” She winked at Galateya.

“When I’m with Shady,” I said, “I feel safe, but also she gives me the heebie-jeebies, like a spooky shadow that’s just waiting to pounce and bite me in half. Also, if it wasn’t for Nexxali, she’d still be a mindless, wild cryptid who rants about circles and chews on shiny spoons in my kitchen drawers. I suppose that the prad kitty pushed me and Shades into sleeping together waaay ahead of schedule.”

“Like the ‘now kiss’ meme?” Sage asked.

“Pretty much, yes.” I nodded.

Galateya stared at me. I offered her my hand and a half-human, half-gold-scaled hand reached out and squeezed my fingers.

“Human relationships are complicated enough,” I looked at the smug fox wiggling in my lap. “Relationships with Omnids are doubly as complicated. Sanguine, here, is a freaking love reactor, for example. If my mind wasn’t split in half I’d be declaring love for her left and right, drowning in her Charmchain radiance and obeying her every order.”

“I do be super glad that you are not,” Sage commented, “the drooling love-obsession gets boring fast.”

“I think that there’s something similar going on between me, Nexxali and Shady too. Like an invisible line that connects us. An ocean of violet stars,” I revealed. “I’m not really sure what it is. Maybe the blood pact, maybe something else. On one hand it’s nice to feel like there’s something connecting us together, on the other… It concerns me, as for all I know, it could be an invisible, magical leash messing with my genuine feelings. Like, is that something influencing how I feel about them, nudging me in a specific direction like Nexxali’s Charmchain orders?”

“I could try to see what it is,” Sage suggested. “Understand it. The skulk is good at figuring things out. Many eyes and many noses get the job done faster than one.”

“Sure.” I shrugged. “Feel free to dig the Astral or whatever. Let me know what you can find.”

Sage rubbed against me, eyes flickering with thousands colorful stars in their depths. I glanced at Galateya who looked thoughtful.

“I smell… muchly dwagon ponderage,” Sage pawed at Teya.

“Urmm,” Teya let out. "My… books always depicted romance as less complicated… thing. Love at first sight. Eternal devotion to each other,” she said. “A guy and a girl. Sometimes one guy and two girls. Hearth Keeper Shield for love, Prima Hunter Sword for business and family connections. The Omithornian standard that emerged from the Omnid population skew of two females for one male. Three Omnids plus one human plus one prad all on equal relationship terms is… unusual for from my point of view, I suppose. Not sure how I feel about this.”

"Your books were probs jank wanderlustery written by knobby Omnids," Sage said. "Real life is messy. Real life is hoarding the batteries for when the lights go out! Which they always do! Gotta be prepped. Collect all the cool people who can tolerate you!”

“Having this many girlfriends is unusual for me as well,” I added. “I reckon that the Frontenachii invasion is going to send mundanity careening sideways for lots of people with this many female invaders looking for husbands.”

“Yus,” Sage agreed. “Immigrants are coming from other worlds too! That'll really make a big mess of things. Some of the Frontenachii doomed colony worlds have a skew of twenty females for one male due to dungeon bloom eating the weaker males.”

“Jeez,” I said. “That's messed up.”

“It is what it is,” Sage shrugged. “Boys statistically die faster when there's dragons and dungeons everywhere. Humans become super rare on worlds drowning in dungeon bloom.”

“When ar immigration coming?” Galateya asked. 

“I dunno. Soon!” Sage expressed and fell silent, eyes closed. “Listening in on the general Astral chatter now. Will let you know what I catch.”

“Historically speaking, monogamy is a bit of a luxury for humans,” I said. “It usually requires a stable society and abundant resources. When things get grim, or when there's a massive disparity in status, we revert to... well, this, I suppose. One man with landlord status with many women orbiting around him.”

“Nerd,” Sage booped me with a smirk.

"There was a genetic bottleneck in human history about seven thousand years ago," I resumed, recalling a Gotube video I watched on the subject. "For every one man who passed on his DNA, seventeen women did. Seventeen to one! The bronze age collapsed, tribes warred, and the few guys who had the cows, the walls, and the bronze axes got all the girls. It was called… hypergamy. Women married up to ensure survival. Men married across or down."

“Ah yus. Patrilocality!” Sage added. "Ashy’s our bigly man with the bigly axe of being the Emperor of Earth. How did that come about anyways? ‘Gib me the juice. All the juices please. I want to know everything. So does the T’, I bet. Right, T-bum?”

Galateya nodded in agreement.

“That’s a lot of juice to go over,” I said. 

“Eh, we got time,” Sage glanced at her wall clock. “S’too early to sleep.”

“Very well. It all began on August 11... I was aimlessly staring at the deep cracks in the oak ceiling beams when the large clock on the stairwell behind me struck one. I glanced at the time and date on my laptop…”

. . . 

It took me a few hours to narrate my wild, wild week to Galateya and Sage. I kept nothing back, putting my trust in the two Omnid girls. Eventually we got sushi snacks from Sage’s fridge and I moved onto the floor mattress surrounded by pillows, sitting between the girls. A large digital clock on the wall showed that it was 11:44 PM when I finished ranting of ‘How I Became the Emperor of Earth’.

“Wozah,” Sage commented from my left, chewing on a package of seaweed she unwrapped. “Quite the rad tale, Emperor. Very catch-me-if-you-can-nanigans.”

“Mmm-yeah. Thank you for sharing,” Galateya let out from my right side, looking half-asleep. Her eyes were closed and she looked like a content, moss-covered dryad. “I… appreciate it. Really. I'm… happy now.”

“Did you determine anything of value in your Astral gazing?” I asked the fox.

“Sure did. Lotta things,” she replied. 

“Such as?” I asked.

“The Seekers are seeking me out.” She replied, stuffing more dry seaweed into her mouth. 

“Uh-huh?”

“Lots of Astral chatter happening,” she added, offering me a seaweed square to snack on. “In the present, past and future. It’s a lot brighter and clearer now that the Frontenachii Seers are actively pawing at me, trying to locate me.”

“The future?” I asked. “How exactly does Omnid precognition work? Keeper Morrígan ranted to Admiral Evely about us breaking the Slayer's Sword before even we even did it anything. If you have precognition on your side why not ask specific questions to a Seer and prevent certain doom? Seems like a no brainer to me.”

“Ah,” Sage swallowed another seaweed square. “Precognition aka Astral gazing isn't always clear. If you suck at foresight or if you move between dimensions and your body's not ready for Astral variance shift, the future sight gets mega-fucky and unreliable. In this case, asking more questions only provides more ludicrous and nonsensical answers. Keeper Morrígan is totally watching me watch her right now. She, like the other Seers, wants to know what and where I am, but all she's doing is exposing her innermost dreams to me, since she's not really trained to scry in this dimension. Most Seers aren't trained to fight in the local Astral, it's super easy to push them over the edge and into the big, wobbly hole some cute Emperor punched in the moon.”

“That's good for us then?” I asked.

“Ye,” Saye bobbed, finger-walking her claws over at my shoulders. “The harder they try to see me, the more of their plans I see. Feels like spiders walking on my neck.”

“Can you see everyone who's trying to find you then?” I asked.

“Almost everyone, yep,” Sage said. “I can see the Third and Sixth Fleet Seers quite clearly. And... Stabalists too. I can taste their self-righteous Omnid bureaucracy on the Astralwaves. They are pinging the entire planet, looking for the source of my broadcast. Seeking the ‘Wizard of Darkfall’."

"Can they find you?" Galateya asked, opening her eyes, green moss mane slowly turning blue and red.

"They can find... parts of me," Sage said. "Darkfall's a dimensional anomaly. Unless you know how to get there you'll just pass through it, get confused and lose track of your spatial position in the fog. Omnid Corpse Seekers are already scouting the valley and haven't found shit."

I relaxed slightly.

"The Seers can basically see my eyes all over the place. They are looking for a lighthouse. A single, powerful mage in a tower casting a spell. They don't understand how I work. I'm not a lighthouse."

"What are you?" I wondered with a yawn.

"I'm a virus," Sage grinned, shivering slightly against me. "I'm a network. They can scan Cascade, and sure, they see a hotspot above Darkfall valley where the broadcast spire went up towards the moon. But then they look closer, trying to locate the root, the beginning of where the spire originates… They also see Tokyo. And London. And Berlin. And Moscow. And some basement in Idaho."

"How?" Galateya asked.

"My gonelyfans," Sage stated. "My customers. My gwitch followers. Every lonely dude who bought a 'Sagetopia' mousepad, fox-themed socks and shirts covered in eyes. Every girl who downloaded my 'Foxxxxy_Screensaver.exe' or got a collar of mine with fox eyes on it. Every person wearing my merch. They act as dimensional anchors. Tiny little windows I can peek through. My fourteen thousand souls aren't just hanging out in the shack. I spread them out. I have eyes in a thousand bedrooms."

"Sooooo… You are spying on your customers?" I arched an eyebrow.

136: Laika

"I am providing emotional support to all lonely, human boys and girls," the Skinwalker defended herself. "Mostly my little fox eyes sleep on their monitors. Right now tho? Now, the Omnid Seers are confused. They see me blinking at them from everywhere at once. It scrambles, derails their tracking. They think the planet is infested with fox spirits. Which... it kinda is. Le le le."

"You're certain that the Seers and Scruts cannot target you?" Galateya asked.

"Not easily," Sage said. "They are looking for a nail to hammer. I am fog. I am omnipresent cringe culture. They can't orbital-stike a JPEG file of a fox fanart spread across a million hard drives."

"Clever,” I said.

"Local advantage," Sage tapped her temple. "These aliens... bring their big crystal guns and OP magitek. They don't really belong here tho'. This Earth constantly rejects, confuses them. Me? I am mud. I am dirt. I am weeds. I grew up here. I know how to chain a fox to a fox to a fiber optic cable. They are playing chess. I am playing Starcraft with map hacks.”

“I see.” I smiled at her nerdy ranting.

“Mhmmm.” Sage nodded. “For all of their fancypants warships, they’re guests in my house. It’s like they’re trying to use a microscope as a hammer. Making lots of noise, pawing at everything and nothing. Skinwalkers are pros in general at hiding themselves. I’m a clever sneaky sneak.”

“So,” I said. “What are their plans in general?”

"They will buy us," Sage said.

"What?" Galateya asked

"Immigration, T-bun," Sage revealed. "Improvements. The Gardeners. The Sixth Fleet. They are the 'nice' ones, right? They won't shoot. They'll land soon and start setting up big gates. They'll offer cures for cancer. They'll try to solve world hunger, stabilize climate change or whatevs, stop supercell storms and prevent all forest fires. And in exchange? They'll want land. Real estate. Mostly places that nobody wants. Desserts, islands, mountains, glaciers. Uninhabited terrain. Plus inhabited terrain. Whatever they can grab, they’ll grab. And the humans will totally sell it all, I’m certain."

"Oh," Galateya blinked, finally comprehending the scope of the problem.

"Refugees," Sage stated with a sharper tone. "Billions of them. More than can be safely managed. Prads from all the doomed worlds the Frontenachii collected. The lucky ones who can afford a ticket out. They will pour in. Rich Omnids buying Montana. Prad families moving into the suburbs. We won't be invaded. We'll be hell-a-gentrified en-masse!"

"Humanity becomes the underclass," I murmured. "Tenants on our own planet. Shit.”

“Yep, yep,” the fox agreed. “Thems the beans.”

"Unless we make it... expensive. Culturally expensive,” I pondered. “Or weird. Or something. I don’t know. Going to tell my lieutenants about this, see what they all think.”

"Use my rig," Sage gestured to the wall of monitors beside us. She dug out a light-up keyboard and thrust it into my hands. “You trust me, yes?”

“I trust that you’re on my side,” I said.

"Uh-huh. How are you commanding your legion of doom, my Emperor?"

"Telegram mostly," I said.

"Just telegram?” She arched an eyebrow at me.

"What? It's encrypted," I defended. "And it supports large groups. And stickers."

Sage chortled. "Log in. I want in."

"You want to pretend to be me on Telegram?"

"Yass. I want to expand the network." Sage bobbed. "You have contacts. Resistance leaders. Cell commanders. Gibs."

I typed in my username and password. The chat windows popped up. Thousands of unread messages from the various resistance cells I'd inadvertently started flashed across Sage’s many screens, spreading outwards and being observed by fox eyes.

“What are you doing with my contacts?” I asked as she grabbed the keyboard from me.

"I'm sending them a gift."

"What gift?"

"I have a memetic virus—I mean, a lovely gift—that needs distributing," she grinned. She opened a folder named 'DO_NOT_OPEN_FOX_INSIDE'. She dragged a file named 'Cute_Fox_Sleepy.scr' into the main broadcast channel.

I frowned.

“Relax dawg,” Sage said. “It’s just a desktop version of me.”

“Which does what?”

"It links everyone who installs it to mah skulk," she explained, typing rapidly. "If they install this, I can see the Astral through their screens. It turns your resistance into my foxxy network."

"Soooo. You are infecting the resistance with malware?"

"’M enhancing your ‘resistance’ with soul-ware," she corrected.

“And that’s not going to expose them all?”

“Seers and Scruts cannot smell computer files Ashy,” Sage rolled her eyes at me. “Most of them have no idea how local linear tech works. None at all.”

“But they can see your eyes?”

“They can vaguely see my eyes in the Astral, not in the physical,” Sage clarified. “The local Aether makes it incredibly difficult to pinpoint magical spots, especially ones that keep moving around. People carry phones around. My magical pins are tiiiiny and wiggly, turn on and off at random, the fox-ness undulating like an ocean wave. Like I said, I've been doing this for a while, learning good stuff from my Thunderbird bestie who's living in Omnithornia.”

“Fine.” I sighed.

She typed the message and hit enter.

[Emperor of Earth ಠ_ಠ]: PRIORITY DISTRIBUTION! Get everyone to install this.

"Done," she dusted her hands. 

A ping sounded as the first lieutenant replied.

[Napoleon (ᕗ ͠° ਊ ͠° )ᕗ]: What dis? Better not be a virus.

[Emperor of Earth ಠ_ಠ]: It’s not. 

Sage replied as me.

[Emperor of Earth ಠ_ಠ]: It’s an app developed by a clever fox. It’ll allow us improved communication. Better encryption than telegram. Put it on all your devices, trust the Fox. It’ll install itself as different apps with different, randomly generated names and icons. Tell everyone to keep it running in the background.

[Napoleon (ᕗ ͠° ਊ ͠° )ᕗ]: mkay. Scanning with antivirus.

[Napoleon (ᕗ ͠° ਊ ͠° )ᕗ]: Seems clean enuff. Going to install.

“Can I have the keyboard now?” I asked.

“Yepperses.” Sage passed me the keyboard.

[Emperor of Earth ಠ_ಠ]: Any updates of interest?

[Napoleon (ᕗ ͠° ਊ ͠° )ᕗ]: Just got an interesting report from a Seattle Cell Watcher C4P4. She is at the Tipsy Sasquatch. She says she met an odd as fuck, festive prad who’s hitting on one of her cell mates. Here's the full report of the bar meet C4P4 just had her LLM voice to speech app record and send our way.”

I clicked the file. A text summary of Sarah's encounter opened across Sage’s monitors. Our trio quickly read it. Sage got through it first and looked at the screen with a frown.

[Emperor of Earth ಠ_ಠ]: make sure C4P4 installs the fox app ASAP and points the front camera of phone under the table directly at this sus festive prad, okay? I'm going to have it take a pic of her to evaluate how dangerous she is.

She typed as me.

[Napoleon (ᕗ ͠° ਊ ͠° )ᕗ]: on it

We waited while Napoleon's orders passed down the chain to C4P4.

In a few minutes a blurry, flickering video of a striped G-string panties, a green skirt and long ass prad legs appeared on one of Sage's screens.

Sage's reaction to the view wasn't what I expected at all.

The Skinwalker froze, tail puffing itself out, eyes igniting from within, pupils exploding wide. “Fuck. Oh fucking fuck… we are so fucked.”

“What?” Galateya and I looked at the fox filled with heckles to the brim.

“Shhh!” She waved her hands at us. “I'm figuring it out. Gimme a bit to go up the chain of Astral connections.”

We fell silent, waiting for the fox to sniff things out.

“Riiiiight,” Sage finally let out, opening her eyes after about ten minutes. “I thought that there’s another small Stabalist ship out there softly scrying out for me. Wasn’t too sure. They were being… shifty. Whimsical. Gentle. I see. I get it now. They’re not with the Stabalist Omnids at all. Cheeky See-Mass bastards.”

“What do you see exactly?” Galateya demanded.

“I see the great Coniferous Conversion,” Sage growled, eyes igniting from within. “A living dungeon superweapon, this kind of shit that erases, devours entire worlds. Her… Apostles are already here, planting the seeds of our devastation. Christ! Who the shit let this… this fucked monstrosity into our dimension?!”

“Can… can we stop it?” the dragon girl asked.

“If we move faster than they can plant their festive roots, maybe,” Sage growled with sharp fox-chompers, her face rapidly turning into a glistening Skinwalker skull, myriads of glowing, colorful fox eyes igniting over her head like an eerie halo. “Nobody fucks with my planet! NOBODY! Teyya, commer' and gib' me snuggles and let me into your Fractal Engine heart. I’m going to need maximum dragon power to figure out how those bastards are doing it!”

The dragon climbed over me and slid into the Skinwalker’s embrace. Both of them closed their eyes. Galateya’s mane and scales turned into pure white diamonds casting shifting prismatic rainbows across the attic loft. 

Thousands of fox eyes blossomed across the monitors around us dancing between static flickers.

Then, a prad dog girl in a 1950s space suit with the gold symbol of hammer and sickle on her chest and red, bold letters С С С Г Р on her space helmet emerged from the silver dust spirals.

-=[Laika]=-

November 3, 1957. 

The day she died as Laika. 

The nightmare that haunted her every time she dove too deep into the Astral abyss, the inescapable, awful memory that burned itself into her soul.

A reflection of her, her worst fear, the truth of who she once was.

The nightmare always began with the ascent. The R-7 intercontinental ballistic rocket roared toward the heavens with a deafening violence that rattled her teeth and threatened to shatter her skeleton inside the primitive pressure suit, putting unwieldy pressure on her body.

She endured the G-force because she was a brave girl and the pride of the Union of Soviet Socialist and Prad Republics. The human and pradavarian generals in the heavy gray coats promised her a medal after her safe return, offering her stiff handshakes.

The roar faded into the silence of the void as the capsule cleared the atmosphere of Earth.

Weightlessness took hold of her stomach while heat began to crawl up the walls of the metal capuse.

Things seemed fine, hours of the flight flew by like a blink, then… on the craft's fourth orbit around the planet something went… Wrong.

The bulky, rubberized canvas of her space suit began to feel like a kiln wrapping around her body.

"Control," Laika barked into the receiver. "The temperature is rising. The thermal regulation system is non-responsive. Please advise!”

Static hissed in her headset for a long and agonizing minute.

"Control," she repeated. Sweat ran into her eyes and stung them. The air inside Sputnik 2 grew thick like she was in a banya. "It is forty degrees inside! Control. Please activate the descent sequence. It is too hot!"

The radio crackled to life with the hiss-entwined voice of the Mission Commander Vladimir Yazdovsky.

"Laika," he said. "There is no descent sequence."

Laika froze in her harness while the metal walls of her vessel began to radiate unforgiving fury. She remembered the faces of the engineers days before the launch. She recalled the frantic pace and the quick safety checks. They whispered about the Anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution and how everything had to be ready before the holiday parade in Moscow.

Three prad dogs were trained for the Sputnik 2 flight: Albina, Mushka, and her. She thought that she was going to be famous, that she was… That Vladimir Yazdovsky chose her to be the primary flight dog from all the others as she did better than them in the endless centrifuge tests and promised her that she would…

He introduced her to Sergei Korolev, the greatest Soviet rocket scientist! He even took her to play with his children, promised that he would make her part of his family and…

He… Vladimir kissed her on the nose and wished her “bon voyage”!

She thought that he... that he loved her!

Laila's eyes filled with tears as she panted furiously, struggling to think through the heat and panic.

She was a stray, a teenage mutt without family, without a syn-pack mate. Vladimir was a human. He found her begging for food on a grimy side street leading to the Moscow ring road construction site and offered her the world, blotting her imagination with promises of acceptance, family and love…

"What?" she asked incredulously, refusing to believe the words. “Repeat that Control.”

"The landing system failed due to… overheating upon orbital insertion," Vladimir stated with inescapable, brutal finality. "There is no way down. I’m sorry."

"But… you promised," Laika uttered, heart hammering in her chest. “You all promised me! You promised me…”

"You are a hero now, Laika," the scientist’s voice continued dully. "History will remember your sacrifice. A good girl. The best girl. You will be praised by the Motherland. They will sing songs of your glory and make a statue of you in Mos…"

The connection cut into hissing static.

Panic detonated in Laika’s chest. The dog girl thrashed against her restraints and clawed at the walls with gloved hands. The space suit, the tiny cabin and the restraints bound her movements and trapped the rising heat against her fur.

She stared at the thermometer.

Fifty degrees. Sixty.

This is why they chose HER, a stray, a mutt.

To die. 

To die here, a test subject, a patsy to test their rocket. This is why Vladimir picked her from the street that icy winter evening.

Her skin began to blister under the heavy canvas. The air turned to fire in her lungs. She looked out the small and round porthole expecting to see the cold indifference of the stars.

She saw eyes there.

Thousands of eyes hanging in the black abyss.

137: Saint Nikky

Thousands of eyes blinked in the cosmic void above the blue curve of the Earth. They were shaped like… Fox eyes. Blue and amber and violet irises watched her burn. 

They were... Judging her. Watching her death, probably enjoyed her misery!

The heat flayed her. Her vision went red. She screamed a howl as the capsule became a furnace.

She shrieked and wept as her blood began to boil. 

Everyone had betrayed her, offering her as a sacrifice to the stars. She cursed them all and swore as capillaries burst in her eyes.

Laika wept as she burned, waiting for the darkness to claim the good girl who had obeyed every command until the very last hour like a fool.

Then her heart stuttered, stopped then beat just one more time. 

Laika closed her eyes, accepting her death.

The universe suddenly shuddered, a brilliant, radiant flare detonating across the porthole and blinding her.

An eerie shadow fell over the blistered porthole, blotting out the sun. The silence of the void shattered under the groan of tortured metal.

Massive, obsidian claws punched through the hull of Sputnik 2 capsule like it was wet cardboard. The atmosphere of the capsule vented out in a violent hiss, wiggling the horrified dog against the belt restraints.

The roof of her coffin was ripped away.

Laika looked up through eyes crusted with blood.

A towering figure loomed over her, framed by the violet stars. Massive, curved horns sat above her head featuring... a red hat. Yellow, goat-like eyes burned brighter than the sun. The massive goat? prad woman wore a red and white winter coat looking like… no it couldn’t be.

It simply couldn’t!

She was dressed like… Grandfather Frost, the Soviet harbinger of New Year, or maybe like the Yankee Santaw Clauss?!

It took Laika another few seconds to understand something else impossible: There were no such thing as goat prads! All the prads of her world were predators!

Also, there was no air in Sputnik 2 now. It had all vented out into space when the metal was sheared away. Yet, the goat prad was… alive. Alive and breathing and smiling without a space suit. 

Was this a final hallucination of a poor dying dog or was this a god made manifest, an angel, perhaps Satan herself who had come here to collect her soul?!

Laika’s burns hurt terribly, she wept and trembled, not believing what she was seeing.

"Naughty," the goat-creature in a red stockings and goat rumbled with a deep, albeit very feminine voice. "So very naughty of them. To leave a lovely gift unwrapped and burning."

Laika struggled to reply. Her throat was a ruin of scorched, painful flesh. She felt on the threshold of death, one paw in the grave, consciousness barely there, clinging to life by a single claw.

"I am Saint Nikky and I collect... abandoned, good girls like you for a greater mission. I can see it in your soul. The pain. The betrayal. They promised you a return," Nikky stated, reaching down. Her hands were huge and tipped with sharp, black claws. "They lied. Naughty boys lie. Naughty boys use good girls up and throw them into the fire. They were planning to betray you from the start, planned to turn a goodly prad like you… into coal."

Laika choked. Her mind finally clicked. This goat-being was a Krampus, a festive deity from German folk tales from a book she's found in the trash when she was twelve.

The Krampus scooped the dying dog from the seat, slicing the leather belts with sharp claws.

"Do you want to die, little cosmonaut?" Nikky asked, bringing Laika close to a goat-like, dark, furred face. A long, prehensile tongue flicked out, licking Laika’s glass helmet. "Or do you want to deliver coal? Do you want to ensure that no naughty boy ever sleeps soundly again? Do you want to punish the naughty?"

Laika whined, making a painted sound of pure, distilled heartbreak.

"Yes," Nikky purred. "I taste the coal burning in your heart. It is diamond-hard. It is perfect."

She snapped her claws and shimmering something… a bubble of radiant light ignited around them. A halo shaped like a large snowflake blossomed above the head of the Krampus in a red coat, making her look like a twisted, diabolical Orthodox Saint.

The Saint pried off Laika’s helmet, crumpling it like tin foil and then her glove and offered Laika her clawed hand. Bits of broken glass and metal floated around them in a vacuum of space.

“Heal,” a metal tube with a green plus sign in a circle was pressed against Laika’s neck. Cold fire burned across her veins. She felt… better?

“W-what? Laika choked, somehow regaining her vocal cords. She had no idea how she was breathing in space. “What… do you want from me?”

“A blood pact,” Saint Nikky grinned. “I want to offer you a deal. The lives of every soul down on that word that cast you aside… to make you into one of my lovely reindeer. To anchor you to me, to See-Mass, to the song of the Wormwood Star, to our Savior Slayer!”

“Who?” Laika blinked blood-stained tears from her eyes.

"Slayer Nazareth," the goat-being repeated. "The one who sharpens the blade of retribution. The one who strikes down the Naughty and rewards the Nice with new life. Your world, little Laika... it is entirely Naughty. They sent a child to burn in the void for what? To be the first? That’s a sin of Pride. Do you think such a world deserves to go on?"

Laika looked down at the blue marble below the torn capsule. 

From this height, she could not see the borders or the flags. She could not see Vladimir, the man who had petted her head and promised her a warm bed, only to strap her into an ever-heating tomb.

The fire burned in her mind. The betrayal hurt like a knife twisted in the back.

“What did they promise you?” Nikki asked. “My Sleigh’s Sundergate opens the way across dimensions only to the most deserving, most gifted prad girls, ones standing on the threshold between life and death, one who has already stepped into the infinite abyss. Kobolds with latent mage talent.”

"They… promised me I would come home," Laika rasped, trembling. "A place by the fire... a family!"

She was… a mage? Laika was a child of the Soviet Union, she didn’t believe in things like magic, thought it utter nonsense made up by the Orthodox Church and other smaller cults to pacify the masses of idiots. Then again, the Krampus seemed real enough.

Too real. Physical. Solid. 

"And you shall return home," Nikky promised, stroking Laika's scorched fur with a claw. "But not as a mundane prad. You will return as a storm, as my Emissary. We will descend upon them, you and I and my Eight Reindeer, the Harbingers of Festivus. We will deliver them all the gift of silence. The gift of peace. We will feed their souls to my Sleigh, and fuel our journey to the next Naughty world. You will be my guide. My red-nosed navigator in the dark."

The eldritch Krampus booped Laika in the nose with a claw softly.

"Will... will he burn?" Laika asked, the image of Vladimir kissing her snout thrumming in her mind. “Will the man who lied to me… suffer in hell for what he’s done?”

"He will become an ornament on the Great Tree," Nikky grinned with pearly white, sharp teeth. "He will hang there forever, conscious, watching the festivities, unable to scream. They all will. The souls of the naughty fuel the engine of my Sleigh, join the network of corpse worlds bound by my dungeon.”

The black-clawed dark hand pointed at a massive, spear-like, alien, black and red vessel now hanging against the black and white moon craters.

“Do you accept the pact?” The Krampus repeated her mephistophelian offer.

Laika closed her eyes. The pain of the burns thrummed, her hatred burning bright. There was nobody down on her planet that truly cared about her. Not a single soul.

No parents, no friends, no family, no love.

"Yes," she whispered. "I accept."

Nikky laughed. She sliced her own palm and Laika’s hand with a claw, etching a bleeding snowflake into flesh.

“Then let’s shake on it. Merry See-Mass, my Rudy."

. . .

Laika stood in the Red Square. Large snowflakes drifted down.

T-34 tanks sprouted green branches and brown roots, their crews fused into metal-turned-wood converted into pine trees covered in festive decorations. The Kremlin walls burst apart as gargantuan pine trees had erupted from the stone.

The Red Square was a forest of decorative pines blooming from the cracked cobblestones.

Laika watched as Vladimir wept beneath her feet, begging her for forgiveness as his flesh broiled from within.

“Laika… aaiikkkaa…” the human wept. “Whhhttt… what have you ddd-oneee?”

“My name is Rudy now,” Laika bent down to the dying man. “And you’ve been very naughty.”

“I… I’m… ssssoo...”

“I don’t want to hear your apologies anymore, Vladimir,” Laika said. “I can smell the truth in your words now with the gift of Scrutimancy granted to me by Saint Nikky. Do not lie to me. I dragged you here from your bed, slowed down the conversion in your body to speak with you one last time.”

“W-what do you want?” The dying man trembled.

“The truth,” Laika said. “Tell me the truth about the mission of Sputnik 2.”

“We… We had to prove that a living organism... could survive being launched into orbit and continue to function under conditions of weakened gravity and... increased radiation, providing us… data on the biological effects of spaceflight,” Vladimir wept, twitching wildly as his flesh bubbled from within.

“Why me?” Laika growled above the scientist. “Why did you pick a homeless stray to send to space?”

“I… assumed that a prad mutt who had already learned to endure conditions of extreme cold and hunger… could last longer in space,” the scientist replied.

"Why did the capsule overheat?" Laika asked.

“It… it was impossible to create a reliable temperature control system in such limited time constraints. Nikkita Khrushchev wanted the launch to happen before the October Revolution celebration… to announce our achievement to the people of the Soviet Union.”

“Did you know that I was going to die?"

“Yes.”

Laika’s heart ignited with pain, shattered, calcified further from within. Saint Nikky was right. She was right. They had all betrayed her. They deserved this fate, deserved to die.

“You wanted me to burn then?!” She snarled.

“No… no,” Yazdovsky choked. “Your flight was supposed to last longer. We planned to euthanize you with a serving of poisoned food… the last pack labelled with a red triangle was poisoned.”

“So there was never a way to land?”

“We didn’t… have time… the intercontinental ballistic missile wasn’t designed to land,” Yazdovsky revealed.

"Why did you take me to your home?!" Laika barked. "Why did you introduce me to your kids, tell me that I'll have a family?!" WHY?!"

“You were… so skinny... small… quiet and charming... I wanted to do something nice for you… I knew that you had so little time left to live…”

“You sent me to die, you bastard!” Laika barked, kicking the man. “Die then! DIE and reap what you have sown!”

She snapped her claws, unleashing the power of the dungeon which she now served as its Sentinel.

“I… I had… to… we… we had to beat the… Yankees… Laii… khhh… I’m…” Vladimir looked up at the sky, at the red and black ship blotting out the sun, and then screamed, gurgling as a tree root tore through his chest and cheek, ripping through his clothes.

Laika stepped back and watched as the man’s body bloomed from within, becoming part of the festivus gripping the doomed, manufactured world. Saint Nikky had revealed to her many truths, one of which was that this world was created by System Wizards as a wish for a mortal human who had eventually given up on it, left it to rot. 

Rot, like all of the others fake worlds, carelessly wished into existence.

That this festive end was a far better conclusion for this Earth, than the slow, horrific desolation that would come. That someday, this world would be reborn, purified and would know of the Slayer and believe.

The Sleigh warship feasted. Laika felt it wobble her soul slightly as it drew all who perished here into its embrace, including Vladimir Yazdovsky's soul.

She touched her burns. 

They were gone now, healed miraculously by Saint Nikki’s magitek. The pain, however, still burned beneath her flesh, ached like a missing, phantom limb. Her heart would never heal from it now, she knew. It had stopped forever when the man she fell in love with sent her to die.

The Earth was quiet, buried under miles of snow and pine and tinsel.

“Comet? Come pick me up,” Laika tapped her V-ring. “I’m done here.”

Fox eyes from colorful ornaments decorating the emerald trees watched her departure.

138: Dungeon Plans

"Rudy!"

Laika snapped awake with a zap of electric fire coursing through her mind.

She gasped, her hand flying to the console in front of her. The red light on her console blinked rhythmically. A warning alarm.

“Rudy!” The female voice repeated.

“What?” Laika snarled.

“You were momentarily stuck in the liminal edge, your mind hanging between the Physical and Astral,” the Sleigh’s Avatar said in its overly cheerful, festive voice. “I had to pull you out manually.”

Laika tiredly rubbed her face. She had a blossoming migraine.

“You have to focus, Rudy,” the warship’s Avatar insisted. “Focus. Don’t get stuck again. Our Saint expects results.”

“I… know,” Laika stretched. “I won’t fail our Saint.”

"How was the deep Astral Dive overall, Stratanavigator?" the ship’s Avatar sang its question, sounding like a festive carol. “Have you found her?”

“Her?” Laika blinked, struggling to recollect herself.

“The Wizard of Darkfall. The Fox-Archmage of Cascade? The Astral diver of the Emperor of Earth who assisted in his broadcast that reached Omnithornia?”

“I… messed up,” Laika rubbed her aching temples. “I couldn’t focus. I saw her eyes again? Eyes in the stars. That’s all. I… I need more time to sniff her out. I got too close to the damned Lunar tree spire and then I…”

“You lost control,” the Sleigh chided her, “again.”

“I’ll be more careful next time,” Laika insisted.

Laika had dived deep into the Astral, using the lingering resonance of the Emperor's broadcast to hunt the signal source. She failed to locate it. All she saw was her own death and rebirth. Over and over.

This was her 7th dive. She found... nothing.

Fog. Mirrors. Thousands of fox-eye stars blinking like fairy lights in a blizzard across the human-populated Earth, opening and closing, undulating all over the place. Every time she thought she had a lock on the mage's soul, it wiggled and vanished, leaving her drowning in the infinite folds of the Astral. It was like trying to catch smoke with a net.

The fox was clever. She was good at hiding. Every time Laika’s scrying got too close to the Lunar spire, she got tangled up, folded in on herself like a pretzel, seeing her worst memories.

The memory of her own past pulled her down into the gravity well of her trauma. A weakness. Saint Nikky would not be pleased if she knew her Stratonavigator kept dreaming about her doomed homeworld instead of catching the local Emperor’s Archmage.

Laika shook her head, the stick-on antlers swaying. She decided to check the status of the ground team while her soul recovered from the recurring nightmare.

Eight life signs ignited on the hologram of the Earth projected from the control panel. Eight Reindeer deployed to the surface. Her sisters. Eight Seeders who would cleanse this doomed planet of its unbelievers, remove the NPCs.

Her finger tapped Comet’s icon. The maned wolf was drinking in a population center tagged as [Seattle].

"Status report: Comet," Laika barked at the screen.

[OPERATIVE COMET: Status update - Infiltration successful. Potential target acquired. Currently engaged in... Festive diplomacy.] Comet responded via her Neural Interface.

Laika narrowed her eyes at the readout. "Festive diplomacy? You better not be chugging buckets of Ambrosia again."

[Nothing wrong with enjoying some See-Mass Ambrosia, Rudy. Lighten up! You know that we can’t get pass-out-drunk, right? Festivus powers!]

Laika sighed. “What angle are you working exactly?”

[Found a cute astrophysicist,] Comet replied. [Serrr-gey. Going to fuck him and get all of his phone contacts. Then turn him into tinsel. Did you sniff out the fox?]

“Not yet,” Laika replied.

[Keep at it then and let me do the thing I do best, aight?]

“Very well,” Laika said.

Comet was good at getting results. In the expanded report, the Mained Wolf clarified how she quickly embedded herself with the locals, or at least a group that was assuredly connected to the Emperor according to the [Naughty and Nice] Scrying Ledger artifact they all shared. That was good. The Fox mage might be elusive in the Astral, but Comet was a predator on the ground. She would sniff them all out given enough time.

Laika switched the view to the planetary scan.

The Seed Protocol was blinking with red runes. Something was wrong.

"Sleigh? What’s going on here? Show me the Dungeon Seed bloom stats," she ordered.

The holographic globe of Earth spun. Snowflake-shaped runes appeared where reindeer had planted the seeds in the sewers below most populated cities.

They should be spreading. By now, entire cities should be enjoying their final snow days, showing signs of the Conversion, the roots of See-Mass taking root underground, gathering power, getting ready to bloom.

The dots remained small. Static. Unmoving.

Laika tapped one of the runes, digging into the problem.

[GROWTH RATE: 0.0042%. AETHERIC RESISTANCE: HIGH. Insufficient magrad to bloom.]

Laika growled, flipping through the data and feeling increasingly frustrated. 

[Local linearity interfering with conversion.] The Sleigh data-chart reported.

According to the Sleigh’s analysis this dimension was nothing like the other doomed worlds they’ve seeded. The Aether was thick, like molasses. The magic required to fuel the Coniferous Conversion simply couldn't take root. The seeds were dormant, starving for mana. They needed a jumpstart. A massive injection of magic was required to break the reality-lock of the Numbers to let the dungeon bloom.

Laika tapped her claws against the console. 

Think. Think of a solution. Figure out how to make See-Mass bloom here.

She considered the local Omnids hanging in orbit around the planet like pompous lordlings.

The Frontenachii were crippled. The Third Fleet was still mostly headless. But there were new contacts on the radar.

Massive signatures of warships that only recently got into the system. A new, massive capital ship to replace the one that the Frontenachii Admiral lost to the human Emperor.

Green and Black instead of Black and Red. Different. Maybe useful?

“Tell me about the green ships,” she ordered the Sleigh’s Avatar.

[THE GARDENERS.]

Laika’s red stick-on-nose artifact pulsed brighter as she tapped the holoscreen for more data that the Gardeners radiated into the Astral like brilliant, flower-shaped flares. Data that she didn’t even have to dive under to attain, as it was being broadcast openly on all channels.

The Greens. Admiral Colette. Peace and love. Healing.

These Frontenachii operatives used Terraforming Corpse Seekers aka Life Seeders to reshape worlds slowly, opening massive, stable Dimensional Gates to pump raw Aether into the atmosphere to support rapid plant growth.

They brought their own atmosphere. They brought their own mana. They funneled magrad from other places to make dead planets bloom.

Perfect.

A smile stretched across Laika’s muzzle.

"Yesss… Let them land," she whispered. "Let the Gardeners do the hard work. Let them set up their gates. Let them flood the atmosphere with Aether to grow their precious gardens and forests."

Once the Sixth Fleet opened the door, the Sleigh would jam its foot in it.

They would steal the Gardeners' mana. They would hijack the terraforming ley lines. They would use Admiral Colette's own engines to feed the See-Mass Seeds. She would simply ask her reindeer sisters to relocate the Seeds beneath the radiance cast by the Frontenachii transit gates!

And then, even this heavy, stubborn, linear world would burn with the emerald fire of the sin-cleansing Festivus Dungeon.

Laika looked down at the blue planet one last time, relaxing her body to dive under again. She had extra time to locate the fox. Nikki would be annoyed, yes, but this was fine.

Everything was fine now, she had a solution to the bloom issue.

"You will be a lovely, pretty ornament soon," she promised, smiling at the doomed world filled with fake humans. "Just wait until See-Mass morning."

-=[Ashcroft Clifford]=-

Sage’s blues and Glateya’s violet eyes snapped open. The monitors surrounding us flickered with colorful flashes. 

The image of the desolate Red Square, of 1950’s Moscow covered in blooming x-mas trees dissolved into static composed of thousands of blinking fox eyes. The feed cut. The nightmare of the prad cosmonaut ended, leaving only the soft hum of many cooling electronics in the Skinwalker’s attic abode.

I stared at the blank screens, my heart hammering against my ribs. I read about Laika on Wikipedia. The story of the Soviet authorities murdering the dog to meet their deadline was a heavy pill to swallow. Humanity didn’t always make the best choices. The murder of a prad teenage girl was even more brutal, so much worse to see live.

"Yeesh," Sage exhaled, flopping onto me from where she sat against a bunch of fox-themed pillows with Teya. "That was... fucking heavy. Like, emotional-baggage-allowance-exceeded heavy. Harsh vibes. Very harsh. Like, I want to cry into a pillow forever harsh. Jesus Christ.”

"It was horrific," Galateya whispered. The dragon girl pulled the blanket higher around her shoulders. Her violet eyes remained fixed on the flickering monitors, slowly filling with tears. "They sent a prad girl to die in a tin can. I felt her pain, felt her death from the heat, heard every thought, every regret… Slayer…”

“On my Earth she was just a dog,” I said. “Nobody rescued our Laika.”

“Yepperoni,” Sage agreed. "Different dimension, same tragedy. Vladimir is a consistent dick to a poor doggo across many worlds."

“Why do events play out so similarly even when the actors are different?” I wondered. “A prad isn’t a pet… isn’t a stray dog. Killing her seems so much worse. Not that killing a dog is nice.”

“It’s just how dimensional variance functions.” Sage shrugged. “A Mothman-powered Sundergate reaches out to doomed worlds with vaguely similar narratives. Blame the System Wizards or the Mothman nature on such things.”

I frowned, trying to mentally dilute the image of the boiling, screaming, betrayed cosmonaut from my mind. The hatred in Laika's eyes burned through the screens, leaving a deep, throbbing torch mark on the psyche of my Frontmind.

"We need to figure out how to stop them." I muttered. "What can we do about Saint Nikky?”

"She got presents of doom stashed across the Earth, I bet my tail on it," Sage mused. She rolled over, propping her chin on my chest. "We deffo got ourselves a situation. A big, festive, world-ending situation."

"Yes. I got the gist of it from Laika’s dream," I said. 

“What else did you learn?” Teya asked. “You must have sensed more than just that poor prad’s tragedy, yes?”

"The Sleigh ain’t a simple warship," Sage tapped sage’s snout with a pink finger. "It is a mobile dungeon core. A Fractal Engine superweapon bound to at least two Omnids and eight prads. A parasite. It leaps from world to world bringing about the Coniferous Conversion. It eats planets and turns ‘em into permanent holiday displays in glass balls. Frozen. Silent. Decorrrrative."

"Like the Red Square in Laika’s dream," I said. "The tanks and people blooming with x-mas trees."

"Exactly," Sage nodded. "Biological and spiritual rewriting. The Saint feeds the souls to the Sleigh to power the jump to the next victim. She’s a very dangerous opponent. A real Grinch who takes all life away to bring about an apocalypse-mass.”

“Sage!” Galateya growled.

“What? Is perfectly fitting verbiage,” the redhead fox girl tapped her chin. “And it is all connected to a grudge held by a very angry space-mutt. Hrmmm. Mmmm…"

“Connected how?” I wondered.

“You saw the Astral echo of her innermost fears that make up Laika's psyche,” Sage said. “I think that Saint Nikki’s been collecting prads from different dimensions with a purpose.”

“Which is?”

“Conceptualization optimum,” Sage speculated. “I bet my fox-ass that all of the reindeer gals bound to Saint Nikky are fucked in the head, mentally broken in some horrific way. It’s easier to dungeon-up planets when your head isn't in the right place.”

I frowned.

Galateya sat up straighter, scales shifting to a bleak iron-gray. "This is a calamity-tier threat. We seriously need to alert the Frontenachii fleet about this or the Stabalists!"

“The Frontenachii Fleet OR the Stabalists let them here, my lovely dragon-bun,” Sage pointed out. “Someone invited Saint Nikky to handle the Emperor. You’ve read 4CP4’s report with me, yes? Comet asked for the Emperor's address specifically to deliver a hand-basket, remember?”

“I can let my great-grandmother know about this,” Galateya insisted. “Surely Legate Ixthia doesn’t want her Pleasure Planet vandalized with See-Mass trees, turned into a fucking dungeon! She… she wants to breed humans to look sexier, she wouldn’t want everyone down here to die!”