Somebody Stop Us. Chapter 8: The Key to Everywhere

The setting sun blazed across the ocean horizon, sending rays of fiery amber and deep crimson through our stained glass windows. The fox-patterns in the glass transformed the fading daylight into a kaleidoscope of colors that danced across our expanded bed and our bodies.

Hexagonal privacy runes pulsed with gentle blue light in the columns, courtesy of Vespera, muting the rest of our tower loft.

I'd been watching Vespera for the past hour as she tinkered with a complex magitek artifact that she's pawned from the Artifactorium, her talons making minute adjustments to its crystalline components. The sunset light caught her feathers, casting them in hues of amber and gold. I noted that there was tension in her shoulders, a tightness around her eyes that betrayed her otherwise casual and overly cheerful demeanor.

"Vee," I said softly, sitting up among the pillows. "What's wrong?"

She glanced up from her work. "Hmm? Nothing's wrong. Just working on stuff." She attempted a smile, but it didn't quite reach her eyes. "Why you think that something's wrong?"

"Your wings," I pointed out.

Vespera's talons stilled on the device. Her wings twitched slightly before folding closer to her body.

"You told me once," I continued, "in another life, in our shared dream—that the edges of your feathers lighten when you're happy. They're looking almost entirely black right now."

"Pfft, look at little Mister detective over here," she quipped. "Maybe I'm just tired. It's, like, gettin' late n' sheet."

"Are you just tired?" I arched an eyebrow.

"Seriously, it's nothing!" she insisted, setting aside her work with a dismissive wave. "Just... project stuff. Nothing for you to worry your pretty human head about."

Cinder, who was reading a romance novel put it aside. "Cut the crap, Vee," she said. "Your wings look like a Stygian void creature. Even I can tell something's up."

Vespera looked between us, her smile sliding sideways.

"Fine," she muttered, crossing her arms defensively. "You want to know what's wrong? Everything is wrong!"

"So why don't you tell us the specifics," I encouraged, patting the space between Cinder and me.

Vespera hesitated, then moved to sit between us, her wings drooping low. "I'm failing," she exhaled. "At everything that matters."

"What do you mean?" Cinder asked.

"That glowing, soul-eating freak at the café," Vespera began, electricity crackling between her feathers. "He was seconds away from devouring our Lexxy, and what did I do? Fired off two bolts that barely did anything to him. Kat and the Sharky-scrut contributed more then me to that fight. If you hadn't blown yourself and that thing to smithereens—" She broke off, black wings flaring in agitation.

"Vee, that was a high level Outsider," I reasoned. "Even Satosh couldn't—"

"I'm a Prima-born Thunderbird!" she snapped, cutting me off. "My family literally manufactures hex-weapons! I should have been able to protect you, but instead, I stood there like a cheap sparkler... watching you explode!"

Her outburst left a crackling silence in its wake.

"And that's not all," she continued. "Your body doesn't have a heart-core, so you can't level up properly. And your soul—" She looked at me, her eyes glistening with sparks of tears. "Your soul is too fragmented, too twirly-whirly n' effed up to level up or to store experience! A four-fold sphere with all these moving bits, none of them fully in control."

"It's fine," I shrugged. "I'm getting by with cleverness."

"Yes, you and your foxy tricks," she continued, "But what if something even more high level shows up to swallow your soul?! Without proper leveling, you can't access higher magics, you can't defend yourself against things like that soul-eater, will never reach our level!"

Vespera slammed a magisteel-wrapped fist into a wall. "And... I effin' just can't figure out how to make you immortal! I've been researching and thinking, scouting through every Prima-restricted text in the library about how to extend human lifespans, and there's nothing there!"

"Not dying of old age yet," I pointed out.

"Irrelevant," she huffed. "You're still aging faster than both of us. Do you think that I want to watch you grow old and die while Ci and I stay young for centuries? What kind of a shitty Prima-wife does that make me?"

Cinder shifted closer. "Vee," she said gently, "you're over-working yourself into a storm."

"Hey, you're the one who's badgering me about this!" Vespera growled. "Yes. I am. I'm stuck. I almost sort of... have an idea, but I... can't put it together."

"What kind of an idea?" I asked.

"To link us... to ourselves," she said.

"What?" I blinked.

"Like... we've met other versions of us on Arx, right?" Vespera said. "Theoretically... there should be infinite versions of us across the Astral Ocean. My idea was to take advantage of that."

"How?"

"To link us to us... via the Astral," she said. "Using magic."

"To what end?" I wondered.

"So that you could level up, you dummy!" She huffed.

The Quetzi-girl slipped behind Vespera and began unbelting and removing the Thunderbird's magisteel armor.

"Gettin' me naked ain't gonna solve this problem," Vespera rolled her eyes, but allowed Cinder to undress her.

The last rays of sun caught on the magisteel plates as they were set aside, refracting through the stained glass in bursts of kaleidoscopic brilliance. 

Then, once the Thunderbird was free of armor and most of her clothes, Cinder began to massage her shoulders and hum, a low, melodic sound that gradually evolved into words.

Her hypnotic voice took on an otherworldly quality in the dying light.

"Listen here, my electric heart,
My Thunderbird, my Prima-Sword counterpart,
Feathers gone dark with doubt and fear,
Let my Quetzi-song make it all clear!

Our triangle's not breaking down,
Your worries won't become your crown!"

She began. Vespera's expression relaxed slightly but her feathers remained pure black.

"Vee, you're not alone tonight,
We'll help you through this inner fight,
Turn your feathers from black to white.
Reach to me connect me with your Electrofractal might!"

Cinder moved in front of Vespera and grabbed her talons putting them onto the sides of her head. Vespera nodded, understanding. Electric currents ignited on Vee's hands connecting her to Cinder.

"Your lightning mind, a brilliant web,
Don't let your genius start to ebb,
Together we face what's ahead,
Let our souls be joined instead."

Cinder hummed, undressing herself.

"Soul-eaters, fears, and our tangled past,
We all have troubles, but they won't last,
Your spark ignites our hearts on fire,
Take us higher, all your dreams you can acquire!

You've saved us both time after time,
Now let our love become your upward climb,
Listen to my voice and let your mind soar again,
Our love's no 'if' but only 'when,'"

"Where you goin' with this?" Vespera asked. "You think you can just change my mind with your song-magic or..."

"Neural networks, fractal and bright,
Quantum-entangled, defying light.
Three-body problem, solved in our kiss,
Vector fields mapping our triangular bliss."

Cinder's song shifted, her voice taking on a rhythmic, almost educational cadence.

"Your mind's a Mandelbrot set, infinite and wise,
Each iteration revealing new skies.
Exponential functions of our combined hearts,
Where your electric field end is where my rainbow starts.

Fibonacci-sequenced feathers, black to white,
Fourier transformed into waves of light.
Martin's armillary, four-dimensional spheres,
This triple integral solves all your tears."

Vespera's gray-gold eyes suddenly lit up. She grabbed the artifact with one hand sending electric pulses into it while clinging to Cinder's temple with the other. The device lit up, floating and spinning to project ever-shifting formulas into the air.

"Non-Euclidean geometries of love we share,
Möbius strip emotions flowing through the air.
Tessellated patterns of our souls intertwined,
Three distinct topologies, perfectly aligned.

Complex eigenvalues, mapping all our ways,
Matrix transformations through our darkest days.
Non-commutative algebra of our love so true,
Where x times y won't equal y times you.

Triangulation requires unequal sides,
Scalene strength where our power resides.
Differential equations, functions of our growth,
Partial derivatives of our sacred oath.
Schrödinger's equation, collapsing to truth,"

Vespera whistled while Cinder hummed. The projected formulas spun around both of them and then a fractal resembling a triangle formed above the artifact.

"Holy shit," Vespera let out. "You're just throwing rhyming science jargon at me... and yet... I think... I know what to do!"

"Quantum superposition of me, him and you," Cinder sang, pointing a claw at herself, me and Vespera.

"Laplace transforms converting time to frequency,
Your brilliance operating at perfect efficiency.
Hyperbolic functions of your soaring thought,
Imaginary numbers where solutions are sought."

Vespera whistled again, directing more holographic formulas through the air like a conductor.

"Divergent series converging in your mind,
Infinite possibilities uniquely defined.
Triquetra topology, three-fold symmetry divine,
Borromean rings where our fates intertwine.
Not Cartesian, not linear, but a tensor field of grace,
A quaternion rotation time cannot displace,"

"What... what... the fuck..." Vespera whistled.

"Hilbert spaces where our dimensions meet,
Holomorphic functions making us complete... All complete.
Our wave equations synchronized in phase... Astral Phase.
A nullspace vector time cannot erase... Forever and ever, stretching onwards towards infinity."

Cinder whisper-sang the last sentence, sounding almost like Ein Sof. She leaned forward and kissed Vespera with a "mwah!"

Vespera let go of the artifact, eyes wide.

"Yes, yes!" Cinder sang. "My Vee. You're mine! Forever entwined!"

"I... I've got it!" Vespera uttered. "It's... done! It's... its like it wanted to be solved, like it was already solved. Holy shit!"

Her wings ignited and gravity let go. Vespera and Cinder began to rise slowly from the bed, their bodies drawn upward. The equations swirled around them, forming a vortex of mathematical brilliance. Both of their bodies stretched via Phase-Shift becoming more bird-like and draconic.

Cinder giggled.

Their eyes locked—ocean blue meeting silver-gold—and in one fluid motion, they moved toward each other. Their faces met in the air above me, wings flaring wide in a cascade of rainbow and lightning. The moment their lips touched, a shockwave of magic rippled outward like violet fire painting the space in illusory starlight that looked almost like the Wheel.

I heard their mental voices pulsing across Vespera's wings.

[I claim you, Vespera Simmi, storm of my heart.]

[I claim you, Cassiopeia Cinder Nova, rainbow of my soul.]

 The mathematical equations collapsed inward, concentrating into a single point of blinding light before exploding outward in a new configuration—a perfect multidimensional triangle, each vertex pulsing with a distinct energy signature. One corner blazed with rainbow fire, another crackled with electric blue lightning, and the third—my corner—shimmered with a quartet of colors.

Luminous vectors snapped into place between all three points, completing the circuit and wobbling reality. The triangle rotated slowly in the air above the artifact, casting prismatic patterns across our trio.

Cinder and Vespera descended slowly back to the bed, their eyes wide with wonder as they stared at the floating triangular construct.

"Did you just... claim me as an effin' Kobold?" Cinder let out.

"Hey, you claimed me too!" Vespera grinned. "Ha! We're equilaterally claimed now!"

"Hum. So, what... is that?" Cinder asked, eyeing the shimmering triangle rune.

The ends of Vespera's feathers were now almost blindingly white, radiating with joy and excitement and raining blue sparks all over the bed.

"That's the key," she uttered.

"What kind of key?" I asked.

"A key based on our love," Vespera said. "Based on all of the connections between us."

"All of them?" Cinder asked skeptically.

"All of them," Vee nodded. "Especially... ones not made yet. It's... Uhmmm... basically referencing the concept of potential Love itself. Like I said before, the idea was to tie a single rune to every possible connection across all dimensions in which we exist..."

"So what does this key open exactly?" The Quetzi asked.

"Everything... everywhere," Vespera let out. "The tool that'll allow Martin to level up through us. The key to every dimensional door... access to every level zero duplicate body across the Omniverse. If my calculations are correct it should allow us to Quantum leap into... doomed worlds. To host our souls on soulless versions of us... to level up... without opening gates. To host experience and bits of our souls across several dimensions! The ultimate backup!"

"Impressive. Did you just make that?" I asked Vespera.

"Yes and... also no," the Thunderbird shook her head, reaching out towards the shimmering triangle. "I only had to conceptualize it, motivated by Ci's music. Then, it... just... made itself, inexplicably resolved itself into being after we claimed each other as a kobold!"

"Meaning what?" I asked.

"Meaning that someone else... Someone dangerously clever also made it from the other side," Vespera revealed.